Crimson Peak: The Official Movie Novelization (26 page)

Believing is seeing
, she told herself.
And I believe.

Then there it was, hovering in the air: a crimson ghost. It was a woman covered in blood, holding a child, and her long hair wafted as if she were underwater. It had to be Enola Sciotti. The baby was tangled in her hair, and the expression on her face was one of extreme trepidation, as if she were more afraid of Edith than Edith was of her.

Perhaps that was true.

Summoning all her strength, Edith pushed herself out of the chair and walked toward the ghost. The pain that clawed at her was physical, but by the expression on her scarlet features, the phantom’s agony was soul-deep. There was such profound grief and anger on Enola’s face that Edith almost looked away. She felt as if she were seeing far more than she was meant to, invading the dead woman’s privacy.

Enola Sciotti, who had loved Thomas Sharpe so much she had left her home and family and allowed herself to be imprisoned here.

Just as Edith had done.

They had killed this woman and her child. They had taken her life, cup by poisonous cup, and she died vomiting blood. Had she held her poor tiny baby in her arms as it had died? Was that unimaginable heartache the reason she had lingered all these years?

How could they do it? How on earth?

She locked gazes with Enola. They were sisters in this foul madness. Their fates were entwined, and Edith would do all she could to ease this dead woman’s suffering.

“I am not afraid anymore,” Edith told her. “You are Enola Sciotti. Tell me what you want from me. Tell me what you need.”
Trust me. Believe in me.

Still floating, Enola stared back at her. Then Enola raised her hand and pointed down the passage where Beatrice Sharpe’s ghost had once appeared and ordered Edith to leave Allerdale Hall. Edith understood that she wanted her to go there. Despite her weakened state, Edith began to walk, and as she did the ghost faded.

Edith was alone again.

She heard someone humming and recognized the tune Lucille had played on the piano in the library. Haunting, sad, and yet tender. A lullaby. For the dead baby?

The melody wound through the gallery, with its blue tracings and fluttering moths. It seemed to go on forever, and she had the strange thought that the objects behind all those doors had been rearranged since she had taken the cylinders. That all the objects, when seen as a whole, could tell her a story.

What did Enola so desperately want her to see?

She followed the sound up the stairs to the attic. Taking a deep breath, she pushed open the door and stepped into the room.

Thomas was there, standing with his arms around a woman, his face in profile against her long dark hair. Her bare shoulder was there for his lips, his touch, and his face was passionately buried in the soft hollow between her breast and shoulder. She was clinging to him.

Who was this? A mistress?

The woman in the elevator. His secret. At last I meet her.

He jerked, turned, and in so doing, the woman turned too.

Edith gasped. It was Lucille.

And this was her room, spilling with moths and dead things, a shelter for Thomas’s horrible secret: Lucille was his lover.

T
HOMAS AND
L
UCILLE
heard Edith’s sharp intake of breath and turned as one to look at her. She could not believe it; Thomas’s face was a study in panic and guilt.

But did he speak?

Not one word.

Lucille flew at her; Edith backed away, then turned on her heel and stumbled into a worktable. A mounting kit upturned, clattering; jars rolled and broke, releasing moths and butterflies that harried Edith as she picked up speed and broke into a run.

This cannot be. I did not see that.

Lucille was closing in.

The elevator. It was Edith’s best hope for escape. She pressed the button and begged it to come. To no avail: Lucille caught up to her and grabbed her brutally by the collar of her nightdress and her hair. Edith felt the mad frenzy of her grip as she struggled to free herself. But Lucille was stronger. Her face was contorted in hatred and fury.

“It’s all out in the open now,” Lucille said triumphantly, turning her around to face her. Edith’s back slammed against the gallery railing. “No need to pretend. This is who I am. This is who he is!”

Then she grabbed Edith’s hand and tried to rip the garnet ring off her finger. The Sharpe family heirloom, treasured by the dead. The metal scraped along Edith’s flesh and burned as if it were molten.

Lucille tugged again, and again. She pushed Edith to the edge of the balcony; Edith’s heels brushed the decaying wood and she teetered, close to a fall. She looked down at the parquet floor and held on for dear life. This could not be her end. Enola Sciotti had not sent her to her death.

The front doorbell rang.

At the same instant, Thomas appeared in the hallway, hand outstretched toward Lucille and Edith. His face was pale and blank, his eyes swollen. His features were contorted in fear—was he afraid for Edith, or for himself?

“Someone’s at the door!” he shouted. “Don’t do it!”

Lucille was uncommonly strong. Her face spoke of implacable determination. Edith fought back as best she could, holding onto her, but she was outmatched and her grip began to fail. Sick, off-balance, struggling for her life as the red stone caught the light, she understood finally that the ring was important to Lucille not because it was a family treasure, but because of what it signified—marriage to Thomas.

“I knew it!” Edith cried. “I felt it all along! You’re not his sister!”

Then Lucille finally slid the ring onto her own finger and slapped Edith with tremendous force across her face.

“That’s delightful,” she sneered. “I
am
.”

Then she pushed Edith backwards off the balcony. Edith fell headfirst, her nightgown streaming behind her like wings. Moths skittered out of her way and pelted as she plummeted. This would be a better death, a cleaner death, than what they had planned for her. At least she had saved herself from that.

As if in slow motion, she saw a railing, but couldn’t avoid it and smacked hard against it. The breath was knocked from her lungs. The parquet floor rushed up to meet her and she slammed against the rotted floorboards. A brilliant flash of light exploded in her vision on impact. Clay oozed out from beneath her body, or was it her own blood and brains?

A doorbell rang again and again. The irritating sound roused her. Or maybe the ringing was inside her own head?

