Wake the Hollow Page 15

As I whistle and call, I venture deeper into the cemetery. Up ahead are the banks of the river. Farther down, a rickety covered wooden bridge about twenty feet long—the very one some say the legendary Headless Horseman is said to cross each night. My dragging feet swish over piles of fallen leaves to get to it.

  It doesn’t look very sturdy, but there doesn’t seem to be another way to get to the other side, either. The wind picks up, sending a fresh burst of golden leaves raining to the ground and water. I start crossing the bridge, my eyes adjusting to the darkness within.

  Go...

  “Mami, I don’t know if that’s you,” I whisper, hurrying through the tunnel. “But I’m not leaving until I talk to you. Where’s Coco?”

  Exiting the tunnel, the trees almost look as though they’re leaning, whispering into one another. I hear what sounds like mumbling up ahead. I strain to see who might be there. More trees and headstones.

  The mumbling comes again, but I can’t decipher it. I walk on for another minute, then stop cold. Breathing. Someone is near me. Just like the night at the train station. Or is that my own breath, suspended in the air in front of me? My heart beats loudly against my ears. At least I think it’s my heart…

  Lela.

  “Mami?” I shout, fists rigid at my sides.

  Leave now.

  She answers me. My mom is answering me. “No! I’m tired of running. Tell me what’s going on!”

  A low snicker comes through just then, not in the cemetery, not in my mind, either. I freeze and listen for it again. It starts low, then grows louder. Is someone laughing? “Bram, is that you, because if it is, it’s NOT funny!” I yell, echoes resonating all around.

  Quiet settles over the cemetery once again, except for the sound of the wind. Something tells me it’s not Bram. Then I hear it—a low laugh. A chilled feeling prickles my arm. I whirl around, expecting to see someone standing there. Instead, I see a flash of white, lying very still against a tombstone.

  No.

  I slowly walk up, eyes glued to the unmistakable curve of a fluffy white tail. “Oh, God, no.” I throw myself on the ground at the cat’s body, still and lifeless. Her tail, the only part of her that seems intact. “Coco.” She’s flattened and muddy in the middle. Her head is broken, fresh blood oozing from her ears and nose. Her tongue barely pokes out between sharp, small teeth. I fight to keep my stomach from rising into my throat.

  She’s been trampled but not by an animal. By tires. Someone driving, looking for a headstone, not being careful. I shut my eyes against the mangled mess. I remember Coconut as a tiny kitten with closed eyes and ears, nestled against Pumpkin’s belly. I reach out and rest my hand on her head.

  “Why didn’t you stay home?” I whisper through tears. Who would do this to her? Why did she come all this way? Then I notice the stone on top of which the cat lies dead—

  MARIA VASQUEZ BURGOS

  Suddenly, I hear the laugh once again, calm and satisfied. A solid wave of rage starts between my forehead and the back of my head, overtaking my entire body. Teeth clenched so hard, I hear them grind. I scream, “What’s so funny, you sick bastard!”

  Then a new sound, so clear there’s no mistaking it. A horse’s neigh, followed by the woody, hollow sound of hooves galloping right toward me.

  Thirsty leaves rustle on the ground like littered newspaper in the wind. I stand paralyzed over my mother’s grave, eyes roving, searching for the source of the sound. A horse in the cemetery? Seriously? But there’s no one here! Yet the galloping feels a blink away.

  Run, Lela!

  I break free of the invisible straitjacket immobilizing my upper body. I plunge through the woods, boots pounding the earth in time with my breath, eyes focused ahead, dodging grave markers, logs, rocks, and fallen limbs in my way. Who’s charging me on a horse? The Headless Horseman is only a character in a story. A legend.

  Isn’t he?

  I run straight for the bridge, my breath short and choppy. Isn’t the horseman supposed to stop chasing his victims once they cross the bridge? How ridiculous that I’m considering the logistics behind a work of fiction. Maybe it’s not a real spirit at all, but someone playing a trick on me.

  It’s unnervingly dark inside the covered bridge, but I have no other choice. The galloping is right behind me. I’ll have to go through it if I don’t want to sense a horse’s hot breath prickling my neck. I avoid eye contact with whoever is chasing me, in case paralysis freezes my body again…then I’ll get trampled like Coconut.

