The Secret Journal of Ichabod Crane Read online

  © 2014 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press,

  an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Irvine, Alexander (Alexander C.)

  The secret journal of Ichabod Crane / Alex Irvine. — First edition.

  1. Sleepy Hollow (Television program : 2013–) 2. Diary fiction. I. Irving, Washington, 1783–1859. Legend of Sleepy Hollow. II. Title.

  PN1992.77.S6125I78 2014

  791.45’72—dc23 2014030654

  ISBN 978-0-553-41898-9

  eBook ISBN 978-0-553-41899-6

  Uploaded by Fluffer Nutter

  Cover design by Gabriel Levine

  Cover photograph ©Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

  Illustrations 3.1, 3.2, 4.2, 6.1, 10.2, 16.1, 19.1, 19.2, 19.3, 23.1, 23.3, and 24.1 by John Burgoyne.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  [October 4]

  [October 5]

  [October 6]

  [October 8]

  [October 9]

  [October 14]

  [October 15]

  [October 19]

  [October 23]

  [October 27]

  [October 29]

  [October 31]

  [November 3]

  [November 7]

  [November 16]

  [November 24]

  [December 8]

  [December 17]

  [December 24]

  [December 25]

  [January 3]

  [January 6]

  [January 7]

  [January 20]

  About the Author

  [October 4]

  One scarcely knows where to start. To commit the facts to writing—if facts indeed they are, and not the last failing sparks of a soul being freed from its mortal confines—is to begin to believe them. Dare I?

  I must.

  I am Ichabod Crane, born in the year 1749 in the city of London in England. I came to the New World in 1770 and followed the dictates of my conscience to the side of the colonial rebels in 1771.

  It seems this is the year 2013 Anno Domini, and I have been given new life—how, I know not; why, I know not. I am in a cell, lit harshly by lamps that appear to be hidden behind glass panels set in the ceiling. The table is made of an unusual stonelike substance; so too the chair. There is little wood in evidence and some of the furniture appears to have steel legs. What people are these, who can spare steel for the legs of chairs?

  They believe me a murderer and are not reticent with their accusations. Yet they have treated me humanely, in marked contrast to the few interrogations I experienced at the hands of the British over the past year—or the past two hundred thirty-two years? Surely it is still 1781 and this is a dream? Or I have died, and the afterlife is far different than any man might have supposed … cold, as if all the natural odors and moistures of the air have been removed. Like the air a machine might breathe.

  It has been some hours now. The sounds of the language here are quite strange. Vowels are flat, phrasings staccato and very fast. This is not the language of angels. Therefore I live—unless this be the infernal realms! Surely not. My life has had a full complement of ordinary sins, but I have endeavored always to do what was right. Also, I cannot credit the idea that hell itself would be so cold and impersonal.

  Well, I am no revenant. Rather than the scent of decay, my nostrils are full of some damnable perfume worn by one of the constabulary. Frightful. All that remains is to believe I am alive. Alive again! Yet how?

  I am accused of horrific crimes, and I have refused to admit anything. The men I have killed knew the side they had chosen. I appealed to these authorities to contact General Washington, and they responded with astonishment, some with open ridicule. They even dared question my name—as if they had never heard of a man named Ichabod!

  Gather your head, Crane. You have been in unusual circumstances before, and you survived by keeping your wits …

  I will discern the truth—if, that is, I can keep my head.

  At least they have permitted me to write, though if they take this journal from me it will do nothing to alter their belief that I am insane. Yet I will hold nothing back. I have always used my journals to collect private thoughts that have yet to take their full shape; reminiscences, drawings, and documents that may prove useful later; and any other bits of flotsam that wish to escape my mind onto their pages.

  The act of writing, through its peculiar alchemy whereby the fruits of the mind are transformed into symbols intelligible to all literate minds—this is the greatest magic, perhaps. It is without doubt the greatest tonic for the sanity of a man such as myself, displaced two centuries and given the dark gift of life after death. I am a revenant in a time not my own, and also it seems a soldier in a war of whose many fronts I had no inkling—before today.

  I have told my story to the constabulary but will set it down again here, because during the course of my interrogation I learned as much from their questions as they did from my answers, or more. The Hessian mercenary I struck down in 1781 lives again. It can be no coincidence that I was returned to my senses at the same time. I shot him from his horse scant miles from where I now sit, the ball clearly striking him in the breast—but he rose again and dealt me a mortal wound with his axe. With the last of my strength I returned his blow, separating his masked and tattooed head from his shoulders. After that, I remember very little. At triage my wife’s face—oh, Katrina, what became of you in the years after my passing?—was the last I saw until I emerged from my sleep in a riverside cave.

  The supernatural life given the Hessian surely explains why General Washington ordered me to seek and kill any man with the figure of a bow tattooed or scarified on his hand. That symbol bears investigating, if I am ever to be permitted my freedom.

