Sleepy Hollow: Children of the Revolution

by Keith R. A. DeCandido

  CAROLYN TOLLEY HAD no idea how her life had been reduced to working as a security guard in the Cortlandt Museum in Tarrytown.

  It seemed like it was just yesterday that she was working a high-paying job at a money management firm on Hudson Street, with a beautiful apartment on the Upper West Side, the best husband in the world, and a wonderful son.

  With Jamal doing well in high school and about to go off to college, she and Greg had been looking into houses in Tarrytown, Sleepy Hollow, Hastings-on-Hudson, and other locations in the Lower Hudson Valley. They’d even put a down payment on a place in Hastings.

  But then Greg got laid off. And then his unemployment ran out without any job prospects. A lot of close calls, but nothing solid. The bank withdrew the approval of their mortgage because of Greg’s unemployment.

  And then everything happened at once. Greg came back from what he said was a job interview completely drunk and assaulted her badly enough to send her to the hospital. After she filed a police report, she learned that he’d blown through their savings on alcohol and had been out drinking all the times he was supposedly on interviews or at job fairs.

  He used the last of the savings on bail, and then proceeded to drive their car into a truck that was in the middle of the intersection of Columbus Avenue and West 100th Street. The very next day, Jamal was arrested for drug possession. He did a deal with the district attorney to give up his supplier in exchange for probation, but then the dealer in question got someone to shoot Jamal in the back of the head.

  The day after that, she was informed that her boss had fled to the Bahamas with all the firm’s money, just barely ahead of an SEC investigation that would likely have shut the place down anyhow.

  All of that happened while Carolyn was in a bed in St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital recovering from the broken arm, broken leg, and facial contusions her late husband had given her.

  She had an even harder time finding work than Greg had, as her association with the disgraced firm was a scarlet letter on her résumé. Nobody would even give her an interview at her level, and every time she applied for a lesser job, she was rejected for being overqualified. “You’ll be bored and leave in a month.”

  Carolyn kept telling them that she was willing to be bored if she could make rent.

  Eventually, she had to give up the place on Ninety-Seventh Street and take a crappy apartment in Sleepy Hollow. She got a job working night security at the museum, one of three guards who kept an eye on the valuables while the place was closed.

  She’d found it ironic that she got a job as a security guard, when she’d been too unobservant to notice that her husband was a drunk, her son was a drug addict, and her boss was a thief.

  Right now, she sat glancing over the security camera footage of all the galleries. Next to her was her partner at the front desk, Kyle Means. In front of her was the paperback novel that she’d finished halfway through the shift, and she had neglected to bring a second one.

  Kyle was reading off a tablet, which gave Carolyn a pang of jealousy. She’d had a Kindle, but the screen died, and she couldn’t afford to replace it. Not that she could afford to buy books anymore, either—the one she’d finished came from the Warner Library on North Broadway—but she still missed having the damn thing. Not to mention a television, an iPod, a smartphone … All of them had died, and the only one she replaced was the phone, but she now had a flip phone that couldn’t even send text messages.

  Her radio squawked. “Hey, Carolina, where you at? Shoulda come by me on your walk-through by now?”

  Carolyn had long since given up correcting Pedro Gomez’s mispronunciation of her name. She’d met him at the dojo in Hastings that she went to for the first month after moving here, before she could no longer afford the tuition. It was affiliated with the one on the Upper West Side that she used to attend when she lived there. He’d been the one to tell her about this job. She figured that was worth his misremembering her first name.

  She grabbed the radio to reply to the third guard, whose job it was to guard the loading dock. Like the front door she and Kyle sat near, it was gated and locked. “My knee’s acting up, Pedro, I’d just as soon not bother with the walk-through. It’s not like we need to do it since the cameras cover everything. Hell, they don’t need three of us here, either. We can just tell Myra I did it, okay?”

  “That’s dishonest, Carolina. I got too much to confess on Sunday, I no wanna add lying to that.”

  Looking over at Kyle, she asked, “Meanie?”

