Crimson Peak: The Official Movie Novelization (2 page)

The coffin—locked—gleamed like obsidian as the pallbearers conveyed the corpse of Edith’s mother to its final resting place beneath the monument raised in hopes of eternal repose for the members of the Cushing family. Swirls of weeping angel wings enfolded generations of the dead.

Her mother’s shriveled body had been so black that it looked as if she had died in a fire—or so Edith had overheard Cook describing it to DeWitt, their butler. Edith had been struck dumb by the horrific revelation, but had no way to confirm it. In the Cushing home, no one spoke to her about her terrible loss; all the servants fell silent whenever she walked into a room. She felt as invisible as a ghost; she wanted, needed someone to see her, wrap their arms around her and rock her, and tell her a story or sing her a lullaby. But the staff kept their distance, as if the little mistress was bad luck.

Now, in the churchyard, she spotted Alan McMichael and his sister Eunice. A year older than Edith, yellow-headed Alan with his ruddy cheeks was Edith’s boon companion in all things. His blue-gray eyes, the only spot of brightness in the graveyard, found her gaze and held it, almost as if he were holding her hand. Beside him, Eunice was fidgety and a trifle bored. Though Eunice was but nine, she had already been to a plentiful number of funerals. They were Victorian children and death was not uncommon.

But Edith had only one mother to lose, and that was new and bewildering. Heart-crushing. Tears wanted to come, but they only hovered at the rims of her eyes. She was not to make a fuss; well-bred children were seen and not heard, even when their worlds were falling apart. Alan, watching her, seemed to be the only one who understood her unbearable grief. Tears sparkled in his eyes.

Eunice shifted her weight and played with one of her ginger ringlets. Alan tugged gently on his sister’s wrist to make her stop and she batted at him. Their mother smiled wistfully down on them both as if she had not seen Eunice’s unseemly display. Mrs. McMichael was still pretty, still alive.

Alan kept hold of Eunice’s wrist. She thrust out her lower lip and their mother reached in the pocket of her sable coat, offering her daughter what appeared to be a sweet. Eunice grabbed it, jerking free of her brother’s grasp. Now it was Alan who pretended not to notice what was going on—or perhaps he truly did not see it. All his attention was fixed on Edith as a huge sob threatened to burst out of her aching chest. There would be no more sweets from Mama, no smiles, no stories.

Black cholera had taken her. A horrible death, agonizing and slow. Edith’s father had ordered a closed casket, and asked her not to look. So there was no parting kiss, no goodbye, no last words.

* * *

That is, until she came back. Three weeks after she died.

* * *

Time did not heal all wounds.

Her mother had been dead for almost a month, and Edith missed her more than ever. The black wreath still hung on the door and the servants wore armbands in the mistress’s memory. Cook had not wanted the maids to remove the black drapes from the mirrors. DeWitt said she was too superstitious and Cook had answered that she was merely
careful
. That you couldn’t be too sure when the dead were concerned. Back in Ireland, the spirit of a maiden aunt got stuck in a mirror in 1792 and had been haunting the family ever since. DeWitt had replied that as the drapes had gone up before Mrs. Cushing had expired, and she was now buried, there was no chance that the mistress was trapped.

Yet the drapes stayed up.

Edith was lying in her little daybed, weeping quietly in the dark with her stuffed rabbit for company. The hurt in her heart seemed deeper and more painful with each passing night. Shadows of snowdrifts mottled the dusty covers of the books her mother and she had read together, a few pages every night. She could not bear to open them.

The grandfather clock at the end of the hall ticked between her sobs like an axe striking wood. Outside her bedroom window, the ever-present snow fell silently over the eastern shore of Lake Erie and the headwaters of the Niagara River. The Erie Canal had fostered the fortunes of Edith’s family. Wind and frozen water. The beautifully appointed Cushing home was cold that night, as it had been every night since Mama’s death. Edith felt as if it were she who had turned to ice, and could never hope to be warm again.

I wonder if she is cold, down in the ground.
Edith couldn’t banish the thought, even though she had been told a dozen times—a hundred—that her mother was in a better place.

She remembered when her room was the best place: the soft, gentle voice of her mother reading as she snuggled beneath the coverlet with a cup of hot chocolate and a hot water bottle.

Once upon a time.

Playing lullabies on the piano when Edith couldn’t sleep.

There was no music tonight.

Edith cried.

The clock ticked, counting off the seconds, hours, nights of life without Mama. Endless. Relentless. Heartless.

Then Edith heard a strangled sound that was halfway between a sigh and a moan. She jerked and clapped a hand over her mouth in surprise. Had she done that?

Her heartbeat stuttered as she cocked her head, listening hard.

Tick, tick, tick.
Only the clock.

There it was again. A sad, low keening. A whisper of grief. Even… agony.

She bolted upright and slipped out of bed. As she crept across the chilly floor, the floorboards creaked and the rustle of silk caressed her ears. She was not wearing silk.

Cook had told DeWitt that Mama had been laid out in her finest black silk gown, and that her skin had turned just as black in the hours before she died. Cook had used words like “revolting, ghastly. A horror.” She had been speaking of her mistress like a monster.

Of
Mama
, who had been so beautiful, and smelled always of lilacs, and loved to play the piano. Who told her the most wonderful stories about plucky princesses who thwarted evil sorcerers and the princes who adored them. Who promised Edith that her own life would hold a “happily ever after” with a man who would build her a castle—“with his own two hands,” she would say, smiling very dreamily, then add, “like your father.”

But now, as Edith stared into the gloom, she couldn’t keep that Mama in her mind’s eye. Her thoughts kept returning to the monster, the horror, and she wondered if the shadows kept shifting of their own accord, or if that was the play of snowflake silhouettes on the wallpaper. She looked from the wall to the end of the hallway. It was not quiet there. The air seemed to flutter, and then to thicken.

