Viola Hatherley was a writer of ghost stories in the 1890s whose work lies forgotten until her great-grandson as a young boy in Mawson Australia learns how to open the secret drawer in his mothers room. There he finds a manuscript & from the moment his mother catches him in the act Gerard Freemans life is irrevocably changed. What is the invisible ever-present threat from which his mother strives so obsessively to protect him? & why should stories written a century ago entwine themselves ever more closely around events in his own life? Gerards quest to unveil the mystery that shrouds his family & his life will lead him from Mawson to London to a long-abandoned house & the terror of a ghost story come alive.