part0050

“And the soldier lost his head when the cannonball sounded with an enormous ear-splitting explosion and struck. It is said by some that each Halloween, he hunts for a new head, taking the first one he sees. But, some with more romantic hearts believe he may actually be hunting for the one true love a fortune teller had told him he’d find, when he was instead killed just before being sent off to go to war…”

Trina Powers, my education assistant that worked with the special needs student in our class, along with being my savior on a regular basis in the second-grade classroom, read the book aloud to the class.

I meant to be back only when the story was already over. I’d tried to get away with reading three other Halloween books to the class before the end of the afternoon, but they would not be tricked into skipping this story.

“We neeeeed to hear the Headless Horseman of Drowsy Hollow.”

“Miss Krane, Miss Krane… it’s tradition!”

I’d asked Miss Powers, Trina, if she would mind doing the honors.

“Absolutely!” She’d jumped up. When we passed one another as she headed to the front of the class and I moved toward the door, she whispered, “You okay? You’ve gone grey.”

I’d nodded. “I’ll be back in twenty. You good?”

“Of course!” she assured.

I dashed out of there in my kitty cat costume and hid in the staff washroom, hyperventilating for at least twenty minutes before I came back.

I didn’t know why she was still reading.

My knees wobbled as I grabbed the doorframe for stability.

Stability. Hah. A year. A whole year. Stability had no part of the past year.

A year ago, when I got to town without incident, I was stunned, relieved, and absolutely baffled by it. All of it.

Katie was there thirty minutes later. I told her nothing much, just that I’d gotten lost when the car broke down and found a little cabin to take shelter in. I’d explained my jitteriness as seeing and hearing a lot of wild animals. I was not okay. I was not remotely close to okay for days, maybe even weeks. Maybe not even now.

A few hours after Katie got me home, my car was towed to me there. It started right up. They couldn’t find a thing wrong with it.

I found this out from Katie after a twelve-hour nap. I had terrible dreams. The dreams continued to haunt me nightly for weeks until I wrote it all down. After that, they didn’t nag at me relentlessly each night, but the ordeal was never far from the forefront of my mind. I had dreams every night, of him, but they were no longer all the same, all a revisiting of the events of that night. They were different. Him chasing me. Him and I having sex. Me running through the woods with a baby in my arms, getting to the cabin and finding that the baby was headless.

The days that followed, I spent a lot of time alone in my room, crying, wondering if I’d gone crazy.

My brain was telling me I was crazy, that I’d had a breakdown and imagined the whole thing, but my leg told another tale. That burn, to this day, is still there, still looks like the shape of his kiss, only slightly faded. The scars inside me? Still vivid. Maybe indelible.

Three days later, I worked up the nerve to drive the route I’d taken to and then from the school again, and found nothing odd, other than the fallen tree. I wouldn’t go far from my car to find the cabin via that route. I considered taking the route behind the school to the cabin, but I just couldn’t bring myself to go back there.

I inquired with some locals at the little café in town about the cabin. They told me it was owned by the mayor’s family, had been in their family for generations, but was rarely used, as the land had been for sale for a few years and had never sold.

I found that to be odd. As much as it was the locale of my nightmares, it was the prettiest little piece of property during the day.

I went online and didn’t find much about the storybook, so went into the Drowsy Hollow Library and researched the storybook. The author was local and had died twenty years earlier, according to the librarian.

He had a grandson in the area. I reached out.

When I tried to ask questions about the genesis of the story, under the guise of it being a class project, the guy agreed to meet me for coffee. We met in the café in Drowsy Hollow.

The story was based on the local tale of a soldier who was killed during a training exercise in the late 1700’s, decapitated by a cannon ball that had been launched by his own sergeant. A freak accident, apparently, that took place on Halloween and there were murders on that day for the following few years in the area so there were those who said it was the ghost of Private Holloway. Others said it was someone using the facts of the ghost story to get away with murder.

It was said he haunted the area, unable to move on for two reasons. One: he wanted revenge against the man who took his head. Two: the night before the battle, soldiers were in a tavern and the man had his fortune told. His fellow soldiers teased about the reading, which told that he would find his true love, but that it would be a long and painful road for him until they met.

The grandson told me he’d perused the notes years back and read that the legend was that he looks for revenge and also looks for her. As it was to be a children’s book, the tale focused more on the revenge, so they could use it as a cautionary tale. Book publishers wanted there to be a ‘moral to the story’.

“Gramps probably took a bit of creative license,” he said with a shrug. He shrugged a lot. More than my questions, he was interested in mostly trying to flirt with me. After a long chat, he agreed to lend me his grandfather’s file folder of research material. I turned down his offer of dinner and a movie, and he creepily requested that I bring the file back to him a week later, on a Saturday night for dinner at his home. I told him I’d check my calendar and confirm. I had no intentions of dinner with him.

On my way toward the café’s door, I ran into the vice principal of the school, who was on his way in.

“Isabella, how are you? What a fortuitous meeting.”

