Finally, she looked at me, then at Brandon.
“Ready?”
I really didn’t feel it, but replied: “As I’ll ever be.” Brandon nodded once, tersely. Alright, here goes nothing…
“Okay,” Becky said, squaring her shoulders. “Let’s do this.”
I really couldn’t help what I said next. When I get really, really stressed, my brain just reverts back to its equivalent of comfort food…or in my case, movies.
“Okay. I have a plan. I know exactly what to do.” I paused, pushing the fear to one side and savoring the moment, the chance to deliver Dan Aykroyd’s epic line. “Stay close…stay close…do exactly as I say…
“GET HER!”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Taking the lead, Becky barged past the rotting wooden door and led Brandon and I out into the sixth floor corridor, holding the iPad up in front of her like a D&D cleric holding up a shield to protect her from evil – which I guess, in a sense, it sort of was.
The three of us burst out into the western corridor.
What struck me first was the presence of so many spirits, all of whom seemed to be in the process of sticking their heads out into the corridor to try and figure out who these new intruders were. They cast a ghostly blue radiance from each doorway, and it felt weirdly like we were walking past the glass windows at the Denver Aquarium as we passed each one.
The power was building to a peak inside Long Brook now – it had to be, because the ghosts of all of those long-dead patients were visible to Becky and Brandon, not just to me.
Becky was focusing all of her attention on the iPad screen, memorizing the words of her incantation, but Brandon stared back at the transparent spirits in nothing short of amazement as he passed each room. He even caught the occasional greeting from one of the residents; I watched one patient, a very overweight guy of about forty or fifty (it was difficult to tell) give Brandon a little wave and whisper, “Good luck to you, son.”
Good luck. Yeah, we were going to need all the luck we could get.
We soon came to the stairwell that connected the middle of the two west wings to its more distant neighbor. As we passed through the door on the far side of the landing, I took a deep breath. One more wing to go, and then it was really game on.
There was no going back now.
Brandon closed the door behind us, as quietly as the ancient hinges would allow. This hallway was no different than the last, full of the spirits of the dead, all nervously watching the corridor as we crept slowly along it.
They know that something’s up, I thought tersely. There really is something in the air, an energy or power that’s growing… whatever it is, they’re picking up on it somehow.
The screams were getting louder and louder now. At the far end of the corridor, I could see a ghostly blue light leaking around the gaps and cracks in the two double doors that led to the operating room.
With every agonized cry, the downtrodden spirits surrounding us on either side winced sympathetically, some hiding their faces with their hands, others covering their ears in a desperate but vain attempt to shut out the sounds of pain and torture, the anguished cries of a soul in torment.
Well, I resolved firmly to myself, not for much longer.
The doors were right in front of us now. I peeked over at the dimly-glowing screen of Becky’s iPad, glad that she had dialed the brightness way down in order to conserve juice. It was down to 3% now. That made me want to cringe.
Wham!
Without so much as breaking stride, Becky pushed her way through the swinging doors and straight into the operating room.
A crowd of faces looked up at the same time, every one wearing a surgical mask that revealed nothing except a pair of soulless black-within-black eyes. They were all gloved and gowned, hunching over the operating table onto which poor Jake was restrained with thick leather straps.
“Well, well. It seems that we have uninvited guests coming to join us at our table. Welcome”
That was Spiessbach, I would have recognized that accent anywhere. The son of a bitch was standing on Jake’s left side, with the fingertips of one hand buried deep inside his patient’s chest. No, I corrected myself, not patient…victim.
The surgeon’s eyes blazed with the dark fury of the truly, almost demoniacally insane, as they looked up at the three of us interlopers.
In his free hand, Spiessbach clutched a blood-stained scalpel. In the dark blue spirit light of the operating room, the fluid dripping from it appeared more black than red, but that was pretty much an illusion.
Spirits didn’t truly bleed when you cut them, not in the sense that a living body did; if I understood what Lamiyah had once taught me correctly, the astral body could present with the same sympathetic pain and injury patterns as a living one could, but only if the host spirit itself truly believed in what was happening to it.
If Jake had only kept his wits about himself enough to realize that while he was in fact really dead, Spiessbach and his clan of lunatic nurses only had as much power over him as he chose to allow them, then he could have stopped this abuse instantly with his own free will. So could any of Long Brook’s resident ghosts, come to that, but such was the force of the mad doctor’s personality that every single one of them was held in his thrall.
I was feeling some of the effects of that myself. When Spiessbach locked eyes with me, I tried to look away…but something about his gaze held mine, a smug, subliminal insistence that nevertheless felt like it was backed by pure steel.
With an effort, I broke contact, wrenching my eyes away from his. It took a lot of mental cojones to make that happen, let me tell you.
I just knew that underneath that surgical mask, Spiessbach was going to be smirking.
Let’s see if we could wipe that smirk right off his face.
