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

by Gleaves, Richard

  His police searched the Pocantico Woods with bloodhounds. They discovered dead deer and possums, decapitated squirrels swinging from branches too high for any person to have climbed, mysterious cairns of stones, tree trunks crawling with caterpillars and cicada. The dogs led them up Witches Spring Trail to Gory Brook, right to the edge of the sluggish water, then lost the scent. One of the thirsty animals lapped at the brook while the policemen decided what to do. “It went rabid-like,” said patrolman Bruno Bettelheim to his friends at the bar later that night. “Just went nuts and attacked one of the other dogs. Ripped its throat out and then went after Ernie and me. We had to shoot the crazy thing. Never saw anything like it.”

  The town closed the high school, of course. Indefinitely. Two students had been found dead inside, near the front exit. Along the south hallway, the walls were covered with the same crazy graffiti that had tormented the town since July, written in the blood of the two dead kids. The school janitor refused to touch the mess, and the school brought in a crew to scrub. But the stain of blood graffiti kept returning no matter what they did, bleeding through primer paint and butcher paper, dripping down the lockers. It was like some curiosity you’d see on the TV news—the perpetually bleeding plaster saint, the red stigmata of a miraculous Christ. Mrs. Thorstenson the math teacher caught sight of it when she came in to collect her spare house keys out of her desk. She resigned the next morning, saying she could never work in that school again.

  Mrs. Tillotson the drama teacher sat alone in the auditorium, in a red velvet chair with the prop skull from Hamlet in her hands, contemplating death.

  Mr. Smolenski heard laughter over the school PA system. A little girl’s laughter. He went into the main office and found the system powered down and the room deserted. He said the sound “gave him cold chills.”

  Mr. Wollenberg the civics teacher was glad of the time off. He reserved a room at the Motel 6 in Philadelphia and went sightseeing at Federal Hall.

  Principal Grayson didn’t have the luxury of time off. She had to deal with hysterical parents, grieving students, invasive police, skeptical insurers, and a self-protective school board. She melted with gratitude when, three days after the killings, a team of grievance counselors from Washington came to assist the terrified and bewildered kids. The newcomers set up a little trailer at the elementary school—a safe space for survivors to talk about what they’d seen. Ms. Bridge seemed to do really miraculous work. Every student that went to see her came out of those sessions changed for the better, and they all strongly recommended Ms. Bridge to their friends.

  Principal Grayson herself felt shaken and destroyed by the tragedy. She felt responsible. She’d missed the signs. She stood alone in the atrium one late afternoon, staring at the trophy case, looking into the eyes of the team photos, searching for murder or hatred or madness in the faces of those handsome players, but finding only eagerness and youth. Still, these same kids had almost murdered the Crane boy last New Year’s Eve. She’d let them off too easily for that, hadn’t she? She’d been fooled into thinking those boys had acted under Eddie Martinez’s bad influence, but poor Eddie was a victim himself, wasn’t he? You never know, do you? You never know. She wept and hugged her file folders to her chest. On her way out, she glanced down at the Rorschach blot of the Horseman logo. She’d already put in a work order to have that symbol torn up. She dropped her papers, fell to her knees, and beat her fists against the tile.

  Four nights after the massacre, the Reformed Church of the Tarrytowns held a memorial service at the Old Dutch Church. The preacher tried to console the confused and disconsolate crowd, speaking of the inscrutability of the Divine Plan and the mysterious ways of the other world. Nobody came out of the event feeling any better. The service was marred by the stink from the nearby burial ground, and many attendees wondered if a skunk had wriggled into the ancient tomb of the Philipse family, down beneath the altar.

  The state of the village only added to the mounting agitation. People hardly recognized the Tarrytowns anymore.

  The Dutch farm at Philipsburg Manor was entirely fallow, except for a scattering of tiny red flowers, like a spreading rash. Only the ram with his great demonic horns would eat those. The swans had fled, the fish in the pond had died. The millwheel was often seen turning by itself. What was it grinding? It felt like it was grinding their town away.

