Ben.
I sat up in bed, where I hadn’t been sleeping—sleep being hard to come by in the days since Katrina’s funeral. My heart slammed against my ribs, trying to get out of its cage.
Had I heard him? Or was it just my imagination? Was it only a secret, shameful hope that he would appear again, that I would ride with him and all of my pain and fear and sadness would blow away into the wind and be gone forever?
Nobody can do that for you. Nobody can take the knot in your chest and unclench it for you, nobody can relieve your sadness and fear. Not even the Horseman.
I rose and went to the window, which overlooked the main street of Sleepy Hollow. Since the house burned down I’d stayed with Sander above the notary’s office. His younger sister had married the previous summer, and his parents had decided to move with her to Ohio. It should have been a scandalous impropriety for me to live in the same household as Sander, except that nearly everyone in Sleepy Hollow thought I was a man, and those that knew different seemed to have forgotten that I’d ever been anything else.
This, too, was part of the magic of Sleepy Hollow, or maybe it was simply being a Van Brunt. In Sleepy Hollow you could decide to be a Headless Horseman if you were only Brom Bones, or could transform from a girl into a boy only on your say-so, and people accepted it, and it became part of the fabric of the town.
People believed in Sleepy Hollow. They were different from people in other places, or they used to be. I didn’t know if Sleepy Hollow would stay that way. Sleepy Hollow wasn’t even very sleepy any longer. It was thriving and bustling, the magic fading out of the air.
But not gone forever, I thought. Schuler de Jaager, or whatever he really was, for he was most certainly not human, was still out there. And Katrina had been right—as long as he was near, his poison could seep into the town, sicken its residents, make bad things happen that shouldn’t be.
And yet I couldn’t work up the energy to care, or do anything about him. Katrina was gone. Brom was gone. My childhood home was gone. My parents were long gone. There was nothing tethering me to Sleepy Hollow save a lingering affection for my best and only friend. Despite this, a weight seemed to press down on me every day. I barely slept at night, and yet all day I felt as though I was half-sleeping, my mind never in the same plane as my body. I barely spoke to Sander, who left me alone to wander in the apartment above his office, nothing but a half-spirit inside a husk.
He never asked questions, never wondered what I was going to do or when I would do it. He put food in front of me and I ate it. Mostly I sat at the window and watched all the people go by in the street below, people who hadn’t lost all of their family, people who still had a life and a purpose.
You have a life and a purpose, too. You made a promise to Katrina and you have to keep it.
I stared down at the street, dark and empty, and hated myself because I couldn’t make myself care about anything, couldn’t make myself talk to Sander or act like a regular person. I was paralyzed by the pressure of grief, lost in memories of the past.
I’m a burden on Sander. I’m turning into Katrina, a ghost, always staring out the window looking for someone who isn’t there.
Ben.
I froze, my head cocked to one side. I’d heard him that time. It wasn’t my imagination. But he sounded far away, farther than he had ever been before.
“Where are you?” I whispered, my hands pressed against the window glass. “Are you here? Are you near me?”
Ben. Help.
My fingers curled into claws. Help? How could I help him? And underneath that thought, in the very tiny, petty, terrible part of me that blamed him for Brom’s death—Why should I help you when you didn’t come for me? Why should I help when you’re the reason I lost Brom?
Ben. Help me.
He sounded weak, on the verge of death. But that couldn’t be. The Horseman was immortal. He couldn’t be in danger.
Could he?
I realized then that I’d heard him whispering sometimes over the last few weeks, heard him say those exact same words, but every time I’d shut him out, pushed away the tug of his voice, pretended I couldn’t hear.
Ben.
He’s dying. He needs me. He’s been calling me and I ignored him, left him alone, and now he’s dying.
“I’m coming,” I said, all my lost purpose suddenly renewed. I couldn’t leave him. I couldn’t let him die. “Wait for me. Wait for me.”
Ben.
“Wait,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m coming.”
I didn’t think about what might happen next, about how I could help him, about what could have occurred to put him in such a state. I felt wide awake for the first time in days, the weight that had pressed me down dissipating.
