Contents
Title Page-1
Copyright-1
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Last Halloween
The Deadseer Chronicles - Book II
Richard Estep
Copyright © 2016 Richard Estep
All rights reserved.
For my Asylum 49 family,
You guys are the best.
CHAPTER ONE
Man, I love October…the nights draw in, and the sighing of the wind through the trees sounds just that little bit more sinister than it does the rest of the year.
What better time to be poking around the burned-out ruins of an abandoned old sanatorium…that also happened to be very, very haunted?
(I’m guessing that you can sense the sarcasm in my voice, even though you can’t hear a word of it.)
“Danny, come see this! This used to be the laundry room, remember?” Becky was gesturing excitedly from behind the crumbling remains of a brick wall maybe twenty feet away, beckoning for me to join her. Putting on a smile that I hoped at least looked genuine, I turned up the collar on my jacket to ward off some of the cold and wandered on over to join her, thrusting my hands deep into my hip pockets.
November would be here in a little over a week’s time, and the early evening air was already starting to drop well below what I’d feel comfortable describing as ‘chilly.’ It was dusk now, but quickly turning toward full-on dark, and the sun was sinking low behind the Rocky Mountains in a spectacular spray of gold and pink light. The shadows were getting longer — my own stretched way out in front of me as I picked my way carefully through the ruins. After darkness fell for real and the night really set in, the temperatures were going to drop even further towards freezing. I really didn’t want to be here when that happened.
To tell you the truth, I really didn’t want to be here at all.
“What’s up?” I asked, feigning an interest that I certainly wasn’t feeling. “Did you find something?”
Becky had a knitted woolen hat pulled all the way down over the tips of her ears, which somehow managed to make her look way older than fourteen. Not that I could talk; I was only a month older than she was, and I had only just begun to shave back in August. The results of that were less than stellar — every three or four days, which was as often as my chin needed to be scraped clean of fluff, it looked like I had been attacked by a madman with a meat cleaver.
Maybe things would have been different if my Dad was still around to teach me how to shave, like every other boy at my school. They were learning it all at first-hand, being taught all the little tricks that seemed to be so obvious once you knew them, like running the blade along the length of the grain instead of at an angle across it. I didn’t have that luxury. Mom was still single and seemed pretty much happy to stay that way, so there was no father figure around the house to demo guy stuff for me. I didn’t have any uncles or grandfathers either. That meant that I had to fall back on my only Plan B: the Internet.
No wonder my chin was cut to ribbons. The cold air was making the fresh shaving rash I’d made earlier that day throb and ache angrily, and I resisted the urge to massage it with my hand. That would only make the pain worse.
“It’s a washing machine,” Becky said, pointing at a mangled lump of rusted old metal that had also been dealt some serious fire damage. “Wonder if it still works…”
“I doubt it.”
I stamped my feet irritably, hoping that she’d take the hint. I was cold, tired, and really just wanted to go home. We had both taken the bus from Boulder up to Nederland, and then hopped in a taxi-cab from there, traveling north along the Peak-to-Peak Highway until we reached a driveway that was set back a little from the western edge of the road, and was almost hidden by tall trees on either side. The taxi driver had dropped us off just outside the rusting iron gate. Its padlock had been smashed off a long time ago, and the gate swung freely now, back and forth in the wind. From the screech it made, I guessed that the hinges could have done with a little WD40. Becky paid the driver and, as she tipped him, she asked him to come back at seven o’clock tonight to pick us up. That gave us a good three or four hours to poke around up there before the weather turned really harsh.
Man, but the time was really dragging…
I don’t usually wear a watch, so I pulled out my phone and thumbed the ‘on’ switch. 5:32. Still another hour and a half of this crap left to go.
Looking around at what was now basically a giant landfill, it would have been almost impossible for anybody who hadn’t seen this place when it was still standing to picture Long Brook Sanatorium as it used to be; my mind was already starting to fill in the blanks, though, translating the dark and shadowy ruin of brick and cement into the ominous edifice where so many poor unfortunate souls had suffered and died over the years. Most of them had died coughing up blood, caught in the grip of tuberculosis, but not everybody there had died of natural causes; some had been murdered by the lunatic doctor that had overseen the place, a card-carrying maniac by the name of Marko von Spiessbach, who had experimented on his patients in all kinds of grim and grisly ways. It turned out that Spiessbach was a Nazi war criminal who had chosen this obscure little corner of Colorado to hide from the forces of justice, and when the Israeli Mossad had finally tracked him down to his little mountain hideaway, he had put the barrel of a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger rather than stand and face the music — which was all well and good, except for the fact that the cowardly little turd hadn’t wanted to go alone, and so he had gone from room to room in the sanatorium and put a bullet into pretty much everybody that worked for him…including Becky’s grandmother, Jennifer, who had been working there as a nurse.
