Agonal Breath (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 1)

by Richard Estep

  Yeah, right…

  Taking regular sideways glances at Becky, I could tell that she was absolutely riveted by this stuff. Her eyes hardly ever left the screen, and I couldn’t help but wonder how much of that interest was because of the lead investigator, rather than any fascination with the sanatorium and its ghosts.

  Finally, the show was over. Becky flipped up the cover on her tablet and stuffed it back into her backpack. It was replaced straight away with her phone, which she used to send a text, presumably to her mom. “What did you make of the show? Pretty amazing, huh?”

  “It was…a sight to see,” I answered with as much diplomacy as I could muster. She grinned. I think she could tell that I was less than convinced, but it didn’t seem to dampen her enthusiasm any.

  “So, what do you think?” She swatted my knee lightly with her fingertips. Oh my…she actually touched me. I know, I know. But Becky was so beautiful, I had a hard time believing she would even want to share the same room with me, let alone give me a friendly swat. That was it, I was pretty much powerless to resist.

  My mental wheels were already turning. I wasn’t scared of a creaky old building, believe me…whether it was haunted or not wasn’t the point. On the one hand, I would have to lie to Mom – probably sneak out at night, or fake a sleepover at some nonexistent friend’s house – which I really didn’t want to do. She deserved better than that. And then there was the risk of getting caught by the cops, which would mean getting grounded for the next…forever; but on the other hand, I was being asked to do this by Becky Page. If I said yes, it would net me the grand prize of being alone in Becky’s company for a good twelve hours, not to mention the still pretty awesome bonus of putting me squarely and firmly in the middle of her good books. Besides, if I said no, that was pretty much it. My already near-astronomically small chances of one day getting Becky to think of me as something more than just “that kid who can see ghosts” would be shot forever.

  “When do we leave?” my mouth answered, getting the sucker punch in before my brain had a chance to debate any further.

  Becky’s smile alone was almost worth the vague sense of disquiet that was already starting to gnaw at my belly.

  “Tomorrow night. That gives us all day tomorrow to prepare. We’ll need to go to the store and get some things – don’t worry, I’ll take care of all that –and then head up there after dark, maybe nine or ten-ish.”

  “How are we going to get up there?”

  “Oh, I have a friend that could drive us,” she answered evasively. I let that pass, figuring that she would want some kind of chaperone along just in case I turned out to be a real weirdo.

  “Alright. Sounds like a plan. I’m in.” I hoped that I sounded ten times more nonchalant than I actually felt. My heart was racing, the blood pounding in my ears so loudly that I half expected Mom and Becky were going to hear it.

  “We’ll figure out the details tomorrow.” Becky waved casually, dismissing out of hand any other concerns that I may have been about to raise. She rose to her feet and shrugged the pack onto her shoulder.

  I escorted Becky into the living room, where Mom was curled up in her recliner watching CSI on TV.

  “It was a real pleasure meeting you, Rachel,” Becky extended a hand solemnly. Mom blew the handshake off, choosing instead to get up out of her chair and give her new-found best friend a big old bear hug.

  “And it was a real delight to meet you too, honey.” By the time they had both hugged it out, the headlights of a car pulling up outside were visible through the window. “It looks like your mom is here. Have a safe trip home, OK?”

  “I sure will. Goodnight Rachel. Goodnight, Danny.” Hopefully Mom didn’t catch the wink that she tossed my way. Even I almost missed it, because I was too caught up in the one thought that kept running around and around in my brain,

  What had I done?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “That went well!” Mom was giddy, practically fit to burst. I rolled my eyes. Her little boy had spent less than two hours in the company of a girl, and she could already hear the wedding bells. But I guess I couldn’t really blame her for that. This family had been pretty short on happiness for quite some time now.

