by Irvine, Alex
From Gray:
The Epitaph
Here rests his head upon the lap of earth
A youth to fortune and to fame unknown.
Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth,
And Melancholy marked him for her own.
Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,
Heaven did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to Misery all he had, a tear,
He gained from Heaven (’twas all he wished) a friend.
No farther seek his merits to disclose,
Or draw his frailties from their dread abode,
(There they alike in trembling hope repose)
The bosom of his Father and his God.
[October 15]
I have learned a timely and welcome lesson yesterday and today: The past is ever present. The Sleepy Hollow I knew in 1781 is still here, hidden perhaps from those who know not how to look for it, but here nonetheless. Recent events have put me again in the company of men who see this past, men who exist in a mysterious network of whispers and secrets. I am speaking of the Freemasons, a most secretive brotherhood who know all too well the cost when good men fail to heed the dictates of their consciences. I was reminded of them a week or so hence when I overheard a conversation about capital punishment, and was struck by its rarity and by the vehemence of the opposition to the practice. The people of this age have little idea how dramatically the estimation of human life has been altered by the emergence of republican government. I can say this having been born in an age when young boys were still routinely hanged for stealing food, and less than a century removed from Britain’s last execution by drawing and quartering. In the colonies, shortly after my arrival, I witnessed not just acts of extreme brutality but a routine snuffing out of lives like so many candles before bed—the offhand execution of human beings innocent of any crime save for their desire to be free of oppression. It was on one such occasion that Colonel Tarleton, doubtless without intending to do so, effected that meeting from which the rest of my life has unspooled.
Arthur Bernard was a man of courage, a black man who envisioned the American colonies as a land where his people could breathe free—despite the sordid history of slavery on which the prosperity of the colonies was built—and a writer of lucidity and great influence. He wrote pseudonymously, as so many did then, knowing the British were watching the American pamphleteering presses and suppressing those they found objectionable. I knew of him (more accurately of his nom de plume, Cicero) through his connection to the thinkers arguing their visions of what a free America might be … and it was also those connections that made him a target for Tarleton. Bernard suffered at the hands of Tarleton’s brutes and only the resolute interference of a young Quaker woman (or so she presented herself) by the name of Katrina saved him further maltreatment. She was a marvelous young woman, courageous and utterly committed to the ideals of her sect (I write this meaning Quakerism, and realizing at the same time how it might be taken to refer to her less pious activities). She caught my eye from the beginning, and I believed I hers; and subsequent events were to prove this impression correct. After she attended to Arthur, I was placed in the untenable position of being forced to prove my loyalty to the Crown by executing him. I refused, and—
Oh. I remember. Or no, that is a foolish thing to write. I always remember. What I mean is that I now understand what I remember; I no longer cover it over with a palimpsest of explanations and rationalizations. For years I tried to convince myself that at the moment of Arthur Bernard’s death, I had not really seen the officer Tarleton assume a demonic aspect. For how could I have? There were no demons. In 1771, for me, there were no witches or undead Hessians, no demons or monsters, no adversaries but the flesh-and-blood men on the other side of the firing lines.
Now, having learned the truth—or at least part of it—regarding my reawakening, I know I did in fact see Tarleton’s true nature. It was my thinking mind that introduced the error, being unable to accept the reality of what it perceived.
To return to the line of thought that first brought the Freemasons to mind: Arthur Bernard’s last words to me were an instruction to find Katrina and speak to her the words Ordo ab Chao. This, it emerged, was the pass phrase that gained one access to the Freemasons; I quickly became acquainted with the known history of this august organization—as a network of professional men dedicated to the compass and square, or the advancement of civilized ideals. Now I am curious to learn more of the Freemasons’ other activities—for nothing, it seems, is as I believed it to be before. More important, Bernard’s request offered me the chance to make my future wife’s acquaintance. Her mysteries were a wonder to me then, and they remain so now; she was more than a nurse, more even than a witch whose magical powers served the highest of human ideals.
I believe Tarleton was the first demon I ever saw—though knowing the powers of disguise possessed by the infernal entities, I confess I cannot be certain. At the time I believed I had become aware of a great gift, to penetrate the disguises of demons walking in human form and know them for what they were. Perhaps I still possess it.
Demons masquerade as men, and every face seems to hide a secret. One makes decisions in this atmosphere, and the only choice is to do what is right, and let the consequences be what they will.
That, in short, is how I came to shift my allegiance from Crown to colony.
The Freemasons have something of a reputation in this time as a social club, save for among the conspiracy-minded, who view them as a secret society bent on the clandestine control of the world. I am a Freemason myself, and had until recently believed them to be men of goodwill who used their common connection to further goals they deemed beneficial to all humanity. If their methods demanded secrecy, so be it; and from that embrace of secrecy the wilder notions about the Freemasons have developed. Masons protect each other, and they do what they can to ensure the integrity of the brotherhood (not yet a sisterhood as well, at least not here; the Freemasons almost alone seem to have preserved themselves as a bastion of the masculine, for good or ill). Where the lovers of conspiracy misunderstand the Freemasons is in their idea that all Masons seek power. In fact they are quite rigorous about setting the well-being of humanity above the survival of any individual member—as I knew before and as I learned anew this past day.
