While working as an art restorer, Alan Curtis becomes haunted by cries from beneath the ground and is led to a small damaged painting by the "Master of Oppenheim", a medieval German painter, nearly all of whose pictures have been lost. A chance encounter with Phil, a young girl trying to escape from her family sends them both on a journey of discovery to Oppenheim itself, where they begin to feel they must have shared a past life together. The answer lies in a cellar behind the walls of which two lovers are buried. As history is revealed, Alan and Phil find themselves under threat both from the ghosts of the past and the treachery of the present.

Robert Wynne-Simmons was born in 1947 in Sutton, Surrey, England. He began his first novel "A Winter Emerald" shortly after the death of his father in 1964. He has written two other novels, "Finals" and "Children of the Spirits", and a large number of poems, short stories, stage plays and film scripts. He began a career as a film director in 1968, with "The Judgment of Albion". His 1970 screenplay for "Blood on Satan's Claw" is now regarded as a classic of British Horror, and screenplay for "The Outcasts" (Ireland 1982) which he also directed, was a pioneer of magic realism in the Cinema. He is also a composer, whose works include an orchestral song cycle, a symphony, a musical, various chamber pieces, and he has written the libretti for two operas.