31. Dead Vengeance
thirty-one
Dead Vengeance
Liam
I’m on high alert, staring down the hall into the darkness.
I’m expecting to be swept up in the smoke and spiders of another hallucination at any moment.
Expecting Jem to reach out of the void for me.
Or, at the very least, expecting a random ghost to jump out at us for another chat.
But none of it happens, and we cross the threshold from the dark hall into his ‘office’ safely.
It still feels ridiculous he calls it that. As if he’s in here making spreadsheets and pie charts, or hashing out marketing plans, or whatever people usually do in offices.
He’s held my hand since we were on the sofa, all the way up the stairs and through the door, but as soon as we’re inside he steps back, giving me a respectful distance.
Space to look around. Not that I need it.
I took in more than enough yesterday. It was frightening then, and it’s frightening now. Only in a different way.
I still don’t understand any of it, but now everything holds a different weight. One that maybe makes or breaks how I feel about Archer.
I wish, again, that we could go back to the ease of how things were in the car that night. Or when we had breakfast that morning. Those short snatches of time when our true realities weren’t breaking into what was a beautiful fantasy.
I wonder if it was that for him too.
“Welcome to my office,” he says softly. “The base of all my operations.” He points at the wall where those red and dark and perfectly satanic-looking words are scrawled. “Welcome to Dead Vengeance.”
“What the fuck is Dead Vengeance?” I utter, maybe sounding a little more scared and a little more forceful than I’d meant to.
Archer grins. “Dead Vengeance is your one-stop-shop for all things unrequited, unresolved, and unerringly revisionist. We set the record straight, so you don’t have to.
” He’s switched from worried, careful, into what sounds like a sales pitch, made kind of cute, if a little bizarre, by the fact he’s still in his pyjamas and dressing gown, which look so nice on him.
Homely. Hard to keep my hands off of on the sofa downstairs.
He snatches an actual pamphlet off his messy desk and thrusts it out for me to take, that same writing on the front of it, DEAD VENGEANCE, like it’s… a company logo?
“Picture this,” he says, standing back, arms stretched wide like he’s showing me a screen.
Or a whiteboard. “You’re dead. Let’s say you were murdered, or framed for a crime you didn’t commit, then executed, which is actually the same thing.
Or let’s say someone badmouthed you after you died, and you went down in the history books as a villain because you never got a chance to set the record straight.
You’d haunt the heck out of the place, wouldn’t you? ”
“I might…” I mumble. “I guess…”
He claps his hands together so enthusiastically I jump. “Well, now you don’t need to! Finally, there’s a service for the dead in which we—I, so far—right the wrongs of the past in exchange for a little kickback on the side.”
“You…” My mouth drops open as the understanding clicks into place. “You help the dead move on… for a fee?”
“In this economy, you have to learn to pivot,” he explains excitedly. “Put all your weird skills to work to make a living in whatever way you can. Think outside the box—”
“Archer, slow down…”
He shoves his hand in his pockets and presses his lips with a keen nod.
“How…” Where to even start with the billions of questions I have? “Wait. You’re telling me you find a ghost who has problems, have them pay you somehow, and you… solve all the problems they left behind to help them cross over?”
Another nod, sharper this time. “That’s exactly right.”
“And they pay you?”
“Yes. Perfectly correct.” He nods again. Very happily. Like whatever weight was on him this morning from our falling out has lifted. And also, like he’s… proud. Which is very sweet.
“But they’re dead…” Okay, very much stating the obvious here, but I just need a moment to get this straight. “How do they pay you?”
He gives me a shrug and a grin. “Depends on the client. My nice car?”
“A ghost gave you that?” I rasp.
“Yep. He’d been lying dead in his house for ten full years!
Rich as a king. His wife died before him, his grown children never came to check on him, couldn’t care less.
They were just waiting for the inheritance.
So when I heard the rumours about haunted estate grounds, I popped in, offered to help resolve a few things, and he was pleased as punch.
No more sitting around lonely, wondering if his family would come back to him.
No more fuming over how ungrateful they were.
We redistributed his money with a fresh will which we back-dated to before his death.
Some of that went to me, in a roundabout way, and he threw the car in on top of it as a thanks.
No one was using it anyway. Kids didn’t even notice it was missing. ”
The tsunami of words washes over me while I struggle to keep my head above it all.
