(Male, 30’s) My wife and I were walking into from town and we passed a tent that was set up as a vegetable stand. The canvas of the tent was printed with broad stripes, I forget what color and there were wooden crates filled to the top with odd fruits and vegetables both inside and outside of the tent. The inside of the tent seemed much larger than it could possibly have been by looking at it from the outside. There were also strange items on shelves, things that looked magical if not just new age-y like a porcelain wall-hanging that depicted something about a woman’s anatomy, perhaps the stages of development during pregnancy, perhaps some strange phrenology diagram. There was a man and a woman who tended the stand both of whom were very friendly but the man did all the talking. There was another person there who was just finishing up her shopping. The man took a 5 x 7 framed photo off the tent wall. It was a picture of a woods, a totally non-descript area of undergrowth and saplings. He explained, “There’s a place where the old Dexter Road splits. Down the wrong path is where men of a wolfish nature congregate.” I nodded like I thought I knew what he was talking about. My wife accidentally dropped something that was like a tiny porcelain bell. It rang but it didn’t break. The shop keepers didn’t seem to mind. The man was cutting into an onion, a strange onion because instead of a papery brown exterior, this had a thick mottled purple husk like the skin of a citrus fruit. He held out a sample to me balanced on the edge of his knife. The onion was sweet, onion-y but sweeter than any onion I’d ever tasted. We thanked them and went on our way to town.
When we returned from town, I wanted to buy some of those remarkable onions but we found the tent completely abandoned. The flaps of the tent were blowing in the wind and the wind chimes were sounding insanely. It had started to get dark and quite cold so we decided to drive the last part of the way home (? I know that part doesn’t make sense. Like we just had our car in our back pocket or something?) But we got a little bit lost. We were driving down a dirt road that had been torn up quite badly so we couldn’t go very fast. What was strange was that houses had been built right up to the very edge of this dirt road on both sides. There wasn’t room for a drainage ditch, let alone a front yard. The road was only wide enough to go in one direction. Then we came to the end of the road. The road dead-ended at a small woods, similar to the one in the photo. No one could tell whether it actually WAS the woods in the picture because everything was so dark by this point. I say everyone because by now there were several people in the car with us. The car had also shrunk to the point that I sat in the passenger’s seat and had to have the door open, with one leg dangling outside just to have enough room for everyone.
We started back and soon we knew that THIS was the fork of the road that the man had told us about. The houses were strange shacks and the road — maybe we have to call it a path at this point — snaked up and around the houses, back and forth, very VERY close to them. We had to get out and close the doors on some houses so we could drive past. The final section of the path actually drove THROUGH someone’s living room. We talked about what we should do but we decided we had to go through. Once we cleared the house, we got back up to speed and tried to drive as quickly as we could. Then someone said “If that was the wrong path, where were the men with wolfish nature?” Just then we felt something heavy land on the roof of the car, something that started scraping with nails hard enough to shred metal. I was scared but not for myself. For some reason, I knew that the onion the vegetable man had fed me would protect me, that it was wolfsbane or something. But I was the only person who’d eaten it. Everyone else in the car was doomed.