The house remembers what its doctors did. Now it wants a new patient.
Jennifer Taylor is one of America's most celebrated actresses, and her new Greenwich Village brownstone is the perfect retreat from the spotlight. But 21 Grove Street holds secrets that no renovation can erase. Beneath its floors lies a hidden laboratory where, over a century ago, a surgeon named Dr. Elias Crane performed unspeakable experiments on children before he was hanged for his crimes. Decades later, another doctor found that lab and lost his mind, consumed by Crane's lingering presence.
Now Jennifer is living in the same house, starring in a film that eerily mirrors her own life, and the boundary between reality and nightmare is dissolving. Mysterious accidents plague the production. A catastrophic carriage crash in Central Park kills her co-star and nearly claims her own life. And as Jennifer fights to recover from surgery in a hospital bed, a figure appears at her bedside: a man in dark wool with pale gray eyes who introduces himself as Dr. Elias Crane. The doctors call it trauma, hallucination, anesthesia. Jennifer knows better. She has felt his presence before, in her dreams, in the walls of her home, in the creeping certainty that something dead is not finished.
As her world narrows to the space between waking and sleep, between the living and something far older, Jennifer must confront a terrifying question: is Crane a ghost of the past, or a force that intends to make her his next subject?