Agonal Breath (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 1) (22 page)

“I remember reading about that,” Becky nodded. “Spiessbach killed himself in his office, didn’t he?”

“Uh-huh,” Billy nodded. “In his private office downstairs. Went in one day, closed and locked the door behind him, plunked his butt down in that big, high-backed leather chair he always liked so much, then put the barrel of a Luger in his mouth and pulled the trigger. I don’t think he had much in the way of brains, but what little he had repainted the walls and ceilings of that office.” He chuckled sardonically. “Didn’t matter how much they scrubbed it and scrubbed it, they could never get the stains out. They tried painting over it, in the end. Didn’t work. Wall
still
looks pink.”

I was intrigued. “Why did he shoot himself, Billy?”

Billy hooked a thumb in his belt. “Couple reasons, Danny. I
can
call you Danny, right? Great. Number one, the way I heard it at least, the Israelis were catching up with him. Spiessbach was a doctor in the German military back in World War Two. Heard a
lot
of rumors that he experimented on American and allied soldiers back then, in prisoner-of-war and maybe even the concentration camps. The Israelis ain’t known as a forgiving people, and rightly so. They spent
years
hunting down Nazis after the war, men and women who had fled Germany and gone underground all around the world. Turns out a bunch of ‘em came
here
to America, strangely enough; set up new lives under fake new names and tried to lay low.”

“But isn’t ‘Spiessbach’ a German name?” Becky asked.

“That it is, young lady,” Billy agreed, “and it weren’t the one he was born with, neither, but he was too proud — no, too damned
arrogant
— to completely cover up his German heritage. To us, he’s the high-falutin’ Dr. Marko von Spiessbach, and it don’t really matter none what name he went under back in the Forties, does it?”

We all shook our heads. Billy was right. A war criminal was a war criminal by any name.

“It
is
a little weird that he’d keep a German name though,” I thought out loud.

“Stupid, yes — but not all that weird. The man’s got an accent as thick as molasses, kiddo. There ain’t no disguising it, so he probably figured, ‘why even bother?’ Anyways, Mossad — that’s the Israeli secret service to you and me — picked up his trail, one way or another. They tracked him here to Colorado and I guess the word must have gotten out that their agents were coming for him, and that’s why he did what he did.”

Billy formed the shape of a gun with two fingers and mimed putting it into his mouth and shooting himself with it, throwing his head backwards with pretend-shock. The fact that his body was semi-transparent only made it all the more bizarre.

“Spiessbach had been…well, in our day we called it something different, but I guess you kids would have said ‘making out’ with one of the senior nurses that worked for him. The rumor was that he had gotten her in the
family way,
if you take my meaning. If word had gotten out, it would have been a really big deal. She was married, you see, to some guy who had nothing to do with Long Brook. Even had her own family with him. Sad, really.”

Becky and I looked at one another uncomfortably. Even Matilda seemed embarrassed at the subject, and sensing it, Billy cleared his throat and moved on hurriedly.

“Anyway, when Spiessbach found out that the Israelis were closing in on him, they got into a murder-suicide pact, the pair of ‘em. He shot her first, and then himself right there after. Considering what they’ve both done to the people of this sanatorium ever since then, I’d say it wasn’t much of a tragedy that they decided to off themselves…except for her having been pregnant, and having deprived her own children of their mother too. That strikes me as a real shame,” Billy finished earnestly.

“You said there were two reasons why he killed himself,” Becky pointed out. “If Mossad catching up with him was the first one, was tuberculosis the other?”

“Partly. You see, Spiessbach was up to some pretty gnarly stuff up here,” Billy explained, using his beefy paws for emphasis. “Looks like once he left ze Fatherland for the last time—” putting two fingertips under his nose and making a mock-Nazi salute with the other hand, he did a
very
un-PC Hitler imitation— “and came to the land of the free, the good doctor never lost his taste for experimentation.” He shrugged, then mimed cutting open an invisible patient with an invisible scalpel. “Mrs. Sharpe here calls him ‘the Butcher,’ and she’s not far wrong on that account. I don’t know what his motivations were…what they
are…
but there was nothing he wouldn’t try on the poor, unfortunate souls that those nincompoops at the state blindly entrusted into his care.”

“And he’s
still
at it,” Matilda wailed. Becky moved to put an arm around her, before checking herself when she remembered that it would only sink right through her. “Every night, Becky…every night, he comes for us, him and his goons. They cart us off to the operating room and they…they…” She simply couldn’t finish, breaking down into a fresh round of sobs and wails.

“There, there,” Billy dropped a comforting arm around her shoulders. He looked me right in the eye, then did the same thing to Becky. “Matilda’s right, guys. Every evening after dark, they come for somebody new. Sometimes three, four, or more on one night, depending on his mood, I guess.”

“Even you?” Becky asked, wide-eyed.

“Even me,” Billy confirmed darkly. “I’m a big, strong guy, sure — but there are always more of them than there are of us. Not to mention the fact that I’m usually a lot weaker than I look. That’s the lung-rot, see? I figured it would go away when I died, but it didn’t. Damn thing’s still here, making my afterlife miserable.”

He tapped his chest with a pointer finger. Almost as an afterthought, Billy coughed, bringing a clenched fist up to cover his mouth. I’d never seen a spirit’s face turn red before, but if it had been possible, Billy ought to have done it just then — the cough was
that
harsh on the ear. I winced with sympathy.

“I just don’t get it.” Becky stood, pacing the cramped confines of the bedroom as she talked. She made a deliberate effort not to actually walk
through
Billy, whose considerable frame filled the exterior doorway. “You guys are ghosts, right…
spirits?
I don’t mean to be rude, but why would anybody want to do surgery on you? I mean, it wouldn’t
work!
How could it?”

