A narrator, who is drawn to look like Gaiman, tells of how, as a small child in Portsmouth, he was taken by his father to be treated by an osteopath who was once employed by Al Capone. The nature of the narrator's relationship with his father, the tales the osteopath told, and the disturbing events that followed, are partially obscured by the narrator's imperfect recall of things he was not old enough to understand at the time.