Retired auto body mechanic Milo St. Laurence is dying of cancer in a California hospital. He has weeks left to live. Instead of wasting away in a hospice, Milo travels to New England, wishing to spend his remaining time in the long-abandoned house his parents and all but one of his nine brothers and sisters died in. Some of his memories of home have become muddled over the years, but Milo can' t shake the feeling that he needs to do something important before he checks out, but can' t seem to figure out what, or why. While Milo lays in a hospital bed in the half-rotten structure he once shared with his family, his memories begin to return. He remembers being obsessed with the Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland as a boy. He remembers working at his father' s auto body shop as a young man. He remembers his siblings becoming sick with unexplainable illnesses, one after the other. He remembers how his parents, strict Catholics, refused to get any of them medical care, insisting God would save them if it was His will. He remembers watching his estranged sister Marie talk to an imaginary friend in corner of the living room. He remembers his parents started talking to the imaginary friend, too. Milo finally unlocks the repressed memory of night he ran screaming from the house and never returned, when Marie revealed the thing in the corner she and her parents had been communing with for years; the many-limbed caterpillar man, with his glowing eyes, and the alien hookah device he used to slowly suck the life out of the St. Lawrence children over a span of decades. Finally understanding his purpose for being back at the house, Milo enacts a wild plan to use his engineering skills to modify the monster' s hookah for human operation, and use it to inhale the life smoke out of it, before it can do the same to him.
