Sleepy Hollow: Rise Headless and Ride

by Richard Gleaves

  “Apologize,” said Eliza.

  “I – I’m sorry,” Jason muttered.

  “I’m sorry what?” said Hadewych.

  “I’m sorry… sir.”

  “That hurt, Jason,” said Hadewych. “I thought we were becoming friends.”

  Jason’s hands balled up. McCaffrey entered the morgue, his face solemn.

  “We got to call it a night,” he said. “The police need me for a pickup.”

  “Someone died?” said Jason. “Who?”

  “Don’t ask that,” said Eliza.

  “You wouldn’t know her,” said McCaffrey. “Little blond girl. Realtor.”

  “Debbie Flight?” said Jason, eyes wide.

  “We know Debbie,” said Eliza, and her hand went to her heart. “She sold us our house…”

  “What happened?” said Jason.

  McCaffrey leaned in conspiratorially.

  “They found her floatin’ in the reservoir. Blood drained out, just like that other fella.”

  “What ‘fella’?” demanded Hadewych.

  “Darley,” said Jason. “His name was Darley, right? I saw Fireman Mike pull him out of the millpond – on our first day here.”

  “You never told me that,” said Eliza.

  “Sorry,” said Jason in a small voice.

  “And why didn’t I hear about this?” said Hadewych.

  “It happened while you were in Augusta. Boxing up our old house.”

  “You saw the body?” said Eliza, shaking her head.

  “Yeah – and Debbie Flight was with me. She saw it too.”

  “So did I,” said McCaffrey. “I hosed the mud off so his wife could identify him. Confidentially, the fella had his wedding ring in his pocket.” McCaffrey winked. “I put it back on his hand ‘fore she saw that. Damnedest thing, though. He was bleach white. Like he’d been floatin’ in Clorox. They hushed it up, but somebody poked his eye out. You know what with? A danged car antenna.”

  An inhuman sound pierced Jason’s ears – so unnerving that he leapt back and almost tipped the coffin. Valerie’s throat valve was not built for screaming after all. All she could do was fall to the floor, writhe and buzz.

  #

  “Do you think she’ll be all right?” said Jason. Charley darted between his legs and barked, happy to be home. He wished he could feel the same. The house felt sinister after his vision in the tomb. He kept seeing Agathe rocking beside the fireplace, writing in her book.

  “Valerie’s a little… fragile. Poor thing,” said Eliza. “You can’t imagine what’s she’s been through. You want some cocoa?” She raised her voice as she puttered into the kitchen. “She’s been in therapy almost ten years to get over it.”

  He stopped by the davenport. It sat in the same position as the chaise in the vision. Had Dylan’s ghost been present when Jason arranged the furniture? No. That was silly. Whatever dead people did on the other side it was not… feng shui.

  “Where is her mother now?” he said.

  “A mental institution. She committed herself. No memory of that night, supposedly – and Valerie refused to testify against her own mother.”

  “Why not?” Jason said, incredulous.

  Eliza reappeared with a mug in one hand. “Would you testify against me? If I stabbed you?”

  “Hell, yeah.”

  “Only ’cause I raised you to be a little shit,” she said affectionately and exited again.

  Their fireplace, he realized, was Van Brunt Quarry stone. He touched the hearth then stepped back, remembering the portrait in the tomb. Agathe had stood there once, her hand on the mantle, auburn hair flowing, posing with… something… something that had been whitewashed over, long ago.

  “It will be Hell for all of us,” ancient Agathe had said, sitting in her rocker, right over there. “This is… evil, Dylan.”

  “I want to know everything you know.”

  “Then stop pestering me. And let me write.”

  “Tada,” Eliza sang.

  Jason jumped.

  “There you go. Hot cocoa, à la Merrick,” she said, pushing a mug into his hand. “My secret recipe – two parts cocoa mix, Ensure, half an arthritis pill and a thimble full of Geritol. Oh lighten up. I’m kidding.” She raised the mug. “To the Project.”

