In 1920, a traumatized World War One veteran leads an expedition into the Idaho wilderness to search for gold and instead discovers a that a portal has been opened to a terrifying other plane of existence.

SYNOPSIS:

Before he went off to the First World War, John Butcher was a legendary professional hunter. Now he's an empty shell, wandering the woods of the Pacific Northwest, alcoholic and suicidal. It's in this state that he stumbles into the town of McKinley Idaho, the personal fiefdom of the timber baron Talmadge McKinley.

When Butcher is thrown in jail for assaulting Talmadge's son, a drifter named Dog-Ear Thomas shows him a rock veined with gold. Dog-Ear claims this came from a rift in the side of a mountain in the wilderness that has been newly opened by an earthquake. One of Talmadge's men overhears the story, and Talmadge forces Butcher to lead a massive expedition into the wilderness to claim the gold.

The expedition is fraught from the start. Talmadge and his son are vying for control of the family corporation. Butcher and his men are under the thumb of the corporation's brutal armed guards. And as they get closer and closer to the rift, Dog-Ear begins to act strangely, almost as if he's under the control of some terrible force...or some terrible being. This all comes to a head when they discover the rift itself, a jagged slash in the earth that was once home to an ancient culture.

In unbearable pain from some unseen source, Dog-Ear kills himself at the mouth of the rift. But Talmadge is undeterred, and forces the expedition in to search for the gold. Soon, more and more of the members of the expedition start to act like Dog-Ear did. Even Talmadge seems no longer to be in control of himself.

Eventually, Butcher starts to wonder if there's any gold at all, or whether this has all been part of a plan created by whatever dwells in this rift to draw them here. And when that dweller bursts into the open, Butcher and the other surviving members of the expedition must figure out how to destroy it or fall under its control forever.