Agonal Breath (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 1)

by Richard Estep

  Before you come down too hard on me and thinking I’m a total idiot, please remember that I was dreaming, OK? Your sense of logic doesn’t work properly in the dream state. Things that would seem perfectly obvious in the light of day can appear very much less so when you’re asleep. I walked slowly along the length of the balcony, looking curiously into each dark opening that I passed. Inside the shadowy recesses of each one was the very same thing, a twin-sized bed with a wrought-iron bedstead. My night vision was getting better, and I could just about make out the lumps and bumps under the pristine white sheets, some of them moving as the body beneath shifted position.

  Coughing accompanied me along the entire journey. I passed maybe nine or ten rooms before I finally came to a door which opened onto a central stairwell. A glass-fronted cabinet was mounted at waist-height on the wall, and in it was a neatly-coiled length of white fire hose. And suddenly it hit me; because right there, stenciled in red lettering on the glass door, was the name of the institution.

  I was at Long Brook Sanatorium.

  At the end of the hall was a small restroom, little more than a couple of stalls, a sink, and a urinal. I pushed my way inside, wary of running into any other nocturnal visitor wanting to use the restroom, and was relieved to find it deserted. On one wall, adjacent to the small window, was a half-length mirror. I stood in front of it. What I saw made my eyes grow wide in surprise.

  After the initial shock wore off, I studied my reflection in the shadowy depths of the glass.

  Looking back at me was the face of a much younger boy, maybe ten or eleven years old. He – I – was wearing flannel pajamas. Plastered with sweat across my forehead, I saw that my hair was dark brown, mussed and tousled because I’d just woken up from sleep, and my frame was a lot skinnier than I was accustomed to.

  Most worrying of all was the color of my skin, though. It was a pale, sallow complexion that greeted me in the mirror, the skin clammy with a cold and sickly-looking sweat. Dark bags hung under my eyes. This was not the face of a well kid, not by a long shot.

  No sooner had I thought that than I felt a tickling sensation in my chest, just behind the breastbone. The tickling flared up into a full-blown tornado demanding to be released; there was no point even trying to stop it. Without even thinking about it, I brought a hand up to my mouth in time to catch the cough. When it finally came out after a couple of false starts, it was a monster, almost deafening in the cramped confines of the small bathroom. Just when it seemed like the cough was over, it would come back again, forcing all of my muscles to work just to get it out of me. My throat felt red raw, my lungs swollen and inflamed. Once it had finally subsided, I took my hand away from my mouth.

  Three small droplets of blood had splattered on the mirror. More stained the palm of my hand. I looked down, then at my reflection in the mirror. A trail of pink, frothy drool was hanging from my lower lip. My gums were dark in patches, coated with blood.

  I suddenly felt dizzy, the light-headedness coming on out of nowhere. I staggered backwards out of the restroom, back into the stairwell once more. I needed to get back, needed to get home. I didn’t belong here, along with all the sick and dying people. Opening the door, I retraced my footsteps shakily back onto the balcony.

  The nurse came out of nowhere.

  One minute, the balcony was completely empty, nothing but shadows running along its entire length as far as the eye could see; then suddenly there she was, standing directly in front of me. I practically jumped out of my skin.

  I hurriedly looked her up and down. She was tall and stocky, dressed completely in a white uniform. White shoes, white-stockinged legs covered by the hem of a white dress which buttoned up tightly over a few extra pounds. What I could see of her hair appeared to be dark, pulled back severely into a bun at the back of her head, and was topped off with one of those old-fashioned hats that you saw nurses wear in those black-and-white movies that were shot in the Forties or Fifties.

  What really set my nerves on edge was the white breath mask that concealed every part of her face except the eyes. The eyes were creeping me out, to be honest. Something about the way they glinted in the low light and seemed to be constantly in motion gave me the jitters.

  Then she grabbed me.

  Her fingers were icy cold, so cold that her touch upon my upper arm almost took my breath away, even through the cloth of my pajama sleeve.

