Even after twenty years, three famous novels, a loving husband and a beautiful eighteen year old daughter, I still couldn't walk down a dark hall without the back of my neck chilling, or my footsteps moving faster. The breath through the windows still rattled and the candle flames still flickered in the dark. The dark was even more haunting than it had been before. More than once I had woken in a cold sweat. More than once my daughter had come running after hearing her mother scream. More than once Alan had had to wake me, after finding me at the bottom of the stairs.

Crimson Peak still haunted me. I still saw the open gash on my cheek, even though seventeen years of scar tissue made it almost invisible. I could still see Lucille's blood on my hands, and feel Thomas's ghost sift through my open fingers.

Crimson Peak would forever hold a place in my heart. But not in the way I had hoped, so many years ago.

"Mother, are you ready yet?" Camille called from the base of the stairs. Edith sighed and stood from her vanity. She could hear the gentle irritation in her daughter's voice and smiled a little. She made her way to the staircase and stood there, looking down at her daughter. She was beautiful, like how Edith had been as a young woman, before she had met her innocence's demise. Camille's eyes were green, sharp and alert, catching every detail that others missed. Her figure was slim, but full, something Edith never prided herself on as a young woman. Camille styled her golden blonde hair to match the style of the young girls who called themselves 'flappers'. Not that much flapping went on in Buffalo, but Camille could only hope. She wanted to be a fashion icon, and she certainly was well on her way of becoming so.

"Milly, darling, won't you be cold?" Edith asked, walking down the stairs to her patiently waiting daughter.

"We're only going downstairs, Mama," Milly said, raking her fingers through her pearls. Her dark lips parted in a lovely smile, one that was rarely seen naked outside her home. But Edith loved that clean, pale pink smile. Not dolled up and gaudy. Camille was a lovely image to behold. Crisp and clean, with her hair down and her face clean, she was truly an image of angelic beauty.

"Speaking of, where is he?" Edith said. "Alan!" She walked about the floor, looking for the dear doctor himself, but was nowhere to be found.

"Here I am, Mrs. Cushing-McMichael," he called, stepping around behind her to kiss her lovingly on the cheek. Milly's mother smiled. She rarely smiled anymore. She was normally sullen, her eyes dark, and her undereyes even darker. Milly worried about her mother. She wasn't herself. But really, she never knew what her mother was like before the accident.

The accident. When Milly was seven, she had asked about the scar on her mother's cheek. Immediately, her mother had paled and turned away from her beloved child and her father had stepped in. A carriage accident, he had said.

When Milly was twelve, she had asked again, this time, her father directly. He had told her the same thing.

When she was sixteen, and her parents weren't home, she had snooped through her mother's office. Only to find what had been hidden from her. The truth. About her mother's scar, about her father's breathing problem, about her mother's sadness.

When they had returned home from the party, she confessed to snooping, received a scolding, but was never punished.

"You needed to know the truth somehow. I'm sorry I wasn't here to tell you," Edith had said, holding her crying child.

"Shall we go? We have a birthday party to attend," Alan said, putting his hand on his daughter's shoulder. They walked down the stairs that led to the main floor, the sounds of party guests and laughter ringing through the house.

"Happy Birthday, Camille!" rang the chorus of guests. Milly gasped and teared up, clapping her hands together in elation. She had known that her parents were planning a birthday party for her, but not of this caliber.

"Mama, Papa, this is amazing!" Milly exclaimed, turning to embrace her parents. They hugged their girl tightly before letting her go to mingle with her friends.

"This was a good idea, Edith," Alan said, putting an arm around his wife. She nodded solemnly and scanned the crowd. Her eyes fell on familiar faces, some of Milly's friends, others of her boyfriends, and some friends from school. But there was one face that stood out in the crowd. One that haunted her nightmares and her waking hours. One face that she saw as a phantom, a face that she knew to be dead.

"No, it can't be. He's not here, he can't be. He's dead. I saw his ghost," Edith mumbled, falling against Alan's shoulder. He caught her and stood her upright again, looking in the direction that she was staring at. But there was no one.

"There's no one there, Edith, calm down," Alan said soothingly. "I signed his death certificate myself," he added in a hushed voice. Edith nodded stiffly, gooseflesh still plaguing her body.

"I need to lie down," she gasped, staggering slightly. Alan nodded and walked with his wife upstairs. She mumbled incoherently up to their bedroom, where Alan lifted her onto the bed and draped an afghan over his wife's lower body. He pressed a gentle kiss to her forehead before turning a night stand lamp on and leaving the room. He walked to their adjoining study and took a seat in his desk, opposite her own, and sat back in his chair. He didn't shuffle through patients' records, or look at other files. No, he simply sat at his desk and wondered if this plague would ever lift from his wife's mind, so she could return to the lovely woman he had fallen in love with so many years ago.

From her place among her friends, Milly saw her parents walk back upstairs, and concerned, pushed past her friends to investigate. She had almost reached the stairs, her brow furrowed, when she was halted.

