Agonal Breath (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 1) (18 page)

I put him at about seven feet tall, and if you made me guess, I would have gone with something like three hundred pounds, maybe three-fifty, but rather than muscle and flesh, he appeared to be made almost entirely out of dark gray or black smoke, or at least something that had a very similar consistency. Whatever it was, it must have been able to harden on demand, because the damage inflicted on the door was all too real.

A pair of glowing red eyes burned like two red-hot coals. I somehow couldn’t bring myself to look away from them; there was some weird kind of hypnotic quality there, and beneath it, what felt like a bottomless well of almost animalistic fury. Powerful-looking arms spread wide, in the manner of a predator stalking towards its prey and casting a broad net in which to trap it.

The man-shaped thing was picking up speed, stomping towards me and causing tremors with every footstep, making the roof shake and my body tremble when I realized that
I
seemed to be its chosen target. I couldn’t go left. I couldn’t go right. He was too close for that. All I could do was stumble backwards, towards the edge of the roof.

“Oh, crap,” was all that I could think of to say.

It appeared that Mister Long Brook had just arrived.

“Mister Long Brook — no!”

Polly’s high-pitched squeal stopped the thing dead in its tracks. Frozen in fear, I almost wet myself with the sheer relief when Mister Long Brook obeyed her shrill command.

There was maybe five feet of rooftop separating us — six at most — and when I slowly turned my head to look behind me, reluctant to take my eyes from the malevolent dark form for even a fraction of a second, I saw to my absolute horror that the parapet was only two or three strides away. I was three steps away from a six-story drop that would turn me into another resident ghost here at the sanatorium.

Time seemed to stand still, all five of us frozen in place where we stood. Mister Long Brook and I watched each other in total silence. After who knows how much time had passed, I slowly let out a long breath that I hadn’t even realized I had been holding until now, and fought to regain control of trembling muscles that until now had refused to obey my commands.

Mister Long Brook turned slowly towards the little girl whose scream had been the only thing which had prevented him from chasing me to my death. He cocked his head to one side and regarded her in the manner of an inquisitive dog eying its mistress.

In the aftermath of her outburst, Polly’s ghostly form had flared into a spectacular purple color. Now that she seemed to be calming down a little, it was slowly returning to its usual faded blue.

“Come here, Mister Long Brook.” Polly beckoned the creature over towards her, and Mister Long Brook obeyed, plodding over to stand beside her like a well-trained dog.

The little girl encircled the tree trunk-sized torso in a hug. Her arms could barely make it all the way around his waist, because it was so thick and chunky, and I noticed with genuine interest that her arms didn’t sink into Mister Long Brook’s body as they had with Becky’s. He looked amorphous, as though his body were made of smoke, but the damage that Mister Long Brook had inflicted on the rooftop door, not to mention the pounding of his feet on the rooftop, had all been very, very solid and real.

Just what on Earth
was
he
?

In fact, come to think of it, was Mister Long Brook even a
he
at all? Or was the term ‘it’ more appropriate? I studied the dark and nebulous form with as much concentration as I could drum up, considering that my heart was pounding its way out of my rib cage right now at the thought of what had almost just taken place. Mister Long Brook looked like the silhouette of a man, albeit a freaking
huge
one. His thick body, arms, and legs all looked male in their shape and dimensions, in the same way that the silhouettes of most male body-builders would look
mannish
(is that even a word? If it’s not, I’m making it one) if you brought one up here onto this same shadowy rooftop.

Was Mister Long Brook the spirit of a man who had died here at the sanatorium after which Polly had named him? I didn’t think so. He wasn’t giving off that ‘dead person’ vibe to me, and he wasn’t glowing or even a little bit transparent like most human spirits. No, I was starting to think that Mister Long Brook was something else entirely.

“Dude, what is it?” Brandon was staring at me with a look of obvious confusion written across his face. Becky was watching me too, which seemed kind of odd when you considered that there was a seven foot-tall supernatural creature not six feet away that was competing with me to be the center of attention.

I opened my mouth to speak, then closed it again when realization suddenly dawned.

“You can’t see him, can you?”

“See who?” Becky asked.

“Him. Mister Long Brook.”

“I saw the door explode,” Becky replied, looking all about her on the rooftop, “and then you freaked out and almost jumped right off the edge of the roof. But I can’t see any ‘Mister Long Brook,’ no.”

“Me either,” Brandon agreed warily.

“Well take it from me, he’s standing right there.” I nodded towards Polly, who had released the enormous entity from her bear hug and was now happily holding hands with him, her small little hand dwarfed by Mister Long Brook’s enormous one. “And he practically chased me off the roof.”

“He didn’t mean to,” Polly pouted, jumping to his defense. “When I get upset, Mister Long Brook gets
very
upset too. He thought you were hurting me.”

Mister Long Brook growled in affirmation, a low bass rumble that only Polly and I could hear. The sense of warning — and implied threat — in that growl was very clear, and I resolved to do everything in my power to stay on Mister Long Brook’s good side.

“Polly, do you know who Mister Long Brook is…I mean, where he came from?” I asked.

Polly shook her head.

“No. He lives here, with me, but he doesn’t like to talk much. He just likes to play with me, and keep me safe. He won’t hurt you as long as you’re nice to me,” she said in what she obviously thought was a reassuring manner.

Carefully, I approached them both. “I have a special friend, a girl who’s about the same age as you. She knows a
lot
of stuff about a lot of things. Do you mind if I ask her to come and play with us for a while?”

“Is she nice?” Polly asked doubtfully.

“
Very
nice,” I assured her. “Her name is Lamiyah, and she always dresses in the coolest and most colorful clothes.”

