SLEEPY HOLLOW: General of the Dead (Jason Crane Book 3)

by Gleaves, Richard

  Eddie’s long shadow swarmed up the hill as he walked, scurrying away from him, like rats fleeing an oncoming flood. A mourner looked up from her grave-gazing as he passed. She had black hair. This stirred up some other Horseman memory, but Eddie couldn’t place it. He reached into his duffel and took hold of his hatchet. The woman registered his size and strength and hurried away. He decided she hadn’t recognized him. He let her leave. And live.

  He paused briefly at the grave of Washington Irving, long enough for his shadow to swallow the white nub of the author’s headstone. Another memory. Fire. Jason had burned the Horseman here. But fire didn’t hurt so bad.

  Next to helplessness, fire was a paper cut.

  He climbed to the crest of the cemetery, to the pillared overlook. Agathe waited there, arms crossed. King of the hill. Queen. Whatever. She wore red. He wanted to take her suddenly. Drag her down to his level. Take her. Take the hill. Take the town. He slowed his steps, enjoying her annoyance.

  “You’re late,” she said.

  “Yeah, so?”

  They stared at each other for a long time. Agathe didn’t blink. She approached and caressed him. “My Horseman.”

  The urge rose again. To take her. To show her who was owner and who was owned.

  “Transform,” she said, in the tone a master might use with a dog. Do your trick. Roll over. Play dead.

  “One second.” Eddie dropped the duffel, took his phone from a pocket, and started its camera recording. He perched it on the outstretched arm of a marble Jesus. “I’ve never seen what it looks like.”

  He stepped back, into frame, picturing the shot. He’d look badass and powerful, turning into the damn Headless Horseman. It would be cool. The Tappan Zee Bridge hung over his shoulder—where he’d killed Jason. Where they had. This would be an awesome video. Too bad he couldn’t show it to anybody. Not while Agathe held him down. But someday, maybe. When he’d climbed on top. Where he belonged.

  He held his arms out in imitation of the marble Jesus. But the statue smiled gently and held its hands open to cup the falling twilight; Eddie made fists and screamed. He surrendered to the magic, though it hurt like hell—just as he’d surrendered to the needle, the syringe, the vial. He welcomed it in like he’d welcomed the Deca, the trenbolone, the equipoise. Yeah. Equipoise had been his favorite. A veterinary steroid, for bulking emaciated horses. For turning a man into a stallion. Oh, he’d been a Horseman in the making, long before he’d ever met—

  Another wave of pain. He screamed again and gritted his teeth.

  The corruption had come. Its fingernails raked his cheekbones. It wriggled into his ear canal, muffling his cries of pain. A meteor hit his forehead and burned his brain away. His eyeballs retreated from the world, like two hermits sequestering in the cave of his skull.

  “Ergeben…” he whispered. “Ergeben… Ergeben…”

  And someone answered, down in that cave of the past—in that Hollow of The Legend. A thin, snarling man, with wild eyes and bloodstained cheeks. William Crane, father of Ichabod. The man gripped Eddie’s severed head, screaming, “I have held the bridge! I have held the bridge!” He raised the head high and threw it—like a flaming pumpkin—into the rushing current of the Pocantico.

  Eddie and the Horseman hit the water together. The woods climbed on top of them and darkness held them down. They sank.

  They sank beneath the flare and foam and taunting laughter of the waves.

  They sank into death. And beyond. Down deeper still.

  Into the depths of the Van Brunt tomb.

  Into the icy fury of… helplessness.

  What are you gonna do now, son, huh?

  What are you gonna do now?

  Eliza Merrick woke to the sound of the Horseman’s summons. It played on her coffin, its note shrill and grating, as if she lay in a buried cello and the reaper had come to bow her grave with his scythe.

  Oh, crapola, she thought. Not this horseshit again.

  She sighed and said goodbye to her box, to her mortal remains in their best blue dress. She rose through the leafmeal and clay, dragging the spectral chains of her imprisonment. She drizzled upward, as a firefly, and coalesced—glowing with daisy-yellow light—to stand beneath the stars again, a convict among the ranks of the Horseman’s Army. Her fellow ghosts sewed themselves from shadows, built bodies of wispy blue—barely more than wraiths. Their faces bore torment and shame. They hung their heads and stared at their dates of death.

