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

by Gleaves, Richard

  “I told you. I’ve never heard of that woman.”

  “He said, she said, I guess.” Martinez threw another photo on the table. Not a corpse. A handsome man that Mike didn’t recognize. The caption read “Arthur Rackham.” “Where’s poor Artie buried, Mike? Just tell us. Help us bring him home to his family.”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Did he see something? You like to take their eyes, right? Or is it better to take the whole head? Where are the heads, Mike? Up in the woods, maybe?”

  “I told you. I didn’t kill anyone.”

  “This will go a lot easier if you cooperate.” Martinez threw more pictures down. A burned party tent up at Stone Barns. A sequined woman pulled from Swan Lake on New Year’s Day, bloodless, her lips blue, her hair frozen flat. “Maybe you didn’t kill them all by yourself. Tell me who you’re working with and we’ll go easy.”

  “I don’t know what this is about. I swear.”

  “Where were you? The night this happened?” More pictures. The headless body of a man, wearing a baseball shirt that rode up to expose his navel. “You visit Sleepy Hollow Manor that night?”

  “Quit it, please.” Mike felt strangled. His face was flushing.

  “That’s David Rittermeyer. He piss you off? Look at you funny one day? He had a kid, you know. Little boy named Buddy. Not ringing the ol’ fire bell? What about these kids? What did they do to you?” More pictures. Victims of the homecoming massacre.

  “How can you think that was me?” Mike gasped. “I was there. With my crew. We put out the cars.”

  “Your crew says you went missing that night.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “So all those men just… magically forgot?”

  “I can’t… I can’t explain it. You saw that thing on the horse. You shot at it.”

  “I shot at something. It’s interesting. People say you’re real big on that Horseman stuff. Can’t get enough of it. Maybe I shot at you. What do you think?”

  “Then where’s the bullet wound? Huh?” Mike struggled to show Martinez his abdomen, but his prison uniform was a one-piece.

  “I missed, maybe. If I’d hit, you wouldn’t have kept riding. No way.”

  “It wasn’t me! Valerie knows. Valerie was there.”

  “Ms. Maule? The woman living with you? Ms. Maule’s gone missing. Whatcha think? We gonna find her next? She figure out you burned her house down?”

  “I didn’t burn her house down. I saved her life.”

  “Hail the valiant hero. Very convenient. Rich lady, isn’t she?”

  “I love Valerie.”

  “I’m sure. And you love fires, don’t you Mike?” He tapped the photo of the burned Stone Barns tent. “What about Kingsland Point Park? Feel good to burn it down?”

  “Why the hell would I?”

  “All you guys are firebugs. Deep down. Something in your makeup. You good with an axe, Mike?”

  “I—I’m good with all my equipment.”

  “Top of your training class. I can see why.” Martinez fanned out the decapitations, like a spread of playing cards, and whistled. “Very clean.”

  Mike rose in his seat. He’d begun trembling, his mind racing. “Wait. Homecoming! There were two kids I talked to. They’ll vouch for me. Zef was there. And that kid… Joey something.”

  “Joey Osorio? Funny thing. Old Jim Osorio was almost killed last night. Two out-of-towners died. Know anything about that?” Martinez threw down a photo of yet another decapitated corpse.

  Mike winced and slumped. “Quit showing me those things.”

  “Guilty conscience?” Headless corpse. Headless corpse. Headless corpse.

  “No. I just think it’s sick.”

  “So do I. Men do sick things. ’Specially when they’re in love. You were sweet on Debbie Flight, weren’t you?”

  “I liked her.”

  “Liked her? People say you were crazy for her.” Another pop-flash. Another photo. The photo of a dead girl in a long leather coat, waterlogged and vacant-eyed, like a cold fish, her blond hair plastered to her skull and streaked with mud. Her wrists had little mouths in them, wide open as if to make accusations. Yes, Mike had wanted that girl, once. He’d flirted with her sometimes, when they met in the street. She was too aggressive though, and that made him blush. She called him “hot stuff” and whistled as he soaped the fire truck. The fire truck with the Horseman painted on it.

  Martinez sighed. “She had rocks in her pockets. You know that? Rocks to hold her down. Now that’s sick. Where were you that night?”

