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

by Gleaves, Richard

  With a last surge of heat, his flame unmade the blade at last.

  The steel melted and ran.

  One of Hadewych’s gasoline tears fell. It sizzled across the molten steel.

  He staggered to his feet and limped away, covering himself with scraps of yellowed newspaper and soiled laundry. He went to Zef’s room and collapsed on the bed, staring at the closet door.

  I can’t go down there, he thought. I don’t care what Agathe told me to do. I’m staying here. I don’t want the Horseman’s Treasure. I hate it. I wish I’d never seen the thing. I wish I’d never heard of it. I wish I’d listened to my mama, not to Oma. I chose the wrong one, just as Dylan did. I chose my grandmother, and power. Oh, damn you, Dylan. Damn you, damn you, damn you….

  But it wasn’t Dylan he should damn. He knew that. Dylan was only his last human shield. The last person not himself whom he could plausibly blame. Hadewych clung to that. He curled into a ball, shivering, and clung to his newfound hatred of Dylan Van Brunt. Everything was Dylan’s fault. It had to be.

  It was the only scrap of denial Hadewych had left—to cover his own nakedness.

  Zef and Joey returned to the waiting room so Jim could get some sleep. The boys were tired, too. Physically and emotionally exhausted from their long ordeal. They worried for Jason, they worried for Kate. But they needed rest. If Jason was right, tomorrow would be a Big Day, and they had to be ready for it. They collapsed together on the hard plastic chairs, Joey’s head nestled on Zef’s shoulder, Zef’s arm around Joey’s back.

  Joey fell asleep first. Zef watched him sleep. It felt… familiar. It had been like this, last Halloween night. Joey asleep in his arms, here in the hospital. But Zef had been frantic then, calling for help, thinking Joey wouldn’t wake from his coma. He wasn’t frantic tonight. He felt remarkably peaceful, considering all they’d been through. Joey was here, and that was good. That. Was. Awesome. Joseph Osorio was awesome, and they were awesome together. He bit his lip. They were both named Joseph, weren’t they? Funny, but he’d never really thought about it before. Joe-Zef, like two halves of one person, only complete when together…

  A nurse approached. She reached over their heads, about to pump hand sanitizer from the dispenser behind them.

  “Do you mind?” whispered Zef. “My boyfriend’s sleeping.”

  The nurse made a gesture of apology and backed away, disappearing down the hall.

  My boyfriend, Zef thought, surprised at himself for having said it so easily, to a stranger, without hesitation. He sat listening to Joey’s soft breathing. I have… a boyfriend.

  The idea was… odd, even to him. But it wasn’t alien anymore, because only unfulfilled wishes feel alien. And all his wishes were fulfilled now. Here was his pal Joey, asleep on his shoulder, and the world could just like it or lump it.

  I, Joseph Van Brunt, have a boyfriend.

  He fell asleep, grinning stupidly, his cheek pressed to Joey’s wet hair.

  Good for me.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  “The Two Altars”

  Jason’s hands had begun glowing again, but he might have preferred the absolute night of the Dead Zone. As he traveled up the endless vein of red brick, fighting the current all the way, a shroud of melancholy grew thicker around him. There were ghosts here. A lot of them. He had the talisman though, and he had a job to do. He had to find a way into Agathe’s pantry.

  He felt as though he were marching down the throat of some snake, as if he were pulled section by section deeper into the belly of a dilating anaconda to be digested somewhere in the darkness ahead. The ceiling dripped with stalactites, and blotches of mold drifted past, like fringed eyes watching him.

  He reached an immense metal gate, half-lowered, with only a few inches between it and the roiling foam. He crouched and peered through, but his feeble light couldn’t pierce the darkness. What was this gate? Some sort of sluice to divert the flow. He found a mechanism set into the wall, but the wheel was too rusty to turn. He sighed, slipped into the water, and fought the fierce current, passing under the gate, hoping it didn’t slam down and cut him in half.

  He rose shivering on the other side and shook water out of the reliquary.

  Ugh. I could have just un-rusted the wheel.

  Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

  Something baby blue and yellow came whitewater-rafting by, and he caught it with a foot. A small denim backpack with a rusted smiley-face button and yellow Day-Glo flowers. He didn’t know what he felt about the thing. One: it was a stroke of luck, because he could carry the reliquary in it. Two: it was informative, because maybe he was close to the school. Three: it was horrifying, because what was a child’s backpack doing in the aqueduct? Four: it was from the seventies, so he might be stuck down here awhile.

  He unzipped it, shoved the reliquary inside, and slung it over his shoulder.

  A stone chimney opened above, revealing a slightly purple sky and a trickle of diagonal rain. This was bad. Dawn had come already. He had to hurry. Strong winds blew a ghostly note across the chimney top, like a child playing a Coke bottle. He splashed on, and the storm fell behind with one last whisper of “Necromancer…”

  The ceiling became black stone as the tunnel bored through bedrock, then red brick again—a product of the Van Brunt brickworks, according to a tiny VBB maker’s mark—dribbling stalactites from cracked mortar, as if patched with too much Elmer’s Glue. And everywhere the scribble, the spell to raise the dead.

  Some distance farther, Jason passed a waterfall sluicing in through an overhead grate. Beyond the opening loomed a goalpost of the SHHS football field, a black fork against reddening clouds. He was almost to the house. He felt heartened—for maybe a dozen steps—before his stupid brain reminded him helpfully of Pennywise the evil clown who haunted the sewers of Derry in Stephen King’s IT. His smile disappeared, wiped off his face like so much greasepaint.

  He almost lost his nerve when he saw the graffiti.

  There was very little of it at first. An odd white mark on the brick here and there. An incomplete triangle or sloppy spiral, a check, a tendril of chalk. But the scribblings grew denser as he traveled. Long ribbons of spellcraft, inscrutable syllables. The hieroglyphics grew more numerous, and more threatening. Human figures, animal shapes, sketches of bones and blood vessels. Pentagrams and more pentagrams. Overlapping mad scribble, on the ceiling, on the walls, half-visible below the water. More and more colorful, too—scrawls of livid green and dark purple, orange and magenta and vermillion. Glossy paint and chicken-scratch and black, black ink. Some parts of the wall had been written on so heavily they looked like manic flowers. The garden grew denser, gathering him in.

  Movement ahead caught his eye. He froze, watching with disbelief as a chunk of white stone moved by itself across the wall, drawing a devil-mark. He pressed his lips together, held tight to the reliquary, and thrust the talisman ahead of himself. He stepped forward. The stone trembled and dropped into the water.

  As he pressed on, the walls ahead writhed with movement. Invisible hands, writing and writing, the sound of their furious clacking and scraping audible even over the rustle of water. The ghost-scriveners attacked the walls and ceiling, writing their spells with charred sticks and pieces of coal, with the marrow of broken bones and the enamel of shattered teeth. These scattered and fell as he walked through the gallery. But the sound of stone on stone resumed behind him once he’d passed, and the ghosts behind him resumed their work.

  A gated pipe appeared to his left, sticking a tongue of green algae through its rusty teeth. He almost passed it by, but stopped. Two pipes carried a channel of water in and out of Agathe’s pantry, didn’t they? He’d wriggled through the upstream pipe to escape Eddie (and had drawn a rusty bone saw across his own bicep in the process). Could this be the downstream pipe?

  He inspected it, bracing his feet. The spellwork was particularly dense around this pipe, and the opening had drooled some viscous slime down the tunnel wall. The round grille had
caught a lot of debris. Sticks, dead beetles, and black, rotting leaves and—aha!—he found a snippet of silver foil bearing the magic words: “JUST 3G OF CARBS!” The wrapper of a protein bar. Eddie-trash! And—ew—white chips. Skull fragments, like shattered pottery, and a coffee-stained molar with long roots and a flake of gold in its pit.

  Jason stared up the dark and slimy bore with helpless dismay, like a medical intern only now regretting his A-plus in proctology.

  Don’t make me go in there.

  But if you don’t find another way in, you’ll waste time.

  And… maybe this is where her bones are hidden.

  Jason could imagine a plausible scenario: Agathe, panicking in a flooded pantry, searching for escape, climbing into a pipe as he’d done, getting stuck, rotting away for almost two hundred years and haunting the house above. The possibility of hitting the macabre jackpot made up his mind, even though his spirit wasn’t entirely convinced.