  They have a machine that can distinguish truth from lies by means of electrical signals transmitted along the skin. What would Benjamin Franklin have made of this odd descendant of the key dangling from his kite string? For that matter, of the electrical light that shines in every room of every building, and from fixtures within the horseless carriages they call cars?

  Despite the machine’s support of my tale, they have determined me fit for the asylum. One hopes the masters of that Bedlam will forbid cloying perfumes. Regardless, I hope to be able to keep this journal there. Already it has proven a great comfort.

  There is another, more practical and pessimistic reason to record my experience. If I do not survive my battle with the Hessian, others will step into my place. For those successors (though I hope they succeed me none too soon!) I write this journal, that it may assist them in navigating the thickets of superstition, spycraft, and malevolence—and the Infinite alone knows what else—that oppose us. My role in the colonies’ rebellion taught me that the most important actions of a war take place on unnamed battlefields. This may be one of those, and I may die on it; but if I must die, I would not have all I know perish with the extinguishing of those final sparks of my brain.

  I am afraid, and unashamed of my fear. Only the fool shows no fear when he fights for his life against an opponent such as the one we face, and only a fool is unafraid when thrust into a situation utterly foreign, alone.

  This is truly a fantastical future into which I have emerged.
Chattel slavery is a thing of the past, and distant enough in fact that Abigail Mills, a black (or African-American, as I have learned is another nomenclature of this era) sheriff’s deputy, treated my disbelief as a joke. Perhaps this is part and parcel of her belief that I am mad, or perhaps she humors me in an effort to draw from me an admission of guilt in the decapitation of her sheriff. This mixing of races and peoples is evidently taken for granted in the—to write these words!—United States of America.

  I must correct myself. She is no deputy, but a lieutenant in what appears to be a much better organized constabulary than any known in the colonies during my time. When I learned this, and addressed her by her rank, she laughed; apparently these Americans pronounce the word “loo-tenant.” A practical people. After all, why should the English language be beholden to bygone relics of French origin? Yet I must confess I still prefer “lef-tenant.”

  Whatever their pronunciation, how far they have come, that African-Americans occupy executive authority without remark. All men are created equal, Jefferson wrote—this America strives to live that ideal. Doubtless it falls short, as do all human actions when compared against ideal goals. However, when I consider the oppression I witnessed during my time in the colonies, I cannot help but feel pride that I contributed—in whatever slight fashion—to the liberation of the colonies, which over time led to the liberation of the slaves. And Abigail’s friend and colleague Brooks bears the traces of yet another history: that of the Asian peoples finding their way to these shores. Of that I know little, but hope to investigate more thoroughly.

  I feel foolish now for congratulating Abigail on her emancipation. Whether I will work up the nerve to confess my foolishness, now … that is another matter entirely.

  Regardless, Abigail is a young woman of considerable fortitude, whatever her pigmentation. She also possesses a quick wit. “You keep running your fingers over that tabletop like you’re trying to pet it,” she remarked. “Never seen a table before?” I could not but laugh, for I had indeed been doing exactly that, seeking to discern by touch of what substance the table might be composed. A pet table! But soon enough we returned to the drier topics of my interrogation.

  She does not believe me, not yet, but she is of a most pragmatic cast of mind. If I can contribute to her pursuit of a criminal—a figure whom she considers a criminal but I know to be something much worse—she will hear me out. It must be even more difficult for her. She clings to the rational, to her belief in only the provable world of the senses. This, I believe, is why she intends to enter an advanced program of education in what they call “profiling.” I gather it is a systematized means of using the evidence of a crime to deduce specifics about the unknown criminal, and thereby speed his capture.

  But only a woman fleeing from the inexplicable would seize so desperately on the tangible to the exclusion of all else. There is more to the young lieutenant than she has yet spoken of, or I discerned.

  And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.

  The eighth verse of the sixth chapter of the Revelation of Saint John the Divine. This verse will not leave my mind. It was marked in the Bible that lay on my breast while I was in my sleep, a most precious book that once belonged to George Washington. I have no memory of how it came to be in my possession, although I knew General Washington well and suspect one of our allies in the war against evil must have placed it there during my slumber. The general and I met frequently throughout the years of the rebellion, and I told Lieutenant Mills of one such meeting. Since she already believes me to be a lunatic murderer, no further harm was possible, I judged, from explaining to her that General Washington himself gave me the Bible, and told me that the American war for independence was something much greater than the struggle of restive colonies yearning for self-determination. No, it was a war between the forces of light and dark—a framing I understood to be metaphorical. That war may have taken a hiatus since the Hessian and I fell together in battle in 1781, but it is now brewing once more—and hurtling toward a conclusion upon which much more than the fate of one nation depends.

