In the wake of his parents’ tragic deaths in a house fire, 14-year-old Richard Elauved has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle in the remote, insular town of Ballantyne. Richard quickly earns a reputation as an outcast, and when a classmate named Tom goes missing, everyone suspects he is responsible. No one believes him when he says the telephone booth out by the edge of the woods sucked Tom into the receiver. No one, that is, except Karen, a beguiling fellow outsider. Richard traces the number that Tom prank-called from the phone booth to an abandoned house in the Mirror Forest. There he catches a glimpse of a terrifying face in the window. And then the voices begin to whisper in his ear: She’s going to burn. The girl you love is going to burn. There’s nothing you can do about it.