Page 36 of How to Fake a Haunting

I crouched at the far end of my office, open backpack at my feet and eyes on my phone. This was the part I didn’t like, but Adelaide insisted we needed to be connected for this to work. I made sure the brightness of my screen was all the way up and my volume was a little above a full mute.

A moment later, the FaceTime call came through.

I answered. The screen was dark, but I could make out Adelaide’s face, as well as the cereal boxes and cans of soup on the pantry shelves behind her.

The orientation of the camera changed, and now I was looking at the door of the pantry.

The door opened a crack, and Adelaide held the phone to it.

“Can you see everything you need to?” she whispered. “Kitchen, living room, playroom through the French doors?”

“Yes,” I whispered back.

“Okay. It’s showtime.”

The FaceTime screen went gray, and I knew she had opened her Alexa app, still connected to the Echo in my kitchen.

My heart beat wildly. A moment later, the same song that had unexpectedly blared from the smart speaker that first night of the haunting hit my ears, both through the phone’s speaker and up through the walls of the house in a disorienting, echoey wail.

For two and a half minutes, I hardly breathed.

Might Callum be so drunk he would sleep through the music?

Or so scared he remained in his bed, hiding under the covers and rendering all our preparations moot?

But then I heard his door open across the hall followed by footsteps on the stairs.

Blood thrumming in my temples, I raced out of the office, across the hall, and into Callum’s bedroom.

I positioned myself at the center of the room, above the island in the kitchen, and took the last two items out of my backpack.

A few seconds after that, I saw movement in the frame of Adelaide’s phone.

Bright light from the overheads joined the weak candlelight, and Callum stood in his boxers, hand still on the switch, his eyes wide and watery.

He stared at the Echo on the coffee bar as if a wild animal had gotten into the kitchen.

The song was nearing its conclusion when Callum finally lurched toward the smart speaker and ripped the cord from its side.

The house was plunged into silence. No, not silence; Callum’s heavy breathing whooshed through the phone.

He turned and, for the first time since coming downstairs, seemed to notice the flickering candles on the island.

He stomped in that direction, and I said a silent thank-you I’d set the timer two minutes later than I’d initially planned.

Callum was blowing out the final candle when the television blared to life in the living room.

Again, the twangy, eerie guitar floated from the speaker and through the floorboards simultaneously.

Where the hell do I know that song from? I thought. And why is it always the one Adelaide chooses to play?

Callum whirled away from the island, and I saw the terror and uncertainty on his face as he turned toward the hall.

A second later, the screen went dark. Again, I held my breath.

However long it took Callum to get to the living room and find the remote was as long as Adelaide would have to exit the pantry, relight the candles, trip the sensor on the object in the playroom, and return to her hiding place, all without being seen.

Time bloated into an abstract thing. The song stopped as abruptly as it started.

The picture on the screen jerked, and I was looking back through the sliver in the pantry door.

Callum stood in the entrance to the kitchen from the hallway, staring at the relit candles with abject horror.

Before he could decide if blowing them out a second time would be prudent, a guttural chanting started from the playroom, whispers layered upon screams layered upon whispers, the language strange and indecipherable.

The chanting was not loud enough to hear from one floor away, but it was chilling enough through the speaker alone.

Adelaide tilted the phone as Callum batted at the light switch beside the playroom, but the angle wasn’t quite right, and I still saw a tilted view of the kitchen.

I knew Callum was face-to-face with one of two identical, recordable teddy bears with light-up eyes, the other of which was in my backpack, but I’d yet to see them for myself; Adelaide had programmed the bears with a track from some horror sound-effects channel on YouTube, set the track to begin after forty-five seconds of silence, and wrapped the stuffed animals in black towels to cover their sensors, all without me being present.

From the sound of it, Bear Number One was doing its job.

I was so fixated on Callum’s high-pitched screams, I almost forgot it was time to employ the magnets.

Hastily, I lifted the two high-powered cylinders, pulled the protective caps off their north poles, and slammed them into the floor.

The sound of the six candles with magnetized bottoms shooting up to the ceiling was like a series of firecrackers.

I knew hot wax had to be shooting all over the kitchen, but the house not going up in flames—and pulling this off without getting caught—were far more important.

