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

by Gleaves, Richard

  He c-couldn’t… He…

  He broke down, at the foot of Agathe’s altar, under the gaze of those seven heads under their glass domes, the heads of Vredryk Philipse and Katrina and Baltus and William Crane…

  “I’m just a kid,” he repeated, his chest heaving, his entire body lurching, wracked with long-pent-up emotion.

  Something behind him wailed and gasped. It was the pipe he’d cleared, guzzling the last of the water from the room. He felt a prickle and looked down. Below the cuffs of his rolled blue jeans, each bare calf wriggled with leeches.

  And those leeches… broke Jason Crane at last.

  He fell onto the puddled floor, screaming hysterically, scraping the things from his skin, hurling them away. His legs ran with thin pink blood. He scrambled to his feet and ran from the pantry, throwing aside the moldy painting of the Van Brunt family, breaking it from its hidden track. He staggered into Agathe’s parlor, shouting profanities like a wild thing. He picked up a delicate teacup and threw it at the wall, Then another, then another. He obliterated the teapot. He kicked the table over and battered his way from the room, careening down another side tunnel of red brick. He knew where he was. He found the stone steps and ran up to the iron door, the door in the Gory Brook cellar, the door he’d entered on his first descent into hell.

  But the iron door wouldn’t budge. He beat his fists against it, screaming. His blows made hardly a sound, just muffled wet thumps, growing weaker and weaker as he spent his energy and gave in to tears. He sank onto the cold stone landing and pressed his glowing hands to his face, as if using his Gift to heal his own poor exhausted brain, to push some light into his eye sockets and drive the darkness away.

  Eliza didn’t come. Not like before, when he needed strength in the open grave. Jason had to rescue himself this time. If he could even find himself. He didn’t know where he was anymore. He’d misplaced Jason Crane, down here in the cellars.

  Jason? Where are you? Don’t be afraid. Come back. It’ll be okay, kid. It’ll be okay somehow.

  He searched for Jason, mentally scanning the aqueduct, the pipe, the flooded pantry. Jason wasn’t here. Jason was elsewhere. He searched for himself down endless empty high school hallways, through the rooms of Gory Brook. He peeked into the camper of the RV, up and down the streets of Sleepy Hollow. He searched for himself in Valhalla Cemetery, atop Kensico Dam, at Eliza’s graveside. But Jason Crane didn’t find himself in any of those places.

  He found himself, finally, in the last place he might have expected: sitting in a pew at the Old Dutch Church.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked himself, slipping into another pew just behind.

  “Seemed like the place to be,” the other Jason replied.

  Jason waved a hand toward the altar. “But you don’t believe in any of this. It’s all just old stories and myths. What would Carl Sagan say?’”

  “‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

  “Exactly. This church is the one place you don’t belong, kid.”

  “Maybe.”

  “So, what? You’re escaping into religion now?”

  “No, thank God.” He gestured to the northeast window—the Halloween window. “I can’t make that leap.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Oh, you know, I came for the music.”

  A choir had begun singing, up in the choir loft. Ichabod stood among them, sharing a psalm book with Katrina. His voice was flat and nasal, but the other singers were good, like the carolers last Christmas Eve, singing in the new-fallen snow at sunset. Jason didn’t know the tune, and he couldn’t make out the words.

  “Pretty,” he said to himself.

  “It is. I can see why people come here. What they come for. This church is a little fortress against evil. It’s holy ground.”

  “I don’t believe in holy ground.”

  “Yes you do. Your parents’ grave is holy ground, isn’t it? And so is Eliza’s. The RV is holy ground. The patch of carpet in Joey’s room where you and your best friend sit and play video games… that’s holy ground. The dance floor where you first held Kate, that’s holy ground. And so is anyplace else you fill up with love.”

  The choir raised their voices. Ichabod’s and Katrina’s fingers touched, and they blushed.

