High Ground

Like a Michael Crichton novel set in a fictional Stephen King Down East Maine coastal town, HIGH GROUND is a collision between the technologies of the 20th and 21st centuries and the struggle between hatred and forgiveness. In a once grand mansion next door Margaret finds Esther Brandt, a strange, frail old woman living alone in terror in the huge, darkened house. Esther tells her she suffers pain in the presence of electromagnetic fields from radio, TV, or even electric wires. She tells Margaret that she is under nightly attack by the searing radiation of an unknown source. Unsure if Esther is insane, demented or truly tormented, Margaret turns to local townspeople for help but finds none. Esther's hated robber-baron father had ground the people of this town to dust in his long-closed mills. Yet, one woman confides, "Esther is crazed, but she is not crazy." Margaret learns that a 21st century robber-baron has begun night test flights of a powerful new weapon from a reactivated World War II airfield nearby, directly over the Brandt estate and out over the North Atlantic, unaware that anyone still lives in the dark, decrepit mansion below. They are hunting satellites with a weapon that is not "yet ready for prime-time." Townspeople despise her family name, and barely remember that anyone still lives in the worn-out, dark old mansion atop Mill Hill. They have grown accustomed to not caring. They hold a secret wish for the day when the last cursed Brandt is no more, and that weight lifts away from them. It is said evil happens when good people do nothing. Having suddenly lost her father, Margaret cannot stand idly by.