  Eliza glanced at her own marker. It bore blotches of lichen and mold. October 26th. Almost a year now.

  Time flies when you’re having fun.

  Only Eliza wore a chain—in all of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, as far as she could tell. The ponderous links and loops of her fetters, clanking and dragging, made her feel like old Jacob Marley in the Dickens tale. But she hadn’t forged this chain in life, as Marley had. Agathe had done it. Agathe had salted Eliza’s poor grave, had bound her, to keep her from raising holy hell.

  She looked up. Red vigil lights had activated, high up the slope at the top of the Palmyra section. They glowed like railway lanterns among the headstones. End of the line. Last station. Terminus. The cemetery had changed awfully as the Horseman’s influence fell upon it. The blight had come down from the woods, sneaking through the chain link. The trees had dropped their leaves to pick up weaving spiders, furtive squirrels, and motionless, watchful crows. The ivy had grown dark and glossy—twisting into hangman’s nooses and devil’s snares. The eyes of the statues had grown strangely hollow and… gimlet; piercing, as if they noticed everything. Carefully planted roses had become wild thorny briar. In every section, some rectangle of earth had fallen in and a circle of grass had withered around it, encroaching outward like ripples on the millpond. These were the graves of dark spirits. The ones who stood smiling, pleased by their enlistment in evil. Even the newer tombs on this side of the river wept bloody rust. The cemetery felt deathly, above ground as much as below, as if not the spirits but the corpses had risen, had liquefied and seeped to the surface. Fossil fuel, like the dinosaurs. Black gold. Texas Tea.

  Eliza sighed. Where was the heaven promised to her by Sunday school? By the oil paintings in her family Bible? Where were the wings and haloes? The togas and sandals? Where was her glorified body, her unlimited ice cream, scooped by the cherubim? Her celestial mansion of marble and gold?

  She turned to a fellow ghost. “I’ll tell you one thing about death. It looked a lot nicer in the brochures.”

  The spirit didn’t even crack a grin.

  Eliza raised her voice. “We should fight,” she snapped. “We’re stronger than the Horseman, if we work together.” She searched the faces of her neighbor dead. “What’s wrong with you people? A body would think you like this, jumping when he says jump. But I didn’t spend eighty years on earth just to—”

  “What can we do?” whimpered the female ghost who “lived” three headstones away. Mrs. Lakeland, the piano teacher. Newly dead. Almost as fresh as Eliza. “He’s the dominant spirit.”

  “It’s a stupid rule. I bought this plot with my own money. He doesn’t own it. I do. Lord. He’s only dominant because that witch is sacrificing to him. We could take back this cemetery. If we tried.”

  The piano teacher looked away. Eliza knew it was useless. Even in death, Mrs. Lakeland was the type of spirit born to obey a metronome, to march to a drumbeat set by another.

  “Fight, you idiots,” Eliza shouted. “Show some gumption.”

  “And end up like you?” said some spook at the rear. “Like you and your grandson?”

  Eliza went still.

  The wind in the branches sounded like distant muttering, like counsels of war. The crickets whispered Jason CRANE… Jason CRANE… barely audible above the weeping rustle of the Pocantico. She’d seen Jason fall, had seen the Mercedes tumble over the railing of the bridge. She’d known her grandson’s mind in that moment, his determination to die on his own terms, to choose the manner of his death and go like
his parents. He’d been so brave. And now…

  Where is my boy? I’d settle for having him here at my side. That would be heaven enough. He can’t be dead. Can he?

  Was Jason with his mother and father now? With Dianne and Andrew in Valhalla Cemetery? Would Jason’s spirit and hers never cross paths again—through all their long eternities? Eliza looked into her heart, searching for an answer. And found one: No. The world didn’t work that way. She wouldn’t allow it.

  “My Jason is alive.”

  Ghostly laughter, all around. She saw pity in the eyes of her neighbors. Pity and contempt.

