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11

He sat on the ground next to me, his legs stretched out beside mine. He was close, far too close, and the look on his face wasn’t right. He shouldn’t be looking at me that way.

I scrambled away, realizing that the hand I’d felt on my face was Henrik Janssen’s. I wanted to scrub at the place where he’d touched me.

“What’s the matter, little Bente?” he asked, and there was something horrible in his voice, something hungry.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. I wanted to stand up, to run, but my legs wouldn’t do what I wanted them to do.

“I came to speak to your grandfather, and I saw you lie down in the field. I didn’t think you should stay out here, not with everything that’s happened. You might get hurt.”

The only thing around here that wants to hurt me is you, I thought, but I knew that wasn’t quite right. He wanted something else from me, something I didn’t really comprehend.

I was a farmer’s child. I knew about procreation. And I also knew that grown men shouldn’t look at young girls the way Henrik Janssen looked at me, like he could see right through my boys’ clothes to the skin beneath.

“I can take care of myself,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “I saw you taking care of yourself today with Mynheer Smit.”

Everything he said seemed laced with some other meaning, and every glance he gave me made me feel like bugs were crawling all over me.

“If you came to see Brom you ought to go up to the house,” I said, finally managing to get my legs underneath me to stand.

He stood, too, and gazed upward at the sky. “This is my favorite time, when the sun slips away and the stars come out. Won’t you walk with me under the stars, little Bente?”

I was hardly little. I was almost as tall as he was, but when he said “little,” it was as if he meant something else, meant that I was something he wanted to take and hide away—like a doll, like a jewel, like a secret he wanted me to keep.

Brom and Katrina would be back from the village by now. All I had to do was run for the house. Henrik Janssen would never be able to catch me.

He shifted, just a little, and suddenly he stood between me and the house, almost as if he’d read my mind.

“I know what you want,” I said. “If you touch me I’ll kill you. And if I don’t, then Brom will.”

His eyes glittered in the half-light. “But the damage will be done, and you’ll need a husband then, little Bente.”

I lifted my chin, though inside I trembled. “I’d rather die than marry you, or anyone. I’m not a girl. I’m a boy.”

He couldn’t possibly run as fast as me. I could get away from him if I took him by surprise.

I wondered at his confidence in this gamble. He had to know that if I escaped him I would tell Brom and Katrina.

He’s going to make sure you don’t escape until he gets what he wants.

“You’re disgusting,” I said, my voice dripping with disdain. “And pathetic. You’re out here in the middle of a field, trying to force a child young enough to be your daughter to marry you because—what? You don’t think your farm is big enough?”

There was just enough light for me to see his half-smile as he stepped closer. “You can’t possibly think this is about the farm.”

There was something so wrong with him when he said this, something that wasn’t just about his impulse. It was as if he was being driven by a force beyond himself.

I had only a moment before he grabbed me, and I knew with great certainty that if he did I’d never escape.

I turned and ran, away from the house.

Away from the house, and toward the woods.

Behind me Henrik Janssen cursed. I heard the rustle of the wheat stalks as he pursued me, his ragged breathing.

I heard a voice calling from close to the house. “Ben! Ben!”

Brom. He was looking for me. I could tell by the way he called my name that he was worried.

I glanced behind me. Henrik Janssen was much closer than I thought he would be. Terror coursed through my blood. I couldn’t let him catch me.

But you’re not to go into the woods either Ben you promised Brom that you wouldn’t and there’s something in there much worse than Henrik Janssen something with long fingers that wants to take your head and your hands something made of darkness that wants to swallow you up.

“Help!” I screamed as I ran. “Help me!”

I didn’t call out because I thought help would come in time. I didn’t think Brom would magically swoop down and find me. But I wanted him to know that I was out here, that I was in distress, and I also thought it might drive Henrik Janssen off if Brom came looking for me.

