Sleepy Hollow: Rise Headless and Ride

by Richard Gleaves

  Jason Crane

  Book One

  Sleepy Hollow:

  RISE HEADLESS AND RIDE

  RICHARD GLEAVES

  This e-book edition includes:

  “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”

  by Washington Irving

  This is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events is entirely coincidental.

  The places in this book are real, though.

  Go find them, explore them, and celebrate them.

  Edited by David Gatewood

  Cover Art:

  "The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane" (1858) by John Quidor

  Design by Jason Gurley

  “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving

  is a public domain text

  Third Edition

  Copyright © 2013 Richard Gleaves

  All rights reserved.

  CONTENTS

  1 Grave-Rubbings

  2 Gory Brook

  3 The Red Moon

  4 The Bridge

  5 The Runaway

  6 The Last of the Bones

  7 The House that Shouted

  8 The Proposal

  9 The Crush

  10 Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

  11 Home of the Horsemen

  12 The One

  13 Eliza

  14 The Lighthouse

  15 The Fourth Fall

  16 Rainbows and Unicorns

  17 Exhumation Day

  18 The Van Brunt Tomb

  19 Absalom

  20 The Horseman’s Treasure

  21 The Dragon and the Bridge

  22 The Perfect Place for a Murder

  23 A Shuffling of Cards

  24 Horses at the Starting Gate

  25 The Horseman’s Hollow

  26 Rise Headless and Ride

  27 More Than a Little Bit

  28 The Legacy

  29 Red Sneaks and Wildflowers

  30 The House That Laughed

  31 Kate

  32 Stained Glass

  33 Swordplay

  34 Graveside

  35 Jason’s Choice

  36 Monsters

  37 The Goblin Chase

  38 The Flight of Jason Crane

  Epilogue

  Appendix

  About the author

  E-BOOK EXTRA: THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW by WASHINGTON IRVING

  FOR DISCUSSIONS AND EXTRAS

  VISIT JASON ON FACEBOOK

  Facebook.com/TheJasonCraneSeries

  ALL THE LOCATIONS IN THIS BOOK EXIST

  FIND THEM IN SLEEPY HOLLOW, NY

  MAP HERE

  If you enjoy JASON CRANE: Book 1 “Rise Headless and Ride”, please consider posting a review on Amazon. In the brave new world of publishing, your comments will probably reach more people than a review in the New York Times would.

  DEDICATION

  To all Grandmothers and Grandsons

  &

  To my own Leah Kendrick, who took me grave-hunting

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Washington Irving, who made this book possible.

  Thanks to Danny Smolenski, who made this book better.

  Thanks to David Gatewood, who made this book legible.

  And Special Thanks to my Mom, Pat Gleaves, who made this book’s author. In every sense.

  Thanks to Jim Logan of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, for teaching me about exhumation rules and old tombs, and for letting me wander his cemetery at night, so the ghosts and I could get better acquainted.

  Thanks to Lance Hallowell, creative director of Historic Hudson Valley’s Horseman’s Hollow event, for his time and inspiration.

  Thanks to Sal Durante, Dianne Durante, Will George, Jason Lockwood, and all my other first readers. You kept me cocky and you kept me spooked.

  1 GRAVE-RUBBINGS

  Jason Crane knelt before the grave of his great-great-great-grandmother with onionskin paper in his left hand and a stick of charcoal in his right. The paper rippled in the wind, threatening to twist and tear over the cemetery wall like an escaping ghost. He frowned and pressed it flush against the stone, pinning it at top with his palm and at bottom with his knee.

  He was a thin boy, bony as a grasshopper kneeling in a field. He wore his auburn hair short on the sides and tangled on top. He pushed it out of his eyes now, smudging his forehead, and went to work. He fanned the charcoal back and forth, bearing down to capture the design above the name: scales of justice, proclaiming the Judgment of the Dead. His grandmother had taught him to read such symbols. The sunflower of adoration, the cedar of consecration, the crown, the cypress, a frog for worldly pleasures, and a butterfly for the freeing of the spirit – he’d seen them all in the past two weeks. The headstone to his left bore an image of the raven, guardian of the cemetery.

