After receiving a strange letter from her mother encouraging her to hide until her fifteenth birthday passes, Alyssa instead returns home from boarding school. When she arrives, her mother is gone and only one of the lodgers is in residence, a wayward stranger known as Dark Man. In Alyssa's concern for her mother, she decides to check her parent's room to find not a clue; however, almost randomly a piano starts to play wildly. Alyssa becomes terrified to such a point that she runs out of the bedroom only to be transported to London during World War II.