Adelaide had sworn the flames would go out as the candles rose, that they’d done so on a test run, but who could know for sure?

I left the magnets in place while I listened to Callum’s primal shouts of fear.

Then I turned, placed one foot on the footboard of Cal’s bed, and used my body weight to knock first one magnet, then the other, onto its side, severing the attraction to the south-pole magnets in the candles.

I heard the candles crash to the ground, but there was not a second to waste.

I recapped the magnets and stuffed them into the backpack along with my phone, then pulled out the towel-wrapped bear.

There was a clatter of pots and pans, a sudden cacophony beneath me. Ignoring it, I sat the stuffed animal at the center of the bed, pulled off the towel, and stepped back, waving my hand in front of its face to activate the sensor. As I did, I got my first real look at the bear.

It had fuzzy chestnut fur, pink paw pads, a shiny black nose, and a pink satin ribbon around its neck.

It was both the most nondescript stuffed bear in the world and so familiar that I choked on the memory.

Every decibel of sound in the house whizzed away, replaced by a long, rising howl that took over my brain.

It’s not the same bear. It’s not the same bear.

A brown bear with pink paws is probably the first thing that comes up in a Google search.

This rationale didn’t help. Neither did the fact that, while Adelaide knew about the bear’s connection to my secret, I’d never told her what it looked like.

But you told her where you buried it. Might she have dug it up?

I pushed the thought away, ridiculous as it was.

I don’t know how long I would have stood there, staring at the past, head roaring, if Callum’s footsteps on the stairs hadn’t roused me from my stupor.

I spun from the bear. Grabbing my backpack, I sprinted into the hallway.

I slid over the last two feet of hardwood and onto the carpet in Bea’s room as Callum cleared the final stair.

I heard the track of the bear on Cal’s bed rise from silence into the demonic whisper-scream of hellish chanting as I lifted myself off the closet organizer and into the attic.

Now I just had to hope the wretched thing was enough to drive Callum into his bathroom.

I moved as fast as I could across the joists to Adelaide’s blanket by the peephole.

Kneeling, I found the small rock, positioned on the ground where I couldn’t accidentally kick it, weighing down the end of the fishing line.

I picked it up, unwound the line, and leaned forward, placing one eye against the peephole.

It took no more than three seconds for Callum to practically fall into the bathroom. He slammed the door, flipped on the light, stood with his hands on his knees, and hung his head, panting and crying.

“What the fuck?” he cried, over and over. “What the fuck? What the fuck is going on? What the fuck is happening?”

At least I’d forgotten my fear at seeing the teddy bear.

The only things that existed were the twine in my fingers and the position of my husband below me in the bathroom.

He hadn’t looked up, hadn’t looked anywhere but at the floor as he tried to catch his breath and come to terms with self-lighting candles and televisions that turned on and off on their own, with floating objects and talking toys.

He straightened, still looking down, wiping tears and snot from his face. He dug his fists into his cheeks and groaned, rocking back and forth on his heels.

Come on, motherfucker, I thought. Look up. Look up and get the final shock of the night.

And then he did.

I yanked the fishing line in a perfect trajectory along the bathroom ceiling, pulling the adhesive from the quarter-millimeter-thick membrane and exploding the bloated bag of pig’s blood like a firework against a stark and starless sky.

Blood shot out over the bathroom mirror, the vanity, the sink, in a trail of brilliant crimson bursts.

The shock of red against white was like waking after an extended, monochromatic dream to a bright and blazing sun.

I saw Callum’s face for a split second before the blood covered the entire surface of the mirror, but it was enough. Enough that I couldn’t imagine the haunting needing to continue beyond tonight.

Callum fled the bathroom as if it were on fire. I listened to his footsteps on the stairs. In another moment, his car peeled out of the driveway. The blood dripped down the mirror, and I watched, hypnotized.

And maybe I was hypnotized, eye still pressed to the peephole like it was, because in the next instant, I saw something that couldn’t possibly be.

I saw it in the mirror. In the thin slick of clinging blood. A figure, hunched and hooded, scrubbing blood from between her fingers like Lady Macbeth. The figure froze. It lifted its head.

To reveal the rippling pond, the shattered glass, the staticky screen, where there should have been a face.