  “That’s what I figure churches are for,” the other Jason whispered, his voice low and reverent. “That’s the thing about them that makes sense to me, even if I can’t deal with the rest. Even if I think Noah is a silly story, or if I refuse to believe that an innocent baby can be born with original sin. Even if I’m grounded in reason and this earth, I still need to remind myself, sometimes, that life is worth living. I still need a place to go, to press my fingers to an altar and rededicate myself to life. We all need altars. Maybe it’s not in a church. Maybe it’s just a poster of Superman hanging on the wall, or a photograph of your dad, or the rocking chair where Mama taught you to read. We all make private altars of our own. We all need to recharge sometimes. Because living is hard, like anything else worth doing well.”

  Tallow candles in golden fixtures lit themselves above. Jason looked around. His friends, his parents, and his heroes filled the pews. His mom and dad wore summer white. Eliza wore her pilot’s jacket. Joey and Zef and Kate passed hymnals. Carl Sagan took two and passed one down to Howard Carter. Luke Skywalker shared with Captain Kirk. Stephen Hawking looked on with Spider-Man. Dianne Crane stood first and began to sing. Jason’s dad rose and joined in. Thomas Paine and Wolverine joined in harmony, supplementing the baritones. Zef sang bass, Kate sang soprano, Eliza sang tenor, and Joey made up a countermelody all his own.

  The choir of Jason’s Church didn’t sing about God or heaven. They sang about the Apollo 11 launch and the taste of apples, they sang about good books and hot cocoa and hyperspace. They sang about bacon. They sang about the flutter of love and the laughter of accomplishment—about the tears we shed at the sight of grandeur, tears of longing, because life isn’t always like that… and we know it could be.

  When the music stopped, Jason’s parents and friends lost color and vanished. Jason sat alone with himself again. That felt natural, because that’s who we’re always left with, isn’t it? When the hymn of life is over, we’re left alone with our selves and the echo of the music we made.

  “Why?” Jason whispered, and the word was just a tiny puff of vapor that slipped from his lips and into the air. “Why did the singing end?”

  “It didn’t end,” the other Jason said. “You haven’t composed the rest yet.”

  Jason lowered his palms and wiped his cheeks. He closed his hands, grasping his light and holding onto it. He brought one hand to his heart as if to pledge allegiance, then let his arms fall to his sides.

  The hymn in his head began playing again, the hymn of good things and endless possibilities. It fortified him. Yes, there was evil down below. Yes, the sight of horrors was hard to bear. But any time you’re fighting evil, you’re in the presence of life.

  Never forget that life can be good.

  Because it has to be enough.

  It has to be.

  He rose and descended the stairs.

  Now back to work.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  “The Apology”

  Jason searched Agathe’s pantry for four hours, growing more frustrated with every object he read. He returned to the altar, reluctantly touching skull after skull, enduring vision after vision after vision. The skulls gave him glimpses of forgotten worlds—men with handlebar moustaches and women with cameo necklaces, wedding nights and fisticuffs and dinner conversations. But nothing else. No ancient horrors. No revelations. Just lives. Just people.

  The inscription above the altar hung before his eyes the whole time.

  The Sins of the Father shall be Visited upon the Sons

  Even unto the Seventh Generation

  He mulled the words as he worked. How could anybody believe in that kind of “justice”? All these year
s later, what did Jason Crane have to do with the Horseman’s murder, really? That was no “moral principle.” It was immoral, frankly, to hold somebody responsible for what their ancestors had done.

  If William was a serial killer, that doesn’t make Ichabod one. If Ichabod stole a pie from a windowsill, that wouldn’t make Absalom a pie-thief. If Absalom cheated on Annabel, that wouldn’t make Jesse an adulterer. Sins shouldn’t be visited on one generation of sons, let alone seven. Children don’t inherit a parent’s evil. Cycles of abuse can end. Monsters can beget saints, and saints, monsters…

  Evil is a choice.

  So why do people choose evil?

  He’d never understood it. Why would anybody want to be bad? What the hell did they get out of it? The very existence of such people scared him. The… inexplicability of their choices. What could possibly be worth the price of ruining your only life and becoming a twisted shit?

  The Persistence of Evil. That’s what his history teacher, Mr. Smolenski, had called it once.

