How to Fake a Haunting, page 23
“You’re as scared as I am,” Callum said, “but you’re not going to leave.” I didn’t like what I heard in his voice, that note of revelation. His next words confirmed my suspicion: “You want me to leave. That way you can say I abandoned you and Beatrix.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, pulling the bag from the shelf.
“You don’t, huh?” His tone had reached that same manic pitch it did when trying to convince me of the latest inexplicable thing he’d experienced around the house. “So if I leave right now and check in to a hotel, you’re telling me you won’t be on the phone first thing Monday morning with some dirtbag lawyer, filing a motion for divorce and loss of custody on abandonment charges?”
Bile rose in the back of my throat. Adelaide and I had done everything right, everything we could, and now actual fucking ghosts had to go and ruin everything? I turned away from Callum, rage growing inside me with the same ballooning pressure as had accumulated before the mirrors and windows exploded.
“Get out of my way,” I said, trying to walk around him to another shelf.
He matched my stride.
“Seriously, Callum, get away from me.”
He laughed bitterly. “If you want to get away from me so badly, maybe you should leave.”
“I’m not leaving,” I reiterated, and though the words made my stomach clench with fear, I knew they were true. A plan had formed in my mind, starting with this goddamn bag I hadn’t opened in more than five years.
“What are you doing?” Callum asked.
“Not that it’s any of your business, but I’m getting the camping equipment.”
“What?”
“Camping equipment? You know, tents, sleeping bag, lantern, a pocketknife. Those things we used back in another life before your drinking kept us within a ten-mile radius of this house.”
When he continued looking at me like I’d lost it, I sighed and waved at the door to the house. “You can go to a hotel or drink yourself into oblivion and pass out in there with the ghosts. But I’m sleeping in the backyard. That way, I’m still here,” I said, gesturing again at the house to make it clear I wasn’t abandoning anything or anyone, “but I don’t have to lie awake all night listening to the sounds of glass tinkling and specters groaning.”
I pulled the tent from the bag, but Callum grabbed the other end and tried to snatch it away from me. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I demanded.
“Who says you get the tent?” he asked.
“It was my idea,” I shot back.
“I was thinking the same thing.”
“No, you weren’t!”
“Yes, I was.”
“We wouldn’t even have this tent if I hadn’t done all the research as to which one we should buy!” It was a ridiculous thing to say under the circumstances, but I was having a hard time dealing with this new reality of Callum no longer leaving. I needed him to remember how scared he’d been, to remember the blood-chilling scrape of the object against the wall as the second being had come down the stairs.
“Like that matters,” Callum responded, tugging harder, but I held strong despite my still-injured wrist, glaring at him over the nylon.
“You don’t even know how to pitch it,” I growled, and that one indisputable fact was apparently enough for Callum to relinquish his hold. He glared at me, but I ignored him and pulled a sleeping bag and LED lantern from a pair of hooks on the wall. I left Callum in the garage, lugging everything across the top of the driveway and into the backyard, keeping one eye on the house . . . and anything that might come out of it.
Chapter 43
After traveling no more than a few feet, I stopped, staring at the place across the lawn where the menace from the foyer had traveled after walking off the deck. Was the ground out there further disturbed, or was it my imagination? Was the soil more disrupted than before? It was hard to tell with only the pale circle of lantern light and a waning crescent moon to see by. I pulled my gaze from the tree line and forced myself to keep walking.
I spread the tent at the center of a small area banked by massive oaks; between them, I would be far away from where Lady Macbeth—as I’d been calling her in my head due to the constant scrubbing of her blood-drenched hands—kept traveling to dig in the dirt.
She’s digging awfully close to where something else is buried. The thought came unbidden, and I forced it away. I couldn’t think like that now, entertaining madness and dredging up the past. Besides, I had a tent to pitch—and a phone call to make—before it got any later.
I worked as quickly as I could, relieved Callum hadn’t followed. At one point, I thought I heard something scrabbling around by the arborvitae, but by then I had finished with the tent and was throwing my sleeping bag inside it. An animal, I told myself. A racoon or an opossum. I crawled in, holding the lantern, and zipped the front flap closed.
The second I was ensconced within the tent, I realized being inside was no better than being out in the dark, open yard. The lantern threw abstract shadows on the walls, and the night seemed to press in on me, the silence so loud I felt certain I wouldn’t hear anything coming, let alone see it. I took a deep breath and pulled out my phone, keeping my eyes on the zipper in case it decided to start moving, then searched for the number I’d saved two weeks ago with zero expectation of ever dialing it.
It was after midnight, but Morgan Tallow answered after only two rings. “Lainey? What’s going on? I saw your number and . . . Is everything okay?”
I was silent. What should I say? The house is overrun with ghosts? I need you to come here and perform some sort of exorcism? Ultimately, I went with something simpler: “About the mirrors . . . Morgan, you were right.”
There was a gasp followed by silence.
“Are you there?” I asked.
“I’m sorry. I’m here.”
I filled her in on what had happened, and was about to beg her and Joe to come, when I realized there was something else that needed to be said.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Morgan. I should have believed you. Or, if not believed you, then at least not been such a jerk. I should have listened to what you had to say.”
