Alison, the living owner who can see and hear the dead, hesitates. "If I press it, we could end up in solid concrete."
The ghosts file in, silent. On the screen flickers footage from their own lives—not the moments they remember, but the nine seconds before each of them died.
"So that's it," Robin, the ancient caveman ghost, says quietly. "No afterlife after the afterlife."
Each ghost watches their own BD9. Then, the final reel: a shot of the manor, empty, years from now. Alison is gone. The house is rubble. And the ghosts are nowhere—not in frame, not in voiceover. Just silence.
The other ghosts crowd around in the drafty hallway. The elevator—installed in 1927 by a previous owner, a reclusive film collector—has always been temperamental. But tonight, the full moon through the warped window of the landing casts a silver line directly onto the BD9 button.
The screen goes black.
"Or," says Thomas, the lovesick Romantic poet, "we could finally learn what BD stands for."