After sending their only daughter off to boarding school, Cookson Selway and his wife, Ellen, travel to London to escape their empty, echoing house. But their quiet hotel has guests other than those on the register, and a vacation intended to distract them from the present instead becomes a chilling confrontation with the past. Selway, an escapist with an alcoholic history and a gift for prescience, is drawn into a series of encounters with the ghost of a young girl who died in a fall from the same hotel sixty years earlier. Gradually, the shadowy rooms and characters of her life - and the nightmarish circumstances of her death - grow more real to him than those of this own, and he relishes the chance to move from his lackluster reality into her troubled history. Selway's wife looks on helplessly, then hopelessly, as her husband withdraws into a darkness whose inhabitants she cannot see or touch. Their marriage begins to crumble, and suddenly the lives of those around them are also in great jeopardy. Read Less