[October 9]
We were given twelve hours to find Jennifer before Captain Irving began a manhunt. This courtesy, scant as it was, proved enough. As it happened, we needed much less, as a visit to the Mills sisters’ last foster mother revealed the location of Jennifer’s sanctuary, a place whence she fled at those moments when her troubles grew too great—or, as Abigail and I learned, when she became entangled in events which might endanger her foster family or other innocents. When we arrived at the specified location, a cabin near a charming small body of water known by the equally charming name of Trout Lake, Abigail and I learned quite a lot in little time.
First, the cabin had belonged to Sheriff Corbin. Photographic evidence indicated that the sheriff and Jennifer were acquainted. This news was a considerable shock to Abigail, perhaps even more than what transpired immediately thereafter.
Second, Lieutenant Mills possesses certain skills ordinarily the province of her criminal counterparts. She dismantled the cabin’s lock with an alacrity I could only admire, hearkening back no doubt to her own days as a lawless youth.
Third, Jennifer was there ahead of us, and armed. She and her sister stood like duelists awaiting the command to fire while I endeavored to restore calm. This was successful, and instead of firing on one another, the two sisters began to exchange information. Jennifer recounted Corbin’s belief in her version of the sisters’ childhood experience. He sent her on a number of secret errands to different parts of the world, for the purpose of collecting rare artifacts that would contribute to his research. This accounted for the records of her travels Abigail discovered when we began our search.
Jennifer’s story grew yet stranger, as she recounted a visit from Corbin the night before his murder—and, therefore, the night before I awoke in the cave. He came to her and warned her of his death, drawing a pledge from her that she would protect a sextant hidden in the cabin. She produced it for us, and I was hardly able to believe what I saw, for the sextant was scored with marks I had seen before.
Every American knows of the Boston Tea Party, but at the same time every American knows nothing about it—beginning with the name, which is quite glib in light of what transpired on the Boston wharves that night. We called it “the destruction of the tea” at the time, and understood our actions to be very serious. The purported goal, to protest ruinous taxes imposed by King George III, was certainly valid; yet the specific choices made by the Sons of Liberty, perpetrators of this famous dissent, masked a more devious goal. I know this because I was there. I saw the costumed revelers dumping tea in the harbor, and I saw the Redcoats responding. While they were so engaged, I and my commander, a Virginia militiaman by the name of Doxford, led an armed party to seize the true object of the mission. We were sent by General Washington himself, who commanded us to capture a weapon of unknown nature held by the British on a pier at Boston Harbor on Griffin’s Wharf. The ships moored there made for a convenient diversion, nothing more; had they held rum or coffee or beaver pelts, our men in Mohawk costume would have thrown those into the harbor with gusto equal to that they demonstrated with the casks of tea. The tea ships were there, and the question of taxes and tea was a stormy one. Thus the way was paved for our mission.
TARRY TOWN
PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL
254 Van Winkle Drive · Sleepy Hollow, NY 10599
[Confidential]
PATIENT INTAKE ASSESSMENT
Jennifer Mills presents as a lucid, somewhat aggressive African-American female of seventeen. She stands five feet five inches tall and is extremely physically fit. She is aware of her involuntary commitment (her third) and understands she has been committed due to acts of vandalism and threatened violence, as well as repeated references to such topics as the end of the world. These suggest a paranoid or paranoid schizophrenic disorder. Testing will continue along those lines. This impression is further strengthened by Jennifer’s desire to train in martial arts and acquire weapons. She states that a war is coming and she will be required to fight. Apocalyptic visions of this sort are atypical in Jennifer’s demographic and are considered another marker of the severity of her mental illness.
We crept to the storehouse on the wharf and Doxford commanded me to stand watch outside. A moment later a tremendous explosion sounded and much of the storehouse was destroyed. I ran to the aid of my comrades and found everyone inside dead, including a Hessian terribly mangled by the grenade he had set off to defend the object we had come to collect. The fire and collapsed ruins made my task exceedingly difficult, but near the Hessian’s body I found a small chest made of stone. Without opening it or making any effort to ascertain its contents, I conveyed it to General Washington, along with a ciphered report detailing the night’s events. Then, in the next years, I thought no more of it; such tasks were quite common in the years leading up to the rebellion, and indeed throughout the years of active conflict. Looking back on it, I think that of all the tasks General Washington set me, this was hardly the most unusual.
