Wed., Oct. 4, 2006
Kate woke up thinking about a corpse.
The image should have been faded like an old photograph wearing around the edges. But instead it felt fresh, more real than yesterday, as vivid as a minute ago.
There was a buzzing sound. She had to clear her head with some effort (she could still clearly see the hand lying awkwardly off the bed—the flesh was pink but it was cold to the touch) and realize it was just the alarm clock.
Her hand reached out and fumbled over buttons until the noise stopped.
She took a dim account of her surroundings and tried to let the dream go. Of course, it wasn’t really a dream at all. It was a memory, a related but fundamentally different beast.
It felt stuffy in the room. Kate got up and walked to the sliding glass door. She opened it and felt a breeze blow past. She walked out onto the balcony of the Hotel Leesburg and was treated to a partial view of the town. Zoning laws did not permit any tall buildings within the city limits, so the view was a poor one.
Still, she breathed in the crisp fall air and took in the orange color of the leaves. It might have been beautiful, but she barely noticed.
Why is it always the same? The image of walking across the ground floor of her childhood home, so real she could feel the carpet beneath her toes. In the dream, she knows what is happening above her but cannot stop. She’s stuck on repeat, a character in an old home movie doomed to do the same thing again and again.
But the dream (or the memory, it didn’t matter anymore) could not explain why she was here—why she had come back. Kate stared down the street and felt her hands grip the cold rusty railing. What was she doing here?
She could hear the chirping of birds, with one long mournful call breaking through the morning air. It was the only answer she received.
Would you know it if you went crazy? There was supposed to be a catch—you can’t be crazy if you wonder if you are insane. But it didn’t feel like a blanket exemption. What happens if you can look at your own behavior, evaluate it coldly in the light of day, recognize it for utter lunacy, but can’t stop it?
There was no reason for her to have left Ohio, a suitcase thrown in her trunk, and return here. Not a good one anyway. Did she expect an answer, or healing, or…
She let the thought drift off. Compulsion. What she felt was a compulsion, an obsession, and she hadn’t been able to stand it anymore.
Kate turned and walked back inside. She sat on the bed and put her head in her hands. Before she could even begin to be depressed, the familiar anger took over, the feeling growing quickly inside her. Why? It was a question that echoed in her head every second of every day. Why had this happened to her?
She stood back up again and walked to the bathroom to take a shower. As she turned on the water, she tried to block out her own thoughts. There were no answers inside her head. She had to trust the instinct—the compulsion—that brought her back here. She hoped some answers were out there somewhere.
It was not until after she toweled off that she saw it. She had just begun to brush her teeth and absentmindedly looked in the mirror. When she looked up, she saw a word written in the mirror. It had been drawn in careful strokes as if the writer had taken their time. Kate was so surprised, she stumbled back through the bathroom door.
“Sanheim,” it said.
For a moment, Kate almost screamed. But when she opened her mouth, no sound came out. Instead, when she blinked, the message was gone. All she saw was fog on the mirror.
She shook her head. She was going crazy. It was as simple as that.
One way or another, this had to stop.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Free edition, with exclusive excerpt from A Soul to Steal) Page 5
