Headless By Scott Crowder Published by r[E]volution Press at Smashwords Contents copyright © 2012 Scott Crowder / r[E]volution Press All rights reserved. Any reproduction, sale, or commercial use of this book without express written permission of the author is strictly forbidden. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are inventions of one author or the other. Any resemblance to actual events or people, alive or dead, is entirely coincidental. Cover image was found on the internet and I make no claim of ownership to it. If it’s yours and you’d like it removed, please contact me at zombieapocalypse [at] earthlink [dot] net. Smashwords Edition License Notes This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work. # # Washington Irving, that icon of early American literature, has for a time now been revered as one of the greatest writers your foundling nation has yet produced. The characters he claims to have created, including the one and only Ichabod Crane, will undoubtedly live long after he has ceased to do so. And yet I must put it to you truly and in the least venomous vernacular available to me: Mr. Irving was a thief, a common brigand who stole no less than my entire life from me. History tells us that in 1809, Washington Irving invented the character of a crotchety old Dutch writer named Diedrich Knickerbocker, and that his most famous stories, including Rip van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, actually came from the pen of this fictional Knickerbocker. Difficult as it is to believe, I am Diedrich Knickerbocker, and while I am a writer and I am Dutch, I am neither fictional nor crotchety. What I am is the man who wrote the story that Irving came to call The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, but which I originally titled Headless; or Fell Dullahan. Irving had been a writer of many years when I met him in the autumn of 1808. He and his brother were becoming well-known even outside their beloved city of Manhattan through the success of their literary magazine Salmagundi, in which they lampooned New York culture and politics. He socialized with a group of literate young men he dubbed "The Lads of Kilkenny". I came to him with some examples of my writing, Fell Dullahan among them, and asked if I could be a part of their literary circle. A week or so later, after having read my work (and copying it all down, apparently), he laughed, he actually laughed at me, and most disrespectfully told me that my writing was too coarse, too dark, and too vulgar for the Lads of Kilkenny. Imagine my astonishment, if you possess the faculties and the inclination, when some thirteen years later I found a copy of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. sitting on the table of a rather run down dining establishment. I picked the tome up to peruse its contents when my eye fell on the author's name emblazoned on the frontispiece: Washington Irving! As a feeling of disquiet grew within me, I began to thumb through the pages, and when I at last came upon the volume's penultimate tale, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and saw its introductory sentence, that feeling of disquiet bloomed into sickness. (Found Among The Papers Of The Late Diedrich Knickerbocker.) Found among the papers, he'd had the gall to write, of the late Diedrich Knickerbocker. It was only years later, after his treachery had driven me to desperation and destitution through vainly hopeful but unsuccessful legal maneuverings, that I found out the reason for his gall. Irving, desperate to be accepted by European and American critics, thought it necessary to present his stories as the constructs of another man's efforts, lest anyone think such a noble writer would stoop to the telling of mere children's fables and ghost stories. And so he'd not even bothered to remove my name from them, knowing that his readers would never have heard of me. I was nothing, you see; I was nobody. I was the cipher he needed to protect his literary reputation. And of course by these later years, fame had drawn to him the ears of poets, politicians, and even Presidents; how was I to tarnish the sterling reputation of a man with friends such as these? Instead, I swallowed my pride and my anger, and I resolved to put on paper the true story of Irving's Headless Horseman, praying for the time to come in which I might prove to the world his treachery and my persecution. If you're reading this, then perhaps that time is here at last. * * * As I stated earlier, the story I wrote and Irving usurped, and onto which he shamelessly put his name without even bothering to remove mine, was titled Headless; or Fell Dullahan. In the year after I left my parents' house to seek my own way in the world, I found domicile in the boarding house of an elderly Irish maiden named Caoimhe MacCarthy, and Ms. MacCarthy was as full of superstitious gossip and country credulity as Irving's Dutch settlers' wives. She told me, did Ms. MacCarthy, in her rolling Irish brogue, about the Emerald Isle's legend concerning the dullahan. The dullahan was a faerie of Irish mythology, one of the Unseelie Court. It was headless, this faerie, usually seen riding a huge black horse and carrying his head under one arm. The flesh of the head was said to have the color and consistency of moldy cheese while the mouth was a hideous grin that reached from one side of the head to the other. The dullahan's whip, she told me fearfully, was a human corpse's spine. The image of this horrible creature stuck with me long after the telling of it, until at last I felt I had no other recourse but to put the story on paper, hoping that in the writing down of it, the spectre might leave me to my commonplace dreams of the dark and wintry waters of the Dommel creek in Den Bosch back home in the Netherlands, or De Gauwdief, the windmill spinning unhurriedly in Westzaan's winds. But as I wrote it, however, the story (as stories so often do) began to change, becoming in the telling something both more and less than it had started out to be. Gone were the settings of the Unseelie Court and the green gem of Ireland, and instead I found myself writing about American people on American soil. As I watched, my protagonist, who had started his literary life as a curious amalgamation of George Washington and the creation that would in time become Washington Irving's version of Abraham van Brunt, or Brom Bones, transmogrified into the almost distressingly autobiographical