  Jason strode up to the altar. He went to the end of the row, to the dust-obscured head of William Crane.

  “You chose evil, asshole. I didn’t. This is all on you. On you, not me.”

  He turned away, but the thing weighed heavily on his mind. He cursed himself, bunched up the end of his shirt, and wiped the dust, feeling weird, feeling like he was rubbing the lamp of a genie, inviting it to come out to visit. He still couldn’t see the head, so he lifted the dome briefly. His ancestor’s skull looked shriveled and sad. Jason shuddered and lowered the dome too fast. A crack ran through it and a piece fell away, revealing one eye socket. The gaze of his ancestor seemed to follow him everywhere he went, and he couldn’t work near the altar after that.

  He moved on to the parlor. The shards of the tea set gave him nothing. He accidentally restored the Van Brunt painting, and Agathe and her brood blazed with malicious color. He found no clues to the mystery of her death. In fact, he didn’t see much of Agathe at all. He saw flashes of bloody sawing when he read her surgical knives, and a pair of withered hands, twisting a key, when he read her hanging cage. That was it.

  He blamed his failures on fatigue. He needed to sleep, to regain his focus, and then resume the hunt. He searched out Eddie’s lair again, finding the aqueduct tunnel, passing beneath another sluice gate, and climbing up into the little space. The inner archway still hung with strips of plastic sheeting. Beyond was… the butcher’s back room. Jason considered climbing up the pipe to sleep in Zef’s bed just up above, to grab a shower and clean clothes, but the memory of severed heads and a skeletal horse stopped him. He wasn’t going back through there. No way. Eddie’s nasty little mattress would have to be good enough. He found Eddie’s clock radio, set the alarm, and laid his head down.

  He fell asleep quickly.

  And the ghost of William Crane came to watch him as he slept.

  “I couldn’t help it,” Ichabod’s father whispered, his voice low and husky. “I couldn’t help myself. Taking a life… feels… so… good…” He bent to Jason’s ear, his ghost-breath tickling the fine hairs. “It’s better than sex.”

  Jason turned in his sleep, exposing the talisman at his neck. William Crane darted away with a grimace and a hiss. The head of the Horseman whispered from within the backpack, “Ergeben… ergeben… ergeben…”

  William evaporated into the darkness. “Taking a life… feels… so… good… I couldn’t stop myself. It felt so good…”

  Frankie Valli screamed.

  Jason bolted upright, immediately awake but wildly disoriented. The song “Sherry” blared somewhere to his left. He searched the darkness for Eddie’s clock radio, desperate to kill the alarm. He got his hands around it but twisted the volume knob by mistake. The scream grew louder, like microphone feedback with lyrics. He panicked and threw the radio away. It clattered off the wall of Eddie’s lair and ricocheted toward the archway and aqueduct. The plug ripped free of its extension cord and the music cut dead in mid-chorus. The radio bounced through the arch, hit water, and splashed southward down the tunnel.

  Jason’s nerves wouldn’t stop jangling. He hadn’t expected the alarm to be so loud, but he’d had to set it. Time was running out, and left to his own devices, he might have slept until spring. He felt like he’d hardly slept at all. He shivered, pushing the nightmare away. Had it been a nightmare? So damn creepy. He fished for a box of protein bars and sat cross-legged on the mattress, stuffing his face.

  The ghost-melancholy pervaded this entire underground world. How many dead were in Agathe’s pantry? How many roamed and wailed and shuffled through these tunnels? Jason checked to make sure he still had the talisman around his neck. He unzipped the backpack, took out the reliquary, and inspected the Horseman’s severed head. He’d never really looked at it before. He held the reliquary high and spoke to the head, man to man.

  “What do you want from the Cranes? Huh? I didn’t kill you, asshole. Okay? I didn’t kill you. But you killed Absalom. And my parents. So that’s three. Three of us to William’s one. That makes us more than even. So tell me. What do you want, huh? What. Do. You. Want?”

  Jason shook the reliquary violently, feeling vicious satisfaction as the head battered the glass.

