Page 22 of How to Fake a Haunting

Adelaide didn’t call or text for several days, and I was grateful not to have to pretend I wasn’t still mad.

She was so stubborn, so convinced that her way was the only way.

Serves her right, thinking she could bring the Tallows in without consequences.

I distracted myself by going about my days, taking care of Bea, tiptoeing around Callum, and throwing myself into my work.

It helped that Adelaide was assigned to a project that required her to be away from Preservation Society headquarters.

Outside project notwithstanding, Adelaide still was hard at work on the haunting.

A grating shriek rang up from the stairwell every morning when Callum left for work, fulfilling some stage of things to which I hadn’t yet been made privy.

The walls and ceilings thumped with strange noises, and rancid smells wafted from the rafters.

I managed to shield Beatrix from most of these “symptoms” with well-timed trips out to Pinecone House to play.

The screen-free audio player I’d recently purchased was essential too; on it, she could choose a selection of stories, music, and educational content.

One afternoon, however, Callum cornered Bea and demanded to know if she’d been moving a teddy bear around the house to mess with him.

Confused, Bea shook her head, but Callum complained about the bear the rest of the weekend and demanded that Bea keep her toys where they belonged, resulting in an epic, if out-of-character, tantrum from Bea in which she threw everything off every shelf in the playroom.

It was odd knowing Adelaide was around, skulking around corners, jumping from joist to joist in her fuzzy slippers.

I couldn’t decide if I was touched by her commitment or annoyed she wasn’t giving me any space.

Still, I had to hand it to her; she was preternaturally good at sneaking around the house, orchestrating all manner of creepy happenings.

One evening, several days after the meeting with Joe and Morgan, Bea and I came home to an ice-cold house.

Bea reacted to the inconvenience of the chill uncharacteristically and, in light of my fatigue after work, intolerably, whining and stomping her feet, doing everything she could to push my buttons.

Callum was camped out on the couch under a blanket, drink in hand, on the phone with the heating company.

I was worried they’d send a service person out, but whoever answered must have heard the slur in Cal’s words.

He broke into a stream of curses when they hung up on him and lurched down the hall, blanket dragging behind him.

He spent the rest of the night in his room, tipping from drunkenness into full-on annihilation, if the overall timbre of chaos and mayhem was any indication.

The next evening, knock-knock-knocks sounded from behind the walls, and the creepy twang of a guitar drifted down from the ceiling.

Beatrix commented on neither the music nor her father’s absence, but was moody and sullen, and though I went to bed when she did, I woke short-tempered and foggy-headed.

By the time Beatrix and I made our way to the kitchen for breakfast, Callum had already left for work.

The night after that, having returned from taking Beatrix to her horseback riding lesson—during which she was so irritable her pony picked up on the negative energy and nearly threw her—I found Callum in the living room again.

There was no glass in sight, but he was clearly drunk, standing at the room’s center and staring into corners like a man in a dream, shaking his head and talking to himself.

“Things keep moving,” he said, his tone incredulous.

“The furniture. The couch. The tables. The tilt of the television. When I got home, everything was slightly off-kilter. Three inches or so. Maybe four. I went to make a drink, but I had to go down in the basement for the extra case of seltzer, and when I came back, everything was worse. Six inches off. Maybe seven. The couch was so far away from the television, it was actually sticking out past the doorway there. I am not making this up. It was obvious. Obvious.”

Though this was the exact reaction from Cal that Adelaide and I had wanted, I was annoyed by the intrusion of his words, and grateful Bea had asked to play in Pinecone House rather than coming straight inside. “Ohhhhkay,” I said, pretending to examine the location of the couch.

“I took a shower to clear my head,” Callum continued. “I thought, you’re out of it, Cal. In need of a reset. When I came into the living room again, everything was back to normal. Not one goddamn thing out of place.”

He scrubbed the side of his head, as if trying to wash away the memories of the bewildering afternoon. “Then my boss called, so I went outside to talk to him. When I came back, everything had moved six inches in the opposite direction.”

He gestured toward the TV, and while his mouth was pinched and his shoulders were hunched, his eyes held no anger, only fear.

