Orion's Cold Fire

Roger stood there staring at the door for about thirty seconds.  Everything about this talk had been confusing and troubling.  The man’s appearance and speech seemed like something from a century before.  And the claim that there were no roads anywhere near seemed outlandish.  And claiming never to have heard of Route 20 was ridiculous.  “Could he have been putting me on for spite?  But what sense did that make?  He’s never met me before.  Was it just because I trespassed on his property and bothered him?”  These were the thoughts that raced through Roger’s mind standing in front of the closed door.  Then walking back to his car, he decided the only sane thing to do was to ride back down the path till he got to Becket.  So, he turned around and headed back.  And he saw how the road narrowed again and sank below the level of the surrounding land.  But after less than twenty minutes he could see the sky ahead darken and eventually the path reached the promised mountain and ended in a boggy stream bed.

“Should I go back to the farmhouse?  Should I leave the car and walk till I find a house here?”  Looking at his gas gage he saw that the answer had already been made for him.  So, he got out of the car and decided to head up the incline toward where he thought the summit was.  It was somewhat steep but even in the dark he could see the path by the light of the rising moon.  And as he hiked, about every few minutes he thought he could hear stray noises like footfalls somewhere behind him.  But when he looked around, he could never see anyone there.  An hour later he reached the summit.  But the environs didn’t look like where he thought he was.  There were low hills and fields and forested land but no major roads or the lights of suburban or even rural New England.  The darkness was profound.  As if electricity and automobiles didn’t even exist here.  And this realization cracked something in him.  It wasn’t exactly panic.  It was an icy hopelessness in the pit of his stomach.  He knew he was impossibly far from home.  And by home he meant a universe where everything he knew about the world existed.  That world had disappeared without a trace.

And now he could hear the footsteps behind him clearly and looking down the path he could clearly see the man from the farmhouse walking toward him.  He was walking with a very stout walking stick, really a cudgel.  And he was heading directly toward Roger.  Roger braced himself and faced his pursuer.  He looked around for a weapon and found nothing.

“Well, stranger, do you believe me now?  Where’s your “route twenty” now?  It looks like you aren’t going nowhere.  You’re here and you’ll stay here with the rest of us.”  Then he tapped his stick on the ground and said, “Or maybe you won’t be nowhere at all.”

“Dunwich?”  And then he remembered Lovecraft had that story, “The Dunwich Horror.”  “Are the locals cosplaying cosmic horror in the woods of New England?”  Suddenly he felt a lot less afraid of what he had seen in that few seconds of flash lit forest.

Suddenly he saw a light in the distance and he drove on.  Presently he could see it was a light in a building possibly a farmhouse and now he was starting to feel a little silly about the fear he had surrendered to back in the woods.  Pretty soon the path began to resemble a road again and Roger began to think that he was literally “out of the woods” and back on track.  When he was within a hundred yards of the house, he noticed that the road seemed to become a private driveway and ended at the front of the house.  Roger wondered if there was a real road around the back of the house and he decided to park and ask for directions to his destination.  When he got out of his car, he walked the last fifty feet to the door and not seeing any bell he knocked.

After a few minutes of nothing, he knocked again only louder and four or five times.  This produced results.  He could distinctly hear heavy footsteps on a staircase inside the house. And then the door opened slowly.  There was very little light inside the house but Roger could make out the general appearance of the man who opened the door.  He was quite tall, about six foot three, he had shoulder length hair and his clothing was either a costume or vintage clothing from the early 1900s.  His expression was very odd.  Not exactly threatening but scowling and suspicious, “What ya want heah?  This is private property.  How did you get on my road?”

Roger tried to explain, “Sorry to bother you but I got turned around getting off Route 20 near Becket in the Berkshires and I somehow ended up on a trail that led me to your house.  If you could direct me to the main highway I’ll get out of your hair right now.”  The man’s demeanor seemed to change.  A guarded smile appeared on his face and he looked at Roger and Roger’s car very intently.  He said, “Mistah you’re a lot more lost than you think.  That path you came down doesn’t lead anywhere at all.  It runs smack into the base of Round Mountain.  And there ain’t no automobile road other than my driveway.  There was a plan which it was the beginning of but it was abandoned years ago.  The only way out of here is on foot.”

Now it was Roger’s turn to scowl, “What do you mean that path dead ends at a mountain?  I just got here on it coming from Route 20.”  The man smirked at Roger and said, “What is this “Route 20” you keep goin’ on about.  I never heard of it.  If yer sah sure that path will get you out then turn round and head off my property right now.”  And with that the man slammed the door and Roger could hear his retreating tread.

When Roger had gotten off Route 20 somewhere in the Berkshires his headlights had quickly disappeared into the road fog.  Even his brights didn’t help.  He headed south (as far as he could tell) but the rural roads kept getting less like paved roads and more like cow paths the farther he went.  And the surrounding landscape became an impenetrable forest of old growth trees.  Finally, the path narrowed down to where he couldn’t have turned around on it to go back without performing some kind of K-turn but the path had already sunk below the level of the surrounding landscape and the whole thing looked less and less like something he wanted to back his car into.  About an hour into this no-man’s-land, he shut off the engine and considered his options.

Roger wasn’t a complete city boy and dark country roads weren’t something he normally feared.  But getting out of his car and looking around, he was shocked by just how dark and secluded his present location was.  It was almost the end of August and the noise of the frogs and night insects was almost deafening.  And he began imagining he was hearing other noises that couldn’t be made by smaller critters.  The sound of larger branches being pushed against the underbrush and the cracking of smaller branches under heavy feet seemed to be all around him.  He began to think that driving his car backward down the road for an hour or two might be his smartest option but then he remembered that his headlights weren’t mounted on the rear of his car.

But Roger did decide to get his flashlight out of the glove compartment and for the first time in his life he regretted being the last man in North America without a cell phone or a GPS device.  He sighed with relief when the beam of his light was just as powerful as he remembered it when he used it last and he quickly directed the beam in a circle around his car.

What he saw didn’t comfort him.  In almost every direction he could see creatures running away from his light.  Some were the size of large dogs and on four legs but there were also some larger animals maybe the size of bears shuffling away on two legs.  And they were giving off various howls, grunts and growls.  All this unnerved Roger so much that he got back in the car and began driving forward on the path.

Eventually after another half hour the road opened up a bit and the trees thinned out to a landscape of fields, ponds and swamps.  And then Roger saw the first road sign since he had goten off the beaten path.  On an enormously wide white pine a rough plank of wood was nailed in with the single word “Dunwich” painted in red letters.  Roger was at a loss.  He had lived in the northeast his whole life but he had never heard of a place called Dunwich.  Or had he?  Some memory from his childhood seemed sparked by the name.