Sleepy Hollow: Children of the Revolution

by Keith R. A. DeCandido

  Frieda nodded. “That’s fine. I—I thought I could just go back to this, and I wasn’t gonna, but—” She let out a bitter laugh. “Beth, she gets in your head, y’know? All single-minded. Crazy stuff. She was obsessed.”

  Irving asked, “Obsessed with what?”

  “Serilda. Everything was all about her, all’a time. Crazy stuff,” she repeated.

  “Damn.” Irving shook his head.

  Abbie gave him a sympathetic look. This had to have been hard on him. It would’ve been like her finding out that Corbin was a serial killer. By comparison, the revelation that Corbin was secretly gathering intel on demons and monsters was pretty damn harmless.

  Then Abbie looked at Jenny. “You okay?”

  She nodded quickly. “Yeah. I mean, no, not really, but okay enough. What’d she hit you guys with?”

  “I was with the FBI, and Corbin was still alive.”

  Irving didn’t look at Jenny, but was staring down at the floor when he said, “I was in command of a precinct in Manhattan, Cynthia and I were still married, and Macey could walk.”

  Jenny winced. “Oh. Oh, damn. I’m sorry, Captain, I—”

  “It’s okay.” Irving waved Jenny off, then looked around. “Where’s Crane?”

  Abbie also looked around, though of course they left Crane outside on purpose. “I’ll check.” She moved toward the front door.

  As she threw it open, she looked toward the SUV they’d come down in.

  Of her fellow Witness, there was no sign. “Crane!” she cried.

  Gritting her teeth, she jogged to the car, and again called out, “Crane!”

  Then she found him lying facedown on the pavement.

  “Dammit!” She ran the rest of the way to him and knelt down. First she checked his pulse, which was thankfully very strong.

  A moan escaped Crane’s lips, and Abbie let out a huge breath of relief.

  She rolled him over and he opened his eyes slowly. “Lieutenant?” he said in a ragged whisper.

  She took his hand in hers. “It’s okay, Crane. We won. Serilda’s not coming back thanks to you.”

  He smiled. “Thanks to all of us.” And then his eyes fluttered.

  “Crap.” She let go of his hand and whipped out her cell phone to call 911.

  NINETEEN

  SLEEPY HOLLOW, NEW YORK

  JANUARY 2014

  CRANE STOOD BEFORE the burnt-out ruin of the Whitcombe-Sears Library.

  It had been a few days since the incident in Bronck’s land, and Crane finally felt well enough to walk more than a few yards without collapsing from sheer exhaustion. The medical technicians who’d examined him outside the Nugent house declared him well but for what they classified as “dehydration,” a disease Crane was unfamiliar with. Mills explained that it simply meant he needed to drink more fluids.

  Sure enough, Mills joined him. “Good to see you up and around.”

  “It is good to be up and around.” He stared at the smoky ruins. “Such a tragic waste.”

  “Yeah, Drosopoulos and Han were good cops.”

  “Indeed, as was Mr. Whitcombe-Sears, although I was referring just at the moment to the loss of the library. I remember my grandfather telling me a story he was told by one of his professors at Oxford. There was a fire in the Grandpoole suburb of Oxford in Anno Domini 1671. The professor in question had a home near Sheerlake, and his house contained a huge collection of books.” He smiled ruefully and shook his head. “Forgive me—the vision visited upon me by Miss Abernathy has had me thinking of my family. Grandfather always spoke wistfully about all the knowledge that was lost that day.”

  “Books can be reprinted—or saved online. People, though …”

  Crane bowed his head, conceding the point. “You are correct, of course, Lieutenant, but you live in an era where books are produced in quantities unheard-of in my own time. Books were not so readily replaced, and knowledge not so easily obtained. And, as we have both learned, knowledge is fickle and not always reliable or findable.”

  “That’s certainly true. C’mon, let’s take a walk.”

  They started to perambulate up Chestnut Street, turning right at Washington Street, which Crane thought apropos.

