Page 53 of How to Fake a Haunting

“Oh?” Morgan asked. “Where is it?”

Callum looked confused, but then realization dawned on his face. He groaned. “No,” he said, voice cracking. “Not that one. No, no, no.” I could see that he, too, was remembering everything that had happened after the long-broken mirror had been rediscovered.

“Where is it?” Morgan said again, her tone making it clear she wouldn’t be letting this go.

“Behind the couch,” I responded. “It’s broken too, but it didn’t happen last night. This one broke six years ago. By accident,” I added when I saw Morgan’s curious expression.

The Tallows followed us into the living room.

I tried not to look too carefully at the damage.

There was a gaping hole in the front of the house from where the tree branch had fallen through.

The floor was dotted with puddles, and the bats had taken over one corner of the ceiling for roosting.

Maybe insurance will cover this? I thought.

Hopefully our policy had a clause about ghosts.

Callum and I stared at the couch, neither of us wanting to reach back there. What if the ghosts returned right then? What if, this time, the corpse specter came from the shattered glass instead of the tortured wraith?

“So, this mirror was broken before?” Morgan asked.

“Yes,” Callum and I said in unison.

“I’ll grab it,” Joe said, sensing our unease. He leaned over the back of the couch, then slid the mirror sideways until its frame became visible on one side. Morgan took over, sliding the mirror out the rest of the way before lifting it, struggling a little with its weight.

“Got it,” said Joe, grabbing the other side. “Let’s put it here.”

They placed it dead center on the cushions. The only thing visible in the broken pieces were the stones of the fireplace across from the couch.

Joe grabbed the camcorder from the coffee table. Morgan handed Callum the gold-framed mirror. I stepped up beside Callum, my heart in my throat.

“Remind me again what to do if we see something,” I said.

Morgan nodded as if this was a good question, though she’d gone over it several times.

“If something shows up in the intact mirror, it will be important to have a clear view. So, Lainey, help Callum keep the mirror steady. Joe will be recording, so we can study the image later. I’ll be using these”—she lifted the belt around her waist hung with various thermometers and readers—“to check for cold spots, random shadows, radiation spikes, disruptions in electromagnetic waves, changes in radio frequencies.” She paused, sensing this wasn’t what I needed to hear.

“The important thing is to stay calm,” she added. “Joe and I are here. We won’t let anything happen.”

For the first time since they’d arrived, I saw Joe’s neutral armor crack, and he rolled his eyes. I knew he didn’t believe in any of this; he’d said as much at our last meeting. But his skepticism helped ground me.

Here was a man who’d been ghost hunting with his wife for over a decade and had never seen anything that convinced him of the supernatural.

If we held up this mirror and it showed our ghosts, Joe would be faced with irrefutable evidence of them, as Callum and I had been last night and earlier today.

The odds of Joe not only seeing ghosts for the very first time, but seeing ghosts bent on violence and destruction, seemed low. I took another breath.

“All right,” I said, “let’s do this.”

Again, Joe lifted the camcorder. Again, Morgan counted.

Again, on three, nothing happened.

Until it did.

The mirror in Callum’s hand shimmered. As we watched, the pieces of the broken mirror put themselves back together. The glass rippled and pulsed, and with each outward bubbling, the form materializing in the mirror appeared more corporeal. With one final pulse, we were staring at Lady Macbeth.

Her hood was up, her head tilted down. She was wringing hands coated with blood, crimson in some places, threaded with blackish-red clots in others.

A sink, I realized. She was washing her hands over a sink.

It felt strange to stare into a reflection within a reflection within a reflection within a reflection.

Like I was standing over a bottomless precipice, about to fall in.

I watched, mesmerized, as Lady Macbeth scrubbed furiously. A moment later, she started to mutter.

“No-no-no-no-no.”

The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I’d heard this muttering before. In the yard last night as Lady Macbeth dug. But before then too. Seven months before. Last November. Standing over a sink.