He must be mad, I thought as I ran. Whatever Henrik Janssen wanted, he was off his gourd to suddenly act this way. Did he think he wouldn’t be caught out? Did he think that Brom wouldn’t beat him bloody for even trying to touch me?

What if he is mad? What if something from the woods—some magic, some miasma—has seeped into him, is making him act this way?

There was no time to think, to wonder, to solve the problem. I heard Janssen put on a burst of speed behind me, and I ran harder than I ever had.

I crashed into the woods, a flailing intruder, and immediately the trees closed around me and shut out the starlight.

I clambered up the nearest tree, feeling out the limbs in the darkness, and tried to slow my breathing.

A moment later Janssen blundered through the bush, making so much noise that he was probably heard by every creature for miles. I couldn’t see him, because I’d climbed as high as I could safely go in the dark, but I heard the rasp of his breath and the scrape of his boot soles over the dead leaves littering the forest floor.

“Come out, come out, little Bente,” he crooned.

He didn’t sound like himself. Not that I’d spoken to him so many times, but Henrik Janssen was normally quiet and soft-spoken. Had he been hiding this monster inside him all this time? I couldn’t imagine keeping such malice stuffed inside a human skin. Perhaps he’d grown tired of it, longed to let the darkness inside stretch and burst its seams.

I stayed very, very still as he fumbled and scraped around in the darkness. After several minutes I heard him cursing, and then the sounds retreated—back in the direction of the fields.

I wondered if he’d run into Brom there.

The forest was quiet all around me—not the eerie silence that meant something terrifying was coming, but a soft hush that enveloped. All the little creatures were tucked up in their beds, and I imagined tiny squirrels and chipmunks and field mice being kissed by their mothers, or told stories by their fathers. I felt safe, the way I’d always felt in the woods before I saw the creature devouring Justus Smit.

A chill brushed across my skin. The trees felt safe now, but they wouldn’t keep that way. I should leave, go back to the house, tell Brom and Katrina what happened in the field.

I was alight to any possibility of a trick as I eased my way out of the tree. Henrik Janssen could have pretended to leave noisily while returning in silence to wait for me to emerge. But I jumped to the ground and heard no movement other than my own.

Still, I thought it best to stay in the woods a while, and walk parallel to the fields until I was closer to the drive that led up to the house. Janssen could be lurking in the fields. I listened hard for any sound of a search, for Brom calling my name, but there was nothing except the wind.

I moved along slowly in the dark, placing my feet carefully so I didn’t rustle the leaves any more than necessary, my hands out before me so I wouldn’t run headlong into any trees.

A horse whickered softly in the darkness, and I stopped walking. It came from somewhere ahead.

Was it Brom? Was he out with Donar, searching for me?

I thought this but deep inside, in that secret place I kept only for me, I knew it wasn’t Brom. I knew because the moment I heard the horse my heart soared, and my feet moved faster, moved toward him because there was nothing else I could do.

I stumbled into a clearing, tripping over my own legs in my haste, and he was there, standing in a shaft of moonlight.

He wasn’t headless, and he didn’t laugh the way that Brom had when my grandfather pretended to be a demon horseman. He sat absolutely still upon his horse—a breathtaking horse, a horse the color of the sky at midnight, taller even than Donar.

His legs were long and so were the fingers that held the reins, and he seemed to be dressed in the same darkness as his horse, except there was just a hint of something racing over his skin, something that looked like fire.

His face was turned away from me. He knew I was there, though. I waited, my breath caught in my throat, for the moment when he would look at me.

He turned his head toward me, and I was lost forever.

He was the most terrible, the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and yet I couldn’t describe the shape of his face. He was so glittering, so unearthly, that human words were wholly inadequate. I’d been wrong about him, wrong because the stories said he came with a sword and took your head away. The Horseman wasn’t death. He was life, more life than I’d ever imagined.

He held out his hand.

I understood. It was my choice.

It was always my choice. He was here before, a long time ago, reaching his hand down to me. There was almost nothing of him then—just a shadow, just a thought—and I was so small. But when I touched his hand, touched that shadow, he was real and solid and part of me and I was a part of him.

