Agonal Breath (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 1)

by Richard Estep

  “I still can’t believe we’re doing this,” Becky said, with all the enthusiasm of a kid on Christmas morning.

  “Me either,” I replied without thinking. She gave me a look in the rear-view mirror, one that said she wasn’t sure exactly how I meant that. “Uh, it’s just so cool,” I concluded lamely. Nice recovery, man. Seemingly satisfied, she returned her eyes to the road ahead.

  “Chill, you really think this place is haunted?” Brandon asked. I looked up, caught the back of his head. That stupid backwards baseball cap was really starting to annoy me. I was a big believer that only Special Ops snipers and gang members could turn their ball-caps back-to-front and actually pull it off. Brandon Monroe was neither.

  “Uh, maybe,” I shrugged noncommittally, but then I thought better of it. Putting on a lack of interest was hardly going to score me any points with Becky. “I mean, it sure sounds like it. It’s all over the Internet. I Googled a few sites last night. People say a lot of weird stuff about Long Brook. They can’t all be wrong, can they?”

  “Exactly!” Becky nodded enthusiastically, with all the zeal of a true convert. It earned me a flash of her smile, and that alone made the quick backtracking well worth any loss of face. “It’s all over the web, Brandon, just like Danny says. There are shadow figures, full-body apparitions, ghostly footsteps, people even say that they’ve seen lights in the windows after dark.”

  “I thought there was no power up there.” Brandon knuckled his brow, which was probably his I’m thinking about this really carefully face.

  “There’s not,” I chimed in. The utilities were shut off years ago, even the running water.”

  “Um, where are we going to…you know…” I strongly suspected that he wouldn’t have been nearly as shy if Becky hadn’t been in the car with us, but we all knew what he meant.

  “You’ll just have to make like a bear,” I smirked, enjoying his discomfort just a little bit more than I should have. “You know…in the woods.”

  “Ewww!” Becky wrinkled her nose in mock disgust. I was pretty sure that she secretly found the idea funny. Besides, I’d seen her pick up some bathroom tissue at the store earlier today; if she hadn’t, I sure as hell would have done. I was willing to bet there were still bathrooms at Long Brook (if my dream was anything to go by, there was at least one still standing) but without running water to flush with, there was no point in using them.

  “We’d better hope there aren’t any actual bears,” Brandon remarked, and that shut Becky and me up really quickly. That was something I hadn’t given any thought to. There were bears aplenty in this part of the world, and the further off the beaten track you went, the more likely you were to run into one. It was getting more and more common to check out the news and hear about a bear being found in the city, pawing its way through somebody’s trash bins or wandering around their garden looking for food. They probably owned this place.

  Oh, crap.

  We rode on in silence until we hit Nederland. Ned is a quirky little town, full of colorful characters and some very cool history, pun very much intended. Every year there’s a town festival known as “Frozen Dead Guy Days,” which has to be seen to be believed. The story behind it is pretty amazing. Apparently the Frozen Dead Guy came to the States from Norway back in the Eighties…after he died. No, seriously – you couldn’t make this up if you tried. The way the story goes, the old dude had a heart attack or something like that, and because his family were big believers in cryogenics, they flew his corpse to California to get the big freeze treatment from some commercial company. Something must have gone wrong there, because after a few years frozen in liquid nitrogen, his body ended up getting shipped to his grandkids, who just happened to be living out here in Colorado. They pretty much stuck him in a shed outside their place, packed him in dry ice, and left him to it.

  I saw a news spot about the Frozen Dead Guy a couple of years ago. The locals go up to his shed every month and replace his old ice with fresh packages. They’ve basically adopted him as a long-term town resident and unofficial mascot. The Frozen Dead Guy festival is just insane; if you’re ever out this way, you have got to give it a shot. Mom took me last year. I was a little crabby at being dragged away from my PC for the day, but we ended up having a total blast. Seeing people dragging coffins around in public and racing each other to the finish line with them was pretty surreal; some other folks were seeing how far they could throw a frozen fish, and there was just a ton of Halloween make-up on display.

