“The horseman rides every autumn, as soon as the leaves begin to fall. He rides searching for his head, and if you happen upon him on the road, he might try to take yours, to see if it fits.”
Katrina listened as Annika Van Wees repeated the oft told story to the newcomer to their kitchen, a neighbor girl, of an age with one of Annika’s own young daughters. Pie making was labor-intensive, and the more hands available to work the dough and braid the lattice, the faster it went. She listened and smiled as the girl dropped the dough ball she was meant to be kneading, her hands going slack around it, but added no embellishments to the tale of her own. None were needed. There was not a single soul in the village who did not live in fear of an encounter with the headless ghost when the leaves began to tumble from the trees. None but her. He rides seeking his head.
He patrolled the main thoroughfare through town, the eldest Van Wees girl went on, picking up the tale from her mother, from the churchyard to the old Major’s bridge and the haunted wood beyond, endlessly searching for what he had lost. He took the heads from the shoulders of others, testing and discarding, never ceasing his search, terrorizing the residents of Sleepy Hollow every autumn.
“That’s just a story,” the Kessler girl broke in, interrupting the tale being spun for her benefit, scowling across the bowl of sugared apple slices. “There’s no such thing as a headless ghost, you’re just trying to scare me.”
“There is so,” the youngest Van Wees cut in indignantly. “Katrina has seen him!”
The Kesslers were new to Sleepy Hollow, neighbors of the Van Wees family, and the girls were delighting in sharing the stories of all the local ghosts with their new friends.
“What do you suppose he’ll do if he finds it?” Katrina asked conversationally, ignoring both the claim of her ghostly acquaintance and the gaping mouth of the young Kessler girl. “His head, I mean. Do you suppose he’ll pack his bags and leave town?”
“Well, that’s just the thing, isn’t it?” Annika cut in, giving the girls a gimlet-eyed smile. “He needs to find the right head. His head. Once he does, he’ll be right as rain again. That’s what your Oma used to say,“ she addressed her daughters. “He wasn’t injured in the battle, save for his head. Once he finds it, he’ll be good as new. Able to sack the whole town, if it pleases him.”
Katrina grinned as the girls began to bicker over the veracity of the ghost story. The trees had donned their autumn finery weeks earlier, and now they had begun to shed their colorful raiment, piling in drifts on the roadside. The Horseman ruled the nighttime roads once more, and she knew the Kessler girl would likely be terrified to even step a toe out of the house past sundown once the Van Wees girls were through with her.
After all, they weren’t lying. She had seen the ghost. Had seen him, had touched him, and as the days passed and the veil grew thinner, she would soon do so again. It would soon be time to enact her plan, to lure the ghost, and this Hallowmas, she was intent on success.
“We arrived in the village at night,” the Kessler girl argued. “The first night we slept in the house, it was night when we arrived. Why didn’t we see the ghost on the road?”
“Because it was still summertime when you moved here,” the youngest Van Wees sniffed, a miniature of her mother. “The horseman only comes out in the autumn.”
“It’s true,” one of the other girls piped up gleefully. “He only rides once the leaves begin to fall, Annemie. You’d better be careful coming and going to your opa’s farm!”
Katrina turned, still smiling, as her hosts cackled and the newcomer wailed. Her thoughts drifted like those tumbling leaves, as they so often did, to him. There was no more room for melancholy, not now. She’d had all winter to grieve, nursing her heavy heart. She’d had the spring to ruminate, and all summer to make her plans. Now . . . now it was time to act.
The leaves had turned crimson once more, fat pumpkins turning their ruddy bellies to the mid-autumn sunlight. The air had turned crisp, the fields shorn of their crops, the trees dotted and heavy with apples, and once the trees were bare, leaves heaping the roads in piles of crimson and orange and gold, it would be time. This year, she would seek him out.
Life tethered to death, all she had ever known.
Katrina Van Tassel had come to Sleepy Hollow as a schoolmistress, charged with ensuring literacy amongst the young girls of the village. She was lucky to have found the position, for there were only a handful of schools dotting the countryside which cared to do so, for literacy amongst women was considered a perilous thing.
That was what she heard, time and time again, in village after village. Literate women were dangerous. Knowing their letters would lead young girls to treacherous thoughts, licentious behavior, and cohorting with the devil himself. She had been accused of witchcraft before. ‘Twas the devil who taught women to read, they’d said, to craft their grimoires and spellbooks and pass on the unholy knowledge, corrupting other young girls and turning them away from their families.
Katrina would act suitably scandalized upon hearing the familiar refrain. She was well versed in convincing the good men in town that she was ignorant to their claims — that being well-lettered would ensure their daughters would be better assets to their future husbands, maintaining the homestead ledgers and teaching their children the good Scripture. That their sons were strong-minded enough to prevent any treacherous thinking from taking root beneath their roofs and admirably virile enough that any licentious behavior would be amply satisfied in their marriage beds. Future generations of their village’s wives would wake each day fucked senseless and satisfied, able to help with the harvest accounting, raise pious children, and cook a hearty meal. All far too busy for cohorting, be it with devils or otherwise, putting their licentious behavior to good use satisfying their strapping, doubtlessly well-endowed husbands, starting the whole cycle of senselessness over again.
Occasionally, her carefully rehearsed rationale worked. A single room adjacent to the boys’ school, or else a space belonging to the church would be requisitioned as her classroom, and she would be installed as the school mistress. It was how she had stayed employed for the last half a dozen years, earning a quarter a week and lodging with the various families in whatever village hosted her, in an endless rotation.
It was unsurprising to her that the men who worried most about dangerous thinking and licentious behavior were the ones whose hands wandered most freely. The more voraciously they argued against her presence in town in the beginning, the more likely they were to slip a hand under her skirts as she set the dinner table in their home, or press behind her at the credenza as she laid the serving dishes, footsteps away from the children they claimed such concern over, ensuring she could feel the rigid bump of their swollen erections, as their wives bustled about the kitchen.
Things hadn’t been much different once she’d come to Sleepy Hollow that spring. She met the usual protestations, the concern over their daughters forming opinions independent of their father and future husbands, and the normal rubbish over demonic dalliances.
The Van Ripper family were the first to take her in, even though the old man had been one of the most boorish, vocal opponents to the girls’ school in the first place. She’d known what to expect in his household, and sure enough, by the end of the first week, Hans Van Ripper was cornering her in the barn, nudging the bulge at the front of his breeches into her side.