I glanced out the kitchen window. Bea was there, climbing the slide into her clubhouse. “Remember when I asked you if you thought the booze was messing with your head?” I started, “Do you think—”

“That has nothing to do with it!” Callum exploded. “You’re not listening! Something has been going on here.”

His words hung in the air. I waited, but he remained silent.

I’d seen enough movies to know how deliciously reversed our roles were here.

It was always the wife whose fears were being downplayed, the husband almost willfully ignorant to her observations: I don’t know what you’re talking about .

. . Nothing’s going on here . . . Everything’s fine .

. . Perhaps you should lie down, you’re not making any sense .

. . You’re hysterical. Hormonal. You’re acting crazy.

Or, in our case: Of course I haven’t had anything to drink, it must be you.

I put a hand to my chest, making a show of realizing that Cal was—somehow—trying to implicate me, and pitched my tone to contain a suitable amount of outrage.

“What the hell does that mean, ‘Something has been going on here’? I just got back from Bea’s lesson, which was stressful as hell, in case you were wondering. ”

Amazingly, this broke through Callum’s fixation with recent events, and he scoffed. “I still can’t believe you let her ride a horse when she doesn’t know how to ride a bike.”

Inside my rib cage, poisonous petals unfurled.

“Do you have a broken leg I can’t see?” I growled.

“You could teach her to ride a bike, you know. And what do you think, I made our daughter skip her favorite part of the week so I could hide in the goddamn fireplace and move the furniture a couple of inches every time you turned your back?”

I sneered, and something inside me recognized the ugliness I felt and that I was reveling in, warned me not to give in to it, not to give in to the stress.

But give in I did. “That’s crazy,” I said, my tone full of all the vehemence I felt toward him, that I’d felt growing like a weed the past six years.

“You understand that, right? That that’s absolutely fucking insane? ”

“I know how it sounds, but it’s true.”

I looked around. “News flash, Callum, everything is—”

“I know, everything’s back to normal. So it must not have happened, right? I’ve lost it? I’m—”

“You’re drunk, Cal. That’s what you are.

You’re drunk, and I’m going outside with Bea.

Why don’t you do something productive like fix the deck rail instead of standing here staring at the furniture like it owes you money?

” I stormed out, and when I returned almost two hours later—the afternoon had remained warm enough for Bea and me to restring some of the pinecones that had fallen from the clubhouse rafters—Callum was passed out in bed.

While Bea was in the tub, I climbed to the top of the closet organizer and peeked into the attic, ready to call out to Adelaide if I saw her. But she was gone, leaving behind no trace.

The following evening, Beatrix and I went out with my parents for pizza.

I’d texted Callum, offering to bring him home a couple of slices—old habits die hard—but he hadn’t responded.

When we got home, he was in his room, shades drawn, lights out.

There wasn’t even an empty glass on the bedside table.

I figured Adelaide had taken the night off—Lord knew she probably needed it—and I gave Bea a quick bath and got her into her pajamas, read her a handful of books, and got her to sleep relatively early.

I usually stayed in bed with Beatrix, watching movies on the iPad or reading on my Kindle.

It’d been ages since I’d ventured into the living room to join Callum in front of the television.

Even when he was sober, Callum wasn’t big on movies or TV series, as he tended to fall asleep within minutes of choosing something to watch.

I’d had the brilliant idea a few months back to attempt to watch something while ignoring Callum passed out on the couch beside me, but it was impossible to hear through his snoring.

Tonight, there was nothing stopping me from claiming the living room as my own. I checked on Bea and grabbed a pint of ice cream before crashing on the couch. Clicking through the latest Netflix offerings, I felt unexpectedly carefree.

Adelaide had warned me to stay away from horror movies, but Callum was dead to the world, and not watching one felt like a wasted opportunity.

While I still felt Adelaide owed me an apology, I didn’t like that we were fighting.

Maybe if I found something in one of these horror films that we could use, it might reopen the channels of communication between us.

It was worth a try. I scrolled through the seemingly endless options parading across the screen.

At first, when the thump came, I thought a trailer for one of the movies had started. But when the thump was followed by a grating shriek, like metal on glass—as if someone were dragging iron across a mirror deep enough to carve out strips—I knew it was coming from inside the house.

Then came the bloodcurdling scream, and my entire body went weightless with terror.