  “What do you want!”

  The Horseman said nothing. He wobbled and stilled. Something dark that wasn’t blood dripped from a cut eyebrow.

  Jason shoved the reliquary into his backpack and zipped it away again. He couldn’t feel sorry for the Monster anymore. The Horseman was evil too, and if Jason saw a chance to end him once and for all, he intended to take it. Who gave a shit what the Horseman wanted, anyway? Screw him.

  Jason finished his breakfast and licked his fingers. He wished he hadn’t lost the clock. What the hell time was it? He’d better hurry. He struggled to his feet, dreading the work ahead, and heaved the backpack onto one shoulder. He braced himself for yet another ordeal, and walked to the exit archway. The red tunnel stretched endlessly right and left, splashing and churning. He wondered which way he should go—downstream to the pantry, or start looking elsewhere. Maybe Agathe had died in—

  His shadow lurched, and searing heat flared in the room behind him. On instinct, he dove headlong into the water. A fireball flew through the arch and struck the brick, breaking into tendrils, leaving a scorched place. Jason staggered to his feet, lost his footing in the slime, fell again, and flipped onto his back. He almost lost the backpack to the current, but he caught one strap and hugged the thing to his belly.

  Hadewych grinned down from the archway. He was bare-chested and barefoot, wearing only a pair of Zef’s maroon sweatpants. He rolled his eyes. “And here I thought I’d have to work for it.”

  “How the hell?”

  “I was sleeping in Zef’s room. I heard the music. Stupid, stupid, stupid, Jason! Thank you, though. Thank you for being such a complete idiot. Now give me the Treasure.”

  “Not going to happen.” Jason pushed against the current, trying to back away. Water crashed against his shoulders.

  “Give me the reliquary and I’ll let you live.”

  “No you won’t.”

  Hadewych waded gingerly into the water and set both hands ablaze. “Don’t make this difficult, son.”

  “I’m not your son! You want this? Take it!”

  Jason hurled the backpack down the tunnel. Hadewych twisted, scrabbling for it as it hurtled past. Jason darted to his feet, splashing up the tunnel, hoping to escape while Hadewych was distracted. He didn’t get ten feet before a fireball scorched his shoulder. He cried out and dove into the water again, batting away flames.

  Hadewych snatched up the backpack, unzipped it, and gave a satisfied nod. “You’re such a little thief.” He re-zipped the backpack, slung it over one shoulder, and bent over Jason. He snatched the talisman from around Jason’s neck. “I remember this thing. Valerie used to wear it. To keep away demons. Stupid bitch.”

  He closed a flaming fist around the owl medallion.

/>   Jason held his breath, hoping that Hadewych would scream and drop the talisman, like the villainous Nazi in Raiders of the Lost Ark, scorched by the headpiece of the Staff of Ra. But the amulet’s power to turn aside evil spirits did nothing against evil men. Silver metal spurted from between Hadewych’s knuckles and ran in rivulets down his arm as the talisman melted away. Hadewych flicked molten droplets from his fingertips, as if he’d touched something distasteful…

  … and the talisman was gone.

  “Well,” said Hadewych. “That’s that.”

  Jason’s heart sank. Without the talisman, he might never drive Agathe out of Kate again. He should have bargained the reliquary while he’d had the chance. Now he’d lost both.

  “So,” said Hadewych. “How may I serve Jason Crane? Medium rare? Well done?”

  “If you kill me, Jessica gets the money.”

  Hadewych looked startled, as if only now remembering the Pyncheon Legacy. “We’re so beyond that. Stand up.”

  Jason rose, chin high, determined to face death as bravely as he could.

  “Raise your hands,” said Hadewych, “and start walking.”

  “What are you going to—”

  “Do it.”

  Jason obeyed, and it was far worse to have Hadewych behind him. The fireball could come at any moment, without warning. Maybe that was the idea. Hadewych was such a coward. He could only kill you when your back was turned.

  “Walk,” Hadewych said.

  Jason looked over his shoulder. “You’re letting me go?”