Some patients don't hallucinate. They perceive.
Inspector Julien Morel has spent fifteen years working cases most people don't want to know exist. He's still carrying the cost of one he can't talk about - three days of hesitation that ended a man's life and his own peace of mind. So when his supervisor hands him a "simple" case - a psychiatric patient who vanished overnight from a locked, barred room in a Laurentian asylum - he expects to be home for lunch.
He's wrong.
Th odore Gagnon spent four years drawing the same thing, over and over: increasingly precise labyrinths that turn out to be a map. A map of doors that don't exist on any architectural plan - until Morel finds a wall that sounds hollow, and behind it, a sealed room no one has entered since 1954.
What waits underneath Saint-Vincent is older than the asylum itself: a network of caverns marked with symbols carved by hands spanning centuries, a Victorian doctor's forbidden theory that madness might be a different kind of sight, and a passage that has been quietly swallowing patients - six confirmed, possibly more - for over a hundred years.
Now Morel has to decide what to do with a missing man who left his pajamas folded and a note promising he'd return - and with the unsettling fact that since the moment he set foot in Saint-Vincent, something in his own mind has started perceiving things that aren't supposed to be there.
Some doors were never meant to stay closed.
And someone has to be brave enough to keep them open.
LABYRINTH OF THE MIND
Shadows of Illusion: Volume 1
A Julien Morel Investigation