I recounted this tale for Abigail and Miss Jenny while I examined the sextant, and after a moment I guessed its function. With a beam powered by batteries—a flashlight, so called, and here again I must note the incomprehensible advance of batteries over the initial investigations of Messrs. Franklin and Leyden—I projected an image via the sextant and instantly identified it as a map of Sleepy Hollow. From my time, at that. A location marked on this map, I felt certain, would hold the chest whose remembered markings had allowed me to recognize the nature of the sextant. I am coming to believe I have awakened into a world where no coincidence exists, or is possible.
Gunfire interrupted us then, and three bandits assaulted the cabin. I have been in a number of battles, but no volley of musketry or artillery had prepared me for the bludgeoning barrage of these modern weapons. We returned their fire, however, and though two of the miscreants escaped with the sextant, we held the third captive, who bore a tattoo identifying him as a Hessian. I interrogated him in German, and with the fearlessness and arrogance common to his cohort, he revealed without hesitation that the box contained the Lesser Key of Solomon. He had no fear of revealing this, he said, because Sleepy Hollow was rife with Hessians, hiding as it were in plain sight.
Abigail communicated with Captain Irving, and he led a search to this man Gunther’s house. There they discovered all manner of esoterica and occult paraphernalia. Abigail demanded of Gunther that he reveal the name of the Hessians’ leader and he replied that they had already seen him. The blurred demonic figure—of the Mills girls’ childhood terror, of Katrina’s otherworldly prison—was none other than the demon Moloch himself. It was he who had summoned the Horsemen, he who returned evil spirits to the world. We pressed Gunther further, but with a final salute to his demonic allegiance—Moloch erheben—he committed suicide by means of a pill hidden in his mouth.
Moloch erheben. “Moloch rises.”
MOLOCH. Attested by the ancients as a god requiring the sacrifice of children by fire. Later understood as a demon, whose favor could only be gained through terrible sacrifice. Records from Carthage suggest the sacrifice of hundreds of children at once—
I cannot bear to write of this anymore. The barbarity of mankind overwhelms me at times, when I am tired and sleeping poorly. All cultures create demons to explain their worst qualities, but we need no demons to excuse our pillage and rapine; it is in us. I have witnessed it today and it is, I fear, my destiny to witness a great deal more. Nevertheless, demons are real. Perhaps they are created from the very stuff of our transgressions, or perhaps they have always been, and alter their appearance to suit the stories we tell of them. Who may know? The Moloch of the ancients would watch my suffering and approve, though it would not satisfy him. Wherever his name appears, there is soon to come accounts of the worst of human behavior.
He is our enemy now, it seems—a warrior against heaven. He is real, and pitiless, and will destroy all those who refuse their consent to be his thralls. The purest distillation of Moloch’s character comes from the pages of Milton. I first read Paradise Lost before I came to Oxford, when I was still a boy, but no force of nature or man could tear these lines from my mind. I seem to hear Moloch’s voice as if the council of his fellow fallen angels was taking place within my brain.
…(I)f there be in Hell
Fear to be worse destroy’d: what can be worse
Then to dwell here, driv’n out from bliss, condemn’d
In this abhorred deep to utter woe;
Where pain of unextinguishable fire
Must exercise us without hope of end
The Vassals of his anger, when the Scourge
Inexorably, and the torturing houre
Calls us to Penance? More destroy’d then thus
We should be quite abolisht and expire.
What fear we then? what doubt we to incense
His utmost ire? which to the highth enrag’d,
Will either quite consume us, and reduce
To nothing this essential, happier farr
Then miserable to have eternal being:
Or if our substance be indeed Divine,
And cannot cease to be, we are at worst
On this side nothing; and by proof we feel
Our power sufficient to disturb his Heav’n,
And with perpetual inrodes to Allarme,
Though inaccessible, his fatal Throne:
Which if not Victory is yet Revenge.
That quieted my mind. The pen does the will of the brain, the hand is the instrument. Yet the sentiments expressed are anything but tranquil. If this Moloch of the Hessians is the same warlike spirit Milton knew (for one who has seen what I have seen must surely believe that Milton knew rather than invented; a visionary he was despite his blindness, or indeed perhaps because of it)—if this Moloch is the same, we are in for a weary struggle, and only faith will permit us to believe in our eventual triumph.
I have read of the Lesser Key of Solomon in any number of texts on demonology. First known during the Crusades, it came under the protection of the Knights Templar until its location was lost following their denunciation and bloody suppression by Philip IV of France and Pope Clement V. It is a book whose contents teach the would-be sorcerer the means of unlocking a door to the seventh circle of hell, where seventy-two demons wait eternally for their opportunity to escape into our world. By its other name, the Lemegeton, it has existed since medieval times, and was compiled from yet older sources.
