Scene 1 - And the gunslingers followed...

Mattie's hand is cold against the door, as she would expect from a plate of metal like this. The metal is smooth, impeccably clean.

As Mattie puts her ear to the door she can hear a faint humming sound - the kind that might be made by a refrigerator. There is also a faint sound of irregular tapping - like something light but hard clicking on metal. These sounds can only be heard with her ear against the door.

Mattie tries the handle, but the door is locked.

However, as she tries the handle, the sounds behind the door change. There is a loud sound of dull, deep barking - it sounds like a challenge of some kind? Sounds of objects being knocked around.

And then, the sound of something pounding against the door from the other side - pounding hard enough to be making dents in the door, a deafening sound in the white room Oscar and Mattie are standing in, the sound bouncing off the tiles that line it, echoing around and amplifying.

The dents in the door are the size you would expect from a fist that is considerably larger than a typical human's. They are appearing peppered around the height of Mattie's head.

There isn't a keyhole. To the right of the door, on the wall at about shoulder-height is a hand-shaped depression.

It seems unlikely that whatever is behind the door will be able to actually make a hole in the door - however, it is starting to shudder in its frame. If it comes down, it will probably be because the hinges or the lock is broken.

Henry and Rose hear hurried sounds from behind the door from which they just exited the house.

Hah!

The sounds are growling and barking, a clattering of heavy objects to the floor, and muffled shouts... sounds nice and friendly to me......!

Oscar taps into the gaps between reality, into The Shimmer, and around him anyone watching him would see a distortion in the air around him, a sense of some other darkness intruding into this world, some disturbing noises somehow echoing faintly in the back of their minds...

As he tries to reach out and touch the mind of whatever is behind the door, the sounds of pummelling against the door cease - although sounds of deep harsh barking continue, which might be sounds of pain, or fury, or both...?

As Oscar backs out of the room, there are sounds of metal objects clattering behind the "Employees Only" door, sounds of things being pushed over, pulled around.

Closing the outer door, Oscar meets up with Rose, Mattie, and Henry. At the same time, the ka-tet is joined by an AR-15-toting Beretta, a huge-revolver-lugging Spline, and a furious looking Podge who has a wicked knife in one tentacle, a spiked bat in another.

"What in TARNATION is going on down there?!" demands Beretta, a look of bemused fear on her face.

"Is 'what is down there' dangerous?'?!? Henry, until now there WEREN'T any 'what is down there' that could have been dangerous!?!"

"There's just that metal table with the basin and the faucet - them there crates with our store of root vegetables - and that door that doesn't open."

"No pets, dangerous or otherwise!"

"Sweet Man Jesus!" barks Spline - who then makes an effort to calm himself to reply to Mattie.

"Yes, Mattie, that's right - when we were led here to this farm, the room was already there. Pretty freaky place, I know that. 'Specially when we first got here. That strange lektrik light, something I never saw before in this world. How damn clean it stays. Not to speak of the cracked-open mummified body we found there lying on the table."

"But that tap, that gives drinking-pure water, as many times as you press the button next to it. We have our good crops, and our health, to thank for that."

"So we cleared out the body, gave it a decent burial, and when nothing else seemed to change in that room - after we'd tried several times to open that door at the back and failed - we started just using it to store our potatoes and such like, and as our source of water."

"Never had anything problematic or anxiety-inducing make its way out of there the whole time we've been here."

"But that's before that man Black Francis, and you, turned up. I can imagine that might set some wheels in motion, so to speak. And that some of them there wheels might be, hm, inconvenient for you and for us..."

Currently there are no loud noises coming from behind the closed outer cellar door.