  A horn blew. Eliza hunted him. A startled squirrel blurred through fallen leaves and was gone.

  Letters shone through, finally, white against black:

  ANNABEL CRANE

  Beloved Wife of Absalom

  Mother of Jesse

  b. Aug 15, 1822

  Called to God Aug 1, 1856

  Jason stood, rolled the paper, and tucked it into a cardboard tube, careful not to smear the imprint. His grandmother preferred to supervise his rubbings, but the path had proven too steep for her knees. She waited below, impatient to judge his work. He lingered, though, leaning against the battered walnut tree, brushing at his blue jeans, enjoying a brief escape from his grandmother’s lecturing and the barking of her small black poodle (named Charley, though it was female).

  The tiny cemetery perched on a hill overlooking Bridgeport, Connecticut. Once, it must have been a beautiful place to be buried, but Bridgeport had sprawled and suburbs had engulfed the area. Bulldozers had burgled away half the hill so that the former crest was now a cliff, leaving the cemetery situated precariously near an eight-foot plunge down to Chopsey Hill Drive. That’s where the RV sat – on the shoulder of the road below, two tires off the asphalt, the cab tilting toward the drainage ditch.

  Above Jason’s head, the walnut tree raised thin arms in sad, leafless benediction. Seventeen graves huddled in rows, herded by a faithful border fence. The weeds grew lushly, overtaking the headstones. No groundskeeper had visited this place in a long time, but a stained mattress lay in the mud and someone had gang-tagged the marble of the single vault – someone named Naldi, apparently, who smoked Marlboro Lights and mistook the broken birdbath for an ashtray.

  Jason wanted to stay, to pull the weeds from Annabel’s grave, but the shadows were lengthening. Eliza didn’t like to drive at night and he didn’t want to be among the graves after sunset, oh no… even if they were family.

  His imagination slipped its leash.

  He saw himself clearing the earth, shoveling, finding the coffin, opening it, looking down at the browning skeleton and empty eye sockets of a woman he had never known but who had made him possible. And what? Thanking her? Weeping for her? No. Just… meeting her.

  Hello, Annabel. Guess who I am.

  Eliza honked again.

  Jason pushed his hair out of his eyes and scrambled down the hill.

  Reaching the bottom, he realized that very little shoveling would be required to reach that coffin. Thanks to the bulldozers, the dead were no longer six feet under but only two feet inward. If he were to stand on the road and dig into the soft embankment, his ancestors were right there, within arm’s reach, waiting.

  “That’s awful,” he said as he climbed
into the driver’s seat. “A good rain and half the coffins could be exposed.” He shuddered, imagining Annabel’s coffin peeking through mud – first a corner, then a brass handle, and then the whole thing tumbling wetly onto the road below.

  “Won’t ever happen,” said his grandmother. “A coffin from the eighteen-fifties is wood. It’s all rotted through now. She’ll stay put. The dead always stay put.” She flattened the rubbing against the dashboard, admiring it. “Good one. Try to press a little harder next time.”

  Eliza Merrick was not a sentimental genealogist. She played at genealogy the way other old ladies play at solitaire or Sudoku: for the sake of solving the puzzle. To Eliza, Annabel Crane, wife of Absalom and mother of Jesse, wasn’t a real person but merely an item in a scavenger hunt – to be checked off the list before driving on to the next.

  But to Jason, the graves were scattered pieces of his family, impossible ever to gather again. And that seemed unspeakably sad.

  He hated genealogy.

  They drove on. The cemetery on the hill dwindled in his side mirror.

  She’ll stay put. The dead always stay put.

  The thought did not make him feel better. He suspected it might not be true.