  “At least,” he said as they walked south on the street named for Crane’s former commanding officer, “we were able to make use of Mr. Whitcombe-Sears’s store of knowledge this once. I shudder to think what manner of havoc Serilda might have wrought were she allowed to return to the mortal plane.”

  “Yeah, that would’ve sucked.” Abbie gave her cheekiest grin, and Crane couldn’t help but return it. Then the grin fell. “You never told me what your heart’s desire vision was.”

  Crane had been endeavoring not to dwell on it for the past two days, which meant, naturally, that he could think of little else. So he succinctly shared with Mills the details of his temporarily living the life of an Ichabod Crane who survived the war and raised three children with Katrina.

  “Primarily,” he concluded, “the vision served to remind me of a horrible truth that I had ill considered up until now. I’ve no idea how my father reacted to my passing. Did my death on the battlefield fill him with sorrow? Regret? Anger? Righteous smugness?” He shook his head. “Any of those would have been in character, sadly.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Crane. What I got from Abernathy was kinda like that. Corbin was the closest thing to a real father I had—and he’s gone, too, and I just wish he coulda lived to see what’s happening. To help me.”

  “Well, to be fair, Lieutenant, he has helped some. His files have proven invaluable.”

  “Yeah.” Mills sighed.

  “What of Miss Jenny and Captain Irving?”

  “Well, Irving keeps going down to the city for whatever reason. Dunno if he’s visiting his ex and his kid or what. This whole thing’s been pretty hard on him. He thought he knew Nugent, y’know?”

  Crane nodded. “And Miss Jenny?”

  “She’s okay.” Mills chuckled. “I guess everything she’s been through, she rebounds pretty damn good. Then again, she’s been getting ready for this fight a lot longer than we have.”

  To Crane’s delight, they found themselves at the northwest corner of Patriots Park.

  “Damn, I haven’t come over here in ages.”

  Crane looked down at Mills in surprise. “Indeed? I try to come to this park as often as possible. It is a fine place to think.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s a good reason for me to avoid it. Thinking too much just depresses me lately. Moloch says you’ll betray me, Andy Brooks is walking around all zombified, I still don’t even know if Jenny’s entirely forgiven me for what happened when we were kids, and tomorrow I get to go to the latest in a series of cop funerals, which started with my best friend and mentor last fall.” She smiled ruefully. “And happy new year to me.”

  They arrived at the same stone bridge where Crane had met Miss Lianne and her dog Puddles—and where he’d received the vision from Katrina that had gotten them started on the quest to stop Serilda’s resurrection.

  Mills leaned on the side of the bridge, looking out over the brook flowing noisily under them. “I told Jenny that we’re the good guys, that the whole reason we’re fighting this fight is to keep the badness from overwhelming the world—but sometimes I look around and wonder if we already lost.”

  “We cannot afford to think that way, Lieutenant,” Crane said urgently. “It is when events have turned the most toward despair that we must fight the hardest. For it is giving in to that despair that truly gives our foes their victory. We must cling to what we believe in and what brings us joy. For me, it is the hope that Katrina and I will one day be reunited.”

  “I guess for me it’s to make things right with Jenny.”

  “I would say you are far closer to your goal than I,” Crane said wryly. “In addition, you should be aware that this is far from my first hopeless battle. When I first came to these shores, the colonists’ rebellion was considered b
y my peers to be the height of folly. King George was the mightiest monarch in the world, England held the most land—or so we told ourselves, in any event. The colonists’ cause was futile, doomed to failure. They were disorganized, argumentative, untrained—when I arrived in this land, Lieutenant Colonel Tarleton informed me that I would spend only one Christmas in the colonies and that any rebellion would be put down in less than two years’ time.”

  “I’m guessing this Tarleton guy wasn’t known for his fortune-telling abilities?” Mills asked.

  “Indeed he wasn’t.”

  “Waitasec, isn’t he the one who was really a demon?”

