The fact that we were only going to be separated by a single brick wall was both comforting and strangely disconcerting; we were both so near and yet so far away from one another, and all that we could really do now was hunker down and hope for the best.
We didn’t have long to wait. I could hear the footsteps getting closer and closer. Every seven or eight steps they would stop, and I surmised that their owner was looking inside each room, perhaps checking it in the same way that we had.
From my hiding place, I had a pretty good view of the lower third of the room’s inner doorway. The shadowy figure of a man appeared in outline there, a dark shape against an even darker background. He seemed totally solid and didn’t have any spirit color to his outline, suggesting to me that he was a living, breathing human.
Apparently seeing nothing amiss in the room, the man walked on. He suddenly began to whistle, a low, melancholic tune that grated on my nerves like fingernails on a chalkboard.
Was this guy playing with us? Did he know that we were here, or was he just breaking the uncomfortable silence with a few whistled off-key notes?
All that and more went through my mind as I lay there, afraid to move a muscle, with just the pounding of my own heartbeat in my eardrums and the stink of who knew what as my only company. Knowing that Becky was behind that wall in the next room was admittedly a comfort, but a very small one indeed.
The whistling gradually receded into the distance, and I heard the jarring creak and slam of the southern balcony’s stairwell door opening and closing again. I let out the breath I had been deliberately holding, counted to fifty just to make doubly sure, and slowly slithered out from underneath the bed.
“And just what do you think that you’re doing under there?” said the voice, almost making my jump halfway out of my skin.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I think that I deserve a lot of credit for not screaming my lungs out. As it was, the sudden shock almost stopped my heart stone cold dead, and I swear I must have jumped three feet into the air when the old woman spoke to me.
She was sitting up in bed — the same bed that I’d been hiding under — and watching me with great interest.
I would have put her age somewhere between seventy and eighty, and she couldn’t have weighed a pound more than I did. Wisps of thin gray hair were scattered across her balding scalp in sparse clumps, and while the skin of her face may have been creased and jowly, the sparkling blue eyes regarded me with a fierce intelligence. Yes, this lady was old, but she also looked formidable.
She was also outlined with a bright mauve radiance that lit up the room, so much so that I could actually see my way around it now.
“You never did answer my question, young man.”
Hands folded patiently across her lap, the spirit lady was resting (perhaps hovering might have been a better word) at about roughly the same height as the mattress would have been during her time as a patient here.
“Well?” she prodded in a croaking, gravelly voice that had a distinctly Southern flavor to it. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you it was rude to keep a lady waiting?”
“Yes ma’am, she did,” I found myself answering automatically, my courteous upbringing causing the words to bypass my brain and head straight for my mouth. “I’m, uh, sorry, ma’am. The truth is, I needed a hiding place, and your bed was the closest one I could find.”
“Ah,” she said, as though that explained everything. “A hiding place. From whom, pray tell?” Her eyes suddenly darkened, and before I could answer she added, “Is it from him?” The word ‘him’ was practically spat with distaste.
“It was a man, ma’am, but I really don’t know his name.”
“You know,” she waved a hand airily. “The so-called surgeon…the German. What’s his name now…Spiessbach. I shall not dignify him with the title of ‘Doctor.’ He is more of a butcher than a physician.”
“I’m not sure, ma’am. Whoever it was…I think I’ve met this surgeon before, at least in one of my dreams…”
“He is more the stuff of nightmares than dreams,” she replied bitterly, and I was forced to agree with her one hundred percent. “A hideous, evil shell of a man, completely devoid of all decency or morality.”
“Then yes, we’re probably talking about the same man. But I don’t know if that’s who was walking in the hallway just now, the whistling man. We heard him coming towards us and sort of panicked—”
“We?” The old lady was sharp, picking up on my use of the plural straight away. “Who exactly is we?”
“My friend Becky and I. She’s hiding next door, probably under the bed,” I explained.
