Falling (Ghost Hunters Mystery Parables) / Ghost Hunters Mystery Parables (ePub)

It all started with visiting a city where falling was "up".

And brought John, Sal, and Jude into a situation they'd never seen before.

Ghosts are a problem of when the soul is left over after the body dies. Solving those scenes are simple for the Ghost Hunters.

But what happens when the soul disappears and the body remains? How do you solve that?

It takes all the resources of their team to solve this mystery. Plenty of clues laying around.

John Earl Stark has already faced worse than death - and now his choice was beyond hell or heaven, beyond even an afterlife...

Excerpt:

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 about halfway there, we were falling as fast as we possibly could, owing to air friction, and 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 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 wind shields 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...