A portrait of the Van Brunt family commanded the far wall. Hermanus was a square-faced button-nosed man in a powdered wig. Brom stood next to him, handsome and burly. Katrina was a real beauty, a blonde with green eyes, pearl earrings, and vast expectations. She held Dylan in her lap, no more than three years old, dressed in blue velvet and lace. The Quarry Prince. Agathe sat in a high-backed chair. Her expression was haughty, defiant, with veiled malevolence. She held a blotch of mold in her lap. It had grown and had spread to cover the bodies of the entire family.
Jason backed away. His hand brushed the key of a spinet and a sinister bass note cracked the silence. It echoed distantly, endlessly, as if from a chamber somewhere beyond the wall. Jason struck another key, listening for the response, the haunted antiphony. He followed those answering notes. They called to him from behind Agathe. He held up one hand and sensed a faint breath of cold air whispering from between the wall tiles and the portrait. He gripped the frame and pushed the Van Brunt family aside, revealing an archway and a passage.
The chamber beyond the arch was vast, the ceiling high and domed. Jason could barely see the far side.
Her pantry.
The floor was slightly lower than the parlor. He stepped down into the space, trying to get his bearings. To his left rose the bright sound of running water, like a blade on a grinding wheel. A channel ran along that side. Water flowed from a wide pipe, about three feet in diameter, splashed through the room and out through a similar pipe on the opposite side. There were… things… hanging above the water. Swinging… chains. Garlands of chains. And the body of a man. No. A cage shaped like a man. A cage of flat metal straps. The flashlight beam found a rat. It shrieked, ran up the leg of the metal man, across his chest, his face, up the chain, and disappeared into a chink in the masonry.
Jason’s breath caught in his chest. He wanted to run, to scream, but he had to look. He had to know. Alongside the channel stood a rectangular metal table. As he approached, the mirror-bright surface scattered the flashlight beam, giving him a glimpse of manacles set into the wall beyond. On the table lay bone saws and axes, long-handled hooks, something bile-colored in a Mason jar.
Jason began to tremble. The flashlight shook and he held it with both hands. He had to get out.
(GET OUT! GET OUT! GET OUT!)
He had to get out of this place. But he couldn’t move. He couldn’t turn. Because something was behind him. He felt eyes on his back. Many eyes, as if he were an actor facing upstage and the audience sat behind, watching with rapt attention. He clenched his teeth, breathed in an out rapidly, as through a straw, and turned…
The eyes were the eyes of skulls. Pyramids of them, stacked like cairns. Shelves of them, cheekbone-to-cheekbone. An altar of skulls, made from an ornate fireplace. Seven skulls grinned on the mantle from behind glass domes, seven skulls of particular significance. Their eyes followed Jason…
We see you.
We’re watching you.
We’re dead.
“I know you’re dead,” he whispered.
Some were long dead. Delicate eggshell skulls of white chalk. These were toothless and most had lost their lower jaws. One stared at Jason from a single socket, its other side shattered so that his light played where the brain used to sit. Other skulls were in better condition, fierce skulls with bright white teeth. Yet even these bore the occasional fatal wound or lightning-bolt crack. Some were not skulls at all but heads. Heads wrapped in mummified skin, like scarecrows in burlap. Some still possessed lips and noses and wore splotches of dark blood, splashes of candle wax, their mouths sewn shut or drooling open, exposing toothless corncob jaws. One had long white hair and no features at all, just a mask of green rot. All bore small metal labels, affixed to their foreheads with fine screws or threaded through their eye sockets to dangle from a silver chain. Jason didn’t want to get close enough to read those tags.
Come, boy, whispered the skulls. We won’t bite.
He didn’t trust them, though. He expected those faces to fly at him with hungry mouths wide. But they just stared… and stared… and stared, mutely, as his curiosity grew. He played his flashlight beam over the seven skulls. The first of them read:
VREDRYK PHILIPSE
Here lay the Lord of Philipsburg Manor. The old Dutch father himself. The patriarch. This, then, was the skull that Dylan stole from beneath the altar of the Old Dutch Church. How old was it? At least three hundred years had passed since he breathed on earth, and half of them he’d spent in this awful place. In the dark.
Jason moved on to the second skull:
BALTUS VAN TASSEL
Jason’s chest tightened. So here lay the skull of Katrina’s father, old Baltus of the Legend, the host of Ichabod’s party. This was the severed head that Dylan had found in the pumpkin field. The head that Katrina had discovered in her mother-in-law’s quarters, on the day she threw herself into the quarry.
Jason turned to the third skull and tears came into his eyes.
KATRINA VAN TASSEL
So Agathe had disinterred her own daughter-in-law, too. She must have done the work herself. Dylan would never have exhumed his own mother. A strand of golden hair clung to the skull. He pictured the beautiful woman of the painting. Her green eyes sat there… in those sockets…
Jason wiped his cheek. He had to get them out. Get these skulls out of this horrible place, get them back into the ground. Oh, Agathe. You mad bitch. Why did you do this? Why?