“Well, you had better fetch her in here, child,” she chided me. “That’s old Billy Kraft’s room, and he can be a cantankerous sort with trespassers, if you take my meaning.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I ducked into the neighboring room and fetched Becky. Sure enough, she had been hiding under the bed in there, just as I had next door.
“I could hear a conversation,” she whispered, crawling out and getting slowly to her feet. She brushed herself off. “Were you talking to yourself?”
I shook my head. “There’s a sweet little old lady in there. I don’t know her name yet. She told me to go and fetch you.”
Becky’s eyes went wide. “Is she a…” Her voice trailed off.
“Ghost? Yup. But try not to worry, I don’t get the feeling that she’s a nasty one. She seems very friendly to me, and I can usually tell when it’s a dark spirit. Come on.”
I led Becky back next door. The old lady was still sitting up in bed, propped up on four or five transparent pillows that I hadn’t noticed before. She beckoned for us both to come in.
“Well hello, child,” she smiled at Becky, and it was a completely genuine and heartfelt one from what I could see. “My name is Matilda. Mrs. Matilda Sharpe, to be precise. And who might you be?”
“I’m Rebecca Page, Mrs. Sharpe, but my friends call me Becky.”
“Becky it is, then,” Mrs. Sharpe smiled in an eerie echo of Becky’s first meeting with my mom last night. “You must both call me Matilda. And you, young man; what is your name?”
“Daniel Chill, ma’am. Danny to my friends.”
“Danny.” She nodded graciously. “I am afraid that I have to ask — do your parents know that you are both prowling around an abandoned sanatorium in the middle of the night?
“Not exactly, Mrs S…Matilda, no.” I had decided that polite honesty was the best policy, which I’d found tended to be true in most of life’s uncertain situations.
“I see.” Matilda managed to convey a sense of disappointment, but didn’t seem willing to make a big deal out of it. Instead, she asked in a jokey sort of way, how exactly we had come to find ourselves in a dead woman’s bedroom after lights-out?
“Well, we—wait a minute, you know you’re dead?” Becky could hardly believe her ears.
I, on the other hand, found it a little easier to swallow. Matilda seemed way too calm and accepting of her situation to be completely ignorant.
“Of course I know, child. I don’t rightly know what year it is, but I do know that I left that worn-out shell of a body behind on the 18th of November, 1967. It was one of those crisp, clear days where the sky is so beautiful and blue, but the wind…oh, that wind was so cold, and I don’t think my poor old bones could take it any more.”
She gazed nostalgically past both of us, looking out towards the balcony, her eyes focusing on that distant, far-off day. “I could hardly breathe, you see. The tuberculosis had got me, had got me real bad. All night long it was cough cough cough. With the coughing came the shaking and the shivering, and I guess that cold November wind was just the icing on the cake.”
Matilda sighed, managed a smile when she looked back at us again. The smile was tinged with sadness. “And so, here we all are,” she said finally, with just a hint of a tear in her eye. Becky reached out a hand in that now-familiar way she had of showing support, but it pa
ssed straight through Matilda’s arm.
Carefully, I lowered myself down and took a seat on the edge of the bed. It protested a little, but still took my weight. That was a safe bet, given how light I was. Somebody Brandon’s size would have probably collapsed it…I suddenly felt as though a bucket of cold water had been dumped over my head.
Brandon.
We had to get moving again, had to find him before something even worse happened to him. We needed to get back on point, I knew, but first I wanted to satisfy my curiosity a little.
“Matilda, the year is 2015; that means you have been here for…” I did the mental math quickly, “forty-eight years. Why didn’t you cross over when it was your time? Why don’t you just cross over now?”
Mrs. Sharpe looked up at me. Iridescent blue tears spilled over her cheeks as she said, “Oh, you silly boy. Do you think that I don’t want to…that all of us here don’t want to? He keeps us here, Danny. He won’t allow any of us to leave.”
“Who?” I asked, afraid that I already knew the answer.
“The butcher,” she replied in a sad, hollow voice. “Spiessbach.”