Ichabod Crane. The dullahan, too, saw its own transformation from Irish faerie to Hessian spirit, and before the passing of no great number of days, I could scarce rein in my imagination for the putting down of it onto paper. * * * I won't burden you with the full recitation of the story as I wrote it, because in truth, the first half of Fell Dullahan and the full text of Irving's bastardized version still bear no small resemblance to one another. Instead, if you should lend me your patience, I should like to point out the differences between the two and why, of course, these differences paint two wholly opposing portraits: one of the artist beholden to his vision, the other of a coward afraid of what he steals even as he steals it. * * * You well know the story by now. An itinerant school teacher by the name of Ichabod Crane arrives for his latest appointment at the small town of Sleepy Hollow, a place rich with local lore and legendry, awash with tales of the uncanny and the supernatural, the greatest of these tales dealing with a spectre that has come to be known as the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow. Here he meets and is bewitched by the beautiful Katrina van Tassel, daughter of old Baltus van Tassel, a substantial Dutch farmer. Katrina, however, is also coveted by one Abraham van Brunt, known countryside-round as Brom Bones. It is here that Irving began to change my story to suit his own rather more mercenary interests. Katrina, in Irving's version of my tale, is a flirtatious coquette, and feigns interest in Ichabod for no other reason than to encourage the true object of her affections, Brom Bones, himself a burly, unruly, but ultimately good-natured country lad. He was broad-shouldered and double-jointed, wrote (or should I say re-wrote) Irving of my character Bones, with short curly black hair and a bluff but not unpleasant countenance, having a mingled air of fun and arrogance. He was always ready for either a fight or a frolic, but had more mischief than ill-will in his composition; and with all his overbearing roughness there was a strong dash of waggish good-humor at bottom. Fie! I say to you, Mr. Irving. Fie, and may whatever hell exists for an artless cutpurse such as you be so loathsome and bleak as to make Dante himself cringe in dismal horror! For it is this arrogation of my work that grieves me the most; you took my Brom Bones, the most abhorrent literary devil of the last quarter century of writing, and you castrated him, you emasculated him! You humiliated him. He was not the love-lorn beau of a shameless strumpet! He was a murderous rogue who terrified the countryside and who forced the denizens of Sleepy Hollow to... I return to you now, gentle reader, after several long moments, having calmed my nerves and banked the fires of my anger yet again. I have bolted ahead of myself in my ire, and of you as well, and will recount his various vile deeds in a few moments, so as not to leave you floundering about in the darkness of ignorance. But first, with your kind consent, I shall counter Irving's many changes to the character of Brom Bones with my original intentions. -Curly black hair and a bluff but not unpleasant countenance... Again I say: fie. Bones was a hideous man, his dark face scarred and scabbed from the many fights he continually instigated, and his eyes, beneath a brow like an outcropping of granite, burned, as if all the Devil's hate raged in his heart. -Having a mingled air of fun and arrogance... There was no fun to be found anywhere in Brom Bones' soul, only the ashes of detestation. Never did he come closer to what may be denominated as fun as when he might be beating a weaker opponent mercilessly in the streets of Sleepy Hollow. And arrogance? The only true thing about Bones that Irving deigned to leave intact. -He was always ready for either a fight or a frolic, but had more mischief than ill-will in his composition... No, Mr. Irving. The Brom Bones that I wrote about had more ill-will in his composition than the sky has clouds. Indeed, a noonday sky as full of clouds as Bones' heart was full of malice would be known as night. -Sometimes his crew would be heard dashing along past the farm-houses at midnight with whoop and halloo... and the old dames, startled out of their sleep, would listen for a moment till the hurry-scurry had clattered by, and then exclaim, "Ay, there goes Brom Bones and his gang!" The neighbors looked upon him with a mixture of awe, admiration, and good-will... And this, of course, is the greatest lie fabricated by Mr. Irving. No old dame, hearing that whoop and halloo at night, would exclaim anything at all. Instead she would huddle close to the fearful fellow form of her husband beneath the quilts passed down to her from her mother, and she would hold her breath, casting prayers to all the saints in heaven that Brom Bones would pass by the farm house without stopping, would continue in his wild ride on to other destinations, to other victims. Because that, dear reader, is the extent to which Brom Bones had reduced Sleepy Hollow; to a town full of victims. Victims of his anger and his fists, or his greed and his thieveries, or his lusts and the far darker parts of his psyche than should ever be forced upon the young or old of any town, much less one as small as Sleepy Hollow. I could continue to some great length refuting Mr. Irving's claims about my literary creation, but will stop here so that we may address other matters, Katrina Van Tassel first and foremost among them. No coquette did I write her to be, and if she wore 'a provokingly short petticoat to display the prettiest foot and ankle in the country round', it wasn't because she was trying to provoke anyone; it was because the possessive Brom Bones, to whom she was neither betrothed or even promised but to whom she was still bound with chains of fear, made her wear it. She was as much a victim of his anger as any other denizen of Sleepy Hollow, and sought out the attentions of the newly-arrived schoolmaster in the hope that here, here might stand a man able to face off competently against the redoubtable Brom Bones. Ichabod Crane alone did Irving leave unmolested, for the most part. In both versions he was a traveling pedagogue descended from good Connecticut stock, lean and lanky, intelligent, of course, but also greatly superstitious and more than just slightly ambitious. He was easily taken with the young Katrina's beauty, it is true, but was much more enamored of her