Chapter 6
“Esmie.” The quiet, comforting voice repeated itself again, a gentle hand shaking her shoulder. “Esmie, wake up.”
But she didn’t want to wake up. She was comfortable in her mother’s old rocking chair, a blanket wrapped around her, and she didn’t want to wake up because she was late for school.
Or some appointment, anyway. She wasn’t sure, but she did know that once she woke up, this beautiful feeling of quiet and comfort would be gone for a long time.
“Esmie, we’re here. We’re at the church.”
Church. But Esmie didn’t go to church. Hadn’t since Dad—
Church. Old church. Old churchyard. Sleepy Hollow. Headless Horseman. Headless Horsemen.
She sucked in a deep breath and sat up, almost falling out of the saddle, but Chad still had an arm around her and didn’t let her go far.
“Whoa, there. I got you.” He chuckled. “You sleep like the dead, you know that?”
Yawning fit to split her face, she stretched her arms, popped her back, then slumped. Her mouth tasted like a dead frog. A really dry dead frog. She should have requested a bottle of water at some point. Ugh.
“I’m thirsty.”
“Oh,” Aaron said, sounding dismayed. “I forgot. You would be thirsty, wouldn’t you? And probably hungry, too.”
On cue, her stomach awoke, growling like an angry cat. “Don’t remind me. I’m guessing another pit stop will have to wait until we’re done here.”
“And we have no idea what food and drink will taste like in the Between,” Jerome said, sounding unbearably cheery. “Could be an interesting experiment, though. You should definitely try something carbonated.”
“I’ll pass.” She looked around. “Not much left of the church. I can’t even tell where it—oh.” She spied a corner of a foundation, worn and broken down with age, crusted with lichen, and nearly hidden with brush. “Is that all that’s left?”
“The whole foundation was there in our day, but it looks like it’s grown up a lot since then.
” Chad unwrapped her from his tattered cape, and she felt the warm fuzzies that he’d thought to wrap her in it, though it didn’t actually get cold here.
“Let’s look around and see what we can see.
Maybe they just put his head elsewhere but still here. ”
“I doubt it,” Jerome said, but dismounted readily enough.
Chad took her gently by the upper arm, and she leaned over to be let down.
As always, he eased her down so gently she didn’t so much as bobble a step.
When he joined her on the ground, she brushed her hair out of her eyes and grinned up at him sheepishly.
She must look awful. Hair a mess, face swollen and scraped in a dozen places, probably bruised all to hell on her forehead where she’d smacked it down in the gravel.
Whatever. He didn’t have a head. No one was winning any beauty pageants right now. But she still felt awkward. He’d been very kind, for all that he’d kidnapped her to the Between. They all had, really. Even Jerome, for all his snark.
Shaking off the moment, she turned to the dilapidated church and went to explore. She started at the ratty corner she’d spied through the undergrowth and climbed up onto it.
“Careful,” Aaron cautioned, climbing up with her. “There’s no way the floor is stable if it’s just wood.”
She bent down on all fours and knocked. Ugh.
Wood. But solid here, at least. She crept forward and knocked again.
Wood, but solid. Again, and more solid wood.
Unfortunately, even a few feet further, and the wood turned spongy.
She didn’t dare try to crawl onto it. In fact, if she didn’t know better, she’d swear the bit she knelt on sagged under her despite sounding solid.
Nervous now, she scooted back to the corner, which felt much more secure.
“Well, that’s a no go. I don’t suppose there’s a cellar or anything below this that we could get into?”
“Huh.” Aaron hopped down off the foundation and mimed stroking his absent chin. “It can’t hurt to go around the outer edge, surely. As long as we watch our step. What are you looking for?”
She frowned. “I don’t know. I’ll know it when I see it.”
They walked around the grown-over foundation, Esmie taking large steps over the underbrush.
The Horsemen, for the most part, didn’t seem to have much problem powering through it, though Aaron did his share of high-stepping, but she was panting and grumbling before reaching the second corner.
Thankfully, they came upon the crumbled remains of a doorway before getting all the way around.
