When Roger had gotten off Route 20 somewhere in the Berkshires his headlights had quickly disappeared into the road fog.\u00a0 Even his brights didn\u2019t help.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And the surrounding landscape became an impenetrable forest of old growth trees.\u00a0 Finally, the path narrowed down to where he couldn\u2019t 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.\u00a0 About an hour into this no-man\u2019s-land, he shut off the engine and considered his options.<\/p>\n
Roger wasn\u2019t a complete city boy and dark country roads weren\u2019t something he normally feared.\u00a0 But getting out of his car and looking around, he was shocked by just how dark and secluded his present location was.\u00a0 It was almost the end of August and the noise of the frogs and night insects was almost deafening.\u00a0 And he began imagining he was hearing other noises that couldn\u2019t be made by smaller critters.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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\u2019t mounted on the rear of his car.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
What he saw didn\u2019t comfort him.\u00a0 In almost every direction he could see creatures running away from his light.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And they were giving off various howls, grunts and growls.\u00a0 All this unnerved Roger so much that he got back in the car and began driving forward on the path.<\/p>\n
Eventually after another half hour the road opened up a bit and the trees thinned out to a landscape of fields, ponds and swamps.\u00a0 And then Roger saw the first road sign since he had goten off the beaten path.\u00a0 On an enormously wide white pine a rough plank of wood was nailed in with the single word \u201cDunwich\u201d painted in red letters.\u00a0 Roger was at a loss.\u00a0 He had lived in the northeast his whole life but he had never heard of a place called Dunwich.\u00a0 Or had he?\u00a0 Some memory from his childhood seemed sparked by the name.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When Roger had gotten off Route 20 somewhere in the Berkshires his headlights had quickly disappeared into the road fog.\u00a0 Even his brights didn\u2019t help.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1289,1263,4],"tags":[3341,200,354,1290],"class_list":["post-37956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction-by-me","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","category-sff","tag-dunwich","tag-fantasy","tag-horror","tag-my-fiction"],"yoast_head":"\n