 A Victorian scientist and his assistant discover the secret of death: everybody has a kind of personal "death spirit", the "asphyx"; when somebody is about to die, this "asphyx" comes in to claim his victim. If it can be caught at the right moment, immortality follows! The scientist succeeds in capturing his own asphyx, but when he starts experimenting on his daughter, he accidentally kills her. The assistant, his daughter s fiance, commits suicide; the scientist, wanting to die with them, tries to set his asphyx free again, but has forgotten the cipher code to the safe in which the spirit is kept. He is doomed to live forever ...