The thought flitted across my mind, a silverfish dancing in a sunlit stream. I’d forgotten. I’d forgotten that I knew the Horseman of old.

(not just knew him made him)

There wasn’t time to take that out and examine it, to look at that idea from all sides. There wasn’t time because he was here, and all I wanted was to ride.

I put my hand in his, and he took me up on his horse in front of him. He squeezed the horse’s sides with his legs, and then we were running, running so fast it seemed impossible. There were trees in the way but he glided around them so smoothly it was as if they weren’t even present.

Then we burst out into the open, and we were galloping across the fields, and we were fast and free under the stars.

I wanted it to last forever, to stay there with him on his horse and run until there was nothing left of me.

But then I saw Brom, standing in the middle of a field, calling my name, and I felt a moment of regret.

The horseman knew, somehow he knew, and felt it. The horse slowed, and cantered around back toward Brom, and a fist squeezed my heart and I didn’t know what I wanted, I didn’t know if I wanted to go back to being a child or if I wanted to stay with him.

“Ben, Ben!” Brom called.

I wanted to stay with the Horseman. I wanted to go back to Brom. The Horseman felt the push and pull of my heart before I did, and I heard him whisper, Not yet. It’s not time yet.

Why did you come for me, then? I thought, and everything in me yearned to stay with him, to ride fierce and free and be exactly who I wanted to be without any expectation.

I came for you so he wouldn’t take you. And so you would remember me.

A noise came out of my mouth, half-sob, half-laugh. So I would remember him? How could I ever forget him? How could I have forgotten him before? He was seared inside me.

He steered the horse toward Brom, standing in the field calling my name. We stopped a few feet from Brom but my grandfather still strode forward, bellowing, “Ben! Ben!”

He can’t see us, can’t see the Horseman, I thought, and slid from the horse’s back. Brom’s eyes widened as I appeared practically under his nose, seemingly out of thin air.

“Ben?” he said uncertainly, and reached toward me, but I turned away from him, my heart breaking.

Don’t leave, I thought, but he was already gone, and nothing remained but the rush of wind to show he’d ever been there at all.

I don’t remember much after that. I remember Brom bringing me inside, but for the first time in my life I wasn’t comforted by his presence. There was only one thing I wanted, and I wasn’t going to find it safe in my house, under the watchful eyes of Brom and Katrina.

I hated the Horseman then, just a little, for he’d made me want. He’d made realize what I had wasn’t enough. He made me long for something unexplainable, indefinable.

The next morning I was up well before the sun. I’d hardly slept again, and knew that sooner or later this lack of rest would betray me, but every time I’d closed my eyes my mind raced out the window and into the night, searching for him.

I dressed and sat quietly in my room until I heard the household stirring, then went out to find Brom.

Lotte was busy preparing breakfast when I passed through the kitchen. She nodded at some apples on the table. I took one to please her even though I wasn’t interested in eating it. Everything roiled inside me, making me feel sick and unsettled.

Brom was in the barn, currying Donar. We had a stableboy but Brom preferred to groom Donar himself, leaving the carriage and field horses to the boy.

Donar whickered softly as I approached and I thought of the great black horse standing in the moonlight, and the rider on his back.

No, I thought. Not now. Don’t think of him now. There are words that need to be said and you won’t be able to say them if you’re dreaming of the night.

“Ben,” Brom said, and I noticed blue shadows under his dark eyes. I wasn’t the only one who’d had trouble sleeping. “How are you feeling today? Your grandmother and I were worried about you last night.”

“I’m better,” I lied. “Opa, listen. I have to tell you what happened.”

I told him about falling asleep in the field, about Henrik Janssen attacking me, how I’d escaped into the woods. A storm moved into Brom’s face until he looked like an angry thundercloud about to burst. I’d worried a little about what I would say about the Horseman, how much I should or shouldn’t explain, but I needn’t have bothered. I never got as far as talking about the Horseman at all.