“The young lady is absolutely right,” Matilda said to me, absently dabbing at her teary eyes. Then she turned to look at Becky. “But he’s mad, you see. Totally and utterly stark raving
mad.”

An insane spirit?
I pondered the idea for a moment, and decided that it might make sense. I hadn’t been aware of my Deadseer gifts for long enough to know more than the tiniest fraction of what there was to know about the spirit realm, but the idea of insanity being brought across along with the soul when it transitioned over wasn’t a big stretch for me to believe. I would have to ask Lamiyah, the next time I saw her…

That
thought sent a sharp stab of fear through me, making my stomach churn. I didn’t even know whether I would ever see Lamiyah again, after what had happened earlier. On the other hand, after those two lunatics had started firing off guns in the downstairs hallway, I might end up seeing a whole lot more of Lamiyah in the very near future, if I didn’t make it out of Long Brook alive…and
that
got me thinking about Brandon once again.

We were getting distracted again, and needed to get ourselves back on track if there was going to be any hope of us rescuing him. I opened my mouth to say just that, but before I could speak, Billy got in first.

“Spiessbach ain’t evil for the sake of being evil, guys. Not many people really are, when you think about it. Matilda’s right; he’s crazy through and through, and that’s why he keeps cutting up the poor souls that he’s kept trapped here. They’re bound to him, you see, the same in death as they…as
we,
were in life; but he ain’t torturing us just for the sake of it. In
his
mind, he ain’t even torturing us at all. In his own nutty way, I think Spiessbach genuinely wants to
cure
us, and he works hour after hour to try and find a treatment that will do the trick.”

“But it’s the Twenty-First Century!” Becky pointed out, smacking a clenched fist into her palm for added emphasis. “We can treat tuberculosis now, with drugs and stuff like that. It’s not necessary to cut people up any more.”

“Becky, you have to understand that for
you
it’s the Twenty-First Century, and for
him
it’s the Twenty-First Century,” Billy said in an entirely reasonable tone of voice, nodding towards me, “but you have to remember that for
me,
for the lovely Matilda here, and most importantly of all for Dr. Spiessbach, there ain’t no such thing. The clock stopped for us when we died. Spiessbach might as well be trapped in the Fifties or Sixties, you see. Time’s standing still for him, and for everybody else stuck behind these walls. So he’ll just keep slicing and dicing us, taking out ribs and deflating lungs, and
none
of it will work, because none of it
can
work, and we’ll go on like that until the end of time if something isn’t done.” He blew out a long, exasperated sigh, and I was sure that I could hear genuine despair lurking hiding behind it.

“Well, I think we
can
do something about it.” Becky stopped pacing. “Danny, you know all about this. How do we—” She stopped suddenly, in mid-sentence, and cocked her head to one side as she listened intently to something I couldn’t hear yet. Then I
did
hear it. Footsteps, walking at a fast pace along the outside balcony. Footsteps that were coming our way

I would come to find out later that his name was Jacob Dickes, although he preferred to go by ‘Jake.’ Jake was in his late twenties, and powerfully built. The dude obviously worked out.

My first thought, when he appeared behind Billy in the doorway to Matilda’s room, was that the wispy mustache that clung to his top lip was going to make it really difficult to take the guy seriously. It was the kind that some of the kids at school like to call a ‘molestache,’ because it looked like it belonged on a molester or something, I guess. Despite the shock of his appearance, I broke out into a nervous smirk.

But then my second thought was:
scratch that.
Because the gun he was pointing straight at me was making me want to take him very,
very
seriously indeed. Suddenly, the molestache wasn’t even remotely funny any more. My entire world had narrowed down to just the doorway, Billy’s semi-transparent body, and above all else, the ominous black muzzle of the handgun.

“Got yer!” he said triumphantly. “
You,
put your hands where I can see ‘em.” He nodded at me, then turned the gun on Becky, who was pressing herself backwards into the shadows of the opposite doorway, the one that led into the central corridor. “Yours too. Up where Jakey can see ‘em, now. Nice and slow. That’s it.”

We both raised our hands slowly into the air, palms facing forwards to show that they were empty…at least,
mostly
empty, because I was still clutching a flashlight in my right hand.

Jake took a couple of steps backward onto the balcony. The moonlight gleamed on the barrel of his gun, making it even harder for me to tear my eyes away from it; but despite that, something else had caught my attention, and a few seconds later Jake confirmed it when he mumbled around a mouthful of chewing tobacco for Becky and I to step out there onto the balcony with him.

“The pair of you, get your butts out here.”

The pair of you,
I repeated softly to myself.
He doesn’t know about Billy and Matilda. He can’t see them.

It had always fascinated me how some people could see ghosts (under the right circumstances) and others never could, no matter what. Becky couldn’t normally see them, for example, but obviously Billy and Matilda had wanted to be seen, because we’d all just had a conversation together as if we were four living, solid people. The same had been true with Lamiyah earlier tonight, and also with Polly and Mister Long Brook.

We hesitated. Jake didn’t like that one bit.

“I said
get out here!
”

I thought that people only fired warning shots on TV and in movies. Boy, was I wrong. From only six feet away, the sound was deafening. Becky squealed and I’m pretty sure I did too. The bullet missed both of us— I’m pretty sure that it was meant to, because nobody short of an Imperial Stormtrooper could have missed us at that close range unless they had wanted it that way —and ricocheted from the floor into one of the walls, shattering the plaster and what was left of the drywall.

The ghosts of Billy and Matilda had vanished, throwing the room back into near-total darkness again. I moved slowly out onto the balcony, heading towards the dim outline of the man with the gun. As I came through the outer doorway I must have blocked Jake’s line of sight towards Becky for just a moment, and that was all the break she needed.