Chapter 3
Camp was little more than a clearing in the woods southeast of Ozark.
Esmie thought for a while that it was taking quite some time to get there, then remembered A) they were on horseback, and B) they were outside of time.
It was no longer “after midnight”. It was no time at all.
A never-ending twilight time with no sun or moon in the sky, no cars on the roads, and no clouds in the gunmetal sky.
Thus, when they did finally arrive, she wasn’t sure they were actually there until the other Horsemen dismounted. Chad took her gently by the left armpit again but didn’t move to heft her down until she leaned that way herself. A gentleman Headless Horseman. Who’d have thought?
When she felt steady on her feet, she stepped back and looked around.
Woods. As far as she could see, which wasn’t very far, thanks to the woods.
She was alone in some nexus of time with three strange, headless men.
She should be very, very afraid, and not in an existential sort of way.
She should be afraid of the men themselves.
The hair on the back of her neck tried to stand up, and she abruptly stopped and stared at them as they went about unsaddling their horses.
“You’ve gone very quiet,” Chad said at her back, causing her fear to kick up a notch into an actual shiver. “Something we said?”
Unfortunately, that only gained the other men’s headless, eyeless attention. They stopped their tasks and turned their bodies to face her general direction. Not what she wanted. Her mouth went dry.
“Now you’ve done it,” Aaron said, sounding dismayed. “What’s wrong, miss? Did we say or do something to upset you?”
“Esmie,” Chad said mildly. “Her name is Esmie. He is Aaron. The smartass is Jerome.”
She pushed past her dry throat. “I remember.” She wanted to cough so badly, and she sounded like she was being strangled, but she managed to speak.
“I just… it just struck me that I’m literally alone in the woods with three strange men with no way out.
” She tried to laugh, but it had a shrieky quality she didn’t like, so she stopped immediately.
“Something tells me my cell phone won’t work out here to call 911. ”
“Your what?” Jerome asked, then snorted. “Kidding. We know what cell phones are.”
“Sort of,” Aaron said tentatively.
“But it’s not the woods that won’t let it work, lady. It’s the other dimension.”
Oh. Right. That.
Her knees weakened, and she sat down without quite meaning to. Aaron made an abortive motion toward her, but she was already down.
“Maybe we should all sit down,” Chad said, again seeming to take the lead. Was he the leader? Did they have a leader? Did it matter? “We have some explaining to do.”
“Storytelling around the campfire,” she said weakly, again trying to laugh but not managing even the shrieky laughter from before.
“No fire here either,” Jerome said, settling his saddle on the ground, then reaching back up to pull down the blanket from the horse’s back.
“It doesn’t start for some reason. You can get sparks, but no fire.
It’s a pain in my ass, let me tell ya. But it doesn’t actually get cold here, or night, so I guess it’s fine. ”
Aaron shook his head, folding his horse’s blanket neatly into quarters. “You’re bombarding her. None of that is important information right now.”
“I’m just making conversation, Mr. Roboto. You know, like human beings do here on Planet Earth.” He gestured with his thumb toward the shorter man. “Mr. MBA, here. You’re a walking calculator, dude.”
Frowning, she broke in. “Actually, he’s been trying to make me feel better this whole time. You, on the other hand, are being a jerk.”
“Ah, there you are.” The jerk had the nerve to sound pleased. “I was afraid we’d lost you back in the portal.”
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t act like you’re being a jerk on purpose.”
“Are you suggesting I’m a jerk on accident?”
“I’m suggesting it’s your personality.”
Chad snorted but stepped over beside her and lifted a hand. “Okay, now that we’ve all regained our senses, let’s sit down and have an adult conversation. Agreed?”
She grunted and turned to look over her shoulder. “What about your—oh.”
The horse was already unsaddled, unblanketed, and munching on grass behind her. The grass wasn’t exactly green and didn’t look particularly appetizing, but it didn’t seem to bother the horse, so she didn’t bring up the fact.
“Never mind. So I do have some questions.”
“I thought you might.” Chad sat down beside her, crossed his legs criss-cross-applesauce, and laid his gloved hands on his knees. “Shoot.”
The other two Horsemen sat down to form a rough square. She looked around at them, debating mentioning how crazy it was to be talking to three people who had no fucking heads, then gave up on sanity and took the plunge.
“Okay. I’m going to skip the craziness of you being Headless Horsemen for now. We can talk about that later. How are you guys apparently students from MSU? Make that make sense for me, please.”