  Now, I’m pretty sure I know what you’re thinking, and the answer is no; I did not see the spirit of the Frozen Dead Guy walking around up there. This is reality, not a Stephen King story. What I did see, though, was a guy whose age I put at about nineteen or twenty, who just didn’t quite look like he fit with the rest of the crowd. He had a mullet for starters, and one of those blue denim jackets that had been popular in the Seventies. I watched him tracing his way through the crowd for a few minutes, weaving in and out of the food stands and the happily-chatting people. Nobody seemed to pay him any attention, but he looked fairly happy and interested in everything that was going on. Then suddenly, he stepped through the side of a cop car and plain old disappeared, just another one of Boulder County’s earthbound dead souls.

  I was just about done telling my companions this story when we hit the big traffic circle where all of the main roads come together. “…and right there,” I pointed at the corner store, “is where the dude disappeared. Just walked right through a patrol car and disappeared.

  “Wow.” Becky seemed genuinely impressed. “Could you see through him?”

  “Not really. A lot of the time, ghosts look as solid as you or me. The longer they’ve been around on the Earth plane, the more transparent they look.”

  “Why is that?” she wanted to know.

  “Is it, like, a battery draining?” Brandon put in before I could answer.

  “Actually, you’re sort of right. Do you remember VHS tapes?” I was impressed that he’d almost hit the nail on the head.

  “Sure,” Brandon laughed. “We still have a VHS recorder at home somewhere. In the garage, I think.”

  “Remember how, if you played a VHS tape over and over again too many times, the picture quality used to fade out and degrade?” They both nodded. “Well, with some spirits, it works sort of like that too. If they’ve been earthbound for a long time, they start to get frayed around the edges, lose some of their color and solidity.”

  “Man, that’s sick.” Brandon braked a little, going clockwise around the traffic circle and taking the north exit, accelerating again as the road led us out of Nederland and over a rise onto the Peak-to-Peak Highway. “Can they, you know, recharge or something?”

  “Right! What if they go back to the spirit world?” Becky wanted to know.

  “I’ve talked to my spirit guide about this. She says that if a spirit goes back to the Summerland and spends some time there—”

  “Summerland?” Brandon sounded confused.

  “The next world,” I explained patiently. “There are lots of spirit realms, some of them much nicer than others. Our world is on the lower end of the scale — sort of like the slums — but there are some that are much worse. The Summerland is where most decent people go first when they die. Sometimes they can cross over in both directions, but time works a lot differently over there than it does here on Earth. It’s all pretty confusing, and I haven’t figured out the way it works yet.”

  Trees were bordering the road in on both sides now, mostly evergreens and conifers. The time on Blazer’s dashboard clock read 15:36. There was still plenty of daylight left, and I was really starting to enjoy the ride. Becky’s company was the icing on the cake, but even Brandon was turning out to be an OK guy now that his cronies weren’t around for him to look macho in front of.

  “Shouldn’t be much longer now.” Becky had her iPad out, and was eagerly charting our progress on the mapping app. “It should be up here on the left, just a little fu
rther ahead.”

  And sure enough, there it was. The turn-off wasn’t sign-posted, probably to act as a deterrent to spook-chasers who wanted to do exactly what we were planning on doing. Brandon slowed and hung a left. Apart from a single Boulder County Sheriff’s patrol cruiser, we hadn’t passed another car ever since leaving Nederland. The Blazer turned onto a rough dirt track which was pretty uneven, but not badly enough to require the 4x4 option to be used.

  Maybe twenty feet away from the highway, a metal gate barred our way. It was supported by a concrete pillar that looked pretty sturdy. Brandon put the Blazer into park and went out to take a look.

  “We could park here and hop the fence,” I suggested, but Becky didn’t seem to like the idea.

