Journey Home (May 2008 challenge, Part 4)

[occhi-bella.livejournal.com]

Title: Journey Home (Part 4)
Author: occhi_bella
Rating: T
fic_variations Prompt/Claim: Love/Hate, Time
Word Count: 816
Warnings: Spoilers
Note: Based on an alternate universe in which Ichabod left the book that Katrina gave him behind.
Disclaimer: Sleepy Hollow and its characters do not belong to me. I make no money from this.

Link to first part.

---

The next day was Saturday. Exhausted after another night in which he was haunted by dreams of finding Katrina in the iron maiden, Ichabod overslept. It was nearly noon when he finally woke with an exclamation. He never slept until so late in the morning.

He washed and dressed hastily, then walked downstairs. The maid informed him that her master had gone out and asked him if he wanted breakfast. He politely declined and left the house with his bag.

There was no school today, and so the children of the village ran about the clearing between the main road and the woods, shouting and laughing. Ichabod stopped and watched them for a short time, wondering if they had seen anything. Children in their innocence were often more honest than adults. Then again, they were also more imaginative.

Although it no longer appeared to be in use, the makeshift watch tower that had been erected before he arrived in Sleepy Hollow still stood just off the main road. It was here that he’d seen Young Masbath for the first time, standing with his father Jonathan for the last time, the last he was seen alive. By the next morning the boy was an orphan, imploring Ichabod to allow him to assist in catching his father’s murderer. Ichabod knew what it was to be alone in the world and instantly felt a certain connection to the boy. He too had lost his mother, at the age of seven, and he was downright terrified of his father; there was no love between them and he’d left home at the age of fifteen.

Ichabod continued walking along the road, leaving the center of town behind and following the path to the Van Tassel home. He stopped and took in the view of the whole house from a few yards back. All was still and quiet, save for the periodic whistle of the wind as it swept across the open fields. The shutters over all of the windows remained open and once in awhile, when a particularly fierce gust picked up, they banged with a loud thud.

Instead of going inside Ichabod circled the house, studying all of the entrances into the house and the area surrounding it. He wasn’t sure what exactly he was searching for. Perhaps he was hoping to find a hidden door through which an intruder might have entered and attacked. Maybe Katrina was a victim as well, and not the culprit he had believed her to be. The fact that she had not appeared for her appointment with her attorney pointed to her possible innocence. A twinge of fear and guilt tugged at his heart as he thought it. If she was indeed innocent, then his premature departure from Sleepy Hollow was a graver error than he’d imagined.

Coming around the house again he stopped at the porch where he had bid Young Masbath goodbye. He had a vivid image of the boy’s expression and the tears that welled up in his eyes when he scolded him.

“It’s my fault,” Ichabod muttered to himself angrily.

As he walked away from the house, he stopped and turned around, eyeing it one more time. He shuddered as he stared at the darkened windows in the upper stories, imagining that he could see shadows moving somewhere behind the glass. For a minute a vision of Katrina gazing out of the upper window with tears streaming down her face came to him. The vision faded and he shook himself as he became conscious of his surroundings again.

Ghosts of the past, he thought, and a pang of sadness gripped him and his throat tightened. With a sigh he turned and walked briskly away. Sometimes he was too sentimental for his own good.

Out of the corner of his eye he suddenly spied two pairs of little eyes watching him and he stopped in his tracks. These two had apparently ceased playing in the clearing with the other children and had followed him to the Van Tassel home. They were now crouched in the field of dried out stalks, peering at him.

For a moment he stood still, staring. He was about to speak to them, but they suddenly leaped up, realizing that they had been caught. Two little blonde girls in light blue dresses. They took off at a run, back toward the center of town.

Ichabod shook his head with a sigh and returned to the main street, heading toward the church.

When he reached the clearing again where the children played he spotted the two little girls in blue. They stood near the watch tower and upon seeing him they clambered up into it to hide from him. He stood for a moment, pondering. Then he strode over to the tower, stopping beside the wooden ladder leading up to the enclosed structure.

“You don’t need to be afraid,” he called up to them.

One of them crawled over to the threshold of the structure and looked out at him.

“It’s alright. There is nothing to be afraid of.”

She stared at him, remaining silent.

“You’re the constable?” the other little girl asked, poking her head out. The first girl elbowed her.

“Shh!”

“I am,” Ichabod answered. “I am Constable Crane.”

“Are you going to find Miss Katrina?” the braver girl continued, not heeding her friend.

“I’m going to try.” Ichabod managed an awkward half smile, wishing to reassure the first, warier girl. “I promise you, I’m here to help,” he told her. “You don’t need to be afraid.”

“We’re not in trouble?” she asked.

“Not at all. Someone in Sleepy Hollow wrote a letter to me asking for my help. So I am here to help.”

“Oh.”

