Walking down the street today, innocently preoccupied with the eternal war of good against evil (as one in my position often is), I collided with a woman running around the corner of the building from which I had just then emerged. She showered me with invective, and I made my excuses, although I am certain the fault was hers. Then she ran on after resetting her wristwatch. Consulting Abigail, I learned I had encountered a “jogger.” These, it seems, are people who run long distances for the sake of nothing more than running. I hereby deem this a psychological disability, and I said as much to Abigail.
Her response? A phrase I believe I shall adopt: “Don’t knock it ’til you try it.”
Abigail has gained conservatorship over her sister, a step toward securing Jennifer’s freedom from the apparatus of the state. In other salutary news, I am free of the sterile environs of the motel room and am now quartered in Corbin’s cabin. It suits me. There is less plastic here. More of this when I have set down the day’s events, which include a brush with death not by demonic means but by a more prosaic road to mortality: a disease of unknown origin.
It began with a lost boy, sick and speaking a language no one could understand. Abigail and I responded, as did medical personnel, and I realized he was speaking Middle English. The vowel sounds and lack of Latinate constructions make this period of the English language quite distinct from both its Anglo-Saxon ancestor and modern English descendant. I followed him to the hospital and continued questioning him. He gave his name as Thomas Grey and said his home was Roanoke. At this point our conversation was truncated by the officials in charge of halting the spread of the boy’s disease, which had already infected the medic who first attempted to treat him. Abigail and I were fortunate to escape quarantine ourselves.
From the boy’s dress, demeanor, and antiquated language, I surmised he spoke not of the present-day Roanoke, Virginia, but the lost colony of Roanoke, one of the first great mysteries of the European settlement of this continent. A thriving community founded in the sixteenth century, it vanished during the period of a single year, without any known cause. The story of Roanoke had already entered the colonial mythology when I first crossed the Atlantic in 1770, and as Abigail and I began our researches we found that the myths and legends had proliferated since then. How odd that here in the twenty-first century, I still find occasion to make use of my hard-won fluency in the Middle English of the fifteenth!
We returned to the place where the boy was first spotted, and I retraced his steps, putting to good use tracking skills I had learned as a youth foxhunting, and which were honed to excellency (I acknowledge the immodesty, but ’tis true) by scouting missions in the company of Mohawks. There were two sets of tracks, which lent credence to young Thomas’s story of an euel þerne—an evil girl—and this story grew yet more credible when the second set of tracks simply vanished. Thomas’s own tracks grew confused at that point, and rushed. I saw the ragged panic in his stride. A skilled tracker can tell much about a person’s emotions and behaviors by the minutiae of that person’s footprints: where the weight falls hardest, whether the spacing between prints is even, a dozen or a hundred different factors. It was clear Thomas was lost once this second set of prints disappeared, and it was not difficult to infer the cause. A demon had misled the boy.
By means of a hidden bridge (and avoiding an amphibious guardian creature which I am glad to report I know of only at a distance) Abigail and I found our way across the bog to the island, and there a wonder awaited us. Roanoke, it seemed, had survived, an idyllic village arranged around a well, with people looking happy and content—their visible black veins notwithstanding. They all had the plague that was proving so lethal in the world outside, yet none of them appeared the least affected by it. I spoke to the prefect of the colony—he too spoke in a version of the language that seemed antiquated even for 1590, which he cited as the year of their exodus from Virginia. The plague began to spread among them in that year, and they understood that they were to leave Roanoke, trusting in their Creator to find a new home. The colony’s most famous resident, the first English child born in North America, little Virginia Dare, died of the plague. Her spirit inhabited a white doe, the prefect recounted, and the guidance of that doe led the colony to their new home. As long as they remained on their hidden island, protected by the doe, the progress of the disease was arrested.
Thomas Grey, upon leaving the island, suffered the progression of the disease anew. The prefect believed him misguided by the devil; I for my part suspected Moloch.
I asked him what was to be done. He had a simple answer: Return Thomas Grey to the island so that he could be healed and the worsening of his disease prevented. This seemed simple enough, but as with all matters related to the evils lurking in and around Sleepy Hollow, first impressions were thoroughly deceptive. The moment I exited the secret island and returned to the hospital—conferring with Abigail along the way regarding the best method by which we might free young Thomas and return him to his magically sequestered people—I too began to manifest the dread symptoms of the black-vein plague.
