Page 57 of How to Fake a Haunting

“What the fuck do we do now?”

Callum was pushing away the mug Joe held out to him, repeating the same question over and over again. He was sitting on the opposite end of the couch, with Joe fretting over him the way Morgan was fretting over me. I’d managed a small sip of water but hadn’t quelled my body’s violent trembling.

Neither Joe nor Morgan had seen anything in the mirror once it had touched the surface of the water, but they’d agreed that both Callum’s and my reactions—eyes rolled back in our heads, joints rigid, muscles seizing—were deeply indicative of not just an overwhelming experience but an out-of-body one.

“Can you tell me what you saw?” Morgan asked me gently.

I stared straight ahead, still unable to speak. But Callum must have recovered enough to be able to convert his vision into words.

“Cirrhosis,” he choked out. He stared past Joe, past the walls of the house, reliving the vision. “That’s how I die. And the lead-up is prolonged and painful. And—”

He stopped and looked across the room, catching my eye, then looked away.

“I’m alone at the end,” he said, so quietly it was hard to hear him. “All alone. In some sort of disgusting end-of-life care home. No one was there. Not you.” He gave me a look that was both embarrassed and accusatory. “Not Beatrix. Not even my mother.”

He glanced warily at the mirror. “The corpse. It’s me. My fate.” He let out a strangled cry and turned to Morgan. “What do I do?” His tone was desperate. “How do I keep this from happening?”

I wanted to scoff, to tell him the best way to avoid dying from alcoholic liver cirrhosis was to quit drinking alcohol, but at that exact moment, the house began to shake.

The rumbling was low but rose quickly. The small colony of bats that’d been hanging in the corner screeched and took flight, swooping wildly over our heads.

Shards of glass still clinging to windowpanes clattered to the floor.

The candles and planters hanging from the ceiling shook like boughs in a hurricane.

The rumbling became so pronounced that my teeth chattered in my head.

“What’s happening?” I managed to cry, but the words were lost to the roar. Just when I thought I’d go deaf from the sound of it, the rumbling stopped.

And all four ghosts burst into the room at once.

Lady Macbeth came in from the French doors, wringing her hands—my hands—so violently blood splattered the walls and floor, the no-no-no-no-no on her lips—my lips—frenzied and animalistic.

The presence from the staircase lurched in through the main entrance, wielding its twisted hunk of metal like a weapon and groaning incoherently.

Its resemblance to Callum the night of the housewarming six years prior was so exact, it was more memory than haunting.

From the place on the floor where, earlier, we’d thoughtlessly laid the broken mirror, the tortured wraith rose like a zombie from a black-and-white horror picture, pulling itself forward on hands embedded with glass.

Its ragged voice rose in a howl that turned my blood to ice.

When it lifted its head, I saw my own face.

The world went black, then came hurtling back in horrifically saturated Technicolor. I screamed, and as I did, I realized Morgan was yelling too, yelling and scrambling to reach Joe. When she did, they held each other, their eyes dark pools of horror as they took in the ghosts and the madness.

I turned to Callum, but his attention was fixed over my shoulder, his mouth a rictus of terror and revulsion.

I knew the corpse specter must be behind me, but before I could turn, a rush of moldering cloth and rotting flesh darted past me and launched itself at Callum, gripping the wrist that, up until now, I’d forgotten had already been injured by the horrible, lumbering thing.

Callum screamed, and his corpse, his own mouth, roared back at him not three inches from his face.

I felt the thing’s rage. But something else too. I felt its desperation, the urgency of it. It may have been dead, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t almost out of time.

How do I keep this from happening? Callum had asked—begged, really—right before the house and its ghosts had gone apoplectic.

I looked to where the staircase specter, Past-Callum, swayed and rallied, and was shocked to find that its attention was as focused on the battle between the Present- and Future-Callums as mine, Joe’s, and Morgan’s was.

His fate has already come to pass, I marveled.

There’s nothing for him to do but remind and cause regret.

But Future-Callum’s fate was uncertain. And this particular Future-Callum’s fate was tied entirely to Callum remaining on his current path.

The path of alcoholism, maybe even insanity.

The path I’d been committed to keeping Callum on by infiltrating his psyche and haunting our house.

“Callum!” I screamed. The corpse didn’t pause in its assault, but the other three ghosts snapped to attention.

I didn’t like the way the Future-Lainey eyed me, eyed the fight between the Present- and Future-Callums. If I voiced what I was thinking, I’d be alerting my own future specter to the fact that I knew what it wanted, opening myself up to danger.

But I didn’t have a choice, couldn’t help but believe Future-Callum and Future-Lainey were inextricably linked.

“Callum!” I screamed again. “The only way for it to exist is if you remain on your current path! You can’t die of alcoholism if you don’t drink, and the only way to not be an alcoholic is to admit you’re one!”

From beneath the heft of the macabre threat, I saw Callum pause, take in my words.

