Slowly, he moved into the library. “Hello?”
Reaching into his pocket, he fumbled for his cell phone. He took it out, pushed the button on top—and nothing happened. He winced, remembering that he’d intended to stick it in the charger an hour ago, and then never did.
There was a phone on the main desk. Just about thirty feet away. All he had to do was get to that and call 911, because there was no way Ray and Diana would just go quiet like this.
That was when he realized that he couldn’t even hear the squawk of either cop’s radio, which had been a pretty constant noise the past day. He’d gotten so used to it, he didn’t notice it anymore, but now it was conspicuous by its absence. And Diana had only told him to come upstairs a few seconds before. What could have happened to her in so short a time?
That he had about half a dozen answers to his rhetorical question off the top of his head did not make him feel any safer, or any less exposed as he slowly made his way to his desk.
He reached his desk, and started to grab for the phone when he saw the bodies.
Prior to tonight, Al would have said that the experience of seeing his father with a huge hole in his chest—and then later seeing him walking around despite still having the selfsame hole—would have inured him to seeing dead bodies.
He was incredibly wrong.
Corbin had told him he didn’t want to see what the demon did to Uncle Charlie, and he was finally starting to get what the sheriff had been talking about. Because lying in the center aisle between the bookcases were two torsos, four arms, four legs, and two heads.
The body parts were strewn haphazardly about the aisle, but the heads of Officers Ray Drosopoulos and Diana Han were positioned so that their dead eyes and open bloody mouths were staring right at the desk.
Al was all set to bend over and throw up when he felt a very long, very cold piece of metal impale him in the back.
From behind him, a voice said, “Sorry, but I’m afraid I need your blood.”
WHEN CRANE ENTERED the Whitcombe-Sears Library, his nose was immediately assaulted by an all-too-familiar smell.
It was one that often invaded his nostrils on the battlefield, and had done so again most recently at the Cortlandt Museum.
The smell of death.
At first, he hadn’t encountered it much. Initially, his time both as a redcoat and as part of the Continental Army was mercifully free of the appallingly high body counts that some of his fellows had dealt with.
But then he found the settlement outside Albany that Serilda had destroyed. The sheer number of bodies was overwhelming, and the stench was just awful. Over the years, he would encounter death more times than he could count—including his own—and he had yet to wholly get used to it.
Were he lucky, he never would.
Now he found himself confronted with another charnel house, this in the passageway between rows of bookcases. He found another massacre very much like the one in the Tarrytown museum. This time it appeared to be two of Irving’s subordinates in the local constabulary.
Then he heard a moan from behind the desk, which was located at the far end of the space—where the altar would have been when this structure had served as a house of worship.
Gingerly moving past the torn-apart bodies of the two officers, he worked his way back to find a man with receding gray and white hair, lying on the floor behind the desk in an ever-increasing pool of blood.
“Damn.” Crane ran to him and tried to see how bad it was.
“Call … help …”
Crane cursed himself for a fool, and immediately fumbled for his cell phone. He recalled that via the simple expedient of dialing the number nine followed by one twice, he could summon police, fire brigade, and physicians, all at the same time.
Two of those three were needed now.
“Nine-one-one, please state your emergency.”
“I’m at the Whitcombe-Sears Library in Sleepy Hollow—there are two murdered constables, and the proprietor of the library has been badly wounded. He has lost considerable amounts of blood.”
“All right, sir, stay there, please. Emergency medical technicians and the police are on their way.”
“Thank you very kindly, madam.”
“Crane …”
Looking over in surprise at the prone form next to him, Crane absently dropped the phone and said, “You have the advantage of me, sir, though I assume you’re Albert Whitcombe-Sears.”
Whitcombe-Sears nodded. “I—I have something that—that belongs to you.…”
“I—I don’t—”
“Downstairs … Storage room … On top of one of the crates, there’s anoth—another Congressional Cross.… It’s—it’s yours.”