  “To the Project.”

  “May it rest in peace,” she said.

  “We’re through then?”

  She nodded. “I think we did good.” She wiped cocoa from his chin.

  “You’re not disappointed?”

  “Me? It’s been the time of my life.” She turned away and shuffled toward her room. “I am tired, though. Ready to go to bed. Take your gloves off, Honey. You’re in the house. Who raised you? Oh, yeah. Me. Sorry about that.”

  “Not disappointed even a little? It was a waste of time.”

  She turned at the door.

  “Having adventures is never a waste of time,” she said. “Sitting on your butt is.”

  He followed her into the room, but she waved him off.

  “Nope. About face, soldier. I’m getting nekkid. Yes, I can manage. My hands are fine tonight. Take my cup. Scoot – finish your cocoa or be scarred for life.”

  He gave her her privacy, chuckling as he closed the door. She was in fine form tonight, silly old woman. Yes, she’d had a very good time – and Jason felt proud of himself for seeing things through to the end.

  “What should I do with the sword?” he called.

  “I don’t know. Hall closet I guess!”

  Hope you aren’t the Horseman’s Treasure, he thought, hiding the thing away. ’Cause you’re getting stuck between the house slippers and the shop-vac.

  “And after all,” Eliza called through the door, “think what you can tell your kids. You broke into a tomb looking for treasure. That’s better than Chess Club.”

  “I guess,” Jason said, shutting the closet again.

  “You guess?” she said. She came out in her nightdress, wringing her hands with lotion. “Honey, do you hate being here that much?”

  “No,” he said, thinking of Kate.

  “I didn’t think so,” she said. “I think Sleepy Hollow is a good place for you to call home. You belong here. You’ll see. You take those gloves off now.”

  He peeled the gloves off and put them in his pocket. She watched with a twinkle in her eye, biting her lip, deciding whether to say something.

  “’Night, son,” she whispered, finally.

  “’Night, Eliza.”

  “Such a grown-up,” she said, and waited with hands on hips. “Eliza” wasn’t enough, not tonight. He kissed her forehead and she leaned in as he did.

  “’Night, Grandma,” he said, “I love you.”

  “Much better. Likewise I’m sure. Oh – one more thing.” She turned at the bedroom door. “Is that boy Joey gay?”

  “Uh – yeah.”

  She nodded.

  “Good. You’ll get some culture.”

  #

  After Jason felt certain that she was asleep, he crept outside and fetched his backpack from the trunk of the Mercedes. Charley heard the click of the door when he returned, and she growled from the bedroom. Jason slipped upstairs before the poodle could decide whether he was an intruder.

  In his room, he drew Agathe’s book from his backpack and turned on the bedside light. He had no vision from the thing, now. Could his gift be limited to one image per item? He would have to test that. Never mind.

  He would finally find out what Dylan was so eager to read. He was just as eager to read it himself. He took a deep breath and opened the cover.

  The pages were blank.

  He held the thing up to the light. Blank?

  What the hell?

  No, not blank. Not entirely…

  He could make out fine brown lines that had been letters, but these had faded so badly that the ink and paper bled into each other, brown on brown. Flipping pages, he did see a few sentences here and there, but the letters were inscrutable, as al
ien as Arabic or Thai.

  That’s that.

  Maybe somebody would read the thing someday. Maybe some lab could fire neutrons at it or something and recover the lost letters. But Jason was done. He felt better now, actually. He hadn’t stolen some precious document, after all. This was as useless as the sword.

  The visions had to be his priority now. He had to get on top of those. The Agathe vision had hit him hard and fast.

  He found his laptop and googled “magic psychic powers.”

  Six million, one hundred and thirty thousand results.

  Ugh.

  #

  “Good night, my love,” said Hadewych, leaving Valerie at her front door.

  “I won’t be – sleeping here,” she said.

  “You’re coming up?”

  She shook her head. “I mean – I can’t sleep – in the Hollow. I can’t – risk – ”

  “Being here at night. I understand. But just because one realtor drowned, that doesn’t mean – ”

  “Not one. Two people. It killed them. You know it did.”

