Excavating the Shadows: Revisiting the Ghosts of My Past

“Some legends are a tapestry woven with blood, bones, and lives – not measured in years, but in the crimson stain they left behind.”

—TL Hutton, “As the Legends Decree”

This past week, I’ve found myself acting as an archaeologist of my own subconscious. I spent hours digging through digital archives and dusty folders, unearthing manuscripts I hadn't touched in over a decade.

Reading them is a disorienting, almost surreal experience. These are dark tales, born from a stygian nascence that feels crafted by a stranger—a phantom appendage belonging to a writer I no longer recognize. It’s like staring at an old photograph where you recognize the eyes, but the man behind them is a ghost.

Among these forgotten files, one has been gnawing at me: As the Legends Decree.

There is something restless about stories that have never seen the light of day. They live in the shadowed abysms of your nightmares, calling out, desperate for their monstrous visages to be dragged into the sun. I’ve always held a macabre fascination with urban legends; they were the bedrock of my fledgling career. From the elusive Lost Dutchman’s Gold to the terrifying lore of the Mogollon Monster (who, I should note, is currently stalking the pages of my upcoming novel, Where the Wind Cries Red), I have always been drawn to the things that go bump in the dark.

As the Legends Decree is cut from that same cloth. It’s set on the northern declivity of the Ozark Plateau, near a creek that shimmers with the sickly, iridescent sheen of an eel. There, you’ll find the “Albino Bridge.” It’s a place steeped in local infamy—a location tangled in history, from the dark legacy of the Sheedy Farm to the low-budget horror flicks and regional books that have tried, and failed, to fully cage its folklore.

In the coming months, I’ve decided it’s time to stop letting these stories scream from the void. I will be releasing these old manuscripts, but not as they were. They are being revised, rewritten, and infused with all the fucked-up, macabre musings you, Dear Reader, have come to expect from my work.

As the Legends Decree will be the first to emerge from the darkness. To whet your appetite—and perhaps haunt your upcoming weekend—here is a sneak peek…

Excerpt from “As the Legends Decree” by TL Hutton

From amongst an ulterior cluster of timber that watched over the land with the glassy eyes of a famished predator, they stirred. Beckoned by a resonance within the earth, a vibration felt deep in their bones, a call that had no voice yet spoke to them through the totem of the bridge.

It had been over a millennia since their clan–once populace in numbers now thinned by disease, violence, and western expansion– had been so directly summoned.

And they were hungry–not the simple hunger of a predator, but a communion with the primal forces of the earth.

Hungry for the flesh of those who had shunned them through the centuries. Longing to again taste the sweet meats of organs broiled in cauldrons of blood over stone dolmens. Lusting for the savoring of brains slow-cooked in their skulls. Craving the chewy tenderness of roasted facial muscles and lips, testicles and tongues and eyeballs, ovaries and uteri, guts and vaginal lips spiced with wild berries and bone marrow and onions.

They stirred. Their pale lips, coursed with dark purple-black veins, salivating. Their milky-pink eyes absorbing the night. And to the cadence of earth-drums crafted of bones yellowed with age and flayed human flesh, they began to skulk through the snowy timber, their forms, gaunt and spectral, seemed to merge with the shadows, their movements fluid and unsettling, their pale, almost translucent feet making not the slightest sound…