“I’ll kill him,” Brom said, slamming the currycomb into a nearby bucket with unnecessary force.

Donar, used to Brom’s moods, ignored this. I stroked his nose and he nudged my shoulder in an expectant way, so I gave him my apple.

“I’ll kill him,” Brom said again, and the way he said it made me uneasy.

Brom was always threatening people, but he didn’t really mean it. It was his—admittedly strange—way of venting his feelings. This time, though, he sounded serious—as if he really would murder Henrik Janssen. I stepped in front of Brom before he went barreling out of the barn in a rage.

“Wait,” I said. “Wait. I didn’t tell you this so you would hurt him.”

“Get out of the way, Ben. I’m going to strangle him, and no one in Sleepy Hollow would blame me if they knew what he’d done.”

“Wait!” I said again. “Please.”

“Why? Why should I let that piece of filth breathe one more moment upon this earth?”

“Because I don’t think it was him, or at least not all him, at any rate.”

I had a strong impression that Henrik Janssen did hold some seeds of those horrible feelings deep inside, but I don’t think he would ever have let them take root. There was something else at work, something that came from the woods, something that had woken the sleeping monster that killed Justus and Cristoffel, something that fed the evil Henrik Janssen would have smothered and let die.

“What do you mean? You’re talking nonsense, Ben. Who attacked you if it wasn’t him?”

I took a deep breath, because I knew how Brom would react to my idea. “I think it’s something to do with the woods, with the magic in the woods. It, well, it seemed like he was being spurred on, that he wasn’t exactly himself.”

“Don’t tell me you believe that rot. Monsters in the woods, fairies in the garden, spirits at the door. I thought I raised you better than that. We’re not small-minded fools.” “It’s not nonsense,” I said. “How can you think that when you saw what happened to Justus? How can you say it isn’t real when you know what happened to Bendix?”

Brom looked away. “Your grandmother shouldn’t have told you that story. It’s put ideas into your head.”

“Don’t act like Oma is confused,” I said, and I was shocked to hear the anger in my tone. I’d never been angry with Brom in my life. “You’re the one who’s confused, who doesn’t want to believe. Strange things come true in the Hollow. Everyone knows that. Everyone except you—and even you know it, you just don’t want to admit it’s true. Because if you do admit it then that means Bendix died and there wasn’t anything you could do about it.”

I regretted this the moment I said it. Brom’s face turned the color of old parchment, and looked just as brittle.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Opa, I didn’t mean it.”

“Yes, you did. I didn’t teach you to lie.”

“All right. I did mean it. But I didn’t mean to say it.”

Brom snorted. The color returned to his face.

“Listen, Opa, please. Every time you’ve seen one of the dead boys you’ve been too busy arguing with Diederick Smit to really think about what happened to them, and why. Oma told me you never really believed what she told you about how Bendix died.”

“It’s nonsense,” he muttered, but for the first time I noticed his eyes didn’t reflect what his mouth was saying.

“Ten years ago my father went into the woods, to try to save me and my mother.”

“Yes, on the advice of Schuler de Jaager.” Brom spat. “So?”

“So when my father went there he woke something, something that attacked him. But nothing like that has happened since, at least not until recently. There have been no other deaths like that, or people going missing with no explanation in the woods. Have there?”

Brom frowned. “There’s always a few going missing every year—usually kids that wandered too far while playing. They’ve mostly been found, though. And a few adults that were turned around and wandered in circles until someone else happened upon them.”

“Anybody that went missing and was never found?” I should know this, since Sleepy Hollow wasn’t such a large village, but I often drifted away when Brom and Katrina were talking, lost in my own world and my own thoughts.

As a child does, I thought. Not bothering about anything an adult might say.

I felt a little pang of mourning for that child that I was, for the innocence I’d never have again. I’d never be able to play in my own land again without thinking of the country beyond, all the world pressing up against my door.

