Sleepy Hollow: Bridge of Bones

by Richard Gleaves

  A parade passed. A chorus of women sang of rushing rivers. A great host waved flags and cheered as a fountain of pure and clear water flared through the sky in firework-splashes of crystal droplets. Men spoke of a new age saying, “This water will improve our morals, moderate the passions, add riches and prosperity, temperance and sobriety, make hearts strong and so brave we may defy all foreign foes.” Drunkenness would be a thing of the past, they proclaimed. After all, only fools would continue to drink beer or cider or ale now that clean water was available. The civic leaders toasted their success with the Croton Highball, a mixture of lemonade and river water.

  Afterwards, father and I walked together. We stopped at the spot where he and I had discussed the aqueduct eleven years prior. Children played in the fountain there, splashing and cavorting.

  “Am I nothing, father?” I said, my voice a low growl at his back. “Is my work to receive no recognition today? You have drunk your fill. Am I to be left parched?”

  Brom turned and stared at me for a long time. He seized the back of my neck and pushed my head into the fountain. I struggled there, unable to escape. At the moment when I felt I would drown, he released me and I fell to my knees.

  “Have you drunk your fill?” said Brom. “If your work had been poor, you would not have been allowed to attend.” He tore the ribbon from my chest. “Pinned to your coat by a President and still not enough.” He threw the ribbon in the fountain, where it sank.

  I felt the fire rising in me, fire enough to raze the city, water or no. The skin of my hands felt hot and they blistered. I kept my Gift in check. “I am sorry, Father. I only wanted to hear that you were proud of me.”

  Brom wound his watch. “I was proud. Until six-thirty-nine on the dot.”

  He turned and strode away. I searched for my ribbon but it had been lost beneath the splashing feet of the children of New York.

  In the autumn, Agathe fell ill. As she reached her ninetieth year her vaunted vitality left her. She retreated for hours to her study at the top of the house, sitting in her wheelchair by the octagonal window and surveilling the town.

  “I have failed,” she said on a cool evening as we watched the sun set over the Hudson. “From this window I see nothing of the Van Brunts. I see only Cornelia.” She pointed to the manor house of Vredryk Philipse. A new wing of whitewashed boards and wide windows had been added to the old building, doubling its size. “Beekman Manor. And all the houses to be seen below my window are Beekmantown. I cannot even see the quarry from here.”

  “Cornelia is ruined,” said I. “She sells more land to the rabble every day. The mill brings her no income. She will die destitute while our quarry prospers. And you can see the Old Burying Ground. Our ghost rises from there and he gives us dominion over all the rest.”

  Her hand touched mine.

  “He is weakening. The new cemetery beyond the burying ground is weakening him. Another strong spirit may rise there, any day, and challenge his dominance.” She patted my hand. “Perhaps we shall be buried there. Perhaps we will challenge him.”

  “Father wants us all to join him in the family tomb.”

  She looked at me with grim determination. “And what if our heads are taken? What if we become slaves to some witch? Or servants of His? What retribution might our Horseman take upon us, should he dominate our spirits? I fear death, Dylan, as never before.”

  “If you could but tell me how the magic was done, how the ghost came to you, perhaps—”

  “No,” she said.

  “You will take your secrets to your grave? You have promised them to me. Someday has come. I expect my inheritance.”

  “I will live.”

  “For how long? You cannot hope to live forever.”

  “I will outlive her, at least.” She said the words with venom. “Cornelia is even older that I. I have the will to outlive her. However, you are right. My story is your inheritance. I will copy it out for you. All of it. When I am dead you may read it and choose your path.”

  “I want it now,” I said, anger rising.

  She sat up in her wheelchair, hand high. A ball of flame blossomed in her hand.

  “You cannot summon your own fire, can you?”

  I looked away. “It burns me.”

  “You feel guilt. You regret choosing me over your mother.”

  “No.”

