Mika Shaw is a drug-addicted schizophrenic who lives in Bishop, California, a small town in the Eastern Sierras where there's not much to do but drink, get high, and have sex. Plagued by bizarre hallucinations, reality and nightmares co-exist in Mika's mind, indistinguishable from one another.

When her friends begin dying all around her under increasingly violent and bizarre circumstances, Mika is terrified that the nightmares aren't just in her head this time.

The Paiute believe that malevolent spirits called Pahoha, water-babies, inhabit the Owens River. The Pahoha have pale skin and black eyes. Their voices sound like the cries of young children and lure people to the lake to be drowned. Sometimes they can look like lost loved ones, dead friends, or relatives calling from the other side. To see them is to be fatally cursed...

And Mika has seen them.