Agonal Breath (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 1)

by Richard Estep

  “Where do you want to go first?” Brandon whispered, more to Becky than to me.

  “Let’s try upstairs,” she whispered back.

  “Why are you both whispering?” I whispered at them both.

  Becky cleared her throat, and made an effort to speak normally.

  “It just seems…disrespectful not to.”

  I knew what she meant. The atmosphere was heavy and oppressive in here, the silence a little closer and more cloying than it was outside. We made our way carefully across the lobby, making sure to avoid the shards of broken glass that seemed to be scattered haphazardly about the place, and slowly began to climb the staircase. A busted-out window set in the wall above the first floor landing allowed some light through for us to see by.

  The staircase switched back at the first landing and doubled back on itself. Becky led the way up onto the second floor, where we were presented with two possible directions to turn, or the option of climbing up to the third. Seemingly at random, Becky turned to the right, leading us through the open doorway and into the first of the two west wings. The doorway opened out onto a surprisingly wide balcony, and I stopped in my tracks, suddenly jolted by a strong sense of deja vu.

  Even though it was only the second floor up, the way in which the balcony stretched out for what seemed like miles in front of me took me right back into the nightmare I’d had last night. I’d been on a higher floor in the dream, but this view appeared otherwise identical…room after room on the right hand side, all with the windows and doors either busted out or completely missing; and on my left, beyond the brick parapet, the trees that surrounded the sanatorium on all sides. Yes, it was daytime, but other than that, the similarity was quite unnerving.

  “Danny, are you okay?” It was Becky’s voice that finally broke me from my reverie, and I realized that I had been standing there in the doorway, completely dumbfounded. She sounded concerned.

  “Uh, yeah. Sure.” That was pretty much the best I could manage right now. “Just a little deja vu,” I admitted. “No biggie.”

  “What’s deja vu?” Brandon wanted to know. “Sounds French.”

  I looked at him sideways. Who the heck had never heard of deja vu?

  “It’s that feeling you sometimes get of having been somewhere before,” Becky explained patiently, “or having done something before.” She looked at me curiously. “Which one was it, Danny?”

  “The first. I had this dream…I was here, at least I think it was here…standing on a balcony just like this. Exactly like this.” I could feel myself starting to sweat, and it was nothing to do with the warmth of the afternoon sun. It was actually a little cold here in the shadows of the second floor, probably because the brick, stone, and concrete leeched a lot of the heat away.

  “What happened in the dream?” Becky pressed.

  “Nothing really…it was actually kind of dumb.”

  I wasn’t quite sure why, but I wasn’t ready to tell her about the whole thing just yet. Maybe I just didn’t want to feel dumb by talking about ghostly nurses and doctors, or the way I’d looked in the restroom mirror and seen the face of a younger kid staring back at me. I really didn’t want to talk about the surgery they’d forced upon me.

  But if I saw any nurses, I was running like hell.

  “God, this is just so sad.”

  Becky was standing in the doorway of one of the patient rooms, looking intently at the framed black-and-white photograph of a young woman that hung in the doorway. The woman was actually quite pretty, and judging from the style of her hair, the photo had been taken during the Forties or Fifties.

  Perhaps more poignantly, however, the photo had clearly been taken in this very same room. The same bare brick walls could be seen behind her as background. She was sitting up in a bed that was no longer there and trying gamely to put on a brave smile for the photographer, whoever that might have been. He or she had been standing in the doorway, exactly where Becky and I were standing now.

  Clarissa Arnold, read the faded, description that had been neatly handwritten underneath her photograph. Resident of Long Brook from 1947-1951. May she rest in peace.

  “She lived here for four years,” Becky said in a small voice, “and then she died here. What must that have been like?”

  Not a whole lot of fun, I thought but knew better than to say. Brandon, however, wasn’t above stating the obvious. “It must have really sucked.” I rolled my eyes, and then felt immediately guilty for it. He was right — it really must have sucked.

