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    Ghost Hunters Anthology 03: Ghost Hunter Mystery Parable Anthology
    Ghost Hunters Anthology 03: Ghost Hunter Mystery Parable Anthology
    Ghost Hunters Anthology 03: Ghost Hunter Mystery Parable Anthology
    Ebook170 pages2 hours

    Ghost Hunters Anthology 03: Ghost Hunter Mystery Parable Anthology

    By S. H. Marpel

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    About this ebook

    The adventures of the Ghost Hunters continue - with more exotic locations and hair-raising paranormal adventures than ever before:

     - Visiting a haunted planet where the normal is falling between two worlds, while John winds up solving being in a coma, away from his body.

     - The goddes Harpy returns with a simple request for John, a personal and very human one.

     - Sal has to help John sort out a mental mis-thinking that could kill him off unless unraveled.

     - A classic murder-detective story, where a ghost re-enacts the scene of a crime. In order to find out how she died.

     - Even elementals can have mysteries, especially when they were the by-product of terrorists and government experimentation.

    All in short reads that fit into the time you have to read. Delicious mental snacks that will leave you with new ideas to consider long after the entertainment is over.

    This Short Story Anthology Contains:

    - Falling by S. H. Marpel
    - Harpy's Desires by S. H. Marpel
    - The 95% Solution by S. H. Marpel 
    - The Case of a Cruising Phantom by S. H. Marpel
    - The Spirit Mountain Mystery by S. H. Marpel & C. C. Brower

    Excerpt:

    (from "Harpy's Desires")

    A fluttering sound, and then a thump, like a dove flying into the side of a building, but heavier, like a wild eagle, or a buzzard. Maybe even heavier.

    I got up from my writing to see what the damage was, if there was something I could do for whatever was out there.

    Opening the heavy outer door, I saw a nude woman laying down on her side, sprawled on my porch. I grabbed my chore coat and squeezed out the screen door to kneel beside her.

    Putting my hand on her neck, I felt a pulse. No blood, no scrapes, what looked like some deep, but healed scratches on her back. So I covered her with the chore coat to preserve her body heat. As much as it would cover, anyway.

    Looking around I saw no vehicle tracks, no bare or other footprints.

    But I had to get her inside and covered before she got chilled in the fall air. Tonight was supposed to be a cold one.

    I moved her legs away from the screen door and found my doorstop nearby, the one I used to prop it open when my hands were full of something. Because my arms would be full soon.

    As I crouched down to pull her into my arms for carrying, her eyes fluttered open to look at mine. They were an emerald green, burning like on fire. And then that fire went out, and her eyes closed again,

    I got my arms under her back and legs, then rolled her toward me. She was a limp weight, her head rolled back and a free arm draped down toward the cabin porch.

    In a few steps, I was inside the small cabin again. I simply laid her down on my futon-couch for now, and pulled the quilt comforter down from the back of it to cover her. For now, I left the chore coat over her until what was left of her body heat could warm the bed as well.

    From overhead storage, I pulled down the winter-weight comforter and heavy wool outer blanket that I usually didn't get out for the next month or so. She was going to need to get warmed up quickly, which meant not letting any other body heat get away. These I draped across her and over the back of the futon, as she didn't need all that extra weight.

    Kneeling down to the floor beside her covered form, I again felt her neck for a pulse, and her forehead for a fever. She seemed fine, just sleeping. Breathing was regular.

    There was something about her I knew from somewhere. Something familiar...

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLiving Sensical Press
    Release dateDec 30, 2018
    ISBN9781386286547
    Ghost Hunters Anthology 03: Ghost Hunter Mystery Parable Anthology
    Author

    S. H. Marpel

    Get Your Copy Now Visit https://LiveSensical.com/books for more entertaining, educational, and inspiring stories that you can read over and over, time after time... Investing in your entertainment is better than just spending.

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      Book preview

      Ghost Hunters Anthology 03 - S. H. Marpel

      Falling

      BY S. H. MARPEL

      I

      ONCE OUR SHIMMERING stopped, we immediately began to fall upward. Gaining speed at 32 feet per second per second.

