When I reached the turnoff to Stone’s Throw, I pulled to the shoulder of the road and attached my GoPro to the driver’s-side window. I started recording. The sun was about to set, and the light would only be good for another fifteen minutes.
And then I was on the Dark Road. I drove five miles under the speed limit so I could take it in. I could have slowed to a crawl and no one would have been bothered. Mine was the only car on the winding road that slithered through ubiquitous forest, the trees packed in tight on either side.
After ten minutes, the wall of trees thinned, shifting from brown and green to charred black, branches grasping and interlocking overhead, creating a tunnel of scorched fingers.
The Wolf Woods.
I had been here before, I realized. I’d visited this place through Kron’s film A Stranger Comes to Town, lauded as one of his most arcane and troubling. In it, a mysterious woman with amnesia wanders into a bucolic town. She doesn’t know who she is or where she came from. A family welcomes her into their home. They feed her, house her, make her a part of their insulated, picturesque world. But the woman begins to suspect that the town isn’t as charming and virtuous as it seems. The townspeople smile constantly, and eat pie for every meal, and they talk about little other than the weather. The woman wakes one morning to discover that a section of her long blond hair has been snipped off in the night. She catches the family she’s staying with spying on her through holes in the walls, then discovers a group of people holding a masked vigil in the woods at night. She decides to try to escape the town, but her plan is discovered. She is captured, bound hand and foot, and taken to a clearing in the woods, in the middle of which stands a fairy-tale cottage. The woman is deposited outside the cottage door, the townsfolk offering her as a human sacrifice to the monstrous god that lives inside—the Ulv Konge, a towering chimera with the head of a wolf. With the smiling townsfolk picnicking in the clearing on red-and-white-checkered blankets, eating dripping cherry pie, the creature eats the nameless woman alive. When it’s finished, the townspeople pack up their picnics and disperse, like they’ve done this a thousand times.
A film studies teacher might say Kron’s film was a feminist (or possibly anti-feminist) allegory, or a commentary on the microcosm that was small-town USA, on the distillation of secrets and myths within insular communities. Fancy ways of saying the film was about a group of people willing to feed an innocent girl to a monster, as long as it was their monster. As long as they got to go home and sleep in their own beds at the end of it all, and it wasn’t their own daughter being swallowed, they could justify their complicity.
Or something like that.
I pulled over on a section of the road where a long swath of the shoulder had been widened to allow for a parking lot. I didn’t realize why until I saw the wooden signpost at the edge of the trees, indicating a trailhead.
I picked up my camera and got out. The sun had set, casting grim blankets of shadow over the road, the charred matchsticks of the trees. I filmed for a few minutes, but the wind was sharp and biting, and I was shivering too hard to keep the camera steady. I took a few photos and short video clips with my iPhone to use on Instagram and Snapchat, noticing that I had no cell reception on the Dark Road. Not a single dot.
I opened the trunk to retrieve my tripod so I could keep my camera steady and record some decent footage. The wind picked up then in a gale so forceful it made me lose my balance, and I had to brace myself against the bumper. A doleful, low-pitched moan of wind wove through the trees, shuddering in currents of air. The forest alive and twitching. I knew I should start filming, capture this classically eerie footage, but I felt frozen where I stood. I kept thinking of the first scene from A Stranger Comes to Town, in which the main character, the amnesiac ingénue, walks right up the center of this road. She’s only wearing one shoe. In the film, she can’t remember what happened to the other one. She has scrapes on her arms and face, and her little toe has been severed, or possibly bitten off. It drools blood as she walks. In the film, no attempt is made to call the police or find out what happened to the woman, and she never speaks, not one line of dialogue. Perhaps she traded her voice for a set of legs, minus one toe, Little Mermaid–style.
I whirled at a scraping sound behind me, a cry clawing up my throat, only to find a stray, blackened branch being dragged across the road by an invisible force. The wind. Only the wind. But then came the howl. At first there was only the sound of one mournful, lupine wail, but it was quickly joined by others until the howling seemed to surround me. Logic told me that the wolves were caged at the sanctuary and couldn’t hurt me, but they sounded so close, their howls echoing off the sides of the mountains and settling in the valley. My brain was not capable of believing logic at that moment. My fight-or-flight responses were kicking in, and they were leaning heavily toward flight.
I slammed the trunk, climbed back into my car, hit the locks, and stomped on the gas pedal. I was still shivering, chilled to the bone, so I cranked the heat up as high as it would go.
I’d come back later, I told myself. I would check into my hotel, and then I would return to the Dark Road. Not tonight. Tomorrow morning, when darkness was as far away as it could be, and the wolves were quiet.