  A dozen yards farther on, they pulled into a parking lot and ordered sandwiches from a strip mall Subway.

  #

  This is how they spent the last weeks of September – Jason, Eliza, and Charley of the unreliable bladder – touring the country in an ancient RV that had belonged to Eliza’s fourth husband, searching out the graves of Jason’s ancestors.

  The trip began unexpectedly. In early August, Eliza had left Jason with credit cards and keys, explaining that she was flying to Southampton, New York, for an event honoring her ancestors’ role in the founding of that town. She would be back in a few days. No worries. After all, Jason could take care of himself. But Jason worried whether she could take care of herself. Eliza was eighty, with swollen arthritic hands and cataracts that stole colors and dimmed sunlight. She’d relied on him more and more that year – for steak-cutting, for dressing, for necklace clasps and pickle jars.

  “I have friends meeting me. New friends. It’s fine. You’ve got school coming up. Take the MasterCard. Buy what you need. Within reason. And don’t wreck the Mercedes.”

  On August tenth she gave him a kiss, wailed laments over her separation from the poodle, and climbed into a taxi.

  Her leaving wasn’t that unusual. Eliza’s many divorces had left her with a comfortable standard of living, even a fortune, and she loved her research trips. Sometimes on a Monday she’d leave Jason the car keys, a few hundred dollars, a full refrigerator and pantry, and a hamper of clean clothes, then she’d disappear until the following Saturday, trusting him in the meantime to attend school, do his homework, and pick up after himself. It was a good system. Jason was responsible and self-sufficient. Child Protective Services hadn’t whisked him away. There’d never been a single problem, except once when she’d come home to find the porch burned off the front of the house.

  She’d never disappeared for this long, though. She extended the Southampton trip indefinitely. She’d call every other day, making sure Jason didn’t become a delinquent and that he was pampering Charley appropriately, but she evaded his questions of when, if ever, she was coming home.

  A few days stretched into a month.

  Jason left the Mercedes in the garage. Mostly. He took it out for his driver’s test only because he had no other.

  Oh, doesn’t a man sweat when parallel parking a sixty-thousand-dollar car.

  Fall semester commenced and Jason had just completed his first week of classes when Eliza finally returned. Her face sparkled with excitement. She announced that they would be leaving together the following Friday, and he was not to ask why. She had a surprise. She signed him out of school only ten days after the term began. If the state of Maine had a problem, they could just answer to her and see who would come out the worse for it.

  Jason supposed she needed him to chauffeur one of her genealogy trips. She couldn’t hold a steering wheel anymore. Not easily. But he didn’t mind missing a few weeks of school. He always read far ahead of his classes.

  And he had few friends.

  For two weeks they trundled down the coast of New England, maps and genealogies in hand. They slept in the camper, which had a small kitchen and leatherette couch, a toilet inside the shower stall, and two small sleeping alcoves one above the other. Eliza pointed, and Jason drove.

  Driving the big RV unnerved him. His license didn’t even have his picture on it yet, and before this trip he’d never driven more than twenty miles at a stretch. This was no Mercedes, either. The RV was a temperamental, gear-grinding machine that hadn’t been serviced since the Carter administration. Eliza would snap at him not to ride the brake on the vertigo-inducing cliff roads of Maine, but he couldn’t help himself. He felt the large camper looming behind him, like something big chasing him down the road. Charley barked and climbed across Jason’s lap as he drove, licking his face, making him even antsier. He imagined careening through guardrails, crashing down onto rocks below, and drowning them all under a heap of metal, engulfed by salt water.

  He pushed the hair out of his eyes and concentrated on the white and yellow lines, on keeping the RV “between the mustard and the mayonnaise,” as his driving instructor put it. He was vaguely aware that a riot of fall colors streaked past his window: russet and burgundy and green edged with yellow, everything just barely turning towards exhaustion and rot and beauty, but he didn’t dare turn his head.

