SLEEPY HOLLOW: General of the Dead (Jason Crane Book 3)

by Gleaves, Richard

  Zef understood. He’d seen her like this before. Many times. Valerie was out of the game now.

  He stood over her, fists balled, ready to defend them both from the approach of bloody cleats.

  Agathe rose to one knee, muttering every spell she could think of. The Usher girl was persistent. Fierce and determined. But she was no witch. She did not have Agathe’s experience or cunning or ruthlessness. Agathe had survived true death, and she would not be defeated by a little girl.

  She snarled and snatched at the tiny light, blasting it with cruel magic to bring it pain and fear. The Usher girl bore it as long as she could, but at the next burst she fled and disappeared into the woods.

  Agathe stood on the rooftop, breathing hard, furious to have been attacked in her moment of triumph. She snatched up the fallen grimoire and studied the scene below. Fire trucks had come. Hoses had unfurled, showering the burning cars with water. Firemen in rubber jackets helped the injured, wrapping the shocked and terrorized in silver blankets, lifting them into ambulances. Policemen advanced. The field was littered with body parts and gore.

  Agathe stroked her chin. “We have stirred the hornets’ nest.” She beckoned her servant ghosts and stepped off the edge of the roof. They caught her body, carried her over the treetops, and she rode the cold wind like an angel of death.

  Valerie groaned as the possessed boys grew nearer. Zef braced himself, fists raised.

  “Freeze! Police!” someone shouted. A splash of red and blue lights hit the Horsemen’s uniforms. The boys ignored it and kept coming. “I said freeze!”

  “Don’t shoot!” Zef said. “They can’t help it!”

  Zef heard a gunshot, but it was distant. Down the hill. The sound of hoofbeats rose above the approaching sirens. The Horseman flew past, riding hard atop a monstrous misshapen thing of bone and shredded football uniforms, chasing someone onto the field. A red-haired football player. Cody McBride, the new quarterback.

  A second shot sounded. The Horseman turned and charged the police officer who had fired. Another shot. A massive exit wound opened on the Horseman’s back—red and livid. The shooter was David Martinez. The Horseman lifted his sword, ready to bring it down and kill Martinez on the spot. But—he hesitated. His arm froze in midair. Martinez got off another shot that grazed the Horseman’s shoulder.

  The Horseman sheathed the sword, whirled, and galloped back onto the field. He raised an empty hand. A football flew into it from the sidelines and caught fire. He cocked his arm and threw a seventy-yard pass—a perfect spiral, a brilliant blazing arc through the sky. It struck the fleeing Cody McBride in the back of his head, hard enough to lift him off his feet and toss him lifeless into the end zone.

  And as the kid fell, the wall of vines burst into a sheet of flames, casting evil shadows. Before they even had time to cover their eyes, the vines had roasted to nothing. The flames rippled upward like a show curtain, dispersed into a fringe of gold, and vanished into cinders, leaving behind only black and melting chain link. His way unobstructed, the Headless Horseman galloped up the slope at the northern end of the field and vanished into the endless woods of Sleepy Hollow.

  The massacre was over.

  One by one the football players blinked and fell to their knees, gaping at the chaos with puzzled, frightened expressions. The ghosts had released them. Some boys screamed, discovering their uniforms redder than usual, their fists bloody, the faces of their teammates spattered. Some had teeth missing. Some had broken bones they were just now feeling. They looked with fear and confusion at the guns raised all around, at the terrified people huddled on the grass or being loaded into ambulances. Number forty saw a familiar face and whispered, “Mom?” The woman spun away with a cry of terror.

  Zef comforted Valerie and helped her to her feet.

  “I’m sorry—” she whispered. “I lost my nerve—They looked like her—Like my mother. The night she attacked—”

  “It’s okay. It’s okay. I get it.” Zef saw Joey struggling up the hill and relaxed. He ran down to him, gave him a bear hug, and kissed his forehead.

  “You won’t believe what just happened inside,” said Joey.

  “I don’t believe any of this.” Zef turned a circle, looking at the devastation. “Come on. A lot of people are hurt. We need to pitch in.”