  He didn’t even look up from his tablet. “I did the last walk-through, and I have to finish this chapter for class tomorrow.” Then he did look up. “Besides, I asked you to stop calling me that.”

  Carolyn chuckled. She couldn’t help it. Kyle was the nicest person she’d ever met, and so she couldn’t resist the nickname. “Cut me some slack, Meanie, I don’t get much by way of amusement these days.” With a sigh, she pulled herself to her feet, wincing as her knee made several unfortunate noises that were very much like what Rice Krispies sounded like after you poured in the milk.

  Kyle winced. “Oooh, that sounds bad.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what happens when you lose your health coverage before you get referred to do physical therapy.” She grabbed the radio. “All right, Pedro, I’ll do it, but when I get to the loading dock, you gotta promise to tell me some of the things you are confessing Sunday.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing, Carolina.”

  “Deal.” Carolyn put the radio in its holster and started gingerly walking through the lobby toward the first of the gallery rooms she had to eyeball. It wasn’t quite a limp, but it wasn’t a comfortable gait, either. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, she finally had health coverage again starting New Year’s Day, and it hadn’t come a moment too soon. She’d made an appointment with a local doctor to look over her leg for next Wednesday. The arm seemed to have healed just fine, but the leg had never been right since she checked out of St. Luke’s.

  She entered the Yellow Room—all the galleries were named after the color scheme of the paint job—which had a bunch of portraits of people who were long dead and who probably were famous for something. Carolyn had never had any interest in art, so the contents of the building were meaningless to her. If the museum was full of shoes, she might have been interested.

  Carolyn really missed shoe shopping.

  Shaking her head at her own shallowness, she moved on to the Green Room, which had landscapes. Dead drunk husband, dead junkie son, and all she could lament was that she couldn’t go shoe shopping anymore because she was stuck in a minimum-wage job in a museum full of stuff she didn’t give a damn about.

  The Cortlandts were one of the rich families that moved up to the Lower Hudson Valley in the nineteenth century. While they weren’t as famous—or as pervasive—as the Rockefellers, they did plenty, including opening this museum, which was now run by the Cortlandt Trust, in the person of a spectacularly annoying married couple. The husband, Daniel Kapsis, handled the money, while his wife, Myra, took care of personnel. She was the one who insisted on the walk-throughs, even though the security cameras that covered every room had normal light and also infrared capability. The simple fact was that the cameras just needed someone to keep an eye on them. They didn’t need three sets of eyes doing the job less well than the cameras when the museum wasn’t even open. Sure, when there were people in the building, having actual security guards standing around looking vaguely intimidating was useful, but after hours? It was a waste.

  Not that she was going to complain. God knew she needed the job to survive, just as Kyle needed it to pay for Marymount College and Pedro needed it to support him, his elderly mother, his niece, and his numerous girlfriends. She was hoping that the latter would be the subject of his shared confession when she got to the loading bay.

  The closest she came to anything interesting was in the Blue Room, which had the decorative arts. She couldn’t give a damn about paintings or sculptur
es, but she always thought it was cool to see what kind of things people had around the house.

  When the museum was closed, the large fluorescent ceiling lights were turned off, but the small lamps that illuminated the artwork were left on. However, when she went into the Blue Room, those lights were all out.

  She grabbed her radio with one hand and reached for her flashlight with the other. “Hey, Meanie, we lose power in the Blue Room?”

  Kyle’s tinny voice sounded over the radio speaker a moment later. “Nope, lights are on and I see you in the doorway. Why, what’s up?”

  Carolyn blinked. She one-handedly fumbled with her flashlight and switched it on—but the light that came from it only made it about a quarter inch from the bulb before it was swallowed by darkness. “It’s pitch black in here.”

  “I’m not seeing it, Carolyn.”

  She slowly moved farther into the room, but the flashlight continued to be useless.

  Then the temperature just dropped. Carolyn shivered from the freezing cold. “What the hell? You put the AC on, Meanie?”

  “It’s January, Carolyn; the AC can’t be turned on until the first of May.”

