"Spirit of Sleepy Hollow on All Hallows Eve" Part 4 of 4

Caitlyn righted herself on the seat and held on as the carriage rocked over the uneven road. She looked out the carriage window expecting to see the front of the inn come into view, but the inn was gone. It was gone!

Before she could process that impossibility she saw they were heading towards the covered bridge.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she whispered, seeing a smashed pumpkin on the side of the road and didn’t like the feeling that it was a warning. She shook off the notion and reminded herself it was all make believe, a well choreographed spooktacular event in a Halloween Town. She admitted it was well done and she might have enjoyed it, if she hadn’t been thrown into the starring role of victim.

Caitlyn briefly wondered if her part in this was being filmed. Was it an elaborate Halloween prank played on an unsuspecting visitor to the area? Guest of honor indeed; she was the patsy.

 

The coach entered the bridge and Caitlyn was thrown into the darkness again. The horse’s hooves echoed over the wood flooring and the lamplight swung precariously, casting those ghostly shadows in the carriage’s interior again.

The carriage made it through without incident and the horses pace quickened as they approached the Old Dutch church.

This time the church doors were closed and the lamplights on this side of the bridge had been extinguished for the night.

The darkened road led straight into to the cemetery.

Caitlyn took out her cell phone, thinking she’d have to find another hotel once she was back in town but she had no cell service.

Great! I’ll be sleeping in my car, she thought as the carriage jerked sideways. She was nearly knocked off the seat again and had to hold on.

The horses jolted into a run putting the carriage at a dangerous speed and Caitlyn was thrown to the floor of it.

“What’s going on Wilbur?” She called out to the driver, but no answer came.

There was a little wooden slide door above the adjacent seat that could be opened to talk to the driver.

Caitlyn had a difficult time balancing in the rocking carriage but she managed to stand up and slide it open. Her eyes widened with fear when she saw the coachman wasn’t there; no one was driving the carriage.

She had only a second to register that fact, when the carriage lurched wildly and came to an abrupt stop causing her to fall back into the seat.

 

Caitlyn opened the carriage door to see her suitcase falling down a small hill. Caitlyn took that as an omen to exit the carriage.

It was tilted precariously and she tried to step lightly down from it but her foot twisted and she tumbled down and landed not too far from her suitcase.

She sat there as the horses, harnessed to the driverless carriage, regrouped and raced off. The carriage disappeared into the fog rolling in over the headstones.

The desolate, dank graveyard closed in on her and she knew she had a problem.

Caitlyn didn’t want to spend the night in this place and decided she’d have to find her way back to the exit gate into town. She picked up her suitcase with a sigh of resignation and began walking in a direction the carriage had gone, hoping it was the way out.

 

There was a waning gibbous moon and shafts of moonlight filtered through the fog. It was sufficient enough to keep her from total darkness but seeing the headstones framed in its eerie light, wasn’t comforting.

An owl hooted somewhere in the trees and leaves shook with the cool breeze that swept over the graves. Caitlyn wasn’t going to think about the creepy surroundings she was in and concentrated instead on the rutted path, putting one foot in front of the other, as she shivered in the cool night air.

She’d walked about ten minutes when she felt the ground under her feet rumbling.

She stopped and looked around expecting to see the carriage returning, but what she saw was not what she expected. Her heart jolted in her chest at the sight of a headless rider on a dark steed, holding a pumpkin and charging her way.

Caitlyn swallowed the scream in her throat and ran as fast as she could but she tripped over a tree root and fell, nearly hitting her head on a grave marker. She lifted her head and saw she’d landed on the grave of Washington Irving. She still heard the thundering hoofs approaching and didn’t know if she should get up and make a run for the exit, or stay there and hope he didn’t see her on the ground behind this stone.

She lifted her upper body, intending to peek over the headstone, and heard a commanding voice.

“Stay down.”

Caitlyn froze at the sound, knowing she hadn’t seen anyone nearby. Still, she heeded the words and crouched low against the headstone. She was shivering uncontrollably as the seconds, feeling like hours, ticked by and the thundering hooves grew closer.

Thankfully, she heard them continue on and soon they grew distant.

Caitlyn sat up and as she calmed her nerves and looked for the person who’d spoken to her. She saw him leaning against the headstone of Washington Irving and he was dressed in the typical vintage wear she’d grown use to seeing.

“Thank you; are you one of the parishioners who were in the church earlier?”

He smiled but didn’t respond to the question instead, he lifted his hand and pointed the way out for her. “Follow that path; stay as close to it as you can. When you get to the town gate, he will be there. You will have to climb over the wall near the Dekker Mausoleum. There is a tall stone behind it, use it to climb onto the wall and go over it.”

Caitlyn turned and frowned at the path he’d indicated. “It looks exposed; won’t he see me walking on it, or is that part of this game?” She asked cynically and turned back to him, but he wasn’t there; he wasn’t anywhere.

Caitlyn backed away from the gravesite, her bones shaking uncontrollably now and her heart pounding painfully in her chest. She scurried to the path the…ghost…had suggested scolding herself for her gullibility.

There had to be an explanation for all of this but without one…she simply refused to think about how he’d disappeared, or who, or what he might have been.

