She did, opening her lungs, and he threaded the pipe down her throat again, tightening the valve.
“There you go. Good as new. Feel better?”
She tested it. “Yes.”
“There’s that beautiful voice.” Mike pointed at her valve. “Don’t you be ashamed of that. Be proud of surviving. Everybody’s got injuries. Inside, outside. Doesn’t matter. See this?” He leaned forward, pointing at his eye. “Left one’s glass. Lost it when I was a rookie. It reminds me to work smart and be careful.” He touched her shoulder. “That which does not kill us makes us stronger, right?”
She smiled.
He lit up. “There you go. You’re really pretty when you smile.”
She engaged her valve. “You too.”
He blushed. Hell, he practically burst all his capillaries. Valerie laughed soundlessly until tears rolled down her cheeks. Tears of relief and release.
Mike let her cry on his shoulder. “See? Now you’re okay.”
And he was right. When she was done crying, she felt like a different woman. No, like a girl. A little girl laughing on a beach. She put the shell back around her neck. Mike stood and offered a sooty hand.
“So,” he said brightly, “who wants ice cream?”
Zef held his mother and kissed her hair. They swayed together, breathed together. They held hands even as the paramedics lifted her.
“You came for me,” Jessica said.
“Dad did this,” Zef whispered, following the gurney.
“I know.” She squeezed his hand. “He’ll get his. Just watch.”
“Excuse me, sir,” said a paramedic, stepping between.
Their hands separated. The men lifted Jessica into the waiting ambulance. The doors began to close but she sat up, stopping them. She pointed at Zef, her green eyes intense. “You’re MY son, now.”
Zef nodded. “I’ll be right behind you.”
She sagged. “You’re my son…” She fell back. The doors closed and the ambulance pulled away.
Zef felt for his keys. He would follow her to Phelps Memorial. But, no—he hadn’t driven here. He had run. The events of the evening came back in a rush.
He was free. He was free of his father. At last.
He stood in Valerie’s yard, aside the smoking ruin of the home that he and Hadewych had shared. The truth shall set you free. He could be himself, his real self at last, openly. Hadewych couldn’t hurt him. Zef would make sure they put the bastard in jail. Arson. Murder. Attempted murder. Hadewych would be the monster in the dungeon, not him.
If any demons had survived the fire, they were quiet now. Zef felt no drumbeat of guilt. He had done it. He was Out. And no one had been hurt. It wasn’t so scary, was it? Three little words…
He thought of Joey. “Come back when you’ve done it,” that’s what Joey had said. He had to call Joey and tell him the good news. Tell him that he was free. That they could be together, tell him…
To tell him those… those three little words.
“Jason, call me,” said Joey, his voice low and desperate. He hung up the phone and turned his back to the wind, circling the lighthouse to reach the landward side. He switched to text and typed in a message:
jason?
i need you!!
Joey hesitated.
i think i
cursed my father.
Waves cracked the rocks beneath the rail. Joey wiped his eyes. Something else bad had happened. He could feel it. He’d never seen so many emergency vehicles on the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was as if the fireworks had frozen, like a still-frame, a patchwork of searchlights and police lights and fire trucks. He saw a searchlight on the water, too. He pictured the red light on his father’s face, the Nyack fireworks, the light of recognition and understanding, his own reflection in his dad’s glasses.
“Joey? That was you?”
And would his father die, now? Was Jim Osorio marked for death? When? Tonight? In a month? How could he live with that? Could it be undone?
“Out is my middle name,” Joey thought. I was so stupid. So stupid. We’re not superheroes. He felt he would gladly go back in the closet if only he could keep his father from being hurt.
“Jason, where are you?” Joey whispered to the water. A chill came over him. A chill and a certainty that Jason had been on that bridge tonight.
Joey’s phone vibrated. He checked it eagerly.
Zef.
Joey fought the urge to either answer and tell all or to throw the phone in the water. He turned the phone off and put it in his pocket. He couldn’t tell Zef. Zef wouldn’t understand. Zef couldn’t begin to know what it felt like to curse your own father.