  “I see your heart, Dylan.” The fireball vanished. I noticed with some astonishment that her skin was red and blistered. She hid the hand beneath her shawl. “You are a good boy. I wonder if my secrets would be a blessing or a burden. And I wonder, too, whether you can control your passions. You cannot kill too often, or else you may be found out. I will not lose what little name we still have.”

  “You promised me.”

  “I will begin a diary and record all I know of the Horseman and his origins. I will put a lock upon it so none but my heir may read it. It will be yours when I am dead.”

  She rose, uncertainly, and I followed her downstairs.

  “I must understand the magic more fully myself,” she said. “To see if it can be repeated. I have no wish to be slave to another witch when I die. I will need your help.”

  “Anything. What do you require?”

  “I will give you a list. I will require privacy and patience.” We descended to the cellar door. She turned and added, “and skulls.” Before I could respond she had stepped within, closed the door, and locked it.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  “Dylan’s Tale: Part Five”

  I shudder to recount the days that followed. My Agathe sent me forth to procure skulls for her study and bewitchment. No common skull would suffice. She sought only the skulls of the strong and powerful. Through clandestine arrangements with unsavory friends, I collected for her the skulls of two Van Cortlandt scions—an aunt and cousin of Cornelia herself. I brought the skull of Abraham Martling and Franklin Couenhoven, some of our earliest settlers. I broke into the crypt beneath the Old Dutch Church and fetched out the fragile skull of Vredryk Philipse himself. Agathe gazed at this skull with such awe and reverence. A tear even rolled down her cheek. She brushed it away, tucked the skull beneath her shawl, and I never saw it again.

  Cornelia died, finally, in 1847. The good woman’s funeral was attended by thousands. To Agathe’s disappointment, she was buried among her kinfolk on Van Corlandt land to the north. This made it impossible for me to collect Cornelia’s skull.

  The death of Agathe’s rival changed her. She became more thoughtful, more fearful, yet she also became subject to flashes of anger, the like of which I have never seen from man nor woman. She killed a servant girl, roasted her with a blast of flame for spilling the soup. I buried the girl’s body and others besides. I noted with some astonishment that Agathe’s hand was blistered afterwards. I began to see white patches on her arms. She hid them with long concealing sleeves and lace gloves.

  The death of Cornelia changed me as well. I became more demanding of Agathe. She had outlived her rival at last and might die herself any day. She might not complete the diary. She might not pass her knowledge on to me. I pressed her to hurry but she would not be rushed.

  She did bring me into her confidence. She asked that I help her build a container for the Horseman’s skull. It would be a reliquary of sorts. The idea amused her. Archbishop John Hughes had passed through Tarry-Town on his way to take the throne in New York, newly pronounced an Archdiocese. He dined with us at father’s townhouse and showered us with praise for the munificence we had displayed toward the poor Irish in the early days. He and father signed a contract to provide Van Brunt quarry stone for the new St. Patrick’s Cathedral to be built on Fifth Avenue in New York City. This was an enormous boon to us, as the quarry revenues had begun to decline.

  After dinner, Archbishop Hughes invited us to take a peek at the relics he was escorting to New York—relics to be placed beneath the new cathedral’s altar. He showed us two gilt reliquaries, gold with scarlet cushions, where slept a thigh bon
e and ankle bone of St. Patrick himself, he who drove the snakes from Ireland.

  “And there we were,” laughed Agathe, afterwards. “Good Dutch Protestants slavering over those bones like a pair of Catholic dogs.”

  So she set to work building a reliquary for her Horseman. She possessed a lantern that had once hung in the dormitory of the mills, where she had been a servant alongside the enslaved Africans. This became the body of the reliquary. The glass for it came from the original windows of the Old Dutch Church, keepsaked after the lightning strike and restoration. I know, also, what gold coins she used to gild the thing, though she never confirmed it to me. She melted the coins taken from the pockets of my mother.