  I charge through the bridge, my breath loud in my ears, panicked footsteps echoing against the siding, plowing along the musty planks until I blast out the other end, nearly tumbling onto the ground. I check over my shoulder. Nothing followed me through. But next to the bridge, a hazy mist hovers above the ground in the shape of what could be interpreted as a massive horse with a rider on top. It stands at the edge of the river, watching me escape.

  That’s no trick.

  I tear my incredulous gaze away from the swirling shape and start dodging obstacles and jumping over grave markers. The marble angels watch me flee, their prayers falling on deaf ears. Suddenly, the horse neighs angrily. I peer over my shoulder in time to see it rear, its front hooves high in the air, land again, then take a few steps back for what quickly becomes a running start.

  I don’t wait to see the horse leap over the water or land on my half of the cemetery. I sprint again, pushing my body faster than I ever imagined possible, visualizing the west end of the property ahead to encourage me. Just then, another shape barrels into my view about fifty feet away, startling me even more. Someone on a bike. He seems to be fleeing the spectral horse and rider, same as me. Hooded black sweatshirt, black sweatpants, small and skillful on the low-riding mountain bike. The fat tires crunch over rough terrain, its driver expertly maneuvering over the challenging topography, using rocks and rotting bark as a springboard for leaping into the air.

  Behind me, the horse and rider draw closer. From this distance, they appear more solid, real. Black shiny coat, brown leather saddle, black boots, gray pants, buttoned coat, and the rider’s head—I want to laugh and scream at the same time—missing? As I gape at the phantom in utter fascination, I stumble over a gravestone and hit my knee against a massive rock, falling onto my side.

  Damn it! I bite my lip to keep from crying out, but the pain is blinding. My jeans tear at the knee, and a deep scrape is already pooling with bright red blood.

  The horseman will definitely get me now if he wants to. But he doesn’t. He bounds on, through stones and bushes as if traveling on a completely separate astral plane as me. In fact, it’s like I don’t even exist. Up ahead, the Irving family plot marks the end of the property on the edge of a hill. If I jump off the hill to escape, I’ll hurt myself even more. I have no choice but to lie perfectly still. I drag myself behind a tall gravestone and wait.

  Watching the Hessian trooper carry on, I realize I’m caught in the middle of a different chase. It’s the bicycle he’s after. The biker pedals through the last section of the cemetery, heading straight for the edge of the short cliff. The horseman leaps over a low knoll, forcing the biker straight off the hill’s edge. I watch in awe as the biker flies over the hill, laughing the same maniacal laugh I heard moments before I found Coco. He lands in a rough skid, swaying, nearly wiping out on the church property below. Seconds later, he regains balance and escapes through a grove of trees outside the cemetery.

  As if pulled by invisible reins, the horse skids to a halt just short of the cliff, and a gruff voice echoes something like, “Ved-peace dish!”

  The horse snorts, dancing in place while the rider reclaims control of its rearing head. I suck in deep gulps of air, trying not to faint. I peek and see the apparition still there, and, maybe I’m delirious at this point, but he’s looking straight at me. How can he? He has no eyes, face, or head to speak of, but I just know that he’s watching me. Is he coming for me next?

  I really don’t think he is. Especially
when, after a minute of listening to the horse snorting air from its nostrils, the horseman calmly kicks his steed and trots back the way he came, satisfied, it seems, that his task of chasing out the unwelcomed has been successful. Was he protecting me when he saw I was in danger? Just in case, I continue to hide behind the tombstone. Until I’m sure, without a moment’s hesitation, that my gallant guardian is completely gone.

  ...

  At the apartment, sitting on the wobbly toilet seat lid, I press a wad of cotton balls soaked with hydrogen peroxide against my knee, staring at my dirty nails and hands, waiting for the solution to penetrate my wound.

  “Ow!” The stinging pain sets off a wave of tears that have nothing to do with my cuts. I lost my cat in such a horrible way. Who would do such a thing?

