Twelve-year-old Rufus has been disqualified from a National Short Story competition. The judges have accused him of copying the story of a boy who won the competition twelve years earlier. But Rufus's story was not a work of fiction. It was a true account of his encounters with a mysterious old man who spoke in riddles - a man who had taken to hanging about the Martello Tower in Donabate the previous summer. But how could that be? How could two boys have shared an identical experience twelve years apart? And why did they both choose to write about it? And why, when the two eventually meet, will the encounter change both of their lives forever?