The Freemasons are alive and well in Sleepy Hollow, and they learned of my connection with the Hessian. They abducted me, with no more force than was necessary, and argued quite reasonably that since I was linked by blood to the Hessian it was my responsibility to weaken the Hessian by ending my own life. This logic, cold as it seems, was unassailable. In the presence of Abigail, I drank the poison they proffered, knowing that this suicidal act—so contrary to my will and the traditions of my people and my religion—was for the best. What matters one man’s death, set against the survival of so many others who would thereby be spared the wrath of the Horsemen and their demonic legions?
I was saved, however, by a Sin Eater, a man named Henry Parish, bearer of a gift that for most of his life felt like a curse. It was he who severed the link between the Hessian and myself, and he who taught me an invaluable lesson. For the Sin Eater cannot simply take sins away; he can only assist in their absolution when the sinner has come to understand the true nature of the sin and atoned for it. My sins—and this is why I thought at such length of Arthur Bernard—included not acting quickly enough to aid good men in peril. Regret for those sins made me vulnerable to the connection with the Hessian, for regret on its own is a sin of another kind, a self-indulgence. Only when regret is partnered with forgiveness and resolve to go forth and sin no more, in the words of the Gospels, does it gain any redemptive power. So Henry Parish taught me, and when I understood this my blood separated from the Hessian’s. Then Parish could perform his strange inverted communion, sopping up some of the Hessian’s blood—bled from my own veins—with bread and eating it. He appeared to me as Arthur Bernard for a moment
, taking on the likeness of that resolute fighter for independence and teaching me that from regret and guilt must be fashioned a newly strengthened resolve.
That act also purged the poison from my body, saving my life and returning me to fitness for the battle against the Horseman and his allies. I have been on the point of death thrice now in these past several weeks (so it seems to me, though the first time my life was saved was more than two hundred years ago!)—surely greater forces than mortal will are at work. I am a Witness, and I see around me the measures people of good heart will take to further our cause. We shall prevail.
Sin Eaters. The practice is as ancient as the idea of sin, and I am well familiar with it from my studies of the history of the more backward regions of Britain. There the Sin Eater often lived severed from the life of his community, marked out by his dark gift. When death was near—or when a sinner had just passed on from this life—the Sin Eater was given a piece of bread and a bowl of beer. In consuming these, he ritually consumed the sins of the departed and sanctified the fleeing spirit. The success of the ritual was typically announced by a short speech: I once saw it recorded as I give easement and rest now to thee, dear man. Come not down the lanes or in our meadows. And for thy peace I pawn my own soul. Amen. Ritual words, which give comfort and ease in the way ritual is supposed to.
The custom survives on these shores as well. I saw the small cakes and loaves prepared at funerals among the Dutch, to be ritually eaten by the relatives of the deceased. (And by Dutch here I mean Germans, by the corruption of Deutsch to Dutch so common in the colonies.) To pawn one’s own soul—for whoever asks—this is a courage I cannot imagine possessing. Yet Henry Parish has it, and he is only the latest in a lineage of such brave lonely souls stretching back into the mists of prehistory.
Jennifer Mills, I learned, went in search of a Sin Eater on behalf of Sheriff Corbin. She traveled the world without success, visiting Africa and Japan. I envy this young woman her world travels. I saw Paris as a young man, and have rested my eyes on the finer prospects of Britain—I visited each of the thirteen colonies in the years before they banded together to form the nascent United States—yet set against the immensity of this world and the marvelous variety of its peoples, my travels seem like the first steps of a toddler proud to traverse the arm’s length from the kitchen chair to his father’s waiting embrace.
What other folkloric constructs await? Am I soon to encounter a wandering scapegoat, laden with the sins of this tribe and cast out into the concrete deserts? I hope to travel in this modern America, and perhaps to see its more mundane wonders as I fight the occult machinations behind the shiny surface. The West! No Englishman had gone farther than the great Mississippi, known as the Father of Waters, in my time. Now there are mighty cities on the Pacific coast, named by the Spaniards who laid their first stones: Los Angeles, San Francisco. The Rocky Mountains! The Grand Canyon! How I would love to see these fabled places.
These are plans for a future time. A time of peace. For now, it must suffice that I am free of the Hessian—and, presumably, he of me. Now either of us may die.
Whilst considering the Hessians and the Freemasons, the Radiant Heart and the Blood Moon—in short, the many secret soci-eties that have proliferated in Sleepy Hollow over the centuries—I had a curious idea. For we have seen as yet no action of a most clandestine club that Benjamin Franklin put me in mind of many years ago, and I might have expected them to be involved in events so portentous as those we have lately experienced. A maddening figure, Franklin. Bombastic and pompous, absentminded and arrogant—yet at the same time undeniably witty, fine company at supper, and a perspicacious analyst of the thorniest problems. Franklin was also an attendee of their meetings during the years he spent in London—years during which I was obligated to converse with him more than once.