If you’re thinking wow, this guys knows way too much about this place, then you’d be right. After all, Becky and I are the main reason that it burned down.
Let’s back this truck up and start over.
My name is Danny Chill. I’m fourteen years old, the nerdiest nerd that ever nerded out (Star Wars is my absolute favorite, but I’m an equal opportunities geek) and the type of person that those few who were in the know would call a Deadseer. If you’ve never heard that phrase before, nobody could really blame you. Unlike the flashy so-called ‘psychics’ you see on TV, we’re the real deal: people that can actually see and communicate with the spirits of the dead. As such, we tend to keep ourselves to ourselves most of the time. We’re few and far between, and take it from me, being able to look beyond the veil of physical life and into the next world isn’t nearly as much fun as you might think it is.
A few months back, Becky somehow managed to talk me into joining her and another kid named Brandon
Monroe into taking a trip up to this old sanatorium. She was heavily into the whole ghost-hunting thing (I know, I know) and had seen this place on one of those dumb reality TV shows — you know, the ones where they run around in the dark with hand-held cameras and wearing Go-Pros, screaming and swearing every time a floor-board creaks? Normally I would have just laughed it off, but I’d had a secret crush on Becky since…well, since forever, and there was no way I was going to turn down the chance to get into her good books, so like a loyal and lovable puppy I just wagged my tail and nodded my head and said “Sure!”
I’ve done dumber things…but not that many.
We arrived on a balmy Saturday afternoon and started to poke around the place, exploring all of its deserted rooms and corridors. I’ve got to admit that it was actually pretty fascinating at first. I found the whole experience of getting a window into the past to be pretty cool. The old operating theater was still there, full of creaking metal lights on swivel-arms and rusty surgical beds. But it wasn’t long before the sanatorium’s ghosts started coming out to play. Many of them were former patients, most of whom were less than happy at still being earthbound in such a miserable place years after they had died, and although some of them were a little frightening and scary at first, none of them meant us any harm…they were every bit as afraid as we were.
The reason for their fear was the spirit of that evil murderer Marko von Spiessbach, and it wasn’t hard to see why. Years after he ventilated his skull with a bullet, von Spiessbach was still top dog at the sanatorium, using a good squad of ghostly nurses and assistants to keep the spirits of his former patients earthbound, still suffering as the subjects of his twisted medical experiments.
Needless to say, the man was a total whackjob. As if all that wasn’t enough, what we really hadn’t bargained for was the meth lab that two dudes were running down in the basement. Understandably, they didn’t want us sticking our noses into their little criminal enterprise. Things got rough when they opened fire on us, but where things really got nasty was when one of the drug dealers got on the bad side of the sanatorium’s resident inhuman guardian spirit — a big hulk of a thing named Mister Long Brook by the young girl that it seemed to have taken a shine to — and ended up falling through a hole in the floor and breaking his neck.
The guy’s name was Jake, and even though he had acted like a world-glass jerk when he was chasing us around the building and taking pot-shots at us, I actually developed a little sympathy for him right after he died. Von Spiessbach and his cronies put his spirit on one of those operating tables and sliced his chest open. Make no mistake, spirits can feel pain, even though they don’t have material bodies like we do. They could probably have heard his screams all the way out there in Nederland.
Jake…
I winced, my mind rushing back to those screams. I could still hear them now, cutting through me like a knife wielded by a madman; like the scalpel wielded by von Spiessbach as he sliced open Jake’s helpless spirit body, right up there in the operating room. I looked upward on reflex, but all that was left now were dark grey clouds.
It was gone now. He was gone. They all were: von Spiessbach, his demented staff, and all of the patients he’d kept prisoner. They had moved on into the next life, each and every one of them entering the spirit portals that had blossomed all through the building that night. Without going into too much more detail, my spirit guide Lamiyah managed to bring my Dad back from the afterlife. I’d say it was like the cavalry turning up at the end of one of those old Hollywood westerns, except for the fact that Dad was a proud U.S. Marine (is there any other kind?) and he’d never much time for the cavalry. If it wasn’t the infantry, which was his chosen branch, then he really didn’t pay them much attention. Grunts win wars, Danny, he had always used to say with a cocky smile that I missed more and more with each passing day. Everybody else is in the rear with the gear!
The battle lines had been drawn then. It was us versus them, the forces of darkness in a standoff against a tiny army of light. The meth lab down in the basement had gone up in flames during our escape, and had taken pretty much the entire building along with it in a giant tower of flame that could be seen for miles around.
Even von Spiessbach had finally accepted the inevitable, though he had gone kicking and screaming toward what he must have thought would be his final judgment, and an eternity of damnation and hellfire. The spirit world doesn’t actually work like that though. Nobody is irredeemable in the end, although it could take hundreds, sometimes even thousands of years for a soul to see the error of its earthly ways and truly begin to rehabilitate itself.