  He took Joey’s hand and they headed back up, returning to Valerie. She stood looking over their heads, toward the school. Her eyes were wide.

  Zef saw her expression and turned back. “What?”

  Valerie pointed at a scrawl of red graffiti across the brick of the auditorium. A twist of dripping, inscrutable symbols four feet high. “I can… read that.”

  “Those marks?” said Joey. “It’s just gang tags.”

  “No. It’s a spell. A spell for…”

  “What?”

  She trembled and hugged herself. “For raising the dead.”

  “I want every free man up there! Search those woods! Every inch!”

  David Martinez stared at the black hollow where the killer had fled. Hatred filled his heart. That son of a bitch, whoever he was! That bastard had killed his boy Eddie. And so many more. But he wouldn’t get away. Martinez didn’t know what trick the killer was pulling, but it was just a trick. He wasn’t about to believe in ghosts. No, that thing had bled when he shot it, and if something can bleed, then it can be killed.

  Run, you bastard, Martinez thought. Go ahead and run. Keep running. But I’m catching up to you. I swear it. He pounded a fist against the roof of his police cruiser. You can’t escape the things you’ve done. You’ll see. Try to run from them. You can’t run forever!

  No man can.

  The vision of Hadewych’s life was unlike any that Jason had experienced before. It came in a rush—as if time had stopped so that decades could pass in the space of seconds. And what’s more, he felt that Hadewych could see the vision too, that they were watching it together, somehow, both of them helpless as the images flew by.

  Hadewych is a child, playing in a crib. A woman in her thirties, with blond hair tied back, lays her chin on the rail and blows kisses. So this is Hadewych’s mother. A pretty woman.

  A different scene. A man raises a baseball and tosses it. The ball rolls into the grass and Hadewych totters after it, picks it up, and puts it back into the man’s hand. The man wears a white T-shirt and jeans. He is good-looking, masculine and wiry, with a dimpled chin. Hadewych’s father, then.

  Hadewych is a little older now, with training wheels on his bicycle. He is charmingly plump, with sunburnt cheeks. He rides his bike along the crest of a grassy hill, past a war monument. He raises his hand to shield his eyes from the setting sun and grins at the Manhattan skyline. The Twin Towers still stand, rosy in the distance.

  Hadewych sits at a breakfast table in a clean little kitchen, its every surface polished, the cup towels folded, a tulip in a pot drinking sun at the windowsill. An old woman sits across from him, sipping hot cocoa. She is thin but handsome, with tiny white earrings like snowflakes. “Are you going to play your cards or not?” she says with a smile.

  “I can’t decide, Oma,” says Hadewych, his voice small and high. He raises his card hand. “Help me?”

  “Okay. Just this once. I bet you have gin, though, you little shark.”

  She rises, leaning over. Her elbow strikes the cocoa cup and it falls. Then she loses her balance and slips to the ground, toppling the table. Jacks and kings joust in the growing puddle.

  “Oma?” Hadewych gasps. “Oma! Get up! Get up!”

  “I don’t know what to do!” Hadewych’s father shouts. Hadewych—or Jason, one of them—peeks around the corner of a doorway, eavesdropping. This is the room where the crib was. The crib is gone now. So is half the furniture. “What if she has a fourth stroke?” He throws a handful of papers at his wife’s face. “How am I going to pay these bills, Christina? Mom’s ruining us!”

  Hadewych’s mother—Christina—rises and goes to her husband, putting her arms around
his neck. “I hate to say this, Jonus, but…”

  “I know. Me too. I can’t believe it, but… I wish she would too.”

  “You want her to die?” howls Hadewych from the doorway.

  Christina rises, reaching for Hadewych. “Your father didn’t mean that, baby, he didn’t mean it. Go—go play in your room.”

  “Yeah,” Jonus Van Brunt whispers, nodding. “While you still have one.”

