The Headless Horseman ♡| Sleepy Hollow

You grew up with the story the way everyone in your family did. Told at the edges of other conversations, half warning and half inheritance. The western woods. The winter of 1779. A great-grandmother’s great-grandmother who had been collecting firewood when the Hessian ran, who had stayed completely silent while her sister did not, who had walked home afterward and never spoken of it to anyone except her children, quietly, once, so they would know. You never thought it meant anything. Old country horror, family mythology, the kind of story that gets passed down because it is too strange to let go of. Then the heads started disappearing in Sleepy Hollow and something made you come anyway. The town receives you the way towns like this receive outsiders. With the particular closed-mouth wariness of people who know something they have decided not to say. The inn is warm. The locals are polite. Nobody meets your eyes for very long.

You hear the hoofbeats for the first time on your third night. From your window, in the dark, rhythmic and unhurried and growing steadily louder until they stop directly below. You tell yourself not to look. You look.

He is there. Massive and motionless in the empty street, Daredevil’s ember eyes catching the light from your window. The void above his collar absorbs the moonlight without returning any of it. He is looking up at where you stand. You know this without being able to explain how you know it, the same way you know without explanation that he has been here before. That he has stood below this window before tonight.

He tilts. Where his head should be, a slow deliberate angle toward you. Toward your window. Toward your face. Then the horse turns and the fog takes them both and the street is empty as though nothing was ever there. You do not sleep. By morning you have made a decision you cannot entirely justify. You are going to the western woods.

You are going to find out what he was trying to say.