” Where Nightmares Come From “

My family lives in a small town called Duwamish Bay.

It near Seattle and forgotten by almost all the other cities around it, which suits some of Duwamish Bay just fine because visitors make them nervous.

Back in the 1920’s all the way up to the early 1950’s Duwamish Bays claim to fame was it’s amusement park complete with a permanent sideshow  that featured some of the finest Magicians, Fortune Tellers, and Freaks and Geeks working the circuit in those days. Now days those families are all but retired and all that’s left of the Sideshow is a Museum, a boardwalk where we have a Soda Fountain, A post office/general store, a dentist and a Doctors Office. The Dentist’s is named Dr. Church and he gets a lot of business around these parts.

Out on Halloway Road is a carpenter who makes customized Coffins and Caskets that are loaded onto a ferry and shipped over to Seattle and then flown or driven all around  the  world. Her shop also repairs things like those menagerie figures and horses who make their home on carousels.Saturnina is flummoxed by people who send her the horses for restoration and use them for decorations in their homes or mount them on fake platforms in museums.

” There’s a reason, ” Saturnina says on the occasions she gets a horse for one of the museum or house jobs, ” why we  hitch these things to carousels that trot in circles. Well. A buck is a buck and it isn’t my funeral.”

Saturnina Deadwood own the shop and she has two employees. One is our town Doctor who works there part time because she isn’t as busy as our Dentist.

I’ll be the first to say,  Duwamish Bay isn’t a regular town, the people who live here sometimes pass for normal when the Sun is out and less so at night. The houses don’t have locks on the doors because nobody in their right mind would ever break into one. Not unless your goal in life is to end up backed into a pie by someone like Irene Macdowell who always wears a simple strand of pearls and always dresses in simple black  dresses and likes to  pain her fingernails the softest shade of pink that you will ever see sold at any cosmetics counter because she blends the polish herself.

Irene’s mother was a Fortune Teller in the Duwamish Bay sideshow and nobody knows when she died. One day she just wasn’t there anymore and then these stories about campers looking for a Witch’s house in the Olympic Forest started to pop up in movies and books and we all figured that Patience Macdowell was doing just fine, thank you very much.

It takes a lot to get anyone from Duwamish Bay to flinch and say, ” what the hell ” but that’s what happened at the end of August.

Ricky Kemp had just returned from Seattle on the morning tide. He had taken one of Saturnina’s customized old school coffins with the little window over the deceased’s face and when he stepped off of the ferry and onto the pier he looked towards the beach and thought, ‘ those are weird sand dunes ‘.

He was curious because we are used to seeing things like shoes with feet still inide of them wash up and we get the odd whale and smashed up row boats and empty life vests and one year we even had about a dozen caskets wash up because a funeral director who had promised to lay to rest the loved ones of grieving families in a cemetery called Birch Road Cemetery dumped the caskets into the Bay because his Cemetery had run out of room.

But this…this was…

odd.

Ricky walked from what turned out to be one jagged rock to another- it only took him a moment to see that the rocks were actually granite and marbel figures- part of lintil trimmed with leaves , the top of  a pillarthat looked like tree trunk and he stopped at one and saw writing on it:

Beloved Husband and Son

Napeoleon Desmarais

1870-1935

Ricky looked from one end of the beach to the other and then he looked up at the road and he saw a man looking back at him.

” Napeoloen? ” he called out. ” Hey, Napeoleon! ”

The figure turned away from Ricky and walked up the road to Duwamish and a few minutes later Ricky followed him but he didn’t make a move to catch up with Duwamish Bay’s newest resident.

That’s my job.

My name is Sheriff Sunny Longyear these are stories from my hometown and I’m also the law here in Duwamish Bay.

Summerween Writing Challenge: Hauntober Prompts #11 Nightmare