Page 6 of 13 Nights

I spent months being no one. Then the cannon at White Plains found me, and that was the end of Severin von Brandt.

Except it wasn't. Because I refused to let it be.

The Void is dark. It's not dark the way a room is dark, or the way the road outside this cottage is dark with the trees pressing in. It's dark the way absence is dark, the way nothing looks when nothing is all there is.

The centuries between my death and this particular October evening exist only as a fact I carry rather than a duration I've endured. I don't age in the Void. I don't think. I don't dream. I simply stop, and then I start again, and the world has moved on without me for another year.

Tonight is Night 2, October 20. I stand at the edge of the Crane Lane property with the black horse behind me and the cottage ahead.

Since last October, someone has opened a Headless Horseman escape room in what used to be a church. The gift shop next door sells plush versions of me carrying smiling pumpkins. Across town, the bronze statue still depicts me as a headless torso on a rearing horse, working from Washington Irving's description rather than from the man Irving never met. Last October, someone balanced a carved pumpkin on the neck stump.

Irving has a great deal to answer for. He died in 1859. I know because the town eventually erected a plaque. I've read it every October since it appeared. I'd tear it from the wall if I thought they wouldn't replace it within a week.

Fritz is dead. Irving is dead. Everyone responsible for the life I lost has been in the ground for generations, and I'm still angry. Fury is the one thing the Void has never managed to take from me.

Every year I stay on the margins. I walk the roads. I watch the tourists and the actors and the merchandise. I don't engage. I don't speak. I don't go to the cottage.

The cottage lamp is on. The woman who opened the door last night is sitting on the porch.

I went last night. I'm going again now.

The gravel is loud under my boots as I cross the yard. She hears me before she sees me. Her head turns toward the sound, and when I step into the lamplight, her hand tightens on the phone but the rest of her doesn't move.

She was expecting me. That's the first problem.

She's arranged herself in one of two chairs on the porch with a blanket over her knees and her phone angled toward the yard. The sketch is on the small table between the chairs. The second chair is set slightly back: a negotiation tactic, her attempt to force an impossible situation into a shape she recognizes. She carried furniture onto a dark porch for a man who vanished from her yard. That isn't confidence. It's determination sharpened by fear.

I stop at the foot of the steps.

"Go inside," I say. It's the only move I have left. If she won't leave Sleepy Hollow, she can at least go behind a locked door where the thing at the tree line can't register her the way it registered Diane.

She stills. Only for a beat, but I see it: the brief arrest of movement before her chin rises.

"You came back," she says, ignoring the order entirely. Her voice is steady, but there's a tightness underneath it that tells me the steadiness is costing her something.

"You're still here."

"I live here."

"Temporarily."

Her weight settles back in the chair. Her chin stays raised. She studies me for a long moment, boots to coat to face, comparing what she sees to whatever her phone captured last night.

"I spent today going through every possible reason for what I recorded," she says. "Camera error. Encoding glitch. Some kind of visual trick with the porch light. None of them account for what the video shows." She pauses. "So I'm here, and you're here, and I'd very much like a better explanation than the ones I've come up with on my own."

She leads with the confession that her framework has failed, and she hates it. Diane would have led with questions.

"I don't owe you an explanation."

"You showed up at my house. You told me I shouldn't be here. You left footprints in the grass that start and stop in the same place." She ticks each point with the precision of a prosecutor building a case. "I'm not asking because I'm curious. I'm asking because you appear to be an impossible physical event, and I have the documentation to prove it."

The woman is either fearless or catastrophically committed to the question.

"Who are you?" she asks.

"No one you want to know."

"My mother thought otherwise." She touches the edge of the sketch without looking down at it. "She drew your face and locked it in a desk and wrote one line about you before she left. Decades later I found all of it. So I'll decide for myself who I want to know."