I had always had a nightmare about wooden floors and wallpaper covered walls that dripped red liquid, and I realized I was, too.
White and yellow, blue butterflies and black moths and snowflakes in the air. I awakened always after that nightmare knowing it had something to do with me, deeply within. With my past. Father almost doesn´t talk about Mother.
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I am Vanessa.
Lepidoptera. Nymphalidae. Butterfly. Or so I read from enthomology books that Father has given me, along with many others, that I share with Mother in lightly colored halls with mahogany floors. Many butterflies, of many colours, rest pinned to white satin, enclosed in wood and glass. I have many hobbies, because Papa allows me to. Collecting butterflies is one of them.
Another is writing. And reading to Mother. Mother, whose pallor and silence has always apalled me. She is forever bound to flowy old dated dresses in faint yellows and beiges, her long, ethereal, crispy, unnatural hair always moving as if by its own will around her. She remains with me at all times, she comes and goes as she pleases but never really leaves. I sit in the light and take her eyeglasses to my eyes and read aloud, just for her. Mother stares at the distance without saying a word. From time to time, she smiles, and kisses me, and vanishes into thin air.
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Father´s mother said in delighted whispers once, when she thought I wasn´t listening, that Edith lost her mind long before she gave birth, long before she died because of it. She longed, ached, she was utterly broken. She refused to marry Father, and that was a horrible blow for him, enamoured of her as he was, of her, the defiled, the cheated, the crazed, the lost Edith Sharpe, but he nevertheless adopted her daughter as his own, raised the poor blue eyed, black haired naive and almost as crazy as her mother, child. Such merciful gentleman, was her son, no? she told in confidance to her lapdog friends of high society ladies.
Until then I was Vanessa McMichael.
I was old enough to do my own research. The scandal filled the first pages of the newspapers not long before I was born.
The wretched Sharpe siblings. Serial killers of innocent women.
Vanessa Sharpe. That was my real name. Lady Sharpe, the last one, heiress to Allerdale Hall, to the Crimson Peak.
Mother came to me, and a ghastly tear of smoke rose from her dead eyes.
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I screamed at Father until he acceded to bring me to Thomas´lands. I told him I wanted to know about my past, to know who I was, that he owed me at least that. He bowed his head in sorrow and agreeded. Poor thing, my dear Papa is, always so easily broken by the memories of Mother he carried within his heart. He, too, wanted to remember. He saved her there. She saved him there.
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I stand before the black, crumpled and nearly destroyed decay of the once glorious Allerdale Hall, in the snowy ground, my footsteps tinting the soil with a deep shade of crimson as I walk, Papa walks behind me with a pain that hardly lets him breathe, even if he stoically refuses to let his eyes fill with tears.
I step on something. I take the chance to kneel to see what I´m stepping on, covered by blood-red mud and snow, to wipe my eyes.
It is a ring, with a huge ruby in it. At the still open, huge, wooden and cast iron door, awaits me a completely black woman, her skin and dress, ebony not as humans can be black, but blackened as she was made of coal. I stand, white dress and coat and black hair moving with the wind, and I put the cold silver ring on my finger. She smiles with deep hatred and I undoubtedly know that she put it there. For me. She whispers about sins and delights and monstruous bonds, for there are loves that never die. Wounds that never heal. I am the only that carries her bloodline now, the blood of Thomas and Lucille. I play the piano too, I whisper back to her.
Mama comes. As always, Father doesn´t see, doesn´t know. At the distance, a white tall man, white as the woman was black, ethereal as her and tremendously sad, with a wound in his face that oozes red smoke, stares at her without moving. She vanishes and appears just in front of him, her hair caresing him, and touches his wounded cheek with her pale hand. They both look at me, and I see the faintest smile on his lips for a split second. Then they fade.
I turn my back to the ruins. I look in Father´s eyes for what seems to be an eternity. He nods as comprehendingly, and as I enter Allerdale Hall, my origin, I lift my eyes to the motto on the walls, black moths, blue and yellow butterflies, snowflakes falling over me, and I walk on snow that becomes red clay oozing from the charred and black remains of the House that Bleeds.