Joey stood like a sentinel at the rail, alone, staring at the chaos on the bridge.
“Kate, are you there? Kate, pick up.”
The voice of Paul Usher rose frantically through the house from the tiny machine on the kitchen counter. The answering machine. Agathe understood what the device was, what it could do. Now that the girl was hers completely, she knew what Kate Usher had known. She took ten thousand dollars from the hidden safe in the office. She slipped the wad of bills into the pocket of her nightdress.
“Kate, it’s Daddy. They say you missed the jet. Are you okay? I can’t get Red on the line. I’m very worried.”
Agathe recognized the Usher house. It had been standing in her time. She had dined here. With whom? Who had lived here? She couldn’t remember. She kicked the girl’s slippers off and left them in the dining room. She considered claiming the house for herself, making it her—what would the girl call it? Her base of operations. But the father would come home to search for his daughter. Besides, she’d left the place a mess. She raised her hem and her bare feet stepped over a puddle of blood. No. It was time to fly. She had promised the girl that they would fly together.
“Kate. Please pick up. I’m at the Brickham Hotel near Lexington. Let me get the number…”
Lexington… Agathe knew that town. She had been there. She had taken Dylan to Lexington, once, to see where the War with the British had begun. Where the “Shot Heard Round the World” had been fired.
She followed Usher’s voice into the kitchen. She found a bowl of fruit on the counter. She took a bite from a sweet red apple. Ah… to eat. She’d forgotten.
“When you get this message I want you to get on—”
Agathe picked up the receiver.
“Hello?” said Usher. “Honey, are you there?”
“Daddy?” Agathe whispered, her voice a perfect imitation of Kate’s.
“Thank God. I’ve been worried sick. What’s going on?”
“I’m running away, Daddy,” Agathe said, smiling, speaking around a wet mouthful of apple.
“What?”
“Don’t look for me. Don’t try to find me. As far as you’re concerned, your little girl is dead.”
Agathe closed her eyes and smiled. She lay the device down, leaving the little man inside to squawk, to question, to plead, to wonder. She walked out into the summer night. The wind whipped the nightdress against her. The wind intensified and the hands of ghosts embraced her—servants of her Horseman, servants of her beloved, now servants of hers.
With a gesture she commanded them to rise. They lifted her easily. Her slim body stepped into the wind, her toes brushing the tree tops, the lights of the Hollow sparkling beneath her. She drifted into the sky like a crone in a fairytale. She took a last bite of the apple and dropped the core onto the rooftops below.
“Beware…” she giggled. “For Agathe has her teeth again.”
The Horseman rose, also. His strong new hands gripped the rivets and ridges of the broken Tappan Zee Bridge. His sneakers found purchase and he climbed. He climbed above the wreckage, above the lights and screaming alarms. He climbed hand-over-hand to the very top, to the pinnacle, and stood on the wind-buffeted summit of the suspension bridge, under the stars. He felt his mortal vitality returning to him. His pride. His power. Smoke rose in the distance, a stripe of bla
ck. The town was awake too, alive and affrighted. These Americans. These colonists. These insurrectionists. War would come to all, now.
Yet the Horseman felt no triumph, only deadly determination. He must win. This town must surrender, or else he would never be allowed to go back to his home. He would return there soon. Back to Prussia. The War would be over, this town dispatched. Victory was at hand. The last of the Cranes had perished. The Horseman had taken the bridge.
And, soon, he would have his head.
He would be a man again. And the fields of the Earth would be his…
Far below the Horseman’s feet, below the wheels of the emergency vehicles, below the bridge of bones, floats a tiny boat christened the USS Rip Van Winkle, named for that other tale of Irving’s, of the man who slept for a hundred years, under the bewitchment of the little people. The boat had been berthed at the Washington Irving Boat Club and had been commandeered for the sum of five hundred dollars cash and two gold wedding rings. The money and the rings now sit in the pocket of the elderly captain, who plans to give them to his granddaughter and her young fiancée, a handsome couple just starting their maiden voyage.