  Grunting noncommittally, I poured myself a glass of milk and told Mom that I’d be in my room and was probably headed to bed. I let her kiss me goodnight and gave her a hug. It’s good to see her this happy, so let’s just enjoy it while it lasts. I’m not sure who had taken the bigger shine to Becky, me or Mom. Although I felt lousy about having to deceive her if I was going to make good on my promise to Becky tomorrow night– and I was going to make good on my promise to Becky – it helped me to rationalize it away by telling myself that hey, staying in Becky’s good books might just keep her around a little longer. Who knew, she might even grow to like me, like me, if you catch my drift; and that would make Mom happy. So it was all good…right?

  I sighed. I was in this now, in it right up to my neck. My hormones had done all the talking, and there was no way I could back out now, not without Becky hating me for the next thousand years anyway. It’s not like I had a TARDIS to take me back in time and replay the last two hours over. And you know what – I’m not so sure that, even if I could change it, that I would change it. When I’d gotten out of bed this morning, I was hardly even on Becky’s radar. Now I was verging on “maybe a little cool,” and who knew – after our little trip up to Long Brook tomorrow, I may even be edging into the territory of “boyfriend material.” Was that really too much to hope for?

  The milk was cold and refreshing. It was a little early for bed, and besides, I needed to let some of the adrenaline that had built up over the last couple of hours drain out of my system. Besides, it might be a good idea to read up a little on Becky’s destination of choice, I figured. Parking my butt at the computer tower, I opened up a browser window and clicked open a Google tab. Typing Long Brook Sanatorium brought up hundreds of hits. Surfing my way from link to link, it wasn’t long before I had amassed a ton of background information on the place. It surprised me to learn that this stuff was actually kind of interesting, and it wasn’t long before I was engrossed.

  If you don’t know much about tuberculosis, you’re probably not that different to most other people today, assuming that you live in the western world; but a hundred years ago, everybody knew about it – and was terrified of catching it. The tuberculosis bacterium is passed on through the little droplets in coughs and sneezes. One of the scariest aspects is that it’s just so freaking easy to catch, particularly back in the days when there wasn’t a wall-mounted dispenser of hand sanitizer in every restroom. Once it gets down into the lungs, things can start to turn really nasty. The disease rots your lungs away from the inside out, and then it makes you cough up blood until you’re almost drowning in it. It’s pretty awful.

  At the turn of the century, thousands of Americans who contracted the disease had already flocked right here to Colorado; when they started hacking up a lung, a lot of them just hopped on board the first train heading towards the dry and fresh mountain air, the bright sunshine, and the beautiful countryside. Special hospitals, called either sanitariums or sanatoriums, depending on whose website you read – I never could figure out any difference – sprang up all over the state. Some rich people got a whole lot richer catering to the wealthy and famous ‘lungers’ – that’s people with bleeding lungs, by the way, not Crossfitters who like to do lunges. ‘Lungers’ has a hard ‘g.’ Grammar is important, kids.

  Where was I? Oh yeah, the hospitals. There were some super-nice facilities to choose from if you could pay your way, most of them not all that different from the top hotels of the time. Freshly-pressed pristine white cotton sheets every day, doctors and nurses on call twenty-four seven, state of the art treatments, the works.

  Long Brook was not one of those hospitals.

  Like Ms. Johnson told us in history class, every society needs somewhere to send its poor and homeless people. Sometimes, tha
t place is the gutter. But people dying of tuberculosis in the street kind of brought down the mood, and probably the Denver real estate prices too. So the Governor ordered the creation of state-run, economically viable – for that, read cheap – sanatoriums, mostly located up in the foothills and the mountains, where the homeless sick would be out of sight and out of mind of the “decent people.”

  I guess some things don’t ever change.

  So any homeless person with a cough or the night sweats got scooped up off the streets, and found themselves swept off to a place like Long Brook. Looking at old monochrome photos of the sanatorium on Wikipedia, I couldn’t help but think that that must have been a real shock to the system. The sanatorium was six stories tall, built of stone, concrete, and brick, a lot of which was grim and gray. What looked to be the main building was flanked on either side by another five-story building, each one being a complete hospital wing — and both of those had a second wing added on to them, so there were a total of five buildings making up the sanatorium.