      Falling toward the sky.

      And once we got well up there, we were falling about as fast as we possibly could, owing to air friction. If Sal hadn't thought to put us in a bubble kind of force-shield, we might have run out of breath and died. Because you can't get much air into your lungs at that speed.

      Jude, Sal and I were falling up.

      And after awhile, some 30,000 feet or so I figured - about the same altitude that a lot of jet planes fly - we started to see the new down we were falling toward. A second set of clouds were ahead of us, but these were opposite to the ones we had been through.

      Like the big puffy cumulus clouds we'd been falling through, but now in reverse. They got thicker as we fell through them, just as they had gotten thinner when we had fallen up into the earlier sky.

      We were also slowing as we went, barely perceptible at this speed..

      The new land below us was still racing toward us. It was another landscape entirely. We had first arrived in a city, a crosswalk across a busy city street. Now we were falling toward a rural, even pastoral setting. Past balloons floating in the high atmosphere, where people with breathing masks and insulated suits were pointing at us. For that was all they could do, since we were out of the grasp for any rescue. Even if we had been, the shock of our hitting their balloon would have torn a hole though any fabric and left them to plummet as we already were.

      Our force-shield was protecting us and allowing us to breathe. But we were so much like an over-sized round cannon ball to the world around us. Sal was working to keep the birds away from our path, although the bugs tended to accumulate as we got toward the ground, like those that impact on windshields when driving through swarms on a highway. Jude worked her own spells to clear these away so we could keep seeing through the shield - or as she put it, wouldn't get too grossed-out.

      We were also continuing to now obviously slow as we went.

      So by the time we nearly hit the ground, it was almost like reaching the end of a bungee cord. A quick deceleration and a smooth stop.

      But like that bungee cord, we didn't. We only started falling back up again.

      As the ride back and to where we started would take some time, and I wasn't casting spells, I was able to think this through:

      • We needed to phase back out when we landed back at the original spot.

      • That phasing had to be instantly, and exactly done.

      • So the force shield would be swapped for a transportation spell, triggered by touching the ground with our feet.

      • The speller would have to get all of us at the same time, in that exact instant.

      • So my job, as the one human here, was to hang on to the three of us, keeping a grip on each of the two girls so we couldn't be separated, and the spell could work.

      Or at least that was the math I'd figured out.

      I sent this as thoughts to the two girls, and they nodded that they understood. Because talking was almost impossible with the noise that the wind was making as it whistled around us. The same reason cannon balls whistled through the air before they landed. Too much air resistance. Making it too loud to hardly think, much less have a conversation. Sal and Jude already literally had their hands full with the spells they were already casting.

      So I hung on as best I could to each of them and tried to pull them closer to me.

      But as the old phrase goes, Man plans and God laughs.

      The next time we hit, the girls were ready and we phased...

      II

      IN ALL MY HUNDREDS of thousands of years of historical experiences, in all the multi-verses I'd been part of, I'd never personally seen this happen. I'd read about it, and been told tales of it happening.

      John, Sal and Jude all came back alive and in one piece. But John had simply collapsed on the floor, as if asleep. He had been holding onto the arms of the girls, but then let go once they all shimmered back in. Well, he actually fell about a foot to the ground.

      But that wouldn't have caused any coma.

      There was no concussion from his landing, no trauma or broken bones.

      While the girls were brave, they were also distraught with worry. We'd lost human guides before, but that was usually through sudden death or longer-lasting disease. We'd just never lost a human soul from their body before.

      Ben, you have to do something. Somewhere in those books there has to be an answer! Sal was almost screaming at me, her hands clenched around the edge of the gurney we'd gotten John's body onto.

      All these machines only say he's fine. Why won't he wake up?!? Jude was checking and re-checking all the monitors, the lights, and lines and connections, as if she hadn't helped set them up right. She knew how to set them up, and they were all right.

