Agonal Breath (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 1) (27 page)

I looked over at Becky for support, or at least a shred of understanding. To her credit, she seemed to be wavering. Maybe my argument was swaying her a little. Maybe…

“Danny, you sound almost as insane as Spiessbach.”
Well, so much for the idea that she was coming round to my way of thinking.
Her voice was a little unsteady. “Let’s say for just a moment that I agree with you…which, quite honestly, I pretty much
do.
What these poor spirits are going through here, all of the pain and suffering that he’s putting them through, is really horrible. I get that. But Spiessbach has to be a really powerful ghost if he’s able to keep them all here, right?”

“Right,” I agreed. “Otherwise they’d have crossed over by now.”

She pressed the point. “And the same goes for his nurses and assistants?”

I nodded. “They’re probably pretty strong too, yeah. He’s the ringleader, the dominant spirit, and it’s the force of his will that keeps everybody else earthbound here.”

“
Then what makes you think that you can take him on alone, Danny?”
She was practically in tears now. The adrenaline dump caused by the shooting down in the cellar must have just worn off. I thought about her question for a minute before I answered her quietly.

“Because you just took down a big, bad drug dealer in a gunfight, Becky. Pretty much all by yourself. Some people can’t be reasoned with. They don’t even talk the same language as the rest of us. Those people can only be
stopped.
”

That was something else Dad had taught me about bullies. He was talking about the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, but he reckoned that the same principles held true for pretty much any bully in the world, whether you found them in the school yard or on the battlefield. They were all cowards, he said, and it was up to good, decent people to stand up to them, even if those good people were scared to do so.

It had been a few years since Dad had said that to me, but I had never forgotten it. Damn, but I missed him.

Brandon slapped a hand up to his forehead in frustration, then winced and said “Oowww!” The big lunk had forgotten all about the bullet graze. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Danny’s right. This Doctor Spiessbach sounds like a real piece of work. We can’t just leave him to torture these poor people.”

Feeling bolstered by his support, I went over to Becky and took one of her hands in mine. That probably qualified as being the bravest thing I’d done all night, something I couldn’t have even imagined working up the courage to do just twenty-four hours ago. I spoke softly to her, because what I wanted to say was going to be very difficult for her to hear.

“Becky, we still haven’t found your grandmother yet, have we?” She shook her head ‘no.’ “Look, I really hate to have to say this, but…what if she’s one of those patients that Spiessbach keeps operating on? What is she’s still trapped here, earthbound, like Matilda and those other poor souls?”

Becky’s eyes flared in surprise, then narrowed in a calculating way. That thought obviously hadn’t occurred to her. She was doing the mental math, probably thinking of the many ways in which a butcher like Spiessbach could inflict pain on her grandma in the misguided pursuit of his ‘medicine.’

It took less than a minute for her to transition from scared and upset to full-on
livid.

“Alright,” she said at last, reaching up to clutch at the pentacle necklace that had been hidden beneath the neck of her shirt. “I’m in.”

“Me too.” Brandon clapped a meaty hand on both of our shoulders. “What’s the plan?”

The truth was, I didn’t really have one. It wasn’t like there’d been much time to think over the course of the past few minutes.

“Have you guys ever seen
Ghostbusters?
” They both nodded. “Good. Then the plan should be really easy to remember.”

“Don’t cross the streams?” Becky frowned.

I shook my head. “No. We don’t have proton packs. Come on, follow me. I’ll fill you in when we get there.”

There was nothing I wanted to do less in the entire world than start the long, daunting climb up that main staircase, towards the sixth floor and the operating room that waited for us up there.

When I reached out to grab the handrail for support, I was a little surprised to realize that my hand was actually beginning to tremble. I chose to believe that it was the adrenaline, rather than the fear which was causing it, that was behind the shakes that now seemed to be spreading throughout my entire body.

Holding the lantern up high with my right hand, I started to put one foot in front of the other and just repeated the process, climbing each set of stairs with ever-increasing reluctance. Each step was covered in threadbare red carpeting that had frayed around the edges and was now full of holes, so we had to take it slow and be careful not to trip.

Becky and Brandon were right behind me, and man was I thankful for that. I don’t know that my nerves would have held out if I had had to make that climb all by myself.

On the first landing that we reached, I paused for a few seconds simply to listen for anything out of the ordinary, and to poke my head through the access doorway on the west side, sweeping the balcony for threats. Row upon row of dark and once-empty patient residence rooms stared back at me, just as they had done earlier that evening, but with one crucial difference: they were no longer empty.

Not a single one of them.

Each room was lit up from within by a dancing and flickering colored light; most of them were some shade or variation of blue, but others were orange, red, or purple.

In every single window stood the ghostly figure of one of the sanatorium’s former residents. Some rooms held three, four, even five spirits, packed in tightly together. All of them were doing the same thing – standing mutely, look straight back at me.

The looks on those faces all seemed to be pleading for help, though not one of them spoke a word to me. It was the look of a bunch of prison inmates who had been beaten down by a particularly brutal and ruthless warden.

They had lost all hope.

I was determined to give it back to them.

“Oh my
God.
”

“So I’m guessing you can see them too,” I said to Brandon, who was peeking over my shoulder at the long row of apparitions.

“Uh huh. This is…man, this is just
unreal.
Like,
pinch me
unreal.”

