Agonal Breath (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 1)

by Richard Estep

  For my money though, we would probably encounter at least one or two of the sanatorium’s former patients as the night wore on. I was pretty sure that one or two of them would still be earthbound, but we’d just have to wait and see.

  We skipped the next few floors, figuring that we’d get to them later, and climbed all the way up to the roof. I was huffing and puffing like a steam train when we finally reached the top, holding the rickety handrail for support. Brandon was hardly even out of breath, which didn’t exactly endear him to me; but to be honest, now that I was spending some time in his company, I was beginning to warm to the big guy just a little. I really didn’t think that he was a bad guy, just a regular dude who had had a really difficult home life and tended to take the frustrations that it caused out on those kids who were weaker than he was (which was pretty much all of us, to be fair).

  “The door’s pretty stiff.” Brandon tried the rusted handle. With a twist, he got it to start rotating a little, but the door itself obstinately refused to open more than a tiny crack. “We’ll soon see about that.” In a move that he had probably learned on the football field or the Krav Maga mat, Brandon shoulder-barged the door. It lost the contest right off the bat, swinging wide open on hinges that squealed in protest. He looked quite pleased with himself, but Becky seemed not to notice, which quickly deflated his ego. I tried not to feel too happy about that, and failed.

  We emerged onto the sanatorium roof from a boxy brick enclosure that capped the top flight of the staircase. The roof was a broad, flat expanse, stretching out across the top of each wing on either side of us. Old wooden tables and chairs were scattered in small clusters, perhaps left over from the days in which the Long Brook staff members would take lunch breaks up here. It would have been a pretty nice way to get some peace and quiet, I thought, and also maybe catch a few rays without the bother of having patients around.

  Noticing that the sun was starting to dip towards the western horizon already, I pulled out my phone. 5:38. We must have lost track of the time, poking around the second floor like that; but there was still some daylight left, at least a couple of hours by my reckoning, and we’d be stupid not to make the most of it.

  I walked over to the waist-high brick parapet that was the only barrier between me and a six-story fall. The cement that held the bricks together was beginning to crumble and crack. I tested the parapet with my hands and was more than a little disconcerted to feel it wobble slightly when I rocked it. There was no way I’d be trusting it with my weight any time soon.

  “Hey, come check this out! Look what we found.” It was Brandon, calling from the other side of the stairwell entrance. I headed over to where he and Becky were standing, perhaps a hundred feet to the east.

  “Man, that is creepy.”

  They had discovered a child’s swing set, which had once been painted a bright orange color, judging from the few flaky patches that were left. Years, if not decades, of abuse from the wind and weather had stripped most of the paint from it, exposing the rusty black iron that lay underneath. There was a slight breeze, but the heavy swings did not move.

  Hesitantly, I reached out and touched one of the chains that supported the swings, prodding the links until I got the thing to move slightly. Just like the stairwell door, it groaned in protest. Nothing here had been oiled since the place was shut down and abandoned, I realized.

  The swing set looked creepy and out of place up here. No doubt the children had been allowed to play around it when they weren’t too debilitated, under close supervision of course, and encouraged to take in some of the fresh mountain air.

  My mind went back to the dream again, and wondered whether the small boy that I seemed to have shared a body with had actually existed, and whether he had really been a patient here. Had he played on this swing set, laughing with joy as one of the nurses pushed him higher and higher, until finally his sick lungs got the better of him and set him to coughing up blood?

  Just the simple thought of that gave me the chills.

  We all felt like we’d seen pretty much everything that the roof had to offer, so after taking a few photos with the cameras on our phones, the three of us trooped back downstairs to the ground floor again.

  I’d noticed that I didn’t have any signal strength bars on my phone — we weren’t getting any signal up here at all. That made total sense, because who was going to put a cell tower up here in the middle of nowhere? The nearest population center was Nederland, and I’d heard that it had pretty decent coverage, but there was practically nobody living out here to make it worth the phone company’s while.

  I did find it just a little bit worrying to be out of total contact with the rest of the world.

  “So, where to next?” Brandon wanted to know.

  The front lobby was getting really quite dark by now. Although the overgrown front lawn was still bathed in the golden glow of late afternoon, only a few shafts of orange light were making it inside, and they were filtered by the branches and trunks of the trees first. In unspoken agreement, we all pulled out flashlights from our backpacks and switched them on.

  Becky’s beam settled on one of the doors, seemingly at random. “Let’s try this way,” she said, setting off determinedly towards it. Brandon and I fell into step behind her, playing the beams of our flashlights around the walls and ceilings. There had been a lot of water damage done to the building since it had been abandoned, evident in the peeling of wallpaper and grimy streaks that ran down the full length of most of the walls. The Colorado winters weren’t known for being particularly kind either, and the old sanatorium was pretty much wide open to the elements.

