Description
Page Publishing, Inc. The Shaman Circle 2019 Edition by Danny Self
Michael Crichton meets Stephen King in the Shaman Circle. Middlesex Hospital, like most small hospitals, is struggling to stay afloat on a sea of uncertain revenues, but the new long-term ventilator facility just completed will command $40,000 a month for every patient. It promises to lift the hospital out of the whirlpool of debt in which it finds itself. There is just one problem: the ground it's built on was a barren circle of land, feared and, at the same time, considered sacred by the local Indian tribes. Dave Hollings is the night-shift respiratory supervisor at Middlesex. Rumors surrounding the construction of the new facility raise his concern for his coma patient's well-being and safety-particularly, the eight-year-old orphaned girl who is in a persistent vegetative state. As soon as the new facility opens, nurses begin seeing hideous faces on cardiac monitors, therapists begin finding unexplained changes to ventilator settings, intravenous solutions start turning into green goop. And throughout the facility, moving from room to room, are bright-green flashes and semitransparent apparitions. It is just an unacceptable, untenable, and unworkable environment. Forced to work in the facility night after night, Dave comes to the conclusion that whatever supernatural force is haunting the facility is not hurting the patients but helping them. He comes to believe that it's instrumental in their emergence from their comas. Dave changes his demand that facility be closed and convinces the chief administrator to keep it open. But when he returns to work, he discovers that despite the administrator's promise, all the patients have been transferred into the main hospital facility. He has no idea that the administrator's father-in-law, a powerful mob boss who is on the hospital board, built the facility and embezzled a million dollars during its construction. Dave desperately tries to sneak the young girl back into the facility for one more night to complete her recovery while, at the same time, one member of the mob is preparing to burn it to the ground.