Lavender Bathwater knows one thing for certain... Pear Tree Cottage is not just an ordinary home. What she doesn't realise is why... Then, the confusing disappearence of her mum and dad becomes even more mysterious, when her dreams reveal unspoken family secrets. Lavender and her friends, Fred Keighley and Alice Sutton find themselves in a search for answers. But who or what can provide them? Motor-cycle riding Aunt Margaret, an elderly family friend who at inopportune moments suffers from blank stares and bizarre prophecies? Perhaps Delius the cat, who appeared from nowhere to make Pear Tree Cottage home, and seems to have a silent knowing. Or does the answer lay somewhere on the Goddodin moors, that loom over the children's home town? The children soon realise they are not alone in their search, when a sinister, gaunt-face man appears in town, with his own dark history and a desire to journey into the past.