Orion's Cold Fire

When the large man with the cudgel said that last line, “Or maybe you won’t be nowhere at all,” something snapped in Roger’s head.  He launched himself at his tormentor and knocked him to the ground.  Wrenching the weapon from the fallen man he proceeded to pummel him to head and body until the victim was curled up in a fetal posture trying to protect his head.

“Not so funny now, is it, Jethro Bodine.  If you don’t want your head splattered over this ground you better start telling me how I can get the hell out of this Twilight Zone episode.”  With the attack suspended, the man on the ground looked up in terror and said, “Mistah, you’ve got me mixed up with someone else.  My name ain’t Jethro.  I’m Josiah Whateley.  Your troubles are caused by the Great Old Ones and their control of the door to the abyss.”  With this Josiah squinted and tried to look knowing.  So, Roger started wailing on him again saying, “Yeah well whatever your name is you better start thinking of a way out of here before I run out of new places to hit you on the head.”

The wounded wizard begged mercy and promised to help Roger find his escape route.  With Whateley hobbling along, holding the side of his head with his left hand, Roger followed closely along as they descended the mount.  All around them the woods were alive with batrachian trills and croaks and the howls of unspecified creatures.  But Roger paid no heed.  He just nudged Josiah in the back with the club if the pace slowed too much.

When they reached the foot of the hillside Roger asked which way was the road and Whateley said, “It’s not a road.  There’s a cave that runs through Round Mountain.  Nobody who went in evah came back out.  But the story runs that it leads to the Great Old Ones’ doors.  If you go theah, you might find a way home.  But I won’t come with yah.  You can kill me but all I’ll do is show you the entrance to the cave.”

Roger looked with confusion and nervousness at the clearly frightened man and said, “Show me the way, now!”  After about a half hour of walking in the bog they came to a crack in the hill that exhaled a faint phosphorescent green mist.  Whateley pointed to the crack but would not approach the opening.  As Roger sized up the tight opening Whateley ran off at surprising speed and was gone before Roger could respond.

The mist coming from the opening was sickly sweet and made Roger light-headed.  He feared that it might be toxic or at least an asphyxiant and was paralyzed by indecision.  But when the noises around him began to grow louder and more menacing, he took a deep breath and entered the cave.  For the first fifty feet it was barely wide enough for him to slip his body sideways through the crack.  But then it began to widen until he could barely touch both walls with his arms extended straight out.  The phosphorescence was almost useless to see by so he crawled along a foot at a time.  But then he laughed nervously and remembered he had his flashlight in his pocket.  So, with a nervous smile on his face, he switched on the light and headed into the lair of the Great Old Ones.

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.