The year was 1999. Detective Julian Marr, a burned-out Louisiana homicide detective, was reassigned to a cold case buried deep in the moss-choked swamplands near Vermilion Parish. His partner was Claire Ross, a sharp but distant criminal profiler recently transferred from Baltimore after a nervous breakdown. They didn’t talk much at first. He smoked too much. She slept with a gun under her pillow.
The file was brittle. Two boys, ages 9 and 12, had gone missing in ’85 near an abandoned sugar mill. Only one body was ever found, dismembered and marked with black star symbols etched into the bone. Locals said the stars meant something in the old tongues back when the swamps still had gods. The official report blamed a drifter. Case closed. But new photographs had surfaced Polaroids showing a ritual chamber, and a third, unknown child. These photos had no fingerprints. No metadata. No one knew how they ended up in the sheriff’s office mailbox.
Julian and Claire drove out to the ruins of the old mill. The air was thick, the silence wrong. Julian found a crumbling shack nearby with drawings scratched into the walls: circular mazes, eyeless deer, and something that looked like a human figure with a bird’s skull for a head — “The Minister of the Black Star,” written underneath in crude French. Claire photographed the symbols, cross-referencing with old cult activity, but the deeper she dug, the less sense the timelines made. Some symbols were older than Louisiana itself. One matched a murder from 1891. Another, an unsolved triple homicide in 1957 different towns, same spiral, same star.
They tracked a lead to a reclusive preacher named Elijah Rourke, who’d vanished decades ago. Old records said he ran a commune called “The Lantern Fold,” known for their fire dances and midnight baptisms in the swamp. All members were presumed dead in a fire but one photo taken before the blaze showed Rourke holding a child with a birthmark exactly like the boy from the new Polaroids.
Julian began having dreams. He’d wake covered in sweat, hearing whispers from the trees outside. Always the same phrase: “He returns in the eclipse, through mouths without tongues.” Claire found his notebook filled with drawings he didn’t remember sketching — spirals, mouths sewn shut, and the same bird-skull figure.
Things escalated fast. A local man killed his wife and child with a hammer, claiming the “Minister” told him to do it through the static of an old radio. Then the bodies started to show up again posed like offerings. Claire found a tooth embedded in one of the spiral carvings. A human molar. Still warm.
They uncovered a hidden chamber beneath the burned commune grounds. It wasn’t just a cellar — it was a temple, the walls pulsing with something organic under the surface. They found bones shaped like flutes, arranged around a crude altar. In the center, a journal — Rourke’s — which described a god that sleeps between seconds, and a ritual that bends time in exchange for “the children of the spiral.”
Julian began losing time. He’d find himself miles away from home, hands covered in dirt, car engine still warm. He confessed to Claire that he thought he killed someone — but he didn’t know who.
Then came the storm. The levees cracked. Whole parts of the parish were flooded. In the chaos, children began disappearing again. Claire and Julian followed a lead into the heart of the swamp, beyond where maps dared go. They found the circle.
It was made of old wooden effigies, moss-covered and towering, swaying though there was no wind. In the center: Elijah Rourke, or something wearing his skin, chanting in a voice that sounded like radios tuning through hell. Around him, the missing children stood motionless — their eyes gone, mouths sewn shut. Spiral scars on their bellies.
Julian drew his gun. Claire wept.
The ground cracked open beneath them, revealing a pit that looked more like a wound than earth. Out of it rose something ancient — not a monster in the Hollywood sense, but a distortion. A human shape stitched from antlers, black feathers, and mouths. “The Minister” didn’t speak. It just was.
Julian ran forward. Screamed. Fired.
The last thing Claire saw before she passed out was Julian being pulled into the air, bent backwards, and swallowed by the thing’s chest. Not eaten. Absorbed.
She woke three days later in a hospital. Dehydrated. No memory of how she got there.
There was no report. No trace of the children. No evidence of a temple or commune. The pit was filled in. The state said she’d suffered heatstroke and trauma.
She never went back to law enforcement.
But sometimes, late at night, her radio still crackles — and through the static, she hears the same phrase:
“He returns in the eclipse, through mouths without tongues.”
And she prays that time isn’t a circle.
Because if it is, then the center is a mouth.
And it’s getting hungry again.
