The Road Less Travelled – Part 1

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.