  Another scene. Hadewych holds his mother’s hand. Her clothes are ill-fitting now and need laundering. They stand with a line of hopeless-looking people in a hallway that reeks of urine. The sign above their heads reads ALPHA PROJECT WINTER SHELTER.

  His mother raps on a window.

  “How many?” asks the bored woman behind the glass.

  “Four. Me and my son. And my mother-in-law.” She points at the old woman slumped on a bench. She’s changed terribly. Her hands are claws, resting on a cheap metal cane. The right side of her face droops. Her lower lip spins a thread of saliva that darkens her grey men’s shirt.

  “You said four?” says the social worker.

  “And my husband.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s working. He can’t be here before five.”

  “All the beds will be gone by five.”

  “I know. I’d like to hold one for him.”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  “He can share with me.”

  “I can’t do that either, honey.”

  “Well, where is he supposed to sleep?” Her voice gains desperation, rising in pitch and volume. Hadewych stares at his mismatched Hush Puppies. “He’ll be here! After work lets out. You can’t make him choose between working and having a damn bed!”

  “I’m sorry,” says the woman. “Those are the rules.”

  “Screw your rules!” Christina shouts, turning away. “We’ll go somewhere else!”

  Hadewych and his mother sit hunched in a bathroom stall, preparing a meal, using the closed lid of the pink toilet for a chopping block.

  “I didn’t mean what I said, baby. Rules are important. I don’t want you breaking rules. You hear me?”

  Hadewych bends, concentrating on his work.

  “What happens to shirkers?” she asks.

  “They don’t eat.”

  “And lazybones?”

  “They sleep outside.”

  She holds a kitchen knife toward his nose—not to threaten, just for emphasis. It works. “Don’t cut corners, and don’t look for shortcuts, son. We’ll get there. With work and nothing else.”

  He nods and returns to peeling the scrawny carrots.

  Hadewych lies in a cold room, watching his breath fog the moonlight. A heap of blankets that might be a person snores from the next cot over. Someone moans in the distance. A figure swims through the darkness, a thin young woman, rifling through a bag that doesn’t belong to her. She glares at Hadewych. He presses his eyes shut and waits until she’s gone. Then he creeps from his cot and climbs in with his grandmother.

  She shares her blanket and comforts him in her slurred voice, softly, so that no one else can hear. “And your great-great-grandfather could make fire, my boy. Whoosh! Fire from his hands. All the Van Brunts could, back in those days. They had a great big house up in Tarrytown, too. Built by Brom Bones himself. Rooms and rooms, all to themselves. All the food they could eat and all the gold they could spend. They ran the quarry, you know. And all the people ’round those parts bowed when the Van Brunts passed. Doesn’t that sound fine?” She kisses his temple. “And you’ll get it all back for us. I know you will. When you find your own magic.”

  “Stop,” whispers Christina, rising from the floor. “Stop telling him those things. There’s no magic to make it 1850 for us, son.”

  “There is too,” says Hadewych. “You don’t know so much. Tell her, Oma. Tell her about the Appointed and the Gifted people. Tell her about the Horseman’s Treasure.”

  “Get back to your own bed,” says Christina. “Before someone steals it from you.”

  Hadewych runs—giddily—past the tables of the shelter cafeteria. He runs to greet his father at the door. Jonus Van Brunt is older but still handsome. He looks tired and… haggard, though. His eyes are sad but loving. “Guess what Daddy’s got for you!” he laughs. His breath smells of liquor.

  “What?”

  “Three guesses!”

  “Did you find us a house?”

  Jonus’s eyes darken and fill with pain. “No—I—It’s just a little nothing, son, from the dime store—” He kneels and reaches into his pocket. “Oh, here, just take the damn thing.”

  A loud noise sounds from somewhere to Hadewych’s left. Jonus’s face goes blank. The light leaves his eyes. He falls over and lands on his side, the back of his neck red with blood. He’s been—he’s been—

  A male voice shouts, “Next time pay your debts, Van Brunt!”

  Hadewych screams. The cafeteria erupts into chaos. Hands take hold of him, dragging him away, dragging him away from his dad, lifeless in a growing puddle of blood, one hand still in his pocket, clutching some present that will never be revealed.

