Legend Haunted

By Peter J Larrivee

A boy and his alien, a loan shark with an unusual method of collecting payment, conspiracies of thought by dark forces, and a snapshot of what the world will look like if they succeed. All of this plus an abandoned town in upstate Massachusetts full of dark secrets that may prove to be too much for Detective Diana Kenny to handle. These stories may cause you to question the solid reality you once believed in, questioning your very sanity and asking yourself some deep dark questions about what truly drives you, and what sort of terrible things it might drive you to do. Legend Haunted is an anthology of short stories, both horror and weird fiction with some speculative fiction thrown in for good measure, including the titular novella, Legend Haunted.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9781365499579

Peter J Larrivee

Peter J Larrivee is a horror and weird fiction writer from the Land of Lovecraft. He's been published in Perihelion, Night Terrors Volume 21, the Hell is for Children charity anthology and on Trembling with Fear. In addition, he is a long time contributor to Motif Magazine, an arts and entertainment publication.   When not working or crafting nightmares, he can usually be found in bookstores or out with his family. 

Book preview

Legend Haunted

Legend Haunted

Peter J Larrivee

Take the Baby

Take the baby.

Three words I have come to hear in my nightmares and waking dreams. I love my son dearly, he is my whole world. Maybe it’s an evolution thing, maybe I’m just the sentimental type, but since the first time I looked into his dark eyes, I knew he would be the only thing I could ever focus on again.

I was right there the whole time while my wife, Britta, pushed and cried with joyful agony. The midwife announced it was a boy, and I welled up with pride. He did not come out crying, but oddly calm, serene even. I saw the head crown, and I watched as the blood and viscera of the afterbirth slid out, following the baby. It didn’t bother me. Some people have trouble with all of that, but this was the most important moment of my life, and I went into it with a sense of wonder and awe.

They put him on Britta’s chest, and the newly-named Alan began to move his heavy head, struggling with muscles that had never moved such weight before. His head turned, his eyes opened, and locked on mine.

I’m told babies can’t see more than a few inches in front of them at birth, but from ten feet away, while I was grabbing water for my wife, I looked back, and eyes as black as ash looked into mine. I felt something within me change forever, like my entire life had new purpose. I was no longer my own man, I was father to a tiny creature that needed me. I can’t imagine any other way to live.

That was three months ago. Britta’s tailbone had cracked during the birth, she tore in three places, and because of how fast the birth was (thirty minutes of pushing, two hours of labor,) there was some minor internal damage as well. We stayed in the hospital for three days. She had some minor surgery, and she was told to stay in bed until she healed, which would take months.

This worked fine, since she intended to co-sleep and breastfeed twenty-four seven. We’d seen some documentary about formula, and she was now vehemently against the stuff. She could be very stubborn. She wanted Alan’s entire food supply to come from her.

So for the next three months, she stayed in bed, and I slept on the couch for fear of rolling over on the little guy. I went back to work, but I couldn’t go full-time. Every few hours the call would come in, and I’d have to rush home to take the baby. She needed to pee, or eat, or sleep, or bathe, and I’d spend hours calming him and bouncing him, singing and rocking, making faces and exhausting myself to get him to settle. Sometimes I could even get him to sleep by myself, but never for very long, not without my wife’s breasts there for him to nurse from. That was what he knew, and that was what he wanted.

The house went to shit. Dirty dishes piled up, food was scarce as I could never get away long enough to go shopping, and little dust bunnies began multiplying in the darnedest places. My efforts to clean or cook or even just breathe and take stock of things was always broken by that piercing cry, and the words: Take the baby.

By month two, she’d lost the baby weight. I’d taken to bringing home mountains of cheap fast food just because it’s all I had time for. I didn’t sleep well, either, as my self-imposed isolation on the couch only assured me quiet time in the dark, but not comfort. The couch was too plushy, and my neck always felt bent at an odd angle.

I’d sleep two hours at a time, maybe, and then I’d hear that cry. That shrill cry that would jerk me awake and fry my brain, send my pulse racing and cortisol spiking. Adrenaline would make me leap from the couch and run upstairs into the room where my son would be wailing, my wife, wide awake with exhausted eyes and a pale complexion would say: Take the baby.

Then, a quick three steps to the changing table, wet diaper off, wipe down, powder, clean diaper on - I’d gotten it down to a precision drill. Before the plume of airborne talc could settle, I had the baby changed, re-dressed, and ready to go back to the breast. But he wouldn’t go back right away, oh no, that would be too easy. I first had to hold him and bounce him for ten minutes, singing a nonsense song that became my only coherent thought.

"Go to sleep, baby boy, a bouncing baby boy-

Go to sleep, little boy, a bouncing baby boy"

The lyrics didn’t matter. What mattered was the hour it took to calm him down and get him back to the breast. I could have been singing Black Sabbath to that tune, as long as I sang, he remained quiet, blissfully, mercifully quiet. If I stopped, that banshee wail would resume.