father's prosperous farm, and it was this captivation that led him to accept Katrina's furtive pleas for aid despite Bones' superior physical properties and fearsome reputation. And so it went through the first half of my story and the entirety of Irving's; both men jockeying for the hand of the fair Katrina, Ichabod ever avoiding Brom Bones' meaty fists and the pain they would inflict, and avoiding, as well, the haunted spots and twilight places along the Hollow where the Headless Horseman would likely be encountered. Then came the night of Baltus Van Tassel's autumnal party, described as a quilting frolic by Irving but a harvest celebration by me; I can only assume that the idea of a 'harvest celebration' read as too pagan or un-Christian to Irving's delicate sensibilities. Be that as it may, it was after this party, held late in the year, that Brom Bones at last made to do away with his competitor once and for all, knowing, or at least suspecting, that Crane had proposed to Katrina during Irving's ridiculous quilting frolic, and that she most probably had accepted. Brom Bones beset Ichabod Crane on the school-master's lonely journey home through the Hollow's dark shadows, dressed as the Headless Horseman lest the pedagogue find some small measure of backbone at finding his pursuer to be merely human. A chase ensued across the swampy earth and muddy roads, by Major Andre's Tree, and finally to the bridge spanning the brook at the old church-yard wherein, legend held, the body of the Hessian lay buried. Both Irving and myself describe the scene as follows (meaning that Irving doesn't change my words at all): An opening in the trees now cheered him with the hopes that the church bridge was at hand. The wavering reflection of a silver star in the bosom of the brook told him that he was not mistaken. He saw the walls of the church dimly glaring under the trees beyond. He recollected the place where Brom Bones' ghostly competitor had disappeared. "If I can but reach that bridge," thought Ichabod, "I am safe." Just then he heard the black steed panting and blowing close behind him; he even fancied that he felt his hot breath. Another convulsive kick in the ribs, and old Gunpowder sprang upon the bridge; he thundered over the resounding planks; he gained the opposite side; and now Ichabod cast a look behind to see if his pursuer should vanish, according to rule, in a flash of fire and brimstone. Just then he saw the goblin rising in his stirrups, and in the very act of hurling his head at him. Ichabod endeavored to dodge the horrible missile, but too late. It encountered his cranium with a tremendous crash; he was tumbled headlong into the dust, and Gunpowder, the black steed, and the goblin rider passed by like a whirlwind. Here Irving begins to draw his tale to a close, doing his best to assuage whatever fears his tepid tale may have engendered in his readers. The next morning the old horse was found, Irving tells us, without his saddle and with the bridle under his feet, soberly cropping the grass at his master's gate. Ichabod did not make his appearance at breakfast; dinner-hour came, but no Ichabod. The boys assembled at the school-house and strolled idly about the banks of the brook but no schoolmaster...An inquiry was set on foot, and after diligent investigation they came upon his traces. In one part of the road leading to the church was found the saddle trampled in the dirt; the tracks of horses' hoofs, deeply dented in the road and evidently at furious speed, were traced to the bridge, beyond which, on the bank of a broad part of the brook, where the water ran deep and black, was found the hat of the unfortunate Ichabod, and close beside it a shattered pumpkin. The brook was searched, but the body of the schoolmaster was not to be discovered. It is true an old farmer, who had been down to New York on a visit several years after...brought home the intelligence that Ichabod Crane was still alive; that he had left the neighborhood, partly through fear of the goblin and Hans Van Ripper, and partly in mortification at having been suddenly dismissed by the heiress; that he had changed his quarters to a distant part of the country, had kept school and studied law at the same time, had been admitted to the bar, turned politician electioneered, written for the newspapers, and finally had been made a justice of the Ten Pound Court. Brom Bones too, who shortly after his rival's disappearance conducted the blooming Katrina in triumph to the altar, was observed to look exceedingly knowing whenever the story of Ichabod was related, and always burst into a hearty laugh at the mention of the pumpkin; which led some to suspect that he knew more about the matter than he chose to tell. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, Irving infers; Ichabod wasn't really spirited away by the Headless Horseman who by correlation with this fact doesn't exist, and Brom Bones really was a rough but good-natured farm boy who merely chased away unwanted competition. He castrated the story as surely as he castrated the character of Brom Bones himself, and this, you see, gentle reader, is his way of removing the piquancy from my story. This is his way of making palatable for his critics what I meant only for those stout enough to stomach the tale. I tell you now truly that those points and correlations were never my intent; I cared not one whit about the emotional well-being of my readers and indeed hoped they might suffer for the brutality of my tale. What other reason would I have for writing a story about a man whose head had been blasted away by a cannon ball, and who later came back from the dead in search of a replacement? Compare this with Irving's trivial version in which he fleshed out the bones he stole from me with lists of the animals Baltus Van Tassel kept on his farm--- Hard by the farmhouse was a vast barn...swallows and martins skimmed twittering about the eaves; and rows of pigeons, some with one eye turned up, as if watching the weather, some with their heads under their wings or buried in their bosoms, and others, swelling, and cooing, and bowing about their dames, were enjoying the sunshine on the roof. Sleek, unwieldy porkers were grunting in the repose and abundance of their pens, whence sallied forth, now and then, troops of sucking pigs as if to snuff the air. A stately squadron of snowy geese were riding in an adjoining pond, convoying whole fleets of ducks; regiments of turkeys were gobbling through the