  Hadewych and his Oma huddle under a streetlight on a busy New York street. In the distance, the lights of police cars turn lazily in front of the shelter.

  “Don’t cry for your father!” Christina screams. “We don’t need him. He never took care of us. Look at the mess he’s left. Him and his gambling. Don’t cry, son. Go with your Oma. No, I have to stay here. The police are coming. Just go. And don’t cry. Not for him. You deserved better. He never provided. And a good father provides, understand? A good father provides.”

  “I want to stay!”

  “I can’t watch out for you and deal with this. I have to stay and make sure we can get him buried.”

  “What do you mean?” says the old lady, leaning on her cane. “They’ve got to bury my son.”

  “How are we supposed to pay for that? That’s a luxury for us, Margaret! I’ll be lucky if they cremate him for free. I don’t know what else to do!” She shakes Hadewych. “I said don’t cry! Go with your Oma. Go. Come find me in the morning. I’ll be here.”

  She presses a few dollars into Hadewych’s hand and kisses his forehead. Then she’s gone.

  Hadewych’s tears freeze on his cheeks as his grandmother leads him away. “Where are we going?”

  “To lay our heads down.”

  “Where?”

  “Pray for your father, my boy. My good boy. You always were my good boy. You always will be.”

  Oma walks him to Washington Square Park, hobbling past some drunk asleep against a fountain. All the benches are occupied by hoboes and drunks. A couple of pot-smoking college kids snicker as they pass. She pats Hadewych’s head and pulls him through a hedgerow and onto a secluded patch of grass under a leafless tree.

  “Good a place as any,” she whispers.

  “We’re sleeping outside?” His teeth chatter. “I’m no lazybones!”

  “It’s just for tonight. It won’t be so bad. Brr! You’re an ice cube!”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “I’m fine. It’s good to feel really cold sometimes. Wakes you up.” She strokes his shoulder. “I know. Here.” She leads him to a public trash can. “Lift the bag out.”

  Hadewych does as he’s told, hefting the heavy bag of garbage up and out of the bin.

  “Find more,” she says.

  Hadewych searches the park, gathering bags of trash, and returns with them. “What do I do?”

  “Just lie down, my sweet boy.”

  Hadewych stretches out on the cold grass, shivering. The old woman bends and wraps him in her coat. She pulls armfuls of trash on top of him, packing it around his stomach and shoulders for insulation. “That’s better. That will keep your heat in.”

  “What about you?”

  “As long as you’re warm, I’m warm. You make me so proud, Hadewych. Always make me proud.”

  Hadewych shivers and weeps.
He hugs a reeking trash bag, as another child might clutch a teddy bear, and stares at the starless Manhattan sky. Before he drifts off, a question arises from within him, floating up from somewhere deep and still and newly emptied.

  “Why?”

  The word is just a tiny puff of vapor that slips from his lips and into the wind. But it is also big. Big and heavy.

  Oma doesn’t ask “why what.” She knows what his little-boy heart has asked. She understands the universe of longing and confusion and hurt in that one whispered word.

  But she evades his question.

  “Don’t think about it,” she says, rocking him. “Think about something else. We’ll get back at all of them. What do you want, my boy? More than anything? What would make you happy right now? What would be enough?”

  “Anything?”

  “Anything.”

  “But not Daddy?”

  She holds him tight, her heartbeat at his back. “No. Not your daddy. Something else. Something nice.”

  “Tell me,” Hadewych whispers, as his grandmother strokes his hair. “Tell me again about… the Horseman’s Treasure…”

  BANG!

  The gun went off a second time. This shot missed Dr. Tamper, already crumpled in a heap on the ground. It struck the winding staircase and embedded itself in the ceiling. Hadewych tore his arm from Jason’s grip. How long had they lain frozen together that way? The vision might have lasted an hour or only a second. Jason had no idea. His hands still glowed, as if he’d pressed them to black light. What was happening? Why were his hands glowing? His palms were hot, itchy, and pulsing with energy.