Crimson Peak: The Official Movie Novelization (10 page)

—
Please, please, please let it be a mistake. Oh, please.

She started holding her breath.

Alan faltered as the coroner opened the door to the morgue. Edith turned to follow the man.

“Wait,” Alan ordered. “Don’t look.”

Edith’s throat was so tight that it took a great effort to speak. “I am told that I have to.”

Alan appealed to the coroner. “No. Please. I’ll give you a positive identification. Don’t make her look. I was his physician.” He turned to the family lawyer for support. “Ferguson, you know that.”

That wasn’t the truth; perhaps Alan had fitted him for eyeglasses. He was trying to spare her.

Unless Father was ill and didn’t want anyone to know… and that is what has happened… some kind of seizure…

The renewed possibility that they were all supposed to be here squeezed her chest even tighter. She was afraid she was going to faint.

No. It is not he. Please, if it is not he, then I will do anything. I will give everything I have or want. I will not marry Thomas…

But her heart wailed in anguish at the thought of losing the man who was holding her up even then. Whose arm encircled her and protected her as she swayed forward.

Mr. Ferguson set his jaw and gave his head a little shake. “And I’m his lawyer, Dr. McMichael. I am sorry. It’s not just a legal formality. It’s obligatory, I’m afraid.”

I’m afraid.
The words echoed in her mind. She was so very, very afraid.

Thomas was there, and he loved her.

Alan was there, and he was her dearest and oldest friend.

But in her fear, she was all alone.

Her knees wobbled. She couldn’t breathe enough to remain conscious. She could not draw sufficient air to hold body and soul together.

I am afraid.

She and the men walked across a tile floor that was slippery, pitted, and dirty. The room stank of blood. There were flies. An abattoir. Carter Cushing could not possibly lie beneath that stained winding sheet, on that steel table.

And yet, the profile was his.

Time stopped utterly. This moment must last forever. This must be where she existed for the rest of eternity, because right here, her father could still be alive. Right here, they were together, and Thomas too. In this ticking heartbeat, this strangled breath, this sunlight in amber. Her world hanging in the balance, teetering until the pendulum swung back the other way. Balanced on the head of a pin. This was where she must always
be
.

Then the coroner took hold of the sheet, pausing a moment as if he, too, wished that the earth would stop spinning. That he could spare her. Then he lifted the drape.

And everything stayed frozen, everything: heart, thought, breath. Edith only stared as Thomas’s hand tightened, tightened…

He did not look like her father.

He did not look human.

His face, destroyed. The bones crushed. Blood pooled and coagulated. The damage to the features beyond her ability to comprehend. A mistake, a mistake. This was not her father.

It is.

Oh, dear God, it is.

If she gave a sign that it was her father, she was unaware. But the tension in the room thickened; she felt a heavy weight pulling her downward as if she would sink through the floor, and the men grew even more somber as they shifted and someone cleared his throat, as if signaling that it was time to move to the next step in a hellish ritual. Was Thomas keeping her on her feet? She could not tell. The candle that they had held on the night they had waltzed…
Night’s candles are burned out. Thomas… oh, Thomas, this cannot be happening.

What had she wished for when she had blown that candle out on the dance floor? Could she have not wished for long life for her father?

“How did it happen?” Alan asked hoarsely.

“An accident,” Mr. Ferguson said. “The floor was wet.”

Alan’s brow furrowed as he scrutinized the body… her father…
Papa.

“May I, sir?” Alan said to the coroner. “Help me turn him.”

Edith watched numbly as Alan inspected the poor, ruined head. The head that could not be her father’s. Then, with the aid of the other man, he began to turn the deceased on his side and she saw shaving cream on his cheek.
Shaving cream. An accident. A wet floor, like this one. Slipping. The porcelain sink.

The sheet began to fall away, revealing—

This is my father. It is, it is!

“Stop it, stop!” she cried, rushing forward. “Don’t handle him like that, please don’t.”

Alan drew back. “Forgive me, I was trying to—”

She strangled on her tears as Thomas drew alongside, steadying her, though hardly steady himself. His face was stark white; he was as horrified as she was. But now she must act; she must shield her beloved father from their eyes and their poking and prodding. Cook and DeWitt had gossiped about her mother—

—
Black as a charred lamb shank, she was. Sight of her is going to give me nightmares for years, I can tell you that. And the stink! They don’t pay me enough to lay her out; I told her lady’s maid to do it, and she up and quit and so I got the belowstairs to take it on. Master says the young lady is not to see and I’m all for that. One look and she’ll grow up in an asylum, sure as my family’s in Dublin. Are all the mirrors covered, DeWitt? Because you cannot be too sure. You certainly cannot. They hate the grave, the dead. And when you leave behind a sweet little girl like our Edith… well, you just don’t go.

