After making arrangements for little Jane to stay with a local woman "for just a few days", they set out. Prof. Fulcroft had hired a truck to drive them and their equipment to their starting point in the the White Mountains, and had a packhorse to carry their supplies. In addition to Prof. Fulcroft, the other expedition members included his niece, Doreen Hastings, who was an anthropology professor, one of his grad students, Red Barnsford, and a mountaineer and explorer, Brett Vanderwaal.
The first day was like a pleasant vacation. The mountains were scenic and not rugged, and the weather was perfect. The party made slow progress, as the route was mostly uphill and they had to divert up every side valley to look for any signs of the Demon's Mouth. But occassional surreptitious checks of the Gatestone showed they were heading in generally the right direction. They camped for the night, and Mary was annoyed to discover that she and Doreen were naturally expected to cook and clean for the whole party.
The night passed uneventfully, but everyone awoke a bit on edge. No one slept well, troubled by dark dreams that they can’t quite remember. Doreen complained of a headache, Brett spilled hot coffee and burned his hand, and the horse, quite docile the previous day, kicked and bit as the party tried to load their gear. The weather and terrain were much the same as the previous day, but the trail felt more steep. Brambles seemed to constantly catch at their clothing, and branches seemed more apt to slap in their face. The air felt dense and stifling, and the birdsong was grating rather than pleasant. They stopped for a short, cold lunch, but didn’t tarry long; they now seemed to be attracting swarms of small biting flies.
Around mid-afternoon, they spotted a small column of smoke rising off to the right. This was the first sign of human habitation they’d seen since leaving the road, so they diverted in that direction, and soon came to a small cleared area, backing up against a rock bluff. Built against the bluff was a small log cabin. As they approached the cabin, the door opened, and a strange figure emerged. He had a wild mane of white hair and a bushy white beard and was wearing a pair of filthy long johns, tall buckskin moccasins, and a shapeless felt hat. His skin was dark and leathery. One eye was dark and glittering, almost black, but the other was white and darted disconcertingly around in its socket. He pointed an ancient double-barreled shotgun at the party.
“This heah’s my propity, an you tain’t been INvited. Nope, we don’t a-want ya heah, an if’n ya don’t git right quick, we’ll just fill ya with buckshot and smoke YOU over yon fiah.” He jerked his head to one side as if listening to someone, then turned back. “We ain’t got nothin’ ya want, and ya ain’t got nothing we need, so just git!” He waved the shotgun menacingly.
The party tried to act friendly, and said they were simply looking for directions to a place called the Demon’s Mouth. That made him even more agitated. “Git out’n here NOW! I keeps the Old Ones away, yes I do, every single day, but you’ll bring ‘em out, sure as shootin’! They cain’t git MY soul, so they’ll a-come fer yer’n, an I don’t want t’ be anywheres near when THAT happens! No sir!”
Just as it seemed there was no hope in getting anything useful out of the crazy old man, Chuck offered him some of the whiskey the professor had brought along. That made his eyes light up. "I s'pose just a little drink wouldn't hurt none." 'Just a little drink' quickly turned into most of the bottle.
The whiskey made him mellow. His bad eye stopped moving wildly around, and stared fixedly off to the left. He began to open up. “M’name’s Ulysses Merrill. Been a-livin’ in these mountains all m’life, an’ I spose it’s made me a mite strange. Don’t get no visitors, ‘cept’n sometimes hunters out after my deer an’ bear. This land used t’ all b’long to my people, an’ I don’t like strangers a’traipsin’ around it.” Asked who 'his people' were, he explained he was one of the last of the Abenaki Indians.
The party tried asking again about the Demon's Mouth, and this time he was more forthcoming. “That’s a bad place, and no mistake. You really don’t want to go there. My granddaddy warned me away from there since I was no bigger’n this stump." Ulysses told them his people's legend of how the Great Spirit had killed a giant snake beneath the earth, creating a giant hole with his spear and releasing evil into the world. “That evil is real, and it tain’t nowhere stronger than at the Demon’s Mouth. I got protections, but you don’t” His hand went beneath his beard, as if caressing something hidden there. “Folks that go there, most of ‘em never come back. The ones as do, they’ve had their souls stolen. They’re crazy. Dangerous sometimes.” His bad eye started jerking again, and his head twitched from side to side nervously. “Sometimes … yeah sometimes we got to …” his voice trailed off.
When the party asked about his “protection”, he reached protectively for his neck with his left hand, while his right gripped his shotgun. “Sorry. we just … I mean I .. I guess I’m kinda protective." He raised his beard. On a leather thong around his neck were five dull metal spheres, about an inch in diameter, smooth, and perfectly round. There were no markings that the party could see in the fading light. “These are Spirit Stones.” He touched them one by one. “This was my granddaddy’s, this was my granny’s, this was my daddy’s, this was my mama’s, and this one’s mine. They keep the demons away, keep ‘em from stealing my soul. There’s only five. That’s why my mama and daddy only had one child, and why my daddy didn’t have no brothers nor sisters. They been handed down my family since back in the olden days. They protect us from the Old Ones – the demons from the pit.”
Chuck tried convincing Ulysses that they could "close" the Demon's Mouth, and destroy the evil there (drawing odd looks from the professor and his friends). However, that just drew a gale of laughter from old Ulysses. "You want to go sacrifice yourselves to the Old Ones, go right ahead! They’re about two miles straight over that ridge” He pointed to the bluff behind his shack. “Just don’t come back here yammerin’ after my soul once they’ve taken yours, or I’ll blow you to kingdom come!” He staggered back to his shack (keeping the shotgun in one hand and the other firmly around the neck of the whiskey bottle), and slammed the door.
