Disgraced and disbelieved, the survivors are shipped home to Miskatonic — where their friends walk the same halls in the same faces, eating the same food with the wrong hands. A girlfriend comes looking for the boy she loved and finds a stranger who speaks in someone else's voice. A professor who was meant to be on the expedition meets the priest who went in her place and does not recognise him at all. And in a locked office on the second floor of the English department, a man who has seen these things before tells a Swiss mountaineer that they are not safe. None of them are safe.

The fog closes over Broken Hill, and the ground beneath the camp begins to hum. By midnight, something has come down out of the dark that is not a falling star — and it has come for its own. By dawn, the friends who were taken have walked back into the sheriff's office alive, and wrong.

The flood recedes and the flower bed gives up its dead. On a hill where no bird sings, the survey team uncovers a whole people buried in a single grief-stricken pit, and a schoolteacher shows a priest what the town's children have been drawing. By nightfall the fog is rising on Broken Hill.

Clement follows the tracks into the hills and finds something alive in the stone that should not be alive. A storm breaks over the Green Mountains, a bridge goes down, and something pink and wrong floats out of the floodwater. By nightfall, the expedition has stopped trusting the man who leads it.

A midnight ritual in the sugar maple forest summons something that was already waiting. Jimmy Maclearan comes home drunk and grieving. The investigators break into Blaine's room and find a photograph of a dead girl. And beneath it all, the same dream keeps coming — of darkness, buzzing, and a woman screaming.

The expedition splits in two. One group digs into the hills and finds echoes of something ancient; the other goes door to door through Cobb's Corners, collecting stories of vanishing men, weeping strangers, and a photograph of something that should not fly.

The expedition enters Cobb's Corners for the first time — a town of warm smiles and cold stares, where the sheriff preaches temperance, the deputy pours whiskey, and the dead are said to walk.

Ten students and two chaperones depart Miskatonic University for the backwoods of Vermont, bound for a second attempt at researching the folklore and geology of the Cobb's Corners region.