The boat is not worth the cost. Its engine is tiny, barely enough to ride the bucking current of the Hudson. The sides of the boat are fake wood-grain. The deck is stained with rust and the upholstery is sun-cracked, like the skin of the desert.
Charley leaps onto a cushion and barks, her feet on the railing, her tongue out. She turns a circle and shakes her dripping fur. She whines, searching the waters for her master. Where is he? Where is Eliza’s boy? Put a hook in the waters and fetch him out.
Hadewych searches, too. He must find Jason. He must. He saw the Mercedes go over. He saw the boy break the surface. He saw the Horseman throw his ghastly missile but lost sight of Jason, who vanished into the dark water.
Jason must be found. The Pyncheon heir must be alive. If not, the Legacy will be given to Jessica. And Jessica must not win.
“Jason!” Hadewych calls, cupping his mouth. “Hallo?”
Charley joins with a howl.
Hadewych listens but hears only the hollow thrum of the waves on the hull and the breath of the water, a current that might easily carry a tall skinny dreamer out to sea. A searchlight ignites like a lighthouse affixed to the rail. Hadewych plays the beam over the water… searching… searching… searching… and, somewhere in the dark, Jason floats. He floats between the wild moon and the water. He dreams, like a man bewitched, and who can say when he’ll wake again? In a hundred years, with a long grey beard and a tale of playing ninepins with the wee folk? In the wink of an eye and the flash of a shooting star? Or in the turning of a page?
Until that hour, the dreamer floats… out there. He floats between life and death, between origins and endings, somewhere in the middle.
As we all do.
THE END
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Gleaves is the composer, lyricist and playwright of Dorian, World and Time Enough, The Golden Days, Oswald on Ice, Omniscience and Adrenaline Junkie. He is winner of BMI’s 2004 Harrington Award for Outstanding Creative Achievement, and is composer-in-residence for New Music New York. In collaboration with author Dianne Durante and software designer Adam Reed, Richard is editor and composer of Monuments of Manhattan, a videoguide for Android devices.
Sleepy Hollow: Bridge of Bones is his second novel.
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Table of Contents
DEDICATION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROLOGUE
PART ONE 1 The Honorary Van Brunt
2 The Bar of Gold
3 Erased from History
4 The Grown-Ups
5 Exodus
6 The Dominant Spirit
7 The Magazine
8 Thanksgiving
9 Oracle of the Bones
10 The Lie
11 Spook Rock
12 The Red Carpet
13 The Stables
14 Salt
PART TWO 15 The Crane Files
16 The Hero of Gory Brook
17 The Cauldron
18 The Great Curse
19 The Old Dutch Church
20 Spider-Man
21 The Dragon Hoard
22 Mister Kate
23 The Quarry
24 The Car Thief
25 The Bloody Pillowcase
26 Stone Barns
27 The Crane Foundation
28 Jessica
29 The Greenhouse
30 The Storm
31 Midnight
32 A Murder of Ice
33 The Battle of Pocantico Hills
34 Aftermath
35 The Two Ghosts
36 Dylan’s Tale: Part One
37 Dylan’s Tale: Part Two
38 Dylan’s Tale: Part Three
39 Dylan’s Tale: Part Four
40 Dylan’s Tale: Part Five
41 Dylan’s Tale: Part Six
PART THREE 42 The Nightmare
43 The Wannabe
44 The Lava-Surfer
45 Look Me In The Eye
46 Be True
47 Dylan’s Tale Concludes
48 The Star-Maiden
49 The Truce
50 The Persistence of Evil
51 Patriots Park
52 The Meteor Shower
53 Headaches
54 Valhalla
55 Movie Night
56 Ashes to Ashes
57 Coupling
58 Brom’s Gift
59 The Iron Door
60 Wine and Roses
61 Burning Man
62 The Catacombs
63 Demons
64 Fireworks
65 The Bridge of Bones
EPILOGUE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sleepy Hollow: Bridge of Bones Page 60