Sleepy Hollow: Rise Headless and Ride

by Richard Gleaves

  He rose at the factory, and by the time he was twenty he had his own apartment and a good living. He told himself the streets were behind him forever. He married Jessica Bridge, a sweet girl who sold popcorn at the movie theater, and before their first anniversary Joseph Dylan Van Brunt came and completed his father’s world.

  Hadewych had come to identify with Dylan, by then. He sympathized with the son of Brom who’d lost everything. Sometimes he would park across the street from 417 Gory Brook and sit in the car, staring at the place. He even began to save his pay, putting cash aside for his dream of buying back the old house that Dylan had lost. He would save his pennies, he would buy the Gory Brook house, and then he would leave it to his son so that the place would never leave the Van Brunt family again.

  He lived scrupulously and honestly, obeying every lesson he’d learned from his mother:

  Don’t lie. Don’t steal. Work hard. Lazybones sleep outside.

  No shortcuts.

  But, just before his twenty-seventh birthday, General Motors closed the Tarrytown plant, laying off four thousand, including Hadewych, in the first wave of firings. He found no other work. Too many locals were in the labor pool at once. He broke Mother’s no-freebie rule and took New York State unemployment, but the benefits ran out. So did Jessica. She fell out of love with him and in love with another man. She left, not even challenging him for custody of Zef. She and her new husband would want their own family. Early that fall, Hadewych spent the last of the Gory Brook savings to buy Zef his school clothes.

  Zef didn’t understand what had happened. He missed his mother. He complained that they never went fishing anymore at the Tarrytown lighthouse; his lighthouse. He didn’t understand that the factory had closed, the gates locked forever. He became demanding and whiny. One day Hadewych slapped him, harder than his mother had ever done.

  “Grow up,” he said.

  Zef’s tears came, and the sight of them broke Hadewych’s heart.

  Are there no shortcuts? Other people got around the system. Why be so damned upright? What has the system ever done for you but promised you everything then taken it away?

  Mother was wrong.

  The time for being a sucker is past.

  He’d needed cash, of course, or he’d have no seed money.

  He took the damn documents to be appraised. The rare books dealer he approached was intrigued but insisted they be translated. Hadewych traveled all the way to Albany to find a professor who knew the four-hundred-year-old language of the New World Dutch.

  But weeks afterward the professor had accused Hadewych of perpetrating a hoax and had ordered him to take the pages and leave. And Hadewych didn’t sell any of the documents; not once he’d read them.

  Two in particular fired his imagination. The first, a long letter from Dylan to his son Cornelius, written from Andersonville prison in Georgia. No one but Hadewych had read that account. The second letter he’d shared with Valerie and the others. Mostly shared. That letter had been written by Brom himself.

  “My dear Dylan,” it began. “I have buried what you seek. You will not recover it.”

  Well, Hadewych had thought, those desperate years ago, we’ll just see about that.

  That was the Halloween he had found Valerie. He had been standing, like this, in front of the tomb. And he had heard her screams.

  Hadewych spun in frustration. Where were McCaffrey, and the old woman, and the boy Jason? Where was Zef to witness this? Hadewych stomped the crowbar on the ground. Didn’t they know what this moment meant to him? No. None of the others knew anything at all. A Van Brunt family secret is not to be shared lightly.

  They would come.

  Patience.

  The Treasure drew near, now. The ultimate shortcut. It would be his, his alone. Only he knew what it could do. He would get everything he deserved. He would restore his ancient family, for the sake of his son and his son’s descendants. That was his destiny, and he was entitled to it.

  “We are the Van Brunts,” he muttered, “and we were here first.”

  He lit a cigarette.

  #

  Jason discovered Hadewych sitting on the stump above the tomb.

  “Where the hell have you been?” snarled Hadewych. He whirled and flipped his cigarette butt at Jason’s head, but it hit Joey in the arm. “You’re late.”

  Joey waved away sparks and stomped on the cigarette. He picked up the butt and pocketed it.

  “You,” Joey replied patiently, “were supposed to meet us at the administration building, sir.” (The “sir” sounded suspiciously like “jackass.”)

