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

by Gleaves, Richard

  “How dare you!” Hadewych growled, turning his gun on Jason. “How dare you look at that! How dare you—invade my life?” His shadow loomed across the lighthouse wall.

  Jason pulled away and his poor leg cramped again, the calf and hamstring and thigh all knotting and twisting. He let out a strangled sound and tried to straighten the leg, but couldn’t. He gritted his teeth and raised one still-glowing palm, backing away from the gun, as the shadow of Hadewych grew ever larger, gargantuan and swollen by the light of Jason’s hands.

  “This wasn’t my fault!” Hadewych shouted. He shook his pistol at the fallen doctor. “I didn’t want this! Look what you made me do.”

  “I made you?” Jason gasped.

  “He hadn’t seen my face. I was going to let him go. But now you’ve killed him.”

  “You killed him!” Jason’s mind was cramping now, just as fiercely as his leg. What was going on in Hadewych’s head?

  “No. No. No.” Hadewych pointed a finger. “This is your fault.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “You used your Gift in front of him. Look at your hands, for God’s sake.” Hadewych paced, his gun making crazy eights. “You cursed him. That’s why this happened.”

  “Shut up!”

  “Like you cursed your grandmother.”

  “Shut up! What the hell is wrong with you?”

  Hadewych crouched over him. “Why did you have to exist?”

  “What?”

  “Why? Why couldn’t the Crane line have died out? Why did you have to be so easy to find? I couldn’t have opened that tomb without you. You dragged me into this.”

  “You dragged me into this!” Jason screamed. “Everything was you!”

  Hadewych shot to his feet. “I’ve never hurt anyone!”

  “You were about to shoot me full of bleach!”

  “That was… a mercy. I thought you were suffering.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Hadewych neared. “I don’t want to kill you. I swear. But I have to. They’ve put me in a corner.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “I don’t have a way out. Try to understand.”

  “I understand, Hadewych. I do. For some reason you need to believe that you’re not the one responsible for—”

  “I’m not a bad person.” Tears rose. “I’m not.”

  “Fine!” Jason spoke as soothingly as he could without vomiting. “I’ll take the blame. I’ll take the blame for it all. And you take the money. Every dime of it. Just… leave me my life.”

  Hadewych sobbed, his shoulders convulsing. He raised the gun, struggling to keep it steady as he aimed at Jason’s forehead. He looked away. “I’m sorry.”

  “Please,” Jason said, dreading a split-second bang and immediate oblivion. “I won’t beg you. I won’t beg. But you were a good man once. What are you doing with that gun?”

  Hadewych opened his eyes and looked at the pistol. Jason knew what he was seeing. The brains of his father blown out by just such a weapon.

  “I’ve seen you with Zef,” Jason said. “I know you love him. What would he say?”

  “I’m a good father.”

  “A good father would stop this.”

  Hadewych blinked. “A good father provides.” His trembling hand tightened on the pistol.

  Jason looked up at Hadewych with pity and said, simply, “What would your Oma think?”

  Hadewych’s eyes went wide. He looked like the kid from the shelters, suddenly. The scared, confused boy hugging trash in Washington Square Park. The boy who had whispered, “Why?” He faltered, took a step back, and lowered the pistol.

  Hadewych and Jason stared at each other.

  “I’m so sorry,” Hadewych whispered, and slipped the gun into his pocket. “I’m so, so sorry. For everything.” He hesitated, searching Jason’s face for forgiveness and finding none. He turned away. “I’ll… I’ll go. I’ll just go.”

  Jason felt such sadness and relief and… hope… in that moment. Maybe Hadewych could be redeemed. Maybe this nightmare could end for both of them. Maybe there was no such thing as a truly evil person. But once Hadewych’s back had turned…

  Dr. Tamper lunged from the floor.

  Tamper caught Hadewych by the arm and threw him into a wall. Hadewych’s head hit the brick. He turned, blindly, raised both hands in panic—

  “Don’t!” Jason cried.

  —and burned Dr. Tamper alive.

