Agonal Breath (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 1)

by Richard Estep

  Still, I felt like I had to at least make one more attempt to make her see the light…quite literally. Or at the very least, get her out of this place. I could worry about helping her cross over once we were all safe again.

  “Polly, if you wanted to come with us…that would be okay. You could stay with me and my mom.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Danny,” Polly said with a seriousness and dignity that seemed far beyond her years, “but I can’t. Who would look after Mister Long Brook?” She squeezed the giant’s hand affectionately, and I swear that for just a second, I saw the big lug smile right back at her. “Anyway, I need to be here when Mommy comes back to get me.”

  I really, really wanted to tell Polly that her mom was waiting for her, but that she needed to accept that she was dead first, and then cross over into the Summerland, but I just couldn’t get the words out. The last time somebody had suggested to Polly that she might not be among the living any more, she had gone ballistic and caused Mister Long Brook to practically force me off the roof. There was no way I was going to risk that happening again, but I could at least do the next best thing.

  “If you change your mind, Polly, just call out to Lamiyah, okay?” Polly nodded happily. “Lamiyah will come and help you out, I promise.”

  “Okay, Danny. It’s a deal.” She beamed at me, and my heart practically melted. I felt totally comfortable making the promise on Lamiyah’s behalf; I knew Lamiyah well enough to be sure that she would drop everything to help out another little girl in distress. “I’m sorry that you have to go. Would you like me and Mister Long Brook to go with you to the door?”

  “I’d like that very much, Polly.”

  Stepping carefully past the wreckage of the shattered wooden door, our group of five made its way slowly into the dark stairwell. Becky had wanted to go first again, but Brandon had overruled her (and surprisingly, she had let him) and took the lead himself. Becky went in the middle, I was in third place, and the Polly/Mister Long Brook pairing brought up the rear.

  Everything was going great until we reached the third floor landing. Then all of our flashlights died at the same time.

  I couldn’t help it: I yelled. Even Brandon let out a tiny cry of surprise. To her credit, Becky was the only one who stayed completely calm.

  “Hey guys, cut it out!” She was talking to thin air, but didn’t seem even the slightest bit self-conscious.

  The stairwell was now almost totally pitch black, brightened only by the small amount of light coming in through the windows on each landing.

  While it’s true that I can’t read minds, or anything even close to it, I knew exactly what we were all thinking right now: how did the batteries in three flashlights all crap out at the same time? However I spun it, I came up with an answer that I didn’t like one little bit.

  I pulled out my iPhone to check the charge on that, and found that it was down to 30% now. Tempting as it was to turn on its little built-in light, I knew that we might need it for something more urgent later on, and slipped it reluctantly back into the thigh pocket of my cargo pants. Draining electrical devices was a classic method for spirits to power their own physical manifestations. The hairs went up on the back of my neck at the thought of just who might be trying to do that to us.

  “We’ll just take it really slow,” Becky encouraged us, sounding surprisingly chipper. That girl must have quite the acting chops, I thought, because she sounded a heck of a lot more confident than I was feeling.

  We began to move again, keeping to Brandon’s pace as he picked his way cautiously from step to step, one hand on the outer wall and the other sliding along the handrail.

  What felt like an eternity later (but really couldn’t have been more than five minutes of actual time) we had made it safely to the ground floor. I’d deliberately avoided peeking out onto each of the balconies as we made our way down from floor to floor, not wanting my worst fears to be confirmed by what I might see there. I could feel the energies inside the sanatorium starting to build, and not in a good way. This felt more like the negative energy that would be associated with darker spirits, completely different from the innocent, childlike vibe that I was getting from Polly.

  Something was awakening within the walls of Long Brook Sanatorium, and whatever it was meant us nothing but harm. The power that I could sense growing slowly but surely in the background was something to be feared, not investigated. Our amateur ghost-hunting night was over, and it was time to change gears and switch over into escape mode.

  Brandon led us out into the long, bare corridor that we had explored on our way up to the roof. We passed the kitchens on our right side, and damn me for a fool if I didn’t catch a glimpse of somebody moving around in there, a dark human-like shape that flitted quickly between two deep pools of shadow. We kept walking, but my mind wouldn’t stop turning the sighting over and examining it.

  It had struck me as being really odd. I mean, I would have expected the earthbound spirits haunting Long Brook to be those who had died here, the patients who had coughed up lungs full up blood in the rooms upstairs. Why would one of the cooks have returned here after their death? It was hardly the sort of joyful paradise on Earth that would attract the employees to come back and hang out in.

  None of us were expecting the gunshot.

  It was deafeningly loud in the close confines of the corridor, the after-echoes running along its entire length. In the split-second flash from the muzzle, I caught sight of a man’s figure standing at the far end of the corridor ahead of us, pointing what looked like a handgun straight at our group.

  Then the hallway was plunged back into darkness and silence again.

  We were all too shocked to scream. There was a moment of silence and stillness; everything seemed frozen, just as it had on the roof when Mister Long Brook had made his spectacular entrance.

  Suddenly, the dark form of the man began walking towards us, and a second man came out of the kitchen doorway behind me. I could see the cold shine of ambient light reflecting from a gun in his hand too.

