The ambulance began to slowly work its way along the driveway, the same track we’d used to reach the sanatorium a lifetime ago. I felt a squeeze in my other arm. Mrla was taking my blood pressure.
Ryan the paramedic was in the driving seat. Guiding the ambulance carefully along the rough He called out to me over his shoulder. “So, I’ve got to ask…what the hell happened to you guys up there?”
Looking through the two oval back windows of the ambulance, all I could see was the flash of multi-colored emergency lights surrounding the angry orange glow that had once been Long Brook Sanatorium.
“I don’t know where to start,” I said at last. “All I can tell you is, nothing will ever be the same again.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Author’s Note
I hope that you have enjoyed “Agonal Breath.” If so, please consider leaving a review or rating on Amazon.com. I would be most grateful.
I have spent the better part of twenty years investigating claims of the paranormal, on both sides of the Atlantic. Readers who are interested in that particular story can learn all about it in my ghost-hunting biography, In Search of the Paranormal, in which my team and I spent nights looking for ghosts inside a number of very haunted buildings.
The truth is that ghost hunting is a rather boring business, at least for most of the time. Even the most paranormally-active buildings aren’t that way twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week…so there is a lot of waiting around, waiting for things to happen.
That’s not a great deal of fun to read about, and one of the benefits of writing about it (whether in fact or fiction) is that the author has the luxury of cutting out most of the boring parts for you, the reader.
Agonal Breath is not based on any sanatorium or haunted hospital in particular (although I have investigated and written about quite a few, as detailed in my book The World’s Most Haunted Hospitals) but there are a number of very similar facilities scattered across the landscape of North America. Many of them lie in ruins now, and are laid out essentially as I have described Long Brook Sanatorium in this novel.
I did not exaggerate in the slightest concerning the cruelty and brutality of the early and mid-Twentieth Century medical treatments for tuberculosis. All of the treatments that I have described in Agonal Breath were in common practice at one time or another, and represented the very best efforts of medical science to combat the blight that was TB.
The physicians and nursing staff of the time worked long hours in the fight against that wretched disease, and it was a fight that they were very often bound to lose. One can only shake their head and wonder at how it must have affected them, both physically and emotionally.
Nor has the battle against tuberculosis been won yet. Statistics published by the World Health Organization cite an estimated nine million new tuberculosis cases in 2013, and an estimated one million deaths.
Globally, the disease continues to take its toll.
On a rather more pleasant note, most of my characters are entirely fictitious. Marko von Spiessbach did not exist, thankfully, but he came to life when I needed a suitably Germanic-sounding name, which was stolen from my fellow Firefighter-Paramedic Mark Spiessbach. Mark is, I can assure you, one of the nicest and most decent people you could ever wish to meet, and is nothing at all like his war criminal counterpart.
Much the same can be said for Jake Dickes, who jumped at the chance to have a meth dealer named after him in the book. Jake is also a superb firefighter and devoted family man who is nothing like his namesake.
Billy Kraft, on the other hand, is every bit the same in reality as he appears in the book. None was more surprised than I when the grizzled 911 communications center manager shoehorned his way into the scene and started talking (which is pretty much his modus operandi in real life) and so I left him in. I’m very happy to report that at the time of writing, he is most definitely not dead.
Much of Boulder County is as I have described it. Where liberties need to be taken in order to serve the needs of the book, I hope that the reader will forgive any inaccuracies. I would like to offer my heart felt thanks to Laura T. for her proofing and copy-editing skills, and to test readers Katy Wheatley, Dr. Catlyn Keenan, Shannon Bradley Byers, and Dibe Hall for taking the time to read the book in advance and to offer feedback, and to Mihai Costea for designing such an awesome cover.
As the ruins of Long Brook Sanatorium burn slowly down into cold ashes and embers, I feel that it is in no way giving out a spoiler to tell you that the dead have not yet finished with Danny, Becky, and Brandon…not by a long shot. There are many more future adventures left for the Deadseer and his new-found friends, as they travel a road of adventure, excitement, heartbreak— and of course, lots and lots of ghosts…
Richard Estep
Longmont, Colorado
September 2015
Agonal Breath (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 1) Page 25