  “If the police drive by and see our car parked out here, they’re bound to come and check on us,” she pointed out.

  Fortunately, it turned out to be a moot point. Brandon was able to swing the gate open and let us through. “It’s chained and supposed to be padlocked,” he said breathlessly when he returned to take the wheel again “but the padlock wasn’t locked.” Driving through to the other side, he hopped out again and closed the gate once more. Apart from our tire tracks in the mud, we hadn’t left any sign behind that might give away our presence.

  The trees rose up high above us on both sides, casting the car interior into heavy shadow. It might have felt a little claustrophobic if it weren’t for the shafts of bright sunlight that came through the gaps in between branches. Craning my neck upwards, I could just about see a strip of clear blue sky directly overhead.

  The driveway (actually more of a cross-country track) was long and winding. I was glad to see that Brandon was keeping the speed down, not gunning it like an idiot to try and impress Becky. Her face was practically glued to the windshield and side window, soaking in every detail. The sense of anticipation that she was giving off was almost palpable, excitement radiating from every pore.

  Suddenly, the Blazer emerged into the sunlight again. We were free of the driveway, and a wide expanse of relatively clear ground opened up in front of us, mostly grass but with some concrete pathways and sidewalks interspersed around the sea of green and yellow. It was a huge clearing in the woodland, and there, standing tall and proud in the middle of it, was the ruin of Long Brook Sanatorium.

  We had arrived.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “I can’t believe we’re actually here…finally here.”

  Becky stood on the front lawn, gazing in rapt fascination at the ruins of the former sanatorium.

  It certainly was an impressive place, I had to admit. The building was huge. When I had dreamed about it, seeing the place only from the inside, I hadn’t gotten a true sense of the sheer scale of the place. Six floors high, each one except for the ground floor being fronted with empty windows, all of which were dark and shadowy despite the best efforts of the sun up above us.

  There was a central building right in the very middle which I had learned from my Google searches was the main administration hub, and then on each side of that, two patient housing wings had been built; at the end of those, two more wings had been added on, so there were a total of four wings built onto the main structure, two on either side. On the ghost-hunting TV show that I had watched with Becky, they had used a few helicopter shots, no doubt to amp up the dramatic elements of the place. You could certainly see how isolated Long Brook was, all alone in the center of a forest clearing in the middle of nowhere, and the way the extra wings came off the main building at an angle made it look like the horns of a bull.

  For some reason, that made me think of being trapped in between them. It wasn’t a feeling that I liked, not one little bit.

  Apart from the sounds of birds in the trees and the occasional rustle of the breeze moving through the branches, the clearing was as silent as the grave.

  “This place is amazing!” Brandon enthused. Standing amongst the overgrown, knee-high grass and weeds of what I assumed had once been the front lawn, he had his phone out, and was madly snapping photos of the sanatorium from as many angles as possible. He had parked the Blazer on a concrete apron located on the east side of the building, sheltered by the overhanging branches of the tall trees. He had left the rear hatch up, so I reached inside to grab my backpack, rummaged around inside, and fished out a can of Monster energy drink.

  I wandered back over towards Becky, who seemed to be lost in her own little world of blissful excitement. Her eyes were roaming back and forth from room to room, never still for a moment.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” I asked with a smile.

  “Hmmm? Oh, I was just thinking…how many people ended their lives in those rooms over the years? All of that tragedy, so many deaths…” She sounded quite sad now, coming down from cloud nine and crashing back to reality.

  It wasn’t difficult to see why she might suddenly feel that way. The atmosphere here at Long Brook was a great deal more peaceful than the TV shows would lead you to believe. It was actually more peaceful than scary, the same kind of atmosphere that you might find inside a church or a cemetery. Yes, the shadow of death did hang over everything here, but I wasn’t sensing anything dark or malevolent.