  “Come along with me, boy. Time for you to see the doctor.”

  If her sudden appearance and creepy countenance hadn’t scared the crap out of me, that voice would certainly have done the trick. There was no warmth or compassion in there at all, not the slightest hint of it; the tone was even colder than the touch of her fingertips was, as they dug into the fleshy part of my bicep.

  “Get the hell off of me!” I tried jerking my arm away, but her grip was too strong. There came a stinging slap to the side of my head that almost made me see stars.

  “Show some respect, boy,” she hissed, leaning in close until her eyes were just inches away from mine. All I could focus on was that pair of coal-black orbs, and noticed now that the nurse was up close and personal that there were no whites surrounding her pupils — her eyes were totally and utterly black. She also never seemed to blink, just continued to stare at me coldly with that fixed, lizard-like glare.

  She tugged at my arm, and I had no choice but to follow her into the stairwell. I couldn’t even begin to match her strength. Tightening her grip, the nurse frog-marched me up the stairs. I had to break into a jog to keep up with her angry stride, and still managed to stub my toes on a few of them before we reached the top floor, the sixth.

  I was wheezing and out of breath by the time we reached the top of the staircase. Turning left, the nurse pushed her way through two sets of double-doors and dragged me into what looked a lot like an operating theater.

  The room was covered from floor to ceiling in tiles. In the middle was a big operating table-slash-chair, padded and covered in leather. To one side of it was a metal tray on a stand, which was covered in tools or implements of some kind. It was hard to make out exactly what they were in what little dim half-light was coming in through the three small windows, but it seemed like a safe assumption that they were a mix of scalpels, saws, and other sharp and pointy implements used for putting new holes in people. That’s when I really began to struggle, fighting her for all I was worth, but even on a good day, she would have had over sixty or seventy pounds on me, and I guess a surprising amount of it must have been muscle, because before I knew it she had hoisted me up onto the table and was pinning my arms and body down from above me, breathing heavily through her face-mask.

  “I said—get the hell off of me!” I was thrashing like crazy now, kicking up at her with both feet. It was completely useless. I could already feel my chest tightening up, the thousands of tiny little air sacs in my lungs clamping down and squeezing shut. The air couldn’t get out — it was trapped inside me, swelling my chest from the inside out; suddenly I was coughing and coughing, bloody phlegm hacking up out of my raw and swollen throat.

  Suddenly, a bunch of other figures were converging on the table, emerging from the dark corners of the operating theater. Most of them were nurses, dressed identically to the mad woman who was pushing me down onto the operating table. I could only make out their eyes, and all of them had that same black, unblinking reptilian stare, as though they all came from the same twisted, merciless family.

  Strong hands encircled my ankles and wrists, splaying them out to the sides of my body with a forceful yank. I yelped, more out of fear than discomfort, and I’ll be the first to admit that it wasn’t a manly yelp, if there even is such a thing. I felt something rough and firm replacing the handholds on my limbs. Craning my head to the side, I was just in time to see a set of sturdy leather straps being buckled into place, tying me securely down to the table.

  I was totally helpless.

  Two of the nurses separated themselves, shuffling aside to make
way for a tall, slender man who suddenly stepped forward into a patch of ambient light; he was outlined in the cold blue aura that told me without a shadow of a doubt that he was a ghost. The new arrival was dressed in a surgeon’s clothes, complete with gown, face-mask, and some type of bandanna that tied at the back of his head. Actually, slender might not have been the best word for him; this dude had missed more than a few meals. He looked almost as thin as one of the standing lamps Mom loved so much, the ones she had picked up at Wal-Mart for twenty bucks a pop.

  The eyes were the same though — completely black through and through, just like those of the nurses. There was something almost hypnotic about him, and without meaning to, I realized that I’d suddenly stopped struggling. He stood silently over me for I don’t know how long, head cocked to one side as if he were sizing me up somehow. Then I saw the mask contort, his eyes wrinkling at the corners. There was no humor to be found there, but he was smiling anyhow.

