Page 14 of Dead Vengeance

Archer

Pour the tea. Drink the tea. Piss the tea.

Totally normal tea, just like any other day.

Very normal.

Perfectly normal, nice tea.

five

A Trick of the Light

Liam

Archer’s place is spectacular.

I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere so beautiful. Certainly not a home. Certainly not a place you might sleep, wake up, casually make tea for guests while you chat about the weather. While we wait to hear his ghost story.

The place doesn’t look haunted—not that I’m pretending to know what a haunted house looks like, except, well, it should be oldish, shouldn’t it? Hung with cobwebs? Have creaking floorboards and dark corners and cold chills everywhere you go?

This place is the opposite of all that. Except it is old. It’s clearly been here for a long time; some posh stables that were converted into this… I want to say ‘house,’ but it feels more like a mansion to me. His living room slash kitchen area is bigger than the entire council flat I share with my mum.

The ceiling soars high above us, old and enormous, supporting beams of wood on display. The windows are wide and tall, and sunshine floods in, leaving no spots for any supernatural nasties to be hiding, as far as I can tell. The gold wallpaper Archer mentioned earlier reflects it back on us, making it seem as if the sun itself is in the room.

The kitchen’s all pastel green and decked out with a million floor-to-ceiling cupboards in some rustic style that looks like it was cut and pasted from a travel magazine. It’s got a shiny coffee machine, every appliance you could dream of, copper pots sparkling bright, hanging over a kitchen island.

We’re sat around a massive, heavy, no doubt deliberately paint-chipped table, and the tea Archer sets down in front of me now is steaming, adding to the cosy vibe.

I wonder how he manages to make a living. How he manages to keep this place so nice when clearly something’s fractured in his mind.

When his hand moves from my cup, I can’t help but notice again how well-maintained his nails are. I bite mine sometimes, still, when I’m anxious. Which I often am, I guess.

If I could make something of this job, get some money going, a career one day, maybe I’d end up with nice nails like that.

Or maybe I don’t get opportunities like him because I have chipped nails. Because I’m not well-dressed and self-assured the way he is. Maybe it’s some weird chicken-and-egg or Catch-22 thing. I can’t have one without the other, so I’m stuck.

No. I can’t think about things that way. I won’t.

But maybe I will file my nails tonight.

As Archer takes his seat, I wrap my hands, nibbled nails and all, around my pretty teacup, and ask, “When did the activity start?”

He settles bright, clear eyes on mine, and speaks low and confiding, straight to the point. “Maybe a month ago now. I tried to take care of it myself, then, when that had failed, it took me a while to find you. The ExorSquad website was… not SEO optimised.”

To be honest, I’m kind of surprised there’s a website at all. I’m tempted to ask how bad it was, but I’d rather get to the bottom of this guy’s menty-b first. “And have there been… any dramatic changes in your life? That might have happened around that time? That might explain…”

His head tilts to the side, Raul’s face turns to me, and I really have no idea how to phrase this. Whether to ask, ‘Did you lose your therapist?’ ‘Is there something that made you forget to take your meds?’ ‘Did you get a shock so bad you started seeing things?’

But Archer dips back in with a light, joking, “Nothing bad enough to raise the dead.”

I laugh politely. Archer laughs politely. Raul taps impatient fingers across the table.

“No more than usual, anyway,” Archers adds quietly before lifting the tea to his lips.

‘The usual.’ I wonder what the usual is.

I mirror him and take a sip of tea. Unsurprisingly, it’s very good tea.