  Only a few of the other patient rooms had similar photographs hanging on their walls or in their doorways. The vandals seemed to have had at least enough basic decency not to smash them up or rip them from the walls, but precious little else had been shown the same respect. Just as in the main lobby, graffiti was scrawled and sprayed-painted everywhere. What few doors remained had been smashed apart or torn from their hinges and dumped unceremoniously inside their rooms. Nature was beginning to seriously intrude on the structure, with vines and creepers pushing their way inside through the open windows and cracks in the outer walls.

  It was a real shame that nobody cared enough about this place to look after it a little. When we arrived, and I got my first good look at the building in its entirety, it didn’t take much effort to visualize Long Brook as it must once had appeared. I’d seen a few of those photos on the Internet last night, and knew that a lot of money and effort had gone into building the sanatorium in the first place — it had been one of the more prestigious healthcare facilities in Colorado in its heyday. I couldn’t help but wonder why the owners didn’t just knock the ruin down and start over, build some cabins or something that would make some money on the site instead; or perhaps put some money into renovating the place, restore it to some semblance of how it used to be, back in the day.

  Becky was walking slowly along the balcony, moving from room to room and peering anxiously inside. I watched her curiously, trying to figure out what exactly was on her mind. She would stop in each doorway, poke her head inside, look around for a few seconds, and then move on to the next.

  “What’s she doing?” Brandon asked, sounding perplexed.

  “Looking for something?” I hazarded, momentarily claiming Brandon’s usual ‘Captain Obvious’ crown for myself and making it firmly my own.

  “Um, yeah,” he nodded, as if that explained everything.

  We trailed along behind her, keeping a respectful twenty feet back, until finally she reached the end far end of the first wing. Another stairwell separated it from the more distant wing, and we caught up with her there.

  “Becky, are you okay?” I asked, genuinely concerned.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” she replied quickly.

  “You don’t seem fine,” Brandon pointed out. I couldn’t help but agree with him. Becky seemed on the verge of tears. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s okay, really. There are plenty more rooms to check yet. No biggie.” She cuffed a tear away from her eye with the corner of one sleeve.

  “Check for what? What are you looking for, Becky?” Now I really was confused. Did Becky have some ulterior motive for bringing us out here, above and beyond her fascination with all things supernatural?

  “I, uh…look, this is a little difficult…”

  “Becky, it’s okay.” Brandon placed a reassuring arm about her shoulder, completely missing the daggers I shot him with my eyes. If looks could kill, he might have ended up a permanent resident here himself…well, not really, I wasn’t that mean, but I could definitely take off his eyebrows or something.

  “Yeah, Becky,” I said supportively, patting her hand in what I hoped wasn’t a condescending way. “Tell us what’s going on.”

  She took a deep breath, then paused as if deciding whether or not to take us both into her confidence. Finally, Becky said slowly, “I never got to meet my grandmother…my Mom’s mom, I mean. She died before I was born. Mom doesn’t like to talk about her much, and when she does, she never goe
s into much detail. I do know that Mom misses her a lot, but I guess it’s still too painful for her to bring up the past, even now…”

  Brandon was still clueless, but I was beginning to see where this was going. “What did your grandmother die from?” I suspected that I already knew the answer. Becky looked up at him tearfully.

  “Like I said, Mom wouldn’t tell me for sure, but I’m guessing that it was tuberculosis,” she said. “That’s what pretty much everybody around here died from.”

  Now it was all starting to make sense. “She died here, at Long Brook, didn’t she, Becky?” I said gently. She nodded, a single tear running down her cheek.

  “Yes.”

  The light bulb suddenly went on above Brandon’s head. “You were looking for her room!” he said triumphantly. Becky nodded again.

  “I understand that we’ll probably never find it. There were thousands of patients here, thousands of deaths. Grandma must have lived…and died…in one of those rooms, but not all of them have photos of the people who stayed there, and even those ones that do only have one or two photos on the wall. I just…wanted to try, to see if I could get closer to her somehow…”

  “And you thought that I could help,” I finished for her, feeling just a little bit annoyed at her. It must have bled through into my voice, because Becky looked up at me guiltily; that made me feel guilty in turn. I hadn’t meant to touch a nerve.

