Crimson Peak: The Official Movie Novelization (16 page)

“My hands are getting rough. Your father would approve,” he said plaintively. She nodded quietly. Did he comprehend the depth of her distress when he’d been hurt? The anxiety it would cost her from now on if he continued to work directly on his invention? He was so preoccupied that it would be difficult to steer the conversation to the topic she wished to discuss: Visions. Deaths. Ghosts.

“The machine will never work,” he grumbled. “Never. Why do I keep deluding myself?”

“You shouldn’t give up hope.” She had to be supportive, no matter her fears for him. She believed in him, and when his own belief in himself faltered, she must sustain him.

“Hope?” He sighed. “Edith, hope is the cruelest of feelings. I normally stay away from it.”

And close your eyes to things you don’t wish to see
, she thought.

He sat next to her. As ever, his nearness shifted her attention as it fanned a flame of its own.

“But now, something has changed in me.” He gazed at her. “Why did I bring you here?” He searched her face. “Who did you marry, my darling? A failure.”

“You are all that I have.” Caught up in her love for him, she kissed him. She felt him stiffen, as he usually did—mindful of her mourning—and then he…
relented
. Surrendered. She was thawing his reserve.

Thomas pulled away, eager to get back to work. “The men leave at nightfall and we are racing against the snow.” They both stood and started heading back, and she told herself that tonight, she would make him talk to her.

They walked out to the kitchen and reached the foyer. “Soon we won’t be able to make any progress,” he continued. “That’s when you’ll find out why they call this ‘Crimson Peak.’”

She froze on the spot.

“What did you say?” she asked tightly.

“Crimson Peak,” he replied. “That’s what they call it. The ore and the red clay reach up from the ground and stain the snow. It turns bright red. So… ‘Crimson Peak.’”

Edith stood stock-still as Thomas moved past her. Her stomach cramped again.

I was warned
, she thought, stunned.
Twice.

But I am here.

Crimson Peak.

* * *

It watched the brother leave the bride’s side. Then he stopped by the foyer, hearing a noise, and turned.

Yes, there was a shadow… and a noise… but there was no one in sight. Turning away, he left.

No one that
he
could see, anyway.

F
LOWERS ON A
grave, in the snow. The Cushing belongings had been packed up, yet for Alan, there was no sense of finality.

Alan placed his bouquet at the foot of the Cushing monument, wondering if the dead rested in peace. Not even a serene death would have prevented Edith’s father from watching over her and protecting her, if such a thing as ghosts existed. Alan remembered how insistent little Edith had been that her mother’s ghost had haunted her shortly after her hideous death. Edith had been nearly hysterical and Alan had pretended to believe her.

But he had been the only one. Her father had soothed his fearful child by reminding her that she possessed a “fevered” imagination, which Mrs. Cushing had fed with a steady diet of fairy stories that they read together. Ghosts were not real, he had insisted, and had bought her books with more sensible themes, such as home management.

“But they are real,” she had told Alan, as they stood together making pretend spyglasses with their hands in their “pirate lair” up in the apple tree in his back yard. “Mama was there. I know she was.” She’d shivered, her face puckering until she nearly cried. “And she was so scary.”

He had listened, and nodded, and tried to make her happy. His mother had advised him that Edith might attempt to call attention to herself with wild stories and concocted illnesses out of sheer misery. It was a fact that her family life was now “imbalanced.” The loving hand of a mother was absent, and girls required a strong maternal influence in order to grow into reasonable young women.

“The damage might be too great,” Mrs. McMichael had speculated and Alan, alarmed, had tried to do all he could to help his fellow pirate mend. He had even secretly played at tea with her and her dollies, much to his shame.

But his sister had laughed at Edith and told all her friends about her ghost story. Girls could be so cruel; at school and church—everywhere, now that he thought about it—Eunice and the others had lain in wait for Edith’s approach, then jumped out at her shouting, “Boo!”

They tortured and bullied her; and finally, one day close to her eleventh birthday, she came to Alan and said, “On the subject of Mama, Alan, I believe I was mistaken.”

For years she did not mention it, and he had almost forgotten all about it. Then she had begun her novel, and he realized that she had only buried the memory. He had shown her those images of spectral visitation as an opening gambit to discuss it, but by then, she had become enamored of Sir Thomas Sharpe. Still, she had peered at the images with acute concentration, and he wondered what had been going through her mind.

If you could come back from the dead
, he told Carter Cushing,
would you tell me how you died? How did you come to write Sharpe a check for such a vast sum on the night before you left this world?

His musings were interrupted by the crunch of footsteps in the snow. Mr. Ferguson had arrived.

“You asked to see me?” the elderly lawyer asked, as they tipped hats to one another. Then he studied the grave. “Perhaps it all ended well enough. Edith seems to have found happiness, don’t you agree?”

It was clear to Alan that Ferguson was testing the waters. “I haven’t heard a word,” he replied.

“I have. She asked me to transfer all her assets to England.”

She is giving her fortune to Sharpe
, Alan realized with a jolt. Which, as a married woman, was of course her prerogative. But he couldn’t help his certainty that it was wrong. And dangerous.

“Are you really?” he asked.