  “Right.” Carolyn had actually forgotten that—but then, she hadn’t started the job until the late fall, so she hadn’t paid all that much attention to what the air-conditioning was supposed to do. “So what the hell’s going—”

  Go away!

  Before she even realized that she’d done it, Carolyn found herself running back to the Green Room. The voice had sounded in her head.

  Violently shaking her head back and forth as if to dislodge the voice that had appeared there, Carolyn yelled into her radio. “Meanie, hit the alarm right now, there’s someone in the Blue Room!”

  “Carolyn, I’m not seeing anything, except you running out of the room for no good reason. What’s going on down there?”

  Pedro said, “I’ll come check it out.”

  “Look, I know it sounds crazy!” Carolyn realized she was shouting, and took a quick breath to calm herself down. “I heard someone yell at me to go away.”

  Kyle was insistent. “Carolyn, I don’t see anything in the—”

  After Kyle’s pause went on for two seconds, Carolyn prompted him. “Meanie, what’s going on?”

  “I—This is crazy. One of the display cases is opening up by itself.”

  Pedro’s voice then came again. “Carolina, I’m at the far entrance. I don’t see nothing, just black.”

  Carolyn found herself unable to make her creaky legs move herself back toward the Blue Room.

  “This is crazy,” Kyle was saying in an ever-more-hysterical tone. “I see the room perfectly clearly—Pedro, I see you standing in the doorway—but there’s nobody there, but the case is opening! Oh, hell, now the cross is floating!”

  “Cross?” Carolyn asked. If she remembered right, it was a cross that was awarded to somebody back during the American Revolution—or maybe it was the French and Indian War. Half the stuff in here related to one of those wars, and Carolyn couldn’t keep it straight. She was less interested in history than she was in art.

  “I’m goin’ in,” Pedro said. “Whoever is in here, do not move! The police have been called and—auuuuuuuugh!”

  The sudden scream startled Carolyn out of her stupor, and she ran for the door to the Blue Room—immediately stumbling and falling to the floor. Running wasn’t really in her repertoire these days. The bitter taste of adrenaline welled up in her throat as she clambered to her feet, wondering what could have caused Pedro to emit such a bloodcurdling scream.

  Kyle was now yelling over the radio. “Pedro? Pedro, what happened? Carolyn, the cameras are all dead, I can’t see anything!”

  “Did you call the cops?”

  “Just sounded the alarm.”

  “Took you long enough.” Carolyn got to her feet and went into the Blue Room.

  The darkness had lifted, and now the exhibits were all again illuminated by the small lamps. All the exhibits were in place, except for the cross, which was missing, its case opened wide.

  Carolyn barely noticed those things, though, because of what she saw on the floor.

  All the parts of Pedro’s body were lying on the marble floor, but they weren’t all connected to each other anymore. His head was by one display case, his torso was in the center of the floor, each arm was on either side of the room, and his legs were on top of another display case.

  There was surprisingly little blood, though despite having lost both her husband and son in the past year, her experiences with dead bodies were limited.

  She wasn’t sure why she wasn’t screaming. She also wasn’t sure why she wasn’t moving or yelling into the radio or running away like a sensible person or really doing much of anything except just staring at Pedro’s head.

  It just didn’t make any sense. Greg had already established himself as a drunk when he drove into the truck. Jamal had already established himself as a junkie when he got shot by a drug dealer. But Pedro was just alive a few seconds ago. It made no sense that he was dead now.

  Another second or two passed before she realized that the cross was floating in midair.

  Then the room grew dark again. On the one hand, Carolyn was relieved, as she no longer could see Pedro’s body.

  But then the cold came back, and then she felt—well, something in the room, like the darkness had form and substance.

  That was impossible, of course, but nevertheless she could feel the darkness closing in on her.

  Specifically, closing in on her neck. She couldn’t breathe, all of a sudden, as something tightened around her throat. Carolyn tried to swallow, tried to inhale, to exhale, something, but she couldn’t.

