The key is to know why Moloch wishes to preserve my life. With that information we may begin to concoct a plan to turn Moloch’s own goals against him—and use the Horseman as the linchpin of that turning.
I slept little last night. The thought of Katrina in her forest Purgatory, subject to the demonic whim of Moloch himself—what man could sleep?
Also the question of betrayal prevented my eyes from closing and my mind from taking rest. An ugly word, betrayal. From the Latin tradere, “to hand over.” Did I hand Abraham Van Brunt over to our mutual enemies?
Unquestionably I did. But could I have done otherwise? Had I stayed to fight, and both of us been killed, British discovery of the Declaration and Resolves would have endangered a number of the delegates to the Continental Congress. Apart from the loss of life, surely it would have delayed the independence of the colonies from Britain, perhaps for decades.
Against that knowledge, I weigh the memory of leaving Van Brunt behind … and though just yesterday I wrote of the necessity of choosing reason over emotion, in this case I find myself unable to make that choice. For without the staying hand of emotion, reason turns the human mind into a calculating machine—one more node, perhaps, in the Internet. There is no worse fate for a mind that believes itself capable of independent thought, or a heart that yearns for the love of fellow creatures, including my Masonic brethren who have been murdered by the Hessian.
I have not written of it these past few days because my instinct would have been to indulge in self-pity—that weakest and most despicable of vices! They are gone. They would have killed me, but they were true brothers, and perhaps the nearest thing I might have had to true friends (Abigail apart). Our side in this war is inestimably weakened by their loss. I would reach out to other Freemasons in and around Sleepy Hollow, but not all of the brethren are initiated into the deeper mysteries; not all possess the darkest secrets; that is as it should be, yet it makes any contact difficult. I must wait until events demand such a desperate embassy—or until others within Freemasonry reach out to me. You are out there, my brothers; I know it. But where? Make yourselves known, I beg of you.
I am probably not, as they say, in the spirit of this holiday called Halloween. When I saw a small child dressed as a witch—or as the Headless Horseman, of whom I counted four today, none more than ten years of age—I immediately ran to Abigail and warned her that the Order of the Blood Moon was openly asserting its diabolical powers and drawing innocent children into their coven. How she laughed!
There was a Hallowmas celebration in the England of my youth, but it consisted primarily of groups of drunken young men singing rowdy songs and demanding gifts from their more sedate neighbors in return for the promise of prayers for the dead. How it became the province of children I know not, although it seems unsurprising that a celebration involving costumes and sweets would draw children in. Samhain, the ancient Celtic holiday, lies behind it all—that time when the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead was thinnest and most permeable. In America it has all been buried under a tide of festival good cheer. I suspect the spirits, accustomed as they were to a certain amount of deference, are quite irritated by this development.
A few thoughts that remain on my mind:
• Miss Jenny is proving herself an invaluable asset. She has knowledge of the secret undercurrents of Sleepy Hollow, thanks to her work on behalf of Sheriff Corbin—and she also has a soldier’s nature. By that I mean that she is the type of person (I almost wrote man) who constantly feels the lack of battle whenever there is no battle to fight. She throws herself into combat with both gusto and intelligence. We will need her in the future, perhaps more than we have already needed her thus far.
• I have been doing a bit of reading in the imaginative literature of this country. Fascinating—I find Twain a splendid raconteur. Also I happened to pick up a volume by William Faulkner. His language is by turns intoxicating and opaque, but one senses every word was carefully placed. I must read more of him before I decide whether he is a literary experimentalist or a purveyor of glib nonsense masquerading as emotional profundity.
• In addition to his dalliance with slaves (which I reflexively denied when Abigail first mentioned it, but now I have come to understand that it is established fact), Jefferson possessed an inordinate fondness for puns—not a transgression on the order of adultery, certainly, but another facet of him that he angled away from public view. The Founding Fathers (this is a source of constant surprise for those who did not know them as men) were like anyone else, with a full human array of foibles and peccadilloes.