Callum faltered with the mirror, and the image dipped. I tore my eyes away from the crimson and black and saw Joe’s eyes, wide with disbelief.

“Hold it steady!” Morgan gasped. “Lainey, help him!”

But I couldn’t help. Couldn’t do anything but watch.

Lady Macbeth scrubbed and scrubbed. I found that my own hands were up, wringing in a mirror image of the specter’s. “No-no-no-no-no,” I whispered.

As if she’d heard, Lady Macbeth stopped. The muttering ceased. The blood, aside from a pale-pink tinge, had been washed from her hands. She looked up.

I found myself staring into my own pale face.

I stumbled backward, my heels hitting the fireplace, and though I went down onto the stone, my eyes remained locked on the image.

On me, out of my mind with a horror I’d been prepared to repress after the voluntary procedure, until the pregnancy had ended not with pink-tinged water in the toilet, as the doctor had told me to expect, but with grayish-white tissue and a mass of blood in my palms, which the internet informed me was not necessarily problematic but was wildly atypical.

Me, scrubbing my hands, something I’d had to do again and again, for the blood hadn’t stopped coming.

Me, walking through the house with the eleven-week-old fetus, stopping to grab one of Bea’s little-used teddy bears from the shelf, because if I were having an impromptu funeral, the bear seemed the very fucking least I could do.

Me, burying everything in the backyard in the dead of night.

Me, returning to the house from the grave, a string of muttered appeals on my lips.

Me, lying in bed that night but feeling myself go through every one of the motions again and again.

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

“Put it down,” I said. My voice was hoarse, like something dug up from the dirt.

“Please. Put the mirror down.” But Callum didn’t.

Couldn’t. Because inside the mirror, the image was starting to change.

Now it was Callum, the night of the housewarming. Metal candleholder in his hand. The blunt object, I realized. Inside the mirror, he swayed, drunk, eyes roving, dragging the metal across the wall. Across the mirror. In it, he saw something.

This, I realized. He saw this. Himself, looking at himself.

Looking at himself.

The Past-Callum lifted the candleholder above his head and smashed it into the mirror.

It shattered, not only in the past, but in the present.

I covered my face with one arm, turning away from the explosion.

But the sound of glass showering the floor, the coffee table, never came.

It was merely an echo. An illusion. When I looked up, the mirror atop the couch appeared exactly the same as it had before Callum had lifted the gold-framed counterpart to it.

I stared. Unable to move. Unable to think.

“What—” Callum started, but couldn’t finish. Joe was no longer looking through the camcorder, but he also hadn’t lowered it. He stared at the mirror in Callum’s hands with a strange, shocked expression on his face. Morgan had one hand to her mouth, her eyes as big as the camcorder’s lens.

I stared at the couch beneath the mirror.

I’d been sitting in that exact place when Adelaide had first told me her idea for the haunting, and I’d responded with derision: This place is twenty-five hundred square feet.

It’s not some gothic mansion. We’re not on a cursed burial ground.

There wasn’t a murder here. And we built it, remember?

There’s no body beneath the floorboards.

How badly I’d misunderstood. How blind I had been.

I’d thought Callum wouldn’t believe that the house was haunted because of its lack of history, and then, even when the actual ghosts had appeared, I’d been confused; this wasn’t one of the Newport Mansions where I worked.

This was a house untouched by history or hardship.

But I had missed something fundamental with that belief.

It wasn’t bad bones that caused a house to be haunted; it was its guts, what it consumed, what lived within it.

We had built this house, Callum and I—the concrete foundation, the wood scaffolding, the plaster walls, and everything in between them.

Then we’d embodied it, filling it with broken dreams, unfulfilled promises, expectations that turned into disappointment, fear, resentment, blame.

We’d poisoned it so thoroughly that we’d turned it bad, as opposed to stumbling on something that’d been bad to begin with.

We’d been parasites, transforming the constitution of our host.

“Oh my god,” I said to the room, unaware of the tears trickling down my cheeks until I tasted them. “We haunted ourselves. We’re haunting ourselves.”