  Oh, what a pair we were, Cornelius. On the last day of October 1849 we inaugurated our new creation. Agathe slipped the skull inside and closed the seal with wax. She said a few words under her breath that I could not understand.

  That night, for the first time, it was my hand that was cut. I marveled at how quickly the wound healed. My blood trickled into the lantern for the first time, and the inscription we had made lit with magical fire. Agathe smiled, she had not expected this.

  I whispered into the thing, “Rise headless and ride.”

  The glass shone with white flame. Agathe delighted at the effect of it. “So beautiful!” She prodded me to name a victim.

  “Not your father,” she said, and I was embarrassed that she knew my heart so well.

  I named Elise. Years before, she had taken advantage of my overwork to keelhaul another. I had often seen her parading her wealthy husband, flaunting her new diamonds as if she were royalty. I whispered her name into the Devil’s Lantern—

  —and the lantern whispered it back.

  Agathe and I were terrified. The thing had never spoken before. The new reliquary had produced some magical change that neither she nor I understood. The voice chilled our blood. I can still hear it:

  “Elise Van Wart! Elise Van Wart! Elise Van Wart.”

  She was beheaded that night by our dear Horseman, and is among the last to be buried in the Old Dutch Burying Ground. I saw the reliquary only once more after that and I never used it again, no matter what my father may have believed. I never again touched the thing, and I certainly never used it to murder Absalom Crane.

  In 1846, Washington Irving had returned from Spain with the intention of domiciling in Sleepy Hollow to the end of his days. Our Secretary of State Daniel Webster had nominated Irving to be Minister to Spain and President Tyler, another Irving crony, had obliged.

  When I first saw Irving upon his return I was astounded at the change in him. The self-effacing man of letters had been replaced with a living landmark, an intimate of kings. John Jacob Astor made Irving first chairman of the Astor Library. No longer content to pen tales of us poor Knickerbocker Dutch, nothing less than a five-volume biography of George Washington was good enough for Irving’s pen. He spoke often of the day when, as a child, the great general had laid his hands on him and namesaked him.

  Visitors flocked to his Sunnyside estate. The neighboring town of Dearman was rechristened for the “dear man” and became Irvington. When the railroad came and the tracks were laid right past his manor, the railroad line gave him the enormous sum of five thousand dollars to compensate him for the inconvenience. They had instructed all engineers never to blow their whistle and had put up special signals to remind them. In addition, Irving could walk to the tracks, wave a hand, and command the engine to take him aboard as a passenger from his own doorstep.

  I mention all this because Irving and my father became close friends in these years. It was their friendship that ruined all my hopes and ambitions.

  The two men loved to show each other off. I suppose if Mister Dickens could invite his own Ebenezer Scrooge to dinner and put him on display he might do so, and that Ebenezer might also bask in the reflected glory of his author friend. Irving and father became enamored of the idea of throwing a Halloween celebration at Sunnyside. Halloween had always been practiced in the Hollow, long before much of the rest of the country, due to the Scots influence in the early days of Philipse Manor and the legions of superstitious Irish who had settled here permanently after the aqueduct was completed. Gourd-carving and popcorn-stringing and apple-bobbing were practiced with enthusiasm. The young played devilish tricks, and many of the aforementioned outhouses were tipped by spooks on that haunted night. Young women played fortune-telling games and gazed into mirrors searching for the faces of their future husbands.

  I do not know if your mother played such games—if she saw me approaching—but I married her that summer of 1850. You may rely on her recollection of those events. I grow weary in my sickbed and I have much to tell you of greater importance.

  As 1850 was to be the thirtieth anniversary of Irving’s Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon in which the Legend first appeared and in which my family’s name was first published to the world, Irving and father decided to seek out and invite the living man Ichabod Crane to join us for our Halloween feast. Through various channels, we became aware that Crane had been a judge of the New York penny court but that he had removed himself to the town of Bridgeport, Connecticut where he domiciled in his retirement.