“Every penny.” Ferguson was trying to remain neutral, but it was clear to Alan that he was also troubled. “I’ve sent the papers and await only her signature. She seems to be investing all of it in those clay mines of his, and I have no recourse but to obey.”

With Ferguson’s frank admission, Alan decided to be more direct.

“The manner of Cushing’s death—the impact on his head. He had shaving cream on his cheek. He was likely in front of the mirror. That is inconsistent with the diagonal injuries he sustained against the basin’s corner.” He paused, for now he was about to move into damning territory.

“And the last check was made out to Sir Thomas Sharpe, on the very night he announced his departure. You were there. The night Edith slapped him.”

Something changed in Ferguson’s face; he was dropping his air of impartiality and letting down his guard, as Alan had done.

“If I may confide,” Ferguson began, and he leaned in close. “Before Cushing died, he hired a New York man, a Mr. Holly. Very hard to track down. He digs up unsavory facts, haunts places not suitable for a gentleman.” A blush of color rose in the lawyer’s cheeks. “I am afraid that even I have used him, from time to time. But the very fact that Holly got involved gives me pause.”

Alan was intent. “What are you trying to say?”

“Look, Doctor, Cushing was no fool. And he liked you. Always mentioned you as someone worthy of his trust.” He waited a beat, and then he added pointedly, “And, quite frankly, of his daughter.”

Alan was moved, and conflicted. This mystery was far from over. Yet was he the one who should persist in unraveling it?

“I would love to visit Edith,” Ferguson ventured. “But I am old and tired. A trip like that requires a younger man than me.” He looked sideways at Alan, who gave him a nod.

They were agreed, then. There and then, a pact was made.

And Alan would not fail.

A
S WINTER SET
in and the days went by, a strange sense of freedom overcame me. I even started transcribing my novel again, inspired by the secrets Allerdale Hall seemed to hold.

* * *

Something had changed in Thomas, and Edith was glad. She knew he had been holding back affection because of her mourning, but a man had… needs, and this she understood. And welcomed. She wanted to be his wife in all ways. She wanted that closeness for herself. And then, perhaps, she could tell him about the terrifying things that she had seen and heard—although there had been no more of them. It was all over.

And just because I saw them doesn’t mean they were actually there, or that they are still there
, she thought.
Or that anything is to be done about them.
As Thomas had observed, the house was centuries old. Many people had died in this house, and some of those deaths were bound to have been violent. He and his sister had seemed quite dismissive of the shadow she saw upon her arrival at Allerdale Hall, and a part of her was still that little girl who had confided the terrifying encounter with her mother’s ghost to her friend, and been laughed at.

Alan showed me those pictures. I’m not certain he put credence in them. But perhaps he thought of them only as scientific phenomena. Lingering presences, memories. He spoke of an “offering,” an invitation to communicate. But was he truly speaking of that, or of a need to create a state of mind that would open one’s eyes in a special state of receptivity?

Am I seeing things that are really here?

Today she had dressed in shining golden satin and styled her hair much as she had worn it the night of the ball at the McMichaels’. She took a moment before she stepped into the elevator, then climbed in and pulled down the lever. As it rose she surveyed the house. Perhaps the wounded structure was letting its ghosts out just as moths and flies seemed to be emerging from cracks in the walls. In the same way that it breathed, maybe the house was simply exhaling old, poisonous histories that had nothing to do with the modern world.

The lift jerked to a stop. As with the more horrifying trip to the mine pit, the bottom of the cab did not stop flush with the floor. She had to step down. She was almost a little dizzy; she was at the highest accessible point of the house. It seemed terribly wrong to place a nursery up here. How had Lucille phrased it? “Confined.” Like prisoners.

But there was no doubt that she had arrived at the nursery. The moldy, mottled wallpaper featured a little boy who appeared to be falling—Jack and Jill? The omnipresent moths clung to painted flowers and did not scatter when she approached.

The first room she entered was incredibly dusty and neglected. A cradle and toy chest occupied a corner near a window. A blackboard and student desk reminded her of her first days learning her letters at her mother’s knee, before she was old enough to join the other children at school. Many more moths trembled, glued to the walls and the ceiling, staining it a deep brown. They shifted and flew, swooping close to her head. Under a skylight stood an old wicker wheelchair. As she turned her head, dust motes seemed to collect in the chair, thickening into a shape; she looked back and the illusion dissipated.

She heard the whirring of a drill and followed the sound into a dark but wonderful room full of gears and clocks and mechanical wonders. Automata of all sorts greeted her eyes—clowns, a lady in a French gown playing a harpsichord. A wigged gentleman with a flute to his lips. A comical little duck.

And there he was with his back to her, Thomas, ever the industrious inventor, refining the prototype of his mining machine, since the snow had precluded any work on the full-scale model. Still hopeful, then. He had a woolen blanket around his shoulders, putting the lie to her suspicion that her thick-blooded English husband was impervious to the cold.

“Do you like it, Edith?” he asked her without looking at her.

“It’s wonderful.” She raised her brows. “But how did you know I was here?”

He turned around and smiled at her winningly. “The creak of the floorboards, a shift in the light. It’s easy to sense when you are not alone in this house.”