  Jason pushed Eliza’s wheelchair up the hill.

  “We’re here now,” Eliza called, waving to Hadewych. “And it’s not their fault, it’s mine. It was too steep for my knees and we had some business to do first.”

  “Oh?” said Hadewych, sounding as sullen as a teenager who’d waited two hours for a pizza delivery. He picked up his crowbar and climbed down to them. Vernon McCaffrey wheezed up the hill, wiping his forehead.

  “Absalom,” he explained. “The lady had to find a plot.”

  “Someplace else to put him,” said Jason.

  “And did you?” asked Hadewych.

  “We had one available,” Joey said. “In the Palmyra section.”

  Jason frowned, wishing they had been able to buy a plot up in Bridgeport, some piece of land in the cemetery above Chopsey Hill Drive. He’d rather reinter Absalom there, alongside beloved wife Annabel, mother of Jesse. The plot that they’d purchased wasn’t very pretty, just a chunk of grass in the newer graveyard across the river.

  “It’ll be just fine,” Eliza said. “You’ll get the commission, won’t you, Honey?”

  Joey shrugged. “Some of it.”

  “Great. I was so worried about that,” muttered Hadewych, forgetting to turn on the charm. “Can we please begin?”

  “Yes sir,” said Joey. (This time the “sir” sounded like “jerkwad.”)

  “I’ve got a truck waitin’,” McCaffrey said, “and two Mex’cans to do any liftin’. No offense, kid.”

  “None taken.” Joey rolled his eyes.

  “Who’s in charge of this exhumation?” McCaffrey said.

  “I am,” said Hadewych.

  “I am,” said Joey, simultaneously.

  “You’re kidding.” Hadewych fixed Joey with a look that was decidedly unamused.

  “Is there a problem?” Joey raised a brutal-looking chain cutter to his shoulder and stared Hadewych down.

  Hadewych smiled, and raised the crowbar to his own shoulder. “Not at all. Why?”

  “Whoa! I’m rolling, Honey,” Eliza cried.

  She was, indeed, beginning to roll backwards down the hill. Jason grabbed the handles of the wheelchair.

  “Where do you want to sit?” he asked.

  “Find me some shade. Charley, bad girl!”

  The dog had squatted above a flat marker with the name WELLS. McCaffrey clapped.

  “Dog! Git off that!”

  Charley’s water spread down the side of the stone. Jason parked Eliza’s wheelchair in the shade of a maple tree and engaged the brake. Eliza zipped her jacket and opened her crazy-quilt purse.

  “Go to it,” she cackled. “I’m fine here with my iPod. Let me know when it’s coming so I can take my pictures.”

  “I’ll keep an eye on her,” said McCaffrey. He’d become a little fond of the old lady. He put a hand on the back of her chair. Charley growled until he removed it, then curled up between them.

  “You’re not coming in?” said Jason.

  “He can’t,” Joey explained. “I need the two of you first. If you gentlemen will follow me…”

  Joey descended between the outflung arms of the hill. He turned at the gate of the tomb, one foot up on the crumbling stone. When Jason and Hadewych joined him he handed each one a flashlight and ascended the step so that his head rose higher than theirs.

  “This is how we do it,” he said. “The exhumation or
der is for one body and one body only, yes?”

  Jason and Hadewych nodded.

  “So we don’t want to be touching any box but that one.”

  “They’re all Van Brunts,” snapped Hadewych. “I can exhume one of them any time I want.”

  “If you’ve done the paperwork,” said Joey. “But you haven’t. I’ve got one order and that’s for Absalom Crane. Okay? Please don’t touch anybody else.”

  “Heaven forbid,” said Hadewych, rolling his eyes.

  “Seriously,” said Joey. “My cutters, my rules.”

  Jason straightened a little. Joey sounded very adult. (Or he would have, if his voice hadn’t cracked.) Jason could almost smell the hostility between Joey and Hadewych. Jason remembered Joey’s story of having caught Hadewych trying to break in with his own pair of cutters. Was he making Hadewych wait just to punish him for that? No, this was more likely about Zef. If Hadewych hated Joey for standing in his way, Joey hated Hadewych for standing in his, though Hadewych had no clue about that.

