14. Breakfast!
fourteen
Breakfast!
Archer
It’s still dark as I stumble downstairs. It was a long drive home last night, and I’m verging on exhausted, but I can’t sleep anyway.
The haunting of this place doesn’t help. Life in general doesn’t help. And now Liam…
“Breakfast!” Old Tony yells at me the second I set foot on the cold floorboards.
He’s seated at the head of the table, knife and fork in hand, staring dead ahead at the wall.
I’ve never been able to get more out of him than that.
I don’t even know if his name is Tony—I just call him that because I have to call him something.
I don’t know why he’s here, what he wants, or if there’s any way for him to move on.
It’s not an everyday thing, like with most ghosts who regularly haunt.
Sometimes he’s just here and… hungry, I guess.
It is what it is. I learned to stop questioning this way of life a long time ago.
“Coming right up,” I mumble, switching on the heating, flicking on the kettle, stumbling over to the pantry to find some flour and eggs.
Baking always helps. My happy place. It’s the one time I can sink into calm, just measure and knead, forget all about—
“Archer!”
“What the fuck!” All the scant morning calm drops away in the sheer panic of having a ghost voice loud in my ear at the crack of dawn. “We’ve talked about this! Warn me quietly when you’re approaching.”
Simon neither lowers his voice nor steps back, just stands there being all dead and floaty and creepy. “Did you get rid of them?” he demands.
“Who?” I wince, taking my apron off its hook, tying the straps behind my back.
“Who?” he repeats dramatically. “What do you mean, who? Just the pair of nincompoops who tried to shoot me yesterday.”
The kettle screams, but not as loudly as my desperation for coffee. “Not ‘pair.’ One nincompoop. Singular. And no, he won’t be returning. Or… I hope not. Look, if he does, I’ll turn him away at the door.”
“Breakfast!” Old Tony shouts, slamming his cutlery down on the table.
“Oh, but you’ll have the other one back?” Simon sneers at me.
My head drops to the side as I try to gather the energy for an argument when the sun isn’t even up yet. “What did Liam ever do to you?”
“Well,” he attempts to rattle out while I set about measuring flour into a bowl, “he came in here, and it seems to me, his sole purpose is to kill ghosts, so…”
“And yet he didn’t harm a hair on your head.”
“Only because he was so useless,” he volleys.
“Breakfast!” yells Old Tony.
“Have you ever heard of manners, Tony?” I call back to him.
“So, basically, you don’t care at all what I have to say about the matter?” Simon carries on, full of his own importance as ever.
“What would you have me do? I cannot fix this thing upstairs by myself. I need help. Who else do you suggest I call if not for people whose job it is to get rid of things like the thing upstairs?”
“Kraa!” Edgar’s tapping at the window now, and I can’t even describe the way every bone in my body is aching to crawl back into bed, even if it’s just to lie there awake and worry for another hour or two. At least it would be quiet. I keep that room warded from ghosts for this exact reason.
I leave a floury handprint on the latch when I pull it open to let him in. Swiftly, I turn to the fridge and do the same to the handle there when I break out some raspberries to pop a few down for him.
“Kraa!” he shouts, poking at the four raspberries with his long beak in a disapproving manner.
“That’s enough,” I tell him. “I need them for Liam.”
“Breakfast!” Old Tony shouts.
“It’s not like you can even taste food!” I throw at Tony. “What’s your rush?”
“What do you mean you need them for Liam?” Simon cuts back in. “You’re making this for him? Breakfast for the killer?”
“Liam?” I do actually laugh at that. “Liam has all the killer instinct of a baby duck. And he’s just as sweet as one.
I promise, he will do you no harm whatsoever.
” I stretch past him to juggle butter and milk out of the fridge, though, to be fair, I could walk straight through him.
But it might be considered rude. “I’m sorry.
I need him here. I need his help because… ”
Because I’m so bloody miserable. And so, so lonely.
There it is, right there. Didn’t even take a full minute to come up with that one.
I am so lonely, I want to cry. Every day, every night, surrounded constantly by voices, by dead people, and all I want on this planet is someone real, flesh and blood, who I could just have a cup of tea with on occasion. Not this mess of want, want, want—
“Breakfast!” Old Tony shouts, like a nail in my skull.
“Fine.” I slam a piece of bread into the toaster, whack a frying pan on the hob, and crack an egg into it. “If you don’t want to wait for pastries, this is all you’re getting.”
“Because, why?” Simon goes on, like a dog with a bone.
I slam my head into my palm, probably leaving a splatter of flour there too. “Do you think maybe you could just give me ten minutes of quiet, please? Just to wake up?”
“Why should you get ten minutes of quiet when I get eternal wandering?” Simons whines. “You with your nice fleshy body, and your heat, and your sleep, and your food that you can actually taste.”
“Breakfast!” comes the next nail in my temple.
“You used to have all those things too,” I argue with Simon. “It’s not my fault you’re dead.”
Simon’s mouth drops wide open. “That’s a very insensitive thing to say!”
