The great actor Henry Irving is not as great as he once was. In fact, he’s awful – a shadow of his former self. Worried that something may be terribly wrong, Irving’s assistant Bram Stoker enlists the help of an old friend – Henry Gordon Jago.

With Irving’s state deteriorating, Professor Litefoot also faces a challenge. He performs an autopsy on a man who has had all his bodily fluids drained from him. Can the detectives discover the connection between the great actor and the mysterious dehydrated corpse? And how does it relate to the Woman in White who supposedly haunts Irving’s theatre?