A boy finds a one-word message -- HELP! -- sealed in a tin can and is sucked into a thrillingly gruesome adventure. Fergal Bamfield doesn´t collect stamps like normal kids. He´s an oddball (his mother prefers to call him \"clever\"), and his collection is as strange as everything else about him. Fergal Bamfield collects tin cans. Then one day he finds a can without a label. What could be in it? Peaches, soup, perhaps revolting spam? But instead it´s something gruesome: a human finger. Then Fergal finds another can, this time containing a one-word message, HELP! Now Fergal and his friend Charlotte are knee-deep in an adventure, and they´re about to learn something horrible: Everybody has an expiration date.