  “Yes,” she admitted. “I did. I didn’t mean to mislead you, Danny; I just knew that you could see ghosts, and thought that maybe if you came to Long Brook with me…”

  “He could talk to your grandma for you,” Brandon put in.

  “If she was still here,” Becky agreed. “That’s was I was hoping for. I’m sorry, Danny.”

  I sighed. First Brandon, now Becky…how could I get angry with somebody who was just trying to connect with a dead relative, even one she’d never met?

  “It’s okay,” I reassured her. “Do you have a picture of your grandmother?”

  Becky beamed, that brilliant smile which had always made me go weak at the knees on the few occasions that I had been on the receiving end of it. She unlocked her iPad and swiped at the screen, bringing up the image of a middle-aged lady, in her late thirties or possibly her early forties. The photo was in color, but based on the resolution and contrast, it was still pretty old.

  “I took a photo of one of Mom’s Polaroids,” Becky explained, twisting the tablet to make the image taller. It looked as if the photo had been taken in somebody’s back yard on a sunny summer’s day. The smiling woman who was sitting on a wooden bench and holding a tall glass of something cold seemed to be really happy. Her dark hair was streaked through with gray, and appeared to be catching a light breeze, lifting and blowing out to the side of her face. The complexion of her skin was tanned and healthy, with no hint of the pale sweats that came down upon tuberculosis sufferers when the disease really took hold.

  “What was her name?” Brandon asked.

  “Jennifer. Jennifer Roderick.”

  He nodded, as if the name meant something to him.

  “I’ll all keep an eye out for her,” I said, “and if I see Jennifer, I promise that I’ll tell you, okay?”

  “Danny, thank-you so much!” Becky said, obviously delighted. She also sounded relieved, as though she had been dreading my finding out about the real reason for bringing me up here. Truth to tell, I still wasn’t sure quite how I felt about that yet. On the one hand, Becky had been a little…economical with the truth, painting it as nothing more than a night in a haunted house, something like paranormal tourism. On the other, she hadn’t actually lied to me, at least not so far as I could tell — who could really blame her for wanting to take a Deadseer along to the place where her grandmother had died? “I’m really sorry I didn’t tell you about my grandma yesterday, I just…I thought you might not want to come, if you knew that I was hoping you would talk to her spirit.”

  “Hey, am I really that unapproachable?” I asked, feeling just a little hurt.

  “Oh no, it’s nothing like that,” she rushed to explain. “But I saw what happened on the street yesterday and…” Becky suddenly had to search for the right words “you just looked so intense, after Brandon left and you were talking to yourself...well, to his grandmother,” she corrected herself. “I really didn’t want to get on your bad side. I can’t be one hundred percent sure, but for a second there it looked to me like your eyes changed.”

  She looked towards Brandon for confirmation. “That’s kind of why I ran,” he admitted. “Your eyes went sort of dark, right after I got slapped. It really freaked me out, man.”

  “When you say dark…are we talking just angry eyes, or black-black eyes?”

  “Black-black,” they both said together. “I couldn’t see the whites of your eyes any more, Danny,” Becky continued. “And to be honest, it was kind of scary.”

  That was a little worrying. Blackening of the eyes was usually a sign of spirit possession, and it usually wasn’t a good spirit you were talking about. I’d encountered one or two ghosts with black eyes before too, they were usually not the kind of spirits you wanted to interact with if you could possibly help it.

  “Evil is a very real force in this world,” Lamiyah had told me once, during one of our late-night chats. “Those who are steeped in darkness are usually highly skilled in the arts of disguise and camouflage — all except for the eyes, Daniel. Always look to the eyes,” she had emphasized. “They truly are windows into the soul, and a darkness of the soul — or a total lack of one — will always be reflected there, if you know how to look for it.”

