Agonal Breath (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 1) (13 page)

“Yeah, Becky,” I said supportively, patting her hand in what I hoped wasn’t a condescending way. “Tell us what’s going on.”

She took a deep breath, then paused as if deciding whether or not to take us both into her confidence. Finally, Becky said slowly, “I never got to meet my grandmother…my Mom’s mom, I mean. She died before I was born. Mom doesn’t like to talk about her much, and when she does, she never goes into much detail. I do know that Mom misses her a lot, but I guess it’s still too painful for her to bring up the past, even now…”

Brandon was still clueless, but I was beginning to see where this was going. “What did your grandmother die from?” I suspected that I already knew the answer. Becky looked up at him tearfully.

“Like I said, Mom wouldn’t tell me for sure, but I’m guessing that it was tuberculosis,” she said. “That’s what pretty much everybody around here died from.”

Now it was all starting to make sense. “She died here, at Long Brook, didn’t she, Becky?” I said gently. She nodded, a single tear running down her cheek.

“Yes.”

The light bulb suddenly went on above Brandon’s head. “You were looking for her room!” he said triumphantly. Becky nodded again.

“I understand that we’ll probably never find it. There were thousands of patients here, thousands of deaths. Grandma must have lived…and died…in one of those rooms, but not all of them have photos of the people who stayed there, and even those ones that
do
only have one or two photos on the wall. I just…wanted to try, to see if I could get closer to her somehow…”

“And you thought that
I
could help,” I finished for her, feeling just a little bit annoyed at her. It must have bled through into my voice, because Becky looked up at me guiltily; that made
me
feel guilty in turn. I hadn’t meant to touch a nerve.

“Yes,” she admitted. “I did. I didn’t mean to mislead you, Danny; I just knew that you could see ghosts, and thought that maybe if you came to Long Brook with me…”

“He could talk to your grandma for you,” Brandon put in.

“If she was still here,” Becky agreed. “That’s was I was hoping for. I’m sorry, Danny.”

I sighed. First Brandon, now Becky…how could I get angry with somebody who was just trying to connect with a dead relative, even one she’d never met?

“It’s okay,” I reassured her. “Do you have a picture of your grandmother?”

Becky beamed, that brilliant smile which had always made me go weak at the knees on the few occasions that I had been on the receiving end of it. She unlocked her iPad and swiped at the screen, bringing up the image of a middle-aged lady, in her late thirties or possibly her early forties. The photo was in color, but based on the resolution and contrast, it was still pretty old.

“I took a photo of one of Mom’s Polaroids,” Becky explained, twisting the tablet to make the image taller. It looked as if the photo had been taken in somebody’s back yard on a sunny summer’s day. The smiling woman who was sitting on a wooden bench and holding a tall glass of something cold seemed to be really happy. Her dark hair was streaked through with gray, and appeared to be catching a light breeze, lifting and blowing out to the side of her face. The complexion of her skin was tanned and healthy, with no hint of the pale sweats that came down upon tuberculosis sufferers when the disease really took hold.

“What was her name?” Brandon asked.

“Jennifer. Jennifer Roderick.”

He nodded, as if the name meant something to him.

“I’ll all keep an eye out for her,” I said, “and if I see Jennifer, I promise that I’ll tell you, okay?”

“Danny, thank-you so much!” Becky said, obviously delighted. She also sounded relieved, as though she had been dreading my finding out about the real reason for bringing me up here. Truth to tell, I still wasn’t sure quite how I felt about that yet. On the one hand, Becky had been a little…
economical
with the truth, painting it as nothing more than a night in a haunted house, something like paranormal tourism. On the other, she hadn’t actually lied to me, at least not so far as I could tell — who could really blame her for wanting to take a Deadseer along to the place where her grandmother had died? “I’m really sorry I didn’t tell you about my grandma yesterday, I just…I thought you might not want to come, if you knew that I was hoping you would talk to her spirit.”

“Hey, am I really
that
unapproachable?” I asked, feeling just a little hurt.

“Oh no, it’s nothing like
that,
” she rushed to explain. “But I saw what happened on the street yesterday and…” Becky suddenly had to search for the right words “you just looked so
intense,
after Brandon left and you were talking to yourself..
.
well, to his grandmother,” she corrected herself.
“
I really didn’t want to get on your bad side. I can’t be one hundred percent sure, but for a second there it looked to me like your eyes changed.”

She looked towards Brandon for confirmation. “That’s kind of why I ran,” he admitted. “Your eyes went sort of dark, right after I got slapped. It really freaked me out, man.”

“When you say dark…are we talking just angry eyes, or black-
black
eyes?”

“Black-black,” they both said together. “I couldn’t see the whites of your eyes any more, Danny,” Becky continued. “And to be honest, it was kind of scary.”

That was a little worrying. Blackening of the eyes was usually a sign of spirit possession, and it usually wasn’t a
good
spirit you were talking about. I’d encountered one or two ghosts with black eyes before too, they were usually not the kind of spirits you wanted to interact with if you could possibly help it.

“Evil is a very real force in this world,” Lamiyah had told me once, during one of our late-night chats. “Those who are steeped in darkness are usually highly skilled in the arts of disguise and camouflage — all except for the eyes, Daniel.
Always look to the eyes,
” she had emphasized. “They truly are windows into the soul, and a darkness of the soul — or a total lack of one — will always be reflected there, if you know how to look for it.”