“Elizabeth van Voort. She was never found,” Brom said, startling me out of my thoughts. “She was a teenage girl, though, and most folk decided she’d run away with some boy from another town. I never really believed it. She wasn’t the type, and even if she did run away, I think she would have written to her parents, and they never had word of her again.”

“What do you think happened to her?”

Brom’s mouth twisted, like he was rolling something unpleasant on his tongue. “I don’t know if I should tell you this or not, but you’ve seen some of the ugliness of this world already, and I can’t shelter you forever.”

I waited expectantly.

“I think one of the men of the village, er, compromised her and then got rid of her. I never could find out who did it, though I tried.”

I did my best to disguise my shock. Of course I was aware—in a dim, childish sort of way—that such things happened.

It was that they seemed like things that happened far away, in places that weren’t like Sleepy Hollow.

Brom seemed eager to move on from the subject of Elizabeth van Voort before I asked any uncomfortable questions. “And there was William de Klerk. That wasn’t so very long ago, and he’s your age. I’m surprised you don’t remember.”

“William de Klerk,” I said. A memory bubbled to the surface, hazy and incomplete. “I didn’t really know him. But he was a farmer’s son. He went missing at the beginning of the summer?”

Brom nodded. “He was playing in the woods with some other boys, and William was separated from them. There was an enormous search. It seemed like everyone in town was out looking for him.”

I remembered now. I also remembered my shameful indifference, my conviction that it hardly mattered to me if some boy I barely knew disappeared. Brom had been out all day for several days in a row. Sander and I were told to confine our games to the farm in the interim. It was decided, in the end, that William had wandered too deep into the woods and was lost forever. No one would dare search for him there, beyond the safety of the trail. Everyone in the Hollow knew that if William had gone there, he would not return.

But I forgot, and nobody talked about it again. This was one of those blind corners, a dead end that nobody spoke of. It was hazed by magic that tied everyone’s tongues. But they didn’t forget, exactly. The knowledge was still there, else Brom wouldn’t have spoken of it so easily. I don’t know why, but I thought of Schuler de Jaager—thought that somehow he was the reason why this happened. Then I pushed Schuler de Jaager away, because I realized something.

“He must have done it,” I said, thinking hard.

“Who must have done what?” Brom asked.

“William de Klerk. He must have woken the creature in the woods. Attracted its attention. Whatever he did caused the creature to go looking for more boys, to stray from its usual place.”

“I don’t know, Ben. If there is some haunt out there taking children, and it’s been awake since the beginning of the summer, why didn’t it go after you and Sander? The two of you practically live in the trees from dawn to dusk.”

Because the Horseman’s been watching over me all this time, I thought. Even if I didn’t know he was there.

But that wasn’t the only reason Sander and I had been safe. There was something more. “You said William de Klerk was playing with some other boys? What if those boys were Justus Smit and Cristoffel van den Berg?”

“What is it you’re thinking? That they trespassed where they shouldn’t, and so the boys were punished?”

I could see the effort it cost Brom to admit there might be something dangerous in the wood to do this theoretical punishing.

“Maybe,” I said, but I still felt I wasn’t grasping all of the puzzle. I hesitated before I spoke again, because I knew my next words would kick open a hornet’s nest. “I bet Schuler de Jaager would know.”

Brom’s whole head reddened, from hairline to neckline. “I don’t want you anywhere near Schuler de Jaager.”

He took a big heaving breath before continuing. “Ben. Whatever he knows, don’t believe for an instant that he’ll tell you of it. He keeps his secrets and only reveals them if he thinks it’s to his benefit. You won’t learn anything from him, and you might even come to harm.”

Brom was thinking, I knew, of Bendix. Bendix, who’d been closeted with Schuler de Jaager and emerged convinced that the only way to save his wife and child was to seek a cure in the deep, dark woods.