  For this notation can only signify that the Hessian, risen again into decapitated life, is the Horseman of Death. The first of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rides in Sleepy Hollow, in the state of New York, in the year 2013. Did General Washington know this, when he sent me after him in 1781?

  My perceptions of those times are somewhat scrambled. This is highly unusual due to the typical accuracy of my memory. Has my long slumber compromised my faculties?

  Or is there a darker force at work?

  My power of recollection has always been one of my keenest weapons. I hope it has not been dulled by disuse.

  [October 5]

  I am no Daniel, to interpret the dreams of kings, but I have had a dream that either confirms my madness or strengthens my inkling of the infernal link between my life and that of the Hessian. I dreamed of Katrina. My love. Yesterday I was led to her gravestone, here in Sleepy Hollow, and learned of her agonized end on the stake. The devastation this caused me is beyond words and I could not write of it then. Now I know I do not have to, for events perhaps yet more tragic have revealed her death to be a ruse perpetrated by parties yet unknown.

  I say I dreamed of her, but it would be more accurate to say that she came to me in a dream. The same falcon that led me to her stone drew me through the world of this dream into a mirror world, a trackless forest wilderness where my wife appeared and revealed to me that the Hessian—the Horseman—and I were magically linked by the intermingling of our blood on the battlefield. She had prevented my death by working a spell that held me on the border between life and death. The Hessian’s body was chained and sunk in the Hudson, and we remained in our deathless suspension until he returned and I was awakened by the bond of blood. I am the First Witness, she said … but to what, I do not know—no, of course I do. Was I not just reading passages from Revelation?

  And I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth. These are the two olive trees, and the two candlesticks standing before the God of the earth. And if any man will hurt them, fire proceedeth out of their mouth, and devoureth their enemies: and if any man will hurt them, he must in this manner be killed. These have power to shut heaven, that it rain not in the days of their prophecy: and have power over waters to turn them to blood, and to smite the earth with all plagues, as often as they will.

  Quite exhilarating, the prospect of breathing fire and smiting the earth, and so forth … yet all the same I would surrender those fanciful powers for the touch of Katrina’s hand, here in this world rather than in the diaphanous fantasy of a dream. Too, the passage goes on to speak of the circumstances of the Witnesses’ deaths, which makes being a Witness a somewhat equivocal blessing.

  Still, if Witness I must be, then Witness I will be. Perhaps General Washington knew more then he was telling me when he made his remarks about the true stakes of the war in the colonies …

  I have also learned that the light of the sun weakens the Horseman, but even that attenuation will not save us if he is able to recover his head. That is my next task, to convince Lieutenant Mills that we must take possession of it. What we do with it is another question. Shall we keep it, to ensure he does not recover it? Can it be destroyed? What would happen if it were to be destroyed? We must not act rashly.

  I also must free Katrina from her forest prison.

  A demon, the guardian of this realm or perhaps its henchman, interrupted us then, but I know where the Horseman’s head lies—beneath Katrina’s headstone. I also know that the man I saw on the way to the cave was one Reverend Knapp.

  Either I have seen him before or the Knapp I knew in the years of the Revolution has engendered a doppelgäng
er. Knapp was an ally of General Washington’s subterfuges, and a stout opponent of the Crown. Confidant to the inner circle of revolutionaries, he was indispensable to our battle then. He may have recognized me as well, and wished to remain discreet—yet I must ascertain the truth of this matter without delay.

  We have fought the Horseman—and at least for today, we have emerged victorious. He fell upon us as we dug up his head, and he was aided by a most unwelcome ally: the police officer Brooks, who seems to have returned from the dead. (This is apparently becoming quite a popular pastime here in Sleepy Hollow.) Only the rising sun forestalled a much gloomier conclusion to the night’s events. Katrina was right; the Horseman indeed abhors the light of day. This is a weapon we must not fail to use.

  I believe I understand why this Reverend Knapp—who I am sad to say fell victim to the Hessian the night before last, before I could communicate with him and partake of what must have been an invaluable store of knowledge—left the Bible in my possession, for surely he must have? Katrina would not have had it, and would have been gone from this world before Washington’s own death. A mystery. One way or another, by some hand the Bible was placed on my breast, and now I have it to guide me. The Book of Revelation speaks of two Witnesses who will rise to the defense of humanity during the period of tribulation that heralds Judgment Day. If I am the First Witness, as Katrina said, who can the second be but Abigail Mills? She has expressed a kind of faith in me that leads me to believe we are bound together in a way—not the way the Hessian and I are bound, but by a higher, nobler purpose.

  For Abigail has also seen the evil we are fighting—when she was a girl, with her sister. She unburdened herself about this to me, and I now understand more clearly how we are linked, bound together by our experiences. I was correct, after all, that a childhood trauma of inexplicable nature drove her to embrace the idea that only explainable things are real.