Page 51 of How to Fake a Haunting

Someone was shaking me. I screamed again and raised my arms, my eyes flying open. Morgan Tallow stood over me, her face etched with concern.

“Lainey! Are you all right?” Morgan’s voice was shocked, but I couldn’t focus on her question.

Could only look around me in a panic. Where was Callum?

Where was the corpse specter? The music had stopped, as had the rain, but the sky was still an unnatural gray.

I leaned forward and peered through the doors into the living room.

The ghosts were gone. All of them. Joe was helping Callum to his feet.

“Did you see them?” I asked. “The ghosts?”

Morgan shook her head. “No, but we heard you screaming. Joe wanted to call the police. I told him that was a ridiculous suggestion. Seeing as you were expecting us, I thought it would be okay to let ourselves in and see if we could help. We got to the door there”—she pointed to the living room entrance—“and we saw your husband. He was waving his hands at something, but we couldn’t see it.

” She looked up. “We did see the bats, but I don’t think that’s what he was fighting. ”

She held out her hand, and I took it. “Was it the ghosts you told me about on the phone last night? The two that emerged when the mirrors exploded?”

“There are four now,” I said. “And, no offense, but you weren’t exactly right about them not being dangerous.” I looked over Morgan’s shoulder to where Joe was leading Callum down the hall and toward the kitchen. “I think the corpse specter was trying to kill him.”

“Corpse specter?” Morgan frowned, her eyebrows furrowing. “Why don’t we go into the kitchen? You can catch us up with everything that’s been going on.”

Five minutes later, we were seated around the table much the way Adelaide and I had sat with Joe and Morgan three weeks earlier.

“So,” Morgan said, “these ghosts emerged last night along with”—she looked at the broken windows, the shattered remains of mirror—“an explosion of glass?”

I nodded, but my stomach churned with anxiety. To say all this started last night with the broken glass was the understatement of the century.

“Was there anything that prefaced the breaking glass?” Joe asked. “Any noises or changes in temperature?”

“Yes,” Callum said, perking up. He had an ice pack on what was hopefully only a sprained wrist. Morgan had wrapped a piece of gauze and a large bandage around the cut along my forearm.

“I was holding a pint glass,” Callum continued, “and it exploded in my hand. It was like, I bent the straw to take a sip, and the fucking thing burst into a thousand fucking pieces.”

Joe and Morgan exchanged a look.

Shit, shit, shit, shit! “Yeah,” I said, “about that . . .”

But Callum went on talking. “There were lots of things before last night too. Knocking in the walls. Strange smells. Furniture moving. Flies by the thousands.”

“Is this why you called us, Lainey?” Morgan asked. “Back in May?”

Callum looked confused. “You called them in May? But you didn’t believe me about the house being haunted. You didn’t believe any of it until last night.”

I picked at a corner of the bandage. What the hell should I say? There was no way out of this now, not to mention that I didn’t want the Tallows basing their plan to help us on a foundation of lies.

“Yeah, um.” I bared my teeth in a pained, sheepish grimace. “I didn’t believe you because I caused it.” Now all three of them tilted their heads at me, bewildered.

“You caused it?” Morgan asked. “The ghosts?”

“Not them. But everything before it. Well, almost everything,” I clarified.

Callum’s eyes were still wide. He looked confused, but as I watched, realization dawned, and his eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?” he demanded.

Wishing the house would engage in some useful haunting activity and open up a sinkhole next to the table that I could jump through, I sighed and started talking.

“Everything up until the shower rained blood last night and the mirrors and windows exploded? It wasn’t a poltergeist or demonic activity.

It was me. Or, more accurately, it was me working through Adelaide.

” I looked at Callum. “If I couldn’t divorce you without giving up fifty percent custody of Bea, I figured it was worth a shot haunting you out of the house. ”

All the bewilderment and curiosity curdled on his face. I watched as he worked to make sense of what I’d told him, thinking through events, recalling incidents in a different light. “No,” he said after a moment. “No, that’s not possible.”

“It is possible,” I said. “Way more possible than the nightmare that’s been going on around us.

” I gestured at the ceiling. “The knocking in your bedroom? Recorders in the attic. The creepy sounds and music? Same. The rancid smells were stink bombs Adelaide cooked up. The ghoul in your closet was Adelaide after a particularly successful makeup tutorial.”

I contorted my face into that half-apologetic, sheepish grimace again. “Adelaide was in and out of this house a hundred times over the last month, courtesy of a felt-lined retractable ladder and your perpetual drunkenness, which made her all but invisible.”

“No, no, no.” Callum was shaking his head now. “No. There’s no way.” He brought his hands up to his face, then winced as the movement tweaked his injured wrist. “The candles shooting up to the ceiling?” he asked.

“Before last night, the candles shot to the ceiling because Adelaide and I glued magnets to the bottoms of them.”

“And the teddy bears?”