  Tamper screamed as the flames swallowed his body. They swallowed him whole, like Jonah into the whale—with a light that blinded and terrified Jason. More than one soul burned away in that moment. Hadewych watched Tamper burn with a horror to match Jason’s own—unable to believe the deed he was committing yet unable to stop himself from committing it.

  Tamper fell to the ground, his body black and smoking but still twitching.

  Jason fought through his leg cramps and tried to crawl to the doctor’s side, but the chain on his ankle caught him short. It had become tangled around the staircase and cot. He stretched out his arms to press his glowing palms to Tamper’s flesh, but couldn’t reach.

  “Please!” Jason begged. “I can heal him!”

  Hadewych crumpled against the brick, cradling a hand. “What’s happening to me?”

  “Bring him here. I can use my Gift!”

  “I burned myself!” Hadewych howled. His arms were scalded and blistering. “I burned myself, too!”

  “It’s guilt!” Jason said. “Your Gift turned against you!”

  “It hurts!”

  “It’s good! You still want to be good! You can still undo this! You can come back! Just let me heal him.”

  Hadewych rose, indignant. “He attacked me!”

  “You left him no—”

  “Back off him.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t leave a body here.”

  “But he’s still alive!”

  Tamper’s eyes were open. His lips were moving. He wanted to tell Jason something. He beckoned, but Jason couldn’t get any nearer, no matter how hard he pulled against the chain.

  Hadewych’s hands caught fire. “I said back off!”

  Jason retreated, cringing behind the fallen mattress of the cot. Hadewych poured endless flame onto the body of Tamper, reducing it to nothing—to less than nothing. The room grew hot as a furnace. Sparks of some violent, vengeful emotion flickered in Hadewych’s eyes. What did he imagine he was burning? Who did he imagine he was burning?

  Jason covered his face.

  When they both lowered their hands, nothing remained of the doctor but a black scorch on the brick and a misshapen figure of grey ash—like one of the white innocents left behind after the burning of Pompeii.

  Nothing remained, either, of the boy from the shelters.

  “Now,” said Hadewych, extending a blistered hand. “Heal me, please.”

  Jason looked up, feeling empty. “I can’t.”

  “You can’t? Or you won’t?”

  “Both.”

  “I see.”

  “My Gift only works once. I’ve read you. I understand you. But I can’t heal you, Hadewych. You’re dark to me now.” Their eyes met. “You’re dark. Forever.”

  Hadewych the dark man sneered. “Clean that up,” he said, gesturing to the pile of ash.

  “I can’t reach him.”

  Hadewych produced a key ring and tossed Jason a small brass key. His voice became flat and businesslike. “You’ll need to be mobile, now that your nanny has been… fired. Take Tamper’s room. It’s just below. He won’t be needing it. Don’t think of escaping. I’ve been very thorough.” He straightened his clothes and checked his hair in the glass of a porthole. “I meant what I said. I don’t want to kill you. I still have ten days to find another solution. I will look for one. But I make no promises.” He rolled his eyes. “Would a ‘thank you’ be too much to ask?”

  “Thank you, Hadewych.”

  “I’m going above and beyond, here. Show some damn g
ratitude.” He turned at the top of the stairs, shaking his head at the spectacle of the charred doctor. “And think about what you’ve done, young man.”

  Hadewych slammed the door as he left. The stir of air broke the ashy figure of Tamper, scattering it, filling the room with an odor of cinders and bleach.

  Jason cringed as the ash began to fall. He held his breath and stared at the maniacal eye of the fallen flashlight as a snow of ash rained down: grey flurries from a cloudless sky, dusting his hair and shoulders and quivering legs, falling one by one into his cupped hands. And those that fell onto the blazing, upturned palms of Jason the healer… transformed. They blinked and melted, and became sparkling teardrops of blood.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “Blackout”

  It should have been on the news.

  The Sleepy Hollow homecoming massacre should have made national headlines. Camera trucks from CNN and ABC and Fox should have turned Broadway into a parking lot. Reporters with foreign accents should have camped out on the lawns of grieving families, asking intrusive questions and trampling the begonias. The tragedy should have been trending on social media. The whole nation should have stopped to rubberneck, to cluck its collective tongue for the people of the Tarrytowns, to send prayers and open their pocketbooks.