  Crane nodded. “Perhaps that was the reason for his overconfidence, but his attitude was shared by most of his fellows. Two hundred and fifty years later, those words have been proven fallacious. The upstart colonies have become now what King George’s England was then: the greatest power in the world. And all because we did not believe that our cause was lost. That was our greatest strength.”

  “I guess so. Still, that vision? It was nice. I mean, there was the usual bureaucratic nonsense, but still it felt so—so normal.”

  “As was mine—and I suspect Miss Jenny’s and Captain Irving’s were similarly quotidian—which was why we saw them. The spell that Miss Abernathy cast was one that showed us what we most desired.”

  “Daydreams. What we hope for, what we dream about. What we wish for.” Mills sighed. “But hey, if wishes were horses—”

  Crane smiled. “—we would be up to our hips in excrement.”

  Mills bowed her head. “Exactly. And there’s plenty of manure already.”

  Leaning against the stone next to Mills, Crane just stared out at the brook. For a moment, he closed his eyes—

  —and when he opened them, he was once again in the dark forest with its gnarled trees. The air had once again gone from crisp to thick, and again a half-moon shone in the sky.

  But this time there were no visions from his past. Or, rather, there was, but it was simply Katrina, this time wearing the nurse’s uniform that she wore the day he and the Horsemen believed they had killed each other.

  “I cannot speak to you for long, my love,” she said without preamble. “Moloch keeps a greater eye on me these past weeks.”

  “Lieutenant Mills and I had suspected as much. I must thank you, Katrina: your actions prevented Serilda’s rise.”

  “Hers was always a great evil, and your actions have shattered her coven as well. But I must admit, Ichabod, that what I am most grateful for is not that you prevented Serilda’s resurrection,” she said with a most uncharacteristically shy smile, “but that you finally were given the laurels you deserved.”

  “What do you mean?” Crane asked, confused.

  “The Congressional Cross. You earned that honor from General Washington himself. It is past time you held it.”

  She reached out to hold his hand, but she wasn’t quite able to reach him so they could touch.

  “We will be together soon enough, Katrina,” Crane said. “If I can at last be issued my honor from General Washington after two centuries, then we can be together again.”

  Katrina’s smile widened. “We can.”

  And then Crane was back in Patriots Park.

  “Hello? Earth to Crane, come in Crane?”

  Blinking, he turned to look at Mills. “I’m sorry?”

  “You were on Koozebane there for a minute.”

  He frowned. “I’m not familiar with that location. How does one get there?”

  “Via a very particular street. It’s where Kermit the Frog used to report from.”

  Crane just stared at Mills. “A—a frog?”

  Mills chuckled. “It’d take too long to explain.” She stood upright. “I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. How do you feel about a bastardized version of Greek flatbread?”

  Crane bowed his head. “I would love to share a pizza with you, Lieutenant. Lead the way to Salvatore’s. Or is it Vladimir’s?”

  “One of those, yeah.”

  They quit the bridge and continued up toward the Broad Way. As they walked, Crane reached into his coat pocket and took out the Congressional Cross—the only thing besides the grimoire that he’d been able to salvage from the Whitcombe-Sears Library. It still had some traces of his blood upon it.

  He’d been able to keep it because it wasn’t actually in Nugent’s possession. The six she did have were currently evidence in her trial and would eventually be returned to their rightful owners. Tilghman’s would go back to the Society of the Cincinnati, van Brunt’s and Willett’s to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Cortlandt’s to the Cortlandt Museum. Whitcombe’s would be donated to the Historical Society serving Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown, who were the beneficiaries of Mr. Whitcombe-Sears’s will—sadly, thanks to the fire, the cross was the only physical item he’d be able to bequeath them, though the society did also get all of his money per that same will.

  The sixth cross that Nugent had possession of apparently belonged to another of Serilda’s coven, Sophia Cabot, currently in a coma, according to Miss Abernathy. No doubt it would be returned to her family.

  Mills noticed him staring at his cross. “Must be nice to finally have something to put on the mantelpiece.”

  “I suppose I could store it there, yes.” Crane hadn’t considered where to place it in the cabin he was currently using as his dwelling place.