“If you see or remember anything that might help me determine where she is, and where Young Masbath is, will you tell me?”

They nodded in unison.

“Do you remember when you saw her last?”

“No,” answered the second girl. The other silently shook her head. “She was always really nice. I hope the Headless Horseman didn’t kill her.”

By this time, the other children had spied him and they all approached the watch tower.

“Has anyone seen him?” Ichabod asked.

“No. And we’re not allowed out into the Western Woods,” several of the children said at once.

“And he hasn’t come here from the woods,” one boy told him.

“But there are other ghosts. We saw them at the house,” a second boy chimed in.

“Oh?”

“Yes, the Van Tassel ghosts.”

“I see. And…you’ve actually seen them?”

“Not their faces,” he admitted.

“You’re wrong,” the first boy retorted. “It’s not a ghost, it’s the old witch from the Western Woods.”

“How do you know?” his friend challenged.

“Because she was wearing all white. She always has her face covered.”

“Yes. I met her once,” Ichabod replied.

“You did?” several of the children asked.

“I did.”

“Was she scary?”

Ichabod couldn’t help but laugh lightly. “Just a little bit. But she didn’t harm me. Are you afraid of her?”

“She made a pact with the devil and summoned the Headless Horseman.”

“We’re not supposed to go near her.”

“I see. Well, I thank you. You’ve all been very helpful. One more thing. Has anyone seen lights in the windows of the Van Tassel home? Candles burning?”

Some of them said they had seen a light in the window during the day, some said it was at night; still others shook their heads or merely shrugged.

They waved to him as he bid them good day. He walked back to the Philipse home. Perhaps he would be there now. Ichabod was hoping that he could persuade him to hand over the key to the Van Tassel home. Enough people had claimed to see movement and activity there that it was worth doing another search of the place. Perhaps there were rooms in the house that he was not aware of, secret places where someone could hide.

The answer to the more difficult question of why someone would hide there was something that he couldn’t even begin to think about yet.

oooOooo

Philipse wasn’t home when Ichabod returned. There was still daylight and he decided to set off for the Western Woods, hoping that he would be able to locate the crone’s cave again. The day was grey and gloomy, as were all of the days in Sleepy Hollow it seemed, and a chill wind blew, rustling the dried brown leaves that covered the path or rested in thick piles around the trunks of the trees, and prying loose some of the stragglers that remained on the nearly bare branches.

He had no trouble finding the cave as it turned out and he knew immediately when he was drawing close. The wind stilled, the forest became eerily silent and the air was thick with a dark nameless something, a sinister essence or presence that he otherwise couldn’t specifically describe.

The wooden door of the hovel that was built into the stone cave was shut when he arrived. He dismounted and tied Gunpowder to a nearby tree. His heart was thudding in his chest as he recalled his last visit to the crone. She’d been channeling a spirit of some sort that told him where to find the Horseman and it nearly strangled him. He took a deep breath and walked to the door.

No one answered when he knocked. After several minutes he gingerly pushed the door open.

“I beg pardon. Is anyone here?” he called out timidly.

When he received no answer he ventured in further and looked around. Along one wall there was a line of dead ravens hung upside down by their claws. A bucket of water alongside the table where the crone was working last time was filled with floating bodies of dead, decapitated cardinals.

“Mmph,” Ichabod groaned involuntarily. The hairs on the back of his neck were prickling and chills ran through him. Besides being an utterly macabre scene, he loved cardinals. They had been his favorite since he was a little boy and he couldn’t fathom any reasoning that justified beheading such lovely birds that sang such beautiful songs.

There was no point in searching the cave any further. Its inhabitant wasn’t here and the blood that stained the table and ground might have belonged to any number of rodents or birds that the woman cut up as part of her magic spells. If there was human blood in the mix, there would be no discerning it.

Back out in the fresh air he inhaled deeply, realizing that he’d been holding his breath, so foul was the stench in the cave. He went back to the tree where he’d tied up Gunpowder and stopped, considering whether he should wait for the crone to return or not.

Ichabod thought of his conversation with the younger Philipse the evening that he had arrived. They hadn’t found any headless corpses but they feared that both Katrina and Young Masbath were the latest victims. The writer of the letter informed him of the same. No one had searched the Western Woods however, so afraid were they to come here. It was possible that the bodies were deep in this forest where no one would venture, perhaps near the Tree of the Dead, the gateway through which the Hessian traveled between this world and the underworld. With any luck, there were not bodies to find because they were alive, possibly hiding somewhere.

Dread filled his frame as it became clear to him what his next step had to be, a step that he’d been postponing for as long as he could. He sighed and mounted Gunpowder, then set off, following the Indian trail that would lead him to the Tree of the Dead and the Horseman’s grave.

But both were as he’d left them the last time he was here. The blood had dried on the trunk of the tree and the thick roots at the base of it hadn’t completely closed over the heads of the villagers that the Hessian had collected, leaving them visible. Katrina’s and Young Masbath’s heads were not there, he discovered with relief.

