S. H. Marpel
In the days when people were owned by the land, two young girls found their power by becoming ghosts, then spirit guides.
This is their origin-story...
Their Dad had to raise them by himself, as Mother died shortly after birthing them. But as a spirit, she remained on Earth to watch over them. Sal and Jude could see her, and knew their Dad could feel her presence.
Efforts to enter the forest, to exploit its abundant
...It started with a dream.
In it, John Earl Stark solved the problem of a ghost he met. Or did he? It was a dream, after all.
The next day he meets two women who visit his cabin, arriving out of the blue, literally. (Well, one arrived with pitched black darkness which filled his cabin and made her cough.)
These two have an offer for Stark. All he really wanted was to enjoy the small
...3) Harpy
She'd been waiting to kill me for a very long time. And run out of patience at last. So she pulled me to her across time and space.
Just so she could end my life. Painfully. Violently.
But first, she had to explain her reasoning. Because she had been thinking this through for a long time and someone should hear and applaud her reasoning.
Crazy, yes. But as I was going to be dead soon, what did it matter if she
...To rescue a 12,000 year old ghost, you have to learn to breathe water.
Our next mystery to solve was the toughest yet. We thought ourselves prepared to deal with being submerged several hundred feet below the surface.
My question was how to communicate with something who was older than all civilization as we knew it. What did it have in common with our modern culture? How to talk through an energy shield built to withstand
...6) Time Bent
Time haunted her. It didn't do what it was "supposed to" when she was around.
It ran forward, backwards, sideways. Sometimes time helped her solve her problems, sometimes it made them worse.
For a lovely young woman, you'd think there would be young men lined up to talk to her at any gathering. But she stayed away from them - to protect them from her curse.
What would be the good of a comittment like that if the
...Things were going well, until we got arrested.
By our own security.
No lawyer, no rights read, even our own boss turned on us.
Because now we were being studied like the very people we were studying before.
Or trying to.
You see, we couldn't find any trace of those people, except for faint traces of biological material that were old enough to be historical.
Everyone was starting to think they
...Where I had come from, how I had got here, I didn't know.
All I knew were my powers, the one's I knew from my childhood. The one's I'd spent my youth learning and perfecting. Witchcraft that could kill someone, or save their life.
But now I was here in a strange world, different people, unusual customs...
I didn't even know if my spells would work here - or if they burned witches at the stake - or tortured non-witches.
And
...A Sorceress appeared after being imprisoned for 12,000 years.
To escape, she tricked the oldest goddess still remaining on earth, and crippled another one shortly after.
Now the Ghost Hunters have to solve a problem they helped create. One who was more powerful than any they had faced to date.
Individually, she could probably destroy any one of them. Only working together as a team could she be stopped.
The
...10) Faith
A Countess who had a problem - she wasn't real. Not even in death.
Ghost Hunters trying to solve her mystery were plummited to their doom before they could solve her problem.
As was going to happen to John and his female spirit-guides Sal and Jude. But that ghost didn't count on the two gals having their own talents. All three escaped their doom this time, but worked out separately how to solve the ghost who stood
...12) A Very Thin Line
I was walking in my pasture one sunny afternoon when a pair of hands pulled me into the underworld.
Once I arrived, I relaxed - a bit. Because it was an old friend. Carol. A time-bender and now a Lazurai as well. Meaning she could walk through rock - and other things.
"Hi John. How have you been?" Carol was standing in front of a crystal fire place, warming herself from the magma heat that was channeled out of the earth's
...13) Shoemaker
The new shoes were paid for with time itself.
Two women came this day, in search of an artisan to make them a pair of shoes from scratch.
Not just repair some cheaply-made shoes, but to get a proper pair of hand-crafted, custom-fit, proper shoes.
Price was no object.
The shoemaker took the measurements of the younger lady's feet.
"Two weeks." He quoted them.
"And if we work as apprentices?"
"Two
...Facing a Fireball and living to tell about it wasn't in John's plans for the day.
But when he and his two female spirit guides were caught behind a red subcompact taking hit after hit of fireballs, some one had to do something. Because they could only keep taking those hits for so long.
Something in what he said made one of the girls step up and get the attention of whoever was throwing those fireballs at them. A distraction
...Gods and goddesses roamed the earth for millenia.
Some hold that they still do.
Two babes were born in the King's Forest, hunted by the King's soldiers and two Duke's armies. Life there was protected - and as pleasant as living among wild animals with only your father could be.
For their mother died in childbirth, and became a spirit-guide for that forest, keeping the land, plants, and animals in balance. Meanwhile,
...It's not often these days that you read about a real goddess.
One who was a lover of Ulysses – and saved his butt more than he would care to admit (and never told his biographer.) And one who influenced history for good and bad in more ways than you know.
But only the very worst stories about how she looked and acted have been passed down through the ages.
So she kidnapped a writer to tell it straight. Only
...18) Walkaway Mary
I felt like a ghost.
I'd only met him once, but was drawn to him like a moth to flame.
And didn't know why.
It was this author I wanted to see, but I didn't know if he wanted to see me.
He left me an autographed book of his, with his number.
But then I lost that book before I could call.
So I found he came to this diner often, a regular. It was where we first met. And It didn't take much to get his schedule from
..."John, I just met a ghost who's dying."
I raised one eyebrow, waiting for the punchline from my favorite time-bender.
"No, it's not what you think. I haven't gone off the deep end. The government made him into something they call a ghost."
"Figure if the government's involved, then it's going to be screwed up... But a ghost - dying?"
"Running out of juice, actually. Kept alive on some sort of weird life
...One too many. And I couldn't remember last night, either. Both unlikely for a witch.
But my powers were still here. Well, sort of.
And that's all I remembered.
Not my name, not how I got dressed (or un-dressed) like this. Or where I was.
Helluva hangover, especially for a witch.
The problem was that I didn't remember anything before I woke up. Nothing. No childhood, no witch training, nothing.
Not
...