“No. You’re right. I am a coward. I’ve never been strong.”
“What do you mean?”
She flexed her hands. “I have an aunt in Salem who can—pick up a truck with her Gift. My Gift is tiny. I spin paper clips. I throw spoons. I have… a weak soul. That’s what guilt does to a Gifted person. Guilt undercuts and twists our Gifts, turns them against us.”
“What guilt? What do you have to feel guilty about?”
“My father… killed himself.”
Jason frowned. “That’s terrible.”
“The Great Curse can get inside your mind. Bad spirits come and—whisper in the dark. Sometimes the Curse—sends a ghost to possess you—to throw you off a cliff. My father shot himself. The night he found out. And my mother blamed me.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“I know. But hearing that… it was a worse wound than…” she tapped her valve, “…this one.” She squeezed Jason’s hand. “You need to be a coward, too. Where the Curse is concerned. The Great Curse will take life—any way it can. From the outside, from the inside. It doesn’t care how. It’s like… surgery—to cut any normal person—who knows about us—out of the world—before the knowledge can spread. It kills and kills and kills. To keep us hidden.” She squeezed his hand, painfully. “You were lucky this time. We both were. But never risk it again. Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“Never.”
Jason nodded, slowly. “Never.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“The Old Dutch Church”
Valerie drove Jason home in silence. He had a million questions but she had no voice to answer. She’d exhausted herself and could only manage gestures and nods. She seemed tense and kept looking at the dashboard clock. Beyond her window, Jason saw a band of red crowning the New Jersey palisades. He understood her anxiety. She wants to be out of here before nightfall. He wondered what had made him brave enough or foolish enough to stay in Sleepy Hollow, even when good sense told him to flee.
“How far do you have to drive to get out of the Horseman’s range?” Jason asked.
Valerie pointed to the glove box. He fished inside and found a folded map. She’d drawn a circle around Sleepy Hollow. Jason measured the radius with his thumb and forefinger and compared it to the map’s legend (the legend of Sleepy Hollow ha ha).
“About five miles?”
Valerie nodded.
“Good to know.”
He reopened the glove compartment, but Valerie gestured for him to keep the map. He tucked it into his backpack. She turned the car uphill, toward Gory Brook, glancing at the sunset reflected in her rearview mirror.
“You’ll make it,” he said. “You’ve got plenty of time.”
Valerie mimed honking the horn and gave a convincing rendition of road rage.
She’d make a great partner for Charades.
“The traffic isn’t bad. You’ll get there. Hey—here’s the street. Just drop me off. It’s better if Hadewych doesn’t see you anyway.”
She rolled her eyes and extended her middle finger.
“That’s two of us,” said Jason.
She parked several houses away from number 417. Jason shouldered the backpack and climbed out. He tapped on Valerie’s window. She rolled it down.
“Merry Christmas,” he said. “Let me know when you come back again.”
He leaned in and kissed her cheek. She fanned herself like a southern belle. He turned to go but she grabbed his sleeve. He mimed “what?” forgetting he wasn’t a mute himself. She produced the envelope of cash. He held up a hand, refusing it. She grew insistent. He shook his head. She pointed at his feet. He spread his hands, puzzled. Her fingers took a walk across the back of the envelope. She pinched her nose, waved the air, and grimaced. Jason understood. He nodded, giving in. He held up a thumb and forefinger to indicate “small.” Valerie fished out a few hundreds and pressed them into his hand. She smiled, waved, and drove away.
Jason slipped the cash into his pocket.
She’s right, he thought. I do need new shoes.
He turned toward the house but stopped, blinking. Something cold had kissed his right eyelid. He looked up.
It had begun to snow.
The flakes trickled down through the sunset. Jason stood on the sidewalk, grinning, looking out over the rooftops, towards the shimmering Hudson River. He knew the snow and the sunset were just frozen water and red-shifted photons, sure. But the sight was humbling and ennobling, somehow.