This club was notorious in its time—and, in certain circles, remains so—for its alleged orgiastic Satanic practices. I never observed anything of the sort, although the club was certainly populated by its share of libertines. Franklin himself was no stranger to the pleasures of the flesh and senses, but he possessed the common sense and fundamental goodwill (I struggle here to avoid enumerating his vices and infuriating personal qualities) to avoid an irreversible descent into debauchery. His interest in this secret club was the product of the same wellspring of curiosity and investigative spirit that gave rise to his other inquiries, be they the nature of electricity or the best methods by which men and women might learn to govern themselves. Such, at least, I believe from my meetings with the man. He, like General Washington, understood that the grand experiment of the American colonies foreshadowed the birth of a new species of government, and that the relocation of power from aristocrats and kings to commoners was more than a political maneuver. It was a new age in history, a decisive break from the past. However, when new ages dawn, the supernatural powers take note, for each new epoch brings opportunity for them as well. During periods of upheaval, demons strike and the heavenly powers are on guard. Such a time began in the 1770s and continues now.
The Freemasons understand such times. In the 1770s, they refashioned themselves as a band of outlaws—today the word terrorist would be applied to them, as it is applied to anyone, it seems, whose actions are motivated by a disagreeable politics. This transformation was led and overseen by General Washington himself, and it was he who set the Freemasons of the colonies their task of collecting occult artifacts and other esoterica. Their power, even if poorly understood, was such that Washington put the highest priority on keeping them from the British. The ancient order, which had since its inception been deeply interested in lore and the knowledge of how things work—see their common emblem, the compass and square, by which great works are conceived, drawn, and erected—threw itself into these new missions with gusto. Ordo ab Chao—those words brought me into the Freemasons, and brought me eventually to General Washington himself. The belief in this creed is what turned me from a soldier of the Crown to a rebel filled with ideas about the rights of man, to borrow the clarion title of Thomas Paine’s influential pamphlet—and to Paine goes all the credit. A great man he was. I learned to respect and admire the Volume of Sacred Writings (which was General Washington’s Bible). I would not have become the man I am without the guidance of Freemasonry—and I say this knowing that men of the Masonic orders would kill me in a moment if they thought that act would further the commonweal.
[October 19]
I have just returned from a visit to what is known as an elementary school. As part of my “cover,” Abigail has suggested I perform “outreach”—in other words, pretend to be a professor and speak to schools. This little masquerade is designed to allay the suspicions of some of Abigail’s colleagues, who persist in viewing me as a suspect (“person of interest”—what a milquetoast phrase!) in the murders of not only Sheriff Corbin but everyone else who has run afoul of the Horseman and his minions.
The classrooms I visited are quite different from those in the schools I attended. They are brightly decorated, welcoming spaces, and the children are free within reason to move about and to speak. When I was eight years of age, we sat silently on benches and copied lessons, regurgitating them on command. I learned, oh yes, but it was only by some small miracle that I ever acquired any love of learning.
What a delight these modern schools turned out to be! The children were subject to many of the same errors and mythological understandings of their history that I noted on my first visit to the local historical society, but their eagerness and openness was a joy to me. I had continually to remind myself not to tell them too much of the truth—but is that not what all adults must consider in any conversation with a child too young to know of the world’s darker truths?
These are the souls I most resolutely fight for. They deserve a world absent the dire threat of Moloch, and I will give that to them. They are sticky and noisy and unruly, and I love them without reservation.
Further notes on Moloch. Known
to the ancients as a sun god—but not the life-giving sort akin to Ra. His were the sun’s powers to sap the strength of men and kill them when they could not shelter from it. He was known as “prince of the valley of tears,” after the location of his shrine in Tophet. The Greeks believed him an aspect of Cronus, who devoured his children—Moloch has power over time, perhaps? Is that another reason why he has taken an interest in me—my sojourn beyond the normal lifespan of a man? Medieval demonology held him to be especially pleased by the lamentations of mothers at the deaths of their children; it was also said that he was at his most powerful in autumn—the time when all things begin to die. Moloch steals children. He is always represented as having the head of a bull, or a bull calf.
I wonder, as I wander through this new age, what it might mean that demons are so much more easily encountered, their works so much more easily discerned, than those of angels. Does the tide of the battle between heaven and hell turn? Or have the angelic hosts chosen a path of action invisible to humans on Earth? If these first weeks reawakened from my long slumber have taught me nothing else, it is that one chooses either faith or despair. Because I have doubt, I am able to choose faith. The man who chooses despair rejects both doubt and faith.
Those around me—Abigail most prominently, but also Captain Irving, Jennifer, Henry Parish, even the Freemasons—they teach me. From them I choose to learn.
And now it has gotten quite late. One can only fight so much evil in one day. Before I sleep, I believe I will take another of those incredible hot showers. Abigail has suggested I might feel more at home in this time if I dressed as others do. This step I am not yet prepared to take. My skin is too accustomed to the touch of homespun and rough wool. I confess I look askance at the idea that so many of the garments now worn were created of materials called polyester and acrylic. These are apparently derived from plastic, which has become a noun in this time. I knew it previously only as an adjective describing an object without fixed shape or properties. The language goes on living, even when the speaker is magically asleep for two centuries and more.