“I guess that would be okay,” she decided. I smiled, walking back to join Becky and Brandon.

“Lamiyah is my spirit guide,” I explained. “Sometimes I can call her up and ask her to help me out a little. I’d really like to know a little more about Mister Long Brook there.”

They both looked across towards the patch of empty air next to Polly. To them, it must have appeared as though she was holding hands with nothing. “If you could see him, you’d understand why.”

“What do you mean?” asked Becky, her eyes darting from Polly to me and back again.

“I don’t know
what
he is, but I’m pretty sure that he’s no human spirit.”

“Cool!” That wasn’t quite the reaction I’d been expecting from her. “Is he an elemental or something? I’ve read about those. Nature spirits of rocks, streams, and trees…”

“Yeah, I know what an elemental is. I don’t
think
so, but I’m not really sure. That’s why I want to try and call Lamiyah.”

“Call her how?” Brandon sounded intrigued. “On your iPhone? There’s no signal up here.”

I tried really hard not to roll my eyes, but I’m not sure that I succeeded. “No, man, not on my iPhone. Everybody has a spirit guide watching over them, but most people can’t actually get them to appear in the physical world. They usually talk to them in dreams. People like me are…a little different,” I added awkwardly. “If I concentrate really hard, I can sometimes get Lamiyah to manifest visually.”

“So that means that we’d be able to see her too?” Becky asked, eyes wider than a kid’s on Christmas morning.

“Sure, if she wants you to. And I don’t see why she wouldn’t want you to.”

“That sounds
awesome
.”

“It would really help if I could hold your hands and use a little of your psychic energy.” Now that really
did
feel a little awkward, but neither of them objected. Brandon asked me if it was going to hurt, and I assured him that it wouldn’t in the slightest.

I took both of their offered hands and closed my eyes. This was basically an informal seance. I’d been involved with the real deal several times before, supervised by a materialization medium and sitting with a circle of people around a big wooden table, but it really wasn’t necessary for a Deadseer to use any of those things to talk to the spirits.

However, adding the energy of my two friends into the mix would make it a lot easier for Lamiyah to manifest, assuming that she was ready and available. Shutting out the outside world and all of its distractions, I sent a mental call to her, which was as easy as simply broadcasting her name in my mind, over and over again, and backing it up with the request for her to answer me.

I don’t know how much time actually passed, but I could suddenly feel Becky’s hand squeeze mine so forcefully that it hurt.

I opened my eyes and blinked a few times. A golden yellow portal of energy had swirled into existence in the air over by the swing set, swelling rapidly from a tiny pinpoint into a sphere of about six feet in diameter. Lamiyah stepped gracefully from inside it. She was dressed in the same colorful sari that she had worn in last night’s dream-meeting, but the look on her face was a heck of a lot darker.

“You are in grave danger, Daniel,” she began without preamble. Uh-oh. That wasn’t a great way to start this conversation off.

“Thanks for coming, Lamiyah. These are my friends, Becky and Brandon.” Each of them offered Lamiyah a smile, which she returned with a curt nod that was a far cry from her usually warm and sunny disposition. “That’s Polly over there, and her friend, Mister Long Brook.”

“Hello,” Polly offered a shy smile, obviously happy to have another kid her own age around — at least, Lamiyah
seemed
her own age, though in reality she had more than a century on Polly. “I really like your dress.”

“Thank-you, Polly,” Lamiyah returned the smile, although hers was tighter and seemed a little forced to me. Her eyes never left Mister Long Brook, as though she was weighing and calculating the facts about him, trying to determine just what exactly he might be.

For his part, Mister Long Brook simply stared placidly back at Lamiyah, towering over her slender form, but not in a particularly menacing way. He simply waited for her to complete her assessment, regarding her with those calm red eyes.

It took a moment for me to realize what was actually going on here. Lamiyah and Mister Long Brook were communicating telepathically. The dead have no real need for verbal communication once they have left their physical body behind, but most of them keep up the ability to speak anyway, if for no other reason than that it will be needed again in their next physical incarnation; I had learned that spirits actually prefer to communicate directly with one another, mind-to-mind, because there is a much smaller chance of their meaning or intention being misunderstood using that method.

“None of the nuance is lost,” Lamiyah had explained to me once. “Human language is such a
clumsy
medium
,
Daniel. Can you imagine what life would be like upon your Earth if each person actually understood the other’s true meaning perfectly? If there were no miscommunication?”

Actually, I thought that I
could,
and based on what I’d learned in history class, most of our wars might never have happened if the leaders in charge of all those countries had been able to make themselves totally understood. No bluffing, no posturing, no misdirection…just absolute clarity.

Her earlier upset now forgotten, Polly went back to playing happily on the swing. The three of us flesh-and-blood types watched silently as Lamiyah and Mister Long Brook seemed to stare each other down, though there was nothing confrontational in their body language. At last, Lamiyah broke away and turned back towards us.

“This is a most extraordinary being,” she said at last. “Think of him as a psychic manifestation of all of the combined emotion, both good and bad, that has taken place within the sanatorium over the years — a kind of protector, if you will. Are you familiar with the expression ‘if only these walls could talk?’” We all nodded. “Well, this is more a case of ‘if these walls could come to life and walk.’ Mister Long Brook has no real name, and no gender as such, because he has never walked the Earth plane as a mortal human.”

“So, I get that Mister Long Brook is a sort of supernatural security system, but…he’s not a man at all, right?” I asked, feeling equally confused and fascinated. “I mean, I know you just said that he’s an ‘it’ not a ‘he’ or a ‘she,’ but it seems a little rude to call him an it…if that makes any sense.”