Once in childhood, Alan, Rick, Donald and Bernard were inseparable friends. Now they are already approaching forty, the lives of each have not been very successful, their paths have diverged, and old friends are brought together by terrible news: Bernard, the loneliest and most harmless person in their company, committed suicide. Alan, Rick and Donald find a suicide note in which Bernard confesses that he was in fact a serial killer. Even when the police find mutilated corpses buried in the city, they cannot believe what they have found, but soon, due to nightmares and terrible waking visions, they realize that Bernard may have died, but he has not disappeared, and there is something worse behind him any person. When the friends begin to look for answers in Bernard's past, they realize that something terrible happened to them once in childhood: an event that they all preferred to forget about. And now the truth threatens to destroy not only their lives, but also their ideas about the structure of the world around them. The book contains obscene language.