“I’m not concerned about that old devil at the moment in any case—only Henrik Janssen. At the very least he ought to be reported, even if Sem Bakker is useless. And then I think I’ll ride over to the farm and have a word.”

“Opa, I don’t think it will do any good. It really won’t.” The more I thought about this, the more I was convinced it was true. Henrik Janssen had not been himself—decidedly not himself. Something had taken hold of him, something that meant me harm. Perhaps it was the shadow creature in the woods, or perhaps it was just a lingering stench of evil that infected Janssen when he went near the woods that night we searched for Justus.

Why didn’t it affect Brom, though? Then I answered my own question. Brom was too good to be tainted by a seed of evil. He was full of mischief, a trickster, a brawler, sometimes a bully, but he was never evil—not deep down, not in his heart.

But Henrik Janssen—he had something inside him that the darkness flowing out of the wood had been able to grasp. And so did Diederick Smit, I realized. When Smit accused me of witchcraft that had killed his child—there had been something in his eyes that had never been present before. There had been the expected anger and grief, but there had also been hate, and cunning. The realization of that cunning chilled me now. What was Diederick Smit planning?

Sem Bakker had been in the woods the night we searched for Justus, too, though he seemed as unaffected as Brom. I attributed this to stupidity rather than inherent goodness. It was strangely comforting to think that most of the people in the Hollow would be untainted by the creature’s influence because of this same quality. Brom always said that while kindness was ingrained in the people of the Hollow, intelligence was not.

Most folk wouldn’t go near the woods in any case. They feared the ghosts and ghouls and phantoms that dwelled there. And that was good. Their fear, their superstition, would keep them safe.

“Even if you think some, er, presence overtook Janssen last night, I still believe he could use a good thumping.”

Brom sounded so sulky that I laughed. “Opa, you always think thumping is the solution. I think it’s more important to find out who was in the woods with William de Klerk, and exactly where they went and what they did.”

“Well, we can’t exactly ask Cristoffel van den Berg or Justus Smit,” Brom said, and I winced.

I realized then why Katrina so often hushed Brom when they were in mixed company. He didn’t have that polite line in his head that made most people stop speaking before something off-color slipped out of their mouths. “What other boys ran around with those three?” Brom asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll have to ask Sander. He might know.”

Most of the boys ignored me—except for the few who tried to bully me, and those, I realized, were all dead now. The boys thought I was strange for dressing like them and acting like them and they avoided me because of it. All of the girls ignored me for the same reason. Consequently, I didn’t bother myself about learning much about most of the other children of the village. Katrina hired various teachers to educate me at home with varying degrees of success so I didn’t even attend the local school with everyone else.

School. The schoolmaster.

For a moment I thought of Crane, pursued through the night in terror by Brom on his black horse. Then I shook it away. Crane had nothing to do with this, and nobody was sorrier than Brom for what happened after.

“The schoolmaster might know,” I said. “Or he would be able to ask the children at the school who William de Klerk was friendly with besides Justus and Cristoffel.”

“That’s a good idea, Ben. I’ll ride out to his quarters and ask him today.”

“Then you believe me? Believe that there’s a monster out in the woods?”

Doubt flickered in his eyes. “I don’t know if I believe in your shadow creature. But there’s clearly something strange afoot. I said it before and I’ll say it again—I don’t want you in the forest, for any reason. Whatever is happening, you’ve already gotten too close to danger for me to feel easy. You take care of my Ben, all right?”

“All right, Opa,” I said. I would have agreed to anything. Things were moving, finally. The mystery would be unearthed. We would solve it, Brom and me.

Brom decided I ought to spend the day learning about running the farm, so I trailed after him like an eager puppy until midday. I suspected he only wanted an excuse to keep an eye on me, but I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind anything at all, because I was with my opa and my head was full of all the triumphs we were going to have together when we vanquished the creature in the woods.

I was in the best mood I’d been in for days. At least, until Brom had Donar brought around after lunch so he could ride into the village and then informed me in no uncertain terms that I was to stay home.