  Kyle’s voice was screaming over the radio. “Will someone please tell me what the hell is going on?”

  It was the last thing Carolyn heard. She had finally worked up the will to scream when she felt something cold and awful begin to slice through her neck.

  ABBIE MILLS HAD only just entered her bedroom when her phone buzzed. They had decided to call it a night at the armory. She had only just dropped Crane off at Corbin’s old cabin, and she really wanted a good night’s sleep.

  “I swear, Crane, if this is you …” She trailed off when the display showed an unfamiliar 914 area code number.

  Hitting the talk button on her phone’s screen, she put it to her ear. “Mills.”

  “Lieutenant Mills? This is Officer Wang. I’m sorry, did I wake you?”

  “That would’ve happened if you called two minutes later.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but my sergeant said you were the one to call whenever some Mulder-and-Scully stuff happens.”

  Rubbing the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger, Abbie asked, “What happened?”

  “It’s at the Cortlandt Museum in Tarrytown. It’s, ah—it’s really kinda gross. We’ve got three bodies that aren’t just dead, they’ve been ripped to pieces.”

  By this point, Abbie had left her bedroom and gone back to the kitchen, where she’d unceremoniously tossed her leather jacket on one of the chairs. “I’ll be there as fast as I can. And tell your sergeant to update his TV references.”

  Wang sounded contrite. “Yeah, actually, that was me. Had a crush on Gillian Anderson when I was a kid.”

  “Thanks, Officer Wang. See you soon.”

  After swinging back by Corbin’s cabin to pick up Crane, Abbie drove them to the Cortlandt Museum. Half a dozen blue-and-whites were parked in front of the Victorian-era stone building that had been the Cortlandt family’s mansion when they had moved here in the late nineteenth century. Red and blue lights flashed in eye-tearing irregular patterns, illuminating the night sky. Also parked nearby was a van from the Westchester County medical examiner.

  As soon as she climbed out of her car, Abbie saw Detective Costa standing by the entrance to the museum and winced.

  “What is the matter, Lieutenant?” Crane asked as he exited from the passenger si
de.

  “That’s Lisa-Anne Costa. She tends to get territorial about her cases, and she also hates consultants.”

  “Ah, so she shall welcome the assistance of another detective and a consultant with open arms,” Crane said dryly.

  Abbie regarded Crane with a smile. “I don’t know why, but it makes me think the world’s a better place knowing that sarcasm was around in the eighteenth century, too.”

  Costa caught sight of Abbie and immediately made a beeline for her, her trench coat billowing behind her as she walked through the cold night air.

  “The hell you doing here, Mills? This is a Tarrytown case.”

  “I called her, ma’am,” came a voice from Abbie’s left. She turned to see a short Asian man in uniform. This had to be Officer Wang. “We were told during roll call, if we had any crazy stuff, to call these two.”

  She pointed an angry finger at Wang. “Your sergeant and I are having words.” Then Costa turned to Abbie. “Ain’t nothin’ for you here, Sleepy Hollow. This is a Tarrytown case, and I got this. Go home, get some sleep, you can read about it in the Journal News tomorrow, got me?”

  Abbie started to reply, but Crane spoke up before she could. She considered talking over him, but she had had enough run-ins with Costa to know that responding would only start a shouting match. Abbie was in a bad enough mood that she might actually enjoy going six rounds with Costa, but that wouldn’t do much good for finding out what was going on in the museum. Maybe Crane’s Old World charm would succeed where Abbie’s New World bitchiness failed.

  “Detective Costa, if you would be so kind to at least inform us of what occurred here tonight. Based on Officer Wang’s communication with Lieutenant Mills, it’s quite possible that this relates to our own ongoing inquiries that began with the decapitation of Sheriff Corbin, Mr. Ogelvie, and Reverend Knapp. We have no interest in usurping your rightful place in command of this investigation, but we do wish to know if it coincides in any way with ours.”

  Costa just stared at Crane for several seconds, her mouth open and forming an oval.

  Finally, she turned to Abbie. “Where’d you dig this one up, Mills?”