He searched for Brom but remembered that the trickster was in his bone box, under the hills of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Brom had outlived his mother, as had Dylan. Who were these other skulls?
LUC FONTAINE
That name rang a bell but he couldn’t remember where he’d heard it. The next two skulls sat beneath glass too obscured by dust. Jason wasn’t about to lift the domes on these. He wanted to leave. There had to be a way out. His flashlight batteries wouldn’t last forever.
He casually glanced at the label on the seventh skull:
CRANE
He blinked, gathered the wet fabric of his shirt, and rubbed the dust from the glass. The engraving on the copper label was deep, the letters unmistakable:
WILLIAM CRANE
It was a skull of high cheekbones and deep sockets. A shock of brittle hair clung to its forehead. The hair might have been auburn once. It hung over the eyes.
How dare she? How dare Agathe steal my ancestor’s skull? Where had she found it? What had she done to it? Had she gone to Bridgeport to dig it up? This was Ichabod’s father. Had she been trying to bewitch it? How horrible that a good man—the Hero of Gory Brook—would end up like this. Jason ran his thumb across the dome, as if caressing the skull’s brow.
“Hello, William. Guess who I am.”
Touch it…
The thought came involuntarily, as if it had not been Jason’s thought at all but a suggestion whispered by the neighbor skulls. The idea revolted him. He stepped back.
Go on… Touch it. Don’t you want to know? Don’t you want to see? See through his eyes?
No, he thought, but his right hand had already passed the flashlight into his left.
“No,” he said aloud, but he had already lifted the dome and set it aside.
“No,” he cried, pulling away.
“Yes,” whispered William Crane, and Jason’s palm closed on his ancestor’s skull…
Jason whips his horse, damning the animal and wishing it would find some speed. Something looms behind him. A swarm of shadows, a tidal wave, a murderer with a knife. Something large and oppressive is in pursuit and Jason’s blood courses through his body, urging him to flee, flee, flee! The hairs on his neck have risen. His fingers clench the reins. A black forest whips past, reaching for him with spindly limbs. He bounces in the saddle, teeth clacking, elbows flapping like wings. He can see a bridge ahead. He has to make the bridge. He has to make the bridge.
His horse thunders up the slope and its hooves hit the wood. But Jason doesn’t cross. He
wrenches the reins and turns the horse to face his pursuer.
A figure on horseback gallops out of the gloom, his black cape billowing behind. The man rides a magnificent ebony steed.
Mitternacht…
Jason draws his pistol and shoots the animal. It rears, throws the rider, thrashes, convulses, and falls.
The horse falls on the helpless body of its master, across the man’s legs. Bones snap and the man screams. He is pinned from the thighs down. He thrashes in ice water. His weeping legs lay anchored on shore, higher than his body. He is helpless, and drowning. He begs silently for mercy, for rescue.
Jason can feel himself smile.
This will be fun.
He climbs down and ties the horse’s reins to the rail of the bridge. He takes his time strolling to the waters edge. The man in the water isn’t going anywhere. The man in the water is pinned by the fallen horse, choking, half-swallowed by death already. He is a good-looking man. Swarthy and olive-skinned with fierce eyes and a full head of jet-black hair. Even in moonlight Jason can see that this is the type of man that women swoon for.
All the more reason.
Jason draws the hatchet from his hip.
No. No. This isn’t happening.
He weighs the hatchet in his hand, savoring the moment, tasting it like raw meat in his mouth. His cheeks feel flushed. His heart is pounding. He is a mad thing consumed by bloodlust.
“You’re through, Hessian!” Jason shouts.
The drowning soldier reaches, his eyes pleading. Jason puts his weight behind the blade. He cuts the fingers from that beseeching hand. He watches the nubs spin into the water. He grins. Yes. Do it. Enjoy the killing. No one will know. No one will see.
The man raises his forearm to ward away the blows. Jason strikes it, feels his blade notch the bone, wrenches the hatchet, raises it high. He feels a surge of pleasure. His shoulders are trembling. A thread of drool runs down his chin. He hacks into the man’s belly, so fiercely that he almost falls into the water himself. Again. And again. Hacking and hacking and hacking. And again. The man thrashes. Jason strikes his stomach, his groin, his hip, his arm. He can’t control the bloodlust, the enjoyment. The thrill of dealing death. It’s ecstatic, orgiastic, sacramental.
Jason aims for the throat. The Adam’s Apple.
He strikes it.
The man’s head lurches forward. It spins in the water, going all the way ’round. The face tips on its side and the current catches it. Jason leaps the man’s body, strides into the water up to his knees, and snatches the head by the long braid in back, reeling it in like a pumpkin on a vine. He holds it by the ears and raises it to moonlight. The enemy is still in there, behind the eyes, his light going out. The man is not just handsome. His face is one of utter perfection. The face of a Greek God. Jason hates that face. He squeezes the skull as if to crush it. His hands shake. He screams, flecks of spittle striking the eyes of the severed head. He screams so that the dying soul can hear the words.
“I have held the bridge! I have held the bridge!”