Quite a number of things transpired during the past few hours, few of which I can recount firsthand, for the reason that I was under involuntary sedation. I can offer direct testimony of the welcome return—despite the trying circumstances—of my wife in a dream. She evinced concern upon seeing me, knowing that my presence in her Mirror World while I was not asleep could only mean I hovered near death. I learned to my dismay that the forested prison was in fact Purgatory, where souls persist until the heavenly authorities decree they have expiated their earthly transgressions. What could she have done to be consigned to such a place? Was her witchcraft the cause—or was her imprisonment there a result of Moloch’s machinations? I asked her and she demurred; I pressed her and she might have offered a hint—or might not—but at that moment Moloch struck. My Purgatory self was more vigorous than my sedated physical self, to be sure, and I was able to escape, swearing I would return. I know not by what means I was able to traverse the distance between near-death and full wakefulness again—save through the willpower all humans possess but so few ever employ fully—but I awoke in the hospital again and quickly conveyed to Abigail my recent discoveries. The disease officials tried to prevent our exit, but Captain Irving again proved that whatever his reservations, his heart is, as they say, in the right place.
I made it to the island with the very last of my strength and the most crucial under the looming threat of the Horseman of Pestilence—for it was he who had infected the Roanoke colonists and he who would burst through into our world if the black-vein plague spread to enough citizens. The second Horseman, so soon! How quickly might we get our first inklings of the third? The fourth? We fought back, staying ahead of the Horseman of Pestilence long enough to submerge my failing body in the artesian water of the well at the center of the island. The same cure was attempted simultaneously for Thomas Grey, but he did not survive … and in a revelation, it became apparent that he had not been alive for quite some time. His spirit rose away, and then the spirits of the other island colonists joined his. The Horseman of Pestilence, thwarted, returned whence he had come, and the darkest times of tribulation were delayed … for how long, it is not given us to know.
When the souls had passed on, I realized I had moved from one Purgatory to another of sorts, where the souls of the Roanoke colonists had been held these five centuries. Abigail and I, as Witnesses, had released them—and we had also forestalled the appearance of the Horseman of Pestilence. All in all, as it is commonly said in this age, a pretty good day’s work.
It was a moment of awe, to understand what the burden and power of a Witness truly was. Then we stood, Abigail and I, in a long-overgrown ruin, the only discernible sign of its ever having been inhabited the remains of the artesian well. I was saddened by its passing; I felt as if I belonged there, or at the very least that this hidden island, ensorcelled though it may have been, brought into stark relief that degree to which I was alone in Abigail’s time. This age of plastic and satellites, cars and endless cities, where everything smells like the river downstream from a tannery … it is not mine. It will never be mine.
Yet it is the age in which I now live—the age in which I continue to serve the cause I first joined in the long-withered year of 1771. Abigail was a great help to me in this moment. We have a connection, not just due to our mutual task as Witnesses; something more personal, transcending the gulfs and barriers of age, or race, of history.…
I believe there is a genuine trust between us now. I have certainly entrusted her with my life, and she has reciprocated. We were thrown together by dire circumstance, and might have allowed mutual suspicion to weaken us in the face of deadly threats; but happily we have made a better choice. I am glad to count her as an ally, and perhaps a friend as well.
Having viewed a modern hospital, it occurs to me now that this age is a fine one in which to be sick or injured. No one dies of gangrene or battlefield infection thanks to drugs known as antibiotics (one apparently created during an experiment on the growth of mold!). Amputations by bone saw, sterilized by whiskey, and suffered by means of biting down on a stick—these are unknown. Injections forestall the spread of diseases that ravaged my age: Smallpox has been eradicated! Scarlet fever, diphtheria, measles … these are now so uncommon that their appearance is newsworthy.
What a difference this would have made to the colonial militias. They were sick, and poorly nourished, and fell in droves to scythes of disease. Had we this medical science, the Revolution would have been over before 1781 … and perhaps I would never have encountered the Hessian; thus it is demonstrated, perhaps, that things occur in the manner they are destined to occur.
Now I am back in the cabin. Still I am thinking of Roanoke, and the world before engines and telephones and videotape and NorthStar and flashlights—before, to be brief, this age wherein everything seems always to happen at once. I learned how to use one of these iPhones (what arrant foolishness, this transposition of the initial capital to the interior of a word). Perhaps I am slowly assimilating this age, or it is assimilating me.…
It is time to sleep, but I cannot stop thinking of the way Moloch misled the boy Thomas Grey, gave him flesh and drew him out into Sleepy Hollow, seeking to spread his disease. The advent of the Horseman of Pestilence cannot be far away, if it has not happened already.
In honor of young Thomas Grey, I recall the last lines of a poem by his near namesake, which all young men of sentiment memorized when I was a boy. The entire poem invariably brings me to melancholy, and I fear melancholy is too much to face this eve—perhaps another, when Katrina and I might again meet face-to-face. For the touch of her hand on mine, I would consider the Faustian bargain.
From Gray:
The Epitaph
Here rests his head upon the lap of earth
A youth to fortune and to fame unknown.
Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth,
And Melancholy marked him for her own.
Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,
Heaven did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to Misery all he had, a tear,
He gained from Heaven (’twas all he wished) a friend.
No farther seek his merits to disclose,
Or draw his frailties from their dread abode,
(There they alike in trembling hope repose)
The bosom of his Father and his God.