“He’s keeping you here?”
“Yes. Me, and hundreds of others. He sends his nurses and orderlies for us, night after night. There is no mercy, no respite from it…the torture never ends, child. They come and they take us away, up to that operating room of his, and then they…” She broke off into a string of sobs that caused Becky to flash me a ‘stop upsetting her’ look. “They cut into you, with scalpels and saws,” she went on, the words rushing out in a torrent as if, now that they had started, the truth refused to be stopped. Neither would the tears. “They slice and they poke, and they stick needles into you all over, until it feels like the pain is all there is in the world; and then…this is the worst part, children…then it actually starts to feel better, and for one or two blissful moments afterward, you think: ‘this is it, I’ve been cured!’ But you haven’t been cured!”
Matilda slammed a frail hand down against the side of the bed, or at least she tried to; the transparent fist simply passed right through the frame, just as Becky’s hand had done when she had attempted to comfort the distressed old lady.
“He’s still operating on them — just like he did when the sanatorium was still open,” I said, half to myself.
A lot of people don’t know this, but the body of a ghost or spirit can still sustain injuries and trauma from others of their kind if they get into a fight on the earth plane.
What they can’t be is killed. The worst that happens if one spirit tries to harm another is a series of similar injuries to those that would have been inflicted on a flesh-and-blood human body, and those injuries would hurt every bit as much; but the crucial difference was that the spirit body would always dissolve, return to the Summerland, and heal up, finally coming back as good as new.
“Who is? This ‘Spiessbach’ guy — the doctor?” Becky demanded. “Because he sounds like a complete psycho. If it’s the one I’m thinking of, his name came up a couple of times when I was reading up on this place, but I don’t remember a whole lot about him, other than he was accused of doing some shady stuff to patients.”
“I don’t know a heck of a lot either, and I’m not sure that I want to.”
“If there’s anything you need to know about that piece of human filth, I can probably help you out.”
The new voice startled us both, but at least Matilda seemed pleased to see the big figure now looming in the doorway, so I took it on faith that he was one of the good guys.
“Well, good evening Mr. Kraft. Billy,” she said, smiling through the tears. “I hear tell that you’ve had a young lady hiding under your bed.”
Matilda gave Becky a teasing look, and although I couldn’t really tell in the dim ghostly light that filled the room, I would have bet my last dollar that Becky had blushed a deep crimson at that.
“Sure enough, although we didn’t have much time to get acquainted. Good evening, young lady. My name is William Kraft, though most folks just call me Billy.” He bowed gracefully, or at least tried to. Billy was a big man, probably close to three hundred pounds, and he didn’t look like the sort of dude you wanted to get on the wrong side of. His head was completely bald — by choice, I thought, rather than illness — and a long handlebar mustache that drooped on either side of his severe mouth made him look as though he was some kind of walrus.
“Hey, Billy,” I nodded warily. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Whassup?” he returned the nod. We sized one another up, and both came to the same conclusion: Billy could probably have had me for breakfast if he had wanted to. I really wasn’t much of an Alpha Male, whereas Billy, on the other hand, radiated a don’t mess with me vibe that I was picking up loud and clear. “That Nazi turd up to his old tricks again?”
“Now, William — simply because somebody is from Germany, does not make them a Nazi!” Matilda scolded him, though she really wasn’t putting much effort into sounding scathing.
“True enough,” Billy shot back, “and I’ve known more than a few Germans in my time — them as I fought against in the war, and a good few others besides. A lot of them were decent folks, as best I could tell, but Spiessbach’s something else entirely. He’s the genuine article, an honest-to-God Nazi war criminal, hiding in plain sight here in the beautiful state of Colorado, U-S-A.”
“A freaking Nazi?” My mind boggled. This was straight out of one of those old war movies that Dad had liked so much, like The Longest Day or A Bridge Too Far. “For real?”
Billy nodded solemnly. His aura pulsed from blue to red for an instant, though whether with annoyance, anger, or sadness, I really couldn’t make out.