Her blood chilled as a shape began to emerge from the gloom—a figure cloaked in shadow, floating at the end of the hall. A woman, swathed in once-fine black silk now tattered like the aging wings of a moth.

Was it just her imagination? A trick of the light?

Edith broke out in a cold sweat.
It’s not there. It’s not.

She’s
not.

Her pulse raced.

It was not gliding toward her.

She was
not.

With a gasp, she turned away and darted back toward her bedroom. Her skin prickled and her cheeks felt hot. She tried to listen but could only hear a roaring in her ears and the thud of her bare feet on the carpet runner.

Edith did not see the thing that was trailing after her as she ran, or feel the skeletal fingers of a shimmering hand as they caressed her hair. Moonlight shone on finger bones, revealed a quicksilver glimpse of a tormented face, flesh eaten away.

No, Edith did not see. But perhaps she
sensed.

A shade. A spirit compelled by inextinguishable love to return, by desperation to speak. Gliding, with the rustle of silk, and the clack of bone and withered flesh.

Edith saw none of that as she scrambled under the covers and clung to her bunny, quivering in terror.

But seconds later, as she turned on her side, she went absolutely rigid with shock. She felt the decaying hand wrap around her shoulder, smelled the damp earth of the grave, and heard the desiccated lips, a hoarse distortion of the voice she had known better than her own as it whispered into her ear:

“My child, when the time comes, beware of Crimson Peak.”

Edith screamed. She shot up and grabbed her eyeglasses. As she looped them over her ears, the gas lamps came back on. She hadn’t even realized they’d gone out.

There was nothing—no
one
—in the room.

Until, alerted by her shrieks, her father rushed in and gathered her up in his arms.

* * *

It would be years before I heard a voice like that again—a warning from out of time, and one I came to understand only when it was too late…

I
T WAS MARKET
day, and puffy white clouds tatted the sky like fine lace as Edith sailed over the muddy yard in her high-buttoned shoes. She had selected her burnished gold skirt, a white blouse, and a black tie to wear on this auspicious occasion. The skirt most closely matched her blond hair, which she had wound into a smooth chignon and topped with a smart new hat adorned with a modesty veil that identified her—to her way of thinking—as something more than a fashion plate and something less than a Bohemian. A bright young woman with ambition, then. And
talent.

For the first time in her life, she had something she had created, a product to sell—and a potential buyer. She hefted the heavy parcel and smiled secretly to herself.

Livestock, street vendors, carriages and the occasional motorcar threatened to splash mud on her clothes. Unblemished, she crossed into the busy commercial building where she, Miss Edith Cushing, had business to conduct, and started up the stairs.

She took it for a good omen when Alan McMichael, now Dr. Alan McMichael, hailed her as he came down the stairs, stopping to meet her as she ascended. They hadn’t seen each other in ages; he’d been in England studying to become an eye doctor. She was rather startled to realize that he truly was all grown up, his face angular in that way adult men’s faces were—baby fat gone—and his shoulders quite broad beneath his coat. He was not wearing a hat, and his hair was nearly the same color blond as hers.

“Edith,” he said delightedly, “you know I’m setting up my practice?” He seemed to assume that she knew he’d returned.

Eunice never said a word to me
, she thought, a bit put out. But on the other hand, Edith hadn’t been calling on the McMichaels. She hadn’t been calling on anyone, and in polite society, that was rather rude. One asked after one’s friends. Except that Eunice was not friendly, not in the least. One called on one’s acquaintances, then. One inquired after their health and kept up with the important events in their lives—which in Eunice’s case would include the minute details of parties, balls, and galas.

How extraordinarily dull
, Edith thought.
Oh, dear, I’m only twenty-four, and it appears that I’m already a crotchety misanthrope.

“At ten I’m going to see Ogilvie,” she informed him, regaining her sense of excitement. “He’s going to look at my manuscript and see if he wants to publish it.”

She had begun the book before Alan had left for medical school, reading sections to him when they chanced to meet—rather more often than one would have anticipated, given that they were only friends. He had been the one to whom she had confided her mother’s ghostly visitation, although of course Eunice had eavesdropped and told the whole world. And the whole world had mocked and ridiculed Edith. From that day to this, Edith had decided to exploit the wild imaginings of her grief-stricken ten-year-old self—for such they must have been—as the metaphor for loss in her novel. Though the memory of that nightmare still haunted her, she was grateful for the terrifying experience, as it had provided riveting grist for the mill.

His smile grew at the mention of the completion of her book. “You do know that it’s only nine o’clock,” he ventured.

“I have a few corrections I wish to make first.” She began to go through a mental checklist of her revisions, then became aware that Alan had just asked her to stop by his new office soon, and was saying something about some uncanny pictures he wished to show her.

She gave him her full attention. She truly was glad to see him. So perhaps she wasn’t precisely a crotchety misanthrope. Perhaps she was simply selective about whose details to keep track of. New business ventures were far more exciting than the latest fashions—although she did not consider herself a frump.

“I’m to help Mother,” he was saying. “She’s throwing a party tomorrow for Eunice’s suitor. Why don’t you come?”

As if on cue Eunice, some of her social-climbing hangers-on, and her mother, Mrs. McMichael, appeared on the stairs. They were dressed to the nines, and Eunice was glowing.

“We met him at the British Museum,” Mrs. McMichael announced. “Last fall, when we were visiting Alan.”

“You wouldn’t believe it. He’s so handsome,” Eunice gushed, all rosy blushes.

Edith was able to feel happy for Eunice. The other girl’s dream was to be well married. She would lead a husband a merry dance, that was for certain.