“Becky,” I hissed, nudging her gently but firmly with my elbow and making the lantern shake. “Now would be a great time…”
“Huh? Oh!” Becky looked as though she had been hypnotized, probably held under the same spell that I had been placed under. I glanced to my left; it was impossible to tell whether Brandon had also been captivated, or if he was simply wearing the same vacant but well-meaning glassy-eyed expression he nearly always wore.
Okay, maybe that was a little harsh.
Shaking her head, Becky blinked and refocused her attention on the iPad screen. In a voice hat began tentatively but rapidly gained both strength and confidence, she began to intone the words of the Wiccan incantation.
“Malign spirits who inhabit this place,
Haunters who dwell within these tainted walls,
I banish you by water,
I banish you by fire,
I banish you by air,
I banish you by earth,
I banish you by spirit.
Leave this place,
Return from whence you came,
Pass either into the realm of love and light,
Or flee into the out darkness,
But trouble this place no more.
So mote it be!”
Becky’s tone grew increasingly forceful, until finally, immediately after delivering the words “no more!” she took a step forward towards Spiessbach, as though ready to do battle with the black-eyed doctor.
Then her iPad battery died, turning the screen completely dark.
That’s it, I thought to myself nervously, this had better have worked, because there’ll be no more chances for her to cast that spell again.
I looked over at Spiessbach, who had waited patiently for Becky to make her way through the entire ritual. When the final words had been spoken, the surgeon raised his eyebrows politely and said, “Will that be all, young lady?”
Oh crap. So much for that.
What the hell were we supposed to do now?
Jake was barely moving.
He seemed to have lost all will to fight against the straps which held him down to the operating table, laying there limply with eyes closed and
tears silently streaming down his face. Spiessbach removed his gloved hand from inside his chest with a disgusting shlurp noise, setting the scalpel down carefully on top of the metal tray.
“Now,” he said calmly, “I believe that we have done all that we can for this young gentleman. Which one of you shall receive treatment next?”
The surgeon’s gaze fell on Becky, probably because she’d been the one with the temerity to challenge him on his own turf by trying to banish him with her spell…for all the good it had done.
“I think it shall be you, young lady.”
Becky turned to run, but somehow the ghostly nurses and orderlies had managed to get around behind us during the spell-casting ritual. Two of the largest and ugliest-looking stood between us and the double doors, completely cutting off our only route of escape.
“Please see that this young man is removed from the table, Geraldine,” Spiessbach said in a soft, casual tone of voice that conjured up images of razorblades covered in silk. You wouldn’t want to get on the man who owned a voice like that. “Michael. Jennifer. Prepare the young lady for surgery.”
The two large male orderlies that were guarding the doors both stepped forward, grabbing Brandon and I by our upper arms. I clenched my teeth at the ice-cold touch of the one who went for me, wrapping ridiculously strong and solid fingers around my biceps and squeezing them painfully. There seemed to be an implied warning in that vice-like grip: struggle, and the pain is going to get a whole lot worse.
One of the female nurses (Geraldine, I think Spiessbach had called her) unbuckled the straps and started dragging Jake’s motionless body from the room. I was fascinated to see that it took almost no effort at all for her to pull him along with one hand, keeping a firm grip on a fistful of his hair.
Skirting around us, she barely touched one of the pair of double doors, yet both of them swung open at the same time. The nurse and her victim disappeared into the far darkness of the central hallway.
I found myself hoping that the light came for Jake soon, because whichever direction he was headed — whether it was up or down — had to be better than this.
Spiessbach busied himself with sorting through the various tools of his torturous profession, laying out the scalpels, saws, and other implements of torture in what looked to be a very specific sequence on the tray. He moved slowly and methodically, and I could have sworn that I heard him humming a tune under his breath while he worked.
I broke out in a cold sweat as I pictured those instruments cutting into Becky’s skin and making her scream in agony.
I shot a quick glance over at Brandon. He was struggling, pain or no pain, but the burly orderly that help him in his grip was barely even swaying, making no effort at all to keep hold of my friend. The dude wasn’t even looking down at him, choosing instead to focus his dark eyes on Becky, who was getting more attention than the two of us combined.
One orderly was hovering behind her, hands pressing down on top of her shoulders to prevent her from getting away. A large male spirit was preparing the table, laying out the straps for greater ease of application; the second nurse, Jennifer, had the strangest look on her face, from what little I could see of it between her surgical mask and the hair-cover. Her black-within-black eyes stared unblinkingly into Becky’s. It reminded me of a Discovery Channel show I’d seen once, where a snake and a mongoose had faced off against each other, barely moving and trying to stare each other down. Jennifer had eyes that were just like the snake’s.
You’ve probably already figured out that it didn’t end well for the mongoose.
But now the dynamic between them both was starting to get weird, and by weird, I mean weird even for a situation as messed-up as this one was.
Finally, the nurse spoke.
“You look…familiar, young lady. Have we met before?”
Confused, Becky replied, “I don’t think so. My mom always told me to stay away from psychotic dead nurses.”
“Is that right? Tell me, missy: what is your mother’s name?”