Crane’s eyes went wide. “What?”
“Your—your cross … My—my family had it, since no one—no one could find any—any heirs to give it—it to.…”
“I will retrieve it shortly, sir. Please, do save your breath. The ambulance will arrive shortly, and—”
Then Whitcombe-Sears grabbed Crane’s right arm with an iron grip formed by his left hand. After the initial grab, though, the man’s strength weakened.
“They will try—try to resurrect Serilda with the blood of—blood of a descendant of one of the—the recipients of—of the cross.…”
Crane frowned. “I thought Washington was able to cast away death without any blood being used.”
“Blood—strengthens the spell … Connection to—to recipients stronger with time … Said they needed my blood when they stabbed me, so coven using—using my blood to strengthen their spell … You—you must cast the counterspell with—with one cross and the blood of its recipient.…” He managed to lift his right arm and point to the main desk. “There’s a—a grimoire on the desk.… Found it when I was—I was researching Mercier. Take it—it has the counterspell.…” His left hand’s grip on Crane’s arm strengthened, and Whitcombe-Sears tried to sit up. “Only you can do it! No one else!”
And then Albert Whitcombe-Sears coughed once and slumped to the floor. His left hand’s grip completely loosened on Crane’s arm.
The man was dead.
“Requiescat in pace, Mr. Whitcombe-Sears,” Crane whispered. Then he clambered to his feet, cursing himself for not arriving sooner.
For a moment, he just stared at the body of the man whose ancestor was a trusted comrade. Though Knox led the expedition, Whitcombe’s contribution was incalculable, and the cannon would never have reached Boston without him. Crane shuddered to think how the war would have proceeded had they not taken Boston in the spring of 1776.
Crane imagined that his friend would have been proud to see what a good man his descendant was. And been as outraged as Crane was now at the manner of his death.
Then he lifted his head, a new smell overlaying the miasma of death that permeated the converted church.
It was, he realized, smoke.
Looking down the aisle of the library, he saw that one of the bookcases was alight. Only moments later, two more bookcases were on fire, and Crane knew he no longer had much time. Wooden bookcases filled with paper books would be nothing more than fuel for an ever-mounting fire.
Only then did he hear the weak voice over his cell phone, which was still on the floor. “Sir? Are you still there?”
He snagged the phone. “Yes, and I’m afraid you’ll need to send the fire brigade as well. Someone has set the library alight!”
“The ambulance is moments away, sir—I’m summoning the Sleepy Hollow Fire Department now.”
“My thanks, madam. Now if you will forgive me, I have a critical errand to run.”
Pocketing the phone in his coat and grabbing the grimoire that Whitcombe-Sears had indicated, he ran to the back room where Miss Jenny had said the exhibits were.
Not at all unexpectedly, the case with the Congressional Cross that had been issued to Caleb Whitcombe was opened, the cross itself gone.
Turning, he tucked the grimoire inside his shirt
to protect it from the smoke and fire and to keep his hands free. The leather binding rubbed uncomfortably against his skin as he dashed to the staircase leading downward. He hoped the storage room that Whitcombe-Sears mentioned was easy to find.
It was, and it didn’t take him long to spy a small item wrapped in cloth. Grabbing for it eagerly, Crane unwrapped the cloth to find a cross that looked just like the one in Ticonderoga and the ones he saw photographs of on the computing machine.
For a moment, he just stared at it. He recalled receiving notification of his receipt of the Congressional Cross. It was, in fact, right after the very meeting of the Sons of Liberty that he and van Brunt had attended—the same meeting Katrina had shown him in a vision. A messenger had arrived at the small inn on Gold Street in New York where the meeting had taken place.
“Excuse me,” the man had said. He had been covered in grime, and had smelled of salt water, indicating to Crane that he had come to Manhattan within the last few hours by boat or ferry. “Do I have the pleasure of addressing Mr. Willett of New York?”