farmyard, and guinea-fowls fretting about it, like ill-tempered housewives, with their peevish, discontented cry. Before the barn-door strutted the gallant cock, that pattern of a husband, a warrior, and a fine gentleman, clapping his burnished wings and crowing in the pride and gladness of his heart—sometimes tearing up the earth with his feet, and then generously calling his ever-hungry family of wives and children to enjoy the rich morsel which he had discovered. --the foods enjoyed by Ichabod-- Fain would I pause to dwell upon the world of charms that burst upon the enraptured gaze of my hero as he entered the state parlor of Van Tassel's mansion. Not those of the bevy of buxom lasses with their luxurious display of red and white, but the ample charms of a genuine Dutch country tea-table in the sumptuous time of autumn. Such heaped-up platters of cakes of various and almost indescribable kinds, known only to experienced Dutch housewives! There was the doughty doughnut, the tenderer oily koek, and the crisp and crumbling cruller; sweet cakes and short cakes, ginger cakes and honey cakes, and the whole family of cakes. And then there were apple pies and peach pies and pumpkin pies; besides slices of ham and smoked beef; and moreover delectable dishes of preserved plums and peaches and pears and quinces; not to mention broiled shad and roasted chickens; together with bowls of milk and cream,—all mingled higgledy-piggledy, pretty much as I have enumerated them, with the motherly teapot sending up its clouds of vapor from the midst. Heaven bless the mark! --and even the birds that occupied the woods of Sleepy Hollow. The small birds were taking their farewell banquets. In the fullness of their revelry they fluttered, chirping and frolicking, from bush to bush and tree to tree, capricious from the very profusion and variety around them. There was the honest cock robin, the favorite game of stripling sportsmen, with its loud querulous note; and the twittering blackbirds, flying in sable clouds; and the golden-winged woodpecker, with his crimson crest, his broad black gorget, and splendid plumage; and the cedar-bird, with its red-tipped wings and yellow-tipped tail and its little monteiro cap of feathers; and the blue jay, that noisy coxcomb, in his gay light-blue coat and white under-clothes, screaming and chattering, bobbing and nodding and bowing, and pretending to be on good terms with every songster of the grove. A list of Sleepy Hollow's ornithological abundance, gentle readers, and recipes for broiled shad and roasted chickens thrust into the story of a bloodthirsty headless spectre! Damn and blast your eyes, I might tell Irving if given the opportunity, and damn and blast your thieving black heart. * * * Of course the end of one thing inevitably brings about the beginning of another. Irving brought his story to a calm and deliberate conclusion, and was called genius for it, and master, and brilliant. No doubt his version will be remembered for longer than mine will be forgot. And yet still I am compelled to tell you my version of the story, if only so that you might decide for yourself whether you prefer his calm deliberate edition or my own rather more wicked one, his pabulum or my season. I offer it to you now and leave it to your consideration. * * * From Headless; or Fell Dullahan, by Diedrich Knickerbocker, reading from page 17 onward-- He worried for months, did Brom Bones, that someone would accidentally stumble upon the schoolmaster's carcass in the marshy and thickly-wooded glen known by the name of Wiley's Swamp where Bones had hidden it. Young schoolboys, perhaps, challenging each other to ever greater feats of bravery, might of a still summer day prove their courage to each other and themselves by exploring the swampy marshland that nestled like dust in the valley's deepest point, surrounded by thickets of dark trees; twisted oaks, chestnuts, and elms matted thick with blackberry vines and alder bushes. These trees cast a cold gloom over the land beneath, even during the tallest hours of noon, and were reputed to be haunted by none other than Chief Black Crow, a Delaware Indian hanged by his own tribe for the crimes he committed against them. But as time passed and no one discovered the schoolteacher buried beneath the mud and brackish water, Brom Bones felt his fear flee from him and he suffered the pangs of worry less and less. Indeed, the denizens of Sleepy Hollow seemed to have accepted quite simply that Ichabod Crane had been the victim of the Headless Horseman, and they looked no further for explanation. The bridge became more than ever an object of superstitious awe to them, indeed to the point that the road was altered of late years, so as to approach the church by the border of the mill-pond. Bones himself fed the ever-growing surfeit of legend and fable with the news that he had heard the Hessian's thundering hoof beats from time to time, or that he had seen Chief Black Crow's spirit wandering through the marshland's trees, carrying a tomahawk and looking for scalps to take. Bones conducted his prized Katrina in triumph to the altar a year or so later, and after her parents passed away, as all parents must, he moved his growing family into the Van Tassel mansion and took over the running of the farm. Child followed child until even the prosperous farm seemed ill-equipped to feed them all. To expand production, Bones forced his nearest neighbors, the cantankerous old Hans Van Ripper and the equally affable Valerius Hoffmeier, to sell their own farms to him at prices so low they verged on the ludicrous, had not the entire affair been illegal to start with. The coercion helped in the short run, but Brom Bones, being no better a business man than he was a husband, father, or farmer, soon found himself standing once again at destitution's doorstep. It was at this point in his life, a decade into his marriage, that Katrina, once a lovely slender girl and now a housewife dour and buxom, began to neglect her connubial obligations, having grown far wearier of being with child than she was frightened of his anger. Bones, never one to dismiss his father's adage that 'a woman who receives no discipline receives no opinion', tried with great vigor to impart both discipline and opinion on his wife, as well as the importance of submitting herself to that most conjugal of necessities. Instead, at the last, he was able to force her to do no more than fall backward against the self-same hearth upon