Hadewych fell forward and covered his head.
“Get up, Hadewych.”
It was the voice of an old woman, harsh as ice water invading a grave.
“I said, get up.”
He rose.
An apparition drifted above the skiff. The upturned faces of the dead gaped at it in surprise. The form resolved itself, and Hadewych recognized its face—the face of the great matriarch, the bust in the tomb—the face of…
“Agathe?” he whispered.
She nodded. “I’m here to help.”
Zef hit the gas and tore away from Stone Barns. They clipped a speed bump on the way out of the gate, and Jason’s head hit the roof.
“Zef? Zef, talk to me.”
Zef spun in his seat and punched Jason in the shoulder three times with the side of his fist. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”
“Okay! Okay!”
They drove in silence down Bedford, picking up speed as the road plunged. Dark woods flew past. Mailboxes leapt at them and fell behind. A trio of police cars approached—sirens rising and falling—splashing Zef’s window with red, white, and blue before disappearing, headed in the opposite direction.
“We shouldn’t have bailed,” said Jason.
“Do you want to be there answering questions all night?”
“I’m the host. They’ll know I left.”
“It’s fine. It’s fine. We’re kids to them. We had nothing to do with it.”
“I know we didn’t.” Jason nodded. “It was all your dad.”
Zef swung and hit him again. This time the third blow clipped Jason in the eyebrow. Jason punched back and the car slid dangerously.
Zef frowned at him. “You’re going to get us killed.”
“Slow down.” Jason gripped the roll handle above his head. It would be so easy to lose control right now. Not just control of the car, but of his emotions. His self-control was slipping worse than the tires. He wanted to throw the door open and jump, to dive over the embankment of snow, to crash, to die. Just to get away. To run away. Away from Sleepy Hollow as fast as he could. “Come on, Zef. You’re going sixty in a thirty.”
Zef pressed his foot to the brake reluctantly. “Joey’s okay, right?”
“He left before it started. So did Kate.”
“What the hell happened?”
“What do you mean? You saw him.”
“Who?”
“The Headless Horsem—”
“Come on. You’re not on that shit again?”
“But you saw him. You had to have!”
Zef shook his head. “The whole thing’s blurry. All I know is you ruined my life, you little son of a bitch.”
“I didn’t do shit.”
“I wish I’d never laid eyes on you. Or Kate.”
“Or Joey?”
“Or Joey either!” Zef cried.
“I’m sure he feels the same.”
“Fine with me. I wish I’d never been born.”
“Kate won’t tell anyone.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t. You don’t know what it’s like, Jason. You. Do. Not. Know.”
“I am not your enemy.”
“Yeah. You are.” Zef began rocking. He sounded as if he was falling apart. “You are you are you are you are.”
Streetlamps swept overhead now. They’d reached town.
“Zef? Are you okay?”
“Oh, shut up. Shut up, Jason, just shut up.”
They hit Broadway and Zef turned left.
“The house is that way,” said Jason, cocking a thumb behind.
“I said shut up.”
“Where are you going?”
Zef turned onto the steep drive of Sleepy Hollow High, hitting the gas so they wouldn’t slide backwards down the hill.
“I said, where the hell are you going?”
“You’ll see.”
They drove past the paint-splattered boulder and reached the parking lot above the school. A line of yellow buses sat snowbound and empty-eyed, the words Stop For Children repeated endlessly down the line. A handful of other vehicles were parked alongside the football field. The headlights of one of these flashed. Jason saw a handful of guys milling around. They wore ski masks.
“What the hell, Zef?
Zef swung the wheel and parked. He popped the door and called out, “Here he is. Kick his ass for me.”
A knot of masked figures descended on the car. The Sleepy Hollow Boys. Had to be. The leader wore no mask. Eddie Martinez threw a liquor bottle across the field. A long pass that clipped the scoreboard with a sound like a bell ringing.
Jason made a run for it but they were on him fast. They pulled his backpack out of his hands. He gave a shout. Somebody shoved a sweat sock in his mouth. Hands seized him and his feet left the ground. The boys were laughing. All in good fun, right? All in good fun.