“Just what does that have to do with you?” Becky practically spat. “That’s none of your business!”
The nurse leaned in more closely, until only a few inches separated their faces. Slowly, hypnotically, she said, “What. Is. Her. Name?”
“Samantha.”
The nurse straightened herself up as though she had been slapped.
“I have a daughter named Samantha. Or at least, I did once…a long time ago. Now tell me your name.”
“Becky.”
Jennifer pulled the surgical mask down from her face, allowing it to dangle loosely around her neck, and then reached up and slowly removed the cap that covered her hair.
I winced.
A small, neat little hole spoiled the symmetry of her forehead, sitting right between her eyes. As she tilted her head slightly, I could see that the back of her skull had been blown outward, the gaping wound obviously caused by a bullet fired at very close range.
“My Samantha looked a lot like you, Becky,” Jennifer said quietly.
And then it hit me.
Jennifer.
Jennifer…Roderick?
No way.
I looked back and forth between Becky’s face and Jennifer’s. Once you knew to look for it, the resemblance was definitely there. They both had the same sweeping eyebrows, the same gracefully curving jawline; heck, even the shape of their lips was the same.
Becky’s grandmother really had died at Long Brook Sanatorium, but she hadn’t been a patient; no, she had been one of the staff here, and she had stayed on after her death, assisting Spiessbach in his grotesque experiments and surgeries.
Now all of the pieces of this nasty little puzzle were starting to come together in my mind, and I didn’t like the picture that they were forming one little bit.
I saw Becky’s jaw drop in surprise as she finally recognized the nurse standing directly in front of her. Her mouth formed the shape of an ‘O’ as the light-bulb went off above her head too.
This was the woman from the scanned photograph that she had shown us earlier, a photo that must have been taken in a much happier time; because Jennifer had been having an affair with the maniac who was standing maybe ten feet away from me now, absent-mindedly humming as he prepared his tools for the latest in a long line of patient dissections…a man with whom she had had an affair and conceived a child, only to have him shoot her in the face and then turn the gun on himself when it came time to pay the piper.
Becky had found her grandmother at long last.
This was not going to be a happy family reunion.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Why?” Becky demanded through floods of tears.
She pointed an accusatory finger at Spiessbach. “Why did you do it? You cheated on Grandpa with that…that…thing over there?”
It looked as if Becky’s sudden realization that Jennifer was her grandmother would be accompanied by a storm of angry recriminations.
Jennifer’s face softened, and so did her tone. I even thought that I could see the hint of a tear glistening in one of those black-within-black eyes, something I’d believed impossible: an evil spirit displaying a sense of remorse?
“It’s…difficult to explain, honey,” Jennifer began. “And I don’t have any excuses to offer you, just my reasons. They made some kind of twisted sense at the time, but I’ve had a lot of time to think about them since then. Things were not going well between your grandfather and I, Becky. He was a good man, but he wasn’t a perfect one. He hated the fact that I took a job here and put the children in daycare, said it wasn’t what a proper family did. That really came between us. Before I knew it, we had just grown further and further apart. It didn’t happen overnight, but one morning I woke up and realized that I didn’t love him any more, and I didn’t think he loved me either.”
“So you decided to put some spark back into your love life by sleeping with a Nazi war criminal?”
Damn, that was harsh. Harsh, b
ut fair.
Jennifer seemed unfazed.
“Marko and I had a connection, Becky. You have to understand that he isn’t a bad man, no matter what the rumors about him might say. He truly just wants to help people. He wants to be the one to cure tuberculosis, and that is a very noble goal.”
I really didn’t mean to laugh. It just sneaked out. I certainly didn’t mean for it to sound as cynical as it did.
“Ha! None of your patients even have tuberculosis! They’re dead, all of them. So are you, if you haven’t figured that out yet!”
“Dead? Don’t be ridiculous, boy.” Jennifer’s expression changed to one of confusion, as though she were thinking about the answer to a highly complex question. “I can touch. I can smell. I can feel. How could I do all that if I were dead?”
I realized that this might be an opportunity to try and get through to her with a little rationality, so I decided to push the issue. It wasn’t as though we had a lot to lose at this point.
“When was the last time you ate something? No, scratch that — when was the last time you were even hungry?” I demanded. “Or thirsty? How about tired? When did you last go to bed and sleep, huh? Or need to go to the restroom?”
A low muttering was starting up among the nurses and orderlies. Finally realizing that there was trouble in the ranks, Spiessbach looked up from sorting his equipment. It was so neatly laid out that the guy had to have some wicked OCD going on.
Jennifer turned to face him, folding her arms in a way that children everywhere knew as the universal sign for ‘look out — Mom’s on the warpath.’
“Marko, don’t you have anything to say about this? Tell them that we’re not dead. Tell them the truth. Most of all, tell me.”
Spiessbach sighed, making his surgical mask suck in and then puff out again in a way that would have been funny under normal circumstances. Now it just looked creepy.
Agonal Breath (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 1) Page 20