"Pardon me, but you're the birthday girl, are you not?" A tall figure stepped directly in her path, and his smooth voice made her forget what she was doing. Milly looked up into the stranger's face and smiled. He was extremely handsome, with fierce blue eyes and soft, thin lips, pulled up into a devilishly innocent smile.

"Yes I am, as a matter of fact," Milly smiled. "Camille McMichael." She extended her hand for him to shake, but he took it and turned it over, kissing her knuckles.

"I see that I am in the presence of a gentleman," she teased, taking her hand back and smiling flirtatiously at the stranger. He chuckled and put his hands in his pockets. He was well dressed for a younger gentleman. He seemed to be in about his late twenties, but he had lines around his eyes and creases along his forehead that a young man shouldn't have. And a scar below his left eye, just below his cheekbone.

And what lovely cheekbones they were. High and pointed, sharp almost, and a jawline to cut glass. But his face was soft, and his eyes bright, like he was a worried but frivolous young man.

"Care for a cigarette?" he asked, pulling out a silver case and a matching lighter. Milly smiled. She never turned down a cigarette from a dashing young man.

"Of course. I could do with a little quiet. There's a smoking parlour off the main parlour, on the other side of the house," Milly smirked, and she motioned for him to follow her. He complied and they scurried away, dodging acquaintances and distant family members.

"In here," Milly said, ushering him through a doorway. He stepped in and was amazed at the beauty of the room. It was lined with mahogany and was amazed at how elegant and intimate the room was. It was built for no more than four people at a time.

"Lovely room," he declared, sitting down on one of the smoking couches. Milly sat opposite him and smiled.

"Yes, my grandfather apparently had this room put in for guests, though he never smoked himself," Milly replied. "At least that's what Mama tells me."

"Oh?"

"I never knew my grandfather. Mama said he was murdered by this horrid woman. Lucille, her name was, I think. She and her brother were crazies who murdered their own mother," Milly declared in a hushed tone, almost as if she were spreading juicy gossip.

The stranger simply looked at her and listened politely, wondering if all this was made up. He pulled out the cigarette case once more and flicked it ope, offering her one of its contents. Thanking him graciously, she picked one out and put it between her wine coloured lips. She leaned in as he flicked open the lighter and took a long first drag to light it. He didn't follow suit and Milly looked at him peculiarly.

"You carry a cigarette case, but you don't smoke," she observed, as the stranger had put the case back in his blazer pocket.

"I carry it around for the occasion when I meet a beautiful woman," he said, his voice smooth as silk. Milly blushed. Did he really just call her beautiful? But they barely know each other. She didn't even know his name!

"So, I've told you my name, now you have to tell me yours," Milly smiled flirtatiously, letting out a long stream of smoke before taking another drag. The stranger smiled.

"My name is..."

"Milly! Camille, are you in here? We saw you come this way! Who's the beaux you've got with you?!"

Milly groaned in irritation.

"Friends of yours?" the stranger asked, chuckling bemusedly. Milly nodded, taking another drag of her cigarette.

"S'pose I should go make myself known," she grimaced. For being friends of hers, she didn't seem to be too interested in seeing them.

"If you'll excuse me," she added upon standing. Walking to an ashtray on the sideboard, she put out nearly a full cigarette, exhaled her last breath and left the room.

Thomas watched the girl leave, leaning back in the smoking couch, wondering if it was a good idea to court her, as well. It hadn't worked out with her mother, and surely this girl was wary of strangers as well. But she seemed perfectly at ease with him. He looked at himself in the mirror above the mantle and saw his ghostly figure reflected back at him. The blood-filled eye, the stab wound on his cheek oozing with crimson smoke, the golden eyes and the pale skin and ash hair. Everything about him had turned negative. His clothes had returned to that in which he had died, white shirt and amber vest.

He returned the ghost that he was.

"Thomas," a voice from the shadows whispered. He turned, his movements slow but fluid. He saw the skeletal face of his once beloved sister standing near the window, the curtain behind her visible through her inky smoke body. They shared a gaze that only siblings could, before she vanished like smoke on the water.

A light gust of wind irritated the flames of the fire, whisking him away as well.

"My friends are so deman... Hello?" Milly walked back into the smoking parlour, her hand barely lifting from the doorknob when she saw that the room was completely empty. The handsome stranger was no where else to be seen at the party. And she certainly would've seen him leave. She walked over to the cigarette at the ash tray and picked it up once more, but losing the appetite for one, tossed it into the wastepaper basket and left the room.

"What was that?" Maureen said, who was waiting for her outside the door.

"Nothing," Milly said, regaining her light demeanor, and allowing herself to be whisked back to the party. For the rest of the night, she didn't think about the stranger, or how he had just vanished into thin air, not until the party was over, the guests gone, and the house dark, and eerily more quiet than normal.

Usually there was a rumble of a motorcar or two going by outside, but tonight the streets were empty. Camille sat at her vanity, unpinning the curl of hair at the base of her neck, a golden curtain falling down her back with a soft swish. The room was dark, save the lamp on her night stand, and the house was dauntingly silent. Even this late at night she could hear her parents talking a little through the walls.