Suddenly, her reasons for bringing Brandon along made a little more sense to me. The guy could bench-press three of me with one arm tied behind his back. If what they were both describing was true (and I had no reason to doubt their story) then bringing along a little extra security in the form of a muscle-bound meat-head seemed like a really smart move.

I hadn’t
felt
myself getting possessed. Whatever had happened, it couldn’t have taken very long. “Just a few seconds,” Becky confirmed when I asked her about it. So the intrusion, possession, call it whatever you will, had been over very quickly, which was at least a little bit reassuring. If something had tried to take control of my consciousness, it hadn’t succeeded; but I was starting to feel more than a little nervous, the more I thought about it.

A shiver ran through me as I was standing there in the shadows of the second floor balcony, in the company of two strangers who I hoped might both be on the way to becoming friends…that old feeling of, as Mom always liked to say, ‘somebody just walked over my grave.’

I had just remembered something from my nightmare last night. The crazy surgeon and his gang of equally crazy nurses…all of them had had completely black-within-black eyes, hadn’t they?

Oh, crap.

CHAPTER EIGHT

We spent the next couple of hours just roaming and generally exploring the sanatorium, without any real plan.

Even then, there was no way we could possibly have seen everything that there was to see. The building just
sprawled.
Trying to at least be a little bit methodical, we went from room to room, most of which looked pretty similar in layout. Some had been trashed a little more aggressively than others, but all of them had seen much better days. Dry paint flaked and chipped from the walls. In some places, the bare floorboards were completely exposed, and we could peer down into the room on the floor directly below.

“
That’s
going to be a worry when it gets dark,” I pointed out. “Not to sound like too much of a wuss, but it would be way too easy for one of us to step into one of those holes when the lights are out and end up falling all the way through.” I deliberately didn’t add the words ‘to our death.’

“I have something that should help with that.” Becky rummaged around in her backpack and triumphantly produced a packet of slender, transparent plastic tubes. At first glance, I thought they were drinking straws, but they were a little bit thicker than that; when she twisted one with an audible
crunch
and I saw it begin to give off a sickly blue glow, I realized what they really were.

“Glowsticks!
Awesome idea!” Brandon enthused, taking one from her and holding it up for inspection.

“
Don’t activate it until we find another hole like this,” Becky warned him. “I only have a limited supply, so we can’t afford to waste any.” Squatting down on her haunches, she made a small hoop out of the glowstick, joining both ends together and securing it around a rusted old water-pipe that ran along the wall close to the gaping hole.
“
There.” Satisfied, Becky stood up and dusted herself off. “That ought to do it.”

“That
is
an awesome idea,” I agreed with Brandon, genuinely impressed. Now, if any of us entered this room after nightfall, the luminous blue glowstick would serve as a warning, reminding us to tread very carefully.

We explored the entire second floor, walking from end to end. It was mostly just more patient rooms, separated every so often by a flight of stairs where one wing met with another. All three of us made a point of looking at the names and photographs of each former occupant that were posted on the walls, some in cheap glass picture frames and others slipped into protective plastic sleeves that had been duct-taped to the walls. None of them bore Becky’s grandmother’s name though, and I could sense her disappointment beginning to build as we climbed up to the third floor and found exactly the same thing.

Zip. Zilch. Nada.

“Have you seen anything yet, Danny?” she asked me hopefully.

“No spirits yet, if that’s what you mean.” From the crestfallen look on her face, that
was
what she had meant. “But I’ll keep looking.” I offered an encouraging smile, unwilling to make any more promises than that. I definitely didn’t want to set her up for failure.

No matter what the TV shows said, there was no guarantee that Long Brook was haunted
at all.
Quite a few places aren’t; just because they’re old, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they have earthbound spirits attached. Oh, sometimes spirits passed through randomly on their travels, but there weren’t likely going to be many of them wandering around a neighborhood like this — we were in the middle of nowhere, the nearest town being a good few miles to the south of us. Nederland’s dead probably stayed close to Nederland, at least until they finally moved on into the next world.

For my money though, we would probably encounter at least one or two of the sanatorium’s former patients as the night wore on. I was pretty sure that one or two of them would still be earthbound, but we’d just have to wait and see.

We skipped the next few floors, figuring that we’d get to them later, and climbed all the way up to the roof. I was huffing and puffing like a steam train when we finally reached the top, holding the rickety handrail for support. Brandon was hardly even out of breath, which didn’t exactly endear him to me; but to be honest, now that I was spending some time in his company, I was beginning to warm to the big guy just a little. I really didn’t think that he was a bad guy, just a regular dude who had had a really difficult home life and tended to take the frustrations that it caused out on those kids who were weaker than he was (which was pretty much all of us, to be fair).

“The door’s pretty stiff.” Brandon tried the rusted handle. With a twist, he got it to start rotating a little, but the door itself obstinately refused to open more than a tiny crack. “We’ll soon see about
that.
” In a move that he had probably learned on the football field or the Krav Maga mat, Brandon shoulder-barged the door. It lost the contest right off the bat, swinging wide open on hinges that squealed in protest. He looked quite pleased with himself, but Becky seemed not to notice, which quickly deflated his ego. I tried not to feel
too
happy about that, and failed.

We emerged onto the sanatorium roof from a boxy brick enclosure that capped the top flight of the staircase. The roof was a broad, flat expanse, stretching out across the top of each wing on either side of us. Old wooden tables and chairs were scattered in small clusters, perhaps left over from the days in which the Long Brook staff members would take lunch breaks up here. It would have been a pretty nice way to get some peace and quiet, I thought, and also maybe catch a few rays without the bother of having patients around.