“Wait for me. Wait for me.”
I dressed, but I didn’t bother to take any supplies. The only weapon I had was Brom’s knife, which I’d carried every single day since the day he killed Crane with it. The knife was strangely unblemished, though Brom’s heart and my hand had been damaged by the touch of Crane’s skin.
I paused in front of Sander’s bedroom door, wondering if I should wake him, wondering if I should try to explain, but then decided to let him be. There wasn’t time for me to help him understand.
I crept down the stairs to the back door. Halfway down I heard him.
“Ben?”
He stood at the top of the stairs in his nightclothes, holding a candle. His face was completely calm, no question in his eyes.
“You’re going to the woods, aren’t you?”
My breath caught in my throat, because I realized then that he understood so many things without my telling him, that he knew me better than anyone in the world, and that I’d never treated him as well as I should have. I should have been a better friend, should have given him more, should have pulled him closer instead of keeping an imaginary distance between us.
“Yes,” I said.
“Of course,” he said. “I won’t see you again.”
It wasn’t a question, and it wasn’t something I’d really considered as I dressed and prepared to rush out of the house, but it was true. Sander had realized it before I did.
“No,” I said. “I don’t belong in Sleepy Hollow anymore.”
“Let me come with you,” he said.
I shook my head. “I don’t belong here, but you do.”
He sighed, as if he’d expected that answer. “They were always more your woods than mine. You were a part of them, even when we were children.”
I didn’t know if that was true, but I’d always felt safe there, felt that no harm would come to me. At least, until the day we saw Cristoffel’s body. Everything changed then. That was when, I realized, I started pushing Sander away, excluding him from my plans, keeping him at a distance. That was when I started thinking I could do everything on my own, that Sander would only get in my way.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and the apology was for a lot of things, so many things, and it was entirely inadequate, but it was all I had.
“I’ll miss you,” he said, and then he turned away, and blew out the candle.
I stood for a moment, listening as he returned to his bedroom, heard the sound of the door closing.
Then I opened the door at the bottom of the stairs and went out into the night, out to the Horseman, out to whatever destiny waited for me in the woods.
I went on foot, not wanting to take gentle-souled Zacht with me into any potential danger. I walked through the silent village, the stars shining above me, the sliver of moon hidden behind a wisp of cloud. My breath showed in silvery puffs of air, though I didn’t feel cold.
It was the beginning of autumn, season of change, like that day so many years ago when Sander and I played Sleepy Hollow Boys. I’d always felt most like myself in the autumn, when nature transformed from its summer glory into its winter cloak. Some people only saw death in autumn—the withering of plants, the falling of leaves—but I saw all the bounty and beauty that summer had wrought preserved for the next spring. Autumn was only a cater pillar in its chrysalis, sleeping until it was time to become a butterfly.
The expansion of Sleepy Hollow meant that the forest began much farther along the road than it used to. There were more buildings to pass, more houses that had never been there when I was a child, more trees cleared to make way for farmland. My ears were pricked for the sound of his voice, the call that had dragged me from my bed and my paralyzing grief into the night, but I didn’t hear him again.
He wouldn’t be in the part of the woods that was close to the road or the village in any case. He would be in the deepest part, the place still avoided by villagers.
Schuler de Jaager will be there, too.
My hand slid around the hilt of Brom’s knife. I didn’t know if I could kill Schuler, or if he could be killed at all. I didn’t know if I could save the Horseman. I didn’t know what kind of future I’d have when all of this was over, or if there would be a future for me at all.
Maybe I was the end of the Van Tassels and the Van Brunts, and when all of us were gone the world would move on, indifferent to our lives and deaths. We would be known only as a part of stories that people told in front of the fire on an autumn night, stories about a horseman without a head who rode through the darkness, stories about two men and the woman they both desired, but only one of them loved her.
And children would say it was only a story, that there was no Horseman and no Crane and no Katrina and no Brom, but they would pull their covers up tight to their chins anyway, and listen for the sound of galloping hooves.
