Page 58 of How to Fake a Haunting

I sprinted forward, whipping around the corner of the living room and bounding through the French doors in two long leaps. From the far side of the playroom, I saw the wraith approach the slider, broken glass like the entrance to a carnival ride, stretched and menacing. It passed through it . . .

And disappeared.

I burst out after her, spinning in circles on the deck as I searched for her mangled form, but I saw nothing. Joe and Morgan ran out a moment later, both breathing hard.

“Where’d it go?” I demanded. I turned to Morgan. “It disappeared. Where the fuck did it go?”

She didn’t answer, but she didn’t have to. I followed her gaze to the yard. All three of us watched the thing’s progression across the yard, invisible but for the disruption of loose soil as she dragged herself across the holes Lady Macbeth had dug over the last twenty-four hours.

“Oh my god.” The words were a literal supplication rather than a pronouncement of disbelief. “Oh my god, no. Don’t let her. No.”

I heard Joe ask, “What’s happening?” but I had already sprinted off the deck.

The second my foot hit tilled earth, my vision went black. A second later, colors and images exploded in my brain. My ears pricked. My fingers tingled. My view of the yard came back for a moment, flickered, then faded to black.

I saw the windshield of a car. Endless rain. Bloodred brake lights and disorienting reflections.

“No-no-no-no,” I muttered helplessly.

I tried to clear the vision, blinking and rubbing my eyes, but nothing happened.

I tried to run but tripped and fell. Beneath my hands was both the grittiness of dirt and the smooth, oily leather of a steering wheel.

I shook my head again, but remained blind to everything but the vision.

The future. “Morgan, Joe, please! Help me!” I cried, and started to crawl forward. Again, the future assailed me.

Dizziness. Drunkenness. Conversation. Anger.

From behind me, someone reached down and wrapped their arms around my chest. “Come on,” a voice next to my ear said. “Come on, I’ll help you. I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ll help.”

It was Callum. One step at a time, he dragged me forward, over the destruction in the earth, as images assailed me and the tortured wraith did her best to ensure my—and her—fate.

The car in my mind went faster. Callum and I struggled to cross the yard. I felt the kick to the back of my seat the same way I felt a jolt whenever my foot plunged into another hole. I felt the rage, both now and in the future. Rage at my helplessness, at how little I could control.

When the car in my mind slid across the rain-slicked highway and hit the median, Callum’s hands were ripped from my body.

“Hey,” I heard him cry.

I pitched forward, catching myself on hands and knees. At the same instant, my vision cleared like fog blowing off the ocean. I saw the bottom rung of the ladder to Pinecone House up ahead. The screech of glass and crunch of metal faded from my ears.

But I still heard the screams. Beatrix.

No, not Beatrix’s screams. And not mine.

Adelaide’s.

I watched in horror as the door to Pinecone House swung open and Adelaide was thrown from the platform as violently as if she’d hit a tree going eighty and been ejected through the windshield.

Her body hit the ground and crumbled like one of Bea’s dolls, all splayed limbs and fanned-out fuchsia hair.

This time I did scream. Screamed and rushed to my friend.

She was conscious but only barely. She blinked and brought her hands to her face.

Her fingernails were painted in an alternating pattern of marigold orange and rose pink.

I held one of her hands, but Morgan and Joe were already there, running their hands along Adelaide’s body, asking her if she was okay.

“I will be,” she whispered. “My back hurts a little. And my leg. But Bea . . . get Bea. I had . . .” She coughed, winced. “I’d gotten her to fall asleep.”

I turned and stared into the open door of Pinecone House in time to see the wraith materialize, no longer invisible despite being outside.

It must have been Pinecone House that granted her corporeality, by virtue of Beatrix’s understanding of what the word home entailed, expanding the wraith’s territory beyond the confines of the house.

She was standing now, her legs and feet a swirling mass of silvery smoke.

The implications of her no longer having to drag herself made me dizzy.

I watched as the tortured wraith, that unyielding bitch who thought she had everything figured out, lifted my daughter.

She held Bea to her blood-streaked face and nuzzled her.

All the air left my body. Bea stirred. I jerked forward and felt something hard hit my hand.

I winced, thinking no wonder Adelaide’s leg hurt, that she’d broken the bone and it was protruding from her skin. But it wasn’t bone. It was metal.

I slipped my hand into the slim side pocket of Adelaide’s leggings and pulled out my knife.

I raised it. Flicked it open. If Callum had slit the throat of his own unsought future, maybe I could do the same.

Hoping to employ the wraith’s same surprise tactic of unexpected speed, I ran for the ladder and propelled myself up it with one hand, the other aiming the knife at the left side of the wraith’s neck, the opposite side from where she held Beatrix to her face.