  “I… don’t know.”

  “Well, somebody does. We got a tip. Searched your apartment this afternoon.” He dropped a little plastic bag on the table. Inside was a gold pin with a SHFD logo and a cartoon Horseman chasing Ichabod. “This yours?”

  “Maybe. Everybody at the station—”

  “Is this yours?” Martinez leaned forward. “It was in your dresser. No point lying about it.”

  “Well… I guess.”

  Martinez leaned into the microphone at his elbow. “Suspect confirms that he owned the pin.”

  “I owned a pin. I don’t know that one is—”

  “What if I told you there’s blood on it?”

  Mike went still. “Why would there be blood on it?”

  “You tell me. It’s not much. Just around the needle. Whose blood could it be, I wonder?”

  “Maybe I stuck myself.”

  “Come on. We have a kick-ass crime lab. It’s not your blood type. It’s Debbie Flight’s, right? She tore it off your collar so we’d know it was you. Smart girl.”

  “I…” Mike stopped, remembering. His pin did go missing the night Debbie died.

  “Something wrong?”

  “This is a frame-up. Somebody else had that pin.”

  “Who?”

  “Ichabod. I mean… Jason Crane.”

  “Jason Crane knew about the pin?”

  “He gave it back. After I lost it.”

  “Is that why you killed him?”

  Mike blinked. “I don’t want to say anything else.”

  “What about Vernon McCaffrey?” Martinez threw down a picture of another headless corpse. This one wore a bolo tie. “He did the autopsy on Debbie Flight. Did he figure something out? Find a needle jab in her palm maybe? Help me out here.”

  “I never knew…”

  “Debbie Flight was seen with Darley the night he died. They hooked up in Patriots Park. Did you watch from the bushes, Mike?”

  “Shut up.”

  “We know it was you! Did my Eddie catch you hurting someone? Is that why you killed him?”

  “I said shut up!” Mike twisted away, mind racing, feeling like he was caught in some twenty-story office building with all the stairwells burning, with no one to get him out. No team, no support, no water. No water because all the hydrants had gone dry. Only his eyes had pressure. Building up. A quarter-turn from dousing his burning cheeks.

  Martinez raised the pin. “We’ll see what the blood has to say. Until then, I’ll be fluffing your pillow.” He clicked the microphone off, gathered the photos, and stood. “Off the record, my Eddie was a good boy. Star athlete. All-natural bodybuilder. He had a future, and you took it away from him.” He turned at the door. “I hope you like injections.”

  Two uniformed detention officers led Mike back to his cell, un-cuffed him, and locked him inside. There was no pillow to fluff, only a vinyl-covered mattress. There was no lid on the toilet, no water inside, only blue liquid that stank up the room. There was no window in the cinderblock, but he still heard the rain. The broken hydrant outside, endlessly bleeding out.

  He slept fitfully and woke in the dark from a dream… of Debbie. In the dream, he’d held her over water and sliced her wrist with a crushed Coke can.

  “I really liked you,” she said as she slid beneath the surface.

  The problem was, Mike had been having this dream for months. Even Valerie had noticed his twitchiness and nightmare
s. He dreamt of black water and blood and couldn’t say why.

  Maybe I did do it, he thought. Maybe I’ve… forgotten. He curled in the dark, listening to the footsteps of the guards and the impossible laughter of children outside. Children playing in a midnight hydrant-gush. Playing in an endless spill of jet-black water.

  “Oh, Valerie,” he whispered, his tear ducts opening with a last quarter-turn. “Where the hell are you?”

  Joey’s dad awoke in the night. Someone had entered his hospital room. He heard a soft breathing that wasn’t his own, like the exhalation of the storm clouds outside, beyond his sweating moonlit window. His eyes flickered open. His pupils inhaled. A silhouette sat in the visitor’s chair. “Pat?” Jim croaked, searching for a light switch, slapping the wall in vain. His head throbbed with his heartbeat. His glasses had gone missing. “Honey, is that you?”

  Lightning lit briefly, revealing a figure. A very old man in a hospital gown. His legs wore black socks and his arm bore a wristwatch.

  “Get out of my room,” said Jim, his voice slurred by painkillers.