“Fine, Mr. Henry. Um. How are you?” I tried to hide how flustered I was. I was also a little nervous at being caught misrepresenting myself as a local schoolteacher.

This was the week leading into December. Mr. Henry asked me if I would be available as of January to be the second-grade teacher for Drowsy Hollow Elementary School on a full-time basis.

Part of me wanted to run as far away from Drowsy Hollow as I could. But, I was nearly broke. I wasn’t getting any hours anywhere else, which had been a blessing and a curse as I hadn’t been functional. But, I had a car payment and rent to pay and my student loan that I was still paying off, with not much more than two months of expenses left in savings (two months if I really penny pinched).

I said yes . I said yes and decided I would stay off that road at night at all costs. Moving into town would mean I wouldn’t have to travel it daily, at least.

As I was leaving the café, I spotted the local paper sitting on a table by the door and read the headline.

The front page of the Drowsy Hollow Gazette had a full-page story that was mostly photos, but that briefly recounted that the ancient tree was found to be mysteriously toppled.

I needed to know more about that tree. That was the tree, the spot where it all began.

When I got home, I scanned every page from that author’s file and saved them to my computer. The notes were handwritten, in bullet points, and I surmised that information came from a local historian who said the tale was spread by word and old versions of the tale confirmed the name, Private Holloway, died in error at the hands of his own sergeant, a man named Archibald Krane. Krane. My last name.

I found the last name of the man’s accidental murderer to be bone-chilling.

I joined a genealogy website and found three Archibald Kranes in my family tree, the first one born in the mid 1700s. It was a name passed down to the first-born son on that side of the family for three generations. Was hurting me some twisted form of revenge because of my bloodline?

I drove to the author’s grandson’s home the following morning and left the original file in his mailbox with a Thank You Post-It. I had no intentions of allowing him to flirt with me again.

After I left, I drove back to the felled tulip tree, not brave enough to do it without the light. And though it was daytime, I still brought a kitchen knife with me. And a stun gun.

Nothing. Nothing but a stump. A very round and wide stump.

The pregnancy test was something I avoided for far too long. The day after the visit to the tulip tree stump, I made myself take the test. I was not only a few weeks late, but I was spending three or more hours per day vomiting with agonizingly sore breasts at that point, so the test was but a formality.

The test was positive.

I was an absolute wreck.

Impregnated by a ghost. A monster.

I went to the doctor to confirm what I knew to be true, what the test also confirmed as true, and he gave me a “Congratulations”.

I burst into tears and got him to book an appointment for a termination. I couldn’t think of it as a baby. I didn’t even know if it was a baby.

It didn’t matter, because a day later, I had heavy bleeding. Very heavy. The hospital told me it was a blighted ovum.

And then, strangely, I mourned the lost baby that might not have been a baby at all. I mourned that baby for weeks. Months even, feeling washed in guilt that I’d wished it away. What if it was healthy? What if it was good. What if it was innocent?

Was I a monster, too, for wishing it away? I felt like I murdered my baby through my sheer will.

I knew what had happened to me had happened to me. I just didn’t know why .

And I didn’t know how to move on.

January rolled around, Christmas a non-Christmas because of where I was at emotionally, and Katie got a new roommate while I moved to the apartment above the dry cleaners in Drowsy Hollow. It was still available. It was affordable. It was perfect. The landlord was reportedly overseas, according to the number I’d called, so I dealt with an agent in his absence, but only remotely. She couriered me the keys and told me to take a look.

It had two bedrooms, a cute little kitchen, a big family room with a painted wood stove, and a big terrace with a small greenhouse that I had grand plans for come springtime. I’d always had a green thumb.

I kept the key and forwarded an application and most of the rest of my savings as a deposit.

I tried to move on. I tried to pretend nothing had happened.

But, I was depressed. I avoided social situations outside of work. I stopped going out with friends, stopped returning their calls and texts. I made excuses to avoid family gatherings.

I was skittish, nervous, and depressed. And every time I undressed or took a shower, it was there. His mark. Every time I saw a baby around town, it tore at my heart. Every mention of Halloween or pumpkins made my heart race and my blood turn icy cold.

July 25 rolled around. This was near to what I figured my due date would have been. I drove to the tulip tree site that day, parked, and stared at the stump. There was now a commemorative plaque about the tree being 300+ years old and having been steeped in the local history and then mysteriously being ripped from the earth by a suspected microburst weather event.

Beside it, I saw new and lush vegetation. I knew how to identify plants with my very green thumb. There were no pumpkins yet, but this was definitely a pumpkin patch.

The smashed pumpkin that night… the seeds shouldn’t have taken. The frost and subsequent winter coming soon after that night would’ve most likely stopped the process. But, evidently, logic meant nothing in Drowsy Hollow.

I didn’t know why, but I knew that come October 31st , I’d want to come and see the pumpkins.

Would facing another Halloween bring closure?

Writing it down didn’t.

Reading self-help books didn’t.