A shimmering wall, like a mirror unspooling—or a reflective shield—cut down like the blade of a guillotine, the force of it throwing me off the ladder and onto my back in the dirt. I lay, dazed, struggling for breath, until rough hands thrust me upward.

Callum.

“Are you okay?” he shouted, eyes on Pinecone House.

Already the barrier wall had shimmered out of existence, but the wraith stared down at me, triumphant, and I knew she would merely use the same trick again.

I watched as Beatrix stirred again, blinking sleepy eyes.

My helplessness threatened to devour me.

Slowly, the ghost turned to the east-facing wall until her back was to me and both her and Beatrix’s faces were framed by the mirror I’d hung for Bea myself, its intricately patterned border resembling the scales and prickles of a pinecone.

The wraith jerked forward, toward the mirror. Its surface shimmered, and the ghost, too, suddenly seemed less corporeal than she had a moment earlier.

It doesn’t matter how she gets it, I realized sickly.

If she can’t have my soul annihilated from grief and regret in the future, she’ll take my soul annihilated now.

Same destination, different route. Could she take Beatrix through the mirror?

I didn’t think so. But I also thought the attempt might kill my daughter, or come close to it.

The realization that I couldn’t stop what was about to happen was one I’d had before, as the car flipped over the median and the world became alternating patterns of dark and light.

Dark.

The wraith moved closer to the mirror.

Light.

My hand tightened around the knife.

Dark.

A screech of triumph rose from her mouth, the sound curling visibly and joining the growing chaos of her form.

Light.

I took two lurching steps forward.

Dark.

The thing’s form—along with Beatrix’s—became grayer and gauzier by the second.

Light.

I raised the blade.

Dark.

Like Lady Macbeth outside the living room, the wraith’s form began to dissolve into a vortex, starting at her mangled legs and rising up to her neck. In an instant, both she and Beatrix were eclipsed by the swirling smoke storm.

Light.

I closed my eyes. I thought of the softness of my daughter’s cheeks.

The smell of her skin in the morning. The tight grip of her warm, trusting hand.

I thought of games at the kitchen table and snuggling close as I told her stories.

I thought of the sweet birdlike kisses she gave me when I helped her onto the toilet, or the way she asked me the most insightful questions in the last few minutes before she fell asleep.

I thought of how the last four years were a tower of memories, each one stacked on the last to form our bond, and how the next ten years would be a void where new memories should have been made.

Dark.

And with that final thought, I plunged the blade into the soft part of my wrist, pressed down hard, and dragged it vertically from hand to elbow, forging a line the way a child might draw the start of a mirror with a silver crayon.

Even as blood glugged from the wound, I dragged the blade across the other wrist, through the stitches, so deep and hard that the pain was like swallowing a dying star only to have it expand and contract inside me.

The effect was immediate and dizzying, a speeding train in reverse, sparks shooting from the tracks.

The vision sped backward, memories I didn’t actually have peeling back like bark from a diseased tree.

The fiery wreckage. The glint of the embankment.

An argument. Champagne in a sparkling glass.

More glasses. Bottles. Avoiding my reflection in the mirror. A new job. New problems. New me.

Until every aspect of that one potential future was gone, and I was me, the old me, the rotten seeds so recently planted by the ghost of my future self, by the haunting—no, by myself, by the staged haunting—dug up and thrown to the wind.

And more important, the old Beatrix, safe, if not happy, with no possibility of a mother who could do the unthinkable, who could set off a chain of dominoes that would cause her death.

I could be happy, at least, in the knowledge that I’d saved her.

I dropped to my knees. Kept my eyes open long enough to see the wraith spin from the mirror like a tempest. She dropped my daughter and howled down at me with inhuman hatred and rage.

My vision swam. I thought I saw her get sucked toward the mirror.

I saw Morgan reach up the ladder and snatch Beatrix away from the swirl of gray and silver and carry her to the side, away from the swing set.

The blood ran down my arms like rivers, coating my fingers and hands, dropping onto the earth.

Soaking into the holes, reddening the ground until dirt became clay.

I thought of scrubbing my hands, of wringing them.

But I didn’t have to. Not now. Not ever.

I’d done what I needed to. What I had to do. And I would do it again.

Because a good mother did what was best for her child, no matter the circumstances.

Somehow, night was becoming day. I lay on my back and stared at the sky. I watched it turn from black to blue. Blue to red. Red to gold.

Or perhaps I didn’t. Perhaps I was already somewhere else, had already returned.

“Do you wanna play Favorite Thing?” Beatrix always asked me.

I had been playing, I realized. All along. It had all been my favorite thing.