I hadn’t set foot in the woods in ten years, and I expected it to feel different, but the moment I was under the trees again something settled in me that I hadn’t even recognized as restless. I belonged there. I belonged in the woods, a part of the air and the trees. I’d always been a child of nature and not of the village. This was where my heart had always been.
Sander was right, I thought ruefully. Sander knew even when I didn’t.
For a while I strode easily, comforted by the familiarity of the trees, the sense of being welcomed back after a long absence. I avoided the road, which wouldn’t take me where I wanted to go. The stars peeked through the branches, and I heard the sounds of night creatures all around me—little things scurrying in the brush, the far-off hoot of an owl, and once the too-close huffing of a bear hunting for a last meal before hibernation.
Then the trees seemed to press in closer, to hunch their shoulders and watch my passage with barely contained malice. The shadows became more substantial, took forms that darted closer and then away, visible only out of the corner of my eye. The scurrying of small things ceased, for all the small things knew better than to pass here, where there were large things with teeth that bit and claws that caught.
My steps slowed, and I tried to ignore the uneasy sickness growing in my chest, the feeling that I couldn’t catch my breath, the feeling that something was just behind me, waiting for me to turn.
“Ben.”
I pulled the knife from its sheath and spun toward the voice, which had come out of the darkness on my left. I almost dropped the knife when I saw who spoke, but I managed to keep my grip.
Cristoffel van den Berg stood there, impossibly whole, the same age he’d been when he died.
He’s not real, I told myself. He’s only a product of your imagination, not a specter but an illusion.
“What are you doing here in the woods, Ben?” Cristoffel said. There was a phosphorescent glow all around him, a soft blue light that emanated from his figure. “Boys shouldn’t leave the path, you know. It’s dangerous. Bad things can find you when you stray.”
He stepped closer, and I backed away, holding the knife out before me.
“Stay away from me,” I said.
“I don’t mean you any harm. Though you never liked me, did you, Ben? Part of you always thought I’d gotten what I deserved when that monster found me.”
“No,” I said. “No, I never thought that. I was sorry for you.”
His lip curled into a sneer. “Yes, sorry for me. Sorry that I was so poor, that all the good ladies of the Hollow would come with baskets full of food because my father drank away all of our money. Sorry that you lived in a huge house where people laughed and loved each other, while I lived in a tiny cottage with no candles, listening to the sound of my mother crying and my father shouting and the sound a fist makes when it hits flesh. Yes, you were sorry for me, all of you good folk of Sleepy Hollow, but nobody helped. Nobody took me away.”
“They couldn’t take you from your parents,” I said.
“They weren’t parents,” Cristoffel said, and he seemed to grow a little, his child’s-form swelling with anger. “Parents care about their children. My father cared only about himself and what he could find at the bottom of a glass, and my mother was too weak to leave him, even to save herself.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, and it sounded horribly insufficient, but I didn’t know what else to say or do. I couldn’t fix it. I couldn’t go back in time and make his parents better people, or make someone from the town—useless Sem Bakker, perhaps—take Cristoffel away and put him in a happier home. I couldn’t stop him from going into the woods the day he died, couldn’t stop Crane from killing him.
“Sorry. Is that all you have for me? Is that all the charity afforded me from the great Ben Van Brunt, who always thought he was better than the rest of us?”
“I never did,” I said. “I never thought that.”
But that wasn’t true. Of course I thought I was better than everyone else. I was a Van Brunt, grandchild of the marvelous Brom Bones. Who wouldn’t think themselves a cut above when they came from such a family? But I’d been a child then, foolish and arrogant, and I’d lost it all the day Brom died.
Sweat beaded at my hairline and rolled down my temple. I wasn’t sure what to do. Should I try to run? Would Cristoffel chase me? What could he do to me, or I to him? Perhaps I should simply pretend he wasn’t there and he would disappear altogether.
“Don’t lie,” Cristoffel said. “You did think you were better than me. You should have helped me instead of pretending that I wasn’t there. You could have done something. You could have told the great Brom and maybe he would have taken me away from there and I could have lived in your great house with you.”