  Suddenly, her reasons for bringing Brandon along made a little more sense to me. The guy could bench-press three of me with one arm tied behind his back. If what they were both describing was true (and I had no reason to doubt their story) then bringing along a little extra security in the form of a muscle-bound meat-head seemed like a really smart move.

  I hadn’t felt myself getting possessed. Whatever had happened, it couldn’t have taken very long. “Just a few seconds,” Becky confirmed when I asked her about it. So the intrusion, possession, call it whatever you will, had been over very quickly, which was at least a little bit reassuring. If something had tried to take control of my consciousness, it hadn’t succeeded; but I was starting to feel more than a little nervous, the more I thought about it.

  A shiver ran through me as I was standing there in the shadows of the second floor balcony, in the company of two strangers who I hoped might both be on the way to becoming friends…that old feeling of, as Mom always liked to say, ‘somebody just walked over my grave.’

  I had just remembered something from my nightmare last night. The crazy surgeon and his gang of equally crazy nurses…all of them had had completely black-within-black eyes, hadn’t they?

  Oh, crap.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  We spent the next couple of hours just roaming and generally exploring the sanatorium, without any real plan.

  Even then, there was no way we could possibly have seen everything that there was to see. The building just sprawled. Trying to at least be a little bit methodical, we went from room to room, most of which looked pretty similar in layout. Some had been trashed a little more aggressively than others, but all of them had seen much better days. Dry paint flaked and chipped from the walls. In some places, the bare floorboards were completely exposed, and we could peer down into the room on the floor directly below.

  “That’s going to be a worry when it gets dark,” I pointed out. “Not to sound like too much of a wuss, but it would be way too easy for one of us to step into one of those holes when the lights are out and end up falling all the way through.” I deliberately didn’t add the words ‘to our death.’

  “I have something that should help with that.” Becky rummaged around in her backpack and triumphantly produced a packet of slender, transparent plastic tubes. At first glance, I thought they were drinking straws, but they wer
e a little bit thicker than that; when she twisted one with an audible crunch and I saw it begin to give off a sickly blue glow, I realized what they really were.

  “Glowsticks! Awesome idea!” Brandon enthused, taking one from her and holding it up for inspection.

  “Don’t activate it until we find another hole like this,” Becky warned him. “I only have a limited supply, so we can’t afford to waste any.” Squatting down on her haunches, she made a small hoop out of the glowstick, joining both ends together and securing it around a rusted old water-pipe that ran along the wall close to the gaping hole. “There.” Satisfied, Becky stood up and dusted herself off. “That ought to do it.”

  “That is an awesome idea,” I agreed with Brandon, genuinely impressed. Now, if any of us entered this room after nightfall, the luminous blue glowstick would serve as a warning, reminding us to tread very carefully.

  We explored the entire second floor, walking from end to end. It was mostly just more patient rooms, separated every so often by a flight of stairs where one wing met with another. All three of us made a point of looking at the names and photographs of each former occupant that were posted on the walls, some in cheap glass picture frames and others slipped into protective plastic sleeves that had been duct-taped to the walls. None of them bore Becky’s grandmother’s name though, and I could sense her disappointment beginning to build as we climbed up to the third floor and found exactly the same thing.

  Zip. Zilch. Nada.

  “Have you seen anything yet, Danny?” she asked me hopefully.

  “No spirits yet, if that’s what you mean.” From the crestfallen look on her face, that was what she had meant. “But I’ll keep looking.” I offered an encouraging smile, unwilling to make any more promises than that. I definitely didn’t want to set her up for failure.

  No matter what the TV shows said, there was no guarantee that Long Brook was haunted at all. Quite a few places aren’t; just because they’re old, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they have earthbound spirits attached. Oh, sometimes spirits passed through randomly on their travels, but there weren’t likely going to be many of them wandering around a neighborhood like this — we were in the middle of nowhere, the nearest town being a good few miles to the south of us. Nederland’s dead probably stayed close to Nederland, at least until they finally moved on into the next world.