  Headlights swept past; Valerie recoiled and hid from the lights.

  “I have to go,” she said, reaching for the door.

  “We’ll find a way to stop it,” said Hadewych.

  “I’ll be at a hotel. I’ll call – when I know.”

  “When will you be back?”

  “Maybe in the daytime.”

  “And at night?” he said, touching her shoulder.

  “Not till after – Halloween.” She pulled away, wiped her eyes, and slammed the door.

  Hadewych waited for the last of her many locks to turn. Satisfied, he walked to his car and opened the trunk.

  There it waited.

  He’d been longing to examine it for hours. Now he had all the time in the world.

  The side of the cardboard box read THIS END UP but the arrow pointed in the wrong direction. He lifted with some difficulty and waited, listening. A few kids laughed as they crossed Patriots Park. Motorists idled softly on Broadway.

  He closed the trunk of the car, making just the smallest click.

  As if on cue, the wind rose – invoking a dervish of leaves that danced up the dead-end road and leapt the picket fences. Hadewych turned up his collar, embraced the cardboard box, and carried the Horseman’s Treasure up the stairs.

  21 THE DRAGON AND THE BRIDGE

  After school on Friday, Jason hiked north on the Old Croton Aqueduct Trail in search of an isolated spot. He had an experiment in mind but it required privacy. He’d stashed three objects inside his red backpack: a hairbrush of his mother’s, a pair of Eliza’s reading glasses and a stuffed dragon from his childhood. He would attempt to read them and see what happened.

  He’d found a promising discussion of “psychometry” online, the psychic reading of objects, but from there it deteriorated into horoscopes and crystals and homeopathy and hoodoo. He’d found ads for live psychic hotlines, stories about telepathic dogs, a website extolling “deviant witchcraft” and the blog of a Himalayan yogi who lived on nothing but sunlight. He’d given up in disgust. He refused to swallow that nonsense.

  After all, what would Carl Sagan say?

  No, he’d find the answers on his own, scientifically.

  It was warm for October, and the sun massaged the back of his neck as he hiked. He enjoyed the exercise. He hadn’t yet explored the woods north of the house. Autumn colors framed the trail as it stretched ahead, two tracks of hard grey dirt converging and disappearing. The silence here was humbling and vast. His hearing grew sharper, opening to the hushed rustle of leaves and the distant splashing of the Pocantico River.

  The river trickled into town from the north, marking the eastern border of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. He couldn’t see it through the trees but he knew it ran alongside the aqueduct trail. The river diverged and turned west when it reached town, passing under the Headless Horseman Bridge and into the millpond of Philipsburg Manor. The Dutch settlers had used the rushing water to turn the millwheels. The river poured through the sluices of their mill, ground their wheat into flour and then spilled into the Hudson, exhausted.

  Another river had once flowed through the forest, but it had been manmade and deep underground. The enormous tunnels of the aqueduct burrowed south from a lake near Croton, ten miles upstate. The water flowed downhill, passing under Sleepy Hollow and emptying into a receiving reservoir in New York City’s Central Park. The whole operation closed in 1955 after modern pumping stations came along. The receiving reservoir had been filled in to become Central Park’s Great Lawn. But the tunnels were still down there, as unused as the veins of a corpse.

  The aqueduct trail ran along the top of this buried tunnel. The ground sloped away on either side. If Jason were to turn around and hike south he could walk all the way through Westchester County and down to Manhattan, but if he took a wrong step to the left he might somersault down the hill and into the river, assuming he didn’t hit a tree on the way.

  An occasional chimney of stone thrust up out of the ground. Jason passed one as he hiked. It occurred to him that the tunnel must pass right under Gory Brook Road. How big was it? What was still down there? He remembered how wet the cellar under the house had been. Could water still be seeping through? He hoped Eliza hadn’t bought a house with a sinking foundation. Debbie Flight had seemed pretty desperate for commissions and Eliza had bought the place impulsively.