 

The sound of crickets hidden in the tall grasses combined with the mist hanging over the headstones crippled her confidence but she kept walking and fifteen minutes later she saw the heavy, iron gate that led into the town. The gate was open but, like Irving’s ghost had warned her, the horseman was there guarding it.

Caitlyn wanted to be brave and confront that costumed person but something told her not to, and the same intuition told her it wasn’t a costume.

She hesitated, unsure what to do, until she noticed the rows of mausoleums on her right, near the wall.

She walked cautiously towards them, reading the markers by each, and found the one with the name Dekker. Her relief at the sight of the sir name was brief because she’d noticed additional names etched in deep pocketed letters on a plaque near the entrance; the etched names were Pieter and Beatrix Dekker.

That can’t be right, unless the couple at the inn were playing acting the lives of these real villagers.  She decided that had to be it, but the supernatural explanation had taken root in her mind and wasn’t going away.

She walked behind the mausoleum and found the tall stone the possible ghost had told her would be there. It was tall and nearly reached the top of the wall and had divots in it deep enough to grab hold of.

Caitlyn climb up on the stone and propelled her self and her suitcase up onto the wall.

Then she looked to her left, at the exit gate, and saw the horseman’s headless body turn in her direction. His crazed horse whinnied, a blood curdling sound as she threw her suitcase over the wall and managed to get her legs over the side too but she found she couldn’t jump down. A strange, thick air, thick like molasses, enveloped her. It trapped her there on the wall. 

She pushed against but the thickness tightened around her like an unseen grip.

Peripherally, she saw the horseman rear up on his horse and raise his right hand, in it he held a pumpkin blazing with fire. He aimed it at her.

Caitlyn screamed and used every once of her strength to slam her fist through the gelled air and in what can only be described as slow motion, she broke through it.

She fell in a slow arc down to the ground and landed gently on the other side of the cemetery wall. Then the strange gelled substance evaporated and she could see the town around her. She took a deep steadying breath, realizing she’d made it. She was back in the town and that crazy Halloween madness, whatever it was, was over.

She heard crowds of people cheering and saw a Halloween parade was passing by on the street. People, six rows deep, were lined up along the streets watching it.

Caitlyn picked up her suitcase and crossed the street from the cemetery side to the store lined side of the street, dodging parade floats and parade walkers in costumes as she did. A mechanical float missed hitting her by only two feet but she made it to the sidewalk on the other side and smiled.

She was safe she thought, huddled near the crowd of people but then she looked across to the entrance to the graveyard and a chill raced up her spine.

The horseman was still there, framed in the entrance to the cemetery.

The crowd of people saw him at the same time Caitlyn did, but they cheered him on; thinking he was a part of the Halloween celebration.

Caitlyn knew better; since fighting through that molasses time warp on the wall she believed something bizarre was happening here.

She tried to look away from the horseman but couldn’t because she knew, even without a head, he was looking at her. Then his horse rear up on its hind legs and the horseman pull back his arm. This time he released the flaming pumpkin with a supernatural force.

Caitlyn watched the flaming gourd spin in the air, suspended against that same thick molasses of time she’d felt on the wall, but then, to her dread, the pumpkin pushed through it and flew up in an arc then down in a trajectory that was aiming for her.

Caitlyn jumped back but the crowd was too close behind her; she couldn’t move away and the flaming pumpkin was closing in on her. She pushed back frantically against the crowd but to no avail. Then her heart trip hammered in her chest as the seconds slowed and the flames of the pumpkin drew closer, close enough to reflect in her eyes.

The pumpkin hovered inches from her face and she could feel the heat of its flames. She dared not breathe and closed her eyes in fear as it moved closer. It stopped with a sliver of space between its flames and her nose. Then it smashed to the ground at her feet.

The Parade crowd roared and applauded the amazing special effects and Caitlyn opened her eyes to see the smoldering pumpkin on the ground. Then she looked up and stared at the horseman at the graveyard’s entrance.

His horse pawed the ground then reared up in fury before it turned and thundered off back into the darkness of the graveyard as a clock somewhere began to toll the midnight hour.

Caitlyn took a steadying breath and came to a sobering conclusion. Tonight, she’d entered what James Paulding had told her was a time fission. She’d met those people from a past century in an inn that didn’t exist and, legend or not, she’d just survived an encounter with the headless horseman, and her escape had been helped by the ghost of Washington Irving.

Impossible, all of it was impossible, but it was true.

The last strike of midnight reverberated and Caitlyn grasped her suitcase and turned it the direction where she’d parked her car.

She was going to get in her car and drive all night if she had to but she was getting out of this Sleepy Hollow town, and never looking back.

*

The shadows shifted in the graveyard revealing the ghost of Washington Irving standing by his headstone watching the horseman thunder past him to vanish into the mists of his time.

“Goodnight to you!” Pieter called out, waving from his mausoleum with his wife Beatrix by his side.

“Goodnight,” Irving replied as he brushed dust from his headstone and pulled out a weed from the grass that blanketed his resting place. He sank back into the earth for a peaceful slumber, until next year, when another unsuspecting soul would be lured into his never ending tale, and he'd feel responsible to see them safely through it.

If only he'd known that penning that tale would immortalize the horseman.

 

link to all parts: https://www.abctales.com/collection/spirit-sleepy-hollow-all-hallows-eve...