“Monster.”
“What?” I ask Old Tony.
“I said, it’s very insensitive!” Simon repeats, twice as loudly.
“No, what was the other thing?” I ask Old Tony.
“Kraa!” says Edgar.
“That’s enough raspberries!” I snap at him. “Tony, what did you say?”
“Monster.”
“What?”
He’s never said a word that doesn’t involve his morning meal, and it honestly scares me half to death.
I step over to him cautiously. He’s still staring straight ahead at the wall. There’s nothing there—nothing that I can see.
A screech, sharp and menacing, sounds behind me. I whirl around just in time to see the claw come for me. I dodge it. It continues the motion downwards, hooking the back of a chair, throwing it to the ground as I stumble away.
“That’s new,” Simon reflects, studying the interloper with vague interest.
Indeed, it is. It’s tall and wispy, humanoid only in that it has long arms with claws at the end.
There is no head where a head should be, no legs, the lower half of it dissipating into strings of silken light a foot above the floorboards, where the too-long arms slice with a horrifying scraping sound when it lunges for me again.
Whatever it is, it didn’t come to chat.
I throw myself backwards, barely dodging it again, my back hitting the wall hard. It hurts, really it does, but that doesn’t register half as much as the exhaustion.
I am so tired.
So tired of all of this.
Yet I have no choice but to fight on.
I gather up what little strength I got from the few hours of sleep and brief whiff of coffee, thrust out an arm, and channel everything I have into the palm of my hand. “Out, foul beast!”
“Here we go,” Simon narrates with a grin. “I love when you get your necromancer talk on.”
If I weren’t concentrating so hard, I’d roll my eyes, but I am concentrating, and also I don’t want to look away from this creature for even a second.
If this were a regular spirit encroachment from a few months back, the spirit would be gone by now with a click of my fingers.
But since that thing upstairs moved into my house, entities don’t obey me the way they used to.
I’ve slowed it. I’m managing to keep it at bay, but I can feel the force of it pushing back against me. It’s brazen, and evil, and it should not be here.
I take a deep breath, trying to tune into some natural current of energy, or centre myself enough to use what little I have. I stretch my other hand out, visualising a tunnel between this world and the next.
It’s there, just on the other side of this being, more spirits, outside our realm, reaching, trying to get in. I push one hand forward, pressing them back, shift the other to open the gateway I’ve created.
“Leave,” I pant, “my,” I gasp, “world!” I shout. Thrusting both hands forward, I fling the thing backwards through the barrier with a pulse of energy, then slam the portal again, falling on the floor in a heap as the last bit of energy flies from my body with it.
The ghost is gone, and I’m wrecked.
I heave in deep breaths, my body fighting me just to breathe.
I wonder what life is like for normal people. People who don’t have to talk to the dead, who don’t have to guard this realm from evil entities, who don’t have to open and close portals and resurrect annoying ‘Spirit Extraction Specialists.’
Must be nice, I think.
“Egg, darling,” Simon calls.
“What?” The smell hits me—acrid, burning-egg smell.
I clamber up off the floor and stagger to the stove to discover my cute little cast iron pan spewing black smoke up into my kitchen. I snatch it with the hem of my apron and drop it into the sink, slamming the cold water on for it to hiss at me.
“Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck! Shit!”
“Kraa!” Edgar helpfully adds.
Guilt churns in my stomach, and I don’t know why it should, but at least there’s something in someone’s stomach. “Sorry, Tony,” I sigh out. “Breakfast’s going to be a few more minutes.”
I look over when he doesn’t yell at me again, and there’s his seat, empty.
I guess he couldn’t wait.
I don’t know why that makes me feel like a failure. But it does.
I wander back to the bench, measuring out some milk as if none of this morning has ever happened. I’ve been awake for ten minutes, and this is already my day. Simon’s still there, waiting. Edgar’s still there, watching.
I pour and mix, then summon up what little I have left to explain, “I can’t handle this myself.
Not anymore. Not now. I need help. I’m sorry they upset you yesterday.
I know it’s not easy being a ghost, especially with everything you’ve been through.
But I can’t keep doing this. I can’t hold back the tide alone. I hope you understand.”
“Have you considered running from this place before you get yourself killed too?” His words remain abrasive, but now they’re edged with sympathy, which makes a nice change.
I laugh, even if it’s sad. “If I don’t stay and do this, then who will?”
I must have finally gotten through to him, one way or another, because he falls quiet for a few moments before he says, “I’d like to help. If I could.”
“Thank you.” He can’t, but it makes me feel better to know he’d like to. “Please, just promise me you won’t hurt Liam today.”
“So long as you promise you won’t let the other one in.”
“Kraa!” shouts Edgar.
I throw him one last raspberry before emptying the others into the bowl. “Done. No Raul, only Liam. No guns, only disposal of that thing in the attic. Happy?”
But suddenly, he’s gone too.
Maybe he ran out of energy. Who even knows?
All I do know is that seeing Liam is about the only ray of sunshine that’s going to warm my life any time soon.