I had a feeling that Marko von Spiessbach would be working on that for a long, long time to come.
Long Brook Sanatorium had burned to the ground. Once the fire department from Nederland (along with plenty of backup from the rest of the county) had done their thing, all that remained were a few structural walls standing here and there like broken teeth, and scattered pieces of the stuff that had once filled the ground floor rooms… like the scrap washing machine Becky was suddenly so taken with.
The cops had asked us a whole bunch of questions about the fire, mostly centered around just what exactly three teenagers were doing poking around in a run-down old sanatorium on a Saturday night. They seemed to have basically bought our story about being wannabe ghost hunters — well, it was actually true, as far as it went; we just left out the part about what we had found up here, except for the meth lab and the two bad guys who were cooking down in the cellar.
Although…looking back on it now, I’m not sure that either of them really were all that bad, not deep down to the core anyway. Yes, Jake had come after us with a gun, something which still sends a shiver down my spine whenever I get to thinking about it, but when he suddenly fell through that hole in the floor above and died, we all got to see a different side of him…a more vulnerable one, I guess. He became just like a frightened little kid who just couldn’t understand what was going on.
I didn’t know anything about Jake’s background or his childhood. Maybe the gun had made him feel a little like he was in control. I don’t know how he got into cooking meth, which is a pretty nasty way for people to royally screw up their lives, but I don’t think that he was actually a bad person, or that he truly meant anybody any harm; I think that he was just scared and lonely, exactly like the rest of us.
In the end, Jake had gone through one of the portals too, so he’s most likely undergoing some major-league spiritual reeducation even as we speak. Hey, come to think of it, I should probably ask Lamiyah to look in on him and let me know how he’s doing.
Jake’s partner in crime was Tony. Tony actually survived the night at Long Brook, despite the place literally coming down in flames all around us, and it genuinely seemed to have changed him. It’s hard to blame him for looking at the world differently after what he went through: I mean, wouldn’t you see things in a new light if you were suddenly given incontrovertible proof that ghosts were real and that someday, you yourself were going to become one?
True to his word, Tony bit the bullet and ‘fessed up to everything when the cops took him into custody. He took full responsibility for the meth lab and for causing the fire down there in the basement, and the cops took him at his word. After all, why wouldn’t they? Brandon, Becky and I breathed a sigh of relief when we heard that. That meant we were off the hook. The cops threw the book at Tony though, even though nobody was living in the building at the time — for some reason, they take arson pretty seriously — and he’ll be behind bars until 2020 at the very earliest.
Tony underwent a form of…I don’t know exactly what to call it, so let’s go with the term ‘spiritual awakening,’ I guess: the sheer craziness of what he saw that night broke something inside of him, something that could never be properly mended again…at least, not in the same state that it had started out in. Tony really fell on his sword when it came to what happened at Long Brook though, and everybody was happy enough
to believe him — especially Mom, and not to mention Becky’s and Brandon’ parents. All three of knew how lucky that made us, because none of them would have believed a single word of the real story.
So we just let it drop, allowing it to drift away into the background of everyday life as things slowly went back to normal.
I thought long and hard about telling Mom the truth. Really, I did. Never mind von Spiessbach and all of the stuff about the haunting: as far as I was concerned, all of that was just background noise when you compared it to the real issue.
Dad had come back from the spirit world.
How did you even begin to have a conversation like that? See, Mom, it’s kind of like this. Ever since I was younger, I’ve been able to see ghosts. See them and, you know, talk to them sometimes. When I was up there in that burning sanatorium — which was totally packed with them, by the way — Dad came back from the Summerland…huh? Oh, that’s the name of the place where most of us go when we die. Gotta say, you’re taking this really well. Anyway, Dad came back through a portal, along with my spirit guide…she’s a young Indian girl from a couple of hundred years ago, her name’s Lamiyah…
See what I mean? She would either send me to a padded cell, or hate me forever for trying to play the cruelest practical joke ever.
On the other hand, I didn’t think that I could just keep it from her either. Dad’s death had torn Mom’s heart right out from her chest, and although she seemed to be coping pretty well these days, deep down I knew that she was really just taking each day as it came, dealing with the pain as best she could. At least she wasn’t trying to kill it with liquor or anything like that.
As I was drifting off to sleep one night, I asked for Lamiyah to come and visit me in my dreams, which was how we usually communicated with each other. She came, which I had expected, but she also brought Dad along with her, which I really hadn’t. Dad had spent a lot of time in one of the houses of healing on the other side — they’re kind of like hospitals, but they heal the soul instead of the body — which is much, much harder work, by the way. The war had messed him up pretty badly, and years had passed before the first time he ever came back to visit me. Fortunately for me, that happened to be the time when I most desperately needed his help, up on the roof of a burning building and surrounded on all sides by dark entities.
Last Halloween (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 2) Page 1
