Agonal Breath (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 1) (6 page)

Where was I? Oh yeah, the hospitals. There were some super-nice facilities to choose from if you could pay your way, most of them not all that different from the top hotels of the time. Freshly-pressed pristine white cotton sheets every day, doctors and nurses on call twenty-four seven, state of the art treatments, the works.

Long Brook was
not
one of those hospitals.

Like Ms. Johnson told us in history class, every society needs somewhere to send its poor and homeless people. Sometimes, that place is the gutter. But people dying of tuberculosis in the street kind of brought down the mood, and probably the Denver real estate prices too. So the Governor ordered the creation of state-run, economically viable – for that, read
cheap
– sanatoriums, mostly located up in the foothills and the mountains, where the homeless sick would be out of sight and out of mind of the “decent people.”

I guess some things don’t ever change.

So any homeless person with a cough or the night sweats got scooped up off the streets, and found themselves swept off to a place like Long Brook. Looking at old monochrome photos of the sanatorium on Wikipedia, I couldn’t help but think that that must have been a real shock to the system. The sanatorium was six stories tall, built of stone, concrete, and brick, a lot of which was grim and gray. What looked to be the main building was flanked on either side by another five-story building, each one being a complete hospital wing — and both of
those
had a second wing added on to them, so there were a total of five buildings making up the sanatorium.

Some of the photos that had been taken from the air made it look as though the place was a big horseshoe, or maybe a giant magnet, according to the people who had left comments posted on the threads. But
I
thought that each wing looked more like the gull-wing doors on the DeLorean car from
Back to the Future.
So sue me, I’m a nerd.

The place looked less than welcoming, to say the least. A shiver coursed through me, that rare but familiar feeling we all get from time to time.
Somebody just walked over my grave.

Long Brook’s history wasn’t all that hard to find out about. Construction finished in 1903, and it was a working sanatorium less than a year afterwards. Meant to house seven hundred patients, at the height of the tuberculosis epidemic they were cramming in over a thousand. Conditions were cramped and hygiene was poor. The doctors and nurses all meant well, but they were over-worked, under-staffed, and fighting an uphill battle. Heck, there were even records of some of
them
committing suicide in there.

The website saved the worst for last. Towards the end of its life, the hospital had supposedly been run by some crazed doctor until it was finally closed down by the state in the late 1980s. Apparently this guy hadn’t taken the closure lying down, because one day in the summer of 1988 he had come into work and walked from room to room, tracking down those members of his nursing staff that were on duty that day, and had then shot each and every one of them dead.

After murdering his entire staff, this doc — who went by the fancy name of Marko von Spiessbach — had dialed 911, gone to his office, and then killed himself.

Another shiver, this one going straight down my spine. Something was obviously very wrong with this place. No wonder I was getting a bad feeling about all this.

I mouse-clicked to another page, all about tuberculosis treatment…or what
passed
for treatment in those days. Nowadays, when you contract tuberculosis, the doctors give you drugs. The disease can be treated, and treated pretty effectively thanks to the wonders of modern medicine; but back then, medical science of the time didn’t have much of a clue. They tried their best, but some of their therapies read more like torture today. Hanging bags of lead shot around the patient’s neck, adding more and more weight with every passing day, until there was the equivalent of a ten-pound dumb-bell pushing down on their chest, was just one of their bright ideas;
hey,
they figured,
if we limit the chest from expanding too much, it’ll give the lungs a rest, help them heal up.
Except that it didn’t, and it was downright miserable for the poor people who had to suffer through it.

Fresh air was the best treatment, all the experts agreed. Except that it isn’t. Hundreds of beds were rolled out onto the sanatorium balconies every day, all year round, even on Christmas Day in the middle of a snowstorm. Don’t believe me? Go ahead and Google it. There are pictures, the most unbelievable photos, of nurses in masks and gowns and winter coats, standing next to beds filled with the most miserable-looking patients, huddled beneath thin sheets and blankets as the snow piled up on top of their feet. There were hundreds of deaths,
thousands
over the years, and yeah – a lot of them died of tuberculosis. But a lot of them died of exposure, too…

…and a lot of them died from the experimental surgeries.

This is the part that really made me feel nauseated, but I kept on scrolling down, horrified and fascinated in equal measure. It would be unkind and probably unfair to label the doctors as
butchers
– after all, they were trying desperate, last-ditch operations on people who were pretty much halfway dead – but slicing open a person’s chest and cutting through their ribs to collapse the lung, sounds pretty darned nasty to me.

It seemed as though as many people died from this type of surgery than survived it; in fact, so many people were dying each month that the sanatorium needed to have its own death chute, a discreet way of getting those dead bodies out to the waiting hearses without rolling the body bags past the patients who were still alive. The doctors, in their infinite wisdom, reasoned that it would be bad for morale…and I had to admit that they were probably right.

Letting go of a sigh that I didn’t know I had been holding, I powered off my computer and went to go brush my teeth in the bathroom. That was it for tonight, I decided. It was just about bedtime, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I would need all the rest I could get to prepare me for tomorrow night.

And besides, I needed to talk to Lamiyah.

Lamiyah is my spirit guide. She’s the ghost of a nine year-old orphan girl who had lived rough on the streets of Bombay when those jolly old English ran the place under the rule of Queen Victoria. The poor kid had had no parents or family to speak of, and made her living by stealing fruit and begging for scraps and coins with a little wooden bowl. One day, after almost getting caught stealing an apple from a street vendor’s stall, Lamiyah had panicked and tore her way through the busy marketplace with the screaming, cursing fruit merchant hot on her heels.