  He pulled the grate wide, swept as much muck out of the opening as he could, and climbed up, pushing the backpack ahead. He got his whole body into the pipe—and immediately regretted his decision. He couldn’t turn. To get back out would mean blindly wriggling butt-first. But he’d committed, and he’d have to deal.

  The smiley-face button grinned at him. It seemed to shout “Have a Nice Day!” with ironic spite. He twisted the backpack around and concentrated on a Day-Glo flower instead. It might have been a sunflower, as on the Sun tarot card. Eliza’s card.

  “Oh, Eliza… how did I get here?”

  Jason shivered from head to heels, longing for summer sunshine, feeling wretched and resentful, wondering why he was the one stuck spelunking while Joey and Zef were high and dry.

  “Oh, very nice, Precious, very nice,” he muttered, pushing the backpack ahead. “Nasty hobbitses send poor Jason down into the dark, down down to Goblin Town, while they do brunch. We’ll wring their necks, we will. Gollum! Gollum!”

  The pipe stank, fishy and dead. The little water that ran through it was stagnant and sticky, like the track of a snail. Threads of this mucus clutched at the backpack and clung to Jason’s forearms and chest as he crawled. He’d wriggled for about ten minutes when he discovered why no water had washed away the slime. A mass of tight-packed sticks blocked the bore ahead—some sort of beaver dam or animal’s nest. Jason managed to pull the backpack to one side so he could inspect the blockage. Yeah, maybe he could dig through it. He had to try. He’d come this far.

  He began breaking up the sticks, trying not to gag as the stink intensified. He paused to retch, then pinched his nose with bright slimy fingers and continued one-handed. He pulled a fistful of leaves from the guts of the nest, and a plug of mud pushed through. He grew nervous as the mud loosened and a stream of water darted past his body. The whole mass of sticks bulged outward, foul water spit from a dozen holes, and pointy debris came rushing at Jason’s eyes.

  He got an arm up just in time, covering his face. Water burst over his head and down his back. The slime beneath him became more slippery. He braced himself, fighting the slide backward. He felt the reliquary washing away and pinned it with his knee, holding it firm. The pressure lessened, but the stink intensified, as if its origin lay right beneath his nose. He kept his eyes pressed shut, grabbed the backpack strap, and waited out the flood.

  Something bit his upper arm. He twisted, panicking, wondering if some pissed-off beaver had sunk its teeth into him. He brought his arm down and hazarded a look. His whole upper body was ringed by dozens of tooth-gnashing…

  … severed heads.

  He freaked out, screaming, darting back and forth, caught in the pipe, unable to twist away. He wriggled backward, but the heads followed him, pressed on by the muddy flow, flipping and biting and spitting water, caught against his shoulder and unable to pass, nipping at his shirt, his chin, his nose. The heads were alive, animated corpse-heads, rolling their rotted eyes, moving their lips and cursing him silently for breathing. Some were leather-skinned with cracked cheeks, beetle-brown hair, bare patches of skull, and half-rotted ears. Some were rotty wet lumps, like uncarved pumpkins, unrecognizable as human except for the occasional nub of an ear or milky-white eye. Jason gagged at the stench of their breath, at the horrors crawling inside their mouths. His heart beat loud in his ears as he tried to ward them off.

  A corpse-head caught his pinky in its teeth, and he feared it might bite the finger off. He batted the head against the wall until it let go, but that made the rest of the heads even angrier. He reached for one, avoiding its gnashing teeth, trying to snag it using only his fingertips. The last thing he wanted was a vision from this grey-haired, shrunken thing. Shadows raced across its cheeks as he plucked it from the water by its hair. Its pissed-off eyes followed him as he raised it. He took a deep breath and shoved it over one shoulder, shrugging it down his back, letting it roll down his body and disappear down the pipe.

  The remaining heads realized what was happening and muttered silently to each other, twisting and sneering. Jason repeated the process, head by head, sending each head rolling down his back. And every time he thought he was done, a half dozen more would extrude from the beaver dam and rush at him. One head caught his shirt with its teeth as he pushed it behind him. He could feel it caught between his shoulder blades, trying to chew through his shirt, but he couldn’t shrug it off. He panicked, maddened by this thing attached to his back, this itch he couldn’t reach. He turned onto his side, struck his spine against the pipe wall, and felt the head fall away.