“How bad a hurt?” said Eddie.
“Whatever,” said Zef. “I don’t want to know about it.” He climbed into the sedan and drove off.
The boys carried Jason like a side of beef. He noticed for the first time that the sidewalk had a bronze horseshoe embedded every few feet, all the way from the field to the school. He’d never seen it from this angle before. The bronze horseshoes bobbed along as the boys carried him. He thought crazily of the manifests who had tried to drag him into the woods. This was a hundred times worse. He had nothing with which to turn these kids aside. His only talisman against these jocks was reason. But they weren’t the type who listened to it. As the Disney song goes, you can’t reason with a headless man. No, these were the Horsemen. The Brainless Horsemen of Sleepy Hollow. Number seventeen and number twelve and number nine and, of course, number twenty-five. The star quarterback. The one they called The Monster. Eddie waited at the bottom of the hill, smoking a cigarette next to a Chevy outfitted with a snowplow attachment.
“You ready, Ichabod?”
Jason heard a clang of metal, loud as a cymbal.
“Keep it down, assholes,” Eddie growled. He blew smoke in Jason’s face and flicked his ear. “Zef’s our mascot, boy. You screw with him—” He stubbed the cigarette out on Jason’s neck. “You screw with us.”
Jason cried out through the gag and pressed his shoulder to the wound. The burn was in the same place the hatchet cut had been.
The boys lifted him higher. Eddie punched Jason in the stomach twice. Someone lost their footing and the black pavement flew at Jason’s skull. The boys caught him just in time.
“Careful,” someone muttered. Good. They weren’t going to kill him. But what did they plan to do? He heard sneakers on metal, saw steps of steel mesh below. They were carrying him up the stairwell—the stairwell where he and Joey always hung out. They had unscrewed a section of the mesh. Jason dangled over the pile of snowy garbage.
He kicked. It was no use.
“Faggot in the hole!” called Eddie.
They let go, and Jason struck the garbage pile with a crunch and a chorus of laughs. A shadow of mesh fell. One of the boys had his ski mask off—Jimmy Puleo—and was screwing the metal back into place. Jason recovered and rose to his knees, vomiting the sweat sock onto the trash pile.
Something hot hit his shoulder. He realized what was happening and lurched away. Eddie chased him with a stream of piss. Jason shouted curses, careening from one side of his prison to the other. Eddie ran out of ammunition before he could tag Jason again. He zipped his pants, knelt, and tested the mesh. “Looks like you’ve got yourself in a pickle, kid. Tell you what. Maybe we’ll come get you out in the spring.”
The boys laughed. They waved and disappeared, one by one, until only their leader remained.
“Martinez!” Jason followed him as he descended. He grabbed at Eddie’s legs through the gaps between the stairs. Eddie stomped Jason’s hand and knelt again, pressing his face against the gap.
“You got something to say?”
“Yeah. Zef’s gay. That’s all this is about. I outed him to Kate. I didn’t mean to.
He’s just using you guys. Come on.”
Eddie shrugged. “He said you’d say that.”
“It’s true.”
“I don’t buy it. And even if I did…” He grinned, displaying a row of Big Bad Wolf teeth. “…all that would mean is Kate’s up for grabs.”
Jason’s fist shot through the gap and smashed Eddie in the mouth. Martinez howled and his hands came up. Jason saw his backpack drop and grabbed it, wrenching it through the mesh, pulling it in. Eddie lunged, but Jason retreated. Eddie dug his fingers into the mesh. He tried to rip it up again but couldn’t. Jason laughed at him.
Eddie spat blood into Jason’s cell. “Fine,” he said, wiping his chin. “See you when school starts.” He stalked away. A few minutes later, headlights swept past. Someone threw a bottle. It hit the mesh but didn’t break, just clattered down the stairs and into the silent parking lot. Jason dropped the backpack. He collapsed and began coughing, left alone to freeze to death in a pile of snowy trash.
