by Nancy Holder
“You don’t?” Edith smiled. “Because I do. You see them only when they want you to. Only when it’s time.” She raised her chin. “And one of them—” she faltered, so tired “—one of them wants you to see him now. It’s time.”
She watched Lucille as a luminous specter emerged from the fog.
Thomas.
His ghost was pale. From his cheek a plume of blood rose, swirling into the air like smoke. His eyes and lips were golden; he was shimmering with sunlight from within. He was no longer a creature of the dark, a denizen of Allerdale Hall and all the madness and barbarity of his tragic, passionate family.
Lucille stared, amazed.
“Thomas? No…”
The sight of him brought her weapon down. Tears streamed down her cheeks. The sight of Thomas’s ghost was the only thing that could vanquish her—that could suffocate her rage.
Edith called softly, “Lucille?”
At the sound of her name, Lucille turned. And as she did Edith crashed the shovel blade against the side of her skull. The jarring impact staggered Lucille backwards, and she fought gravity with knees that would no longer support her weight. Seeing her falter infused Edith with a sudden burst of strength. It was now or never. Press the advantage. End this or die trying.
She swung the shovel, smashing the back of the blade into the woman’s head. Only when Lucille fell to the ground did she pause to gasp for breath.
Though down, Lucille was not done. She blurted out, “I will not stop, I will not.” She groped for the cleaver she’d dropped, blindly clawing at the crimson muck. “Until I kill you or—”
Edith already had the shovel in motion again, a blow that started in the soles of her bare feet, and corkscrewed up through thighs and hips. Before Lucille could finish her words, the shovel came down on her head with a crack that echoed off the walls of the manor, driving her face into the blood-colored snow. There was no need for another blow. Well short of the cleaver, Lucille’s outstretched fingers quivered in frantic palsy, then went forever still.
“I heard you the first time,” Edith said, heaving for breath.
Leaning on the shovel for support, she looked down upon the corpse of Lucille Sharpe, who had once been a tiny, innocent baby in her mother’s arms. A toddler who had wanted nothing but love, and warmth, and to be safe and cherished.
Or could it have been that Lucille had “come out wrong,” just as her own poor baby had? Thomas’s child?
Edith’s face was suddenly lit by shimmering, warm light. Thomas’s ghost moved closer, suffused with gold, in contrast to the dark, mad creature lying dead in the mud.
He smiled at her, really smiled; she remembered the glow of flame in his eyes when they had danced the Chopin waltz; the radiance of the firelight on his face in their humble honeymoon sanctuary at the depot. Need had driven him into the darkness, but love had brought him into the light. It had redeemed him.
Letting the shovel fall, she opened her arms to embrace him one last time, but the diaphanous figure dissolved away into the mist… into white light.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I KILLED HER.
Edith gazed down at the ruined body of Lucille Sharpe, the deeper red of her head wound darkening the crimson snow. She tried to summon pity or remorse, but she could be nothing but fiercely glad. Lucille would have killed her, and would have gone on to kill others, if Edith hadn’t stopped her.
Snow fell on the back of Lucille’s head flake upon flake, each crystalline shape soaking up the blood and sparkling like rubies. The sight was beautiful in a horrible way.
Trembling as the adrenaline in her body burned off, Edith hobbled to the narrow tunnel of the mine and called, “Alan?”
The word echoed but there was no answer.
She went cold. He must be alive. He must. After all this, his incredible bravery, his sacrifice… after loving her for his entire life, he must not die.
“Alan?”
Still nothing.
And then she heard him call her name, deep beneath the earth in the clay pit and Edith choked out a sound that was halfway between a sob and a laugh.
“Alan!”
She started to climb back down the rail track but her whole body rebelled. Her muscles would not obey, her joints would not bend.
“Alan, hang on!”
* * *
Allerdale Hall glared at her as she staggered through the front door. Her injured leg had stiffened further, from ankle to hip. The memory of Thomas’s arms around her as he carried her over the threshold brought tears, which she held back as she summoned the elevator. She could not break down now, not when Alan needed her. She had been right that first day; it was colder inside the house than out in the snow. Colder than the grave, she thought. A grave’s contents rotted into earth, to someday return to the sunlight and warmth. There was no hope of renewal in Allerdale Hall; what died there stayed there, frozen in place by a cold beyond imagining.
The elevator did not seem to want to come. Eventually it rattled up to her. Blood had pooled on the floor and smeared handprints ringed the cage bars like the stripes on a barber pole. The coppery smell was overwhelming. For the briefest of instants she couldn’t make herself go inside, and then she knew she had no choice. She had to get to Alan.
“I am not your enemy,” she told the house. There was no answer, no scattering of leaves in the hallways or huge, moaning breath. There were dozens of black moths circling the snow that filtered through the hole in the ceiling, as if they did not dare test themselves against the light.
