A teacher starts her job at a high school but is haunted by a suspicious death that occurred there weeks before and begins fearing for her own life.

Writer in need of money returns to his hometown to try to write a new book. But his addiction to alcohol causes strange dreams that take him 50 years back to a Mardi Gras tuesday, when he was a teenager.

A work of Valle-Inclán, the story takes place in Galicia in the early twentieth century. To escape poverty, the wife of a sacristan uses a hydrocephalic child as a sideshow attraction. This causes a confrontation with her sister-in-law.