The corpse had its hands around Cal’s throat, but it wasn’t choking him.

It didn’t want Callum dead; it wanted him traumatized.

Demoralized and defeated. It wanted him to leave this haunting never having really left it.

“Do you hear me, Callum?” I screamed. “You can defeat it by admitting you’re an alcoholic.

” I was crying, tears streaming down my cheeks, soaking my neck and hair.

I thought of standing over him in the hospital as he slept, holding Beatrix to my chest and dreaming about the future.

I thought of how the years had changed him, the ways the last month had changed him, solidifying the haunted expression on his face, the set of resignation to his mouth and chin.

If things had changed so much in one direction, perhaps they could change back.

“This doesn’t have to be the way it always is!”

This last utterance flipped some switch within him, and as the corpse specter raised its fist, Callum took the opportunity to roll away.

He scrambled out from under the monster and took off toward the kitchen.

Joe and Morgan and I ran to follow. A horrible, frenzied screeching engulfed me as all four apparitions responded to Callum’s desertion.

I felt, more than heard, the undead beast’s footsteps on the floor behind me.

I rounded the corner into the kitchen to find Callum pulling bottle after bottle from the cabinet above the refrigerator.

When he’d pulled the last bottle out, he began unscrewing caps and dumping them into the sink two at a time.

Something twinged in my chest. It was heartbreaking, watching Callum resort to that most clichéd of actions an alcoholic with fresh resolve could take.

I knew what he was going for, but I didn’t know if it would be enough.

The corpse specter, too, was unimpressed.

It flew into the kitchen like a ghostly train, all gray smoke and keening wails.

It tackled Callum, knocking the bottle of vodka to the floor where it shattered, and dragged him away.

Callum pummeled the thing with his fists, scratched at its eyes, but to no avail.

I turned to look for the others; Joe was at the table, throwing things out of the duffel bag like a madman, no doubt looking for something that would help. Morgan was holding a pendant around her neck she’d removed from beneath the collar of her shirt, her lips moving in silent prayer.

The cadaver continued dragging Callum, whose hands scrabbled for purchase on the edge of the counter, the leg of the coffee bar, the floor itself, the corner of the hallway. As he was about to disappear around the corner, I jumped forward.

“Here!” I yelled, and kicked the broken vodka bottle his way. It spun across the hardwood, and for a moment, I thought its trajectory was too wide and that it wouldn’t reach him. But at the last second, Callum shot out an arm and intercepted it.

He lifted the jagged mouth of the bottle and stared, calculating, then brought it to the floor, breaking off one side and leaving himself with a single line of jagged glass. He raised the bottle and set his jaw.

“I’ve had enough of this shit,” he growled.

“Enough of you, enough of myself, enough of the drinking. I am an alcoholic, but I’m not”—he stuck the bottle in the side of the thing’s neck—“going”—he dragged it across its throat—“to die one!” He yanked the bottle the final few inches, and the corpse jerked back, raising its fingers to the ragged mouth of its throat.

It tried to swallow, but something black and viscous glugged out from the wound like oil, pouring onto Callum.

Callum pulled himself out from under it and backed away, stopping when he hit the wall.

We watched as untold horrors poured from the thing: black blood and putrid tissue and bugs and chemicals and dirt.

When it seemed nothing else could possibly be inside it, the corpse closed its eyes with a groan and slumped to the floor.

Slowly, steam rising from its moldering remains, it sunk into the floorboards, like a series of time-lapse photographs of animal remains putrefying.

A heartbeat later, the corpse specter had disappeared.

Callum and I stared at one another, our expressions mirror images of horror and relief. I sensed Joe and Morgan coming up behind me, and I started to turn, but my attention was diverted by movement at the other end of the hall.

Callum’s annihilation of a future in which he died alone had been witnessed by more than the two ghost hunters and me.

Lady Macbeth hovered and wrung her hands, fear on her face, her muttered exhalations more frenzied than ever.

The staircase specter dropped the candleholder as he swayed.

With wailing cries, their bodies spun into hazy tornadoes of ghostly material.

They spun, faster and faster. Then, like smoke whooshing up a chimney, they vanished.

In their wake, one remained. The tortured wraith . . . the Future-Me, face twisted into an expression I hadn’t seen before but, to my horror, could read: Outrage. Hatred. Bitterness and determination. In an instant, I saw that my Future-Self would not go as easily as the Future-Callum.

I thought of raising my hands, stepping toward her, trying to reason with her the way one did a spooked animal or irrational child.

The thought was ridiculous, and she wasted no time proving she wouldn’t make the same mistakes as the corpse specter.

She let out a vengeful screech and scuttled forward on her mangled hands with a speed both horrifying in its unexpectedness and devastating in its singularity of purpose.

Toward the hall and the sliding door to the backyard, then onward, to the playhouse.

Toward my unsuspecting daughter and best friend inside it.