“Here we are.” She paused to tuck annoying wisps of sweaty hair behind her ears and catch her breath. Her cheeks, she knew, were flushed and damp, and she was sweating under her hoodie from the stupid workout. “There’s something here for us. I can feel it.”
She took out her phone and turned on the flashlight. Jerome grunted but didn’t comment. She checked her battery. Seventy-six percent. Not bad, but she’d better use it sparingly.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to heft open the remains of the bulkhead door one-handed.
Aaron, ever the gentleman, hurried over to help, and they practically ripped it off the grubby, rusted old hinges getting it open.
She jumped back from it as it flumped into the overgrown grass, but no beetles or creepy crawlies scurried away from the weird half-light.
“There aren’t any spiders in the Between, right?” she said nervously. She hadn’t seen any in the rest stop bathroom, but she wanted to be absolutely sure before going down into that dark, forbidding maw. “Right?” she said with more force when no one answered.
“Um….” Chad scratched at the back of the neck of his cape. “Honestly? I have no idea.”
“Why would we know that?” Jerome said, amused. “Seriously. Are we supposed to have been taking a wildlife survey this whole time? Seriously, girl. Cobwebs, we clearly got, but spiders?”
Aaron tutted. “Jer, c’mon. Can’t you be nice for, like, a minute?”
“This is my nice.”
“Ugh.” He did something so sweet then that Esmie was won over totally. He tucked one arm behind his waist and one arm in front of it, bowed slightly, and said, “Don’t worry, Esmie. I’ll go first and knock down all the webs.”
“Aaron?”
He paused halfway back up, his cape falling slightly forward over one shoulder.
She smiled with genuine warmth. “You are a true gentleman. Thank you, brave sir.”
“Oh. I mean, it’s no problem. At all.” He sputtered, awkward now and standing stiffly.
Chad chuckled. “Take the win, A.” He clapped his friend on the shoulder. “And get down those steps before I steal your thunder and do it for you.”
Aaron did as suggested, waving his arms furiously and knocking down every cobweb dangling from every direction.
Esmie followed hesitantly, shining her light every which way, trying to see everywhere at once.
She wasn’t too worried about bats, as she hadn’t seen any other living things besides them, but she didn’t want to find out the hard way by waking up an entire legion of them by bumping into one.
And no, she didn’t actually see any spiders. Just lots and lots—and lots—of cobwebs.
“Lots of barrels down here,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. “But they’re little. What’s that all about?”
“Probably consecrated wine. For blessings and such.” He leaned over one, holding his cape back so it wouldn’t get even more dusty and cobwebby. “Chad would have a field day down here. He could probably read all of this chicken scratch, but it’s too faded and fancy for me.”
She sighed, rubbing her free hand up and down the opposite arm and shining her light around, hoping she’d magically know what she was supposed to look at.
“I don’t think hundreds of years old wine has anything to do with the Headless Horseman.
I was hoping something really obvious would be down here. ”
“Like his head in a bag hanging from a corner?”
“Exactly, if I’m honest.” She pointed the light into each corner, just in case, but though various crosses and books and moldy, moth-eaten robes hung from them, no bags with heads did. “Well, no luck there. Wait, what’s over there?”
The light fell on a piece of furniture buried crookedly in the dirt of the cellar floor against the far wall.
It appeared to still be quite solid—despite the fact that it had clearly fallen through the floor above at some point—though it was covered with lichen, mold, and, inevitably, cobwebs.
Moving together, they stepped closer to it, dodging around the stacked barrels and various other obstacles on the cellar’s floor until they stood in front of it.
It was a large piece with two facing doors jammed closed, little knobs on each side.
They exchanged looks—Esmie assumed they exchanged looks, as Aaron’s shoulders turned toward her—and shrugged. Aaron reached out, since his hands were gloved, and yanked opened the doors.
“It’s a chifforobe,” he said, sounding delighted, as the doors gritted open with absurd ease on rusty hinges.
“A what?”
“A chifforobe,” he repeated, turning to look at her. Again, she assumed. “What, you never read To Kill A Mockingbird?”
She shrugged.
“It’s like a closet on one side and a bookshelf on the other.
Look.” He gestured, and she saw that he spoke nothing but the truth.