  Somehow, that made it even worse.

  “Ah, Nurse Baker…what have we here?” The voice was that of a really, really old man, a dry and croaking rasp. He sounded like he could have done with a glass of water or six. Every word was delivered slowly and with great precision, as though he was thinking carefully about each one before he spoke it, weighing it and carefully considering alternatives. There was a definite accent going on under there as well, I was guessing at German based on the way he mangled “what have we” into “vot have ve.”

  “Another patient demands my attention, hmmm?” It was phrased as a statement rather than as a question. The surgeon took up an old-fashioned stethoscope in hands that were trembling (I couldn’t tell whether it was with fear or excitement) and after a couple of unsuccessful attempts, finally managed to get the two listening tips gingerly into his ears. Snaking one hand up beneath my pajama shirt, he placed the metal circle at the far end of the rubber tubing up underneath my armpit. It was freezing cold, and I tried to recoil but couldn’t. If Nurse what’s-her-name — oh yeah, Nurse Baker — hadn’t been pinning me down helplessly, I would have leapt six feet off the table in shock.

  “Now boy, take a deep breath, hmmm?” Like I could even help taking deep breaths, with how freaking cold that stethoscope felt…okay, and how afraid I was. Apparently satisfied with what he heard, the creepy old doctor repeated the procedure on the opposite side. “Just as I thought. Advanced pulmonary tuberculosis.” He shook his said sadly, though whether his sympathy was real or fake, I couldn’t tell.

  “I don’t have tuberculosis!” I yelled back at him. “I had X-rays when I was a kid. My lungs are just fine!”

  Nurse Baker (in my head, she was already labeled Nurse Crazy, so how about we just go with that?) grabbed my chin with one hand and turned my head towards her.

  “Now just you listen to me, you silly little boy…if Doctor Spiessbach says that you have tuberculosis…” — she punctuated each word with a slap on the cheek that stung — “…then slap you slap have slap tuberculosis slap.”

  I could feel the skin flushing where she’d slapped me, not hard enough to do any real damage, but enough to cause a little pain and a heck of a lot of embarrassment. I was starting to get angry now, which I figured was good. It was beginning to wash some of the fear away.

  “There is no point in deluding yourself, child. Hmmm?” Damn, but that Hmmm-ing was getting annoying. The doctor had his back to me, but from all of the clinking and clanking sounds must have been caused by him rearranging the tools on the metal tray. I knew where this was heading, and I didn’t like it — none one little bit.

  “I’m not delusional, doc.” Desperation was pushing me to try a different tack, a nicer one. I was starting to feel like Luke Skywalker hanging from the ceiling of that ice cave in Hoth, except I didn’t know how to use the Force to get me out of this mess before Doctor Wampa chewed my ass. Oh, and there was no lightsaber to grab anyway. “I shouldn’t even be here. I’m not even a patient. My name is Danny Chill, doc, you’ve got to believe me. I know how crazy this sounds,” I had to resist the urge to tell Nurse Crazy not to take offense, “but before I went to bed last night, I spent a little time on Google, looking this place up. That’s why I’m stuck in the middle of this messed-up dream now.”

  “Google?” The word sounded way funnier in his accent. “I am afraid that I am not familiar with this place.”

  “Oh, come on, man! Everybody knows Google.”

  Look at it like this, Danny: your little late-night search engine session just landed you straight in the middle of a brain-bender of a nightmare, smack in the middle of the hospital from hell, and the one thing — the one thing — you choose to get mad about, is that the bad guy from this week’s episode of American Horror Story hasn’t heard of Google? Get a grip, man.

