Haunted Legends Read Online Free Page A

to come back and I never saw that man again. But it wasn’t the same. Even Crispin seemed jumpy after that.”
    Everyone was silent, seemingly chilled. But I thought I knew what was afoot and smiled.
    “I wonder,” said the Major, “what Eddie Ackers saw the night he staggered in here to die.” She was going to add more but at that moment, Benicia the server came over to the table and said, “Folks, I’m afraid we’re closing a little early.”
    That broke the spell. Quite quickly for people in very late middle age who were all more than a bit smashed, we figured out the bill and got ourselves together to depart. It was a little past midnight but we were about the only customers.
    Sunday nights are the one time Manhattan really does seem quiet and almost deserted. We said our farewells out front. Dawn and Doug both lived in New Jersey and hurried off to the Herald Square Path station assuring us that they’d be in touch.
    Jay Glass and Mimsey shared a cab to the Upper East Side. They both seemed troubled—part of the act, I thought.
    The Major and I lived downtown and we were going to walk. “What if the idea that Brom Bones scared Ichabod Crane with a carved and lighted pumpkin head was a scam?” she asked as we crossed the street. “What if he actually summoned the Headless Horseman?”
    And I replied, “Nice performance from Mimsey. She, you, and I’m guessing Jay had fun running that return of Van Brunt scam on the rest of us. It reminds me of the old days.”
    She paused on the curb and looked down at me. “Back in the old days your sense of the uncanny was more acute. You had no trouble recognizing that there was evil in Bud Van Brunt. You’ll have to take my word for it, but outside of a couple of hints I got from her at Eddie’s funeral, I didn’t hear Mimsey talk about this until tonight. Jay did once tell me he’s convinced some great misdeed or evil occurred on the spot back in Colonial times. But he’s obsessed with this subject.”
    I was amused.
    “In fact,” she said, “I wanted you here tonight because you were the one I worried about. I remembered how disturbed you were forty years ago about Van Brunt—we’d call it sexual harassment today. I remembered your dream of the night coach and the light in the windows. I thought maybe Van Brunt had his hooks into you as he did with Ackers.”
    To clear my head of this nonsense, I turned to look back at KNICKS in all its renovated tackiness. What I saw was a roadhouse in a country village. The only lights came from the stars, the waning half moon, and a pair of candles flickering in the middle windows of the inn.
    In the moment that I stared, the lanterns on the night coach swung into sight. A couple of details of my old dream that I’d forgotten came back: the pumpkin-headed coachman in his box, the face of Van Brunt staring at me out the coach window.
    “Instead,” Major Barbara said, watching the way my jaw dropped, “it’s Mimsey we have to worry about. That poor kid was desperate to supportherself and that worthless first husband and Van Brunt got a bit of her soul. And from the way he’s behaving, I’m afraid Jay Glass is another one Van Brunt seduced.”
    “Always at the center of things,” I said, and felt the October chill and was no longer stoned. “But not us,” I said.
    “No. We’re minor characters.”
    “Like Doug and Dawn.”
    “Yes,” she said, “we lucky bystanders.”
Afterword
    Washington Irving’s
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
is the immediate background from which my story was drawn. Irving is believed to have combined elements of local New York tales about the vengeful ghosts of Indian chiefs with German folktales of the Night Rider. Writing about thirty-five years after the American Revolution, Irving set his story in the Hudson River valley of a generation before, not long after that war ended. He made his Headless Horseman a Hessian trooper searching for the head he lost to a cannon ball—a very