Morgan sighed, but it was a sigh of understanding, not disapproval or frustration, as if she’d heard apologies like this before. “Remember how I told you my connection with the supernatural is personal, so I don’t fault anyone for their skepticism? It’s okay.” She said it again, the kindness in her voice making me want to cry. “It’s okay. What do you need us to do?”
“I need you to come here!” I exclaimed. I had thought that part would be obvious.
“Right. Okay. Where are you and your husband now?”
“I’m in a tent in the backyard. Callum is . . . I’m not sure where he is.”
“And your daughter?”
“She’s with my parents, at their house on the other side of town.” Of course Morgan wouldn’t know why Beatrix was there, wouldn’t know everything that’d happened in the last few days, or even the state of my marriage that had prefaced this awful evening.
“Okay, that’s good. You need to keep her there. Do not bring your daughter into that house. Especially after Joe and I get there to do, well, whatever it is that we end up needing to do.”
“So you’ll come?” Those three words belied the flooding well of desperation inside me. I had kept it together in the garage in front of Callum, but inside my house right now was proof of the supernatural, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. I needed Joe and Morgan if I was going to get rid of these things, if I was going to protect Beatrix.
“We’ll come,” Morgan said slowly, but there was a catch in her voice I didn’t like. “But we can’t get there until tomorrow afternoon. We’re at my in-laws’ in New York, but we’re driving home in the morning. We can be at your place by three, four at the latest.”
“Okay.” That was good, or at least better than I’d expected. “Okay, tomorrow afternoon is fine. But what should we do until you get here?”
“From what you’ve told me, it doesn’t sound like the ghosts are dangerous. In fact, it sounds like they might not interact with you at all. If they’re engaging in the same actions over and over again, that’s good. There may be some sort of residual haunting going on.”
“Residual haunting? What the hell is that?”
“Well”—Morgan sounded less sure of herself now—“I don’t want to speculate. I’ll know more when I get there. But I think it would be okay for you and Callum to venture into the house tomorrow and see the state of things. The ghosts might quiet down overnight. They may disappear altogether.”
“They could do that?” That sounded too good to be true. I figured any ghost worth its salt wouldn’t leave until it got what it wanted or told the house’s inhabitants something they didn’t want to hear. Wasn’t that how these things worked in books and movies?
“Whatever you do,” Morgan cautioned, “be careful. We’ll be there as soon as we can. I promise.” I heard muffled words, as if she were covering the mouthpiece to speak to someone else. She came back on the line. “And Lainey? Joe made a good point. Until we get there, stay away from the mirrors.”
“There aren’t any left,” I said, but she had already hung up.
I placed my phone beside the lantern and looked around. How the hell was I supposed to sleep? I pushed ghosts and mirrors from my mind, reasoning there was nothing I could do to fix this until Joe and Morgan arrived tomorrow, but the thoughts still swirled like mist, blotting out patience and reason. I had convinced myself to at least lie down when a noise came from outside. A shuffling sound, hushed but gritty, like something dragging in the dirt.
I held my breath and doused the lantern, plunging the tent into darkness. I tried not to succumb to terror as outside, someone approached the tent. I grabbed the knife and flicked open the blade. It was incredibly sharp, purchased for use in place of the small hatchets or machetes some hikers liked to carry. But what good would even the sharpest knife be against a ghost? The dragging footfalls grew closer, stopping in front of the tent.
Seconds passed. The figure stood, motionless. I realized I could hear somebody breathing. “Callum? Is that you?”
“Yeah,” he huffed, “it’s me. Come on, Lainey, let me in.”
The fear went out of me like the tide, only to be replaced with a rushing tsunami of rage. I stabbed the lantern back on and unzipped the tent. “What. The. Fuck. Callum. No.”
He was holding a garden rake, one of the metal ones with widely spaced tines. His face was utterly bloodless in the LEDs’ glow.
“Lainey,” he said in a breathless whisper, and it was only then I realized, in the lull of my own fear, how terrified Callum sounded. Freshly terrified, not the lingering fright from earlier, as if something had driven him toward me, pursuing him in the dark.
“Lainey,” he said again, the terror in that whisper chilling the blood in my veins. “You’ve got to let me in. The ghost. The ghost from the foyer mirror . . . I can hear her.”
Chapter 44
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.
Chapter 45
By the time I reached the driveway, Callum was opening the back passenger’s side door of my car. He practically fell out onto the pavement, his eyes bloodshot and his face creased with sleep.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, surveying the yard. “I knew that thing was digging all night long, but this shit is next level. Another day or two and the entire backyard will be one big pit.”
“Things won’t go on that long,” I said, and continued walking toward the front of the house.
Callum perked up slightly. “Why do you say that?”
“I have some people coming today. People who should be able to help.”
He hurried to catch up with me. “People? Who?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Lainey, fucking tell me!”
I stopped and sighed. “Jesus Christ. If you must know, it’s Joe and Morgan Tallow.”
Callum’s forehead wrinkled. “Who the hell are they?”
I glared at him. He should know who Joe and Morgan were; I’d mentioned them enough over the almost ten years I’d worked for the Preservation Society.
As if to prove this point, the names finally clicked for him. “The Ed and Lorraine Warren wannabes?”
“Yes, the Ed and Lorraine wannabes.” I was approaching the front walkway.
Callum seemed to realize the direction I was heading in and stopped, the expression on his face that of a frightened rabbit. “Where are you going?”