She struggled for breath, but she had none. She was completely empty and when she tried to draw air, nothing happened. Her chest did not move, and suffocation squeezed down on her like a hand over her mouth.

The doorbell, again. It was real, not imagined, outside not inside.

Find me, save me
, she begged whoever had arrived.
Come now. Please
.

But Lucille’s face appeared in her field of vision, eyes spinning with madness and victory, and then all went dark.

* * *

In Edith’s dream, the sun was shining on a field of green grass, and she was holding hands with her parents. Her mother on one side and her father on the other. And Mama gazed down at her and said,
“Thomas and Lucille don’t even have this. They have no happy memories to draw from.”

When she opened her eyes again, she knew that she was still dreaming. Peering at her intently was Alan McMichael, and he could not be real. He was back in Buffalo… or had he gone to Italy? Why was she thinking that?

Enola Sciotti’s letter
, she remembered, and it all came rushing back.

“Hello, Edith,” he said warmly, but in a subdued, professional tone. “Don’t try to talk or move just yet. You are heavily sedated.”

Alan, listen to me, oh, dear God
, she thought. But she looked around and realized she was still at Allerdale Hall. Thomas and Lucille stood close together, observing. Two vultures circling carrion. Dear God, what would they do to Alan?

She tried to warn him, but it was just too much to manage. His face blurred in and out of focus; was he a ghost already?

“It’s a shock seeing me, I warrant,” he said to her. Then he turned to Lucille and Thomas. “Forgive me for dropping in unannounced.”

Lucille simpered, the very picture of a worried sister-in-law. “Heaven-sent, as it turns out.”

“I arrived in Southampton yesterday. I should have sent a wire.” His smile took in all three of them. “But I thought you’d enjoy the surprise.”

Tell him, tell him
, she ordered herself, flailing at him. But she was drifting in and out of awareness. Part of her was back with him in their pirate lair in his back yard, and she was trying to tell him about Enola Sciotti. And Eunice was there, laughing at her.

No, not Eunice.

Lucille.

“We’d have been at a loss. It’s a miracle,” Lucille told Alan. “She’s been sick. Delirious.”

Edith looked down. Her left leg was bandaged and braced. Alan must have done it.

“She spoke to me—” she began.

“Who spoke to you?” Alan asked gently.

“My mother was delivering a warning.” She
had
to make him understand. “Crimson Peak—”

As she reached toward him, he dropped his gaze toward her hand. She followed his line of vision: It was her ring finger, red and swollen, from where Lucille had torn off the ring.

“Delirious, you see?” Lucille murmured. “Poor thing.”

Alan looked at Lucille.

She is wearing the ring. See the ring
, Edith begged him. But even if he did, it wouldn’t mean anything to him. He had probably never noticed it on her hand, although she had begun wearing it the second that Thomas proposed. Men didn’t see things like that.

Tears of fear and frustration rolled down her cheeks, but deep gratitude rushed through her as well. Alan had relinquished his work, crossed the sea, and searched her out in the stormy moors of England to save her life, at grave risk of his own. She had not understood his true mettle or the depth of his feeling until now, and she felt deep remorse for not allowing herself to see it before. It had been there all along, like the air around her and the ground underfoot. Because of her blindness, Alan was like her, a butterfly for these two dark moths to devour. If he discovered what was going on, they would kill him. If they convinced him to leave her with them, they would kill her.

“Here, drink.” He held a cup of tea to her lips.
The
cup.

“No, no, no, please, no!” she cried, batting at it. She felt herself fainting. She was going to die. And he, too.

Alan…

* * *

Edith’s “sister-in-law” put on every air of the utmost concern as Edith slipped back into unconsciousness. Alan made a show of putting away his equipment as he pondered his next move.

“I’m only sorry that you have to see her like this,” Lucille said. “Really, for all her city upbringing, she’s taken to life here in the hills.” She paused and then she said, “You will stay here, with us? Wait for the storm to pass.”

“If you insist,” Alan said, although etiquette demanded that he make at least a token refusal. This was certainly no time to stand on ceremony. “But then…” When she raised her brows, he knew he must not reveal that he had a terrible suspicion that Edith’s fall had been engineered. Did they actually mean that she had plummeted from the topmost floor? It was a miracle that she was still alive. He, too, for that matter, if his suspicions were correct. “…I’ll need a moment alone with my patient,” he finished.

Lucille paled and Sir Thomas nervously came forward. His apprehension and culpability were written all over his face. It took everything in Alan not to strike him.

“I beg your pardon?” Sharpe said.

“Would you mind?” Alan asked in a friendly, innocent tone. “Just a moment more. We must all do our best to see her through this.”

Lucille pulled Sharpe by the sleeve. “We’ll leave you then, Dr. McMichael,” she said. “With your patient.”

* * *

Once out of sight of Dr. McMichael, Lucille was relentless, taking the stairs so quickly she skipped half of them. Thomas followed, near-paralyzed with apprehension. Everything was spiraling out of control. When he had seen Edith fall…

He thanked Providence that the floorboards were rotten, and the viscous, bright clay had softened her landing.

“Where are you going?” he asked her. But he knew where: to the attic. He followed after her, as he always did.

She whirled on him. “Somebody has to stop him. I just want to know, brother. Is it going to be you this time? Or me, as usual?”

His face fell. He couldn’t even name all the emotions that were swirling through him—shame, horror, bewilderment. Reaching her room, she rummaged in a drawer and pulled out a familiar-looking knife. He recoiled, and she huffed.

“Thought so,” she snapped.

* * *

Alan knew that Edith was almost out of time. He touched her cheek, concerned by how clammy it was. His mind raced, working out various scenarios to get her out of here as fast as possible. These people must own horses. Could he get her to the stables? Would he have time to hitch a horse to a carriage or a wagon? How far would they go to stop him?