  “Don’t you take another step,” he growled, and that shattered the spell of immobility right there.

  My eyes had gotten a little more used to the darkness since our flashlights had failed in the stairwell, so I was able to pick out Brandon tottering weakly for a couple of steps, reaching out an unsteady hand to support himself against the wall. I thought for a moment that he had perhaps been blinded by the flash, but then he slid limply down the wall and collapsed in a heap.

  No, I realized, Brandon hadn’t been blinded at all.

  Brandon had been shot.

  I wanted to stick around and help my friend, I really, truly did. That’s what my mind wanted to do, what my heart wanted to do — check on Brandon, and get him away from the lunatic that had shot him.

  But that’s not what I actually did.

  What I actually did was what any sane person would have done under those same circumstances, or so I would tell myself later on when it would keep me awake at night.

  I bolted.

  Things got very confusing, and they got that way very quickly. My memory is still a little hazy now (gunfire in a pitch-black haunted building will play havoc with your sense of recall) but I remember turning around and slamming into a brick wall that I hadn’t even realized was there.

  It turned out that it wasn’t a wall at all, but rather the man-mountain called Mister Long Brook, who I’d forgotten was bringing up the rear along with Polly. The little girl squealed and simply disappeared into thin air, followed a second later by her protector. That was a handy little trick, if you could swing it. I was flesh and blood, though, and fully intended on staying that way.

  I knew that I couldn’t run to either end of the corridor without running towards a gun, so that left me with no other real choice. I dived head-first through the nearest open window.

  At least I landed on dirt and weeds rather than concrete, but it still knocked most of the air out of me in a whoosh. I
rolled sideways, stalks of thick wild grass whipping against my face and stinging my cheeks.

  From the sound of it, Becky must have had the same bright idea, though she would have implemented it way more gracefully than I did. I could hear a pair of feet land lightly in the grass behind me.

  “Danny, come on!” It was Becky alright. She grabbed the back of my shirt in a bunched fist and half-dragged, half-carried me to my feet and into a run.

  “You kids come back here!” one of the men yelled. “We ain’t gonna hurt you!”

  Three crack-crack-cracks coming in rapid succession showed that for the lie that it was. Fortunately the bullets didn’t come anywhere close to us, and we could hear them zipping their way merrily through the tree branches away to our left.

  Becky and I just kept running. We zig-zagged towards the wrecked Blazer. Don’t ask me why; maybe in my mind, I just thought it would make a decent shield against the random gunfire. Maybe we were just being drawn to it like moths to a flame.

  Behind us, the two men let loose another couple of rounds. These came closer than the first shots had, but still missed us by a good ten feet or so.

  Whoever these guys were, they weren’t among the dead former patients of the sanatorium. If I had to bet, I’d put my money on them being trespassers, the same as us. But if that was the case, why would they take potshots at a group of kids doing the same thing that they were? Being caught trespassing here was hardly worth killing us over, surely…what was it that they were so desperate to hide?

  “Into the trees!” Becky hissed. Taking cover (or at least concealment) seemed like a great idea to me, so I followed her through the treeline and up the heavily wooded slope.

  After we had climbed maybe a hundred feet, I realized that our pursuers would never be able to find us now, not until it was daylight at least. There was barely enough light from the stars and tiny crescent of moon for us to see by, so I began to feel a little more secure. Heck, Becky and I could barely see one another. “Who were those people?”

  “No idea,” I shrugged invisibly. Then reality brought me crashing back down to Earth, and I added, “but I think they shot Brandon.”

  “Oh my God…” Becky sounded close to tears, and frankly I couldn’t blame her. I felt close enough myself. This was supposed to be a fun and mildly scary overnight adventure (with hopefully a little romance thrown in), and now one of us might be dead. I felt myself slowly turning cold and numb inside, as though some great heavy rock was sitting in my guts.

  Lamiyah tried to warn you, I thought guiltily, she told you there was great danger. Why couldn’t you have been more careful?

  I felt a pair of arms around me, and realized that they were trembling. Then I realized that I was trembling too. For I don’t know how long, Becky and I just held one another, standing there underneath the canopy of leaves and branches on the hillside behind the sanatorium.

  “So what are we going to do?” I said at last.

  “Leave and get the cops,” she replied in a small, quiet voice.

  “We can’t. We don’t know if Brandon is still alive, but I know that if we leave him, those men will be gone by the time we get back with the cavalry, and they’ll almost certainly have taken him with them.” I deliberately left out the part at the end that would have gone “or his body.”

  “So what, then?” She sounded frustrated. I knew just how she felt.

  “I think we have to go back.”

  “Danny, those men have guns!” she hissed.

  “I know, but it’s either that or risk losing Brandon forever. Besides, I don’t think he’s dead.”

  “You don’t?” Sudden optimism blossomed in Becky’s voice. “How can you tell?”

  “Well, I can’t be sure,” I hedged, “but I’m pretty sure that if Brandon had been killed, his spirit would have made contact with me by now...or I’d be able to sense it, at least — and it hasn’t. Not a peep.”

