An orphaned teenager forms an unlikely friendship with a detective. Together they investigate her mother's murder, and uncover the supernatural force that proves to be a threat to her family.

A stone-encrusted body is unearthed at Pompeii, and people left alone with it keep dying of crushed skulls...

A new social worker at a girls' reformatory discovers that her charges are being used by a group of ancient alchemists, who have insinuated themselves as the prison's chief staffers, to keep themselves alive and free from an insidious petrification, which is already afflicting one of their number.