which she used to sit as a child, and to split her head upon its warm worn stones. On the night of this final awful altercation, he stood for long empty moments looking down at Katrina's body, shocked into silence by the utter incredulity of it all. In the one moment, Katrina, who years ago had seemed to him the greatest prize the country-side round, had been opening her mouth to raise her voice in a most undisciplined manner, and in the next she was lying unmoving on the floor, and the hearthstones were so oddly red... After a moment, however, he set his mind to the task at hand. As quietly and surreptitiously as he could, so as not to wake the children, he pulled the body of his deceased wife out the front door, across the house's tiled piazza with its benches and spinning wheel, down the rough-hewn front stair, and across the yard to the pile of fire wood awaiting the axe. He pulled the axe from the chopping block and then he did to his wife what that cannonball had long ago done to the Hessian trooper. He placed her head along with some stones in a burlap sack, tied the bag and its contents around the head of the axe, and tossed the whole ghastly collection in the pond. The splash awakened Irving's 'stately squadron of snowy geese' most rudely, and they squawked riotously to let him know it. Then, dear reader, he did a thing of most monstrous proportion; he left the body lying in the front yard for the children to find, and acted as confused and distraught as he could on hearing their cries the next morning. The news of Katrina's death spread quickly through Sleepy Hollow's cobble-stoned streets, and those who were doubtless the Headless Horseman had done it numbered almost as many as thought it the work of Brom Bones himself. The village's constable, a fearful instance of a man named Rudyard Riesling, made only a perfunctory investigation into the matter, afraid of setting himself against Bones, and quickly labeled the case closed. In a week or so, Bones was sleeping more soundly than he had in years. * * * The weeks that followed were pleasant ones for Bones. The incessant nagging that had plagued him these many years past was gone, replaced by a pleasant silence into which crept only the most tremulous of cricket chirrup or bird song. He even managed to hire two competent farmhands and a reliable overseer, so that fieldwork became less a burden. He began to spend more time in the great forests surrounding Sleepy Hollow, walking and hunting wild fowl, and spent less time with his now-motherless children, because, as his father was wont to say, 'ducks and geese are foolish things and refuse to come to the dinner table of their own preference, but children can take care of themselves'. Brom Bones found himself at the swamp down in the Hollow's belly one late afternoon after summer had crept slowly and tiredly into autumn, a stringer of ducks thrown across his shoulder. He stood and watched as the sun painted the still waters and treetops with all the colors of the dying season's verdancy, before it disappeared behind those self-same trees and cast the swamp into shadows. He tossed rocks into the water, contemplating the schoolmaster's ultimate fate at the mercy of fish and turtles who give no thought to commemoration but only to consumption. How much of the man would be left by now? Any? Movement on the far side of the swamp caught his attention and he dropped the rock he had been preparing to hurl. In the dark shadow of the tulip trees verging the brook that spilled into the swamp, Brom Bones beheld something huge, misshapen, black, and towering. It stirred not, but seemed gathered up in the gloom, like some gigantic monster ready to spring upon an unwary soul. The hair of the suddenly-affrighted Brom Bones rose upon his head with terror, much to its owner's vexation. He was not used to feeling fear such as this; indeed, he'd spent his entire life facing and conquering whatever fear might face him, from his father's fists when he'd been but a stripling to the fear that his bold scheme to rid himself of Katrina's cadaver would fail. But the...thing...on the far side of the swamp was like nothing he'd ever experienced before. It seemed a creation as much of the darkness as in it, constructed of the shadows and not merely hiding in them. Summoning up, therefore, all the courage he could muster (and, oh, how he hated the feeling of having to summon something so long at his disposal!), he demanded, "Ho, there! Who are you?" He received no reply from the shadowy form beneath the tulip trees. It shifted in a darkness growing ever deeper with the setting of the sun, but nothing more. He repeated his demand in a still more agitated voice. Still there was no answer. "For you, then," Bones called over the still water, "the same hell that took my pap!" He turned to walk back to the road that lay just outside the cordon of overgrown trees, where his horse stood tethered awaiting its master's return. Movement snagged the corner of his eye and he turned his head to gaze at the spot whereupon the massive shadowy thing had stood. The darkness there seemed less dense now; he could make out the ghostly trunks of trees as they extended back from the swampy shore. The thing was gone. Despite himself, he quickened his pace. * * * A chilly autumn wind had sprung up by the time Bones reached his horse standing at the road's edge, and he pulled up the collar of his homespun shirt before climbing into the saddle. He draped the stringer of ducks over the saddle's pommel as the last of the day's light fled from the sky. The horse wheeled around slowly, lethargically, behind the bit and Brom felt a pang of sorrow as the memory of his favorite steed came to him; Daredevil—a creature, like himself full of metal and mischief, and which no one but himself had been able to manage. But dead was Daredevil these many long years, and he had never been able to find another horse of an equivalent nature. Instead, he'd had to settle for this broken-down plough-horse that had outlived almost everything but its own pain. The horse was gaunt and shagged, with a ewe neck and a head like a hammer; its rusty mane and tail were tangled and knotted with burrs; one eye had lost its pupil and was glaring and spectral, and the other had nothing in it but fatigue. Brom Bones, of course, preferred vicious animals, given to all kinds of tricks, which kept the rider in constant risk of his neck, for he held a tractable, well-broken horse as unworthy of a lad of