Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow has always been a favorite Halloween tale of mine for decades. When I wrote Autumn Saga, I knew that I had to work that tale into my own Halloween story in some way. The following chapter was the first of several paying homage to the scary "monsters" of literature and classic film. I tried in each chapter to see each character's psychological motivation or a less obvious Raison d'etre.
Chapter Forty-three
Something must be amiss, for this is not what the gathered multitude had in mind for Halloween.
Something must be amiss, for this is not what the gathered multitude had in mind for Halloween.
Each individual in the audience suddenly finds himself abandoned by a country church, sitting astride a blackened horse amid a country graveyard, the Pavilion having completely vanished. Friends and family members and neighbors sitting beside them on the lawn a few moments ago have instantly disappeared. Home and hearth are now mysteriously supplanted in the mist of their unsettled memories, as if our modern age has not yet taken place.
The serrated moon in the night sky ominously hangs above like a luminous coat that has been left in an otherwise empty closet. Every person present realizes that he or she has unwittingly assimilated a new identity. A seductive voice from deep inside their curious minds now addresses this altered consciousness:
The tombs of these dead round about you are sealed against your admittance. Your kind is refused entrance merely because you fought as a mercenary—on the wrong side—in the late Colonial war. A stray cannonball severed your fate, and here you stand, with no settled grave to call your own.
These vague forms that you sense nearby cannot actually be seen by you. You cannot hear nor taste of the world any longer, cannot conventionally reason, other than with what restless motives guide your pulsing heart or your dangling limbs, all which physically remain of you. Sitting challenged in the saddle, you have suddenly materialized without benefit of a head.
The infernal forces that rule your troubled soul must be buried deep within your genetic makeup, your personal programming, if you will. This tormented psyche provides your sole motivation to be out each bewitching night, on a dark quest. Relentless dawn and the covered bridge are your only parameters.
You still have feelings, however. Starkly aware of your own shortcomings, you are startled to learn that you will be granted no final rest until you take from another that which you so severely lack.
Any other head will do. Without a discriminating residue in your anatomy, you are the proverbial condemned man, out to decapitate another for your own benefit.
Soon, along the wayward path by a crumbling stone wall, you sense a nervous trespasser on a dappled nag, clopping closely by. Alert, you stalk him quietly, slipping between full tombs and the old stone tabs that the living inevitably keep on their cherished dead.
In some farmer's autumn field nearby, a small plot of barely cultivated ground, a wary scarecrow flaps a dire warning. A novel breeze pushes the tattered pant legs up to his very knees of straw, yet all of these frantic gestures go unheeded. Without a rugged stake stuck up his pliant back, this spectral figure might give his own ragged garments leave to flee up the corn rows and be out of this fatal vicinity. But like you, he cannot escape this virtual reality.
Unlike this passing traveler, unwary but pursued now, you slowly shadow his slower motion around the various shafts of moonlight, until his precious ears pick up the persistent echoes of your horse's step, more insistent than those of his own rough mount. He has been forewarned of your mission, however. Town gossips on a howling evening have told familiar stories, dreadful tales of terrifying nights like this.
Thus alerted, he picks up the pace of his retreat; but his way is soon lost in these deep woods.
You lift the blade of his demise high in your sordid hand and then thunder hard after. He flails to get away, but you are soon at his side. Slashing at air again and again, your impatient thrusts miss repeatedly. His precious skull ducks too desperately and foils your every attempt at its swift condemnation.
The immediate road ahead breaks right and left. This night the pursued chooses right and the covered bridge looms fast ahead, certain sanctuary on the other side. Before you can recover and cut him off, his fleeing sounds reverberate off of the wooden slats and beams, and the emerging victor pulls up to gloat down the sure tunnel of his escape.
In frustration, you hurl the carved and flaming orb, with an aim truer than either one of you expected from a flying pumpkin. But was your furious aim true enough?
No one alive quite knows for certain.
The deceased author, Mr. Irving, left broken, pulpy shards on the morning ground, a few hoof prints, and a bowed, borrowed nag grazing some distance away, riderless. Yet unconfirmed rumors abound of your prey's escape, Mr. Crane having wisely relocated to a safer village.
The conclusion does flirt, though, with your victory. So you are left with at least a slim possibility that you may finally find eternal peace, however discontented you might eventually be. Eternally lodged in a confining coffin, you see, your body would suddenly become a slave once again to the fickle rule of a head. No longer subject to its own demands, your corpse would now be forced to contend with someone else's.
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