Unsusucessful music student Rafael Meden, an organist and a sexton in a parish without a priest, indulges in drinking. At the same time he is more and more aware of the fact that the Catholic Church as a form of faith and spirituality is disintegrating and decaying and that he is completely helpless fighting against that. In one of the wolf’s nights when according to a pagan belief the world of the living is ruled by dark chthonic forces of evil, he is surprised by the strange arrival of one of the most prominent professors of music theory. It is exactly the professor that prevented Rafael from continuing his studies by failing him at an exam. The professor who is now very timid and humble and who smuggles along a young, according to his words, talented student, is supposed to save the parish from spiritual decay. But the young debauched student and more and more obviously heathen professor only accelerate the decay.
The novel actually speaks of the crisis of the European civilization, of erosion of Christ’s idea of the love for one’s neigbour and of the last phase of this crisis, i. e. of the wolf’s nights of the civilization when it is dominated by the demons of disintegration and decay.