Excerpt from the opening chapter:

The Place

“It’s too late now to turn back.”

Tony Downs repeats the words he has spoken so often since arriving here.  At the evanescent edges of his thoughts, he wishes he knew what they mean.  But he’s not able to deal with meaning.  An overwhelming blankness has captured him.  If only he could—

The words themselves somehow torture him.  His shoulders seize, and he slaps the water in the pond by which he stoops.  He is splattered with the cool liquid.

As suddenly, he rolls his hand from side to side, watching the concentric rings of ripples spread.  Pond debris bobs on the tiny waves.

Once, he remembers, in a patchwork of images and sounds, when he’d lived in the big house with the large living room decorated in mid-American chintz and doily, his mom and dad had bought him a football-sized Noah’s Ark.  Made of a shiny, blond wood, it had doors that opened and a top that came off to reveal the animals he’d put inside.  The animals—lions, tigers, giraffes, elephants, and others, all two by two—had come with the Ark in a large pasteboard box.

He’d taken the Ark and animals down to the pond in a nearby park.  Putting the animals in, he’d roll the boat with his hand, careful not to let go of it.  “This is a big storm,” he’d say, “and the animals are all safe.”

Tony Downs is completely happy.  He wishes he had his Noah’s Ark now and—

Again his shoulders seize.  His fists clinch.  His face strains.  He’s terrified.

“It’s too late now to turn back,” he says.

Henrietta Hink, M.D., Ph.D., watches Tony’s latest seizure—or whatever they are—from the park bench where she’d plopped two hours ago to continue to evaluate him.  Actually, the spasms and facial contortions don’t seem to be seizures—at least they don’t coincide with any irregular electroencephalograph patterns when he’s hooked up to an EEG.  Whatever they are, they’re as mysterious as the man himself.

She places her clipboard in her lap and stretches to relieve the stiffness in her back, staring at Tony.

Who are you? she wants to ask him.

She removes her glasses and wipes away a yawn and returns to her intent observation.

Who are you?

It’s obvious that something’s different about him.  Against her will, all her other responsibilities were removed the moment an unmarked helicopter brought him to the chopper pad.

It is the man that Demont—she shivers—Mr. Demont, that is, has such an unusually strong interest in.  Perhaps Tony’s the patient she has dreaded since she understood what coming to work here means—the one who will destroy her life, her work.

Perhaps this mysterious Tony Downs has already set in motion her personal Armageddon.

She works, after all, for a crazy man.  Oh, not Cranston.  No one works for Cranston.  Against him, maybe.  Around him—over, around, under, or behind his back.  Occasionally with him.  Never for him.

Demont—“Mr. Demont to you, Hankie Hink,” he’d said in that airy hiss he spoke in, the first time she’d met him.  “Always Mister Demont”—he was the man in charge.

She shivers, remembering that time. 

“It’s too late now to turn back.”

Tony’s words draw her back to the real moment.  Her hands shake as she notes Tony’s behavior on the chart.  Her breathing is short and choppy.

The cycle remains constant, she writes.  It’s always those words, that tortured look.  Then comes the total silence, when his expression rolls from awareness to blankness.  A veil of peace follows, such as now, then he returns to whatever he’s doing.  Such as now, when he appears to be pushing an imaginary boat on the pond.

She shakes her head.  Whatever he’s going through, Dr. Henrietta Hink, Johns Hopkins Phi a Kappa magna cum laude, can’t fathom it.  Before coming to work here, she was noted as one of the top three neurosurgeons and researchers in the world:  three international awards AND a Nobel nomination; papers published in all the top journals including JAMA; consultant to the U.S. Surgeon General.

Except now, she feels like a beginner.  Psychiatry, after all, isn’t her field.

Who are you, man?  And why are you here?

She wipes the moisture trickling from her face with the handkerchief—her hankie—that’s ever present in her suit jacket.

By the pond, Tony burbles joy and giggles as he waves his hand in the water.  Beads of sweat, big, like paste diamonds, dot his forehead under the rim of the gauze-and-bandage cap that hides a nasty wound.  A smile tinges the corner of his mouth.

Henrietta squints at him.

Who are you?

Whoever you are, I’ve got less than three days to find out what you know.  And something you know might doom us all.

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