A man named Wallace Daniels moves out to the Wisconsin countryside after a car accident kills his family and severely injures him. One day after he’s lived there for a few years, his lazy neighbor Ben Adams accuses him of stealing his chickens. The sheriff drives up to question Daniels, but quickly realizes the accusation has no merit. Daniels spends most of his time wandering the land and taking care of his minimal livestock. However, unbeknownst to the sheriff, ever since the accident jumbled his brain Daniels has been able to see the past around him. At random, he shifts into different time periods in which he can see dinosaurs, ancient creatures, and prehistoric flora. He has also gained the ability to listen to the stars’ conversations. In particular, he discovered a cave in the nearby cliffs only accessible by an ancient tree in which he can hear a creature buried within the stone, remembering its past on another world.  Daniels wants others to be aware of the creature so that eventually they can free it from the stone, and so begins to tell a paleontologist about his abilities. The man seems like he may believe him, but when Daniels mentions listening to the stars, he quickly dismisses his story. Frustrated, Daniels returns home, and that night hears the sound of someone cutting down a tree. The next day, he finds that someone has chopped down the tree to the cave. Daniels gets a rope and climbs down to the cave’s entrance, wondering if someone disturbed the creature, but finds nothing different. When he tries to leave, sensing an approaching storm, he finds that someone has taken the rope up and trapped him in the cave. A blizzard begins outside, and despairing hope of a rescue, Daniels climbs further into the cave and attempts to speak back to the creature for the first time. He initially doesn’t get a response, but then notices the cliffside beginning to shake and fall apart. A creature of light emerges and approaches him. It explains that it is waiting for the creature in the stone to be freed, and wonders if Daniels can help. Daniels says that in a hundred years, humans may have the capability to free the creature, but no one will know it exists if he cannot escape the cave. Since the light creature is not made of physical matter it cannot help him leave, and Daniels finds himself overwhelmed with exhaustion and goes to sleep. Daniels finds himself transported farther back in the past than he’s ever gone before, to when the Earth was covered in oceans. He witnesses a ship dispose of a sphere of light on the planet as a form of exile for its crimes, which he realizes is the creature trapped in the stone. He is then transported back to the present in the woods outside the cave, where he finds the sheriff, who has been out looking for him. Ben Adams had called in that he was missing, and they were searching the cave for him now. Daniels realizes that Adams was the one who pulled the rope up on him. As they approach, Adams begins shrieking in terror and they haul him out of the cave, where he says he heard a creature. The men disperse, although the sheriff questions Daniels about the mysterious circumstances of his disappearance, and Daniels returns to his farm. Inside, the light creature waits for him, and together they go tend his livestock as they realize they may perform similar caretaker roles.