Prologue

      Alex Maple wasn’t sure, as he first became aware of himself, if he was alive or dead.

      He was miserable; he knew that.

      Alive—he had to be alive to hurt in so many places.

      He hadn’t opened his eyes. Slowly, he tried to do so. At first, he thought about the Undertakers—the duo of kidnapping killers who had recently terrorized Boston. He was probably buried—deep in the earth, in a hole, in a Dumpster, in newly poured roadwork...

      No. When he opened his eyes, there was light.

      Too much light, maybe. Looking around, he realized that he wasn’t buried. The harsh light of a naked bulb filled the room where he lay.

      He tried to move; he sat up. He saw that he was on a gurney. The walls had once been painted that awful sickly green color that graced most of the country’s hospitals. Paint was peeling; dust and dirt covered the floors; spiderwebs were visible around the hanging lightbulb. There were several other gurneys in the large room—four or five of them. Scattered throughout and by the gurneys were tables, some made out of wood, some that appeared to be newer, made of stainless steel.

      There were tools on those tables. Knives, clamps, more—instruments that resembled those used by doctors years and years ago, some not so different now. He narrowed his eyes to study the one set.

      From the 1800s, so it seemed: bullet extractor, amputation knife, saw, cervical dilator, lithotome, scarficator and trephine, among others he couldn’t quite see.

      Surgical instruments—the trephine for creating gouges in the skull.

      And the strange shadowy color on some of the tables...

      Dried blood.

      He quickly turned to look at another table. Instruments for lobotomy, he thought—the controversial procedure invented by a Portuguese neurologist in the 1940s, known to create as many side effects as the initial mental problem, almost stripping the soul from a man.

      He tried to rise from the gurney.

      It was only then that he realized that he was shackled to it. One huge chain on his left ankle. Another on his right arm.

      His heart raced; he couldn’t breathe. It seemed that his vision blurred before him and the world started to go black.

      What the hell? What in God’s name had happened to him? Kidnapped, taken, was he going to be killed? Worse—tortured and killed.

      The fear was nearly overwhelming!

      He fought the sensation. Hard! He didn’t have any kind of training for this type of thing; he hadn’t even been a Boy Scout. But he was bright, and he wanted to survive.

      He was—not all that useful in such a situation!—a historian. He had to make do.

      Okay, that meant that, at the least, he was pretty darned sure he knew where he was. The Mariana Institute for the Mentally Unfit, opened circa 1840, closed down when the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had approved the disincorporation of several valley towns in order to create the Quabbin, a reservoir of water for Boston, in the 1930s. The Mariana Institute remained on high ground, ground that was deeply forested, now inhabited and visited only by the wildlife that proliferated the area—bobcats, black bears, moose, red foxes, eagles, deer, weasels, coyotes and more.

      It was supposed that it existed no more.

      But Alex was in it!

      According to official records, it—like so many other buildings—had been razed circa 1936.

      But clearly it hadn’t been, and he only knew that it was still here because of an obscure reference he had recently found in a book of incredibly boring records. Reading between the lines, he realized that they’d run late with the demolition—a complaint by the man in charge chalked it up to the fact that the doctors had been trying to find new placements for the remaining patients. And no more crews had been sent out after the date that it had been recorded as demolished.

      The area was called “the accidental wilderness,” because no one had realized what a reserve they would create when they flooded the towns.

      He’d been so excited about what he’d discovered.

      He hadn’t been able to wait to...tell Vickie!

      The terrible thought filtered in: no one knew it was here. No one would know he was here!

      Of course, people hiked along trails that weren’t that far away. There was a visitor center, there were wildlife refuges...

      None of them near the site of the abandoned mental institute—which had just been left there as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts dealt with matters far more serious than a derelict building that most people wanted to pretend had never existed. It wasn’t anywhere near any kind of an actual large city, with no real roads left to reach it. The wretched place—known for death and mayhem—was not even up for grabs to the many entrepreneurs who loved to create Halloween horror houses or museums out of such old institutes. Massachusetts had a solid grip on the area.

      How the hell had he even gotten here?

      He couldn’t remember. He had just woken up and...

      Found himself shackled to a table.

      Think! he commanded himself. He was supposed to have a brilliant mind. He was one of the youngest professors of history at one of the finest institutes of learning in the United States. That was, of course, why he could figure out where he was.

      None of this helped in the least in explaining how he had gotten chained up in a supposedly nonexistent mental hospital!

      Remember! Remember where he had been, what he had been doing.

      For a moment, his past eluded him. So he went back to the beginning: he’d been born in Auburn, Massachusetts. He’d grown up on State Street. He’d always been a nerd, but thank God, it was okay; time and society—and The Big Bang Theory—had made nerds acceptable. He was a hair over six foot three, but his weight was a mere hundred and eighty-five—no matter what he ate! One of the biggest, toughest football players in the school had been his best friend. He hadn’t been stuffed into school lockers or had his head shoved into the toilet. He’d been treated like some kind of guru, really.

      And after high school, Harvard.

      Graduation. He’d dated Allie Trent; they’d been a good pair. But Allie had died, way too young, way too smart and lovely, to have been lost so sadly to the horrors of disease. That had been a few years back now. He’d gone on a dating