Deep River Blues
An adventure for New Orleans PCs, working for Belasco’s Rare Books.
Clayton Roach, doctor and rare book enthusiast, sends you a letter from Greenville, Mississippi. It just arrived at Belasco’s door, weeks late, envelope smeared with red mud.
“Marvellous discovery,” he writes. “Confirms all my theories. Come at once.”
There’s a file on Roach. A scrawny little guy, fixated on Atlantis and the origins of the Aryan race. Belasco sells him books related to lost civilisations - Godfrey Higgins’ Anacalypsis, Charles Brasseur’s French translation of the Popol Vuh. Philip J. Cozan’s Little Eva: The Flower Of The South.
Belasco wants you to head to Greenville and learn what this is all about.
Three weeks ago, the levees broke. The river’s higher than it’s ever been. The whole Mississippi delta - 27,000 square miles, home to seven hundred thousand people - is under around thirty feet of water.
Standard Oil barges, Gulf Coast fishing boats, hastily requisitioned paddle steamers, make the trek across the flooded farmlands. Saving people from the roofs of barns. Bringing Red Cross flour and molasses to the sunken townships. Evacuating as many women and children as they can.
Greenville is at the heart of the flood zone.
You need to get to Vicksburg, where the refugee camps have been set up. Thousands of families, mostly black, spending the summer in tents. Herbert Hoover doing a grade A job coordinating flood relief.
Rumours haunt the town.
Monsters in the water. Said to be God’s punishment for the Delta’s sins. Sheriff’s trying to keep it quiet, but an old bluesman sitting on the porch outside a general store will happily tell you about the biblical leviathan that almost took his hand.
No, it wasn’t a gator. He knows a gator when he sees one and they don’t have skulls for heads.
You want a boat. There aren’t many to be found. You could buy one from a fisherman or volunteer on one of the relief boats, if they’ll take you.
Cross the flood zone. You encounter a -
feral hog on a hillock chomping on a woman’s corpse.
southern belle sitting on a rooftop taking pot shots at trilobites.
river hobo floating on a log, weighed down by stolen gold.
dunkleosteus circling two card players sitting in a dinghy.
shelled squid menacing a show boat full of panicked actors.
heavily armed bootlegger couple having a marital dispute.
sharecropper family cornered in a windmill by sea scorpions.
naked preacher on a church roof, proclaiming the end times.
sinking aid ship, loaded down with flour and panicked refugees.
encyclopaedia salesman engaged in disputation with a shark.
A plane soars overhead. You spot it early in the morning, then later in the day. Someone is keeping an eye on you from above.
A child calling for help from a barn roof draws you into an ambush.
River pirates in flat-bottomed boats, bearing flaming torches. Klansmen. They don’t like your kind round here. They accuse you of being Irishmen, in league with the Pope. Planting evidence against good Christian men who just want to keep the county safe from Negro depredations.
One wears a copper plate around his neck. The figure of a man-faced bird.
Will Percy, plantation heir and aspiring poet, runs the Greenville relief effort from the Knights of Columbus’ poker rooms. His days are spent getting milk for babies, finding shrouds for corpses and solving ten problems at once.
Will’s dad, LeRoy Percy, former senator, sits in the upper floors of his mansion, ruminating on mortality, looking out at his flooded tennis court and smoking endless cigars. As the secret boss of Greenville politics, it’s his job to make important phone calls and keep the donations rolling in.
National Guards stomp everywhere. Boats come and go. 7500 black men and women are camped out on the levee, without tents. The bookstore, the courthouse, the Masonic hall are all submerged.
Boardwalks set up through the business district. Peanut sellers. Paperboys in rowboats. Boys setting fire to the gas from punctured dead cows. Piano players on the Cowan Hotel’s mezzanine, where the black market runs.
Roach’s house is a mess. Full of old books, now clumps of damp paper, and Indian artefacts. The old woman who keeps house for him is camped out on the top floor. She has a gun and thinks you’re coming to rob her. She can tell you where he’s gone.
Police chief Red Taggart breaks up craps games. It’s rumoured he shot a man for stealing bananas. The black areas have been hit way harder than the white and Percy is treating black people as slave labour - withholding food unless they work. He says it’s for their own good.
Ray Toombs, county prosecutor and Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan, makes the trip north to the Winterville Indian mounds. Packed earth pyramids jutting from the flood. Klansman in white robes camped out on the tops.
A burning cross. An altar. Clayton Roach, nude and painted, wielding a copper-coated mace. Wearing the feathered headdress of an ancient Mississippian priest.
Toombs unloads his cargo - two dogs and a hogtied farmhand, kidnapped from the camps atop the levee. Roach bashes their brains out, one by one, on the altar. Blood creeps through grooves in the stone.
Water swirls around the mound. Klansmen shy back from the edge as another Devonian sea monster is birthed into the flood. The pyramids are islands, keeping them safe from the ammonites and bone-headed fish.
Roach wants more blood.
He found instructions from an Elder Thing, a sapient Devonian echinoderm whose civilisation spanned the stars. Written on a plate of pseudo-brass, buried in the mound. How to open a time portal. If he makes it wide enough, the Thing can come through.
The Percies, once determined foes of the Klan, have cut a deal with him. They plan to use the magic of the Elder Things to expel the Yankee liberals, destroy the Union and restore the planter aristocracy. The South will rise again.