What would? Would Halloween do it?

Today was Halloween, one year from when my grip on reality steeped in logic slipped. I stopped by the site of the tulip tree, during my lunch hour, during sunlight when I’d hoped it would be safe.

As suspected, a pumpkin patch was there. All the pumpkins had appeared to have been picked except one small, perfect, head-sized one. It was still attached to the vine and it sat on the stump.

That whisper that had haunted my dreams for the past year echoed in my head.

A woman approached from the woods. She wasn’t much older than me and strangely, her approach didn’t startle me.

“Hello,” she greeted.

She had long, auburn hair and heavy eye make-up. She was shoeless and dressed like a gypsy. She carried what looked like a very old book. It was massive in dimensions and thickness, bound by leather, with writing that I couldn’t make out on the front. I didn’t know if she was extreme boho hippie, or if she was in costume for Halloween.

She looked to the pumpkin. I lifted it protectively and pulled it to my chest. I didn’t really know why I did that.

She gave me a small, strangely knowing smile.

I thought it was odd for her to introduce herself.

“You’re lost,” she informed.

“Nnooo. My car’s just---” I jerked my thumb behind me.

She leaned forward, strange intensity rolling off her. “You’re feeling lost. But soon, you’ll be found.”

I frowned. My thumb was still in mid-air.

“Don’t question it when he finds you. Believe it. Believe that you’re getting something wonderful. He’s getting something wonderful. You’ve had untold pain this past year, but he’s had untold pain for over two centuries. It’s fate.” She shrugged. “I tried. Several of us tried. But, it was meant to happen this way. That’s why we haven’t been able to stop it. Don’t fight it. Don’t fight him. He needs you.”

“I think you have me mistak---”

“You’re his. Don’t be afraid. Life will be beautiful. You can both count it as a happily ever after. But don’t speak of it. Do not. Don’t confront it. Don’t dig into it. Don’t speak of it. Believe me. If you do, you’ll wish you hadn’t. Believe this. Heed this warning. Please. What was taken that night was taken by the man it belonged to. He didn’t steal it from you. You gave something precious to him. It was meant to be his.”

I stared at her in disbelief.

“Believe me. I beseech you. He’ll be as he was before… before he became what you saw. The transformation began that night. You felt the evidence of that. You gave him that.”

“Farewell, Isabella.”

She gave me a wave, a meaningful look, turned, and then she walked away from me.

I watched her walk down the country road, the road that was paved today, but that I feared would turn to dirt later tonight.

I looked down at the pumpkin I was holding to my chest and bit on my lips. I looked back up and she was gone. Vanished. She must have disappeared in between some trees.

It then dawned that I never told Erica that my name is Isabella.

I stood there, ruminating on her words. They rang as real, they rang as matching my exact situation. But if they were true?

The wind picked up and whipped my hair around. The sun had moved behind some clouds and it felt like rain was coming. I hurried back to my car, taking the pumpkin with me.

If he was coming for me, I wanted no part of it. And something told me it was essential that I get out of there immediately.

Much to the disappointment of my coworkers, my students, last year’s students, and Trina, I made an excuse and said I needed to leave the party early. I wanted to be home, in my apartment, behind locked doors when it got dark. Maybe I should’ve left town, gone to the airport and left the country.

I said goodbye, feigning a headache, but a real headache began to materialize when I got outside, and dark clouds moved in. There was a loud crackle of thunder. The sky opened up with lightning, more thunder, and pouring rain. This wasn’t in the forecast today.

I pulled my headband with the kitty cat ears off and stuffed it into my bag and yanked my hood up over my head. I rushed to my car and got inside. It wouldn’t start.

It wouldn’t fucking start.

And I started to bawl about it. Slam my hand on my steering wheel about it. Ask the sky WHY ME about it.

I could’ve gone back inside and asked for a jump-start. I could’ve gone back inside and asked for a ride or talked to the guy that owned the cab. The tiny town had a cab company with one car. But, he was in there with the rest of the community, bobbing for apples.

I grunted and found my umbrella in my backseat and decided to walk home. Six blocks. It would suck, but I just needed away from this area, away from my memories and all the cute little kids dressed like him , not to mention the haunting foreboding feeling engulfing me.

I just needed to go home.

I was in a long trench coat, black ballet flats, my kitty cat costume, which had consisted of a bodysuit and black tights, which hit me like a ton of bricks that morning as I clicked the snaps between my legs into place. I had kitty gloves, too, which were cocktail gloves that came to my elbows with paw prints on the fingertips. I kept those on and pulled my hood up. I would’ve been a sight, my black nose, my drawn-on whiskers, my cat’s eye make-up.

It was a longish six block walk, and I felt the need to hurry, to get behind the locked door of my apartment as soon as possible. My umbrella flipped inside out four times on the walk before I gave up and just dragged it along, letting the rain soak me through to the bone.

When I got into my apartment and locked the door, I didn’t feel the least bit of safety and relief I’d hoped for.