Page 29 of How to Fake a Haunting

I crept closer to Adelaide’s things. Light streamed up from a small hole where the wall met the closest ceiling joist. Dropping to my hands and knees, I crawled forward.

When my face was a mere inch from the hole, I realized I could see through it into the house.

I wasn’t sure what I was looking at; the room was in shadow, and there was something reflective across the bottom of my view, at a right angle to a darker vertical line, like a slit in a doorway.

That’s what the vertical line was: a slit in a doorway.

Specifically, the closet doors in the primary bathroom, Callum’s bathroom, containing the washer and dryer.

The horizontal, slightly reflective object was the lip of the washing machine.

If the closet doors had been open, I thought I might be able to see a good way into the bathroom, left of the toilet, thankfully.

But Adelaide had an unobstructed, if small, view of the mirror, which would allow her to glimpse far more of the bathroom than what she could have seen without it.

Why hadn’t Adelaide told me she had this window into our lives?

I thought she’d been acting on sound alone, listening to where Callum was in the house.

But this midway vantage point opened things up, literally and figuratively.

I pushed myself to my feet and walked around the rest of the attic, then turned to find myself face-to-face with the broken mirror from the housewarming party six long years ago.

An inescapable chill caused me to shift on the joist. The mirror was in a different position from the last time I’d been in the attic, wasn’t it?

As I was trying to figure why Adelaide might have moved it, a sound came from behind me.

A rustling, followed by a repeat of what I’d heard several times downstairs:

Scrrrrrrrrape. Scrrrrrrrrape. Scrrrrrrrrape.

I spun slowly, certain I was about to confront something horrible.

But what I saw surprised me: Nothing. No wraith with sunken black eyes, and no Adelaide having come to her senses and sent Todd packing before getting her ass over here to help.

The noise came again, and I realized I was seeing nothing because the sound was coming from beneath me, at the midway point of the attic.

Directly below the peephole.

I retraced my steps to Adelaide’s little alcove, pushing her blanket and water bottle aside, and pressed one eye to the hole in time to see the closet doors of the bathroom swing open.

My limbs turned to lead. Callum must have come home after all.

He would catch me up here, rendering everything that had come before today—all our efforts and sneaking around—futile.

Why had I returned to the house so soon, let alone come up to the attic?

But the figure in the bathroom didn’t look like Callum. It floated past my vantage point like a train in the distance, steel gray and fast moving. I pushed my eye to the hole a little harder. The figure had walked out of view. I listened, but nothing further came.

Please, please, please don’t let it be Callum.

My recklessness made me queasy; had I really forgotten that Bea’s safety, Bea’s future, my future with my daughter, rode on not screwing up the haunting?

The possibility of this thread that held Bea’s fate unraveling over the next few heartbeats made me feel like vomiting.

I shifted, moving back slightly from the peephole, and as I did, my perspective changed.

Now, I could see the bottom half of the bathroom mirror.

And in that reflective portion, a figure moved from right to left.

Smaller than Callum. Slight. A woman? Had Adelaide taken leave of Todd after all?

I made my breathing as shallow as possible and tried to avoid shifting again, out of position.

The figure was dressed in loose, dark clothing.

A hood covered its hair. I looked for a telltale strand of fuchsia but could make nothing out.

I considered saying something, but what if Callum had come back and I gave away my location?

The figure dipped in and out of sight. Between my light breathing and the aching of my muscles as I tried to hold my position over the peephole, I was getting dizzy.

Maybe that’s why the figure seemed less than corporeal, going hazy then sharpening, hazy then sharpening.

The figure disappeared, drifting left and out of sight.

Thirty seconds passed. Then another thirty.

I was starting to believe I’d imagined the whole thing and was about to tear myself away from the peephole when something blotted out my vision entirely.

I blinked, heart rate skyrocketing, and shoved down the gasp careening up my throat.

Another few blinks and I was able to parse the image beneath me: It was the figure, standing in front of the bathroom closet and a little to the left, facing the mirror.

I was looking at the back of the black hood and the hunched shoulders, but the figure was too hunched to see its face.

The mirror captured only the top of the head, the dark fabric there, with no hint at the shade or length of the hair underneath.

I heard myself breathing as if from far away. Who was down there? Why did I feel, in some deep, primal part of myself, that this wasn’t Adelaide?

The figure raised its head slowly, stared directly into the mirror, and I saw, with growing horror, that there was no face at all. Just a shimmery surface, like a pond after a pebble has been thrown into it, or a mirror at the moment of impact, in the first nanosecond after it shatters.

As I watched, paralyzed with terror, the figure without a face raised its hands and wrung them, over and over.

Like Lady Macbeth in her staggering guilt, they were covered in blood.