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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"Fuck!"
Sweat drizzled down Benny's temples as he shot up, clutching the covers to his neck. His heart thrummed in an unsteady rhythm, and his lungs were tight, uncomfortable.
The nightmare still played out before him, as if he hadn't woken up. Blood-red eyes glared at him in the darkness, and yellow crime-scene tape swirled around them, below them, above them, forming a silhouette. It was a feminine outline, with slender hips and long hair and a sway to her walk, and she'd stormed up to him, filled with rage. A misty substance formed the rest of her body, though her clothes and muscles and limbs remained blurry. A reddish glow gyrated about her, pulsating, throbbing like a heart's beating. Her voice was shrill, impossible to understand, but charged with fury.
When she'd reached an arm out to him and howled, it had woken him with a start, and a near heart attack.
"That was insane," he said, throwing the blankets off and setting his feet to the frozen floor. A gloomy cold hung heavy in the air as he hunched over, bristling through his bed-hair, massaging his temples, hoping to erase the horrifying image.
Who was that? Or what? He'd never had such a vivid nightmare, so clear, as if real and not stuck in his head. And he'd never had visitor in his dreams with such an ominous tone, a mounting tension to its every move. Had something followed him here from the house? And was it still in the room?
He sat up straight and gaped around the obscurity, but stilled at the sight of the bathroom light. It was on, but hadn't he turned it off before bed? Benny needed absolute darkness to sleep, and wouldn't have managed to lay down if he'd forgotten to turn that light off.
"The fuck?" He stretched as he stood and sauntered over to the bathroom to flick the switch—but instead he immobilized at the threshold, his jaw dropping to the floor.
To the soaked, flooded floor.
"Huh?" He snatched a hand-towel from near the sink and tossed it onto the ground, where it began to sponge up a considerable amount of water. "The toilet overflowed?"
He recalled flushing said toilet before bed, and he hadn't done anything that would have clogged it. Brows scrunching, he dared a step inside, and his foot squished onto the towel.
"Gross." As he sloshed forward, he noticed the liquid drizzling from the toilet bowl, the lid pulled up, and something floating within. And that never-ending still-flushing sound filled his ears. "Gross, gross, gross."
But to his shock, it wasn't feces that congested the drain, or a giant wad of toilet paper. It was a cluster of small, rectangular pieces that eerily resembled—
"The tapes?" He hurried to fiddle with the flusher, to adjust it so that the tank would stop hissing at him. Then, grimacing in disgust, he dipped his hand into the bowl and snatched the tapes, shaking them out before hauling them into the sink.
