swamp and lagoon country

The region lies to the south of New Orleans. Its squatters, mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte's men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen upon them in the night: some of their women and children had disappeared after a malevolent tom-tom began its incessant beating far within the black haunted woods where no dweller ventured. On November 1st, 1907, their frantic summons reached the New Orleans police.

Legrasse's raid on the supposed voodoo meeting followed. Past the squatter settlement — a miserable huddle of huts whose hysterical dwellers ran out to cluster around the bobbing lanterns, the muffled beat of tom-toms faintly audible far ahead — the party pressed on into the swamps. The rites they stumbled upon were so singular and hideous that the police realized they had found a dark cult totally unknown to them; the statuette was captured there, and an oral ritual was noted and copied among the arrested swamp cult-worshipers.

The orgy itself raged on a grassy island of perhaps an acre's extent, standing in a natural glade of the swamp: worshipers writhing about a ring-shaped bonfire around an eight-foot granite monolith topped by the carven statuette, with the oddly marred bodies of the disappeared squatters hanging head downward from a circle of ten scaffolds.