The party made camp in Ulysses' clearing, but no one had a restful night. Several members awoke screaming during the night, haunted by strange nightmares where they seemed to inhabit the bodies of someone else. They broke camp early the next morning, and quickly found a trail leading up the bluff behind the cabin. At the top, the land flattened out, forming a natural bowl between the mountains surrounding it. A trail led around the circumference of the bowl, but after traversing a quarter of its length, it was clear that the Gatestone was pointing towards the center.
As they moved closer to the center, everyone was filled with a deep sense of foreboding. Some felt as if they were being watched by unseen eyes; others felt as if the ground were about to give way beneath their feet; still others felt as if the forest were closing in around them, the plants grasping at their feet and clothing. They pressed on despite their fears, and the trees began to look stunted and withered. Finally they found themselves in a clearing - in the center was a dark pit, 20' in diameter and perfectly circular.
Prof. Fulcroft and his team were excited by the find, and rushed to the edge, but the party was more cautious. Finally, seeing that nothing was reaching up to pull the others into the pit, they approached. The pit appeared bottomless; even their most powerful flashlight revealed no bottom. There was a gentle updraft coming from the pit, and while one would epect a breeze from a deep cave to be cool, this one was almost icy. Brett went back to the packhorse and returned with a long coil of rope and a small camp shovel. Tying it to the rope, he chucked it over the edge. He determined that there was in fact a bottom, although it lay almost 200 feet down.
Brett explained that they'd brought enough rope and rappelling equipment for four people to descend at once. The party broke into three groups. The first to descend were Brett and the Professor, accompanied by Jerry and Ice. During the first 50 feet, they had difficulty with roots and loose rocks catching on their clothing, and occasionally put their foot on what they thought was a solid outcrop, only to have it give way and their foot sink ankle-deep into a disgusting swarm of worms or insects. Roughly 100 feet down, they encountered a colony of bats. Brett was able to easily vault over them, but Jerry blundered into their midst, and woke them up; the hundreds of bats swarming around him caused him to lose his grip on the rope and fall some distance before he caught himself, suffering rope burns and badly pulled muscles in the process (as well as the terror of falling into the suffocating darkness).
As they continued down, they could hear more high-pitched sounds coming from below, but they were less piercing than the cries of the bats. In fact, they sounded almost like tiny human screams of pain and torment. Suddenly, Brett was attacked by four hideous flying creatures. The size of a skinny human child, they had a thin membrane of veiny flesh between their arms and sides, allowing them to fly with a great deal of maneuverability. Their faces were like an evil caricature of a human face, with long, wide ears and long, sharp teeth. They swooped in attempting to sink their claws into his flesh; when they succeeded, they began to tear at his neck with their fangs.
Brett began firing his pistol at the creatures, but was handicapped by the need to maintain his grip on the rope and by the awkward angle of shooting at something on his own back. Jerry was also limited in his use of spells by the need to hold onto the rope, but he managed to exhaust his supply of Magic Missiles on the creatures. Ice decided to use his paintball gun (in the DM's opinion mostly because he'd been dragging it around through a succession of universes with no opportunity to use it). This succeeded mainly in decorating the attackers in a rainbow of psychedelic hues. However, it did do 1 HP of damage, and amazingly, ended up killing several of the creatures. Brett was very badly wounded, but managed to continue his descent.
Shining their light down, they finally begin to see the bottom – or at least something blocking their way. Unlike the rough, dark rock of the pit walls, the surface revealed in the dim light was a pale, sickly color, and seemed to be smooth and undulating – almost like pale, anemic flesh. Ultimately they discovered this was a thick layer of bat guano. The pit opened up into a wider cavern roughly 15 feet above the floor, extending off into some unknown distance in the darkness.
Once the first group had reached the bottom, they jerked the ropes in a signal for the next group to descend. Those at the top had heard the distant sound of gunfire echoing up out of the pit, but had not been able to see what was happening in the darkness below. Nonetheless, the second group began their descent: Chuck, James, and Joe, along with Doreen. They had the same difficulties with obstacles and with passing through the colony of bats. This time it was Joe who found himself under attack by the horrible bat-things. He fared better than Brett, mainly thanks to the Stoneskin spell he'd received the night before. Like Jerry before him, James used up his Magic Missiles on the creatures.
Chuck, deciding that Joe was tough enough to take it, just began blasting away with his Mac-10. He did quite a bit of damage to the bat-things, and slightly less damage to Joe. Ultimately, all the creatures fell, and they joined the rest of the party on the floor below.
Chuck, deciding that Joe was tough enough to take it, just began blasting away with his Mac-10. He did quite a bit of damage to the bat-things, and slightly less damage to Joe. Ultimately, all the creatures fell, and they joined the rest of the party on the floor below.The final group was Mary, Phil, and Red. When they reached the level of the bat-things, both Phil and Mary came under attack. Having heard all the gunfire from the two groups before them, and seeing their lights only 50 feet below, they elected not to fight, and instead just rappelled down as quickly as they could. Once they came within range of the rest of the party, they made short work of the attackers.
The party found themselves surrounded by a seemingly vast cavern extending off in all directions beyond the reach of their lights. The sunlight that made its way down the long narrow shaft cast a glow barely brighter than faint moonlight in the area immediately below it. The air in the cavern was unusually cold, even for a cave. The area immediately below the shaft was covered with a nearly a foot of bat guano. and the acrid stench of guano made it difficult to breathe. Beneath the guano, the floor was littered with rocks that had fallen from the sides of the pit over the years, making it uneven and bumpy. On the opposite side of the shaft from where the party descended, there was an obvious crater in the guano, where something appeared to have fallen in from the surface. Whatever it was is gone, and a trail led through the guano off into the darkness showing where it either dragged itself off, or something drug it away. The Gatestone, still pointed down.
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