David Williams comes to the Isle of Wight to renovate the old Victorian mansion Fortyfoot House, hoping to recover from his messy divorce from his wife. But on the very first night he hears some loud rustling in the attic, during the day he sees the ghosts of long-dead people near an abandoned chapel nearby, and then finds out that Fortyfoot House is notorious among the locals: for a century it has been associated with the disappearance of children throughout the area and with the legend of a terrible monster named Brown Jenkin. Only this is no ordinary ghost story. The evil that has settled in Fortyfoot House is much more terrible and powerful than any ghost, and David's life soon turns into an unspeakable nightmare in which people die, and the past, present and future are intertwined into a single inextricable thread.