  “Well, you earned it. More than once.”

  “I suppose so. I just wish the only blood it had cost to obtain it was mine, and not that of so many good people.”

  “Amen,” Mills said quietly.

  IN A HOSPITAL bed in Mount Sinai Hospital, a young woman named Sophia Cabot lay, breathing shallowly, several machines attached to various body parts to monitor her vital signs.

  She’d been in a coma since the previous October, and the doctors had no prognosis for when, or even if, she would wake up.

  Nobody was in the room one fateful January night. It was the first full moon after a half-moon. During the latter, two of Sophia’s closest friends attempted to resurrect the mistress whom they all worshipped.

  She woke up. And had anyone been in the room when she opened her eyes, they would have seen that those eyes were an obsidian black.

  HISTORIAN’S NOTES

  Just like the TV series it’s based on, Sleepy Hollow: Children of the Revolution mixes historical fact with fantastic fiction in order to tell a grand adventure with Ichabod Crane, Abbie Mills, and the rest in their fight against the forces of darkness.

  Patriots Park really does border the towns of Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, and is quite lovely. It has all the memorials mentioned in chapter 1, from the dedications to fallen soldiers in World War I, World War II, and the Korean War to the monument to John Paulding and his compatriots who captured Major André.

  The story of Lord George Germain’s order to the British troops in New York to sail gunboats up the Bronx River has been exaggerated, but while the Regular Army did not try to actually enact Germain’s order as legend would have it, his lordship did give it, blissfully unaware that large portions of the river in question are very narrow and shallow. The name “the Bronx” (which is your humble author’s birthplace and home) derives from Jonas Bronck, a Dutch farmer who owned much of the land in the peninsula that now bears his name, hence Crane’s references to both river and region by the alternate spelling.

  While the Independence Cross (or Congressional Cross) is a fictional award, the others mentioned in the text—the elegant swords issued to ten heroes of the Revolution, the Fidelity Medallion awarded to John Paulding—are actual awards that were issued by the Continental Congress. It’s unknown whether the others had magical properties. Independence Cross recipients Tench Tilghman, Henry Knox, and Marinus Willett are all historical personages; Caleb Whitcombe, Ezekiel Cortlandt, and Jebediah Cabot are inventions of the author.

  The portrayals of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of the
City of New York are mostly accurate, with only minor liberties taken, mostly with the security setup of the latter. Also, there really is a gallery in the American Wing of the Met with a portrait of Marinus Willett catty-corner from a portrait of Washington, and it really is in the next room over from Leutze’s portrait of Washington crossing the Delaware. If you’re ever in New York City, I highly recommend both museums—in particular, the Astor Court at the Met is even more magnificent than described here (mostly because words cannot possibly do justice to the place). However, the Cortlandt Museum in Tarrytown and the Whitcombe-Sears Library in Sleepy Hollow are both wholly fictional.

  The Society of the Cincinnati was formed in 1783 by the aforementioned Henry Knox, and included officers of the Continental Army and the French army and navy. George Washington was the society’s first president general. Originally a society of noble soldiers, who passed on their membership to their firstborn sons, these days it’s an educational nonprofit organization. Their museum is located at Anderson House in Washington, D.C. The traveling exhibit that lands at MCNY is wholly a creation of the author.

  Washington’s famous crossing of the Delaware River on Christmas night in 1776 was indeed to fight Hessian mercenaries who held Trenton for the British. While the public story that he wished to achieve a victory after the demoralizing retreat from New York that is in the history books is accurate, it was also a full moon that night (it’s how Washington and his troops were able to see to cross the treacherous river), and we all know how important moon phases are to witches. Lieutenant Colonel Johann Rall was indeed the commandant of the Hessians in Trenton, and anecdotally, he was given a note saying that Washington was approaching, which he then shoved in his pocket unread; some say he was eating dinner, some say he was playing chess, few say he was summoning the demon Abaddon to infuse its power into a woman named Serilda. The note was, however, found on his body after he was shot—that it was Washington who shot him is an indulgence of the author.