  Some of the photos that had been taken from the air made it look as though the place was a big horseshoe, or maybe a giant magnet, according to the people who had left comments posted on the threads. But I thought that each wing looked more like the gull-wing doors on the DeLorean car from Back to the Future. So sue me, I’m a nerd.

  The place looked less than welcoming, to say the least. A shiver coursed through me, that rare but familiar feeling we all get from time to time. Somebody just walked over my grave.

  Long Brook’s history wasn’t all that hard to find out about. Construction finished in 1903, and it was a working sanatorium less than a year afterwards. Meant to house seven hundred patients, at the height of the tuberculosis epidemic they were cramming in over a thousand. Conditions were cramped and hygiene was poor. The doctors and nurses all meant well, but they were over-worked, under-staffed, and fighting an uphill battle. Heck, there were even records of some of them committing suicide in there.

  The website saved the worst for last. Towards the end of its life, the hospital had supposedly been run by some crazed doctor until it was finally closed down by the state in the late 1980s. Apparently this guy hadn’t taken the closure lying down, because one day in the summer of 1988 he had come into work and walked from room to room, tracking down those members of his nursing staff that were on duty that day, and had then shot each and every one of them dead.

  After murdering his entire staff, this doc — who went by the fancy name of Marko von Spiessbach — had dialed 911, gone to his office, and then killed himself.

  Another shiver, this one going straight down my spine. Something was obviously very wrong with this place. No wonder I was getting a bad feeling about all this.

  I mouse-clicked to another page, all about tuberculosis treatment…or what passed for treatment in those days. Nowadays, when you contract tuberculosis, the doctors give you drugs. The disease can be treated, and treated pretty effectively thanks to the wonders of modern medicine; but back then, medical science of the time didn’t have much of a clue. They tried their best, but some of their therapies read more like torture today. Hanging bags of lead shot around the patient’s neck, adding more and more weight with every passing day, until there was the equivalent of a ten-pound dumb-bell pushing down on their chest, was just one of their bright ideas; hey, they figured, if we limit the chest from expanding too much, it’ll give the lungs a rest, help them heal up. Except that it didn’t, and it was downright miserable for the poor people who had to suffer through it.

  Fresh air was the best treatment, all the experts agreed. Except that it isn’t. Hundreds of beds were rolled out onto the sanatorium balconies every day, all year round, even on Christmas Day in the middle of a snowstorm. Don’t believe me? Go ahead and Google it. There are pictures, the most unbelievable photos, of nurses in masks and gowns and winter coats, standing next to beds filled with the most miserable-looking patients, huddled beneath thin sheets and blankets as the snow piled up on top of their feet. There were hundreds of deaths, thousands over the years, and yeah – a lot of them died of tuberculosis. But a lot of them died of exposure, too…

  …and a lot of them died from the experimental surgeries.

  This is the part that really made me feel nauseated, but I kept on scrolling down, horrified and fascinated in equal measure. It would be unkind and probably unfair to label the doctors as butchers – after all, they were trying desperate, last-ditch operations on people who were pretty much halfway dead – but slicing open a person’s chest and cutting through their ribs to collapse the lung, sounds pretty darned nasty to me.

  It seemed as though as many people died from this type of surgery than survived it; in fact, so many people were dying each month that the sanatorium needed to have its own death chute, a discreet way of getting those dead bodies out to the waiting hearses without rolling the body bags past the patients who were still alive. The doctors, in their infinite wisdom, reasoned that it would be bad for morale…and I had to admit that they were probably right.

  Letting go of a sigh that I didn’t know I had been holding, I powered off my computer and went to go brush my teeth in the bathroom. That was it for tonight, I decided. It was just about bedtime, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I would need all the rest I could get to prepare me for tomorrow night.

  And besides, I needed to talk to Lamiyah.