  My mind reels with a multitude of thoughts. How I should’ve kept Coco at the townhouse. Screw Nina’s allergies. How I never should’ve come back to Sleepy Hollow, or hey, never should’ve left my mother in the first place. Maybe, if I hadn’t been such a naive little princess under my father’s influence, I might’ve helped my mother, and the poor woman might still be alive.

  But that’s not how my life is turning out, and now I’m smack in the middle of a colossal mess. I lift the cotton balls and blow on my knee, what my mother used to do. It feels worse than it looks. I can’t remember the last time I ran that fast.

  It had to be the biker who trampled Coco. She had tire tracks on her. Though I want to believe it was an accident, that no decent person would ever do that to an animal or to me, no matter how much they hated us. But it was so deliberate—the way she was left on Mami’s grave and all—like a warning.

  And I’m convinced the horseman was protecting me. I’ve heard older folks at parties before insist that the apparition exists. They talk about it with kids gathered at their feet, but I’d always assumed they were stories for a dark autumn night. He certainly looked real to me.

  I don’t know anything anymore. In fact, I’m starting to embrace uncertainty with the same sense of duty as a ship’s captain sinking with his own vessel. One thing I know is that I can’t stay at Bram’s. Too risky. What if he’s not really into me? What if it’s all just an act to get to my mother’s documents?

  I open a packet of gauze and place it over the wound, ripping bandaging tape with my teeth and securing it in place. My tattered jeans go in the garbage. Carefully, I hobble to my bag and change into sweatpants, then I transfer my mother’s envelope from my purse to my backpack, along with a few other things I’ve brought—a sweater, textbooks, an extra pair of shoes.

  From the bed, my phone rings. I run over and grab it, noticing that Bram has texted me pics. I enlarge the first one, and—surprise, surprise—me and Dane at the lake! Of course! Because my day has not been shitty enough! The first one shows us walking through the courtyard. The other, us sitting together by the lake, my face twisted into a knot. And the last one, pure fodder for Bram, Dane holding my hand.

  Bram’s text—

  You sure you want to do this?

  The last pic is a screenshot of a text argument between him and Lacy. She tells him he’s too stupid to realize that I have eyes for someone else, and it’s clear that the photo came from her.

  How did you get that?

  What does it matter?

  Because it matters.

  Lacy is in color guard, Mica.

  What does color guard have to do with any— Ugh, stupid color guard. I knew we should’ve left the college. They were using the field to practice when Dane and I were there.

  My fingers tap out a quick reply:

  Do not pretend to know what this is all about.

  It doesn’t sound very understanding. After all, it does appear as though Dane and I were having a quiet, romantic lunch together the very morning after Bram and I kissed for the first time, but after learning my mother was buried, might be a thief, plus finding my cat flattened beyond recognition, getting chased through the cemetery by a fictional ghost, and smashing my knee into a jagged rock, crap from Bram is the last thing I need right now.

  A moment later, another text from him comes in.

  I’m not the one pretending,

  Princess.

  Every time I think I can’t handle another ounce of stress, more stress piles on. Screeching, I hurl my phone across the room, straight for the opening front door.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “…a stouter man than he would have shrunk from the competition, and a wiser man would have despaired.”

  The phone clocks Bram right on the temple, bounces off the doorframe, and tumbles to the floor. “What the hell?” He drops an armful of things and rubs his head furiously.

  “Well, I didn’t know you were right outside the door!”

  “I’m the one who should be throwing things, not you!”

  “Really? And why is that?” I cross my arms. “Because your ex sends you a few pictures, and now you think you have it all figured out? Of course she sent those. She’s mad at you! You broke up with her a month before I arrived!”

  He closes the door and marches up to me. “Well, they do speak for themselves.”

  “No, they don’t. That meeting wasn’t a date or anything.”

  He throws his hands up, and I get a sinking feeling. “Look, Mica, you’re free to be with whoever you want. I’m only worried about you, because you told me someone was after you. So don’t come crying in the middle of the night anymore about how you need someone to protect you. I can’t protect you if you’re talking to strangers.”

