Page 44 of How to Fake a Haunting

We got as far as the downstairs hallway before the sounds from the foyer were replaced by a low, dull scraping along the stairway wall and the tink-tink-tink of glass on wood.

Callum and I froze beside one another, unable to stop staring at the thing coming down the stairs.

A second figure, taller than the first, its face as abstract and amorphous, swayed on the top step of the first flight after the landing.

Flecks of glass fell from its swirling, shifting clothes, and it held something in its right hand, something it was using to keep its balance.

As it walked down the stairs, the glinting object dug against the wall, producing the horrible scrrrrrrrrape that was like bone on bone.

The thing was too close to the bottom for us to move in either direction.

When it cleared the final stair, it was a mere foot in front of us.

This close, its shifting visage looked like a thousand insects undulating under an iridescent pool of oil.

I felt Callum beside me, pressing against the wall, trying to disappear within it.

The thing took another half step forward, and my mind shifted and bubbled like its face.

There was something beneath my fear, beneath my abject terror.

Something akin to understanding. But then the flicker went blank, as if my mind had seen the window through which it could glimpse the truth and quickly pulled a shade over it.

The thing swayed left, then right, as if looking at us through eyes we couldn’t discern.

I felt almost as if it were smelling the air between us and it.

Then it lurched to the right and continued its unsteady progression through the house.

Callum released a breath. My heart revved to life after having stopped in my chest.

“It came from upstairs,” I said, breathless. “From the mirror in the bathroom.”

“How many mirrors are there?” Callum asked.

I swallowed, counting in my head. “Five.”

Callum’s eyes grew wide. “Five? Why the hell do we have so many mirrors?”

Rather than answer, I held a finger to my lips.

“What are you—” Callum started.

“Listen,” I hissed.

We stood, doing just that. From above us, in Bea’s bedroom, more groans and creaks floated down through the stairwell.

A similar assemblage of sounds came from the downstairs bathroom at the other end of the house.

There was a mirror in each of these rooms. Did that mean there were two more specters?

I decided I didn’t want to find out. Without waiting to see if Callum was behind me, I sprinted across the foyer, yanked open the front door, and all but fell onto the porch.

Callum came crashing out beside me a moment later, but I kept running—down the front steps and into the grass—where I stumbled on the uneven ground.

Now that I’d put distance between myself and the house, the horror and impossibility of what we’d seen actualized, sticking in my brain like a dagger.

I didn’t waste time getting to my feet but half crawled, half scrabbled to the road.

I lay on my back in the damp grass, breathing hard, the fingers of my right hand on the pavement, as if, by virtue of that physical connection to something outside the house, I was safe.

I stared at the star-strewn sky, moths flitting about my face, the trill of crickets and tree frogs filling my ears with the soothing sounds of the creatures of this earth, this plane of reality. What the hell had happened in there? What had been unleashed?

I rolled onto my stomach, pulled myself onto my elbows, and stared across the lawn into the house.

I had a clear line of sight from where I lay, and the light above the foyer might as well have been a spotlight, but though I looked for several minutes, nothing pulled itself out of the foyer mirror and across the kitchen.

Could the beings not be perceived from outside?

Did the walls and the places where the windows once hung act as some sort of barrier?

I wished fervently that I could still make my carbon monoxide poisoning theory work, but there was dried blood on my arms from where shards of glass had sliced into my skin.

Not to mention that having a horrific specter stare through you with nonexistent eyes from six inches away was a far cry from seeing a vague figure in black at the edge of your periphery.

“Do you see anything?” Callum asked. He’d come to crouch beside me. He stared in the direction of the house, squinting at the open front door.

“No.”

“Why did you run? Shouldn’t we be figuring out some way to get rid of them?”

I shot him an incredulous look. “Says the guy who was on his way to a hotel?”

Callum scoffed and said something I couldn’t catch.

“What was that?”

He grunted. “Not for nothing, but I fucking told you.”

I bit my lip. I knew where this was going.

I knew that I could—probably should—admit to everything Adelaide and I had done.

But I didn’t want to. Let Callum have his moment of gloating.

If there was some way to salvage things and get Callum to leave, I wasn’t going to jeopardize that, real ghosts or not.

