Dr. Logan Westlake is a world-renowned psychiatrist who specializes in working with the elderly. She works hard to improve her patients' quality of life, and she has made her career implementing better programs in nursing home facilities across the world. So when Logan is personally invited by the Quantamaker Group to help improve the work culture at Full Circle Sanitarium in Wyrdham, Pennsylvania, she jumps at the chance.
Full Circle is one of several Pennsylvania mental hospitals that were closed down during the 1980s due to the medical staff abusing or neglecting their patients. The property has now been purchased and re-opened by the Quantamaker Group, which tells Logan they are committed to providing the best possible environment for their incoming patients.
Logan witnessed her father, Sawyer, and her mother, Patricia, die in a car accident when she was only 11 years old. She was then raised by her grandmother in Wyrdham, until she went to Temple University in Philadelphia. While there, Logan married, divorced, and had a baby named Hunter. The divorce was amicable, and she chose to keep her ex-husband's surname. Logan and Hunter now live at Grandma Wynn's old farmhouse in Wyrdham, which Logan hopes to fix up and put on the market some day.
Dr. Westlake's first day at Full Circle is very bizarre. She is first asked to sign a confidentiality form, prohibiting her from sharing anything about the hospital's activities with non-Quantamaker Group personnel. She is then surprised to see that the sanitarium's patients never seem to move, eat, speak, or even sleep; they just sit upon chairs in their cells, staring in silence. The staff never take any of the patients' vitals; they are unable to draw any blood or even puncture their patients' skins with needles. The patients do not even seem to have names, but are only identified with serial numbers. Logan is especially spooked when she realizes none of the patients has a heartbeat, even though they are clearly alive.
Logan has all kinds of questions for her new supervisor, Dr. Quantamaker. He laughs and answers none of them, telling her this is exactly why she is here. He wants her to conduct her own study on the patients and see whether she might find a way of reaching them and communicating with them. "We don't know any of their names, or what happened to any of them," Quantamaker says. "We hope maybe you can make some kind of breakthrough; if we can just get them to speak."
Logan isn't sure what she thinks about this; the patients are really creepy, and something about Quantamaker spooks her even more. But the pay alone will help her put Hunter through college when he grows up, and she can't deny she is very curious to learn more about Full Circle's patients; so she agrees to work at the sanitarium.
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