  “Jason,” said Joey, “since it’s your ancestor, you need to give the word.”

  “What word?”

  “Just say, ‘This is the box I want.’”

  “I don’t know which box I want.”

  Hadewych ascended one step so that he towered over Joey. “We’re going to have to examine each box until we find the inscription. Is that acceptable, or do I need to speak with your father?”

  Joey sighed.

  “Just keep the disturbance to a minimum, guys.”

  He raised the chain cutters, clamping the links between the two blades. He pushed the handles together and the blades bit the iron, but the chain wouldn’t break.

  “Little help?” Joey said.

  Hadewych made a noise of disgust.

  The boys took one handle and Hadewych gripped the other. They leaned toward each other, bracing their feet. Jason and Hadewych were almost cheek to cheek as they strained together. Jason could smell his bad cologne. The blades snapped through. His shoulder collided with Hadewych’s. The chain rattled to the ground.

  They drew back. The iron gate of the Van Brunt family tomb floated inward – effortlessly, silently, without the slightest touch.

  As if someone had oiled the hinges every day, thought Jason. Oiled them with… with…

  He pushed his hair out of his eyes. What had made him imagine that? Gross!

  He had thought:

  …with the rendered fat of unbaptized infants…

  He chuckled at his own macabre imagination. Gruesome thoughts for gruesome deeds, he supposed.

  “It’s all yours,” said Joey.

  No one budged. They each tested their flashlights. Even Hadewych looked rattled. He took a deep breath, stepped aside and extended his arm over the threshold.

  “After you, Mister Crane.”

  18 THE VAN BRUNT TOMB

  The tomb was larger than he had imagined. Two chambers lay on either side of the entrance, protruding back under the hill the way they came, just as the cellar under Jason’s house extended beneath his front yard. The walls were grey stone, identical to the stone of Jason’s cellar and the stone of the weirs and ventilation shafts along the Old Croton Aqueduct Trail. In fact…

  “Is this the same stone as my house?” whispered Jason.

  A flashlight beam blinded him.

  “Van Brunt Quarry stone,” Hadewych said, reverently. He ran a hand along the mortar-less seams.

  Something clanked behind them and they jumped. Joey had closed the gate.

  “Sorry,” said Joey.

  Jason felt small. He could feel the pressure from the hill above them. He lowered his flashlight. The slabs beneath his feet were each the length and width of a man lying on his back; blue striations snaked across them like veins beneath embalmed marble skin.

  Stop letting your imagination run, thought Jason.

  “Okay, which one?” said Joey.

  Jason wished his friend would speak more quietly, try harder not to wake the tomb’s occupants. Joey had no doubt been in many such places, but his nonchalance clashed with Jason’s own skittery gooseflesh.

  They panned with their spotlights, searching the stage for their leading man. About seventeen stone boxes filled the space. A few, Jason noticed, were of grey stone that matched the walls: Van Brunt stone. Others were made of marble like the floor, but most were of pink or brown sandstone, softer, with eroded corners.

  “Start on the left,” said Hadewych. “I’ll look over here.”

  Jason swept dust away with the back of his hand, grateful that he had remembered to wear gloves.

  ANNA VAN BRUNT

  He moved to the next.

  JOHANNES VAN BRUNT

  He sighed, moved down the row.

  Hadewych brushed an inscription.

  Joey sneezed. “Try not to kick so much up?” he said.

  “You can wait outside if you want,” said Hadewych.

  Jason brushed another lid. “Here,” he said.

  “You found it?” said Hadewych, his beam dipping as he joined Jason.

  “No, but…”

  Jason’s flashlight lit the inscription. Hadewych’s light doubled it.

  ABRAHAM VAN BRUNT

  “I found Brom,” whispered Jason.

  The sarcophagus of Brom Bones had been carved from Van Brunt Quarry stone, but the lid had broken halfway through at some point – about where Brom’s belt would be – and the lower half had been replaced with inferior brown sandstone. A corner of this slab had fallen in at the joining, revealing the Brom Bones bones: two sturdy arm bones wrapped in a grey sleeve that had once been cloth or skin.