It makes… some kind of weird, perfect sense?
I mean, I know ghosts are real. I know he’s a necromancer.
I work for a ghost extraction business. How, at this point, is this even a stretch for me to believe? Yet I still murmur, “You’re joking.”
“All true,” he assures me. “There’s a lot of money out there if you know where to look. Especially in…” He raises both eyebrows at me expectantly.
It takes me several slow and overwhelmed seconds, but finally, “Antiques!” I shout at him.
“Exactly that!” he shouts back, clapping his hands together, catching me in his enthusiasm, like this is actually the greatest business plan ever. “The dead bring me things, or tell me where to find them, and, on occasion, well…” His lips twist into a mischievous grin. “How to steal them.”
“You steal them?” I wheeze, like a kid at a magic show.
“Well, it’s not really stealing, is it, if it belongs to the person I’m working for.”
“Archer!”
He waves my pathetic attempt at a reprimand away. “It’s a whole lot easier to take things if you have a ghost lookout. But if the ghost happens to be a poltergeist, the stuff just appears right here in the middle of the floor.”
I follow his outstretched hand to the massive pentagram beneath my feet. “They leave it here for you?”
“It’s not a satanic symbol, like a lot of people think,” he explains. “Not dark at all, if used the right way. It’s like a beacon to them. The end of a bridge between worlds. With this gigantic symbol, they can find me easily from wherever they are, so long as I’ve opened a bridge.”
‘Opened a bridge.’ It’s exactly what Helena referred to the other day.
“Helena?” is all I manage, hoping he’ll catch my drift, because I can barely string two words together with all of this.
He smiles, happy I’ve caught that much. “I tracked her down especially because I had a feeling she’d be pissed at the way the history books had left things. And I had a feeling she’d be stinking rich.” He winks then, and it’s really too hot.
He swishes across the room, his robe shifting around his body in a way that should be illegal.
He pulls a few books off a shelf, which exposes a safe, and he doesn’t even seem to consider the fact that I’m still watching when he turns the little dial this way and that until it pops open with a satisfying snap.
When he returns, he’s holding long, gorgeously crafted, shimmering earrings, which he places gently into my outstretched palm. “Diamonds,” he reveals. “The lot of it. There’s a matching necklace, bracelet, and rings too. Made in eighteen thirty-four.”
I turn them over in my hands, dazzled by the glistening and glinting. “And she just took these to give to you as payment? From who?”
His grin turns sly, and his voice drops low. “She was buried in them.”
I almost drop the loot. “You dug her up?”
“No!” he gasps out, sounding perfectly offended. “No, of course not. She went and grabbed them for me.”
“From her own corpse?”
“Why not? It’s no different to walking through walls, you know.”
“Yeah. I guess not.” But somehow the shine’s gone off them a bit, wondering if her ears had completely rotted away by the time she took them.
“Don’t worry,” he says, watching me close, a large dose of humour in his tone. “I have washed them.”
“Yeah…” I still inspect them for corpse. “Yeah, of course.”
He leans against the desk, folding his arms in front of himself. “That’s why that article you read about her the other day referred to ‘new information that came to light recently…’”
My mind turns over, trying to remember the details. “New information that showed her husband was a brute?”
“Yes.” He nods like he’s a teacher, and I’m his student, and I’m trying really hard to not make that too hot in my mind. “And…” he probes.
“And that she was falsely put in Bedlam,” I report studiously. “Because he wanted to marry someone else and also keep her money.”
“I had all of that researched by the proper authorities and updated using old journals she helped me find. And guess whose statue was recently toppled by outraged university students, the head of it broken off and thrown in the Thames?”
The pride is absolutely radiating from him, and with every passing second, I’ll admit, I’m feeling it too. “Her husband?”
“Correct. She thought it was hilarious. It’s too little, too late, to be sure, by a century or two, but it was still a deeply satisfying experience for her.
Now the world knows what she went through.
Now the world sees him for what he was, and our understanding of her world is changing.
With a resource like this, it’s not only the winners in history who get to write history.
” His finger touches down on the sparkling jewels I’m holding with increasing reverence, like they’re a symbol of justice.
“Also, that jewellery is worth maybe a hundred grand altogether.”