“They look so
lost,
the poor things.” Becky’s voice was sad. “I’m not frightened of them, which seems pretty weird. Do you think they want to hurt us, Danny?”

“I doubt it. They’re pretty beaten down, and most of them aren’t bad people really…they’re just, well,
people
, you know? What they’ve been through since they died must have been horrible, but we are sure as hell going to put a stop to
that.
”

I hoped that I sounded a lot more determined that I actually felt. Both inside and outside, I was shaking with fear, and it was getting more and more difficult to pretend otherwise.

Letting the door close as gently as possible, I started back up the stairs again. I was feeling hesitant, yeah, but also fiercely determined, and getting more so by the minute. The thought of what Spiessbach and his cronies had been doing to the poor, unfortunate souls that they had kept trapped in this place, was starting to prey on my mind and to really,
really
drive me nuts. I didn’t care that in his own crazy, perverted way he might believe that he was acting in their best interests, by trying to cure an illness that none of them even
had
now they were in their spirit bodies; I remembered way too clearly how it had felt to be strapped down to his operating table from my nightmare last night, which was looking more and more like I had actually traveled here in spirit rather than just dreamed about the place, and be opened up with that cold steel scalpel.

This needed to stop, and I was going to make damned sure that it did.

The screaming got louder and louder the further we climbed, growing more intense and anguished with every cry. A sick feeling was starting to fill my stomach.

Jake may have been a dirtbag, but nobody deserved
this,
not even a meth cook who liked to take potshots at teenagers with his Glock.

When we reached the sixth floor, I ignored the balcony exit doors that stood on both the left and right sides, choosing instead to push forward until we hit the central corridor that backed onto both the north and south rows of patient rooms.

All three of us clustered together on that landing, hiding behind the uncertain (and probably imaginary, if we were honest) protection of the western door, which was closed and seemed to be taunting us silently. I knew only too well that the sanatorium’s operating room lay at the far end of that central hallway, and we had an appointment with the monster that made his home there.

Jake screamed again. The piercing shriek cut right through me, forcing its way down deep into my already-squirming gut.

“So what’s the plan?” From the tone of his voice, Brandon’s heart must have been racing every bit as fast as mine was.

Never mind my heart, though. My
mind
was drawing a total blank.

Plan?
What
plan?

I’d led these guys up here with no more of a plan in the back of my head than confronting Spiessbach and his team of nurses from hell, and somehow trying to get rid of them. Now it was time for me to deliver, and I was totally clueless.

I knew I couldn’t reason with him; Spiessbach was his own special kind of crazy, and he was hardly likely to listen to sense after spending so many years of his afterlife in the same rut, carrying out surgery after surgery on the helpless dead patients of Long Brook.

I’d heard about some spirits ending up like this before, driven insane by years of obsessively, repetitively following the same old goal in the same old way. What was weirdest about
this
situation was the way that Spiessbach had managed to get not only his team of assistants to buy into this hellhole of a limbo situation, but also hundreds, maybe
thousands,
of innocent patients to stick around as well. The dude sure could intimidate when he wanted to; either that, or he had rolled a
wicked
charisma score on his D20.

“I have an idea.”

Thank God for Becky, because I was fresh out.

“Let’s hear it.”

“There’s a ceremony …well, it’s more of a
spell,
really…that Wiccans use to cast out evil spirits. I mean, we have lots of stuff like that; ways to ward off evil, to cast out spirits, sometimes just to protect ourselves and our loved ones.” She smiled, putting a hand on both of our shoulders. Despite the nasty situation we found ourselves in, the simple, affectionate contact sent a warm ripple running through me.

Man, but I liked this girl.

“Sort of like an exorcism?” Brandon asked, excitement apparent in his voice.

“
Sort of,
I suppose..
.
but without the twisting heads and puking green soup.”

“So you can use that on Spiessbach? Blast his ass out of here with some kind of magic spell?”

“Maybe.” She sounded a little doubtful. “But there are no guarantees, boys. Wicca isn’t a faith that’s strong on confrontation.”

“I thought you were all witches and warlocks and stuff?”

“This is reality, Brandon, not a scary movie,” she laughed, keeping her voice low. “Yes, we practice spells and charms and wards, but it’s not like I can shoot lightning bolts from my fingers or anything like that. A lot of our faith is practiced with spells and invocations. Wiccans will fight when pushed, but we really have to be provoked in order for us to go nuclear.”

“Right now I’m feeling pretty damn provoked, Becky. Do you need anything to make this work?” I wanted to know. “Or at least try it? Because right now, it sounds like our best shot.”

“There are no ingredients to this sort of casting. Just the proper words, and the right intent.”

Tucking the pistol into her waistband, Becky pulled out the iPad from inside her backpack and fired it up. I peeked at the power bar. Holy crap. Only 7% left. This place was draining energy from it, even when it wasn’t being used.

She quickly double-tapped the icon to open her e-reader app, bringing up a book titled
The Wiccan Arts: Practical Magick For Everyday Use.
A big pentacle adorned the cover, along with what I assumed were a bunch of arcane symbols or runes.

Swiping her pointer finger rapidly from right to left across the tablet screen, Becky flipped through the pages of the e-book, finally settling on the one she had in mind, her lips moving noiselessly as she followed along with the words, going over them several times while we waited in tense silence.

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…