“This is my father,” she said staunchly. She took possession of him. He was hers. She moved through the haze and took her stand as his daughter. “He—he is turning sixty next week, and he is afraid of looking his age, you see? That’s why he… dresses so well, why he loves taking long walks with me.” She cradled and kissed his hand. “It feels cold. Why is it so cold?”

They looked at her with such pity. And then as the horrible reality finally sank in—that he was truly dead—she crumbled.

T
HE CEMETERY
,
AGAIN
. Fourteen years vanished like phantoms as Alan once again regarded his dearest friend lost in grief. It seemed only yesterday they had gathered to bury Edith’s mother, who had died horribly. And now her father, too. Alan could not support the coroner’s cause of death: There had been far too much damage, and at the wrong angle, for a fall.

But that was a matter for another day. Now he must be there for Edith. She should have never been forced to see that. Ferguson and his obligations be damned. There were things that once you saw them, you could not unsee. Such had it been when he had witnessed his first surgery upon a human eye, popped from the cadaver of a beggar woman in the operating theater in London. Only the certainty that by observation he might save the sight in others gave him the fortitude to remain at his place, although the fellow beside him had covered his mouth and excused himself, running for the door.

He remembered the way Edith had looked to him for comfort when she was but ten and he eleven. Even as a callow lad, he had known how her heart was aching, seen the tears that would not fall.

What had Conan Doyle said during his spiritualism lecture? “Of all ghosts the ghosts of our old loves are the worst.” Alan had loved Edith Cushing all his life.

But today she wasn’t even looking at him. Too much a boy back then to think of marrying her, he was also here today to bury his hopes as a man. Upon her finger glittered the large red ring that had graced Lady Sharpe’s hand the night Edith had waltzed with Sir Thomas. A family heirloom, clearly; for Edith, a new acquisition, and it sucked in the watery light of the gloomy day, casting no reflection. Alan knew what it signified: She was engaged to be married to Sir Thomas Sharpe.

Sharpe, whose pale English face seemed to vanish into the sleeting rain as he sheltered her beneath an umbrella. In tribute to the man who would have become his father-in-law, the Englishman wore deep mourning, and Edith was likewise swathed in black from head to toe. Alan remembered her childhood story of seeing a woman in black in her nursery, likely her mother, and how Eunice had laughed at her and called her mad. Now Edith was a woman in black, and as she leaned against Sir Thomas’s chest, dazed and unfocused, Alan knew that she would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Sir Thomas’s arm was around her, which would have been a breach of propriety had they not been affianced. It was all too soon, under circumstances too horrible to comprehend, and perhaps he was looking through the prism of his jealousy, but when he regarded the way Sir Thomas held Edith, it seemed that the man was determined to keep her in his grasp rather than to ease her suffering. She looked trapped, not protected.

Then Sir Thomas noticed his gaze and held it, steadily. It was an unspoken duel. Edith saw none of it. Alan knew that he had already lost, and so he tipped his hat, as one would do under such a circumstance to salute a grieving relative of the deceased. Encumbered by umbrella and fiancée, Sir Thomas was unable to return the gesture, and so, inclined his head. Sharpe was the model of gravity and sorrow, and Alan wondered if he himself was being unfair because of his jealousy. Sir Thomas’s feelings for Edith could be pure. It
was
possible to fall in love deeply and quickly.

Just ask Eunice.

* * *

Three short weeks later, a few of the same guests who mourned my father’s passing would attend my wedding at Asbury-Delaware Church. It was a small affair, the details of which I now struggle to recall.

* * *

Edith the bride was dressed and veiled in white, like a phantom. The bouquet of red roses that she held as Ferguson walked her down the aisle reminded Alan of a beating heart, and of her father’s favorite song, “A Red, Red Rose,” which Cushing had listened to nearly every morning as he showered and shaved at his club. She looked dazed. Like every man present, Alan included, the groom wore a mourning band. It was macabre that they should marry now, and when the minister asked if there were any present who knew of any impediments to their union, Alan wanted to speak up. He wanted to say that it felt wrong, her father had not approved and Edith was making a terrible mistake, but he held his peace. He wished her well, he truly did.

But as Sir Thomas kissed his bride, her garnet ring cast a slash of red light against her pale, wan cheek, and it looked so much like a wound that Alan gasped. Heads turned his way, including Eunice’s, and she favored him with a sad, tight smile. She was sending him a signal: He must accept that the kiss sealed the two as husband and wife and the hopes of the McMichaels were dashed. Eunice would love again, of that he was sure, and he tried to convey confidence in her future happiness by taking her hand and giving it a squeeze.

And he was equally sure that he would never stop loving. He would go to his grave married in his heart to Edith Cushing, and perhaps, if there were such things as ghosts and the fates were kind, he would be able to watch over her, and her children, and her grandchildren and keep her free from danger.

Let her be happy, and I will be happy
, he thought.
It is all that I want out of this life.

“No ghost was ever seen by two pair of eyes.”

—
THOMAS CARLYLE