  Jason recoiled, but Hadewych became softly prayerful.

  “Hello Brom, you old trickster,” whispered Hadewych, his head bowed. “Guess who I am.”

  Jason’s eyes shot to Hadewych’s face. Over the man’s shoulder, the bust of Agathe Van Brunt leered from its niche in the wall, looking both menacing and protective.

  They went to work on the rest. After a dozen more inscriptions had been dusted away, revealing name after name, they still had not found Absalom Crane.

  “You’re sure of what the letter says?” said Jason.

  “Of course I am,” snapped Hadewych, “Look again. I’ll start on the left this time.”

  They switched sides and checked each other’s work. No boxes were without inscription, and none bore the name Crane. Hermanus Van Brunt, Brom’s father, slept in the far corner. Brom slept in the middle. The others were just random Van Brunts and one empty Affannato – important to themselves, but not to their visitors. Their dates of death became more recent, ending somewhere around 1950.

  “Where is he?” bellowed Hadewych. His voice rang the stone.

  “Calm down,” said Joey.

  Hadewych let loose a stream of profanities. His flashlight had died. He hurled it into a corner and grabbed Jason’s. Then he checked every stone a third time, becoming ever more agitated as he did so. He shone his light onto the face of the bust in its niche.

  “Agathe!” he demanded. “Where is he?”

  Hadewych picked up the crowbar.

  “Mister Van Brunt!” said Joey.

  “He’s got to be here,” Hadewych said, and put the edge of the crowbar under the lip of the first stone lid.

  “Hadewych,” Jason said.

  “You can’t do that,” said Joey.

  “Stop me.”

  Hadewych pried the lid from the first box. It flipped to the floor, exposing a skeleton wearing a blue rag of a dress, jaw open to scream. A prowler had surprised her in bed. Jason reached for his arm but Hadewych recoiled. Jason retreated into the shadows, holding Joey back with a palm on the boy’s chest.

  Hadewych cracked the lids and ripped the roofs from above the heads of his ancestors. The room became crowded with Van Brunts – with men, women, children, with curled infant bodies, skulls trailing wisps of white and grey, with the eggcups of eye sockets; it became a meeting hall, wi
th a whole choir of gumless mouths singing together as tiny black bugs scattered in fear. Brom’s skull clutched its teeth in outrage, tight as a man about to whip a child with a belt. He had a bird’s nest tucked under his chin.

  All the boxes stood lidless. Hadewych panted in the middle of the room. He sagged, exhausted, holding the crowbar limply.

  Jason heard a long low whistle. McCaffrey stood at the door of the tomb.

  “Well, ain’t you made a pig mess,” said McCaffrey.

  “Time to leave,” said Joey. Jason could feel the outrage pouring from his friend.

  Hadewych shook his head. “Not till I – ”

  “Leave now or I’m calling the cops.”

  Hadewych grabbed Joey by the collar. “Good. Call the cops.”

  “Hadewych,” said McCaffrey, reaching for the man.

  “Call the cops – and you people can explain – ”

  “Let’s go,” McCaffrey said.

  “ – explain – why you’ve stolen him!”

  “Out, now,” McCaffrey bellowed.

  Hadewych tossed Joey to the floor. He raised the crowbar. Jason leapt between them. Joey threw up an arm. Hadewych swung the crowbar like a baseball bat and brought it down across the face of Agathe Van Brunt.

  The side of the bust exploded with plaster.

  “Where is he?” Hadewych said.

  He struck the bust again, backhanded.

  “Where?” he said, losing steam.

  He swung again, missed, and cut an arcing white groove in the wall.

  He went limp, dropped the crowbar and ran from the tomb like a batter headed to first base.

  The dust settled.

  “Christ on a cracker,” said McCaffrey. “That could’a gone better.” He shook his head and left.

  Charley barked outside. Somewhere down the hill, Eliza shushed the dog and chirped, “Was it in there? Let me get my camera. What’s wrong, Hadewych? Where are you going?”

  Jason extended a hand to Joey, who pulled himself to his feet.

  “I guess we know where Zef gets his temper,” said Joey.

  “You okay?”

  “Until my dad sees this,” said Joey.