7/4/17
The Dungeness
We’re at the Dungeness Inn. It’s the only place to stay in Deadwater. This place… God it’s weird. I don’t know the full history of it, but according to August it’s had a rocky one. It was founded on the strength of its Dungeness crab harvest, but apparently the crabs suffer mass die outs periodically and no one knows why. The die outs tend to plunge the town into poverty and despair. The last few years have been good I hear, but decades of an uneven economy have taken their toll.
None of that is weird, I know. It’s the place though. It feels, expectant? I don’t know. I get the sense, when I’m here, that we are merely stepping into the pause between battles in a great war. The land, the ocean, it’s like they’re holding their breath, waiting for the fighting to begin again.
I took August the Knocking Swamp, the swamp he was hired to help destroy when he was alive. It’s beautiful, but like everything here, it feels haunted. Maybe it is. The nokken actually existing would not be the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. You can read a little more about the swamp, the nokken, and August’s life in Deadwater in this post.
But I digress. At the inn I drew The Sun, a card of enlightenment and vitality. And, as it turned out, a bad card for August. Deadwater’s residents believe that their current good fortune is, in part, thanks to the Circus in Black, a kind of goth, alt-circus where all the actors are all dark and creepy. The circus, as it turns out, is camped right in the field where August buried his treasure. They’ve been camped there for a couple of years at this point, and don’t plan on leaving anytime soon.
He thinks he can spook them into leaving. But as we drove by to check out the circus, and I smiled at a guy in an amazing goat-man costume, I realized these people were not going to spook easily. We may have to come up with an alternate plan. I just have no idea what…
I want this to be a novel or mini-series.