Page 43 of How to Fake a Haunting

I stayed pressed against the cool surface of the stove until Callum rose, visibly trembling, and lurched to the freezer.

He grasped the neck of the vodka bottle with his uninjured hand and groaned as he unscrewed the cap, leaving a handprint of blood smeared across the glass.

He lifted the bottle to his mouth, as if its contents were medicine—and, probably they were—but stopped short of drinking from it, a strange look on his face.

“Do you feel that?” he asked.

I wanted to say I didn’t. I wanted to tell him not to talk to me.

I wanted to point out that he should be gone by now, that the plan had worked, that Adelaide and I had haunted him into submission.

But I didn’t, because I could feel something.

A rumbling, low but steady. As if the house’s very foundation was shaking.

The candles on the island toppled over and shot up to the ceiling .

. . the candles Adelaide had replaced after removing the magnetized ones.

The entirely normal candles, made of nothing but beeswax and cotton wicks.

The teakettle followed a moment later, water shooting from its spout and spraying over the kitchen.

Followed by the paper towel rack, the fruit basket, and the knife block, along with all twelve of the knives housed inside it.

When I took my hands from off my head and peered up, I saw that the knives were stuck to the ceiling by their handles, gleaming blades pointed down at our heads.

“What the fuck!” Callum shouted. “What the fuck is happening?”

But the knives were forgotten when the buzzing began a moment later.

Flies poured in from the vents and out of the sink drain.

They crawled in from the windows and beneath the doorjambs, flew past our heads and covered the picture frames, darkened the woodwork, joined the hanging objects on the ceiling.

The music exploded a second later, not from the smart speaker, which was still unplugged, but from the walls themselves. Or maybe it was in our minds:

Open your eyes . . . See what’s right in front of you.

There are ways to see what’s hidden in the dark . . .

The lyrics were distorted and discordant. A moment later, the acoustic guitars melted into horrible, tortured screams.

Callum had dropped to the floor when the knives had shot to the ceiling, but now he was up and turning in circles, staring at the horror unfolding around us.

The rumbling started again, vibrating everything around us.

There was a pounding in the walls, like something was trapped behind them and intent on breaking out.

I gripped Callum’s arm. He looked into my eyes.

And that’s when the creaking started from the shattered foyer mirror.

It was like the moment before the windows and mirrors exploded, those tinkling pops, the sense of stretching, of pushing a solid object to its breaking point. But there was something else, something that raised the hair along my arms. A metallic whine. A crunching scrape. Choppy. Intermittent.

Like something was dragging itself through the lingering pieces of glass.

“Callum,” I whispered. “We need to go.”

But it was too late. A blood-slicked hand emerged, fingers curling over the bottom frame of the mirror. The top of the head appeared a moment later, hooded with thick black fabric.

A second hand curled around the frame much in the way the first one had, pulling the thing forward so that the shoulders became visible, hunched and shrouded in the same dark fabric as the head.

The thing crawled down the wall as easily as if it were crawling across a floor.

When it was actually on the floor, it pushed itself to a stand.

Strands of hair hung from the hood, but it was impossible to make out the shade.

Like the bathroom mirror earlier, its color shifted—blond, brown, pink, silver—so I couldn’t tell what color it was.

The thing lifted its head. It was the figure that’d been coming to me over the last several weeks, haunting me as much as we’d been haunting Callum.

It was the figure from Bea’s nightmare, the face from the mirror.

The shimmery, undefinable nonface. It refracted and folded in on itself, more like reflective flesh than hard angles of silver, nickel, and glass substrate.

Decidedly human, if horrific. Specter-like .

. . no mirror-mask trickery here. It raised its hands, and I saw there was something gore-soaked and gummy clutched between the blood-streaked fingers.

I wanted to close my eyes but couldn’t; it was as if they were frozen open.

Silent tears of horror spilled down my face.

The creature glided over the floor, its feet silent on the shards of glass glinting along the hardwood.

I shrieked, and Callum let out a strangled cry as we tried to get out of its path, but it didn’t come for us.

It was as if it couldn’t see us. It paid us no more mind than it did the flies on the wall or the knives hanging from the ceiling.

As it traveled, the thing wrung its bloodied hands, Lady Macbeth having sealed both her fate and that of her husband.

It floated into the playroom and through the sliding door, leaving a familiar bloody handprint in its wake.

It descended the deck stairs and crossed the backyard until it reached the tree line.

It fell to its knees at the edge of the property.

A moment later, dirt flew up on either side of its body as it dug.

“What the fuck?” Callum said. “What’s it doing?”

I didn’t—couldn’t—answer.

“What the hell is it doing?” Callum asked again.

“Who cares what it’s doing,” I finally got out. “What the hell is it? Where did it come from?”

As if in response, the figure at the back of the yard disappeared. A metallic whine came from the foyer mirror, followed by a crunching scrape.

We waited long enough to see the same bloodied hands, the same black hood, the same madness-inducing face-that-wasn’t-a-face, the same specter on its mindless loop through our house, before we turned from the kitchen and ran.