spirit. This animal, which he had taken to calling Angel-cake most disgustedly, was nothing if not tractable and well-broken. He raised his feet to deliver vicious kicks to the animal's ribs but let them fall again, overwhelmed by a sudden melancholy. Instead, he allowed the tired old animal its reins and it ambled slowly, pursuing its travel homewards along the sides of the lofty hills which rose above Tarry Town. Brom sat in the saddle and let his mind drift, hoping the rhythmic swaying of the horse would ease some of the tension and fear from his bones; they'd never belonged there to begin with. His peace of mind seemed ill sought after, however, for as he rode, the oncoming night grew darker and darker; the stars seemed to sink deeper in the sky, and driving clouds occasionally hid them from his sight. His thoughts turned as inevitably as the tide to the memory of Ichabod Crane. He had followed the bothersome teacher from the party that night at the Van Tassel mansion, donning the garments of the Headless Horseman behind the great barn, high shoulders constructed of small sandbags that at once hid his head and also kept in place the great flowing cape. He'd then followed the pedagogue as silently as possible on Daredevil. Hard by the bridge close to the church, he bounded into the middle of the road. The schoolteacher had stood bolt upright in the stirrups in abject fear, giving voice to girlish shrieks, and had wheeled his own horse around. The chase had been short, as Daredevil had been twice the horse of the schoolteacher's, and Brom had ended it quickly by hurling a carved pumpkin at Crane's head. It met the pedagogue's skull with a great crunch and knocked him sprawling from the saddle. Bones had dismounted and strode most imposingly up to the prostrate Crane, who lay squirming in the mud. "Mercy," the schoolteacher had whimpered. "Mercy, I beg you." Brom Bones and the knife he pulled from his belt had showed him none. Brom pulled himself from the fugue of his memories at the cry of some night bird off in the forest as he gradually left it behind, and he looked over the fields of buckwheat and Indian corn half-harvested to the house laying below. The great elm tree which for countless centuries had spread its broad branches in the sun now stood withering and denuded in the gathering moonlight, dying at long last. The wide bosom of the Tappan Zee lay motionless and glassy under the fitful starlight, and Brom Bones felt his melancholy deepen even further. As he neared the house, he spied a figure on the porch, standing in the shadows of the roof's eave but silhouetted by firelight beaming out through the windows. The figure took a great lurching step forward, and bells of alarm began ringing in Bones' head. Who was in his house? And following closely behind the alarm bells came the old familiar anger. Who would dare to trespass on his property? He did at last put his heels to Angel-cake's ribs and the horse grudgingly broke into a trot; harder kicks forced it to gallop. As he charged down the road leading to the house, the great dying elm obscured his view of the piazza, and by the time he'd gained the front door, the figure had vanished. He searched for the next hour, combing through the house, the barn, and the smaller outlying buildings, and found no trace of the intruder but for a clump of cold black dirt on the piazza tiles, smelling of the grave and littered with gleaming pebbles and sea shells. * * * He spent the next day in a sulking pout, pushing the children out of his way and shouting at them to shut their mouths. The younger whined and cried while the older sulked and complained, and it was only after he had taken the oldest to task for not keeping the rest in line that he remembered the significance of the sea shells, and he at once mounted Angel-cake and rode out to the churchyard. Once there, he fought his way through the brambled undergrowth to Katrina's grave, only to find the turf torn and cast aside, the black earth beneath clawed as if by some wild beast. As he stood looking down at the torn grave, he remembered how the children had scattered the sea shells and polished pebbles on the grave the day they had buried their mother, their tears, the suspicion and anger burning on the preacher's face even as he'd chattered on about ashes and dust; Émile Lascaux, not just a man of God but a French man of God. And suddenly Brom Bones knew who had done this: Father Lascaux, the only man in Sleepy Hollow, aside from Ichabod Crane, who had ever had the spine to speak openly against Bones, if from no closer than the pulpit. Brom resolved himself to pay a visit to the good Father as soon as darkness fell tonight. * * * The good father opened the door of the parsonage and Bones began to immediately explain with the punishments of fist and boot and shouted curses the error in Père Lascaux's logic, and he would not regain full control of his faculties until long after the Frenchman was dead. He stood panting and huffing like the bellows of a forge as he looked down at Père Lascaux's body, much the same way he had stood over Katrina's corpse what seemed like years ago. The silence that followed was dense as summer thunder but short-lived, and when it had ended he retrieved a lamp from the table and smashed it on the floor beside Lascaux's body. With a whump and a whoosh the oil ignited and began to consume both Père Lascaux's body and the house in which it lay. Bones turned and fled into the night, stopping to watch from the shadows of the mercantile as the fire destroyed the parsonage as well as the church beside it. * * * It was only after he'd arrived at home in the wee hours of the morning that he realized the magnitude of his mistake in thinking Père Lascaux the man who had desecrated Katrina’s grave. Mounds of thick black earth lay heaped in front of the mansion, the largest mound topped with the rough-hewn granite tombstone that until recently had marked his wife's final resting place, and these things most certainly had not been carried here by the man whose body Brom Bones had not an hour ago consigned to the flames. Once more he mounted Angel-cake, who by this late hour displayed an increasingly foul mood and required more than the normal heel to set her in motion, and was soon again at the grave of his wife. Here it was that Brom Bones, who rarely knew fear and resented it deeply when he did, was seized by a terror so profound that for several long moments he felt like a young boy again