  My little personal rant was interrupted when Nurse Crazy leaned back over me with a rubber oxygen mask of some kind clutched in her hand. A long, flexible tube connected to the mask disappeared away into the darkness behind her. The doc reached up with a trembling hand and pulled down one of those big flat spotlights on a mechanical arm, positioning it in the air right above my body. When he flipped the switch, I was pretty much blinded. The gang of nurses who had all been just shadows and silhouettes before, were now completely invisible to me, lost in the blinding white glare of the round lamp. In fact, it was so bright, tears started to form in the corner of my eyes. I squinted, tried to make out what was happening, but then the mask was pushed down firmly over my nose and mouth. I could hear the tell-tale hiss of gas flowing, somewhere in the background.

  “Mhmmhfmfhmmmfhff!” I said, which roughly translated to “What the hell are you doing to me, you creep?”

  Nurse Crazy must have understood me anyway, because she said: “Relax now, boy. It’s just a little something to help you sleep.”

  For a moment, I could almost have mistaken her for actually caring about me…if I could have forced myself to ignore the totally black eyes, that is. But then she followed that up with this little gem: “After all, you don’t want to be awake for the surgery, do you?” Her tone was way too gleeful for my liking. And so I did what any reasonable person would have done in my situation.

  I freaked.

  Thrashing and writhing against my restraints, I half-expected to feel the nurses start to force me down against the table again, but the leather straps must have been doing a pretty good job of keeping me under control. The only other possible explanation was even worse, and as my vision began to blur and the world around me started to lose focus, it was beginning to look like it was the right one.

  The gas was making me helpless.

  It felt like my head was stuffed full of cotton candy. My thoughts were starting to get foggy, and even stringing a couple of words together to form a sentence was starting to get difficult. “Wha…what…you…” was the best I could come up with, though what made it past the face mask couldn’t have been more than a weak little moan.

  “In conjunction with this, you are merely getting a combination sedative and analgesic,” the doc explained helpfully, holding up a glass syringe. With my blurred vision, I was seeing three needles. A goofy part of my brain wondered if he was going to stick me with the one in the middle.

  I felt a poke in the inside of my left elbow, but it seemed to be far away, almost as though it was happening to somebody else and I was hearing about it later. It was getting harder and harder to keep my eyes open. The doc was suddenly sounding way too chipper for my liking.

  “As Nurse Baker said, you are going to take a nice, long nap. After all, we wouldn’t want you awake during the surgery, would we, hmmm?” He gave a little snickering laugh that made me want to punch him square in the throat…if I could have moved even one single muscle, which wasn’t looking at all likely right now.

  Hey, wait a minute: “Surgery?”

  I fought to open my eyes again. It was harder than any push-up I was ever made to do under protest in gym class. Dimly, I could see the doc’s face swimming
in front of me. Then he held something up, something long, shiny, and square. I blinked rapidly, was finally able to bring it into sharper focus for a second.

  Oh crap. It was a saw — a freaking saw. He flexed it experimentally, like I’d seen carpenters do on TV shows. Then he put it down on the metal tray and reached for something else. If anything, this next implement was even scarier. What the doc held up now looked like a bigger, nastier version of the pruning shears mom used when she was working outside in the little flower garden that she was so proud of; but these shears had evil-looking curved tips that remind me of the pincers on a crab. The doc snapped them open and shut several times, until he was satisfied with their action.

  I was so terrified, I wanted to pee my pants.

  “Ja, surgery. Those ribs must come out, I am afraid, dear boy. After all, how else am I to get at your lungs, hmmm?”

  I woke up screaming, drenched in my own sweat.

  “Daniel!”

  Mom burst through my door like a one-woman squad of Force Recon Marines, her head on a swivel and fists clenched, ready to fight. I swear she was ready to grab whoever it was that she thought must have broken in and attacked me, and beat him to death with her bare hands. She got like that sometimes, now that Dad was gone…all ‘Mama Bear, defending her cubs,’ if you know what I mean.

  For a while there I must have been bicycling with my legs and thrashing around like crazy, because my comforter was a big lumpen mess on the floor next to my bed.