Three months had passed.
The rains had come and gone, the river now calm and glassy, as if the horror never happened. But the town of Obade was not the same.
Shops opened later.
Children no longer played near the water.
And the elders—those who remained—no longer spoke after sunset.
Detective Kareem had returned to the city, but sleep had become a stranger. Every night, he heard it—the rhythm of the drum. Not in dreams, but in the walls. The air. His own heartbeat.
And the faces.
The eyes.
Watching.
On a hazy Monday morning, a sealed envelope arrived at his office.
No stamp. No name. Just a wax seal—a snake twisted around a river reed.
Kareem stared at it for minutes before opening it.
Inside: a single photograph.
A child. Maybe ten years old. Standing by the water. Mouth open. Screaming.
On the back, written in an unsteady hand:
"It has started again. But now, it's not only the drowned that whisper."
And below that, a name he hadn't heard in months:
"Ola."
Kareem was on the road by sunset.
Obade looked smaller now. Weaker. Like the river's rage had taken something from it—a part of its soul.
He drove straight to Ola's aunt's house. The door was already open.
Furniture overturned. No signs of struggle. No blood. Just silence—and a faint, rhythmic tapping from the back room.
Tock. Tock. Tock.
Kareem followed the sound with his flashlight.
In the center of the room, carved into the floor, was a symbol:
The broken drum.
And beside it, scratched into the wall:
"She is awake now."
That night, Kareem met with Amaka in secret.
She looked thinner, paler. Like the river had followed her too.
"There's something else," she said. "I tested the fragments from the broken drum. It wasn't wood. It was... bone."
Kareem stared. "Human?"
She nodded. "And the carvings? I translated them fully."
She handed him a printout:
"When the river is no longer fed, the mother of silence will rise and take her own."
Kareem exhaled slowly. "There's a bigger force."
"Yes," Amaka said. "And I think the drum was never meant to seal the river. It was meant to keep her inside it."
Now the question was:
Who is 'she'?
And why did she want Ola?