  We stepped into what looked like a huge assembly hall. It was filled with dilapidated old tables and chairs. I took a closer look, and noticed that they were the exact same design as the ones we had found on the roof, though most of them were in much better shape. You might actually trust these to take your weight if you sat on one — at least, if they hadn’t looked so dirty and nasty that you would probably catch something unpleasant.

  “I think this is where they ate breakfast and dinner,” Becky said, walking into the center of the room.

  “There were dances and stuff like that held in here as well,” I added. “I saw the pictures online.”

  They had been scans of old and grainy monochrome photos. I was sure that it was the same hall that we now stood in, but it had been filled with balloons and party decorations. There had even been a band playing, up on a stage against one of the walls. I swept the flashlight beam around, trying to orient myself to the photo that I had seen just the night before. The stage would have been right about…there. I walked forward a few steps, bumping into one of the chairs with my hip and causing it to scrape noisily on the floor. Sure enough, there it was — a round wooden stage, maybe four feet high, nestled comfortably against the back wall.

  Our voices echoed around the interior of the massive room. Looking out through the high, thin windows (none of which had any glass left in them) I could see the Blazer still parked outside. That gave me an idea.

  “Hey Brandon…we should probably move your car, man.”

  “Why?” he asked, puzzled.

  “What if the cops come by to check on the place?”

  “Out here? We’re in the middle of nowhere, dude. There aren’t any cops out here, and even if there were, why would they randomly check on some old ruin in the middle of the night?”

  “Boulder County Sheriff still sends cars out this way — remember the cop we passed on the way out here? Look, why not just park behind the back of the building? Better safe than sorry,” I said, suddenly exasperated.

  “It’s Saturday night, man,” Brandon fired back. “The cops have a thousand and one better things to do than be up here on the weekend.”

  “Danny’s right,” Becky interjected. Before he could argue, she put a hand on his arm and said, “Brandon, look — you’re probably right, okay? Probably. But somebody still owns this place, and we re
ally shouldn’t be here. Somebody put that chain around the doors and the padlock on the front gate, right?” He nodded slowly. “It should only take two minutes for you to move the car around to the back of the building, just out of plain sight.”

  “Okay,” he reluctantly agreed. “I’ll be back in a few. Where are you guys going to be?”

  “Right around here.” Becky clambered up onto the stage, her footsteps making the wooden boards creak and groan. I winced at the sound. “Feels pretty sturdy,” she said, and having tested its stability to her satisfaction, dropped back down to stand beside me again.

  With Brandon gone, there was a slightly awkward silence. She finally broke it by asking: “Is it weird that you haven’t seen any ghosts here yet?”

  I thought about it for a moment and took another sip from my now-warm can of Monster, then offered it to Becky. Surprisingly, she accepted the can and took a deep swig. “Maybe,” I said at last. “It’s a little strange that I haven’t seen at least one or two.”

  In the next room, we could hear the front door slamming shut.

  “Can you see them all the time, or do you have to do something special first?”

  “Pretty much all of the time,” I confirmed, “unless they don’t want to be seen, in which case they can hide themselves from me if they really mean to.”

  “That’s got to be so awesome.”

  “You’d think so, right? But it doesn’t always work out that way.”

  “What do you mean. Is it frightening?” Becky sounded concerned. I shook my head.

  “Not really.” With a throaty growl, the Blazer’s engine fired up in the distance. We both looked up and saw it pulling slowly away from its parking spot. I took a seat on the edge of the wooden stage. “I mean, I have seen some spirits that were a little frightening—”

  “Like in The Sixth Sense,” she broke in excitedly, “when the ghosts are all walking around with wounds and blood, from when they were killed?”

  “It’s not like that,” I explained patiently. “Spirits don’t always stick around in the same form that they died in. Some do, but not necessarily for very long. It’s a matter of personal choice, I guess. A lot of them choose to revert back to how they looked and felt in their prime, when they were strongest and in the best shape of their lives.”

  “But what about the children,” she asked curiously. “The ones that died young and never got the chance to grow up and become adults?”

  “They usually do appear to be the same age that they were when they died,” I conceded, “but if they were killed in an accident or in some violent way, all of those injuries are gone. They don’t come over with them when the spirit leaves the body.”

  “That’s good to know,” she laughed. The laugh echoed around in the gloom of the big, empty hall. “That would be way too much like a horror movie for comfort.”

  We both laughed at that. There was an undertone of nervousness to it, though. Perhaps this wasn’t the best place in which to be bringing up the subject of horror movies.

  “What I meant was, usually the dead just go about their business and do whatever it is that they want to do. The living are usually pretty oblivious to them being there, and they get used to being ignored; but every once in a while, one of them figures out that I can see them and hear them. Then they usually want me to do something for them, and that can get old really fast.”

  “Do something for them…like what?”

  “Well, some of them want me to pass on a message to their loved ones.”

  “So it’s more like Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost?”

  “Yeah, exactly. Imagine something kind of like that, but without any of the comedy.”

  “What do you mean?” Becky frowned.