  In June, Father sent a note inviting the old scarecrow back to Sleepy Hollow. No word came in reply and Father’s hopes faded of seeing his old rival again. Agathe told me, privately, that she doubted if Crane would dare the ghost. I asked her to tell me the entire tale of what had occurred in those old days but the refrain of “someday” was all I received. She did inform me that her study of the skulls had produced marvelous results, that she knew now how to keep the Horseman strong, no matter how many should challenge his dominance. She spoke with excitement and glee of the discoveries she had made. I salivated with anticipation of my inheritance. I could taste it. I would control the Horseman soon. Agathe could not live forever. When I mastered the ghost, Father would be the first to die, and afterwards your mother and I would be the Quarry King and Queen and never again in my life would I stand in anyone else’s shadow.

  But Agathe disappeared.

  A terrible storm struck on the night of September second. The downpour was so heavy that the Croton Dam broke and was given an emergency patching. The day after the storm I went calling on Agathe, bringing her a bloody armful of wrapped packages from the butcher. She was nowhere to be found. Her servant said that she had gone down to her pantry the night before but no one had seen her since.

  I went to the cellar door in a panic but I did not know the puzzle lock. I ran to Father’s townhouse and found him in prayer.

  “Ask no questions,” Brom demanded.

  “But she could be in danger,” said I. “She could be trapped. The water from the storm might have—”

  My father roared at me. “What did I say to you? You shall ask no questions. Our Agathe is gone. She will not be found. You will obey me.”

  “And what of her estate?” My blood rose thick and hot in my chest. “I was promised certain bequests.”

  Brom frowned. “You mean this?” He threw aside a length of cloth. The reliquary lay beneath, shining gold. Brom threw the cloth over it again. He took a book from a drawer, a book in green leather. Agathe’s diary. “Or this?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I was promised both.” I reached for the diary but father locked it away. He turned from me and stood staring at the cross on his wall.

  “You knew what she was.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  He whirled. “Don’t lie to me, Son.” His eyes lit and I could see the old Brom there, the Brom of Legend who could chew horseshoes and spit nails.

  “You look for the truth?” I felt a dreadful impulse. I would reveal myself to him, as Agathe had revealed herself to Katrina. Father would be cursed and die. “I can do it too.” I raised my hand and a pillar of flame appeared there. My eyes met his and I held his gaze despite the agony of my hand. I would not feel guilt, I told myself, but I knew that I did. I
t is a terrible thing to curse one’s own father, in whose likeness and image we are each made.

  Brom laughed at me. He raised a palm over his head and it produced a flame of its own, as if he wielded a burning pumpkin. We glared at each other as the two fire-lights flickered in Father’s golden cross. Our skins blistered. The smell of cooking flesh filled the room. I turned aside first, extinguishing my flame, gritting my teeth against the agony. Father lowered his own hand and laughed. I shut my eyes and turned away. I knew that the wounds from the fire would heal, but my shame at losing our contest never would.

  “We are Van Brunts,” Brom said. “I have read her book.”

  “She promised it to me.”

  “It never existed.”

  “No, father—”

  He raised the diary. “Shall I burn it now?”

  “You can’t!”

  “You will obey me or I shall alter my will. Would you be doubly disinherited?”

  I wanted to fall upon him, to throttle him, to drag him to the ground and end his life. But I still feared him as ever. Feared and loved.

  “Whatever you wish, sir.”

  The old man put the book back in its drawer. He staggered a bit and I prayed that some brain stroke had come.

  “Leave,” he said. “Now.”

  I stepped out of the townhouse and onto shady Beekman Street. I screamed. I screamed until I had drawn a small crowd. I pushed though, rode by carriage to a disreputable tavern by the docks, and took a whore to bed, not returning to your mother for three more days.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  “Dylan’s Tale: Part Six”

  Father and I met the train on the morning of Halloween. We were in receipt of a card that read only:

  WILL ATTEND.

  NYRR 10a.m. 10/31.