He turned away from Gory Brook. He was in no mood for a Van Brunt Family Christmas Special. Hadewych and Zef had decorated a tree and strung lights on the sycamore outside. They’d bickered the entire time. Hadewych had criticized every decision Zef made, Zef had shouted self-justifications, and Hadewych had shouted back. At breakfast the next day, Jason had noticed a bruise on Zef’s bicep, in the shape of four fingers.
“I take Christmas very seriously,” Hadewych had said. He celebrated in the Dutch way, decorating the sills with images of Sinterklaas, the Dutch Santa, traditionally dressed as a bishop in red robes. He’d also put a statuette of someone called “Black Peter” in the bay window. Jason hated it. It looked like something from a minstrel show.
Lately, Hadewych had adopted an air of piety. He sat by the fire and made Zef read Bible stories. Stories about disobedient sons and wise fathers, of stern kings and ancient dynasties. Jason avoided all this, earning scornful glances. Hadewych harrumphed and informed him he was going to hell.
The nights were bitter cold but Jason stayed in the RV. He never had the Nightmare anymore unless he dozed off in his old room or in class. That had happened once. Really embarrassing. He’d shouted with fright, awakening Mr. Wollenberg, and had earned a derisive chuckle from Eddie and his boys. Only in the RV was he safe. But the RV had no heat. He’d begun to enjoy sleep again and he dreaded having to choose eventually between the Nightmare and frostbite.
He’d had no more magnetic poetry messages from Eliza but he knew she was still there. He could feel her… living… alongside him. Objects moved on their own behind his back. Sometimes Charley would yip and bark at the air. Sometimes Jason would smell his grandmother’s hand soap, or feel a step not his own. He’d laid out the Scrabble board and had challenged her to a game but, so far, she hadn’t taken him up on it. He laid down a first move and waited.
Jason planned to use his Gift to spend Christmas Eve with Eliza. He’d set aside a few special items: handmade tree ornaments, a stocking she’d knitted when he was six, and the reindeer earrings she’d worn to his Christmas pageant. He would climb into the RV tonight and slip into Christmas memories.
But those could wait.
He wandered along side streets, head down, mind empty. Something nagged at him. Not any immediate worry. Nothing to do with Hadewych, or Zef, or Kate, or even the Horseman, for once. No, Jason felt safe tonight. If the Horseman feared holy ground, he’d likely fear Christmas Eve as well. Jason looked up, at the snow drifting through the sunset, at the Christmas lights on the houses and the good cheer that glowed in passing faces. These sights sanctified the air—as if the whole village were Holy Ground tonight.
He passed a familiar Colonial-style house. In Halloween season this yard had sported a cemetery of false headstones. The bleached skeleton of Groucho Marx had sprawled across the garden bench, leering—Say the secret word and win a hundred dollars, bucko. But the gravestones and skeleton were gone now, replaced by a plastic manger scene. Three Wise Men knelt in the Kentucky bluegrass, lit by bulbs within. They presented the infant Jesus with gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh. What function did those serve? Were they like salt? Protection against some ghost hacking its way into the stable? Mary and Joseph knelt over the child, flanked by a donkey, a camel, and Santa Claus.
Jason brushed snow from Santa’s cap. He hadn’t believed in Santa for a long time. And he missed believing—craning his neck to find that magic sleigh among the stars—that happy myth conjured up by Washing
ton Irving himself. Santa was another Dutch tale Irving had introduced to the Americas. Irving was considered the father of Santa Claus. He’d created the sleigh, the long pipe, the laying of the finger aside the nose to pop up the chimney. Jason had found Christmas essays in The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, right alongside the Legend.
Where had Irving lived, back then? Where had he first imagined Santa? Maybe right here, wandering the streets of Tarrytown on some snowy Christmas Eve, hands in pockets—like Jason Crane.
The Horseman is real, though.
So—should I start believing in Santa again?
Jason turned and ambled down the hill, thinking hard.
What else? What else should I start believing in?
He’d seen ghosts.
Does that mean we have souls?
He’d healed with his hands.
Was that a… miracle?
No no no. I refuse to believe that.
But if souls and magic are real, then what about God?
What about the Devil?