  At least, not right now…

  I looked up at the vacant windows again, leaning back to take in the roof. There were some very cool-looking stone gargoyles up there, crouching in the eaves beneath the guttering. I’d seen them when I was clicking around during my online research session last night; when it rained and the gutters filled up with water, the gargoyles would vomit it out of their mouths. There were a few photos of that on Flickr, posted by visitors to the sanatorium, and I thought that the effect looked really cool.

  Just for an instant, as my eyes were looking from room to room on the top floor, I thought I caught a glimpse of something white, flitting from shadow to shadow between two of the windows. I barely blinked, and it was gone. If this was a horror movie, this would be the scene with the ominous music building up to the quick jump-scare, and then the director would cut away to something else. “It was probably just an old bed-sheet or something,” one of the actors would say to another. Then there’d be a point-of-view shot looking down on the actors from up on the roof, because of course, the white shape was really the form of something dark and mysterious that was haunting the sanatorium...something that would turn up later, probably when the lights were out. And then the deaths would start…

  I’d seen way too many bad movies where the plot went something like that.

  But here’s the thing…whatever ghosts might be haunting this place, I wasn’t the least bit afraid of them. I had practically no doubt that the sanatorium was haunted. I mean, you didn’t get to have that many deaths — thousands upon thousands — over the space of that many years, without something being left behind, some psychic residue of all the physical and emotional trauma that went on in this place. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the spirits of some of those patients hadn’t remained earthbound, tied to this place where their lives ended…and what about those members of the staff who had worked so hard to take care of those patients down through the years, giving them the very best care that they could, but constantly running up against the limitations of the medical science of the time?

  I couldn’t imagine how it must feel to put your heart and soul into taking care of hundreds or thousands of people, only to have so many of them die on you despite your very best efforts. That had to be just brutal, heartbreaking in fact. It would be amazing if some trace of that didn’t remain behind.

  So I was more than ready to encounter the ghosts here.

  At least, that’s what I thought then.

  The big double doors that led into the central building were chained up, or that’s how it seemed to us at first.

  When the three of us reached the big stone awning that sheltered the main entrance, we discovered that the chain was hanging slack and limp between the metal loops of the large door handles.

  “Ch
eck it out.” Brandon squatted down and scooped up a silver combination lock from the ground. It was left in the open position. “Looks like security ain’t so tight after all, huh?”

  “Who actually owns this place anyway?” I wanted to know. Becky shrugged.

  “I couldn’t find that out. The state used to own it, but then it was sold to a private buyer. I looked at a lot of websites, but none of them identified exactly who that was.”

  “So it’s a mystery. I like a little mystery every once in a while.” I grinned. With a crack that seemed way too loud, almost blasphemously so in the sleepy quiet of the lazy afternoon, I carefully pulled open the ring-pull on my can of Monster and took a sip of the bubbly carbonated goodness inside. “Keeps life interesting.”

  “Look, it’s old man Monroe!” Becky said, pretending to pull a mask from Brandon’s head. “I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for you meddling kids!”

  “Ruh-roh!” I joined in, in my best Scooby-Doo voice. “Raggy!”

  Brandon looked at us like were both crazy. “You want to take a look inside?” he asked rhetorically, taking one end of the chain and pulling the links slowly through the handles until he was finally able to swing one of the doors open. It creaked ominously, a horror movie sound effects person’s dream, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed with a squirt of WD-40. Brandon passed me the length of chain, which I coiled up in a neat little circle and laid on the ground to one side of the door.

  Unable to contain her excitement any longer, Becky pushed past him and became the first of us to step inside Long Brook Sanatorium.

  “Wow.”

  The entrance hall was fairly big, stretching quite a way back from the open doorway into deep, dark shadows at the rear. I could just make out a wide staircase, half-hidden in the gloom. Doors led off to the left and right of us, all of them standing partway open. Graffiti was sprayed on most of the surfaces, some of it crude and embarrassing, a lot of it taking a satanic and demonic theme.