“You do,” Willett had said in reply.
The messenger had then turned to Crane and van Brunt. “And might you two gentlemen be, or have knowledge of, Mr. Crane of Oxford and Mr. van Brunt, also of New York?”
“We are those gentlemen,” van Brunt had said in reply.
“Excellent. I have come from the Congress in Philadelphia with instructions to find you three. I thought fortune had favored me when I was told that you two sirs”—he had looked at Crane and van Brunt—“were scheduled to attend a Sons of Liberty meeting to be led by you, sir.” He had then looked at Willett.
“Fortune has indeed favored you,” Willett had said. “What news from the Congress?”
“They have appointed Mr. Washington of Virginia as the commanding general of the army.”
Willett had nodded. “An excellent choice.”
Crane, however, had frowned. His switching sides at the urging of van Brunt’s fiancée Katrina van Tassel was relatively recent. “I do not know the man.”
“He is,” van Brunt had said, “a gentleman of the highest order, and a great leader. He could command men to walk into fire, and all they’d ask is if they should leave their boots on. The Congress has chosen well.”
The messenger had gone on. “At Mr. Washington’s—pardon, at General Washington’s request, the Congress has also awarded ten men with the Congressional Cross, in honor of great achievement in the attempt to gain liberty for the colonies. Three of those ten men are from New York, and it is my privilege to provide you each with official notification of your honors.”
At that point, the man had reached into the pouch that had been slung across his shoulder, and presented each of them with a rolled-up scroll secured with the wax seal of the Continental Congress.
Crane had broken the seal and unfurled his scroll. With a small smile, he had said, “You described this as a ‘cross,’ did you not?” He had held the scroll up for the messenger to inspect. “I was unaware that crosses were made of parchment.”
Chuckling, the messenger had said, “The Congress has commissioned a French silversmith known to General Washington to fashion the crosses. Upon their completion, they will be delivered to you. God willing, we will have at last resolved our conflict with the Crown by then.”
“Let us hope,” Willett had said.
Now, almost 239 years later, Crane finally held the cross in his hand. And based on what Whitcombe-Sears had said, his holding this cross that had been earmarked for him was, as Katrina had indicated by her urgent request for him to find it, the only way to stop Serilda from once again rising.
A roar from upstairs reminded him that he would not be preventing anything if he did not remove himself from the premises posthaste.
He felt a blast of heat as he mounted the staircase, and winced when he entered the main section of the library and saw that most of the bookcases were consumed by massive flames.
There were many things that Ichabod Crane believed in that had been proven false over the last few subjective years. When he enlisted in the Regular Army, he believed that the colonists were upstarts who needed to be taught a lesson. When he interrogated the prisoner Arthur Bernard under orders from Colonel Tarleton, he believed that daemons and monsters were the stuff of superstitious legend that had no place in an enlightened society—a belief shattered when Tarleton revealed himself to be such a daemon right after he murdered Bernard. When the Horseman’s broad axe mortally wounded Crane, he believed that he was dead.
He also believed that his wife was not a witch and that he and Katrina had no children.
All those beliefs were shattered in due course, and so many more had been demolished since his unexpected resurrection that he scarcely knew why he chose to believe in anything.
But one thing he had held on to was his scholar’s certainty that the one thing that separated humanity from the beasts of the field was the accumulation of knowledge.
And so to see so much knowledge go up in flames was the latest in a series of heartbreaking occurrences. He had been a history professor before his patriotism got the better of him and he left Oxford to enlist, thus setting him inexorably on the path that led to him standing in a burning building almost three centuries after his birth.
The sound of the Klaxons used by police and fire vehicles broke him out of his reverie. He looked around, trying in vain to ascertain a way out of the library. He faced a wall of flame that served as an effective barricade to the front entrance. Even the aisle was alight, the mutilated remains of the two officers now also burning.
Recalling that there was a metal door visible at the far end of the corridor that also adjoined the staircase and the exhibit hall, Crane went back the way he came.