“What do you mean, ‘help me?’” croaked Hadewych. He’d fallen onto his back. He could see nothing but the stars rocking above the lake and the motionless figure of Agathe hovering between them. The specter reached for him and he flinched. “What do you want?”
“Only to see you succeed. To help you.”
“I don’t need your help.”
“Of course you do,” she snapped. “You weak men have always needed your Agathe. Agathe and her Horseman. Why else did you fail tonight?”
“Go away.”
“Why did the Treasure not bring you your just rewards?”
“Because it’s evil. It’s an evil thing.”
She drifted nearer. Her foot touched the skiff and the rocking slowed.
I’m going crazy, thought Hadewych. I am. I’ve driven myself mad.
“Of course it’s evil,” she said, her face solemn. “I’ve always known it was evil. Evil and beautiful and powerful.”
“It’s not beautiful.”
“It will be. If you let it grow.”
“I won’t.”
“You will. You will let it grow, and all your ambitions will come to pass.”
“I threw it away. I don’t want it.”
“You cannot rid yourself of your birthright. You crave the thing, even now. I see your mind, child. I see your heart.” She extended talons towards his chest. “You have no guilt. You are like your Agathe.”
“I have guilt.”
“No.”
“I feel guilt. I do.”
“You don’t. Not true guilt. I know you.” Her features twisted suddenly. Her eyes fixed on some distant vision. “Brom! Brom! The water, Brom!”
Hadewych sat up. He grabbed the oar and brandished it. “Get the hell away!”
“Brom! The water’s bleeding in!”
“Go away!” Hadewych’s hands erupted into fire. He gasped. The fire raced up the oar, transforming it into a blazing torch. “What’s happening?”
Agathe came back from her trance. The firelight had half-erased her from the sky now. She rose. The tongues of flame flickered at her feet. She threw her arms out and spun ’round, laughing like a spirit happily dancing in the flames of hell.
“You are a Van Brunt!”
He dropped the oar and raised his hands. “I said go!”
A fireball blossomed outward, catching his clothing, the other oar, the rim of the boat, even the branches of trees on the far shore. Agathe was gone. Hadewych’s world rocked. He stared at his hands. Only a few spindling flames trickled from his fingertips. St. Elmo’s fire, as when he lay sobbing in the storage unit. The day they’d buried the old woman.
Brom’s words came to mind. “And you, my son, you would claim these swevens and nightmares for yourself? You would summon the Horseman, yoke yourself to his service that your enemies may fall and your name be raised high? You would feed this spirit and see your hands burn?”
It was all true. It had come. The Van Brunt Gift had come at last. As his Oma had told him it would, when she’d spun her tales in the shelter before the strokes stole her away. As the Van Brunt documents had revealed.
Suddenly his mother’s voice came clear and bright: “There’s no power to make it eighteen-fifty for us, son.” But here it was. The flames raced up and down his fingertips and did not burn him. He turned to his left and watched the drifting dead by the light of his own Gift. The corpses of the insiders, the players, the people-in-the-know. The Appointed. He was one of them now. No janitor, no wannabe. He would never be that man again. He fell onto his back, laughing, staring at his hands until the flames went out.
The boat calmed. The stars hung motionless. No dead people danced in the night sky, unless one counted the constellations of heroes. Hadewych’s laughter died in his throat. Zef deserved a hero for a father. Not this.
Not this.
“I could still be good…” he whispered, and the fog of his breath reached for the stars. “And I do feel guilt. I do.”
But he knew, down in his depths, that he was lying to himself.
Jason stripped off his suit jacket. He was freezing, but he couldn’t take the smell of piss. He found his phone in the inside pocket, and hope grew in him until he remembered that Hadewych hadn’t paid the bill. His connection was dead. How long before someone found him?
“Help! Help!” he shouted.
School didn’t start for a week. No maintenance would come on New Year’s Day. Would Zef have a change of heart and come back? Not likely. Jason hugged himself, rubbing his arms for warmth. Hadewych wouldn’t come either. Face it: if he were dead, it would solve a lot of problems for Hadewych, especially after tonight. Anyone else? Valerie wouldn’t know to look. Kate hated his guts, and Joey wouldn’t know where to find him either. He might be down here a while.
