The Aftermath

Chapter six

After her afternoon tea, Lucille began to read Edith's book. The whole plot was about a woman who was abandoned all her life and so began to write a list of all the people who had wronged her so she could, when she was ready, murder them. The ending was brutal enough, she finished the job but it ended at mid sentence, which made Lucille wonder, Did the protagonist survive? Was she arrested?

After minutes of contemplating, Lucille placed the book back where she found it and sat on her piano stool and began to play her lullabies.

Closing her eyes, she remembered:

"What the devil are you doing?" She demanded in a shaking voice.

More blood soaked into the fabric. He reached for her.

"Lucille, you're injured."

She brandished the knife at him. At him. Her eyes jittered but her jaw was set. He knew that look. What it meant. It was a look that meant she could kill, and would. But kill him?

"Stay where you are. You burned them."

"She will live. You're not to touch her."

Her lips parted as she held out the knife. Her look cut him as sharply as if the blade found its mark. "You're ordering me now?"

"We can leave, Lucille. Leave Allerdale Hall." They could free themselves of this horrible curse-

"Leave?" She echoed, as if she couldn't understand the word. He wouldn't have been able to either, before Edith had spoken to his heart. Given him hope. He felt as if he were looking at their world through different eyes. He stared at his sister and partner in mortal sin, and he swayed, dizzy and thrilled and terrified. There could be redemption for them. They were standing on the edge of a precipice and for the first time in his life, he grasped that they could soar high above Crimson Peak. Wings weren't just for butterflies and moths. Gargoyles could have them, too.

"Yes," he insisted. "Think about it. We have enough money left. We can start a new life."

She gaped. "Where? Where could we go?" She was listening to him. Perhaps believing him. Considering the possibility that he was right. That they could make it happen.

"Anywhere. We can leave it behind."

"Anywhere," she said, testing out the word, groping toward the prospect like a blind woman. Standing beside him on a cliff, defying death.

He was elated. They were saved. There was hope.

"Let the Sharpe name die in the mines. Let this edifice sink in the ground. All these years holding these rotting walls together. We could be free, Lucille. Free of all this. We can all be together-"

"All?"

He realised only then what he had said. And that he had said exactly the wrong thing, at exactly the wrong moment.

"Do you love her?" The agony other face stabbed him through the heart. He remembered all the times she had taken the cane, a slap, staring at him as tears rolled down her face, bearing the brunt, loving him. There was more pain on her face now than in all those times combined. He didn't want to hurt her. But to free her, to give her a life, a real chance, he had to be cruel to be kind. It was the same thing that Carter Cushing had demanded of him, and he knew, unfortunately, that he was good at it.

Beyond that, he must quell her rage, for Edith's sake, and Alan McMicheal's survival. Lucille had withstood torture at the hands of their parents. The blood on her dress was no guarantee that she could be stopped from anything she set mind to. And that included seeing their plan through to the end.

By killing Edith.

They spoke at the same time:

He began, "This day had to come."

And she, speaking over him like someone drowning out horrible new that, once uttered, could never be retracted: "Do you love her? Tell me, do you?"

"We've been dead for years, Lucille. You and I in this rotting place...with an accursed name. We are ghosts."

Lucille's face drained of colour. Blood loss, shock, disbelief. "Do you love her more than me?"

"But she if life. Life, Lucille. And you won't stop her."

Her breath was hitching. He felt as though he had just pushed her off the cliff, and she was falling.

"You promised-we promised we could not-that you would not fall in love with anyone else-"

Falling to her death.

He delivered the death knell:

"Yes, but it happened."

Lucille's piano playing escalated quickly as the memory began to go on, she remembered the pain and the horror of the truth. That Thomas didn't love her anymore.

Yes, but it happened.

And with a shriek, she stabbed her brother in the chest. He tried to grab the knife but she slashed at his arms and hands, wildly. Clay oozed through the floorboards and the ghosts wept crimson tears in all their prisons of Sharpe misdeeds and malefactions as the prison bars shut again. No more free than the puppets and dolls in the attic, to be wound up again and again and again.

"Is this how it ends?" The sister screamed in the throes of anguish. "You love her? You love her?"

Hate him, it cackled.

Thomas looked down at his belly as blood poured from it; out of his mouth came the faintest sound-a discreet surprise, a quiet, nearly casual sigh:

"Oh, Lucille..."

She stabbed him again, almost as if she had to prove to him that she meant to, weeping half in rage and half in pain.

The pain was so great that he went numb, which was more than he deserved. He had done this...to her, to them. To all of them. Still, he tried to save her from ripping him apart, because he must save her, and Edith, and the doctor.

With a shriek she drove the knife in one final time; it lodged itself firmly itself into his cheek, almost to the hilt. That he felt, and he staggered as he moved away from her. He shuffled a few steps forward. He dislodged the knife, though the effort cost him, and he sank wearily down into a chair. Everything was growing dark.

"It will...it will be fine," he promised her. "Or...I...the things we do..."  He gazed at her for a moment he thought she saw the sun. "Oh, sister, you killed me," he murmured.

Lucille held him and in her mins he was so little and scared, she but two years older, she sang to him as she played the piano:

We can't live in the mountains,
We can't live out at sea.

Lucille's soft lullaby escalated into a frantic horror show, every note was wrong, everything pitch she sang of the lullaby was wrong. Everything was wrong.

All because of Edith. All because of fucking Edith Cushing.

Lucille smashed her hands down onto the piano keys in rage.

"Edith Cushing, I will tear you apart if I see you again!"