Edith entered the elevator and closed the grate, holding her breath all the way down. As usual, it did not stop flush with the floor; she lowered herself to a seated position and gingerly put down one foot and then the other.
She heard a moan.
“Alan, Alan!” she shouted.
Water dripped. Vats bubbled. The foundation groaned.
There was no tapping.
She limped and half-fell and staggered and lurched, and somehow miraculously made it to Alan’s side before she collapsed. His eyes were closed and his mouth slack. He looked dead. His forehead and face were icy to her touch. She felt no breath. There was so much blood. Was she too late? Had the house claimed another?
Wrapping her arms around the still form, Edith burst into sobs.
Not this. Not Alan.
“You loved me,” she wept. But more importantly, “I love you.”
Alan grunted.
And opened his eyes. He tried to raise a hand and moved only his fingers instead.
“Edith.” He smiled weakly. “You found me.”
* * *
Edith did all she could to help Alan into the elevator and then out the front door of Allerdale Hall. He couldn’t bear to stay inside the house while Edith went to the stable to harness the horse to the carriage.
She came back with bad news: The horse must have smelled the fresh blood on her, for as soon as she had pulled back the gate of its stall, it had bolted and run out of the building, and from there, Alan assumed, out onto the moor. Given their physical condition, there would be no recapturing it. He was bleeding still, and it was a long walk, but it seemed the only chance either of them had for survival. He had already beaten the odds, as he figured it.
Edith Cushing had declared her love for him.
And so they began the trek.
* * *
With Alan’s heavy arm and most of his weight across her shoulders, Edith limped upward in the mist. She and Alan left tracks in the blood-red snow. The black hulk of Allerdale Hall was perched half a mile away ringed with a moat of scarlet.
“Will we make it?” Alan asked in a tired, faint voice.
She decided to be honest. “I don’t know, Alan. Nothing seems sure.”
“No,” he agreed. “To think… to think that I came to rescue you.”
Edith smiled as she held him. “We have a long way to go. We have each other’s shoulders. We should be grateful for that.”
No sooner had the
words left her mouth, she caught sight of torches bobbing a distance ahead of them, growing larger as they approached. They were men from the village. She could hear their voices, suddenly excited and shouting, but couldn’t make out what they were saying. One wore a bright yellow muffler as brilliant as a sunbeam. Upon spotting Alan, he raised his hand in greeting.
Rescued, she thought. Both of us.
She looked back at the house and the opening lines of the novel she would begin again popped full-blown into her head:
Ghosts are real. That much I know.
They fade away, along with the past, like mist in the daylight… Leaving only small lessons behind. Small certainties.
EPILOGUE
INSIDE THE HOUSE:
The blood of Alan McMichael on the floor.
The broken banister where Edith had fallen.
The chimney in the library, raising as the house took a deep breath of poisoned air.
There are things that tie ghosts to a place, very much like they do us. Some remain tethered to a patch of land or a time and date. But there are others that hold to an emotion, a drive: loss, revenge, or love…
…a terrible crime…
And the ghost of Lucille Sharpe, alone, all alone forever, seated at the piano in the unforgiving cold. Playing the first note of the lullaby.
Those, they never leave.
Let the wind blow kindly
in the sail of your dreams
and the moon light your journey
and bring you to me.
We can’t live in the mountains,
we can’t live out at sea.
Where oh, where oh, my lover,
shall I come to thee?
THE END
“To learn what we fear is to learn who we are.”
— GUILLERMO DEL TORO
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MY THANKS TO my agent, Howard Morhaim and his team; to my editor, Natalie Laverick, and to Alice Nightingale, Julia Lloyd and everyone at my Titan Books home. I’d also like to acknowledge the University of California at San Diego for an education in film and TV production that has served me well all these years. My friends Beth Hogan, Pam Escobedo, Julia Escobedo, and Amy Schricker so often went above and beyond while I was on deadline; and Mark Mandell shared my joy, hope, and anxiety about this project as only another freelancer could. Thank you to Anna Nettle and everyone at Legendary, who proved so helpful. My appreciation to the cast and crew of Crimson Peak, whose artistry continues to astonish, delight, and terrify me. But most of all, I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to Guillermo del Toro, whose brilliance blazes bright in every frame of Crimson Peak. Muchas gracias por invitarme a su casa.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NANCY HOLDER IS a multiple award-winning, New York Times bestselling author (the Wicked Series). She has won five Bram Stoker Awards from the Horror Writers Association, as well as a Scribe Award for Best Novel and a Pioneer Award from RT Book Reviews. Nancy has sold over eighty novels and one hundred short stories, many of them based on such shows as Highlander, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and others. She is the vice-president of the Horror Writers Association and teaches in the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing Program, offered through the University of Southern Maine. She lives in San Diego with the writer Mark Mandell, Tater the corgi, and McGee the cat.
You can visit Nancy online at www.nancyholder.com