...Little Aucker Van Acker, all of twelve, skinny as a fencepost and gaunt as a ghost, had watched Brom Bones bury a body under the bridge near the brook in the dead of night, while that massive, black, red-eyed stallion, Daredevil, whinnied and huffed and tugged madly against the reins lashed to a thick elm. 

     

He’d dreamt about the episode every evening since. The corpse had looked limp and of no great heft for the powerful Brom Bones to heave into the hole he’d dug quite sloppily with the butt end of a blunderbuss. The frightened urchin had watched it all from the hill as he crouched behind the headstones of the old Dutch churchyard. Watched the hulking shape work soundlessly in the dour moonlight to cover the evidence of his crime.

     

Allegedly.

     

Hampered by hunger, filth, and a weird rash running across his sunken tummy, the boy had no less judged his eyesight to be as good as anyone’s, even though he’d observed the scene from a healthy distance of a hundred paces or so. 

     

In the middle of the night. 

     

By moonlight.

     

Even so, Aucker Van Acker’s innards told him that something bad had happened. In such a remote period of American history, the boy had certainly seen a dead body before, and he knew that something dead and something alive looked assuredly different from one another at any angle. By all rights, then, whatever Master Bones had buried looked as close to dead as something dead could look. Putting two and two together had woven a nightmarish encounter he couldn’t shake out of his mind no matter how he preoccupied himself, whether it be by pinching ticks off the goat or boiling chicken parts for his mother’s enchanted broth.

     

But instead of trying to sort it out, he’d remained stubbornly silent on the subject, regardless of the specters that haunted him. Terror kept him quiet, of both the thick and mean Brom Bones and his equally nasty mother who’d once warned him, via the aid of a burning strap, against the mischief of poking around in other people’s business, especially that concerning dark secrets. There were some things that a boy should never know. Besides, curiosity, he’d been told, had killed the cat, and he’d had no desire to be curious or a cat. He’d only been out picking worms and mushrooms, creeping tiptoe over the crisp grass in bare feet, when his eyes, quite innocently, had fallen on the surreal incident. But he shouldn’t have seen the scene, even if he had been minding his own business. Mama would be angry as a hornet and Brom Bones would bath him in hot sap and roll him in feathers. 

     

No, thank you!

     

So, he’d shut up.

     

Even when the ladies gossiped and gabbed about the vanished schoolteacher in front of the church on Sundays. Or when the gentlemen guessed and gambled at the fate of the instructor behind the church on Sundays. Or when the schoolboys played “Find the Ichabody” beside the church on Sundays, and on many other days.

     

S’posably kilt Mr. Crane, then!

     

Talk of the missing schoolteacher had given a name to the corpse and a face to Aucker’s ghosts, exacerbating his suspicions while churning the salty worry in his belly. He’d never thought either way of his teacher, good or bad, but he’d definitely never thought him dead, even if Mr. Crane had reddened the boy’s knuckles with the ruler from time to time for having come to school with crud under his nails. He had just as much soap after the stinging licks as he’d had before, so he’d soak his fingers in the brook and take the punishment as it came the next time. That’s just how it went. 

     

There’d be no more of that, he’d guessed.

     

Prolly no schoolin’, neither!

     

But as the days rolled into a week, and the weeks stacked up to a month, little Aucker Van Acker had found himself becoming less and less confident about what he’d seen. In an attempt to poke feebly at a solution to the puzzle, he’d wandered tentatively around the bridge and road at least a hundred times, and only in the broad daylight. Still, he couldn’t force himself down the bank and to the brook’s narrow shore on account of the fact that he shook so much, sweat so much, and stumbled so much that he simply couldn’t muster the constitution to be brave enough.

     

Could be the teacher’s popped his clogs and’s rottin’ down there midst the moss! Means a ghost’s afoot to right a wrong!

     

And he’d wanted no part of getting tangled in that fright. 

     

Far away from the scene, and safely sheltered in the murky shadows beneath the black oak and shagbark surrounding his mother’s shack, the boy’s thoughts remained all akin to the trauma he’d faced. The more he thought about it, in fact, the more confused he’d felt. Closing his eyes as tightly as he could, he often tried to remember any detail that might convince himself that Brom Bones had undeniably buried Ichabod Crane under the moonlight and lingering darkness of a cold and early Saturday morning.

     

He’d replayed the grisly event on a loop in his head, tried to recall whether the flaccid man’s small noggin, dangling deadly from a skinny neck, had been flat at the top with big ears and a sharp nose. Had he seen these features, or had he only imagined them in the hours and days that followed? Long and lanky, large hands and shovel feet, spindle-shanked like a baggily dressed scarecrow—how much of the dark memory had been real?

     

Because he could never be sure, he must have been wrong. 

     

So, he’d kept minding his own business, as the months became years and the people of Sleepy Hollow went on, and the mystery of poor Ichabod Crane—that ravenous and opportunistic schoolteacher, his worldly possessions fertilizing tomatoes and eggplants, and his schoolhouse boarded up—had moved quietly into the hazy realm of maybe-true legend.     

     

But guilt’s an insatiable worm if given enough time to feast on the mind of a sensitive man. Why, there’s no telling how quickly it might devour the wits of a mere boy, then, especially one who already has the whole world and everything in it to fret about. No thought echoes in an empty skull, and certainly no child’s head should be hollow.

     

Be that as it may, and bit by bit, Aucker Van Acker’s conscience grew hangry over the course of the next three years. Guilt made a meal out of him in the long and lasting months following his accidental witness to the alleged disposal of the schoolteacher’s body. Twisted dream by terrible nightmare nibbled away at the boy’s will to keep the dark secret from the world, or at least, less dramatically, from the curious citizens of Sleepy Hollow. Night after night, he woke up drenched in sweat, having once again clawed his way out of his own deep and icy grave. How many times had he rolled over in his sleep only to come nose-to-nose with the rotting and oozing face of the dead Ichabod Crane? The screech of crows echoed in his head. Snakes crawled over his skin and beetles skittered out of his ears. Ticks fed on his veins and fleas chewed up his skin. The goat babbled English backwards. Then everything flipped and birds sang in the trees. A pleasant breeze played in the leaves, the goat said bah-bah, and everything was alive and safe and good, just as he’d always wished for it. Then the brightly shining sun dropped out of the sky, and in the next breath, a soupy darkness came on, swirling with another dreadful course of hair-raising mind-bogglers. Over and over and over again, day after day, and night after night.

     

Something had to make all this madness stop!

     

But only Aucker Van Acker could govern that…