“You saw some flies,” I said with a shrug, “and heard some knocking. I don’t know what this is”—I gestured at the house—“but I’ll figure it out.” I stared past him, to the driveway. “You better get going. It might be tough to get a room at this hour.” I stood and brushed grass from my pants.

Callum’s expression twisted into something unreadable, but his eyes were red and watery, and I reminded myself that, even tonight, even in the midst of this nightmare, he was drunk.

Or, at least, he had been before a ghost had pulled itself out of a broken mirror in our foyer, a sobering occurrence if there ever was one.

Still, I couldn’t forget my endgame: I needed him gone.

“You’ll figure it out?” There was disbelief in Callum’s voice. “So, you’re staying? Why?”

I didn’t answer. Anything I said might inadvertently cause him to consider what his leaving could mean for the future.

“There are fucking ghosts in there,” he said, as if I might have forgotten. “Actual ghosts! You can’t . . . stay!”

I started across the top of the yard to the driveway. When I reached my car, I opened the door and hit the button to open the garage.

“What are you doing?” Callum asked, appearing beside me.

I still didn’t answer, just riffled around the large set of shelves along the right-hand wall until I found a cobweb-strewn bag. It was only when I followed Callum’s gaze that I realized my hands, along with my entire body, were shaking.

“You’re as scared as I am,” Callum said, “but you’re not going to leave.” I didn’t like what I heard in his voice, that note of revelation. His next words confirmed my suspicion: “You want me to leave. That way you can say I abandoned you and Beatrix.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, pulling the bag from the shelf.

“You don’t, huh?” His tone had reached that same manic pitch it did when trying to convince me of the latest inexplicable thing he’d experienced around the house.

“So if I leave right now and check in to a hotel, you’re telling me you won’t be on the phone first thing Monday morning with some dirtbag lawyer, filing a motion for divorce and loss of custody on abandonment charges? ”

Bile rose in the back of my throat. Adelaide and I had done everything right, everything we could, and now actual fucking ghosts had to go and ruin everything?

I turned away from Callum, rage growing inside me with the same ballooning pressure as had accumulated before the mirrors and windows exploded.

“Get out of my way,” I said, trying to walk around him to another shelf.

He matched my stride.

“Seriously, Callum, get away from me.”

He laughed bitterly. “If you want to get away from me so badly, maybe you should leave.”

“I’m not leaving,” I reiterated, and though the words made my stomach clench with fear, I knew they were true. A plan had formed in my mind, starting with this goddamn bag I hadn’t opened in more than five years.

“What are you doing?” Callum asked.

“Not that it’s any of your business, but I’m getting the camping equipment.”

“What?”

“Camping equipment? You know, tents, sleeping bag, lantern, a pocketknife. Those things we used back in another life before your drinking kept us within a ten-mile radius of this house.”

When he continued looking at me like I’d lost it, I sighed and waved at the door to the house.

“You can go to a hotel or drink yourself into oblivion and pass out in there with the ghosts. But I’m sleeping in the backyard.

That way, I’m still here,” I said, gesturing again at the house to make it clear I wasn’t abandoning anything or anyone, “but I don’t have to lie awake all night listening to the sounds of glass tinkling and specters groaning. ”

I pulled the tent from the bag, but Callum grabbed the other end and tried to snatch it away from me. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I demanded.

“Who says you get the tent?” he asked.

“It was my idea,” I shot back.

“I was thinking the same thing.”

“No, you weren’t!”

“Yes, I was.”

“We wouldn’t even have this tent if I hadn’t done all the research as to which one we should buy!

” It was a ridiculous thing to say under the circumstances, but I was having a hard time dealing with this new reality of Callum no longer leaving.

I needed him to remember how scared he’d been, to remember the blood-chilling scrape of the object against the wall as the second being had come down the stairs.

“Like that matters,” Callum responded, tugging harder, but I held strong despite my still-injured wrist, glaring at him over the nylon.

“You don’t even know how to pitch it,” I growled, and that one indisputable fact was apparently enough for Callum to relinquish his hold.

He glared at me, but I ignored him and pulled a sleeping bag and LED lantern from a pair of hooks on the wall.

I left Callum in the garage, lugging everything across the top of the driveway and into the backyard, keeping one eye on the house .

. . and anything that might come out of it.