Verny, Massachusetts, a small town in the rural Northwestern portion of the Commonwealth. The town has a serious problem, one seemingly insurmountable given the supernatural origin thereof, and only three police officers to protect the 120 residents. You see, this sleepy town is the home of a doorway, a doorway to a dark place, a doorway that no one in the town knows how to close. Even after years of research into the doorway, the small town's sherriff, Earl Kendrik, has been unable to lcoate a single serious scholar, academician, professor, wizard or other expert to come in and tell them how to close it. In addition, there are no intelligence or military units willing to investigate issues of the paranormal. No such channel exists, or takes the good sherrif seriously.

So, right now, Earl Kendrik, with lazy deputy Sean Reynoldson and smart alec over achiever Rodney Danvers, are the only organized force against a steady trickle of demons, zombies and other creatures of the night that pop up from time to time.

Deputy Danvers, formally Rodney Clark Melville-Danvers, was the scion of a once propserous family, now reduced to owning their fabulous three story town house, the contents inside, and not much else. Danvers Mills, Danvers General Produce, The First Bank of Verny, etc., have all been sold, or gone out of business, during the long, prosperous history of the Danvers. All that's left now is Danvers, his controlling momma and an ailing law practice that barely pays the bills. Danvers is very afraid of woman, as his mother is prying, deceitful and malicious to him, and so contents himself with Craigslist and porn when not on duty. He of course also makes dinner for her every night that he is home, and she makes him a breakfast and lunch for work hours. When he is on the night shift, he usually orders pizza or a sandwich. Danvers never knows what to do either, usually preferring to speak to or make peaceful a situation, rather than using his authority in any firm way.

Sean Reynoldson, on the other hand.... Well, he's a boozebags, a class barfly and a notoriously brazen womanizer. He hasn't read more than a few lines of the newspaper headlines since highschool, and even then his reading comprehension could be said to be low. He has a divorce with alimony that he is chronically late on, kids from that relationship that hate him, and now a palimony suit against him by the librarian of the town, who has one child by him. They love him very much, even if he smells like a musty hamper, eats terribly, curses and generally shows disinterest and disdain in everything other than the red sox, the patriots and the Bruins (he doesn't watch basketball-- too racist). Overall, though, Reynoldson is a great cop, a canny, intuititve enforcer who keeps people off kilter just enough to respect him and be wary of him. He is merciless in his teasing of Danvers. The only guy he respects is Kendrik, although for all Kendrik has done for him, he is still jealous and unreasonably angry towards him for perceived slights.

Add to that, everyone and their mother is very well-armed in Verny, and you have a serious problem of safety and control on your hands.

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The cops had been keeping up a routine for the past three years or so. The few candidates they've requested and received from the police academy normally requested a replacement or a transfer, after only a few days. Way too poor and sleepy for most young recruits. The one guy who had stayed, a quirky, odd fellow, hanged himself in a horrible auto-erotic situation gone very awry. He had never liked hearing about the creatures of Verny.

Every evening, the night patrol would meet with Sherrif Kendrik and inspect the seal. It's a concrete cap poured over the fissure in Dunburton Falls, the adjacent ghost town with its burned down factories, closed down mine and vastly polluted ground soil. In a playground on the old Dunburton Public Schools facility, there is a cap placed at Kendrik's expense by the local contractor. Each night, he measures temp., weathering, thickness, etc. He has no idea whether such a thing can hold back the creatures again (last time, it was bat-like simians, twenty of them, who took up roost in the old Dunburton church and waged horrific warfare against the people of Verny. Each touch by one gave the victims visions of the hell they would be sent down too, and soon they would reappear as more of the simians. He had Rev. Dumphries do the appropriate rights, but Rev. Dumphries was uneasy with that given his immoral leanings (he is having an affair with a local woman and several distant men). He isn't a catholic after all, thinking that the right itself does the charm. He also didn't like doing anything with the seal, other than the fact that one of the creatures had touched him, showed him its life in hell and what awaited him, and then broke his arm. The necrotic flesh had to be scraped off by Dr. Smiley before infection set in. His arm was next to useless today, something he didn't like.