I have seen copies of this book before, yet it appeared quite differently to the Hessians this day. One suspects that is due to Moloch’s power and control. Miss Jenny seems to know of the book as well, and she also has knowledge of the lore of the Knights Templar, which I would not have expected in a woman of her tender years. She and Abigail both seem to me, in the phrase of Juliet’s father, but strangers to this world as yet … although if one were to count up our birthdays, mine would not number too differently from theirs. I must remember this, lest I appear patronizing to two such vigorously intelligent and competent young women.
Not for the first time—nor, I hope, for the last—my gift of memory played its part, as I was able to sketch out the map as I had seen it projected from the sextant. Abigail noted the marked location, where General Washington had the chest containing the Lemegeton buried, as currently occupied by the Dutch Reformed Church—reformed from what, I had occasion to wonder—and we made haste to get there before the two other Hessians could make the same discovery and unlock the awful potential inherent in the Lesser Key.
Miss Jenny’s courage under fire was quite impressive to me, and I expressed this to her, whereupon she explained that during the course of her travels in Sheriff Corbin’s service, she had seen combat with rebellious forces in Mexico and what she called South Sudan. I know of the Sudan only as the region in Africa where the Blue and White Nile flow together, and that thanks only to the accounts of explorers read in the British Library during my early studies. So too with a nation now called Somalia, which I understand to be in the Horn of Africa, near the ancient civilization of Ethiopia—where, it is said, the Ark of the Covenant itself is hidden away and guarded by the deathless resolve of the Knights Templar and their descendants.
There was no time to speak in more depth, for we had arrived at the Dutch Reformed Church. We engaged the two Hessians as they were sacrilegiously performing the Lesser Key’s ritual of opening in the sanctuary. Within a burning pentagram composed of the pages of the book itself, the seventy-two demons strained at the thinning membrane separating them from our world and their infernal plane. Jennifer again demonstrated her bravery, as with a gun to her head she encouraged Abigail to think of stopping the ritual instead of protecting her. Abigail refused either choice, finding instead the third way of throwing the book itself into the fire. The agony of the demons as they were driven back from our world was terrible to hear, and driven by the fury of battle, I drove one of the Hessians into the closing portal, consigning him to the hell he wished to serve.
A recollection of a humorous nature: NorthStar. Some cars are equipped with a means of communicating with distant monitors who address the driver in the event of a mishap. The technology involved is difficult to explain, it seems. I gather it has something to do with machines orbiting Earth itself, miniature mechanical moons numbering in the thousands, each of which receives and transmits signals by means of some electrical field or beam. The telephones in every pocket operate using the same mechanism. How the electrical field transmits sound is a mystery to me.
In any event, Abigail’s car emitted some sort of signal, to which one of these NorthStar monitors, a young lady named Yolanda, responded. I spoke to her and assured her nothing was amiss, after which we struck up a heartfelt conversation. This young woman was lovelorn and uncertain how to answer the edicts of the heart, and she confided in me. It being churlish to do otherwise, I answered her confidences with such advice as I deemed appropriate. How incongruous in the midst of a war between heaven and hell, to find oneself playing soothsayer to an utter stranger—and, what is more, an utter stranger who might have been on the very moon. I could not have anticipated that a disembodied voice speaking to me through the car would require counsel, but such is what I endeavored to provide. And indeed she too salved some of my emotional wounds; I spoke to her of Katrina, my love for her, and the difficulties of our separation. Yolanda was a lovely young woman, and a comfort in a lonely time.
Also of interest today: Captain Irving suspects a Hessian turncoat in the ranks of his constabulary. Spy hunters of some sort are coming from Manhattan, which from what I understand is now one of the world’s great cities, with a population of some sixteen million. I remember traveling there on errands for General Washington, when it was a settlement at the island’s tip, thickly forested and well watered by not just the Hudson and Haarlem Rivers but numerous smaller streams as well. It was much smaller than Boston or Philadelphia then, but in the two centuries since it has far outstripped them.
I remember New York as a thriving port, where the Dutch presence was still visible not only in the names of streets and landmarks but in the practical and thrifty ways of its citizens. Not for them the pretensions of Boston or the lofty ruminations of the Philadelphian; New York was a city where there was much to do, and the people there set about doing it. I understand it is now much the same, and has acquired a reputation for brusqueness as well. It was one of my favorites of all American settlements; I do hope to see what has become of it.
Another product of my researches, this bit of doggerel, apparently known as the “Boston Toast”:
And this is good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod.
Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots,
And the Cabots talk only to God.
Ha! Quite so. Even when I knew that city, its social snobbery was renowned.
I have not dreamed of Katrina in several days. Optimism is my true nature, but even so I fear the worst.