  “This isn’t your room,” said the silhouette. “I died in this room, mister. That makes it mine.”

  Lightning returned. The man was standing now. He trailed a plastic tube from his nose to his chest. It dangled there, loose, like a long thread of snot. Blackness returned, bringing wave upon wave of sadness and misery.

  Jim found the call button. “You’re a nutcase, fella.”

  “I reckon I am. Probably the thing in my brain.”

  “What thing?’’

  The lightning flashed. The man was close now. His temple bore an exit wound. “The bullet,” he said, with a gunshot of thunder.

  Jim cried out. The man fell on him. Dead weight and bony hands. Hands on his throat, choking him, cutting the blood off, quieting the throb in his head. The lightning lit up the ghastly face right above him, the air hose dangling like a pendulum.

  “I had to do it!” the man screamed. “I’m sorry! I had to! I couldn’t stand this room anymore!”

  The overhead lights clicked on. The dead weight vanished. The old man evaporated. Jim’s hands struggled with empty air. The pretty African-American nurse bent over him, gently guiding his hands down. “What can I do for you, Mr. Osorio?”

  “Someone was here! A man was—a man was here! He tried to strangle me!”

  The nurse made a face of astonished sympathy, humoring him. “Well, I’m glad I scared him away then!”

  “I’m not imagining things… I’m not… am I?” Jim fell back against his pillow, weak as an anemic kitten. The pain in his head had traveled, becoming a drip of hot blood between his eyes.

  The nurse tucked him in, as a mother bundles a child scared by bumps in the night. “Doctor says that’s normal. You’ve had a hard time. Can I get you a glass of water or something?”

  “No, thank you. Where’s my wife?”

  “Pat? She seems like a nice lady. We can hardly keep her out. But you’ve got to sleep and get better.”

  “My son’s nice, too.” Jim’s voice slurred. “He’s a hero. Saved us. With dirt.”

  “With dirt?”

  “He’s Dirtman.”

  “Well, good for him. I bet he’ll be zooming in to see you soon.”

  “He’s Dirtman. I saw him… I saw him do it.”

  “You sleep now. Let me know if you need anything.” She clicked the light off.

  “Please!” he cried. “Please no!”

  “What, honey?”

  “Please? Leave the door cracked? Please, Mama?”

  She did. Her silhouette dwindled and disappeared, leaving him alone. Jim waited for the Boogey Man to come back, but the Boogey Man never did. Good. He didn’t like that ol’ Boogey Man. He liked the Dirtman though. He loved the Dirtman. Why didn’t the Dirtman come? That was sad. The Dirtman never came anymore.

  Only the Sandman did.

  Pat Osorio sat in a hard plastic chair in the waiting room. Occasionally a nurse would reach over her, pump antibiotic soap from the wall dispenser, and wring her hands. It was annoying.

  Pat washed down a NoDoz with a swig of warm Dr. Pepper. She leaned on her blue umbrella and waited for visiting hours to resume.

  “Oh, Jo-Jo,” she whispered. “Where are you, baby?”

  At Lyndhurst, the shutter kept tapping and tapping. Endlessly tapping and tapping and tapping. A bump in the night, like the creak of a step in the dark. Its hinges howled like a werewolf and moaned like a ghost down the white marble halls, bringing fear and despair and monotonous listening, listening, listening…

  Something is coming.

  Listening, listening.

  Something that’s deaf to the cry of a child or the plea of a prisoner.

  Listening, listening.

  Something is coming. A merciless something is coming. It’s endlessly tapping and rapping and ticking. You hear it? It’s marking the moments and counting the seconds as, hoofbeat by hoofbeat, the night spurs its nightmare and gallops for midnight—the span between now and tomorrow. As night hurtles onward and makes for the bridge called “The Witching Hour”…

  … when scarecrows dance in the pumpkin field.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  “The Quarantine”

  Down in the basement, Joey couldn’t hear the shutter. He sat listening to the snoring of his roommate, Number Four, the man in the red baseball cap, who had finally relaxed and thrown his mask aside. His name was Chuck Tucker. He worked as a manager at the Bridgeview restaurant, and could turn tiny things to stone. A stone housefly or mosquito, a stone house key or bottle cap. Not much of a Gift, Chuck knew. Nothing useful. Nothing grand. A Medusa in miniature, that’s all Chuck was. But even the tiniest Gift is something to hide. He had a son, Eric, who’d just turned eleven. Chuck worried about him and wished he could call home.

