Death. What happens after it? What lies beneath the surface?
Poor Arielle Daniels stumbled through dangerous hoops to figure this out. She wakes in a new place--the Void--and discovers that what waits after death are layers, dimensions, and sadly...
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Tattered tapes and messy paperwork scattered all over the rickety hotel room table as Benny settled in a chair to review footage on his laptop. Between his captures and those from Kylie's cameras, he hoped to find something that would validate what they'd felt in that house.
But though both cameras had caught the device shooting across the area and smashing against the wall, the angles didn't show Benny's hand well enough to ascertain that he hadn't done it himself. That, coupled with the voices on the recorder, wouldn't tip the scales in his favor; if anything, they would worsen his chances at convincing Kylie's bosses.
It had taken Kylie so much time to sway them into letting Benny onto the crime scene to work his magic. If he couldn't produce results... he worried she'd be fired. He worried she'd bet too much on him, and he slouched in his seat and sighed at the idea of her telling him. "Benny, your failure has caused me to become unemployed. Thanks for helping me lose my dream job." To see her eyes filling with such deception and her lips down-turning would hurt him more than he cared to admit.
More than once in their lifetime as friends, he'd heard defeat in her voice. There was that time when he'd dropped out of college, or when he'd confessed he was obsessed with the occult, and when he'd chosen said obsession over her, deciding to pursue it without remorse.
I can't bear to witness her disappointment again.
He rewound the tape he'd been working on and analyzed the moment the device turned off. That part was significant, as he'd been standing in a manner that showed his hand on camera, and how his fingers were far from the buttons. And yet he had an inkling it wouldn't suffice, either. Machines malfunctioned, batteries drained, and the FBI would rather believe in mechanical deficiencies than in someone turning the recorder off.
Again, he rewound the footage to a few seconds before the device flicked off. He zoomed in, curious to see how much detail he might have captured and hoping for the tiniest sign of something supernatural—and gasped.
"Oh... oh, no way." He leaned closer to his screen and his eyes widened as he paused the tape to better gauge what he'd witnessed, what appeared to be floating near the recorder. "Is that... a hand?"
In the video, the faintest trace of slender fingers wrapped around the device. It was a see-through arm with hard-to-discern limbs, but with a bit of manipulation and light changes and editing, he might be able to obtain a better view. So he pressed a few buttons and opened a few programs and got to work, desperate to prove Kylie's bosses wrong.
Before long, he had a clearer picture of the scene. A thumb was propped against the off button, attached to the fuzzy outline of a wrist, and an even fuzzier outline of an arm.
"That can be used," he said, patting himself on the back. "It's still not enough, but it's a start."
He jotted down a few notes to add to his official report—Kylie had begged him to type one up for her superiors—and swiveled his chair towards the bed, where he'd laid out all his research.
