Page 9 of 13 Nights

"Go back inside," I tell her. "Lock the door."

"I'll sit wherever I want."

"Then sit inside, where sitting won't cost you something you can't afford."

She holds my stare. I let her. Yielding has never suited me.

She breaks the silence with another question, because questions are the weapon she knows best.

"Your name," she says. "You still haven't given it to me."

"If you're still here tomorrow, ask me again."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one you're getting tonight."

I leave before she can push further. I walk down the steps and across the yard and past the woods where the shadows have settled into ordinary October darkness.

The horse falls into step beside me. It has never spoken, never carried a jack-o'-lantern, and never needed either to make sensible people run.

I should stay away tomorrow. Every year I stay on the margins, and every year the cage holds, and every year I walk these roads until the Void takes me and nothing changes. That's how this works. That's how I've kept it working.

The woman on the porch looks at me as if every locked thing must eventually open if she applies enough pressure.

Her mother looked at me the same way, and the Veil noticed. Diane left.

Her daughter sets out chairs.

CHAPTER THREE

Ashley

The little sleep I got was disturbed by dreams I don’t remember and I made myself eat toast with my morning coffee before I went back to the video. It plays the same way every time I run it. He's standing at the foot of my steps, chin raised, lamplight catching the hard edges of his face. Then he's gone. The frame before holds a man. The frame after holds empty grass. Between the two, there is nothing I can name: a clean cut, instantaneous, without blur or dissolve or motion in any direction.

I've spent most of the morning watching it on loop, slowing the playback to frame-by-frame, expanding every pixel at the boundary of where he stood. The recording is clean. The audio runs continuous. Between the last frame that contains him and the first frame that doesn't, the timestamp advances by a single interval. I've shot enough investigative footage to know what camera artifacts look like, and the usual culprits are absent. The encoding is intact. The data stream is unbroken. The lens shows exactly what was in front of it.

There's an explanation. There is always an explanation. The universe does not suspend its operating rules because a woman on a dark porch in October asks it a question. I am not going to become the kind of person who stops looking for the rational answer because the irrational one is more interesting.

But I've looked, and the rational answer isn't here.

I close the laptop and pull my mother's folder across the desk. The handwritten German correspondence is still beyond me without a translator, but my mother clipped a typed, line-by-line translation to the muster-roll facsimile. The Hessian regimental records volume I bought from Tom explains the standard administrative fields well enough for me to compare Johann Brandt's entry with the surrounding names. My mother's annotation is precise: Johann Brandt, debtor substitute. Documentation inconsistent with standard substitution pattern. Cross-reference Hadley collection.

I've been staring at this note since I found the drawer. Today I lay the translation and Tom's reference volume side by side.

The standard debtor substitution process left a clear paper trail. A debtor was identified, a contract drawn, and the substitute entered the rolls with the debtor's name, origin, and terms attached.

Johann Brandt's entry has the name and the notation, but compared against the dozen surrounding entries, the supporting documentation doesn't match the format. The origin field is vague where others are specific. The debtor contract reference is a catalog number that doesn't correspond to any standard administrative filing system the reference volume describes. It looks like someone filled out the paperwork correctly enough to pass inspection but didn't actually have the underlying records to support it.

She caught that. Pulled this thread hard enough to write to archivists in two countries and then locked everything in a drawer and walked away.

I photograph the new documents with my phone, including the German pages I can't read, and upload the set to cloud storage.

Then I open a separate file on my laptop and start a timeline. The man on my porch claimed he was killed at White Plains on October 28, 1776. He said Washington Irving profited from his death without learning his name. These are testable statements, and I test them.

The Battle of White Plains: October 28, 1776. Hessian forces present. The Regiment von Lossberg, where Johann Brandt appears in the muster rolls, among the units engaged. Irving drew on local folklore about a Hessian soldier killed in the war and never identified his Horseman by name.

His historical claims check out. An actor with a German accent and good research could manage that. The video, the interrupted footprints, and the face my mother drew decades ago are harder to dismiss.