She looked at the clock on her mantle. It read 2:18. Later than she had hoped to get to bed, but still early enough to get a decent sleep. Standing from her vanity, she untied her dressing down and let it slither down her arms, landing in a pile at her feet. She walked to her bed, but before she reached her sanctuary, her french doors that led to her balcony burst open, and snow blew in, circling around her room.

A figure, black, hooded and skeletal, breezed towards her, and panic-stricken, she froze where she was. It's voice was raspy and cold, unfamiliar and distant, but the message was that of deep concern.

"Beware Crimson Peak." The figure blew through her and she screamed, dropping to the floor in a shivering heap, the doors still wide open, snow falling into the room lightly now.

The next morning, she woke in bed, an extra blanket draped over her feet. Sitting up, Milly looked around. The doors were shut and the snow was gone, as was the figure. Sitting in an armchair near the fire was her father, fast asleep, his head propped up on his fist, still dressed in his suit from last night.

"Papa," Milly said cautiously, climbing out of bed, her bare feet padding across the wood floor. She reached her father in the chair and gently shook his shoulder. He started and sat up abruptly, looking around and blinking in the morning light.

"Milly, you're okay," he said, leaping up from the chair and embracing his daughter tightly. Milly chuckled nervously and let go of her father.

"Of course. Why wouldn't I be?" she asked, wondering why he had slept in her room last night. Her father shook his head and kissed hers, before walking out of the room. Closong the door behind him, Milly watched her father leave and took a seat in the chair he had previously occupied, wondering once more what was truly going on. Who was that mysterious gentleman last night, why had he disappeared, and what the hell was that ghost?

Milly remembered Crimson Peak to be the alternative name for the horrid home she had been subject to previously, Allerdale Hall, but what did that have to do with Milly? She shook her head, changed into a warm dressing down, slid her feet into a warm pair of slippers and headed down to breakfast.

Her mother either wasn't down yet, or she had already eaten and thus taken to her study to work on her latest novel. Either way, Delilah, their maid, was already preparing Milly breakfast.

"Good morning, Miss," she greeted the girl. Milly smiled briefly at the maid and took a seat at the kitchen table.

"The post's come, Miss," Delilah said, motioning to the stack of envelopes on the end of the table. Standing, Milly reached over and rifled through them, none catching her attention immediately. Some bills for her father, a letter for her mother from a friend in Paris. Nothing for Milly.

At least, until she reached the bottom of the stack. In neatly scripted handwriting was written her name and address, but with no return address.

"Thank you, Delly," Milly said, setting the other envelopes down and leaving the kitchen, completely ignoring her breakfast. Ripping open the top of the envelope, she pulled the letter out from within and unfolded it, raking through the page.

"My dearest Milly,

My evening spent with you last night was truly entertaining. You are lively and exuberant, and clearly your large circle of friends and acquaintances mirror this. But there is a pressing matter that I must address with you. You see, I could not stay long at your house, (though knowing full well my exit was deplorable. Where were my manners?) because I had pressing matters to address where I worked. I work for an invention company, as sort of an engineer.

Please, my darling, you must understand that I could not stay, though my work called me away, but because I felt myself in danger of falling in love with you. I could not stay because I believed your heart to be unattainable, and attempting to reach it I would surely break mine.

She sat on the stairs, one hand to her stomach, the other, shaking, holding the letter.

My angelic Camille, I understand my affections will never be returned, and thus is why I must return home. I am booked on the next train to New York City, and there, I will always treasure your smile, the way you'd laugh, the sparkle in your bright emerald eyes, and the red roses that kissed your lips. Remember me, my Camille. For I always will

Yours forever, Tom

Milly clutched the letter in hand and sighed. A tear streaked down her cheek and she looked towards the door. It wasn't proper for her to chase after a man she had just met, and she knew that soon he'd forget about her.

He sat in the hotel room, one leg crossed over the other, is fist under his chin, waiting for her to burst into the door, begging him not to leave.

But she didn't come. Two hours passed since he wrote and sent the letter and still nothing. His train was leaving in half an hour and he still needed to make it to the train station.

And still, she didn't come.

"So much for her being like her foolish mother," a woman's voice said. Thomas turned to see Lucille's ghost hiding in the corners, cloaked in shadow despite the sunshine.

"She's smarter than that, Thomas. Come back to me," she said, drifting over to him, attempting to take corporeal form. She flickered between skeletal and human, the distinction rather distracting.

"Leave, Lucille. I don't love you in that way any longer," he said, turning away from her. Her ghost returned to the black skeletal shape it was in originally and vanished in a cloud of smoky black moths, fluttering about his head.

"Camille, you're going to make us late!" her mother called, slightly frantic, but a laugh ringing in her voice. Camille smiled at herself in the vanity mirror and leapt up, bounding down the stairs.

"Get your coat, your father's waiting in the car," Edith said, ushering her now nineteen year old daughter out of the house. The McMichael family was headed to the theatre tonight, to see a visiting Italian opera that Camille was dying to see.

She had moved past the handsome stranger that had visited her on her birthday, and was much more contented with her steady cycle of beaus that floated in and out of the Cushing Manor.