  “Mather and them know what they’re doing,” Chuck had said. “We shouldn’t question. I’m sure they’ll look after my son while I’m here.”

  All of the Gifted acquiesced to the setup. Number Five, the Kykuit groundskeeper, thought it sensible. He could pop light bulbs with his Gift. Number Seven, from Ichabod’s newsstand, approved. She bent spoons. They scowled at Joey over dinner as though they blamed him for everything. He was the rogue who had started this business. They looked at him with fear, too. Word had spread among them that Joey’s Gift was strong, and that scared them. Joey thought these people could have been just as strong, if they hadn’t chosen to hobble themselves.

  Joey had heard that gay people had been like this, back in the 1950s. He’d believed that this kind of fear and hiding was a thing of the past, that all the world’s little subcultures had come out now, for good or ill, to be embraced or laughed at, but at least not invisible. He’d been wrong. These others lived in such terror of being discovered that they hid their faces, even from people like themselves. It was sad to him, and he hoped someday it would change, that all Great Curses could be broken and all people could come into their own, find their strength, and do good in the world.

  Joey wasn’t about to lie down and snore. How could he? His dad was still cursed, and no one out there would know to protect him. Plus Jason was alive and needed rescue.

  Joey sat on his bed, knees bobbing, trying to formulate a plan. His other roommate, an articulated plastic skeleton with a top hat and monocle, was no help. What could be done? Joey had no Gift, not in this Dead Zone, and even going to the bathroom required showing his arm stamp to a thug with a gun.

  He crept from his room and into the hall, passing a fake autopsy table laden with latex body parts and a mannequin mad doctor in blood-soaked scrubs. He really hoped they would get the Halloween decorations out of here. He couldn’t take the heads floating in crystal balls, the voodoo dolls dangling from the ceiling pipes, the candelabra and bloody handprints and pipe-cleaner spiders.

  Spooky spooky, kids.

  Joey caught sight of a moving shadow and stood motionless until the guard passed by. Th
en he slipped through a side door and almost let out a yelp as he ran into Frankenstein’s monster, sleepwalking in the pantry. He cracked an inner door and peeked into the manor’s kitchen, stocked with food. He snagged a pudding cup but couldn’t find a spoon. He ate it with his finger as he searched for an escape route. At the back of the kitchen, he found a narrow staircase. He crept up, licking his finger.

  Okay. This is progress.

  The extravagant dining room was done up like the rest of the house, with spider webs on the chandelier, eyeballs in the soup bowls, and plastic fingers in the fingerbowls. Ha ha. Get it?

  Spooky spooky, kids.

  He heard a footstep and dropped to the floor, wriggling between a pair of wheel-backed chairs and hiding himself under the table. He had dropped the pudding cup though. It rolled away and came to rest by a china cabinet.

  A pair of legs wearing military boots came into the room and circled Joey’s hiding spot. Joey tried not to breathe. The man above muttered something into his walkie-talkie. Joey couldn’t make out the words over a sudden rumble of thunder. The feet stopped moving. The overhead light clicked on and a boot kicked the plastic pudding cup hard in Joey’s direction, striking his forehead. Someone rapped on wood above. “Come out, kid.”

  Joey backed out of his hiding spot. The guard was Bent-Ear Man. Joey put the empty pudding cup on the table, keeping his other arm raised. “I just wanted a snack.”

  “Eat all you want,” said Brian. “The house is yours. We’re not your enemies.”

  “Then let me leave.”

  The guard slung his weapon across his back. “This is for your own good. I know it’s frustrating, but it’s necessary. It’s way more dangerous out there, believe me. Somebody’s killing Gifted people, you know.”

  “Who’s been killed?”

  “Between us?”

  Joey mimed a lip-zipper.

  Bent-Ear Man leaned against the faux-marble wall. “I’ve seen the list. Artie Rackham disappeared last Thanksgiving. Frank Darley was murdered in October. He was the first one.”

  Joey slipped into a chair. “The guy in the millpond? Darley had a Gift?”