  That was the worst of it.

  He forced himself to inspect every one. He had to find Agathe. He doubted if she would be an animated corpse-head—these were modern faces, some with tattoos and piercings, and almost all were male—but he had to make sure. He felt himself going dead inside, oblivious to the passing horrors like a factory worker in hell, watching death pass by on a conveyor belt. The last head, of a slack-cheeked middle-aged woman, snapped her teeth at his crotch as it passed. She gave a lewd wink, flipped over, and rolled away.

  Jason lay shivering for a long time, clutching the backpack. He pressed on, his face blank and emotionless. The air smelled better up ahead. He found the end of the pipe, wriggled out, and fell into a shallow channel. He raised a palm, revealing an altar of skulls, a hanging cage in the shape of a man, and a table full of glinting torture implements.

  He’d reached Agathe’s lair.

  And, impossibly, he felt relieved.

  Jason’s shivering continued as he stumbled to his feet. He’d forgotten how big this room was, vaulted and grand as a cathedral. The backed-up spillage from the blocked pipe had filled the immense stone chamber with a foot and a half of icy black water. It lapped Jason’s calves and danced in his wake. Sometimes the smooth surface ahead would ripple, just a little, as if waved by a fin or tentacle. Jason left the backpack on the metal table next to a row of rusty saws and an immense overturned mason jar.

  He hugged himself and pressed into the room. If he wanted to know how Agathe died, he’d have to start touching things, but he dreaded doing it. He’d seen too much already. His mental morgue was full. How many corpses had he seen since arriving in Sleepy Hollow? Too many, from Frank Darley in the millpond to Brom Bones in the Van Brunt tomb, from Absalom to Carlos to the snapping-turtle heads in the pipe just now. He might have sixty more years to live, if he was lucky, and he worried that his teenage adventures might still be giving him nightmares in the nursing-home. Even if he spent the rest of his life watching Julie Andrews flicks.

  The skulls were eyeing him, prickling his senses, drawing shivers. Cairns of them, those on the bottom completely submerged, those in the middle with water lapping their eyeholes, those at top grinning like kings of the bone hill.

  He trembled violently as he approached. He felt strangely fragile, impossibly alone, and very, very young. He stared up at Agathe’s altar, the altar of death.

  The Sins of the Father shall be Visited upon the Sons

  Even un
to the Seventh Generation

  He raised a fluttering hand, sending jittery light across the skulls, across the rotted ones and the chalky ones, glittering from each silver tag engraved with a name. He chose a small skull, clean-looking, and was about to read it when he heard a mothy whisper just behind him. He spun, searching the room with his light.

  Something leapt aside, something spindly and black that vanished into a crevice in the wall. He saw a white face above, a woman’s face, gone in a flash. Something spindled through the water—a tendril of green light. He backed away and knocked over a cairn, sending a clatter of skulls splashing into the water. Three skulls floated past his legs, nodding up at him. Vertigo took him, and he stumbled. His own face screamed up at him from the water—wide-socketed and terror-filled. He couldn’t breathe. It was too much. This was some—some panic attack. Maybe—maybe even shock. He—He turned back to the—the altar, l-looking for a sk-sk-skull to read. He found one and he r-r-r-raised a hand again, l-lowered it and… he could-couldn’t… Couldn’t. Just. C-c-c-c-couldn’t. That’d break—break—break him. He—He knew it.

  “I’m just a kid,” he groaned.

  He was only seventeen. He was supposed to be going to movies and getting into trouble, worrying about exams and whether his zipper was down. His biggest concerns should have been his English grade and whether he could work up the nerve to ask Kate to senior prom. No kid should have to deal with this! He’d been through enough. He was orphaned, his parents thrown off a dam, his grandmother murdered by a thieving bastard; he’d been chased by monsters, by manifests and ghosts. He’d faced danger after danger after danger. He couldn’t take another vision, another glimpse of death, another spectacle of human evil. Not another splash of blood, not one more decapitation, not one more hatchet swing. He couldn’t! He just couldn’t! He couldn’t touch this damn skull or he might go insane. He’d reached his limit. He’d reached his limit here, now, tonight. After losing Kate, after his long march… after the p-pipe and—the severed—the sev-sev-sev-sev-severed—