  As much as I want to fall into his arms and forget this day ever happened, one glaring fact is, he is a Derant, and if all Dane said was true, the old Hollow families can’t be trusted. My eyes land on the things he dropped when he came in—cans of spray paint, a gallon of fog machine fluid, and best of all, the brown leather saddle that was in the apartment before.

  “What is this?” I point out the obvious.

  “What does it look like? Stuff for the show.” He picks up the items and dumps them in the corner with the rest of the HollowEve boxes. “It’s all going to the manor house tonight.”

  “I only met with him because I wanted to talk about the items my mother left me. It’s related to his theory.”

  He crosses his arms. “Like what? The picture of Mary Shelley? I can’t believe you’re sharing all that with him but not me, right after you told me someone’s following you. What the heck’s wrong with you, Mica? You don’t know that guy from any other treasure hunter who comes through here.”

  Guilt gnaws at me. Is he right? Did I give away valuable info today to a thrill seeker? “I had to ask him questions.”

  “Ask me! I know more than that guy! Let me guess, you didn’t, by any chance, talk about how he even knows all that stuff he talked about in class, did you? About the Engers’ missing journal, did you?” He takes a step toward me.

  “What does it matter who I talk to?” I say, sinking back onto the couch.

  “What it matters is that my whole family and Jonathan’s were responsible for that thing, and now it’s gone, and the last one to see it was your mom!”

  I’ve never seen Bram this upset before, and I’m just as unsettled knowing that I caused it.

  But he quickly regains his composure, giving me a defeated smile. “I’m the traitor in my family for defending you and insisting that your mom had nothing to do with it. Same way Ellen took the heat for being her friend. Looks like we all get screwed in the end.”

  I don’t know what to say.

  “Why do you think I’m living in this paradise?” He spreads his arms out wide. “Huh?”

  I shrug, tears threatening to spill over. “Because you wanted to live on your own? Independence and all that. I don’t know, you never told me.”

  “While working my ass off still in school? Needing to shack up with Jonathan to pay for this piece-of-shit place? It’d be a hell of a lot easier living at home, don’t you think? That’s what you don’t und
erstand, Mica.” He squats in front of me and takes my hands. “I’m here because of you. Because as long as I’m defending you, have always defended you, will always defend you, I can’t live at home.” His voice softens. “Got it?”

  Flinging tears away, I feel like a total jerk.

  “I love you,” he says, and the words burn. “I always have. So I need to know right now…if you’re just playing the flirt with that dude to get a rise out of me, because you wanted to see how much I’d care, that’s fine, I can handle it. But tell me the truth…do you trust me, or do you trust an outsider? Because that’s what he is.”

  Yes, Dane Boracich is a stranger, yet only hours ago, I saw him as the keeper of all knowledge, the one to trust if I wanted to stay safe. Was it all an act? Is Bram acting, too? I wish I knew the truth. “It’s not that.”

  “What is it then?”

  “I don’t know.” I fight back exhaustion. “I have to rest a while and think. I’m sorry.” I drop his hands, get up, and brush past him into the bedroom. From the other room, I hear Bram’s arms drop against his sides.

  “That’s great, Mica. Go and think,” he mutters. “I’ll still be here for you. Like always.”

  I pace the bedroom, taking in my surroundings one last time, the stain on the ceiling, the ratty desk, the bed where we kissed for the first time ever. But I can’t stay. This was a mistake. I let myself get too involved when I said I wouldn’t.

  In the other room, Bram is still muttering. “I can’t believe you talk to Boracich one time, and he turned you against me. I’m not to be trusted. I’m a Derant. Right? Isn’t that what he said?”

  I smash my lips together to keep from bawling.

  “But what he doesn’t know”—Bram appears in the doorway and calmly leans against the frame—“is that I know his little secret. I know why he’s in town. And I can say the same about him.”

  He moves over to the coffee table and picks up his old, cracked iPad, pointing at the screen. An article headline reads: Huge Cash for Irving Diary. “Read it.”

  I grab the tablet out of his hands. A historical preservation society is offering five hundred thousand dollars for finding Washington Irving’s private journal previously housed at the Historic Hudson Library in Tarrytown, New York, last seen in Andover, Massachusetts.