Tacoma isN’T what you think it is
I don’t expect to live for very long after posting this blog.
That’s fine. A man has only one Earthly life to live. Best to live it with courage. Cowards have no love or gratitude in their hearts. I refuse to be one. Even in the face of insurmountable evil, I will laugh, love, and dance—and speak.
Two years ago I wrote a piece for Grit City Magazine. It was about the Shanghai Tunnels reputed to run beneath Tacoma, Washington. It was supposed to be just a fun bit of local history, and it was—at first.
See, I published that story with a magazine titled Grit City. I like to think it’s a well-written piece, though perhaps unextraordinary, and certainly not anything that would shake anyone’s sense of reality.
The truth, though, is that I never shared what I actually found during my research for that piece. Nor have I shared what I continue to find, as this seemingly endless horror story continues to unroll before me.
It’s my life now, the real, secret history of Tacoma. I’m as tied up in it as is the Maury Island Incident, the Servants of Awareness, or Fred Crisman.
The biggest myth about Tacoma isn’t that the Shanghai Tunnels were or are real. They exist—in a way few can comprehend, in fact.
The biggest myth about Tacoma is, instead, that the Shanghai Tunnels are abandoned.
The tunnels are very much active and very much active. They’re much bigger than they used to be, in fact.
They are home now to alien-made baboon-mutant species I call “unhumans,” because I don’t know what else to call them. Some dark occultists, too, whose connection to the unhumans is unclear to me even now.
Then there’s the Cabal, the Eyes, the Pythians, and the Chatter. Others. Too many. More than even I know.
It’s a goddamn rat’s nest of monsters and lunacy down there.
Yes—I said it, and I meant it, and I don’t give a damn who believes me, anymore.
The unhumans live mostly off of barnacles scraped from the bottoms of ships in Thea’s Inlet, though they aren’t opposed to snatching some of that delicious human meat when the opportunity arises. That’s only one of their secrets, though, and the least terrifying of all.
They aren’t the end of Tacoma’s madness. Not even close. They were the way I entered into this nightmare, however.
That’s the thing I never told the blissfully ignorant publishers of Grit City magazine. I didn’t just read history about the tunnels when I wrote that piece. I went inside them.
One starless, fateful night, when I unwittingly stepped out of the fake Tacoma and into the real one.
That was where this all began. Twenty feet below the surface of Tacoma. Two years ago. Ten lifetimes ago. I was a different man, then.
But, ah, I’m rambling.
If I’m going to tell the true story of the secrets of Tacoma, Washington, then I’d best start with that night I went down into the tunnels.
So be it. I’ll tell as much as I can before this blog is shut down—or I am.
I am the Northwest Nomad. I hide from no man and no monster.
If these are to be my final days, then let me spend them finally telling my story.
I didn’t know where the Dungeness Spit led to when I started walking it. I was just taking a weekend to explore Sequim, staying at the Seqium Bay Lodge (which is remarkably spacious and clean for the price, by the way).
The trailer’s got a shower, toilet, and three beds. The kitchen’s got all the basics. None of this mattered a great deal to me, to be honest, as I planned on spending the least amount of time as possible indoors.