Then, if I was lucky, I’d get two more hours of sleep. Then another cry. More panic. And just when I was too frustrated to think straight, he’d look at me with that smile, that perfect, wide, adorable smile, with wide dark eyes that always looked right into my soul, and I’d be his slave once again.

By the end of month two, I was so sleep deprived that I was hallucinating at my desk. I’d take phone calls without picking up the phone, I’d fall asleep on conference calls and once I had a dream that the phone rang for me, my wife repeating my new mantra over and over as I stared blankly at a monitor screen: Take the baby. Take the baby. Take the baby.

Coffee and grim determination kept me going, but I had to take a lot of days off just to take care of wife and baby, or maybe even grab some vital, nourishing naps during the day. My long absence was intolerable to little Alan, and I could barely get my foot in the door at night before I’d hear the words: Take the baby.

I didn’t understand how other people could do this. Babies weren’t supposed to fuss this much, were they? I called the pediatrician, who told us to bring him in. A quick visit and a $50 co-pay later, and she was still stumped. I called the midwife, who told me everything would be okay as long as he kept going to the breast. He was a little young to be teething, but that might be a slim possibility. She asked how my wife was doing, and I told her she’d been losing a lot of weight.

Lots of fatty food, she said, She needs nutritious fat from good sources. Stuff her. She’s feeding the little one who needs every calorie he can get. Do that, and everything should be fine.

So I soldiered on, waking in the night thinking the blinking lights on the smoke detector were red eyes watching me, or that the shadows would make some slithering skittering noise. Those were the bad nights, when I found myself so disconnected from my senses that a light wind could make me feel as if something were breathing on my neck from behind.

Then the cry. Then the words. Take the baby.

But I get it now. I understand, because last night, it all started to make sense in a beautiful kind of grotesqueness. I found myself lying and staring at the swirling multicolored dots that speckle the pitch black, the error messages of the brain trying to find a pattern in the gloom. I thought I could see grinning faces of strange things that would then slither away into the black. I was sure I was half-dreaming as the winged thing with red eyes glided soundlessly past and towards what I think was the stairway, and with a whoosh of flapping wings, shot upwards towards the landing.

A creak in the dark from somewhere upstairs shook me fully awake. I knew that creak. It was the bedroom door. I heard it in my dreams and nightmares, always immediately before the words Take the baby.

Then I heard the cry, that horrible shrill cry, jarring me from any possible thought and sending me bolting faithfully up the stairs. I knew my way through the dark, past all the hallucinations and half-dreams to the bedroom, where there was a pale red light. Was it red? Or were my eyes still half-closed. I willed them to open fully, but the red did not disappear. Something bathed the room in an unnatural red glow, like a dying fire.

There in the bed, the blankets pulled down, was Britta. Her skin was porcelain white, but mottled by black spots all over her hairy un-shaven, atrophied legs. Dark stains surrounded her on the mattress and walls as her chest was open, bare, bleeding and dripping loose fat from the mauled breasts. She turned to me with a wide, manic smile. Her emaciated form raised its toothpick arms, struggling to hold up the nine-pound screaming thing in her arms. The red glow burned like dying embers behind his dark eyes, and the spreading wings from his back began to beat against my weakened wife’s arms. Fingernails like black claws tore into her papery skin, shedding dark blood. I heard her weak, raspy voice: Take the baby. At my approach, the tiny winged thing with dark eyes smiled at me.

Then I was his slave.

Idol of Thy Open Altar

When the ominous box arrived on my doorstep, I didn’t even notice. I was in the middle of a sale. A very well-dressed woman took a liking to the antique grandfather clock in the window. I just signed for the box absently while running her credit card. I didn’t even look at it until almost an hour later when I’d finished arranging the shipping. It was small, made of strong, pale wood and stamped a half-dozen times from countries I didn’t even realize existed.

My antique shop in the heart of Providence was struggling. My uncle left it to me three years ago, and I’ve kept the shop afloat, just barely. He was my only family in the end since my mother ran off and my father died of cancer. We lost touch after I went to business school, but I knew he was a popular man in academic circles once. After he died, several letters from prominent professors and doctors came in offering their condolences, but never a package like this.

I pulled off the lid to find the grotesque statue nestled in straw. I snapped on my rubber gloves, then lifted it out for a closer look. It was heavy, very old, and made of some kind of obsidian. The thing was hideous with its sloped forehead, intricate, long tendrils at the mouth. It was hunched, and in place of legs the thing seemed to have a slug-like bottom covered with tiny, stick-like appendages, and what looked like strange eyes running all over its squat body. It didn’t even have any arms to speak of, just strange, spindly things that could have been legs, but wouldn’t support the girth of the thing on this world or any other.

The invoice said it was from an archaeology professor named Danforth, for my late Uncle. They’d dug it up in the Ural Mountains in Kazakhstan. I remembered seeing that name, Danforth, on other paperwork when I took over the shop.

I looked to the note.

