Page 46 of How to Fake a Haunting

Every inch of my body broke out in goose bumps. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“I hear her, moving across the yard. The one from the foyer.”

“You said that already.”

“I peeked inside, hoping they were gone, but they’re not. There’s another one too. It’s . . . it’s the worst one of all. It looks . . .” He trailed off.

“It looks what, Callum?” I hissed, terror making me impatient.

“It looks dead. It has a weird face like the others, but its body is disgusting. Rotting. It’s a corpse, I fucking know it is.

I ran, but not before I saw the one from the foyer too.

The one with the blood on her hands. She’s walking that same path from foyer to yard.

From foyer to right out here. She’s burying something.

Over and over again. The sound of the digging is making me crazy.

I was going to sleep in your car, figuring it was far enough from the house to be .

. .” He paused. “I don’t know. Not safe, but safer.

But I can hear her digging through the windows. ”

It was as he spoke this last sentence that I heard the slur in his words.

“Did you have something else to drink?” I asked, my voice rising. Could this night get any more unbelievable?

He stared, clearly trying to come up with some sort of retort. “I had some nips in the garage. What of it?” When I gave him a disgusted look, he added, “There are fucking ghosts in the house, Lainey. I think a better question might be, why the hell aren’t you drinking?”

I jerked my chin at his rake. “If the ghost from the foyer is digging, maybe you should help her. Because you’re not coming in here.” And with that, I closed the flap and zipped up the tent.

The pleading started immediately. “Lainey, please. Please.”

“You would hear the digging just as well from in here. Better, even.”

“But at least we wouldn’t be alone.”

“Sorry, Callum,” I said coldly. “But if it’s a question of being alone versus riding out a night full of ghosts with you, let’s just say I don’t regret bringing a single sleeping bag.”

He said something I didn’t catch, then turned and walked away. I heard my car door open, then slam shut. If he engaged the locks, I was too far away to hear it.

I shivered and tucked myself into the sleeping bag, the reality of my situation hitting with the hardness of the ground beneath me.

This was crazy. Truly crazy. Staying in a haunted house to spite one another.

Why hadn’t I run back inside long enough to grab my keys and return to my parents’ house?

To Beatrix? Callum would never be able to accuse me of abandonment, the way I could him.

Bea was with my parents because I was keeping her safe from her father.

But then I remembered what Rosalie Taylor had said about custody of Beatrix in my kitchen the day I’d found Chris’s first blackmail note: I imagine you’d get a vastly different outcome from what you desire.

“What the hell am I doing?” I said aloud.

In the wake of my whisper, silence flooded the tent once again.

No. Not silence. There was . . . something.

At first, I thought it was the wind rustling the leaves in the trees, or else a far-off neighbor taking out the trash, the noise made more indeterminate by distance and fear.

But the noise persisted, clarified into something far more horrifying and sinister. A muttering. Low and frenzied:

“No-no-no-no-no.”

On the surface, it was arbitrary, a common word, a mere expression of disbelief.

But I knew. I felt it hit some visceral part of my memory where things like absolute joy and absolute terror were stored.

It was me, what I’d uttered, on the long walk from the bathroom to the backyard the night after the abortion, when the fetus had finally passed.

It was me, out of my mind with a horror that I was prepared to repress had the blood and tissue not been expelled in such a violent, obvious manner.

In such a violent, obvious, and completely abnormal manner.

It was me, knowing I hadn’t made a mistake, but filled with horror for the experience, the secrecy, the shame of it, all the same.

Coupled with the no-no-no-no was the gritty rustling of digging. Manic. Maddening.

And as the long night wore on, growing closer.

And closer.

And closer.

When the first rays of sunshine finally slipped over the horizon, I pushed myself groggily from the ground.

My back was sore, and I had the worst headache of my life.

But at some point during the night, after the hours of muttering and digging had turned into an indecipherable whir, like white noise engulfing my brain, I must have fallen asleep.

The sun was a merciful haze through the fabric of the tent, but even with its glow sufficiently muted, the events of last night blared too loudly, too vibrantly, within me.

I listened, but heard nothing, none of the sanity-stripping sounds that had scrabbled like talons in my ears and pressed like grit beneath my nails.

Slowly, I unzipped the tent, wincing in the unfiltered light of morning, praying there’d be no signs of my and Adelaide’s prank-turned-real, no evidence of ghosts that’d escaped from mirrors and turned my house into a feedback loop of horror.

I blinked.

And blinked again.

Then stared at the hundreds of shallow holes dug out of every available space in the yard, black earth exposed to the light like tide pools, like innards, like dark creatures pulled from hollows—from wombs—before they were ready.

With the smell of tilled earth stinging my nostrils, I stepped out of the tent and walked toward my very still, very silent, very haunted house.