Author: photog

“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.