Agonal Breath (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 1) by Richard Estep Page B

grave.
    “This place is amazing !” Brandon enthused. Standing amongst the overgrown, knee-high grass and weeds of what I assumed had once been the front lawn, he had his phone out, and was madly snapping photos of the sanatorium from as many angles as possible. He had parked the Blazer on a concrete apron located on the east side of the building, sheltered by the overhanging branches of the tall trees. He had left the rear hatch up, so I reached inside to grab my backpack, rummaged around inside, and fished out a can of Monster energy drink.
    I wandered back over towards Becky, who seemed to be lost in her own little world of blissful excitement. Her eyes were roaming back and forth from room to room, never still for a moment.
    “Penny for your thoughts,” I asked with a smile.
    “Hmmm? Oh, I was just thinking…how many people ended their lives in those rooms over the years? All of that tragedy, so many deaths…” She sounded quite sad now, coming down from cloud nine and crashing back to reality.
    It wasn’t difficult to see why she might suddenly feel that way. The atmosphere here at Long Brook was a great deal more peaceful than the TV shows would lead you to believe. It was actually more peaceful than scary, the same kind of atmosphere that you might find inside a church or a cemetery. Yes, the shadow of death did hang over everything here, but I wasn’t sensing anything dark or malevolent.
    At least, not right now…
    I looked up at the vacant windows again, leaning back to take in the roof. There were some very cool-looking stone gargoyles up there, crouching in the eaves beneath the guttering. I’d seen them when I was clicking around during my online research session last night; when it rained and the gutters filled up with water, the gargoyles would vomit it out of their mouths. There were a few photos of that on Flickr, posted by visitors to the sanatorium, and I thought that the effect looked really cool.
    Just for an instant, as my eyes were looking from room to room on the top floor, I thought I caught a glimpse of something white, flitting from shadow to shadow between two of the windows. I barely blinked, and it was gone. If this was a horror movie, this would be the scene with the ominous music building up to the quick jump-scare, and then the director would cut away to something else. “It was probably just an old bed-sheet or something,” one of the actors would say to another. Then there’d be a point-of-view shot looking down on the actors from up on the roof, because of course, the white shape was really the form of something dark and mysterious that was haunting the sanatorium...something that would turn up later, probably when the lights were out. And then the deaths would start…
    I’d seen way too many bad movies where the plot went something like that.
    But here’s the thing…whatever ghosts might be haunting this place, I wasn’t the least bit afraid of them. I had practically no doubt that the sanatorium was haunted. I mean, you didn’t get to have that many deaths — thousands upon thousands — over the space of that many years, without something being left behind, some psychic residue of all the physical and emotional trauma that went on in this place. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the spirits of some of those patients hadn’t remained earthbound, tied to this place where their lives ended…and what about those members of the staff who had worked so hard to take care of those patients down through the years, giving them the very best care that they could, but constantly running up against the limitations of the medical science of the time?
    I couldn’t imagine how it must feel to put your heart and soul into taking care of hundreds or thousands of people, only to have so many of them die on you despite your very best efforts. That had to be just brutal, heartbreaking in fact. It would be amazing if some trace of that didn’t remain behind.
    So I was more than ready