King found work in the kitchens of Pineland, a nearby residential facility for the mentally challenged. After Stephen's grandparents passed away, Mrs. Other family members provided a small house in Durham and financial support. Her parents, Guy and Nellie Pillsbury, had become incapacitated with old age, and Ruth King was persuaded by her sisters to take over the physical care of them. When Stephen was eleven, his mother brought her children back to Durham, Maine, for good.

Parts of his childhood were spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father's family was at the time, and in Stratford, Connecticut. After his father left them when Stephen was two, he and his older brother, David, were raised by his mother. Stephen Edwin King was born the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. But no one has ever escaped from the Institute. As each new victim disappears to Back Half, Luke becomes more and more desperate to get out and get help. If you go along, you get tokens for the vending machines. Sigsby, and her staff are ruthlessly dedicated to extracting from these children the force of their extranormal gifts. In this most sinister of institutions, the director, Mrs. Others, Luke learns, graduated to Back Half, “like the roach motel,” Kalisha says.

And outside his door are other doors, behind which are other kids with special talents-telekinesis and telepathy-who got to this place the same way Luke did: Kalisha, Nick, George, Iris, and ten-year-old Avery Dixon. Luke will wake up at The Institute, in a room that looks just like his own, except there’s no window. The operation takes less than two minutes. In the middle of the night, in a house on a quiet street in suburban Minneapolis, intruders silently murder Luke Ellis’s parents and load him into a black SUV.

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