Preoccupied with her pursuer, who seemed to gain ground with every passing second, Lamiyah hadn’t been looking where she was going; she hadn’t seen the ox-drawn cart until it was too late. Before she knew it, Lamiyah had been knocked off her feet and found herself trampled underneath the creature’s hooves. The way she told me the story, the hooves and cart wheels had broken her back and she had died quickly, right there in the sun-baked mud.

Don’t let yourself be fooled, though — Lamiyah may
look
like a nine year-old kid, because that’s how old she was when she died, but she’s been kicking around the spirit realms ever since then, so she’s a nine year-old with more than a century’s worth of experience and attitude under her belt. Believe me, you do
not
want to get on Lamiyah’s bad side.

She’s a good-natured soul at heart. Let’s face it, she’d have to be in order to put up with me for this long. Just in case you happen to be one of the billions of “normals” who can’t communicate with the dead – that’s most of you reading this, statistically speaking – let me break it down for you. All of us – you, me, everybody – have a spirit guide. It’s funny how, if you ever see a stage psychic perform, they always seem to be some kind of Native American brave or chief. Don’t ask me why, because in reality, our spirit guides come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and ages; but they all have one thing in common – they’re all fundamentally decent and unselfish spirits, usually because they’ve outgrown most of the more toxic human personality traits over their many years going around and around through the eternal cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. No matter what age they appear to be, we’re usually talking about an old and advanced soul when it comes to a spirit guide.

“Signing up to be a guide can be a frustrating experience, Daniel,” Lamiyah had told me once, when I’d asked her how she had ended up with the job of shepherding me through this life. “But there is no more rewarding vocation in all the worlds than committing oneself to the betterment of another.” She had giggled then, involuntarily covering her mouth with a dark brown hand. “Although it sometimes seems to me that I have, as you like to say in your country, perhaps
bitten off more than I can chew,
with you.”

Yeah, kind of hard for me to argue. What can I say, I’m a handful.

I had actually been a spirit guide myself in past lifetimes, she had told me with great amusement. I wouldn’t be able to remember the specifics as long as I was incarnated in my physical body, but I would get all of that stuff back when I passed on and went back to the Summerland.

Communicating with Lamiyah wasn’t anywhere near as easy as making a phone call or sending a text message. For starters, I usually had to be asleep. Like a lot of guides, Lamiyah had multiple charges in her care – hundreds, she told me once with a goofy smile that never quite reached her wise old eyes. Spirit guides were
busy
. Think of them sort of like your doctor – when you’re not sick, your doctor isn’t hovering around you all day and night, right? No, they’re off doing their own thing, usually making other sick people better. You check in every so often for a physical, and then when you get sick,
that’s
when you go talk to them. Same deal with your guide. They don’t even realize that you’re having problems unless you call on them sometimes — that goes for your spirit guide as well as your doc, because those are both very busy professions.

Mostly, I talked to Lamiyah in my sleep. Chances are, you’ve done the same thing with
your
spirit guide, but in the morning you probably wrote it off as just a dream. Maybe you could barely remember the conversation at all, that’s just the way it works sometimes. My bedtime routine is always pretty much the same. Clean my teeth, wash up a little, crawl into bed. Sometimes I’d read for a while, but tonight I wasn’t really in the mood. It had been a long and eventful day.

I pulled the sheets and comforter up to my chin and closed my eyes, burrowing down like an animal hibernating in its nest, and began to formulate a very specific thought.

Lamiyah, I want to talk to you, please.

Lamiyah, we need to meet.

Then I went out like a light.

I’m told that when most people go to hang out with their spirit guides, the place where they meet is a lush green garden that’s full of flowers and shrubbery, or a beautiful meadow with a crystal-clear and sparkling stream running through the middle. Clear blue skies, birds chirping and singing… you know, that sort of thing.

Not me, though. I’m a card-carrying nerd, remember?

I “woke up” in my spirit body on a sandy desert plain, standing next to a domed homestead which was sunk partially below the ground. Two suns burned in the sky above the far horizon. Two parallel trails crisscrossed through the sand on their way to and from the moisture vaporators; one was a set of footprints, the other a pair of tramlines with a third, fainter line in between them. Droid tracks.

“Really, Daniel?” The voice that carried faintly on the dry, sultry air was that of a fairly young girl, but it sounded as if it had been educated at a British boarding school. Every syllable was crisp and sharply delivered, as though etched from finely-cut glass. “
This
planet again?”

“Thanks for coming, Lamiyah,” I grinned, raising my voice. “It’s really great to see you again. You’re looking…awesome.”

And she was. Trekking towards me across the sand dunes was a very familiar and comforting figure, willowy and graceful. The soles of her gold-braided sandals weren’t leaving even the slightest trace upon the unblemished sand; for all intents and purposes, Lamiyah seemed to be gliding across the desert surface, rather than walking. Her slender frame was wrapped in a colorful red and purple ankle-length sari, and her ponytail of lustrous black hair was held in place by a decorative tiara of fine gold, inset with a sparkling sapphire which sat squarely in the center of her forehead like a third eye.

Overjoyed to see her, I enfolded Lamiyah in a tight brotherly hug. Even though she was a spirit, she smelled good – faintly of lilacs. She always did.

“How are you keeping, dearest boy?”

“Hey, not so bad. Life’s…interesting.” I sounded a little awkward, even to my own ears. Lamiyah knew me well enough by now to pick up on it, and raised an inquisitive eyebrow. “Want to take a walk?”

“Certainly.”

We fell into step together, strolling slowly towards the twin suns in a peaceful, companionable silence. This place wasn’t actually real, of course – it was a purely mental construct, a temporary part of the spirit realm built from components of my subconscious, just like any other dreamscape. Your lucid dreams are made of exactly the same stuff. Our two spirits were both real, but my physical body was snoring the night away, back in my bed on the physical plane.