  Nothing grew in Patriots Park either, not even dandelions. Prissy Stephens, who lived in the area, claimed to have seen the water of Andre Brook glowing red on the night of the massacre, but Prissy was a Scientologist and no one believed her.

  Broadway had developed a sickly rainbow shimmer, as if perpetually drenched in spilled gasoline. Tiny swarms of flies spun like dervishes over the lawns. A dumpster caught on fire behind the Rite Aid. Crows chattered in the trees or took to the air, cawing like rusted hinges. More graffiti appeared, scratched into window glass or keyed down the sides of parked cars. A green traffic sign hung over the intersection of Broadway and Bedford, its arrow pointing the way to Pleasantville. People longed to follow that arrow. Pleasantville sounded… pleasant.

  The villagers had come to accept the blight on the hills, thinking it a short-term problem that would mend itself over time. But they’d taken the beauty of the Hollow for granted and missed it terribly. Autumn was upon them, usually the most gorgeous season of the year and one they looked forward to with eagerness and pride. But there were no leaves on the trees of the Rockefeller Park Preserve, no orange and red and yellow and gold, only black char and spider web and rot. Tourist season was a bust. Everyone would go bankrupt. It was like the year the GM factory closed. How would they make ends meet? Moods blackened. People stopped saying “good morning” to each other. The word “good” bore no relation to their lives.

  Seven days had passed when the pressure valve broke and the tension erupted into violence. A group of kids and parents, witnesses to the massacre, took it upon themselves to rid the town of the Headless Horseman. Late that night they went roaming on Beekman Avenue with bats and crowbars, bashing out any shop window with a Horseman logo on it. They smashed the glass out at the bicycle shop, the Halal restaurant, the consignment store, the Yogurt Tree, the hair salon. Then they started taking down street signs. They threw white paint on the rusted metal statue of the Horseman vs. Ichabod, and they spray painted over the mural on the side of the Chevron station.

  These were not habitual vandals. They were average, everyday Tarrytowners gone mad. When confronted, they said they “just couldn’t look at him anymore.”

  Mayor Nielsen didn’t have the vandals arrested. He sympathized. His executive assistant, Mark, bought blank labels at the Barnes stationery store, to cover the little Horseman on the mayor’s official letterhead.

  The rampagers spared the Horseman Restaurant. Jennifer had taken down the logo of the Horseman slinging burgers and fries—leaving a white ghost of him on the wall of the building—and had hung a sign proclaiming the new name of the place: ICHABOD’S. In the vestibule, she laid out flyers for “The Hoofprint Society,” a group for Horseman witnesses and believers.

  There were a lot of believers in Sleepy Hollow now. They spent money in their own gift shops, for once, to buy magical amulets and good luck charms, crystals and incense and voodoo dolls. Teens watched horror movies late into the night, Re-Animator and Friday the 13th and Saw, as if desperate to wash away the memory of real blood with rivers of the pretend stuff. They stripped the Warner Library of its paranormal titles, from the Twilight saga to the Encyclopedia of Celtic Faerie. From Pet Sematary to The Vampire Lestat. From Wiccan herbology to The Call of Cthulu. The Local History shelf grew sparse as Tarrytowners studied with new interest (and dread) the old tales of the Dutch settlers, the White Lady of Raven Rock, and the Heer of Dunderberg.

  From the Hudson Valley Compendium of Legends:

  A goblin imp lives at the top of the Dunderberg, the ‘Thunder Mountain’ north of the Tappan Zee. The ‘Heer of Dunderberg’, as the Dutch cal
led him, sits high above the southern gate of the Hudson Highlands, watching the waters below. He is a bulbous-bottomed spectre, in trunk hose and a sugarloaf hat, who raises his speaking-trumpet to summon the Storm Ship: an evil vessel manned by malevolent witches and dire spooks. The Heer, or Storm King, calls down rain and thunder from his intimidating perch, commands his legion of hail-spooks and lightning-spooks, and sends them wailing down the Hudson River to scuttle hapless mariners. His minions lash, his waters pitch, and all a man can do is knot himself to a sturdy rail and pray to be spared. Often the imp will blow so hard he will knock his own cap off, and sailors claim to see it ensnared in the rigging, high above, twisting in the wind until they clear his domain, at which instant it blows off as if snatched back by his hand.