  “Then we have to try and find him,” she said defiantly. “Maybe those men think we’ve made a run for it by now. It’s what anybody with any common sense would have done.” Becky laughed, more than a little hysterically, I thought. It was a little forced, but if it was intended to keep my morale up, it was sort of working.

  “It’s a really big building, but we can’t risk splitting up. We’ll go in through the front door this time, and just search floor by floor,” I decided on the spur of the moment. “Maybe I can ask Polly and Mister Long Brook to help out. We’ll cover much more ground that way.”

  As plans went, it was hardly original (or particularly brilliant) but it was the best we had to work with.

  There was just enough starlight for us to work our way carefully out of the trees without getting poked in the eye by a branch, though I did accidentally snap one or two of them in the process. Each time I heard that telltale crack of breaking wood I would stop and strain my ears to listen, but nobody ever came to investigate.

  Hugging the very edge of the treeline in order to provide a little concealment from hostile eyes, Becky and I skirted around the eastern edge of the sanatorium until we were positioned parallel to the front of the building. Seeing nothing obviously amiss, we made our way cautiously toward the front door, crouching in a duck-walk which was actually pretty pointless in terms of stealth value but at least made me feel a little bit better about being so exposed.

  The front door was still wedged open, exactly as we had left it, with the chain still coiled neatly beside it. Remembering how loudly the door had creaked when we had opened it earlier that afternoon, I led Becky further along towards the western wings and clambered through the first window I found there, helping her through behind me.

  The familiar, rounded shape of the stage told me that we were back in the dining hall again. Moving mostly by touch and feel this time, we ran the gauntlet of chairs and tables in order to get to the far end, where another doorway led to a long access corridor that was pretty similar to the one we had followed on the opposite side of the building.

  I tried really hard not to think of it as “the hallway where Brandon got shot,” hoping for all I was worth that my friend was still alive.

  The shells of smashed-out windows ran along our left side, and on the right were a string of interior doors, spaced at fairly regular intervals. A lot of them opened out onto the same rooms that we had glanced into from that other hallway; the same kitchen from with the armed stranger had helped ambush us, laundry rooms, and administrative offices. All of them were dark and deserted, with no signs of life at all.

  Finally we came to the first western stairwell. “Keep going west, or check the upper floors?” I whispered to Becky. Frankly, I had no idea what the right thing to do next was. It seemed like a coin-toss decision, and wasn’t like I could ask Lamiyah any more. She had been forced out by whatever malevolent presence held the sanatorium in its grasp.

  “Let’s try upstairs,” Becky shrugged, obviously as clueless as I was. We climbed carefully to the second floor, keeping to the sides of the staircase as much as possible, and prowled westward along the south-facing balcony, looking inside the first patient room that we came to.

  It was every bit as empty as it had been when we had passed it in the fading light of the afternoon, yet I couldn’t help but notice that there was a subtle energy in the air that hadn’t been there before, kind of like an electro-static charge or the sort of ionization you get when there’s a thunderstorm on the way.

  Something was building, I reminded myself. Long Brook was waking up, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be here when it did.

  “Hey,” Becky grabbed my arm to stop me from walking past the first room. “Why don’t we take the central hallway?” She was right, and I could have slapped myself for my own blind stupidity. Sticking to the north and south balconies might have given us a little more ambient light, but it would take twice as long to check all of the rooms. If we went down the pitch-black inner hallway, on the other hand, we’d be able to peek into the north an
d south patient rooms at practically the same time and clear them twice as fast.

  “Good idea.”

  Leading the way, I stepped past the remains of the cast-iron bedframe and through the doorway that led out into the central corridor. Not a thing was moving.

  I indicated that Becky should take the rooms on the north side, while I stuck to the south.

  We worked our way methodically from doorway to doorway, peeking inside and clearing it. I don’t know why I thought that we might find Brandon up here, but we had to do something, and covering at least some of the vast amount of square footage in the sanatorium in search of our friend qualified in my book.

  Lost in my own thoughts, I was jerked to a sudden stop when Becky grabbed my arm again. Annoyed, I was about to ask her just what the heck she thought she was doing, when I saw that she had a finger pressed firmly to her lips, giving me the universal sign for ‘shush!’ Obediently, I quit moving and just listened.

  Then I heard it.

  Oh crap, I thought. The sound of footsteps was slowly approaching, coming towards us from the far end of the central hallway. I couldn’t see anything yet, which was good news — if I couldn’t see the person making those sounds, hopefully they couldn’t see us either.

  This time, it was my turn to grab Becky’s arm, and pull her gently but deliberately into the patient room on our ride. We could both hear the heavy, measured tread getting louder and louder as it approached.

  “Under the bed!” I hissed, dropping to my knees and slithering underneath the bedframe. It stank under here, and my knee started to get cold and damp. I must have slid into a small puddle of water.

  I fit snugly under there, but there was no room left for Becky. Thinking on her feet, she quickly darted through the south-facing door and out onto the balcony. I caught a glimpse of her disappearing to the right, and realized that she was going to conceal herself under the bed in the neighboring room.