I thought of the bullying little Cristoffel I’d known, a child I’d thought repugnant and mean, and my stomach turned at the thought of him inside my house.
My feelings must have shown on my face, because Cristoffel pointed at me, his expression twisted in anger.
“See? You do think I’m less than you, that I wouldn’t have belonged there. But there’s something you don’t know, Ben Van Brunt. We’re all the same, here in the woods. We all come to the same end.”
His face changed. Then I realized it wasn’t his face changing. His head tilted to one side, tilted crazily, impossibly, and a great gash opened wider and wider across his neck. Blood bubbled at his lips and nose and streamed from his eyes like tears.
“You’re the same as me, Ben Van Brunt. There’s only one fate at the end of this path.”
He laughed, a wild sound that had no place in the world, and then the laugh stopped abruptly. He reached toward me, and there were no hands on the ends of his wrists, only bleeding stumps.
“Don’t leave me here alone,” he said, his head teetering on the edge of his neck. “Don’t. I’m so afraid.”
I ran, heedless of where I stepped, ran from the ache of loneliness in his child’s voice, ran from the guilt that told me I should have done more when he was alive and that being a child myself was no excuse.
After a while I slowed, my breath ragged, with no knowledge of where I was or how far I’d come. I glanced behind me, worried that Cristoffel would have followed, but there was only darkness.
The Horseman, I thought. I can’t be distracted by haunts in the woods. I have to find the Horseman. He’s the reason I came here.
Brom’s knife was still in my right hand, and I didn’t resheathe it. I felt better holding it, even if it couldn’t protect me from a ghost.
“Little witch.”
Again, the voice hissed out of the darkness, this time on my right. I spun toward the noise, already knowing who would be there.
Diederick Smit watched me, his eyes full of hatred. He looked just as solid as Cristoffel had, and was surrounded by the same phosphorescent glow.
“Damned little witch. You killed my Justus and then you killed me.”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t hurt Justus. I didn’t.”
“But you killed me, didn’t you? Didn’t hesitate for a moment. Didn’t think of anyone except yourself. You picked up a rock and beat me until all my breath was gone.”
“You hurt me,” I said, and I was bothered by the pleading in my voice, my need for him to understand. “You kidnapped me. You were going to kill me first.”
I sounded small, pathetic, defensive. His eyes narrowed. His hands curled into those terrible fists, the ones that had smashed into my face and made me bleed.
“You deserved everything you got. You thought you could hurt my Justus and get away with it, thought being a Van Brunt kept you safe. You were always lording it over the rest of us, you and your parents before you, and Brom and Katrina worst of all. Always acting like money let them do whatever they wanted, pretending to be the benevolent landowners, doing good works and looking out for the village. But I knew better. I knew that they didn’t really care, that they only wanted to feel important. And you treated my Justus the same, treated him like he was mud on your shoes.”
I shook my head. “I didn’t. He was always cruel to me, and to Sander, and I only defended us from him, and avoided him if I could.”
I didn’t know why I was trying to explain to Diederick Smit, trying to make him understand. He was beyond understanding.
“My boy wasn’t like that! He was high-spirited, to be sure, but only the way a boy is supposed to be. You’re the one who was unnatural. Whoever heard of a girl pretending to be a boy, dressing like a boy, cutting her hair like a boy, running wild like a boy? And people believed you, believed that you were something you weren’t. That wasn’t right. I knew that there was wrong in you because of that, knew that you had witchcraft.”
I’d been prepared to defend myself, to shout him down, to tell him that I wasn’t what he thought I was, but his last words arrested me.
There was something wrong in you.
There was something wrong in me. It wasn’t my desire to be a boy, though. There was nothing wrong in that.
It was a thing I’d turned away from the moment I’d found it existed, but there was something in me that shouldn’t be there, something that came from the most unnatural creature imaginable.
Schuler de Jaager, or whatever creature he really was beneath the skin he used to disguise himself. He was my grandfather. His blood, however diluted, was in my veins. Had the power of that blood somehow hurt Justus? Perhaps Diederick was right and I was responsible.