  Twenty-seven locals had died. Ten of them kids, ranging in age from fourteen to twenty. Ten kids in boxes. Ten fathers in despair. Ten mothers in agony. And the seventeen adults who had died—how many wives and children and brothers and sisters were affected? How far did the stain of blood spread? And what about the wounded? Sally Newcomb had lost an arm from the elbow down. Kenny Nides might never walk again.

  It should have been on the news.

  The stories that did appear made no sense. The following was published in the New York Times two days after the game:

  TARRYTOWN STUDENTS KILLED BY FALLING TREES IN TRAGIC ACCIDENT

  By KATHY WALLACE, Associated Press

  Saturday night’s homecoming game at Sleepy Hollow High School ended in tears as almost a dozen parents and students were injured by falling trees. An unusually strong wind is thought to have been to blame. Parents opened up on Sunday regarding the tragic accident, offering first-hand accounts of the moments that led up to the deaths.

  “I can’t believe this happened,” said Cecelia Blatt, whose own daughter Salome Blatt was killed. “We’ve known for months that something was rotting those trees. The hillside looks awful. It was only a matter of time before someone got hurt.”

  The game between Sleepy Hollow’s varsity Horsemen and the visiting Ossining O’s had reached its halftime when students reportedly heard “deafening cracks” from the hillside above. At least four large trees toppled in high wind and fell on the assembled spectators. Some students and adults were injured in the melee that followed. High emotions led to a brawl between players on both teams, but no charges have been filed at this time.

  “Some people thought it was the Horseman mascot attacking the crowd,” said Jessica Bridge, a local resident whose own son sustained minor injuries. “But tensions are high, understandably. A handful of unexplained murders rocked our little community this past spring, but they seem to be over, thank God. Now if we can just survive the root rot!”

  Ms. Bridge, a guidance counselor, is making herself available to the survivors of the tragedy free of charge. “Grief does funny things, but tragedies like this give us a chance to reach out to each other, and my door is always open to anyone who needs help processing what they saw.”

  Earlier this year, the Village Council of the Tarrytowns engaged dendrologists from the New York Botanical Gardens to investigate the spreading rot of the Pocantico Hills, but the cause of the blight could not be determined. Now villagers are demanding that the community be more vigilant regarding the stability of the old growths, so that future tragedies such as this one can be avoided.

  It was inexplicable that Sleepy Hollow should be left to mourn on its own. It felt as if some order had been given to keep quiet—that the massacre had been declared a Forbidden Subject by the world. Sleepy Hollow junior Felice Oliva wrote a factual first-person account on her blog and forwarded it to everyone she knew. Her web provider dropped her service and informed her that the content of her blog had been “accidentally deleted.” Corbin Talley had taken a forty-second film of the Horseman attacking the crowd. He posted it to YouTube. Within fifteen minutes, his account had been suspended with a notice of “copyright violation.” He had, supposedly, posted content from the upcoming found-footage movie Sleepy Hollow Gridiron, based on Washington Irving’s classic tale. Variety published an article on the upcoming film, noting sadly that certain climactic scenes had been pirated and posted on the internet. Later, someone broke into Corbin’s home while he attended the Patriots Park memorial service; his computer disappeared, and the footage with it. Others reported similar bizarre break-ins, deletions, erasures, service denials, and a baffling lack of interest from the media.

  The town’s helpless frustration began to build up. The community felt itself under siege, its plight unacknowledged. They were children screaming in the night, ignored by parents, left to wrestle their fears alone.

  Tragedies are supposed to bring little towns together, knit them tighter. In some ways, the massacre did that. By nightfall on the day after the massacre, the hillside below the high school had become a flower shop, a spectacle of vibrant color and teddy bears and memorial wreaths, a defiant rebuke to the hulks of burned vehicles, the yellow police tape, and the memories of horror. Security chased away the gawkers, but little knots of people stood on the sidewalk below the school, holding hands, singing songs, and wiping tears.