  Lamiyah is my spirit guide. She’s the ghost of a nine year-old orphan girl who had lived rough on the streets of Bombay when those jolly old English ran the place under the rule of Queen Victoria. The poor kid had had no parents or family to speak of, and made her living by stealing fruit and begging for scraps and coins with a little wooden bowl. One day, after almost getting caught stealing an apple from a street vendor’s stall, Lamiyah had panicked and tore her way through the busy marketplace with the screaming, cursing fruit merchant hot on her heels.

  Preoccupied with her pursuer, who seemed to gain ground with every passing second, Lamiyah hadn’t been looking where she was going; she hadn’t seen the ox-drawn cart until it was too late. Before she knew it, Lamiyah had been knocked off her feet and found herself trampled underneath the creature’s hooves. The way she told me the story, the hooves and cart wheels had broken her back and she had died quickly, right there in the sun-baked mud.

  Don’t let yourself be fooled, though — Lamiyah may look like a nine year-old kid, because that’s how old she was when she died, but she’s been kicking around the spirit realms ever since then, so she’s a nine year-old with more than a century’s worth of experience and attitude under her belt. Believe me, you do not want to get on Lamiyah’s bad side.

  She’s a good-natured soul at heart. Let’s face it, she’d have to be in order to put up with me for this long. Just in case you happen to be one of the billions of “normals” who can’t communicate with the dead – that’s most of you reading this, statistically speaking – let me break it down for you. All of us – you, me, everybody – have a spirit guide. It’s funny how, if you ever see a stage psychic perform, they always seem to be some kind of Native American brave or chief. Don’t ask me why, because in reality, our spirit guides come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and ages; but they all have one thing in common – they’re all fundamentally decent and unselfish spirits, usually because they’ve outgrown most of the more toxic human personality traits over their many years going around and around through the eternal cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. No matter what age they appear to be, we’re usually talking about an old and advanced soul when it comes to a spirit guide.

  “Signing up to be a guide can be a frustrating experience, Daniel,” Lamiyah had told me once, when I’d asked her how she had ended up with the job of shepherding me through this life. “But there is no more rewarding vocation in all the worlds than committing oneself to the betterment of another.” She had giggled then, involuntarily covering her mouth with a dark brown hand. “Although it sometimes seems to me that I
have, as you like to say in your country, perhaps bitten off more than I can chew, with you.”

  Yeah, kind of hard for me to argue. What can I say, I’m a handful.

  I had actually been a spirit guide myself in past lifetimes, she had told me with great amusement. I wouldn’t be able to remember the specifics as long as I was incarnated in my physical body, but I would get all of that stuff back when I passed on and went back to the Summerland.

  Communicating with Lamiyah wasn’t anywhere near as easy as making a phone call or sending a text message. For starters, I usually had to be asleep. Like a lot of guides, Lamiyah had multiple charges in her care – hundreds, she told me once with a goofy smile that never quite reached her wise old eyes. Spirit guides were busy. Think of them sort of like your doctor – when you’re not sick, your doctor isn’t hovering around you all day and night, right? No, they’re off doing their own thing, usually making other sick people better. You check in every so often for a physical, and then when you get sick, that’s when you go talk to them. Same deal with your guide. They don’t even realize that you’re having problems unless you call on them sometimes — that goes for your spirit guide as well as your doc, because those are both very busy professions.

  Mostly, I talked to Lamiyah in my sleep. Chances are, you’ve done the same thing with your spirit guide, but in the morning you probably wrote it off as just a dream. Maybe you could barely remember the conversation at all, that’s just the way it works sometimes. My bedtime routine is always pretty much the same. Clean my teeth, wash up a little, crawl into bed. Sometimes I’d read for a while, but tonight I wasn’t really in the mood. It had been a long and eventful day.

  I pulled the sheets and comforter up to my chin and closed my eyes, burrowing down like an animal hibernating in its nest, and began to formulate a very specific thought.

  Lamiyah, I want to talk to you, please.