yearning for the comfort of his mother's arms. The grave had been emptied of all its charnel dirt, and it was only now that he saw the claw marks on the walls of the pit leading down to the coffin, pale moonlight gleaming on the mouldering boards of the coffin lid itself some six feet below him. Who would have done this? Who could have? It had taken a ferocious effort to move an entire grave's worth of soil from one place to the other; surely only a group of people could have done it in the short time he'd been away. It came to him, then: the identities of those who mocked him so, and no church or temple had ever been set on so solid a belief. The children. The children had risen against him, and this was their revenge for what he'd done to their mother. Only the children working together could have done this in so short a time. He'd deal with the children, then. He'd deal with them most efficiently, and then he would make a new start; somewhere out west, perhaps, and alone, so that he could remake himself in whatever image he chose. He remounted Angel-cake yet again and set off for home. * * * The fear faded swiftly as he rode from the graveyard and that dank open pit, the moon painting the road before him a dull amber. The children; his children... And yet he held no special attachment to them; they were more their mother's children than his own, and he had never been one to shy from doing what needed to be done. He still wasn't. That was when he heard it: the sound of someone else following him on horseback, strange hoof-beats on the road echoing his own. He turned in the saddle and saw nothing in the darkness behind him, and it was only as he turned back that he noticed his companion, a huge figure astride a great black horse of powerful frame, both of them swathed in darkness and shadows as they paced Brom Bones on the other side of the dense tangle of alder trees bordering the road. He made no offer of molestation or sociability, but kept aloof on the other side of the trees. Bones was in an instant put in mind of the apparition he had seen in Wiley's swamp two days ago, and once more found a disquieting fear creeping into his head. He put his heels in Angel-cake's ribs in an effort to leave his taciturn companion behind but was dismayed when the figure matched his pace. He slowed in the hope that the other would simply travel on without him, but again, the rider simply slowed as well. A sudden anger burned the fear from Bones' brain and he reined to a swift stop. The figure followed suit. “Ho there!” Bones called through the tangle of trees separating them one from the other. “Put shut to this and show yourself!” Just then the shadowy object of alarm put itself in motion, and with a scramble and a bound stood at once in the middle of the road. Though the night was dark and dismal, moonlight allowed the form of the unknown to in some degree be ascertained. Gigantic in height the rider was, and muffled in a cloak, but Brom Bones was suddenly and disgustedly horror-struck on perceiving that he was headless! but his horror was still more increased on observing that the head, which should have rested on his shoulders, was carried before him on the pommel of the saddle. This was the thing that had watched him from the shadows across Wiley's swamp yesterday and still carried with it the same air of wrongness. This isn't possible! his mind shouted within his skull, Someone is playing me for a fool! but his fear, rising to terror, shouted far louder. He kicked Angel-cake in the ribs so hard that the old horse shrieked and spun in a spastic circle. His terror rose to desperation and he yelled incoherently, raining a shower of kicks upon Angel-cake, hoping by a sudden movement to give his companion the slip; but the spectre started full jump with him. Away, then, they dashed through thick and thin, stones flying and sparks flashing at every bound. Bones' garments fluttered in the air as he stretched his muscular body over his horse's head in the eagerness of his flight. This will be the end of me, Bones thought as he flew through the night. The Headless Hessian will be the end of me, and I deserve no less for my thievery. He had usurped the Hessian's legend for his own and now would pay with his head. He risked a look behind him, and fresh terror leapt hot into his heart when he heard a barrage of maniacal laughter booming out from the Horseman's direction. He has no mouth! He has no mouth! How can he laugh? He kicked his horse again viciously, as desperate to be away from the source of that seemingly source-less laughter as a child would be desperate to be out of the dark woods and back in the safety of a warm house. Brom Bones thundered down the road that ran through the Hollow more fiercely than ever he had, even in the days that he'd ridden Daredevil. Another quick glance behind told him that the Horseman remained in a pursuit every bit as fierce, and again that maniacal laughter boomed out at him. Bones felt his composure begin to slip like mud on a rain-soaked mountainside as the truth of his situation, of his pursuer, came home to him full of piss and vinegar. It was real. All of it was real, and the Headless Horseman was behind him; not the mimic Hessian who had chased down Ichabod Crane or beheaded Katrina, but the Horseman himself risen from the cold black grave. As he leaned over his horse's neck, the truth of it clawed at his back like a mountain-lion driven mad with starvation and summer heat. At that moment he rounded a bend in the road and came into view of the bridge before him, its old and weathered wood glowing like bone in the moonlight. All the old legends came back to him in a rush: to cross the bridge to the church side in whose graveyard lay the body of the Horseman was to leave the ghost behind; and triumph shot through him like lightning as Angel-cake's hooves thundered over the old planks. At the far end of the bridge, he reined his horse up hard and spun in the saddle to see if the old wives' tales held true, and his desperate hopes were not in the least bit confounded. As he watched, the Horseman stood up tall in the stirrups as the great black horse reared up, screaming and pawing at the night air. That horrible wicked laughter again boomed out from the place where the Horseman's head should be, and then the whole figure, horse and rider alike, vanished with a clap of thunder and a flash of fire and brimstone. Brom Bones sat back down in his saddle as the thrill of elation shot through