But just as he approached the large doorway, the massive wooden door that was propped open suddenly whirled around and slammed shut.
Another of Crane’s beliefs that had been destroyed was the surety that doors did not close without a human hand or a mechanism acting upon it.
An unearthly voice echoed over the flames and the ever-louder Klaxons. You will not be permitted to escape, Ichabod Crane. Like the fool who ran this library, your time is over.
Defiantly, Crane looked up, shaking a fist in the air. “My time has been ‘over’ on many occasions, yet I am still here! I have survived many battles on this plane and the next! I have imprisoned Death! Do not imagine, then, that I am helpless before your sorcery!”
Even as he bellowed, a portion of the balcony at the front end of the library started to visibly buckle, its collapse imminent.
Turning, and trying to ignore the tickle in his throat, Crane grabbed for the metal pull-handle on the wooden door that had been magically shut, then pulled his hand away quickly. It was white-hot to the touch. Crane wasn’t sure if the heat came from the fire or the eldritch machinations of Serilda’s follower, and it ultimately didn’t matter.
The Klaxons had steadied in their volume, meaning they were as close as they could be. Distantly, Crane could make out the sounds of water rushing, and he assumed that the fire brigade were beginning their work.
However, the tickle in his throat was building to a full-on cough. Glancing around, he noticed that, while most of the accoutrements of the structure’s former function as a church had been removed, the lectern was still present. It was a simple wooden podium. A quick examination revealed that it was in two parts, with a short upper portion that latched on to the much longer lower portion. Crane assumed the top part was there to allow for taller ministers, and its ability to be removed to accommodate the shorter ones.
Either way, it was the best weapon Crane had available. As he unlatched the top portion, Crane was extremely grateful that this hadn’t been a Catholic house of worship. The lecterns in those churches tended toward the ornate, and taking off a piece of that while in a burning building would likely have been impossible.
The door that had slammed looked as though it
was made of oak, so Crane didn’t even bother trying that. Instead, he slowly worked his way along the side wall, keeping his eyes firmly on the roaring flames, and periodically pausing to cough so violently, he felt it in his ribs, until he reached a window.
Again, he was grateful that this place wasn’t Catholic originally. Crane would have hated to have damaged a stained glass window.
Hefting the lectern portion over his head, he then swung the large block of wood around his body and threw it at the window, throwing himself to the floor as he did so.
The glass shattered over his head, though he barely heard that noise over the flames, the Klaxons, and the water, which, he hoped, was at least tamping down the flames on some part of the structure. As soon as the lectern went through the window, the flames were drawn to the outside. Crane felt the heat on his head and hair.
His first night in the twenty-first century, Crane had found himself, following Sheriff Corbin’s murder, surrounded by lights of many colors that flickered and awful Klaxons, and dozens of men—and women, which had surprised him at the time—in uniform. The assault on his senses was overwhelming, and it was the most frightening experience of Crane’s life. Given what he had seen during the war, that was not a light claim, but a true one, nonetheless.
Tonight, as he stumbled toward Chestnut Street after climbing out of the window that he’d broken, that selfsame sight of vehicles belonging to the police and the fire brigade, the Klaxons, and the people in uniform was the most welcoming sight he could imagine.
Even more welcome was the voice that cried out, “Crane!”
More coughs spasmed Crane’s body, preventing him from answering Lieutenant Mills directly, but she came to him and guided him the rest of the way toward a third type of vehicle that he hadn’t noticed at first: an ambulance.
As she led him over, Crane, still coughing, reached into the space between his shirt and his chest and pulled out Whitcombe-Sears’s grimoire. “Guard this,” he managed to get out between coughs.
“You got it,” Mills said, trusting him unconditionally. Grateful, Crane allowed himself to be put in the hands of one of the medical technicians.
Sleepy Hollow: Children of the Revolution Page 13
