People of the dark

The plot centers on a love triangle between the narrator, John O’Brien; an Englishman, Richard Brent; and the woman they both love, Eleanor Bland. O’Brien plans to murder Brent out of jealousy, and plots to ambush him at a remote cavern on the English coast called Dragon’s Cave, once known as the Cavern of the Children of the Night, reputed to have been carved by a hidden atavistic society known as the Little People .  O’Brien enters the cave, which he had overheard Brent saying he had planned to explore, musing on the Little People: “Legend said that this cavern was one of their last strongholds against the conquering Celts, and hinted at lost tunnels, long fallen in or blocked up, connecting the cave with a network of subterranean corridors which honeycombed the hills.” The narrator slips and hits his head, giving him a vision of a past life when he was Conan of the Reavers, a black-haired Irish barbarian fighting with the Briton Vertorix over the love of the woman Tamera–earlier incarnations of Brent and Bland.