Aaron raised his hand a little. “What year is it, Miss Esmie?”
“You can just call me Esmie. And it’s 2026.” Her eyes narrowed. “Why? What year do you think it is?”
He nodded, his lips tucking in a little grimace. “It’s been longer than I thought. I was guessing somewhere in the early teens.” He shook his head slightly. “Time doesn’t progress here, obviously. We just keep getting caught between moments when we cross into the Now and back.”
She blinked. “I don’t think that makes sense. Either time progresses or it doesn’t. How can you be aware of the passage of time if time doesn’t pass?”
Chad lifted a hand. “The Between isn’t really a here, so when he says time doesn’t pass here, he’s really saying time stops the second we cross over and starts again the second we cross back. This place? Where we are right now? This moment? Never exists again once we leave it.”
She tried to work her mind around that for a long moment, but quantum physics, if that’s what it was, was so not her field of study.
“Uh,” she finally said, “that’s a little beyond me. Does it have something to do with how you guys are students from my same university? Because I’m not seeing that.”
“It does,” Jerome said. “See, we went to your school back in 1988.”
She blinked again. “I’m sorry?”
“Would’ve graduated with my master’s in criminal justice in less than a year.” The headless body shrugged. “Chad would’ve had his history degree a semester before me. Aaron was a year behind us, but he was our friend through Alpha Sigma Psi. Buncha school chums, living the dream.”
Aaron sighed. “Must you make it sound so grand?”
Jerome snorted. “Dude, we’re headless. If that isn’t worthy of an epic story, I don’t know what is.”
Chad cleared his throat, which was strange and horrifying and something she hoped to never see again.
“Okay, maybe I should take over. This would take an eternity even here if left to you two.” His shoulders turned toward her, suggesting his full attention was on her.
“To get right to it, coming up on Halloween, we made a stupid mistake. We all fell for the same girl. She was this cute Goth girl, a transfer from New York, and we were preppy ASP men who thought we were better than Missouri, and we lost our heads. Not literally yet, but you know what I mean.”
Jerome snorted, and Aaron let out a surprised little giggle, but Esmie was not amused.
She stared at Chad’s messy severed neck and waited for him to continue.
It wasn’t a clean cut. A notch in the middle spoke of an interrupted chop and a second swipe.
It made her gorge rise in her throat, even though it wasn’t at all bloody.
“Long story short, she told us if we went to New York and came back with the Headless Horseman’s skull, we’d win her…
well, her hand, let’s say.” He left a very deliberate pause that, thankfully, nobody filled.
Not even Jerome. “So, like idiots, we packed our bags and headed out for Sleepy Hollow, found the Horseman’s resting place, dug him up, and… no head.”
Her shoulders had tensed through the summarized tale, but they relaxed now, and she rolled her eyes. Why bother telling the tale at all if it was just a bunch of pointless dramatics?
Jerome reached down and pulled his sword partially from its sheath. She flinched at the sudden sound.
“So we stole his sword, instead.”
Now, she looked appalled.
“What? We figured it was close enough.”
Rolling her eyes, she scoffed.
Aaron sighed. “What we didn’t figure was not even getting to the tree line before the Headless Horseman, in all his macabre glory, rose up and cursed us for our audacity. Literally cursed us, not cussed us out.”
She looked from one to the other, then back at Chad, whose shoulders rose and fell.
“Because we dared disturb his grave, we will know his unrest until his head is returned to him. We will ride as he has for over a century, sleepless and unstoppable, beheading lonely souls wandering where they oughtn’t in the midnight hour and sending them to the Great Beyond to find whatever torment lies there for the unwary and the unwise.
He rests now for the first time in centuries because we ride in his place. "
Her eyes wide, she felt like a child listening to a particularly scary bedtime story. Surely, this was nothing but a campfire tale. The Headless Horseman? From Washington Irving’s tale? That couldn’t be, could it?
“Unfortunately, if the old story is true,” Aaron said, “his head was blown off by a cannonball, so finding and returning it to him is impossible. So we ride, and it’s 2026, so you tell us.
It’s only been….” He paused and seemed to count in his head.
“Huh. Thirty-eight years. But it feels like an eternity already.”
“I could be on the Supreme Court,” Jerome said, sounding less like a smart ass and more like a vulnerable human being for the first time.