  They clopped over wooden bridges, down through the land of the Penobscot Indians, past markers of Colonial Heritage. Pumpkins pimpled a hill. The landmarks didn’t have the good sense to agree with Eliza’s memory, and her cataracts made the map a pastel blur. They lost the roads, found them again. She’d cry out and her stiff hand would flap in a gesture to turn. Charley would yip, and Jason would steer the camper down a snaking trail of graveled wheel ruts. They would park on the side of some road, the cab threatening to tumble into the weeds, and Jason would scramble to the passenger side and help Eliza to the ground. She would pause, sniffing the air, and then shamble across a field of pokeweed and nettles. Charley would leap in the cold air, happy to be out in the open.

  Then Jason could stop and look at the countryside, at the ancient trees blazingly solemn, with leaves mottled like Indian corn. But Eliza would cut his sightseeing short. “Found the sucker!” she would cackle. They would push some rusted gate aside, clearing vines, and she would stride into the cemetery to pour bottled water over faded inscriptions, looking for the name Crane.

  They found Jason’s great-grandfather Jack Crane in a cemetery named Calvary outside Skowhegan, a brown hill surmounted by white obelisks. Jack had been buried alongside three brothers and one sister who’d all died in infancy, unnamed: Baby Boy Crane, Baby Girl Crane. Doubling back, they found Jack’s wife Bethel Crane buried in a neatly manicured plot a hundred miles away, near Windham. Her headstone sported a cone of green copper. They slipped in a few orange daisies from the gift shop.

  As they drove through Massachusetts, the graves became harder to find, the headstones more weathered, and nature more encroaching.

  They drove into Connecticut, stopping at the Bridgeport cemetery above Chopsey Hill Drive. Jason began to suspect that the final destination of their trip would be Valhalla cemetery in Westchester County, New York. There in Valhalla, he knew, alongside the graves of Rachmaninoff, Ayn Rand and Danny Kaye, stood a joint marker for the man and woman who occupied two rectangular boxes just above his own on the family tree:

  ANDREW CRANE

  DIANNE CRANE

  His parents.

  He was ashamed to admit that he’d never been to their graves. They’d died when he was seven and, considering what he went through, no one had wanted to risk a relapse.

  When they started this trip, Eliza had promised a surprise, but her idea of a nice surprise and J
ason’s idea didn’t always agree. Maybe she’d decided that the time had come for Jason to pay his respects? If so, he dreaded the painful duty ahead of him.

  The RV passed into New York State on the first of October. They’d stopped at six cemeteries, taken fourteen rubbings, and had been locked in a library when they’d lingered past closing. Two weeks into the trip, they were feeling ripe and exhausted. Fast-food wrappers cluttered the cab. Splashed sodas made the dash sticky, and black poodle hair stuck to everything.

  They found a scenic route down the Hudson. The road became straight and level, and the dog stayed curled in Eliza’s lap, for once. Jason felt confident enough to admire the sights. The wide blue of the river met the wide blue of the sky; stripes of green hedge raced them down the Albany post road and fell behind; houses drifted past, a few already bedecked with the orange and black crepe that announced Halloween.

  “Our exit’s coming up,” Eliza said. “You’ll see Saint Mary’s Episcopal on the left. Turn right after.”

  “But Highway 9A takes us to Valhalla,” Jason said, reaching for the map. “I’m pretty sure we missed it.”

  “We’re not going to Valhalla.”

  With a flap of her hand she pointed the way. Jason passed the church and turned onto Sleepy Hollow Road.

  Between them, Charley whimpered.

  #

  Welcome to Historic

  Sleepy Hollow

  Settled in 1640.

  Jason had looped around the town and had come up Broadway from the south. Behind the retaining wall next to the sign, a yard worker turned on his leaf blower, sending a tidal wave of yellow and red up and over the stones to splash off the windshield of the RV. They passed antique shops, a Shell station, and a Food King grocery.