      We've done all we can for now. Granger is bringing me more books and papers about this as we speak. And she's sent off to our other 'verses connections to get any data that might be applicable. Why don't you two take a break, at least sit and calm down. I looked them both in their eyes and they knew I was right. I'd trained them for all I could, but I couldn't train them for anything like this. Because even I, very rarely, didn't know what I didn't know.

      They sat and tried to calm down, taking seats in the stainless chairs available in the Infirmary.

      And we all waited.

      III

      ALONE IN FEATURELESS space.

      All my own doing, my own fault.

      Because I had thought the one thought no one should think.

      And this was the result.

      Nothing.

      Just me and nothing else.

      Probably most people would think this as scary. I've heard and read some stories of people going insane in solitary. But this was much worse than solitary.

      It was nothing of nothing.

      Imagine no gravity, no air or need to breathe. No heart pumping or body to pump it to.

      Nothing of nothing.

      Instead of scary, this was peaceful to me. Because I wasn't haunted by my own thoughts, of things I hadn't done, of people I needed to feel complete.

      I had nothing that I was missing, nothing to lose.

      I'd long ago made my peace with just about everything, just before I decided to turn to writing.

      One of those many self-analysis questions I'd read in one of those countless books I'd studied to find the answers I could only give to myself.

      This question was one that had changed my life, earned enough financial freedom to be able to do pretty much anything I wanted, let me choose to live in a small writer's cabin in return for managing the livestock at enough profit to keep the farm running.

      And that was my answer to that last question: What do you most need?

      I answered: Nothing.

      Of course, when I got separated from my body, and the physical universe, that answer came back to haunt me.

      So the multi-verse gave me endless, fathomless, perpetual - nothing.

      My first thought after that: Cool.

      A writer's paradise. A writer's job is making something out of nothing. They are re-combiners of everything that is. And can literally build a world out of nothing. So I was existing in a world of my own creation, with endless raw materials to work with.

      For a writer, their next question is always - who would I like to share this with? And then: what story would they like to hear me tell?

      At that point the typing begins, or the recording in some form or fashion. The nothing always comes first, and then the audience. The writer creates the audience.

      For me, my closest audience was my two spirit guides.

      So: I love Sal. I love Jude.

      Hey John, is that you? Sal's thought.

      Sal, John, where are you? Judy's thought shortly after.

      Oh, wait girls, let me put a setting there. I thought to them both.

      AROUND US FORMED A huge round room, wooden tongue-and-groove pine floor with windows on every side of those circular walls. Probably 16 or 32 flattened sides to that big circle, or some number in between. Some thin curtains on them, so that the sun was kept from shining in blindingly, but it was still before dawn and sunrise was not for some time yet. We had just enough light to see what was going on.

      The ceiling overhead was timbered in sections right up to a central metal collar where they all bolted on. They didn't rise straight up, but curled up to meet it, flowing counter-clockwise. Concentric slats wound around, evenly spaced, and insulated in between with curving filler that could have been plaster or plastic or hand-laid fiberglass, regardless, it was a tannish off-white that complemented the clear-coated ceiling beams.

      We lay in a huge bed, queen-sized, just the three of us. And from where we lay, there was nothing outside those windows but lightening sky. Which meant that we were probably at the top of some tower in the middle of nowhere.

      I was in the center between these two girls I loved, with my arms around them and under them. Of course, that put me on my back looking up at this gorgeous, spacious room.

      Sal raised her head with her to-die-for, all-natural, long wavy blond hair from her fluffy pillow with its white cotton pillow case. Well, hello sleepy-heads. Good morning, I guess.

      Jude then batted open her eyes and raised her raven-haired head from my shoulder. And hello to you, too. She brought a hand up to rub her face. I think your idea of a pillow rather than a muscular shoulder might have been a better position. No offense, John, but you'd probably like to be described in your stories as having a great set of muscles than being soft.

      I just smiled. It was great to be with them again. No offense, of course. Your compliments are always welcome.

      Jude pulled the sheets up and looked down at her body below it. Darn, you are such a prude. You know I like to sleep in the raw. And you're even wearing cotton jammie bottoms. I never saw these in your cabin.

      I glanced down. You have to admit yours is a fetching black negligee, though.

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