A young writer named Fabio takes up residence in a mountain chalet to write his new, unsettling novel on Girolamo Segato, an 18th-century Florentine who discovered a method for petrifying the human body but took the secret to his grave. Fabio is disturbed by a bothersome old woodsman whose chatter appears to make no sense, while the mysterious presence of a young woman holed up in the neighbouring home proves to be an even greater distraction …