He coughed. God, he felt like shit. This was not good.
Another possibility occurred to him. He closed his eyes.
Jessica…
He felt like Luke Skywalker at the end of The Empire Strikes Back, calling out mentally with the Force.
Hear me, Jessica…
Nothing. No telepathic reply. What did he expect? It was a stupid idea anyway.
“Eliza?” he whispered.
She didn’t answer either.
He was on his own. He packed snow and trash to make an igloo, pushing it into the mesh of the stairs, filling the gaps between them, building a wall to keep his body heat as close as he could. His adrenaline was wearing off and fatigue grew. He was so sleepy. He began to cough again, deep rattling coughs that scared him.
Only after his igloo was half-made did he remember his spare gloves in the side pocket of his backpack. He pulled them onto stiffening fingers.
Through the last gap between the stairs, he saw something watching him from the darkness of the parking lot. It was a shark, peering out of the top of a dumpster next to the Chevy snowplow. Some art class project or school spirit dummy—papier-mâché and cardboard and chicken wire, a great white shark with glossy black eyes and a row of white teeth like Eddie’s. Big Bad Wolf teeth. The better to eat you with, my dear. The inside of its mouth was red with blood. Its gills were hatchet cuts in its neck. The shark watched him as he worked, watched him with its dead eyes.
Jason kept turning to stare at the shark. Why did it disturb him so much?
It can smell blood. He pressed snow to the cigarette burn; he rubbed the torn flesh of his ankle where the Horseman had seized him with fingers of glass. The shark could smell the blood. Sharks could smell blood from miles away. Chum. Blood in the water. Like the Nightmare.
Jason looked away, trying to ignore the thing, but he couldn’t. He stuffed snow between the stairs, blocking his view of the dumpster, and felt a bit better. He huddled down, coughing and shivering, pulled trash on top of himself to keep warm. His knees were wet, his ass, his back. He found the sweat sock, turned it inside out, and wiped his face. He layered chip bags and KFC boxes and plastic bags and soggy ruled notepaper. He found a ragged child�
�s sweater and pulled it on gratefully, though it strangled him. He put the jacket over his head to gather his exhalations. The piss had frozen and his nose was too stuffed up to smell anything now. He clutched the backpack in his lap and began to drift. The snow had fallen away from the gap between the stairs, and the shark was watching him again. It swam in and out of his consciousness, circling.
“Wake up, Honey.”
He blinked. Eliza sat with him in his fort. Her form was wavy at first, white, with a shimmer of daisy yellow. He shook his head and closed his eyes. He was hallucinating. He was Luke Skywalker again, dying on the ice planet Hoth. Eliza had just come to tell him he must go to the Dagobah system and train with Yoda… that’s all… that’s… that’s…
“Wake up,” she said. “You can’t fall asleep.”
He blinked again. Eliza glowed like the morning sun, but she gave only light, no heat. He reached for her. Tears came to his eyes. They took hands, and he felt a slight prickly sensation, as if it had been his hand that was asleep and was just now waking up. She smiled, and he felt hope and eagerness, the very opposite of the trap of sadness every other ghost had invoked in his heart.
“Come on, Honey. You’ve got to keep your brain going. If you sleep, you won’t wake up.” Her face grew grave. “You don’t want him to get away with it, do you?”
Jason thought of Hadewych. His face flushed. “No.”
“Give yourself a slap.”
He slapped his cheeks, waking himself.
“Here,” she said, drawing near to him, slipping behind him. Her arms slipped around his body. “Remember how we sat on the playground?”
He did remember. He had been seven years old. He had run away from home after his parents died. She had found him on the playground, and they had watched the dawn together. They had leaned against a teeter-totter, on the cold ground, and she had gathered him in her big winter coat, her heartbeat at his back, her cheek pressed to his. He felt her, now, in memory only, but she heartened him and made him feel safe.
Sleepy Hollow: Bridge of Bones Page 29