“For real.”
“I’m not doubting your word, sir,” I said hastily, raising my hands defensively. “It just seems a little hard to believe, that’s all…I thought all the Nazis were gone a long time ago.” Which wasn’t strictly true, I realized, because I’d seen American History X (Mom really hadn’t liked that) and knew from the movie that the Nazis still had a following in America, and probably elsewhere around the world to some degree.
“Spiessbach is dead. Just like me. Just like Matilda here.” Billy’s tone was matter-of-fact, but it brought Mrs. Sharpe to tears again.
“Now Billy,” she sniffed, “you know I don’t like talking about that.”
“It’s the truth though, ain’t it?” Billy shrugged. “No sense sugar-coating it, not even for the children here.”
Becky shot him a who do you think you’re calling children? look, to which he seemed totally oblivious. I was impressed. There weren’t too many people who were impervious to Becky’s pointed looks.
“The damned TB got you, Matilda, and it got me too. It would have gotten Spiessbach as well, if he hadn’t done the job himself first.”
“I remember reading about that,” Becky nodded. “Spiessbach killed himself in his office, didn’t he?”
“Uh-huh,” Billy nodded. “In his private office downstairs. Went in one day, closed and locked the door behind him, plunked his butt down in that big, high-backed leather chair he always liked so much, then put the barrel of a Luger in his mouth and pulled the trigger. I don’t think he had much in the way of brains, but what little he had repainted the walls and ceilings of that office.” He chuckled sardonically. “Didn’t matter how much they scrubbed it and scrubbed it, they could never get the stains out. They tried painting over it, in the end. Didn’t work. Wall still looks pink.”
I was intrigued. “Why did he shoot himself, Billy?”
Billy hooked a thumb in his belt. “Couple reasons, Danny. I can call you Danny, right? Great. Number one, the way I heard it at least, the Israelis were catching up with him. Spiessbach was a doctor in the German military back in World War Two. Heard a lot of rumors that he experimented on American and allied soldiers back then, in prisoner-of-war and maybe even the concentration camps. The Israelis ain’t known as a forgiving people, a
nd rightly so. They spent years hunting down Nazis after the war, men and women who had fled Germany and gone underground all around the world. Turns out a bunch of ‘em came here to America, strangely enough; set up new lives under fake new names and tried to lay low.”
“But isn’t ‘Spiessbach’ a German name?” Becky asked.
“That it is, young lady,” Billy agreed, “and it weren’t the one he was born with, neither, but he was too proud — no, too damned arrogant — to completely cover up his German heritage. To us, he’s the high-falutin’ Dr. Marko von Spiessbach, and it don’t really matter none what name he went under back in the Forties, does it?”
We all shook our heads. Billy was right. A war criminal was a war criminal by any name.
“It is a little weird that he’d keep a German name though,” I thought out loud.
“Stupid, yes — but not all that weird. The man’s got an accent as thick as molasses, kiddo. There ain’t no disguising it, so he probably figured, ‘why even bother?’ Anyways, Mossad — that’s the Israeli secret service to you and me — picked up his trail, one way or another. They tracked him here to Colorado and I guess the word must have gotten out that their agents were coming for him, and that’s why he did what he did.”
Billy formed the shape of a gun with two fingers and mimed putting it into his mouth and shooting himself with it, throwing his head backwards with pretend-shock. The fact that his body was semi-transparent only made it all the more bizarre.
“Spiessbach had been…well, in our day we called it something different, but I guess you kids would have said ‘making out’ with one of the senior nurses that worked for him. The rumor was that he had gotten her in the family way, if you take my meaning. If word had gotten out, it would have been a really big deal. She was married, you see, to some guy who had nothing to do with Long Brook. Even had her own family with him. Sad, really.”
Becky and I looked at one another uncomfortably. Even Matilda seemed embarrassed at the subject, and sensing it, Billy cleared his throat and moved on hurriedly.
Agonal Breath (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 1) Page 15