  “He’s alive. I know it. He has to be.”

  The ghosts grumbled and catcalled. One of them threw a stone at her. It passed through her body and clattered down the hill.

  A different kind of laughter answered. Mortal laughter. Living laughter. A girl strode up the starlit path. She wore red. She was young and blond but her eyes were old. Agathe. Agathe, wearing her Kate Usher suit. A hulking, headless figure followed behind. The General and his Witch.

  “Dissension in the ranks?” Agathe said, drawing near. “We can’t have that.”

  Eliza flew at her, but the chains went taut. “If I ever get my hands on you—”

  Agathe raised a finger. The chains tightened around Eliza’s throat. “You’ll do what, spirit?”

  Eliza met her eye. “Free me and find out.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  The chains tightened again. Eliza struggled and clawed at the links. She didn’t need air, but she could still feel pain—and fear.

  “Let her go!” Mrs. Lakeland rushed forward, wagging a finger at Agathe. “She’s nice!”

  The Horseman stepped between. His arm swept the air and struck the piano teacher’s figure. She scattered like chimney smoke in a thunderstorm. Eliza’s eyes widened. Had Mrs. Lakeland been destroyed? Sent into oblivion? No—the woman re-formed, sobbing, and knelt before the Horseman.

  All the other ghosts knelt as well, their faces downcast and servile. Only Eliza remained standing, bent by the weight of her shackles, but holding her chin defiantly high.

  Agathe gestured to the ground. “Kneel.”

  Eliza shrugged. “I’d die first.”

  The line got a laugh. A few ghostly faces looked up at Eliza admiringly.

  “I said kneel.”

  “And I said no. I may not have a skeleton, but I still have a spine.”

  More ghost-laughter. A sound like water droplets in Carlsbad Caverns. Agathe glared at the assembled ghosts. The slaves were listening. The slaves were drawing strength from Eliza’s mettle. Hope shone in their faces.

  Agathe’s finger shot out, pointing at Eliza. “Take her.” The ghosts hesitated. “I said take her! Obey your masters. You will be rewarded. Obey me, and I will make you stronger than ever before! My magic will rip the seam wide. You will possess bodies, as I possess this one. You will breathe air and taste food and rut with lovers.”

  “Don’t believe her,” said Eliza.

  “It matters not, what they believe,” said Agathe. “They have no choice.”

  The Horseman plunged his hatchet into the heart of the birch tree that stood beside Eliza’s grave. The ground shook, rattling the bones below. A tendril of fire ran along the cemetery fence, marking the border of his influence. No one buried within it could resist. The ghosts fell on Eliza, like spider web claiming a sunflower. Even Mrs. Lakeland joined in. They took hold of her and lifted her from the ground.

  “Get your hands off me!” Eliza shouted, searching each face for some ghost of courage.

  They seized her chains and carried her down the hill, across shadows of moonlight, through bright patches of shade, over the cemetery bridge, across the Pocantico, into the main cemetery on the other side. Eliza cursed like a sailor all the way. Other dead emerged from their rusting mausoleums to join the parade. A little girl with hair-ribbons skipped alongside the growing caravan, whirling a brown leaf and singing a tuneless nursery rhyme:

  “Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home,

  Your house is on fire and your children are gone,

  All except one and that’s little Ann,

  For she crept under the frying pan.”

  The Horseman’s lackeys carried Eliza to a moonlit clearing surrounded by tombs and dropped her onto the gravel. She staggered, struggling under the weight of her chains, but refused to let her knee touch the ground no matter what. She kept her footing and met Agathe’s eye.

  “I thought I had rid myself of you,” said Agathe. “But I see that you need… special attention.” She smiled. “This ghost is court-martialed. I find her guilty of insubordination. The sentence is eternal imprisonment without parole. Any objections? I thought not.”

  An iron door in the hillside opened, revealing a white marble room, the rusting rings of burial niches its only decoration. The receiving vault of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.

  “I was trammeled, once,” Agathe said. “Behind an iron door in the cellar of my own house.” She beckoned. “Your turn.”

