It's all out in the open now.
No need to pretend.
This is who I am.
This is who he is.
Edith M. Cushing published her debut novel Crimson Peak in 1902. The photograph on the original cover depicted a young woman, bespectacled, a deep scar on her cheek, her face stiff and serious the way most old photographs are. The novel, while beautifully written, wasn't well received by her peers who were not used to the honesty and the gruesomeness Ms Cushing depicted.
Ms Cushing wrote 15 novels until she died, all of which were centred around ghosts, loss and love. And while she maintained a close and loving relationship with her childhood friend, Dr Alan McMicheal, Edith M. cushing never remarried.
One day, when Edith is old and frail and feels as weak as she did when she was 23 and poisoned, she gets up from her chair and leaves the ache behind. Her cheek bleeds again, her feet are cold and damp and the collar around her neck restricts her breathing. Allerdale Hall emerges in front of her, heaving and breathing and sinking into the blood red clay.
Her ankle hurts, twists under her weight and Edith can feel the ragged cold eating into her skin, can hear the soft humming of Lucille's singing, of her piano play, polished and perfect after decades of unresting, unwielding patience. Edith pulls the door open, with shivering, trembling hands and, after sixty years of writing, dreaming of this place and it creaking ache, she wanders its halls again until her fingers rest on the piano.
Lucille, with her hair drawn up tight, her dress laced up, corset snug, too tight, around her waist, plays her lullaby, her blood stained hands steady and secure, Thomas' head on her shoulder. He is still as she remembers him, bleeding onto the snowy white of his skin, his clothes, his hair, eyes sunken in. His chest rises and falls slowly.
Lucille is wearing black, bowy, frilly black, fabric tied together, holding her in. Edith remembers a wide, flowing night gown and open, spilling hair, the ring a spec of red in all this sea of dark and white, can feel her own hair flowing over her back, over her shoulders. "You play marvellously", she says, runs her hand over the rotting wood of the piano.
Thomas opens his eyes, lifts his head. "Edith", he says, as if her name was the first breath of air he's taken in decades, as if his entire being was tied to it. Lucille doesn't stop playing, the ring prominent and bright on her finger. Thomas gets up, takes a step towards Edith. He says her name again and Edith smiles. "Thomas", she says, and caresses his oozing, bleeding cheek. Lucille hits the wrong key.
"I see you have not grown any smarter", she says, her voice deep and rough. Edith thinks of the poison that never left her completely and cooks her head. "Maybe not." She opens her collar, draws a deep breath. "But I have lived. Longer than either of you meant for me to."
"I congratulate on the success of your books, Edith", Lucille says, rising from her chair, and puts two fingers under Edith's chin. Blood drips from the wound on her head into her eyes and she hums. "I wonder if they would sell quite as well if you had written about the whole, the awful truth of it all." Edith smiles and grasps Lucille's wrist. "I am no biograph, Lady Sharpe. I write fiction. As inspired by reality as it may be, it is still fiction."
Thomas laughs, a quiet, soft sound echoing through the rotting walls. "I have to say, Your Ladyship." He kisses her cheek. "You have not lost your spirit." Lucille presses her lips together. Edith draws small circles on her skin and Lucille pulls her hand away as if she had been burned.
"I am not one of your characters who is seduced by a little kindness, Miss Cushing", she says and grabs the house keys hanging from her dress. Edith's hand is blood stained, or maybe it is the clay. She can't be sure. "I am aware of that", she says softly. "But you told me yourself that the only love either of you ever knew was from one another. Perhaps it is time to change that."
"We are dead", Thomas says and Edith nods. "Yes." She crouches down in front of Lucille. "But that does not mean that there are no feelings. Ghosts like you, ghosts so beautiful even after years of decay, they are bound by emotions. Some by anger, by fear, resentment even." She reaches for Lucille's hand. "Others, by loss, or desperation, or love." Lucille draws in a deep breath. The house around them groans.
"Tell me", Edith looks at Thomas, doesn't let go of Lucille. Her skin feels soft and calloused, the metal of the ring cool and soothing against Edith's hand. "Which is it, for you?"
Thomas sits down on the floor next to her. His blood drips on the rotting wood and he looks at her. "Why would you be here?", he asks. "We almost killed you. Lucille tried, until the end."
Edith hums. "I am a writer who, at 23 years old, married a man she knew was too good to be true and stabbed his sister with a pen when I knew she had killed four people before me and was bedding her brother. What does that say about me?"
Lucille laughs, a chilling sound, and kisses Edith's hand. "That you are a very brave, very stupid young girl. And that you have little sense of self preservation."
Edith smiles and bows her head. "Yes, perhaps. But it also means that despite all your efforts, I am alive, and I am here, and I love Thomas." She straightens a fold in Lucille's skirt. "And the two of you will always be two. You will never be without one another. I can see that, too."
"What are you saying?" Thomas' hand is cold and soft and bloody on her waist and Edith raises her head to look at Lucille towering above her. "How could I not love what you love, too? How could I live in this house and breathe with it and listen to its stories and not be entranced with Lucille?"
"We poisoned you", Lucille says. "We lied to you. We've killed three innocent women."
Edith nods. "Yes", she says. "You did." She kisses Lucille's knuckles. "This house, it transforms you, drains the colour out of you. But you forget one thing."
"And what is that?"
"There are moths, more colourful than any butterfly. They feed on the cold and the dark, and they are not so easily maimed."
Some say, Ms Cushing was an odd woman, ever smiling, ever writing. She didn't mind blood and darkness, wrote of them with love and tenderness. She wore her scars with pride and told her stories with certainty, with loving care, as if each of the ghosts was her child. She dedicated each of her novels thusly:
For my moths, withering in the dark
For the butterflies that led my life
And for all things sinking into the ground
May You find peace in this holy soil