Chapter 4: The God of a Hundred Mouths

Chapter 4: The God of a Hundred Mouths

My nineteenth birthday began with the wail of the 10 PM curfew siren, a sound that had bookmarked the end of every single day for the past eight years. It was a fittingly bleak celebration. Nineteen. In any other town, it meant freedom, college, the future. In Forsyth, it just meant you were officially old enough to be a viable candidate for the tithe. My father had left a slice of store-bought cake on the kitchen table, a small, tentacled wooden symbol placed beside it like a grim party favor. I’d scraped it into the trash.

My desire wasn't for cake or presents. I wanted one night. One single night where I didn’t feel like a prisoner in a town-sized cage. I wanted noise and recklessness and the kind of stupid decisions that normal nineteen-year-olds made.

I found Isaac by the creek, not pacing, but sitting perfectly still on our log, staring at the black spire that stabbed the night sky. His folder of horrors sat unopened beside him. The rift with Hunter had hollowed him out, leaving his obsessive energy with nowhere to go.

"Happy birthday," he said, his voice flat.

"Don't remind me," I grumbled, pulling a mason jar from inside my jacket. The clear liquid inside sloshed, catching the faint moonlight. "Found this in the back of the Gas & Go's supply closet. Old Man Hemlock's private stock. He claims it can strip paint."

Isaac’s eyes widened slightly. "Moonshine?"

"The cure for what ails us," I said, twisting the lid off. The smell, sharp and sweet and utterly foul, singed my nostrils. I took a long, burning swallow. It felt like drinking fire and regret, but as the warmth spread through my chest, the tight knot of fear I’d been carrying for a decade loosened its grip. I handed the jar to Isaac.

He hesitated for only a second before taking a gulp, choking and sputtering. "God, that's awful."

"Yeah," I grinned, feeling a spark of life for the first time all day. "It's perfect."

We passed the jar back and forth in silence for a while, the raw alcohol working its magic, sanding down the sharp edges of our reality. But our trio felt broken. Incomplete. The obstacle wasn't the curfew or the town; it was the empty space beside us on the log.

"I'm going to get him," I said, standing up. The ground felt a little unsteady.

"He told us to stay away, Howie," Isaac warned.

"And we listened," I countered, my voice thick with liquid courage. "For three weeks, we've listened. Look where it's gotten us. We're just sitting here, waiting our turn. I'm not doing it anymore."

Hunter's house was dark, save for a single light in an upstairs window. His family was likely at the church for some late-night "prayer meeting." I found him not in his room, but sitting on the back porch steps, head in his hands. The picture of misery.

I didn't say anything. I just sat down next to him and held out the mason jar.

He looked from the jar to my face, his eyes full of a weary, bottomless pain. I saw his refusal forming, the reflexive urge to push us away, to keep us safe in the only way he knew how.

"It's my birthday, man," I said softly. "Just one drink. For old times' sake."

He stared at the jar for a long time. Then, with a shuddering sigh that seemed to carry the weight of the last ten years, he took it and drank. He drank deeper than either me or Isaac had, a desperate, self-destructive swallow. He handed it back, his hand shaking. "Happy birthday," he rasped.

The three of us sat on those back porch steps, the sons of a broken town, and passed the jar until it was empty. The moonshine didn’t make us happy, but it burned away the silence. It melted our fear into a volatile, angry sludge.

And then I said it. The stupidest, most reckless, most necessary thing I'd ever said in my life.

"Let's go in."

Isaac and Hunter stared at me, their faces ghostly in the gloom.

"In where?" Isaac asked, though he already knew.

"The church," I said, the words feeling powerful on my tongue. "Tonight. No more theories, no more whispering. We go see for ourselves. We look the devil in the eye."

"We can't," Isaac breathed, the scholar in him wrestling with the terrified kid. "The doors will be locked. There are alarms. People live on the grounds."

Hunter, who had been silent, let out a hollow, bitter laugh. "There are no alarms. God protects them, remember?" He pushed himself to his feet, swaying slightly. "And the main doors are ceremonial. They use the deacon's entrance in the back. The lock is a joke. My dad showed me once. For 'emergency access'." The venom in his voice could have curdled milk. He looked at me, a wild, nihilistic light in his eyes. He had nothing left to lose. "If we're doing this, we're doing this now."

Breaking into the heart of our fear was terrifyingly simple. A single, heavy oak door in a shadowed alcove, a simple lock that Hunter jimmied open with a piece of wire from his pocket in under ten seconds. The air that billowed out wasn't stale or musty. It was the smell of Forsyth, concentrated and pure: damp earth, pine, and that thick, coppery-sweet scent of old pennies and molasses. And beneath it all, a faint, low hum, a vibration I felt more in my teeth than in my ears.

The inside wasn't a church. It was a mausoleum.

We stood in a vast, circular nave, the ceiling so high it was lost in shadow. Moonlight filtered through stained-glass windows, but they didn't depict saints or biblical scenes. They showed a small community huddled at the base of a great, black mountain, while celestial, tentacled shapes swirled in the sky above them.

Around the room's perimeter, where side chapels should have been, were alcoves. Each one was a shrine. But not to a saint.

In the first, resting on a velvet cushion, was a worn leather baseball cap.

"Mark Henderson," Isaac whispered, his voice trembling. "He loved that hat."

In another, a single, silver track shoe. "Maya Washington," I breathed. "She was a sprinter."

There was a glass case holding a collection of butterflies pinned to a board. A stack of dog-eared comic books. A child's retainer. Trophies. It was a hall of horrors, a curated display of every soul the town had sacrificed. This wasn't just a legend; it was a history, meticulously preserved.

And then we saw the altar.

It wasn't a simple marble block. It was a massive, chaotic sculpture carved from the same greasy black stone as the spire. It dominated the center of the room, drawing all light and sound into itself. It was the source of the hum.

It was a god.

But not a god made in man's image. It was a blasphemous riot of form, a tangle of limbs that ended in claws, fins, and impossibly jointed legs. It was a creature of the deep sea, the cold void of space, and the darkest parts of the human mind, all smashed together.

And the mouths.

There weren't a hundred. There had to be more. They covered every surface of the thing, a pandemic of open maws. Some were tiny, puckered holes. Others were vast, gaping chasms lined with rows of needle-like teeth. Some had lolling tongues; others were just empty, screaming voids. They were carved with such grotesque, loving detail that I could almost hear the chorus of their silent hunger. The great mouth, Hunter had said. The holy hunger. It wasn't a metaphor.

I reached out, my body moving without permission, my fingers brushing against the stone surface. It wasn't cold like rock should be.

It was warm. Like living flesh.

We stood there, three drunken, terrified boys, bathed in the monstrous shadow of the truth. The legends were real. The stories were true. Isaac's clippings, Hunter's trauma, my father's vacant faith—it all led here. To this thing.

The truth wasn't just worse than any legend. It was a living, breathing, and very, very hungry god.