Agonal Breath (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 1) (12 page)

“Penny for your thoughts,” I asked with a smile.

“Hmmm? Oh, I was just thinking…how many people ended their lives in those rooms over the years? All of that tragedy, so many deaths…” She sounded quite sad now, coming down from cloud nine and crashing back to reality.

It wasn’t difficult to see why she might suddenly feel that way. The atmosphere here at Long Brook was a great deal more peaceful than the TV shows would lead you to believe. It was actually more peaceful than scary, the same kind of atmosphere that you might find inside a church or a cemetery. Yes, the shadow of death
did
hang over everything here, but I wasn’t sensing anything dark or malevolent.

At least, not right now…

I looked up at the vacant windows again, leaning back to take in the roof. There were some very cool-looking stone gargoyles up there, crouching in the eaves beneath the guttering. I’d seen them when I was clicking around during my online research session last night; when it rained and the gutters filled up with water, the gargoyles would vomit it out of their mouths. There were a few photos of that on Flickr, posted by visitors to the sanatorium, and I thought that the effect looked really cool.

Just for an instant, as my eyes were looking from room to room on the top floor, I thought I caught a glimpse of something white, flitting from shadow to shadow between two of the windows. I barely blinked, and it was gone. If this was a horror movie, this would be the scene with the ominous music building up to the quick jump-scare, and then the director would cut away to something else. “It was probably just an old bed-sheet or something,” one of the actors would say to another. Then there’d be a point-of-view shot looking down on the actors from up on the roof, because of course, the white shape was really the form of something dark and mysterious that was haunting the sanatorium...something that would turn up later, probably when the lights were out. And then the deaths would start…

I’d seen
way
too many bad movies where the plot went something like that.

But here’s the thing…whatever ghosts might be haunting this place, I wasn’t the least bit afraid of them. I had practically no doubt that the sanatorium was haunted. I mean, you didn’t get to have that many deaths — thousands upon thousands — over the space of that many years, without something being left behind, some psychic residue of all the physical and emotional trauma that went on in this place. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the spirits of some of those patients hadn’t remained earthbound, tied to this place where their lives ended…and what about those members of the staff who had worked so hard to take care of those patients down through the years, giving them the very best care that they could, but constantly running up against the limitations of the medical science of the time?

I couldn’t imagine how it must feel to put your heart and soul into taking care of hundreds or thousands of people, only to have so many of them die on you despite your very best efforts. That had to be just brutal, heartbreaking in fact. It would be amazing if some trace of that
didn’t
remain behind.

So I was more than ready to encounter the ghosts here.

At least, that’s what I thought then.

The big double doors that led into the central building were chained up, or that’s how it seemed to us at first.

When the three of us reached the big stone awning that sheltered the main entrance, we discovered that the chain was hanging slack and limp between the metal loops of the large door handles.

“Check it out.” Brandon squatted down and scooped up a silver combination lock from the ground. It was left in the open position. “Looks like security ain’t so tight after all, huh?”

“Who actually
owns
this place anyway?” I wanted to know. Becky shrugged.

“I couldn’t find that out. The state used to own it, but then it was sold to a private buyer. I looked at a lot of websites, but none of them identified exactly who that was.”

“So it’s a mystery. I like a little mystery every once in a while.” I grinned. With a crack that seemed way too loud, almost blasphemously so in the sleepy quiet of the lazy afternoon, I carefully pulled open the ring-pull on my can of Monster and took a sip of the bubbly carbonated goodness inside. “Keeps life interesting.”

“Look, it’s old man Monroe!” Becky said, pretending to pull a mask from Brandon’s head. “I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for you meddling kids!”

“Ruh-roh!” I joined in, in my best
Scooby-Doo
voice. “Raggy!”

Brandon looked at us like were both crazy. “You want to take a look inside?” he asked rhetorically, taking one end of the chain and pulling the links slowly through the handles until he was finally able to swing one of the doors open. It creaked ominously, a horror movie sound effects person’s dream, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed with a squirt of WD-40. Brandon passed me the length of chain, which I coiled up in a neat little circle and laid on the ground to one side of the door.

Unable to contain her excitement any longer, Becky pushed past him and became the first of us to step inside Long Brook Sanatorium.

“Wow.”

The entrance hall was fairly big, stretching quite a way back from the open doorway into deep, dark shadows at the rear. I could just make out a wide staircase, half-hidden in the gloom. Doors led off to the left and right of us, all of them standing partway open. Graffiti was sprayed on most of the surfaces, some of it crude and embarrassing, a lot of it taking a satanic and demonic theme.

“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.