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

blast. Seeing people dragging coffins around in public and racing each other to the finish line with them was pretty surreal; some other folks were seeing how far they could throw a frozen fish, and there was just a ton of Halloween make-up on display.
    Now, I’m pretty sure I know what you’re thinking, and the answer is no; I did not see the spirit of the Frozen Dead Guy walking around up there. This is reality, not a Stephen King story. What I did see, though, was a guy whose age I put at about nineteen or twenty, who just didn’t quite look like he fit with the rest of the crowd. He had a mullet for starters, and one of those blue denim jackets that had been popular in the Seventies. I watched him tracing his way through the crowd for a few minutes, weaving in and out of the food stands and the happily-chatting people. Nobody seemed to pay him any attention, but he looked fairly happy and interested in everything that was going on. Then suddenly, he stepped through the side of a cop car and plain old disappeared, just another one of Boulder County’s earthbound dead souls.
    I was just about done telling my companions this story when we hit the big traffic circle where all of the main roads come together. “…and right there, ” I pointed at the corner store, “is where the dude disappeared. Just walked right through a patrol car and disappeared.
    “Wow.” Becky seemed genuinely impressed. “Could you see through him?”
    “Not really. A lot of the time, ghosts look as solid as you or me. The longer they’ve been around on the Earth plane, the more transparent they look.”
    “Why is that?” she wanted to know.
    “Is it, like, a battery draining?” Brandon put in before I could answer.
    “Actually, you’re sort of right. Do you remember VHS tapes?” I was impressed that he’d almost hit the nail on the head.
    “Sure,” Brandon laughed. “We still have a VHS recorder at home somewhere. In the garage, I think.”
    “Remember how, if you played a VHS tape over and over again too many times, the picture quality used to fade out and degrade?” They both nodded. “Well, with some spirits, it works sort of like that too. If they’ve been earthbound for a long time, they start to get frayed around the edges, lose some of their color and solidity.”
    “Man, that’s sick.” Brandon braked a little, going clockwise around the traffic circle and taking the north exit, accelerating again as the road led us out of Nederland and over a rise onto the Peak-to-Peak Highway. “Can they, you know, recharge or something?”
    “Right! What if they go back to the spirit world?” Becky wanted to know.
    “I’ve talked to my spirit guide about this. She says that if a spirit goes back to the Summerland and spends some time there—”
    “ Summerland? ” Brandon sounded confused.
    “The next world,” I explained patiently. “There are lots of spirit realms, some of them much nicer than others. Our world is on the lower end of the scale — sort of like the slums — but there are some that are much worse. The Summerland is where most decent people go first when they die. Sometimes they can cross over in both directions, but time works a lot differently over there than it does here on Earth. It’s all pretty confusing, and I haven’t figured out the way it works yet.”
    Trees were bordering the road in on both sides now, mostly evergreens and conifers. The time on Blazer’s dashboard clock read 15:36. There was still plenty of daylight left, and I was really starting to enjoy the ride. Becky’s company was the icing on the cake, but even Brandon was turning out to be an OK guy now that his cronies weren’t around for him to look macho in front of.
    “Shouldn’t be much longer now.” Becky had her iPad out, and was eagerly charting our progress on the mapping app. “It should be up here on the left, just a little further ahead.”
    And sure enough, there it was. The turn-off wasn’t sign-posted,