  The wrath of the Storm King struck down the Flying Dutchman, they say, sinking that famous ship somewhere near Pollopel Island, the Dead Man’s Isle, a fearsome place the Indians refused to visit at night. The Dutchman became a ghost-ship, a wanderer unable to find port. Sometimes, through a veil of fog, sailors observe a strange red light on the water, as of a phantom ship all aglow, with spars and sails pitching. To see the Dutchman is an omen of doom, and old rivermen claim that even with eyes closed tight one can still hear the phantom captain shouting his defiance: “We sail until doomsday!” The crew of that ghost ship must have burned with guilt for some terrible crime, the old folks whisper, to be condemned to gallop eternally through the clouds, unable to cross over to the eternal port until the period of their penance expires.

  The ancient Dutch mariners trembled with mortal terror on their approach to the Dunderberg. They prudently shortened their sails, hammered horseshoes to their masts, and sang to St. Nicholas, patron of sailors, begging his protection from the foul weather ahead, from the black squalls of spring or the icy blasts of winter. But the Storm King reigns above the Hudson.

  The men and women who read these things didn’t bother to hide the books from each other. They read Ghost Suspense and Young Adult Horror openly, in the park or at the train station or over broken yolks at Ichabod’s. But they did hide their books from outsiders. On the morning commute to Manhattan, on lunch breaks, on the ride home. Not out of embarrassment, but out of contempt. Only people like themselves could possibly understand.

  People in the know.

  People who had seen.

  Already within that first week, Tarrytown had become a little island of superstition in a sea of scientific Americans. Some fissure had opened up between the Hollow and the rest of the world, snapping the two apart like the ends of a wishbone or the girders the Tappan Zee Bridge, separating two alienated shores. Tears for the dead of Sleepy Hollow had salted the thresholds of the town. No outsider could enter, not truly.

  The world of Brom Bones and Ichabod Crane and Katrina Van Tassel had been like this. Once before, long ago, the people of Sleepy Hollow had believed fervently in magic and monsters. Beneath the modern roads and landfills still lay the foundations of that eighteenth-century community of insular and superstitious Dutch, those fervent believers in dark spirits and witchcraft. The ghosts of the old burying ground remembered that world and its skittish peculiar people, separated from the English colonists all around by language, dress, customs, and beliefs. The modern Sleepy Hollow had begun to imitate those famous forbears of the Legend. They too had withdrawn from the outside world—from the deaf and sensible world that lay over the water and beyond the ridge, from the skeptical workaday world that didn’t believe in ghosts or banshees or trolls. From the foolish innocents who doubted the existence of the Heer of Dunderberg and the White Lady of Raven Rock and the galloping headless Hessian.

  Agathe Van Brunt stood framed in the octagonal window of her attic aerie, hands clasped behind her back, watching a candlelight vigil snake through the streets below.

  You are the dead things, now. Not I. Dead and cold, like stones quarried from beneath the earth, to be chiseled by the master mason. Yes. The quarry-master has made her detonation and has opened a rich adamant seam. You should be honored that I have chosen you—to provide the foundation for the glories I shall build.

  The attic door behind her opened. She knew who stood there, but she did not turn.

  “Why?” groaned Hadewych.

  Agathe drummed the cold glass with her fingernails. “Why not?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “The Trap”

  Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap!

  The severed head of the Horseman awoke to the twitching of his stirrups.

  Tap! Tap! Tap!

  The stirrup bones in his ears had knit themselves at last, tiny and delicate, hidden deep within the bony labyrinths of his skull. All three bones had regrown, the stirrup, the anvil, and the hammer, linked together as they’d been in life. They conducted the vibrations of his tympanic membrane, tight as a snare, and a maddening sound played upon his eardrums.

  Tap! Tap!