  I thought back to something that happened last year. “There was this one young guy, back in Boulder. He was maybe nineteen or twenty years old. I was in Boulder with Mom; she’d wanted to do some Christmas gift shopping on Pearl Street.” In case you’re not familiar with it, the west end of Pearl Street is home to a lot of the cool little ‘Mom and Pop’ stores in Boulder. They have a lot of Pearl Street pedestrianized, so you can walk up and down it and just shop. Mom loves to stop in at one of the little coffee-houses every time we go there. At Christmas, the whole area gets tricked out with lights and decorations. Carol singers and street performers hang out there. It’s actually really cool.

  “Anyway,” I continued, “I saw this guy standing outside one of the bars there. I could tell that he was dead; the Christmas shoppers kept walking through him, and his body was a little bit blurry and faded.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “Just standing outside the glass window, staring inside. Watching the people drinking, I guess. He just looked so sad, you know?” She nodded. “So lonely and lost, right there in the middle of a crowd, and at Christmastime too. My heart went out to him a little.”

  “So what did you do?” Becky asked, enthralled.

  “I told Mom that I wanted to go and check out a bookstore, and we agreed to meet up again in fifteen minutes…” I went on to tell her about how I had sidled up to the guy, standing in front of the window and pretending to check my phone. “…so I said, ‘hey, dude, are you okay?’ And the guy totally freaked out — like, really, really lost it.”

  “But nobody could see him.”

  “Exactly. When he calmed down and was finally ready to talk to me, he told me that he’d been dead and earthbound for almost three years. He’d died after an accidental heroin overdose—”

  “Oh my God!”

  “—and felt really ashamed of it. He said that his name was Chris, and that he came from a very devout family. Chris was worried — well, terrified is a better way of putting it, I suppose — of being judged and sent to hell. So after the overdose, when he woke up in his spirit body, Chris saw the tunnel of light that everybody sees when they die, but instead of going into it and passing on into the Summerland, he turned away from it. Chris ran as fast and as far as he could from his apartment, and never looked back.”

  “I thought the whole ‘Carol-Anne, don’t go into the light!’ thing was just the movies,” Becky said doubtfully. “That stuff actually happens in real life?”

  “That’s one thing Hollywood did get right,” I corrected her with a chuckle. “The light and the tunnel behind it are basically a portal into the next plane of existence. You have to go through it in order to move on into the next world. But,” I stressed, “it’s a totally voluntary thing. Nobody can force you to step into that portal and pass through to the other side. In fact, it’s amazing just how many spirits choose not to do that.”

  “Because they’re scared?”

  “Mostly,” I agreed, “but there are other reasons. Some of them are so attached to their families and loved ones that they can’t bear to leave them behind just yet. That usually changes with the passing of time, though, and most of those spirits outgrow the need to cling on to them once they see that those they have left behind have stopped mourning and are capable of moving on with their lives.”

  I took another sip of the Monster. It was almost gone. “Then they just need to call out for the light. It will come back for them in an instant, and they can move on like they’re supposed to.”

  Becky pondered this in thoughtful silence for a moment, while I finished off the energy drink and carefully set the empty can down next to me on the stage. It was getting so dark now that I could barely even see Becky’s outline, despite the fact that she was sitting right there next to me. Finally, she said, “You said that there are other reasons for staying behind — not just attachment?”

  I nodded, which I realized was kind of dumb when I came to think about it. It wasn’t like she could see it in the dark.

  “Well, yes and no. Attachment is usually a big part of it…but some attachments are healthier than others. Sticking around because you want to watch over your loved ones is completely understandable. I think that’s why Brandon’s grandmother is still arou
nd. But think about those people who are addicted to things, like drugs, alcohol…even just material possessions, like owning a great big house and an expensive car.”

  “Huh?”

  “The desire for all of that stuff doesn’t just go away when you die, Becky…not if you’ve grown addicted to it. That’s why Deadseers tend to avoid bars and places where lots of alcohol is served — they’re usually crawling with those spirits of the dead who still crave a drink. They’re sitting next to the living, who usually don’t have even the faintest idea that they’re there; well, maybe they get the occasional cold draft or shiver, if the spirit’s energy is really high. But they spirits can’t drink, can’t even touch a drop of it, no matter how much they want to. So they end up doing the next best thing, at least in their minds.”

  “Which is…?”

  “Once they’ve hung around salivating for so long that they can’t take it any more, some of them will try and possess one of the living.”

  “Shut up!”

  “No, seriously. I mean, think about it. If you were desperate for something, so desperate that you could practically taste it, wouldn’t you go to almost any length to get what you wanted?”

  “I guess,” she said doubtfully.

  “That’s pretty much what addiction is,” I pointed out. “Some people think that when they die, they’re going to change their personally overnight, but it doesn’t work like that. We don’t become all-knowing, all-powerful, like some superhero version of Mother Teresa…”

  “Though that would be pretty cool,” Becky laughed, causing me to join in as well. Her laugh was infectious, and I could listen to it all night long.