Jason raises the head high in one hand, as a trophy, and throws it like a flaming pumpkin into the Pocantico River.
Jason ripped his palm from William’s skull, his gorge rising, bending over, squeezing his eyes shut, pinching back a surge of acid. Oh, he was going to be sick. He sank to one knee, leaning against the fireplace, pressing his fist against the stone. He stared at the puddle of light on the floor. He had dropped his flashlight.
He had known this. He had suspected it, at least, for months. He hadn’t wanted to believe it. He hadn’t wanted it to be true.
William Crane was the Monster.
Jason hadn’t been dreaming as William in the Nightmare, no. Not as the supposed Hero of Gory Brook. Whatever William—as sole survivor—might have claimed afterwards, it was his side who did the ambushing, not the Hessians. And William was no hero that night. William was a murderer.
He had chopped that wounded drowning man to pieces—it had been—a war crime—a secret act of cruelty performed on a defenseless enemy. And William had… had enjoyed it. Enjoyed it as a serial killer might, with an almost… sexual… pleasure.
Jason stared at the floor, his heartbeat fluttering like a moth throwing itself at a light bulb.
Jason hadn’t been dreaming as William at all these past months.
He had been dreaming as William’s victim.
He had been dreaming… as the Horseman.
The Horseman is showing me… the night he lost his head…
…sending the message that I’ll die the same way:
Sie sterben an der Brücke.
The details of the Nightmare came roaring back. The battles, the sense of strength and power, the black horse Mitternacht—a German name, of course—German for midnight. The Hessian coats of blue wool…
British General Howe had sent the Horseman and his fellows on a mission into the hills. William Crane and his patriots had ambushed them, firing from the roof of Mother Hulda’s hovel. Jason had seen the Horseman’s friends fall—the Horseman had shown him Joey’s death and Kate’s—so that he would feel the same anguish, the same loss. The Horseman had seen his friends die at the Battle of Gory Brook—had pursued William Crane and—
—and had discovered the naked woman wringing her clothes on the rock. Jason recognized her now. He recognized her from the painting in the parlor. From the painting in the Van Brunt tomb… The naked young woman in his Nightmare, the woman who had offered herself to the Horseman, that had been…
…Agathe.
Young Agathe had been there, on that Halloween night in seventeen seventy-six. She saw what happened. She saw what William Crane did. She watched it unfold. She knew the truth. She had retrieved the Horseman’s head afterwards, had bewitched it somehow.
And the map? Taken from the Horseman’s body?
She had bewitched the head of the Horseman. And all the rest had followed…
The Horseman rises, headless, and rides. He serves the Van Brunt Family. And Agathe helps him in return… to achieve his revenge. That’s why the Horseman wants to kill the Cranes. All of them. That’s his motive. That’s his justice—
—and… and I can’t blame him!
Jason’s eyes trailed upward—to an inscription cut in the stone above the altar of skulls:
The Sins of the Father shall be Visited upon the Sons
Even unto the Seventh Generation
The seventh generation…
How many generations of Cranes had been born since William? Once more Jason pictured the grave-rubbings strung like carnival banners on the night of the Proposal, the night he’d read Brom’s letter and had said “yes” to it all. How many children of William had there been? Ichabod begat Absalom who begat Jesse who begat Jack who begat Adam who begat Andrew who begat…
Jason.
I’m number seven. I’m the seventh generation.
And William’s sins shall be visited upon me…
Jason’s fingers trailed to the sensitive stripe of skin at his throat. He rose to his feet unsteadily and something else caught his eye—an object on the mantle a few feet away. It was the hatchet. The hatchet he’d seen in the Horseman’s hand so many times, the hatchet that had nicked Jason’s neck in the Old Burying Ground. He had never seen it up close before. A crude hand had carved letters into the handle. The inscription read Wm. Crane.
The Horseman carried his ancestor’s hatchet—had always carried it.
But… how had it come to be here?
Jason froze, staring at the blade uncomprehendingly, every nerve screaming with alarm… The blade of the hatchet was… red… with fresh blood…
“Hey, Ichabod.”
Jason whirled and pointed his flashlight…
…into the smiling face of Eddie Martinez.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
“Demons”
Jason tried to say Eddie’s name but nothing came out. Eddie took a step closer. Jason backed away, into the wall of skulls
.
“You’re all wet, buddy,” Eddie said, his voice calm and kind and reverberating around the room. “You okay?”
“Wh—what are you doing down here?”
Eddie shrugged. “Just taking a walk.”
“A walk?”
“Nice night for a walk.” Eddie took out a pack of cigarettes. “Want one?”
Jason shook his head, just trying to hold the flashlight still. Eddie lit a cigarette for himself. His face was a little thinner. He needed a shave and had cut his cheek. He wore jeans and a dirty red t-shirt that read:
SLEEPY HOLLOW HORSEMEN
Follow the Hollow!
…with a logo of guess-who.
The tip of Eddie’s cigarette glowed, reflecting in his eyes, three red points in the dark.
Sleepy Hollow: Bridge of Bones Page 55