  He heard. As a living man hears. But what was that incessant noise? It was high and crystalline, like the flick of a fingernail upon a wine glass, the sound of a prince proposing a toast…

  Tap! Tap! Tap!

  The sound darted this way and that. Something small, battering the glass of the reliquary, trying to escape. A fly. That’s what it was. A horsefly had wriggled into the darkness of the Devil’s Lantern, drawn by the delicious odor of crusted blood. It had brought its babies to banquet and could not find its way out again.

  Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap! Taaaaaaa—

  The sound changed. It became a tiny song of hysteria and beating wings. The fly hung suspended, twitching a mere inch from the Horseman’s closed eyes. It tugged and wriggled, as if reined to his temple. Ah. The fly had been caught. Caught in the net of web that hung anchored between the gilt walls of the reliquary and the skin of the Horseman’s face.

  Poor creature. Another had preceded it to this den.

  Something delicate and many-legged skittered up the Horseman’s cheek. The hunter had come, drawn to the blood. The fly’s screaming grew muffled as the spider cocooned it and began to feast.

  The Horseman, too, longed for blood. For the drip-drip-drip from above, hot and thick. How many times had blood kissed his brow like summer rain? A hundred? A thousand? He’d grown strong. Never had he come so near to fullness, to satiety. The glut of it flushed his cheeks and stretched his veins. A grand restoration had begun. Skin spread across his skull, hairless and smooth as an infant’s. His eye sockets jellied and velvet curtains of eyelid sewed them shut, heavy as coins left for the boatman—he who ferries a fallen hero across the River Styx.

  But he was incomplete.

  He desired… himself. His own lungs and hands and heart. He longed to be joined to sinew and flesh. To be whole. Or to find oblivion. Either would satisfy. To be all the one or all the other. To stride the earth as a man entire or to cross over and kiss the far shore at last. No more in-between. No more sundered twilight between life and death. No more split between body and soul.

  The spider finished its feast. It crawled down the Horseman’s forehead, across his eyelids and nose. He opened his lips, beckoning. The spider hesitated, but slipped its small body inside. The Horseman waited until it tickled his tongue, then crushed the spider against the roof of his mouth.

  Ah. Just the tiniest drop of blood. But so… magical.

  A pulse of vitality coursed through him. He blazed like a star, briefly illuminating the chamber where Hadewych Van Brunt had hidden him: the dark lantern-room atop the Tarrytown Lighthouse. But it was not enough. He was not enough. Not yet.

  But soon. Soon. Soon. Soon…

  Darkness fell again, and soft and low as the rumble of an oncoming storm… the head of the Horseman laughed.

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

  Surrender… surrender… surrender… surrender…

  The sound of laughter woke Jason again.

  He shot to his feet, kicked the blanket aside, and scrambled up the spiral staircase. He press
ed his ear to the trap door in the ceiling. He’d heard this sound four times now, on different nights. A man’s laughter, just as Tamper had said. Deep-throated and soft, strangely muffled and echoing. It sounded at odd hours, always after dark. Sometimes it was indecipherable muttering, as if a monk lived above, reciting his catechism to the stones.

  “Hello?” Jason called.

  The laughter ceased, but not at once. It trailed away as if dispelled by the growing dawn that turned the eastern portholes bruise-violet.

  Jason’s left calf began cramping. He winced and backed down the staircase, using each step to stretch the muscle. He waited at the bottom, staring up at the grey ceiling, listening hard but hearing only the white noise of the Hudson below. He’d half-convinced himself that the laughter was some trick of the acoustics, some creaking board. But his skin prickled with gooseflesh and dread. Was the lighthouse haunted? With his luck, it would be another vengeful victim of William Crane.

  Jason sank to the floor of the porthole room. With everything that had happened to him, he’d barely had time to think about what he’d discovered in the cellar beneath Gory Brook. He should have guessed that his family had played some part in the Horseman’s death. What other motive would drive the ghost to attack Cranes, two centuries later? The Horseman wanted revenge.

  And he deserved revenge. That was the awful part.

  The Sins of the Father shall be Visited upon the Sons

  Even unto the Seventh Generation