  The ghosts heaved Eliza forward. The door in the hill grew large. Agathe took one of Eliza’s chains in her own hand, tugging her along like a favorite pet. But Eliza summoned all her strength, tore her chains free, and made a desperate lunge. She clapped a bony hand to each side of Agathe’s head.

  “Get out of this girl, you witch!”

  Eliza’s command echoed across the wooded hills. Agathe wrenched away, fell to one knee, and screamed. She dropped to the ground and writhed there, clawing at herself. For a moment, Eliza saw two figures superimposed, one upon the other. Kate and Agathe. The beautiful young girl and the toothless old hag.

  The hag vanished and the girl opened her eyes.

  “I beat him,” she whispered.

  “Kate?” said Eliza. “Kate, is that you?”

  The girl blinked. She looked bewildered and disoriented. “I beat… him.”

  “Can you hear me, Kate?”

  “Who said that? Is—is someone there? Where the hell am I?”

  Kate caught sight of the Horseman and gasped. She lurched onto her rump and scrabbled across the gravel, eyes wide and full of panic. The Horseman approached her, hatchet in hand. She screamed. The Horseman seized her arm, raising the weapon, about to strike.

  But Agathe’s malice returned to her face. “No!” she roared. “I will have this flesh. I will have this flesh!” Her body twisted violently. Her back arched. The Horseman retreated as Agathe took control again. A green-yellow firefly rose from her sternum and hurtled into the air. It hovered above the tombs, a confused little light.

  “Run, honey,” said Eliza.

  Kate’s soul darted to the ground, evading Agathe’s grasp. It threaded the legs of the bewildered ghosts, found a gap between the tombs, and slipped through, disappearing into the darkness.

  Agathe wiped her chin and stalked the clearing, turning a circle. “Find her.” A troop of spirits whirled and gave chase. She glared at Eliza. “How did you do that?”

  “You’re weaker than I am. Aren’t you? That’s why you chained me up.”

  “Be still.” Agathe rubbed her brow.

  “When I get loose, I’m going to open such a can of whoop-ass on your butt you won’t be able to ride your broom for a month.”

  “Silence her!”

  No ghost moved.

  Eliza turned. “And as for you, Horseman. My Jason is coming back, too. You’ll see. He’ll find a way back, and he’ll end this.”

  Agathe drew near. “Oh, this will end. But I will end it.” She took hold of Eliza’s chains and dragged her deep into the receiving vault. She threw Eliza to the floor and backed away.

  Eliza raised a finger. The impolite one. “And I’ll end you, you mad bitch. If it takes a thousand years. Just watch. You can’t kill me. I’m already dead.”

  “Yes. Dead and buried.” Agathe slammed the door.

  After many long moments, the echoes subsided. Eliza crouched in darkness, clutching her c
hains. Outside the iron prison, Agathe’s voice rose, chanting some spell. Magic ran across the door of the vault, sealing it.

  “What?” Eliza called. “No deck of cards? That’s fine. I’ll be snug as a bug. Just sitting here. Counting the ways I’m going to end you. Storing them up for winter, like preserves in a root cellar. Oh, I’ll have a fine time, planning the end of you. I will. You know what us old women are like. We adore our little hobbies.”

  She crossed her arms.

  “It sure beats bingo.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “Soliloquy”

  Joey stood at the top of the stairwell, his tray of chili mac in hand, and stared at the string of metal mesh steps. This had been their lunchtime hangout—his and Jason’s—this secluded stairwell perched above the parking lot dumpsters of Sleepy Hollow High. They’d come here to vent, to plan, to talk “Death and Carnage,” to moon over their respective unrequited loves. This had been their Rebel Base, their tree fort, their Fortress of Solitude.

  No. Not of solitude. This was the one place where neither was ever alone.

  He took off his backpack and sat down. He pushed his tray away. He couldn’t eat. Not here. Not with the Tappan Zee Bridge visible in the distance. Even two months later, the wound remained too fresh. He peered through the grille into the clean hollow beneath the stairs. The Sleepy Hollow Boys had trapped Jason down there, in snowy trash on New Year’s Eve. The school had installed a trap door afterward, and now the janitors gave the space a regular scrub.