Young poetess Rose Elliot buys a book from a local antique dealer, a diary in Latin of an architect, E. Varelli. She learns of the Three Mothers, and believes her apartment building is one of their houses. She pleads her brother Mark, who is studying musicology in Rome, to come, because she is afraid. Mark's friend Sara reads her letter, which he left behind in class, and discovers the school is run by the Mater Lacrimarum, and is killed for this knowledge. The house of Mater Suspiriorum has already been destroyed, and by the time Mark arrives in New York City, he is investigating his sister's murder.

John Baxter is a freewheeling trader of goods in Africa with a pet chimp and one dream: to save enough money to buy his dream gas station in Detroit. Madeleine Cooper is the lady of mystery he runs into as she flees from big game hunter Jack Palance.

In contemporary Prague a young musician is obsessed by jealousy for his beautiful girlfriend Klara. He engages a private detective to spy on Klara but this starts an uncontrollable series of accidents, misunderstandings and traps culminating in an unusual Venice.

A journalist researching a documentary in the Sahara Desert meets a gunrunner who dies suddenly. When the journalist notices that they have a similar appearance, he assumes the recently deceased's identity and accepts the consequences that it brings.

A team of scientists working to raise a sunken Russian nuclear submarine on an ocean platform off the coast of Miami, Florida, unearth an ancient Atlantean relic from the sea floor and bring in an expert to make some sense of it. But while attempting to raise the sub, radioactive leakage from its missles triggers the re-emergence of Atlantis, and the resulting tidal wave destroys the platform and leaves only a small group of survivors. Rescued by two Vietnamvets-turned-heavies who are out relaxing after their latest job, their boat eventually runs aground on a Carribean island nearby where, upon going ashore, it is discovered that everything has been destroyed and everybody killed. The culprits, a vicious group of well-armed raiders, and their leader, Crystal Skull, are descendants of Atlantis' original race who set about reclaiming the world and adding the survivors to the list of...