He heard the carolers before he saw them—a small knot of tasseled singers.
“O little town of Bethlehem,
How still we see thee lie!
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by.”
The singers were good. Joey wasn’t among them. He’d left the day before to spend Christmas with his grandmother in Seattle. Jason fished Joey’s present out of his backpack, brushing snow from the cover of it.
Psychic Abilities for Dummies
He grinned. It had been a good laugh. He flipped through the book as he walked. On the title page Joey had written “Merry Christmas, Spidey!”
The voices of the carolers dwindled behind.
Jason had looked up this psychic shit on the Internet once and had given up in disgust. It was all such crap. New Age garbage for stoners and naïve college girls. He laughed at people like that. He didn’t like them. They annoyed him. He felt as though he’d catch some disease from them—a mental illness that caused its victims to break out in nose rings and macramé.
But now he saw glimmers of truth among these pages. Things he’d actually experienced. Psychic flashes. Telekinesis. Psychometry. The lore of the Gifted had seeped out, somehow, into this subculture of weirdos. Maybe they weren’t so weird, after all. Maybe he’d been wrong about them too.
He slipped the book into his backpack.
Was he wrong about everything?
Everything he’d ever believed?
This was what had been nagging him, ever since he’d left Valerie’s house, ever since he’d seen her use her telekinetic Gift. No. Further back. Ever since Kate had explained Founders and Gifts and The Appointed. A fissure had been opening beneath his feet. He’d straddled it, trying not to fall in, resisting the lure of complete credulity, struggling to hold on to his scientific and rational self.
What would Carl Sagan say?
He’d say bullshit, that’s what. He’d call shenanigans on this whole affair. He’d denounce the whole ghostly thing as hooey. Balderdash. Poppycock.
“Bah, Humbug,” came the voice of Ebenezer Scrooge from some movie, denying the ghost of Jacob Marley. “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”
Yes. It’s just flim-flam! I reject the whole lot of it!
That’s what Jason had always done.
He’d been a born skeptic. At eight years old he’d discovered his credulous grandmother watching some Noah’s Ark documentary. The narrator claimed that, since seashells were found on the tops of mountains, water must have covered the Alps. Proof of Noah, Q.E.D. Eliza had nodded at this, happily, but Jason had snapped the TV off to give a lecture on plate tectonics.
“The shells were once on the ocean floor, Grandma, see? But the continental plates pushed them up when the mountains formed. Ooh!—and maybe those shells got the story going in the first place, you know? Maybe—maybe ancient people found them so mysterious that they created the story of Noah to explain the shells away. What do you think?”
“Don’t be so smart,” she’d said.
But he was smart. He couldn’t help that.
She’d been a free thinker herself, kind of, but Jason’s skepticism did trouble her sometimes. That’s possibly why she’d married Bill Ferrer, her sixth and penultimate husband.
Jason had been ten. Eliza had recently divorced Grandpa John—irreconcilable differences—and she thought Jason needed a father—a role model and lawgiver. So Bill Ferrer entered the picture. He was handsome and tall, with a distinguished shock of white hair. He was pious and devoted to his church. He took Jason fishing on the Kennebec and Eliza dancing in Bangor. He must have been a better dancer than fisherman, because she threw caution to the wind and proposed to him that summer. Eliza usually did the proposing.
But, six weeks after the wedding, Bill Ferrer and Jason had a falling out.
They’d gone to the movies. Just the two of them. What had they seen? Something science-fiction. Had it been a Star Wars movie? No. Some generic space-opera. Coming home, they hadn’t been able to park near the house. They’d left Ferrer’s Cadillac around the corner and had been walking across an empty lot. Jason had stopped to look at the stars. He had been carried away by the movie. He wanted to climb into a spaceship and explore the heavens.
“Think!” he cried happily. “There are a hundred billion stars in our galaxy. And our galaxy is one of billions! There are supernovas and nebulae and, oh, I bet there are a hell of a lot of aliens.”
“Don’t say ‘hell,’” said Ferrer. “Let’s get in. It’s cold.”