“Adelaide and I were hiding in the house that night. We staged them, propped them up. The bears were recordable; Adelaide set them to play creepy sound effects from a Halloween YouTube channel.”

We went through half a dozen more instances, and with each revelation, Callum grew angrier and more incredulous. Finally, his head jerked up, something like an epiphany on his face.

“What about the glass exploding in my hand? That happened before the mirrors!”

I felt Joe and Morgan’s eyes on me. Yes, their expressions said. Tell us how that happened. “It’s called a Prince Rupert’s drop,” I said haltingly. “A type of toughened glass bead. I put it in your straw. When you bent the straw, the bead exploded, which broke your glass.”

At Callum’s stunned expression, the dark thing inside me that reveled in hurting him reared its ugly head. I wasn’t alone in my feelings; Callum looked like he was going jump across the table and choke me.

“You,” he spat, “and your friend from work have been . . . haunting me? Making me think that I was crazy?”

I scoffed defensively. “And you’ve been drinking yourself to death, to insanity, in front of our daughter,” I shot back.

Callum’s expression twisted with resentment.

He’d thought Joe and Morgan were going to sensationalize our story, had wanted to stick to ghosts in the mirrors rather than reveal the skeletons in our closets.

But the idea that the ghosts weren’t random, couldn’t be attributed to a haunted artifact or building a house on a Native American burial ground, was gaining traction with every passing hour.

There was a reason we were being haunted, and Joe and Morgan wouldn’t be able to help us until we took the whole picture into consideration.

“I wish I were surprised,” Callum said. “I wish I were mad. I am mad. I’m fucking livid. But I can’t possibly care more about you and that psycho-bitch’s crazy plan to haunt me than about your far worse, far more selfish betrayal.”

He shook his head, staring hard at me, as if trying to find the reasons for my actions somewhere on my body.

“You started this, Lainey.” He spun on Joe and Morgan.

“You’re here to discover the big mystery?

The reason our house is full of destructive, evil energy?

Why don’t you ask her how she can sit here with a straight face and say she needed to haunt me out of my own house when she had an abortion and kept it a secret?

” He lunged at me. “How dare you turn me into the villain? This isn’t my fault! ”

As he spoke, I’d been growing lightheaded, rage climbing up my throat like ivy, making it hard to breathe.

But with this last sentence, my vision sharpened with laser-focus precision.

“It is your fault,” I said, too raw and tired and fearful to hold back.

“Your drinking must have been like an open invitation for all things evil to come into this house.”

“Maybe we should—” Joe started, but Callum interrupted.

“My drinking,” he said, incredulous. “You think my drinking is the problem, something that, oh, I don’t know, eighty percent or more of people everywhere do on a regular basis, but your abortion has nothing to do with the ghosts crawling all over this place?”

Morgan tried to temper the shock with which she turned on me, but I still saw it there, in the parting of her mouth and the way her eyes creased as if she were in pain.

Every detail from the story she’d told me about wanting a child and delivering a stillborn baby rushed back to me, and I hung my head.

“It was my choice,” I stammered. “And I didn’t make it because I don’t like being a mother.

” I made it because you are not a good father, I thought but didn’t say.

Insulting him wouldn’t help; I needed to steer the conversation back to the quartet of ghosts in the house if we were going to make any sort of progress. But first, I needed to try to explain.

“I didn’t have an abortion because I don’t like being a mother,” I repeated, “but because Beatrix has always felt like a blessing I didn’t fully deserve.

When I got pregnant again, I was terrified.

Whether or not I deserved Bea, I had her; why would I upset that sacred balance?

Why would I take away a single resource or divert my attention from her for even a second when my greatest purpose in life was to be her mother . . . hers and hers alone?”

Callum didn’t say anything. Joe shifted in his chair, looking uncomfortable. But Morgan reached out and took my hand.

“There is a lot to unpack here,” she said, her tone patient.

“Resentments. Secrets. Broken dreams and unrealized expectations. But I think we can help you.” She looked across the table to Joe, and he nodded.

Then she pushed back in her chair and looked down the hall.

“The first mirror’s down there?” she asked.

I nodded, and all four of us stared in that direction as if waiting for a repeat performance. But nothing emerged, no bloodstained hands or shimmering skin, no splatters of blood or unearthly wailing from a face as blank as an empty mirror, featureless, without focus.

Joe and Morgan stood and walked to the floor beside the island. Joe lifted a duffel bag onto the marble surface and unzipped it, then pulled out some of the equipment from the first time they’d been here: thermometers, night vision goggles, camcorders, a Geiger counter.

“What’s happening?” Callum asked. “Do you have a plan?” Neither Joe nor Morgan answered. “What are you doing?” he pressed.

“I don’t think why you’re being haunted matters,” Morgan said. “I think what matters is who. We have to find out the identities of the apparitions.” She lifted a camcorder out of the bag. “Each and every one of them.”