  Yet as witnesses hesitantly opened up about what they’d seen, a bitter divide opened among the population. Those who hadn’t witnessed the massacre were torn between trusting these witness accounts or dismissing them. Those who didn’t know, who hadn’t seen, rejected the tale of the massacre as an outlandish insult to their intelligence. Even the many homecoming videos were greeted with skepticism. People refused to even look at them, claiming squeamishness. Some bought the Variety explanation. But they really just… didn’t want to know.

  “Really. The Headless Horseman killed those people? How stupid do you think I am?”

  Barbara Frank sat across the breakfast table listening to her husband John babble about “walls of living vines” and “monsters” who threw “flaming football helmets.” John even claimed to have seen a girl flying away from the scene. “Flying. Up in the sky.” It was ridiculous. What do you do when your dad or wife or son claims to have seen the town spook swinging a hatchet at the football game? Barbara checked their insurance policy to make sure they had sufficient mental health coverage. The Franks tried to hide their arguments from their two kids, Mary and Abigail, but those girls knew. They saw. No matter how many times they heard “Everything’s fine. We’re good. Everything’s under control,” they knew that shit was going down. The Frank family descended into name-calling, sullen silence, and angry resentment. Barbara and John still slept in the same bed, but they faced opposite walls, back to back. Barbara kept thinking “liar.” John kept thinking “idiot.” They fell asleep that way, two heads on two pillows, severed by the Headless Horseman.

  Maybe this tension between believers and skeptics was the reason why the village clamor focused so much on the Horsemen football team and the players’ part in the murders. That was the one thing everyone could agree on—the one part of the story that didn’t require anybody to believe in ghosts. The Sleepy Hollow Boys had gone nuts, they said. The boys had passed around some controlled substance at halftime. Something that made them all go apeshit. That at least made sense.

  Deep down, people knew there was a lot more to the event than that. What about the boulder? And the barricade of vines? But it was easier to dismiss the inexplicable parts and go after those helpless boys, to blitz and tackle them and pile on. Far easier than to
believe in monsters. Easier, and more comfortable.

  David Martinez kept the Sleepy Hollow Boys under lock and key at the police station—without bail. For the first twenty-four hours, most were still in their grass- and gore-stained uniforms.

  Quarterback Cody McBride wasn’t considered a suspect, since he’d been a victim himself and was lying comatose in Phelps Memorial Hospital. The girls of the Wolfpack cheerleading squad went to visit him. They left a mound of ribboned chocolate boxes, arranged on the bedside table around his red velvet crown. Jenny Bale lingered and brushed his red hair. She’d developed an unrequited crush early in the school year but had never before been close enough to touch her ginger hero.

  Under questioning, the entire team stuck to their story about ghosts and blacking out. They claimed not to remember what they’d done. Martinez thought the story was bullshit and told them so, but he admired them for sticking together the way they did. His officers collected phones from the crowd, to study the collected videos, but just as their investigation had begun in earnest, a team from Washington arrived and confiscated them all. That pissed Martinez off, but what could he do?

  Jimmy Puleo’s parents demanded murder charges be brought against the boys, as did Coach Konat’s sister and many others. A busload of Ossining next-of-kin camped out at the police station, threatening violence if the Horsemen weren’t prosecuted as adults. Only one of the boys was over eighteen though, and while Jake Santelli was arraigned on multiple charges of first-degree murder, the rest would be tried as juveniles. Martinez made that happen. He had a soft spot for these boys, who’d so often carried water while Eddie won trophies for them.

  The rider on the horse was the only perp still at large. Martinez vowed to keep searching for the last attacker—the hatchet-swinging ringleader. He kept a photo of Eddie on his desk—a suntanned and baby-oiled Speedo pose from his son’s first amateur bodybuilding competition—to remind him of why he put in the overtime. He looked at the photo occasionally while preparing his profile on the Horseman Killer, the spider at the center of this web. He was looking for a Caucasian male with a gunshot wound to the stomach, over six feet tall, muscular, strong, and vicious. “Count on me, baby boy,” Martinez whispered to the flexing Eddie. “Daddy’s going to find the bastard.”