How to Fake a Haunting, page 26
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.”
Chapter 50
“When we talked last night,” Morgan said, “something occurred to me. You said the ghosts only emerged when the mirrors broke, and that they’re shadowy, slippery, almost as if they’re made of reflective material themselves.”
I nodded, and Morgan slipped both hands back into the duffel on the counter. A moment later, she came out with an oval mirror, gold-framed, about a foot tall by a foot and a half wide. It looked like something that would hang over the sink in a tiny bathroom. “It’s from our downstairs bathroom,” Morgan admitted. “It’s small, but I think it’ll work.”
Without realizing it, I recoiled slightly. Callum did the same—as if the mirror might shatter by virtue of being in our house.
“Work how?” I asked. “I mean, what’s your idea?” I hoped Morgan didn’t plan to break it, to summon the horrifying specters back.
Still holding the mirror, Morgan shot a quick glance at Joe. He nodded, urging her on. “I . . . sort of have this theory,” she said, “based on historical representations of mirrors in hauntings. I think we can use this mirror to see what, up until now, you haven’t been able to. I think we can position this mirror to be a way in. To see who these ghosts are.”
I could tell she was speaking the way she had when Adelaide was here, trying to present her ideas and philosophies cautiously enough for us to accept them, but I wanted to tell her no such care was needed; Callum and I had seen enough to believe whatever she said.
“Ghosts can do as little as reflect emotions, fears, desires, and secrets,” Morgan continued. “And when that’s the case, they’re mere phantoms, coming to us in dreams, as shadows in our periphery, a smell or taste or memory. But sometimes, and more frighteningly, ghosts are real, and I mean really real, corporeal, tangible, not mere hallucinations, mental projections, or even the apparently purposeless phantom.” She paused again, looking apologetic. “And when ghosts are real, they can do terrible, irreparable—if unspecified—harm. They have it in their power to change the course of a life . . .” Her voice dropped so low I struggled to hear her. “They have the ability to seal fates, maybe even to kill.”
“So what are you suggesting we do?” Callum asked gruffly. He’d hardly said a word since I’d spoken of the abortion.
Morgan held up the mirror again, a small smile on her face. “Like I said, we start by figuring out the actual identity of these ghosts. If they’re real, like you say, they’re bound to have some sort of agenda, maybe a nefarious one. But we can’t fight back until we know who they are and where they came from.” She nodded in the direction of the foyer. “I believe, or at least, I hope, that if we hold up this mirror”—she waved the mirror in her hands—“to one of the broken ones and look at where the apparitions came from through a reflection, we might be able to see their real faces.” She paused, looking hard first at me, then at Callum. “Are you ready for that?”
“Oh,” I said, which was decidedly not an answer. Beside me, Callum gulped.
But Morgan must have been satisfied; she held up the gold-framed mirror and raised an eyebrow in supplication.
“Let’s start in the upstairs bathroom.”
Five minutes later, I stared into the prismatic remains of Callum’s bathroom mirror. My head ached from nonstop adrenaline, and frissons of panic kept radiating through my gut. For Beatrix, I kept reminding myself. We had to figure out who or what was haunting us if Beatrix was ever going to come back.
Callum held the gold-framed mirror while Joe and Morgan prepared their equipment. I could see by the way he kept readjusting his grip that his fingers were slick with sweat. I wasn’t sure how Callum was sweating. Every inch of me was ice-cold, my fingers numb, my arms and neck prickling with gooseflesh.
I pushed down waves of panic and examined what I could see of my reflection in the shattered mirror. There were a few intact shards at the bottom, clinging to the wood. Or, at least, I thought they were intact; when I looked more closely, I saw that my reflection went on forever in a ghastly funhouse effect.
“Are you ready?” Morgan asked. She and Joe were in the open doorframe, Joe with a video recorder and electromagnetic field meter at the ready.
I nodded, but that was a lie. I wasn’t ready. Not at all. Still, I stepped up beside Callum and took a breath.
“All right, so on the count of three, Callum will raise the mirror he’s holding to the broken one on the wall.” Morgan’s voice was calm, but did the air suddenly feel different? Heavy and throbbing? Or was I imagining it, letting my fear get the best of me? Allowing the last twenty-four hours to prime me for chaos?
“Do I raise it on three or after three?” Callum asked.
Joe gave a little laugh. “Either one. I’ll be ready.” He held up the camcorder.
“All right, then,” Morgan said again, but did she sound less certain than she had a moment ago? Less convinced everything would be fine? If so, it didn’t matter, because the next word out of her mouth was the start of the count. “One . . .”
I blinked. The air is not hazy, the air is not hazy . . . Callum adjusted his fingers, almost losing his grasp on the mirror.
“Two . . .”
My stomach lurched. I shuffled to the side a half step, to better see into the mirror when Callum raised it.
“Three!” Morgan shouted.
Callum grimaced and lifted his arms. Joe aimed the camcorder. I looked into the gold-framed mirror, expecting to see one of the shimmery-faced ghosts made visible. Made far more terrible.
What I saw was the same broken mirror that hung on the wall.
There was no ghost. No illuminated reflection. No question made known.
“Nothing happened,” Callum said. I resisted the urge to respond, No shit.
I turned to Morgan. She and Joe were whispering to one another. “It’s okay,” she said to me and Callum a moment later. “I sort of expected that to happen.”
“You did?” Callum’s tone was suspicious.
“The ghosts have come and gone twice. Since they’re not staying perpetually in your home, it stands to reason they wouldn’t be present in the mirrors all the time either.”
“It stands to reason, huh?” Callum said. “What part of this is ‘reasonable’ to you, lady?” I shot Callum a look, but neither Joe nor Morgan seemed to mind his little outburst.
“What do we do now?” I asked. My headache had worsened with this latest instance of receding adrenaline.
“We go on to the next mirror,” Morgan said matter-of-factly.
We moved ourselves and the equipment to Beatrix’s room and followed the same process. After another anxiety-spiking countdown, Callum raised his arms to reveal the same broken mirror we could see with the naked eye.
The same scenario unfolded three more times—in Bea’s bathroom, in the downstairs bathroom, and, to my great surprise, in the foyer. I’d thought that since the foyer mirror was the first point of ingress, it might be the ghosts’ main portal.
“What now?” Callum asked.
Morgan started to respond, but I interrupted, clearing my throat.
“Sorry?” Morgan said. “What was that?”
Fear clenched my insides, but I knew it had to be said. I grimaced, pushing images of the tortured creature from my mind, swallowing against the smell of burning flesh. My eyes flicked toward the living room.
“It’s just that . . . there’s one more mirror.”
Chapter 51
“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.”
Chapter 52
It was starting to get dark. Callum and Joe were at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. Morgan was standing against the sink, asking if I wanted her to put on the water for tea.
“That’s okay,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. I . . .” I what? Needed a second? More like a lifetime to make sense of the past two days.
“I’m so sorry this is happening,” Morgan said. I looked into her face. I didn’t even recognize her as the woman who used to lobby the Preservation Society to bring ghost tours to the mansions. She was wholly new to me in this posthaunting world, where the ghosts of one’s past haunted their present so hard that it affected the future.