him. Bones had perjured himself in the Horseman's name and the Horseman had risen from the grave to exact revenge, only to fail at the attempt. “I told you!” Bones shouted at the last whiffs of sulfurous smoke lingering at the far end of the bridge. “The same hell that took my pap!” Then he wheeled his horse around, thinking to find someplace in town to spend the night rather than face the Hollow again, only to stop with such violence that Angel-cake squealed in pain. Standing before him in the shadows was a lean, lank figure of unsteady footing, lurching like a scarecrow in a high wind. Then the smell of rot found its way to Bones' nose, and the horse's as well, and Angel-cake screamed and reared, pitching Bones' from the saddle... * * * The people of Sleepy Hollow had formed a bucket brigade stretching from the well to the burning church, but the church by now had burned to little more than ashes and embers and the charred remains of supporting columns that stood like great black bones. The townspeople stood in distraught silence as sparks spit and spiraled into the night sky, where they joined the stars they so poorly imitated. Constable Rudyard Riesling stood in a small knot of townsfolk, all of them blackened with soot and smelling of smoke. They watched, their eyes deadened with exhaustion, as the last supporting timbers of the church fell with a splash of flames. “Oddsbodkins,” Riesling grunted and turned the bucket in his hands up over his head. The bit of water in it spilled out onto his face, washing away filth in rivulets, some of it running into his mouth, and he spit to clear it. “Oddsbodkins,” he repeated, and looked at the townsfolk standing in the fitful firelight. “You should all go home,” he told them. “I'll watch until the fire is dead, and then we'll meet again in the morning to douse the embers and look for Pastor Lascaux.” With grunts and moans of agreement, the townspeople began drifting off into the darkness toward home. A sharp scream brought everyone up short, and the dispersing circle clenched back into a knot like a closing fist. “What?” Riesling barked at the group. “What was that?” He looked over as Bethany McClellan fought her way through the crowd, pointing back down the road behind her as she came. “There!” she gasped. “Coming toward us!” Riesling now pushed his way to the other side of the crowd even as they turned to face the direction in which Bethany had pointed. As they watched, a figure lurched from the darkness at the town's edge, walking unsteadily into the burning church's dying firelight, someone tall and lank and carrying something before it in its hands. The figure lurched closer, light creeping slowly up its body as it emerged from the Mercantile's shadow, until at last it stood before them fully revealed. Beside Riesling, Bethany McClellan with a gasp and a huff fainted dead away, and he hadn't even the wherewithal to help ease her to the ground, for the swimming of his own vision and the breath that had caught in his throat and refused to let go. It was...dear God in Heaven, it was Ichabod Crane, or the wet and muddy remains of him, at least. That long snipe nose was gone, having been eaten away by rot, and much of the face was obscured with muck, but the dangling arms still dangled a mile despite the missing fingers, and the feet still could have served as shovels if one didn't mind using shovels soggy and fetid and corrupted with decay. The crowning horror, however, was the burden carried by this horrible spectre in its dead and rotting hands, in fingers caked with thick black dirt: the head of Brom Bones himself, and the first thought in Riesling's mind, God help his soul, was: he's gone, thank goodness he's gone. Still the wet and dripping figure of Ichabod Crane trudged forward with its grisly prize. Riesling stepped forward to put himself between the approaching nightmare and the townspeople behind him. “Come no closer!” Riesling called, amazed that his voice didn't shake like his heart or his hands, even more amazed when the shambling thing obeyed. It stared at them cyclopically, as only one eye remained and burned at them most hellishly; the other was gone, leaving behind a blasted blackened hole. It reached out and placed Brom Bones' head on a fence post, from where it stared at the townspeople, a look of ghoulish horror forever written on its pallid skin. “Beware,” the spectre of Ichabod Crane croaked, its voice as clotted with mud and decay as its face. “Beware, ye who would wear the Horseman's legend the way you might a cape.” The figure backed away unsurely, returning to the shadows, and as it turned to walk away, it moaned one last time, in a voice that trailed away and died in silence, its solitary warning: “Beware...” It took the rest of the townspeople a sizable piece of time to drift away, all of them giving the head of Brom Bones on that fence post a wide berth, until at last Rudyard Riesling stood by himself in the dark, looking toward the night into which had vanished the spectre of the man he had known so long ago, the man named Ichabod Crane. * * * This, then, dear reader is the story I wrote as I wrote it, and I should like to point out one last thing before I leave you to your own pursuits. Irving, desperate to preserve his standing not just as a writer but as an artist (who, as you will recall, would never stoop to crafting stories of spectres and goblins), felt it necessary to insert one final caveat at the tail end of his story in the form of a wordy and pretentious postscript (attributable to me, no less), in which yet another character twice removed from Irving himself denies the story's plausibility. The cautious old gentleman knit his brows tenfold closer after [the story]...while methought the one in pepper-and-salt eyed him with something of a triumphant leer. At length he observed that all this was very well, but still he thought the story a little on the extravagant—there were one or two points on which he had his doubts. "Faith, sir," replied the story-teller, "as to that matter, I don't believe one-half of it myself." D. K. And that leads us like an overprotective parent to the end of this sordid little tale. Believe or disbelieve as you will, but rest assured that there is no one here to laugh at the shattered pumpkin of Irving's story. This as I write it is the truth of the matter, but even I would have trouble accepting it if it hadn't happened to me. Faith, I might say, as to that matter, I don't believe one-half of it myself.