Arthur,

I’m sorry, old friend. I must call on you one last time. You know what to do. Make the preparations and meet me, with the Idol, at the usual place. I hope this will be the last one. And look out for Sharpe. I think he’s on to us.

Sincerely,

Professor Raymond Danforth

Professor Danforth’s number was on a receipt from a previous sale, so I called and left a message at what I had assumed to be his home number. Then I took the curiosity with me after I closed up shop. I didn’t know why then, but now I fear its hold on me had already begun.

The statue unsettled me. When I looked at it, I found myself strangely drawn to its hideous features. A couple of times I swore I could hear whispering, a strange, muttering nonsense. I turned off all the devices, TV, phone, and sat in silence for a while. Every time I thought I was alone in the quiet dark, something would tickle my neck hair, or I would hear the faint hiss of gibberish from behind me.

I thought I’d just been working too hard. I spent almost every waking moment trying to turn a profit at this damned little shop. I decided to just turn in, get some much-needed rest.

Sleep brought neither rest nor comfort. In my mind, I stood under an alien sky while around me things moved in awful darkness, making sickening, slithering noises. I tried to focus on the source, but it was like trying to stare through thick, warped glass. When I looked to the sky again, I saw a wide, glowing circle of loose iridescent clouds that seemed to almost spark with static striations.

The whispered, garbled words from the slithering things filled my mind. Somehow I knew this was some kind of gateway.

The shrill chirping of my phone brought me, mercifully, out of the hideous fog of dream.

Hello, I mumbled, happy to leave the nightmare behind.

This is Gregory Danforth, said the voice, very dry, very stuffy with a hint of an Oxford accent. I believe you left a message for me.

Yes! I said, I received a package from you. You’d sent it to my Uncle Arthur, I guess, but, well… I’m afraid he passed on years ago.

Oh, he said. A dark silence fell over him then. I’m sorry to hear that. Arthur was a good man. I’m afraid, then, that this task falls to you. I need you to bring that box to me, and for the love of Heaven, don’t open it!

Um… I said.

Tell me you didn’t open it! he burst into rage, his voice resonating with my budding migraine, which again, I attributed to a lack of sleep.

I’m sorry! I said, But I was very careful. I even wore gloves when I handled it. It’s not my first day, you know!

There was a long, clearly controlled exhalation of air.

All right, he said, I have to make some preparations. Put the idol back into the box. Bring it to my office first thing in the morning. Don’t let anyone else see it or touch it! Oh… if you meet a man named Clancy Sharpe… just run away, as fast as you can.

He hung up, and I spent the rest of the twilight hours oddly shaken. Every time my eyelids closed I heard whispering, and my half-dreams would show me hideous, impossible creeping things in sick landscapes. My head began to throb with pain as the seed of a migraine began to sprout.

My sleepless night faded to gray morning. I put the crate in my car and headed for Brown University, my head throbbing the entire time, as if warning me not to go.

Normally the area around the University is a bright, vibrant community. Today seemed surreal, gray, unnaturally quiet.

I fumbled the crate out of the trunk, fighting through the dull ache in my skull when I saw a man across the street watching me. He seemed odd somehow. Looking at his face hurt my eyes, but I got the impression of dark hair, big, watchful eyes, strange wide lips, and his crisp, white suit and jacket was an odd contrast to the dull gray mist around me.

No one answered when I knocked at the thick oak door in the old, historic building. Every minute I waited, the migraine pulsed harder against my skull. An odd, rusty scent was in the air.

Finally, I just turned the knob. It was unlocked.

The door slowly swung inward, creaking on old hinges. Inside was the crumpled form of a man in his late fifties, his pale, swollen flesh devoid of blood, which splattered over all the furniture and chairs in a sticky crimson and pooled on the floor.

I wanted to scream, but bile exploded my throat instead. I retched onto floor, pain searing my skull. I staggered back to the far wall on my hands and knees. I’d dropped the box and that bizarre, hideous little idol rolled out to stare back at me, its inhuman eyes taunting me with alien hatred.

Somehow they were all around me, then. That man with the black hair stooped down and retrieved the idol. He smiled at me, then turned to his flock, a mix of students, professors, everyday people, all different ages, nationalities, all with strange, hideous, glossed-over, gelatinous eyes. He held the idol up with a triumphant grin.

We have the key, he said, The gateway shall be opened.

He turned to me, and the crowd turned to stare at me, all at once, as if they were of one mind.

Reverend Sharpe has the key! They said in unison, Praise Thy Open Altar! The Gateway and the Key!

I was frozen, looking down, seeing that on the soles of the Reverend’s shoes was sticky crimson. He then turned his attention to me, and those bizarre, wrong-looking eyes bore into my soul.

Listen. Believe. His voice was a truth that I accepted before I even understood the words. My migraine sent white pain into my skull, but as the strange words nestled in my mind, the pain vanished, as did the strange congregation.

I sat on the floor for… I don’t know how long. I guess that’s how the police found me. I barely remember them taking me from the scene, asking me questions, but I was in a fog. I couldn’t think, couldn’t feel. They