'Dear Stephen King,
I am writing to you because I know you are a true believer in the world of spirits, that your had a near death experience similar to mine, and because you are a fellow Mainer. My name is Eleanor Druse...'
Experimental psychologist and academic Eleanor Druse has had a lifelong interest in the paranormal. Then in 1999, her interest took an intensely personal turn when she suffered a serious head trauma in a road accident that resulted in a Near Death Experience. Since then it would seem Eleanor has acquired the disturbing ability to communicate with the dead...
And her interest in this inconclusive world of shadows has become an obsession, prompted by what seems to be happening at Kingdom Hospital - the regional medical centre of her home town of Lewiston, Maine. It's an ultra-modern establishment, a centre of excellence, but it sits on the site of an old textile mill that burned to the ground in 1869. Dozens of workers, mostly child labourers, were trapped underground and perished in the inferno.
Somewhere beneath the modern hospital, Eleanor Druse believes ineffable evil still lurks. She believes the 'distressed spirit' of a child is somehow trapped there, unable to find peace. She feigns illnesses that ensure she is readmitted to the hospital in order to investigate the increasingly strange goings-on there. She wants to make contact with the ghost girl - Mary Jensen - who is calling out to her from the hereafter, and there are those with vested interests who want to stop her. But something strange and disturbing is going on at Kingdom Hospital, something evil that modern science cannot explain away...