Jason spun in a circle, head thrown back. “But think what might be out there. There are so many stars.”
Ferrer looked at Jason quizzically. “But aren’t the stars just reflections of the sun?”
Jason stopped spinning. The sentence had shocked him. He stared at Ferrer. The man’s question was ghastly. Did he really not know? How could he be so old and not know? How had he gone through life missing out on the whole universe? In a split second, Jason decided—right or wrong—that religion was to blame. Bill Ferrer had never bothered. Bill Ferrer didn’t ask questions because he already had all the answers. Bill Ferrer lived in a pre-Copernican universe with one planet and one sun—a goldfish bowl with a benevolent overseer who sprinkled manna now and then.
“Wow, you’re stupid,” Jason blurted.
Ferrer’s palm came down hard across his cheek.
They had stood in that vacant field and had stared at each other for many frozen moments.
And that was that.
They’d argued from that point on. Jason would have none of Ferrer’s church-going and Ferrer tried to enforce greater piety by beating Jason up. This went on for weeks, in secret, until Jason ran to Eliza shouting, “Make him go away! Make him go away! I don’t need a father! I don’t need a father!”
The moment she heard Ferrer had hit Jason, Eliza filed for divorce. But what was done was done. After Bill Ferrer, Jason became a more deeply entrenched skeptic than ever before. He hadn’t changed in all the years since and he’d never questioned his viewpoint.
Until now.
He heard the ringing of a bell and looked up. He’d walked many blocks—past Beekman Avenue, past flocked windows and lights and revelers. Past the sign at Pocantico Hook and Ladder promising Cookies and Milk with Santa (Santa looked a lot like Fireman Mike), and past a knot of seniors with ukuleles who crooned “You’re a Mean One, Mister Grinch” to the last-minute shoppers. He passed Philipsburg Manor—surprisingly cheerless, the edge of the millpond grey with ice. The site had closed during these cold winter months and the ancient buildings hadn’t been decorated for the season.
Cars purred past, wheels muffled on the white road. Jason blessed the snow, because snow meant salt, and lots of it. Palettes of road salt already lined Broadway. White salt. Pink salt. Gre
en salt. Brands like “Blue Heat” and “Arctic Thaw” and “Magnamelt.” Big trucks would appear soon to spray beautiful crystals up and down the roads, turning the pavements into a briny Horseman-repelling slush.
The sound of hooves came up from behind—
Clop clop clop!
Jason froze.
Two white Clydesdales passed, bell-bridled, pulling a wagon of giggling, snow-nipped children.
Jason exhaled and relaxed.
The kids waggled mittens at Jason. He raised a glove in return. He trudged over the Headless Horseman Bridge, past the black gate, and up the knoll…
The bell rang again, over his head.
He’d come to the steps of the Old Dutch Church.
The Burying Ground lurked behind, full of tilted cenotaphs and baby stones and frightened angel faces. Snow fell through the early evening starlight and collected on the twiggy branches of the locust trees. It blanketed the graves and quieted them. The Burying Ground had lost its spookiness. It was half-creepy and half-festive now, like a Stephen King novel illustrated by Currier and Ives.
He heard voices rise inside the church.
He touched the door handle.
He’d been inside once, though he hardly remembered it. On Halloween night he had thrown himself into the church in search of refuge. He’d been battered and bloody and beaten, slipping in and out of consciousness. Now, he wanted to see the place properly. He cracked the door and stepped into the vestibule. A guest book lay open. He considered signing his name, but thought better of it. He slipped around a corner to stand at the head of an aisle. The church had two aisles, not one. He hadn’t noticed that in his vision of Kate. Two aisles marched to the altar, dividing the pews into three sections. To his left, an ancient box stove pushed its stack up and out through the roof, providing heat.
A minister stood at the far end in a raised box flanked by evergreen boughs and candles. An odd round shape hung above his head, like a Hershey’s Kiss carved of burnished wood. A soundboard, Jason realized. To amplify the man’s voice. He recognized the minister—he’d performed Eliza’s graveside service.
Sleepy Hollow: Bridge of Bones Page 16