Moldy, gross, ragged old clothes hung limply on one side, while moldy, gross, ragged old books were stacked in the shelves on the other.
“Too bad they obviously got wet over the years. They might be worth a fortune if they’d been preserved. ”
She didn’t want to touch those books. She was going to have to touch those books. Dammit.
“Can I borrow one of your gloves?”
“Huh? Oh, sure.”
Just like that, he pulled one off and handed it to her.
He was such a good soul. She put on the glove, oversized though it was, and tweezed up the topmost book.
The cover was unreadable, and the book squelched unpleasantly as she lifted it.
She barely applied any pressure before it fell apart between her fingers.
“I hope that one wasn’t important.” She grunted and pushed it aside with a grimace. “The next one’s in better shape, though. It was sort of shielded by that one.”
They scooted in close, ignoring the unpleasantly damp, moldy smell from the chifforobe as she gently lifted the cover of the book, which was some treatise or other on the Bible. Boring. Definitely not anything to do with the Headless Horseman. She carefully lifted it aside with Aaron’s help.
“What’s this one?” he asked, as the next one down didn’t have any sort of writing on the cover. It was a leatherbound book wrapped around with a twisted, gross, slimy-looking leather thong. Knotted, of course. “Should we untie it?”
Her mouth pulled down in disgust. “I guess we’ll have to.”
“You two alright down there?” Chad hollered from above.
“Fine,” Aaron shouted back, but distractedly. “Just looking at some books.”
“Nerds,” Jerome said, perhaps predictably but pleasantly enough.
Her too-fat gloved fingers wouldn’t be able to untie the slimy, thin leather string, so she had no choice but to take off the glove and do this bare-handed. She didn’t like it. She hated it.
Did she want to get back to the Now or not?
Grimly, she gritted her teeth, pulled off Aaron’s glove, tucked it under her arm, and pried at the horrendously slimy thong knotted around the book.
Her fingernails slid in the repulsive goop.
It got under them to the point that she would need a scrub brush to get it back out.
She gagged more than once. But finally, the damn knot loosened, and she untied the wretched knot and flung back the gross ends of cording.
“I’ll just….” Aaron gestured at the book while Esmie wiped her hands on her leggings in almost atavistic disgust. “Can you hand me your light? I can’t see anything with it bouncing around.”
“Sorry. Just… ugh.” She handed over her cell phone, then pulled on the glove as if it could retroactively save her from feeling the gooshy grossness she’d just encountered. It had been like trying to dissect a semisolid ball of snot. “What’s it say?”
“Maybe we should take it up to Chad. This writing is really old. It’s a journal, I think. At least, it’s dated entries. That much I can tell just from the format.”
“Let me see, if you don’t mind.”
“Sure. Help yourself.”
She took the book into her gloved hand—no more touching revolting things, thanks—and turned it toward the light. Spidery, sharply slanted cursive flowed over the page. It almost looked like a foreign language, it was so elaborately written. She could decipher some of the words, but only just.
“Sermon… Light of God… blah blah blah… townsfolk… yada yada….” She muttered under her breath. “Blessed the food… elaborate dinner at… someone’s house? I can’t read the name.” She turned the fragile page carefully with her ungloved hand. “Holy shit!”
“I didn’t expect that to be in there.”
“No,” she said, too excited to laugh. “Look. Van Tassel. That’s one of the names from the story! This is from the right time period! Or at least the right family name.”
“No way.” He sounded ridiculously proud. “Esmie, you really are a wonder!”
She huffed. “I didn’t do this by myself. I wouldn’t have made it down the steps without you, ya know.”
He shifted his feet, which gritted on the cellar floor. “You’d have found a way.”
“No, seriously, Aaron.” She reached out with her bare hand and touched his arm.
“Thank you. This is important, and you helped find it.” She grinned crookedly, and not just because her face was still a little swollen from her faceplant.
“Now, let’s take this up and see if Chad can speed read some old cursive and get us out of the Between. ”
He shifted his feet one last time, then abruptly held out his elbow to her.
She carefully closed the book, tucked it under her arm, and curled her arm through his.
And though she wouldn’t have allowed just anyone to do so, she let him lead her like a courtly knight of old up and out of the cellar and into the dim light of day.