Diederick took a step in my direction, his face contorting. “Everything that happened was your fault. Justus. Me. My line ended because of you. And you buried me in the woods like a dog, like I wasn’t worth anything at all. You couldn’t even put me in the ground next to my son.”
His face changed, the skin seeming to bubble and stretch and break, blood bursting from the open wounds.
“You beat me with a rock,” he said, holding his hands to his face. “Look what you did to me.”
“No,” I said, squeezing my eyes closed.
I didn’t want to see his face again, for the moment I saw those wounds I could feel it, could feel the smoothness of the stone in my hand—and it had been smooth, smooth and perfect like a skipping stone—and then the way his flesh gave way beneath it.
“Look at what you did to me,” Diederick said.
“No!”
“Look at what you did to me.”
His voice came from everywhere, from the trees and the brush and the very earth, reverberated through my head and pressed behind my eyes.
“No!” I shouted, and ran again, blind this time, terrified to look at what I’d done to Diederick Smit.
I’d killed him. I’d killed him and I’d never really faced that, just buried it away in the deep dark secret part of my heart, where I hid all the things that brought me shame. And when that secret tried to push its way out in the night, when I was asleep, I’d wake with a pounding heart and push it down again, pretend it never happened, pretend I didn’t remember.
It didn’t matter that he was going to kill me first. It didn’t matter what he’d intended for me at all. I should have run instead of hurting him. I should have stopped hitting him before he went completely still.
I killed a man, and Katrina helped me bury him in the woods and we’d never talked about it again.
I heard Diederick’s voice shouting after me, but I pretended I couldn’t hear him, and soon his voice faded away. He hadn’t followed me.
The stars were gone, hidden by the deep shadow all around. I wandered blind, bumping into trees, tripping over rocks and roots. I didn’t know if I walked in a straight line or in circles, but I was afraid. I was afraid of what the woods would show me next, for I knew it wasn’t done with me yet.
“Ben.”
I hesitated, for I’d known somehow that it would be him, that it could only be him. I wanted to see him more than anyone in the world and also least of all.
“Ben,” he said again.
I had to look. I had to see. I had to know if he blamed me.
There he was, bigger than life or death, and for a moment I thought I would run to him and leap into his arms and he would swing me up into the air and laugh that great booming laugh. If he laughed, all the shadows and the specters would go away and I’d be safe again.
“Opa,” I said, but he didn’t smile that Brom Bones smile and he didn’t open his arms. He looked stern, a thing that Brom had never been in life.
“Ben,” he said. “What are you doing?”
I withered under his gaze. “I was . . . I was only trying to . . . Oma made me promise and . . .”
“What makes you think you can do anything at all about Schuler de Jaager? I told you to stay away from him. I told you so many times and you didn’t listen.”
“Opa, it’s not just Schuler. The Horseman—”
“There is no Horseman, Ben. I told you the story. You know that. You know better.”
“Not the Horseman that you were, a different Horseman.” I felt scrambled, like I didn’t know what I thought I knew a moment before. Brom never acted like this, never talked over me and made me flustered and defensive.
“There’s no other Horseman. There was only me, playing a prank. Now stop this nonsense and go home where you belong, Bente.”
I stilled, staring at him. “Bente. You never call me Bente. You never did, not even when I was very small. Katrina always complained about it, that to you I was always Ben.”
“I told you to go home,” Brom said.
“You’re not Brom,” I said. “You’re not even a shadow of him, or a shade. You’re nothing like Brom at all.”
He did smile then, a smile that wasn’t Brom’s, a smile that went too wide, covered too much of his face. The illusion that was Brom faded away, but I was left feeling that the teeth were still there, floating in the air.
Ben. Hurry.
The Horseman. I’d half-forgotten him, forgotten why I’d come into the woods in the first place. I’d been distracted by haunts that were meant to throw me off my path, meant to keep me from finding him.
There was only one person who’d want to keep me from finding the Horseman, only one person who’d fear my presence in the woods.
Schuler de Jaager.
“I’m coming,” I said, and I didn’t know if I was telling the Horseman or my monster grandfather. “I’m coming.”