  Jason pushed his hair out of his eyes, shook his head and marched on.

  The trees on the left side broke open and he saw the graveyard.

  He looked down into a grassy garden of headstones. This was the newer section of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, scooped from the forest east of the river, inaccessible from the trail, protected from vandals by a high chain-link fence. Absalom would be buried there soon.

  Jason lost his appetite for exploration. This creeped him out. He hated to have a field of dead people so close to the house. He hadn’t realized these graves were on his side of the river. He left the trail, skirted the south side of the cemetery fence and followed the chain link downhill to the river where the fence plunged into the water. A short wooden bridge, designed to look rustic and quaint, connected this new section to the main cemetery. Otherwise the little auxiliary graveyard was unreachable, surrounded by its lidless cage.

  He felt like going home now. He shouldn’t leave Eliza alone anyway. Rather than trek back up to the aqueduct trail, he decided to try following the riverbank southward. It proved to be a bad idea. He fought vines and brambles, slid in mud and stepped into treacherous crevices hidden by leaves. He started to sweat. Tree limbs rotated abruptly under his sneakers, threatening to throw him down the hill. A branch broke under his grip, pitching him forward towards the water. He caught himself before he fell, breathing hard. This was pushing his luck. If he twisted his ankle in this forest, who would hear his cry for help?

  A shelf of grey stones protruded into the Pocantico River. He climbed out onto it, feeling grateful for something sturdy under his weight. He sat cross-legged on a wide flat stone almost in the center of the river. He took off his muddy sneakers and washed the soles in the current. He shook off the backpack and remembered the purpose of his hike. This secluded island was the perfect place to try his experiment.

  He took out his mother’s hairbrush. He held it in his lap and focused on it.

  Nothing.

  He shut his eyes and concentrated. He sensed a cloud passing over the sun and his body prickled with goose bumps as his sweat cooled. Around him the rushing water drowned out all other sound. It splashed around the little island where he sat, eyes closed, holding a hairbrush and feeling damn ridiculous.

  He felt ready to give up when the cloud passed and the sun blazed overhead. Now, somehow, he felt a river of happiness and warmth splashing around him, a feeling of peace and contentment and summer mornings. He caught the mouth-watering odor of bacon and eggs wafting up from downstairs. He saw a hand running the brush through long b
londe hair.

  “It’s getting cold, baby. And I need to get Jason to school.”

  This was a voice he hadn’t heard in over ten years – his father’s.

  “I can be on time or presentable but not both!”

  This was his mom: her husky chuckle and almost undetectable Virginia accent.

  Oh, he’d forgotten… How could he have forgotten their voices?

  The hand lowered the brush. He tried to catch his mother’s face in the mirror, but she’d already gone. The brush rocked back and forth on the dresser. It stopped and Jason opened his eyes.

  It had been so real. He looked up at the sky, now bluer than he remembered. He didn’t want to cry. No, he was smiling. He ran his thumb across the hairbrush. Deep between the bristles he discovered a few strands of blonde hair. He put the brush back in his backpack, slowly and a little reverently.

  He squared his shoulders and brought out the reading glasses. For five minutes he turned them over and over in his hand.

  Nothing.

  What was missing?

  Each vision so far had involved something personal, something emotionally “hot” in some way. He counted them off. He’d been boiling with emotion when he first touched Kate’s bare skin. His father’s boot meant a lot. So did his mother’s hairbrush. He’d been pretty worked up in the tomb. Did he feel anything about this pair of broken dime-store reading glasses? Nope. Maybe that was the secret.

  Maybe you have to care.

  Not for the first time, he wished that he could find a teacher to explain all this to him. Surely someone else out there had a gift. He couldn’t be the only one.

  He tucked the glasses away and took out the dragon. This would be an emotional item. He’d adored it when he was little. It was green, with a smiling face, a forked felt tongue and multicolored fins protruding from the back. One seam had broken and a little white cotton peeked through.