The souls of the dead held a lifelong fascination for Tyler Andrews. He had been a well-respected scientist and parapsychologist, renowned for his apparent clairvoyance and practice of psychokinesis, yet forced to take an early retirement from the Philadelphia Center of Paranormal Activities after a psycho-hypnosis experiment had gone tragically wrong, resulting in the deaths of two student volunteers.

Shunned by his colleagues and ridiculed by the profession he had all but given his life to, Tyler spent most of his time reconstructing the experiments which had cost him his position, in an attempt to prove his theories and correct his previous mistakes.

The dead came back! His earlier studies had all but proven such a claim and he had published many papers detailing his experiments and apparent successes. Only now, volunteers for his experiments were few and far between and Tyler had been forced to practice the dangerous technique of self-hypnosis he had pioneered some years before, using himself as a conduit between the mortal and spiritual worlds.

Setting up a series of video cameras to record these sessions of divination within his psychomantium, Tyler was hopeful of finally capturing indisputable evidence of the spiritual phenomena he knew to exist.

He had created his psychomantium in the darkness of his basement using two, door-sized, black-glass mirrors with one of the video cameras set up carefully between them. The mirror behind the camera was angled in such a fashion as to catch and reflect any anomalies or supernatural luminosity back towards the second mirror facing the camera, yet reflecting nothing at all of Tyler, or the chair in which he sat, whilst peering hypnotized into the glass. At a predetermined time, his recorded voice would free him from his self-induced hypnotic trance.

The second and third cameras were mounted on the ceiling above, the loop of lenses and mirrors combining to create a doorway into the afterlife; the cameras ready to record anything which manifested through the glass, spirit or otherwise.

In recent weeks, Tyler had noticed a sudden increase in supernatural activity, witnessing many manifestations with both mind and eyes alike, many of which had been captured by his cameras. Every session brought him closer to his one objective: to finally make contact with the souls of the dead he had summoned through the darkened glass.

Today, like every other day so far this week, something was acutely different. His cameras had recorded fervent activity behind the surfaces of the glass. The restless dead seemed unusually frenetic, so much so that Tyler wondered if his own experiments had somehow incensed the transitory poltergeists.

Disbelieving what his hypnotized eyes had shown him, he placed the latest videotape into the machine and played back the images from this morning's session. In spite of his experience and all he had witnessed previously, nothing could have prepared Tyler for what he saw on the tape. Horrified, he lowered himself slowly into the chair, fumbled for the remote, and then with a trembling hand, gently pressed the rewind button.

Copyright Ó 2001 Neil C. Cladingboel and Virtualbookworm.com Publishing Inc.