The Hessian’s grave remained open, the skeleton of the body now half covered with fallen leaves and dirt that had been stirred up and deposited in the hole in the ground by the wind. Unsurprisingly his head had not been returned.

A search of the surrounding area yielded nothing. Thankfully, there was no sign of them, and no sign of their corpses, headless or otherwise.

oooOooo

That evening, when Ichabod finally found him at home, Samuel Philipse Jr. reluctantly agreed to turn the key to the Van Tassel home over to him.

“I don’t know that there is anything to discover there. We searched the house on the day you arrived and found nothing. What makes you think that you will find something now?”

“Sometimes one can discover something upon a second search that was missed the first time. Besides, I believe it is a good idea to watch the house. Perhaps the culprit will return.”

“Or if we’re lucky Miss Van Tassel and the boy will return.”

“Yes.”

“It’s a long shot, Constable.”

“Perhaps.”

“Well, I don’t need to go into the house anymore. I suppose it will do no harm for you to keep the key temporarily.”

“Thank you.”

“Have you discovered who sent you the letter yet?”

“I have not. Whoever it is clearly didn’t want me to know they had written. For all I know it could have been one of the children that I saw playing in the clearing today.”

Philipse looked surprised. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“Of course not. Though, judging from the handwriting, it isn’t impossible,” he replied with a weary sigh. “More likely it was someone writing with their non-dominant hand, however.”

The maid appeared in the doorway of the sitting room where they were speaking and announced that dinner was ready.

“Anneke is a terrific cook. I hope you will join me for dinner tonight, Constable Crane.”

“Yes, thank you.”

They ceased talk of the crisis at hand during dinner and ate silently, once in awhile remarking generally about neutral topics. As Philipse had promised, Anneke’s cooking was delicious and Ichabod ate unusually heartily. It had been over twenty-four hours since he’d eaten a substantial meal.

“You slept in this morning,” Philipse remarked.

“Yes. I hope to have an earlier start tomorrow.”

“Our Sunday church service begins at nine o’clock in the morning. You are welcome to attend.”

Ichabod had grown up with a father who was a pious reverend of the church and yet thought nothing of torturing his mother and others to death; he no longer had faith in God or religion. It was then that he’d learned the hard lesson that villainy wears many masks, and that the mask of virtue was the most dangerous one of all. The same lesson that he’d attempted to impart to Young Masbath when he turned his back on the boy, consumed with bitterness and disappointment in Katrina.

“Thank you,” he replied. “Perhaps I will.”

oooOooo

Cracking thunder woke Ichabod during the night and he sat up with a start. Through the window he saw a flash of lightning. There was no rainfall and after the flash the night became silent.

He stood up and moved to the window, gazing out. The night was overcast, but a thin crescent moon peeked out from behind the clouds. In just two or three days they would have a new moon and the night would be even darker. He stood tautly, waiting for the next flash of lightning and an accompanying thunder clap. Either the storm was far away or it had ended as quickly as it began, for neither came.

Again he thought with a shudder of the rumbling thunder and lightning flashes that accompanied the Horseman’s journey out of and back into the depths of the Tree of the Dead. He was about to turn away from the window and return to bed when something caught his eye.

The window in his room on the upper story of Philipse’s house looked out on the open fields behind the back of his home and beyond the center of town. He realized that he could see the Van Tassel home in the distance, at least the upper stories, and he imagined for a moment that he saw the flicker of a candle in one of the windows facing him.

At first he thought he had dreamed it. But moments later he glimpsed another flicker of light, this time in the adjacent window, as if someone was walking across the room holding a candle, moving from window to window.

After dressing hurriedly and pulling on his boots, he moved to the door where his frock coat was hanging on a hook. He donned it and felt in his pocket for the key to the Van Tassel home that he’d retrieved from Philipse. Then he quietly left the room, eased the door closed behind him and tiptoed down the stairs so as not to wake the rest of the household.

His overcoat and scarf were in the closet downstairs by the front door. It was late November and already quite cold so he pulled these on before silently leaving the house.

Clouds obscured the little moonlight that there was and Ichabod was grateful that he’d thought to bring a lantern with him. His heart was fluttering as he walked along the empty village road toward the Van Tassel house, glancing about nervously. He began to go over the questions that he had in his mind, the clues that he was aware of so far and the conversations that he’d had with various villagers, including the children. A rational train of thought that would take his mind off of his confounded fears and make him cease jumping at the sight of his own shadow.

He looked up at the upper windows of the Van Tassel home as he walked towards it. There didn’t seem to be any sign of life or light there now and he halted, considering turning back.

Mustering his courage again, he kept walking toward the house. If he found nothing and no one there then this would be a trip made in the night for nothing. But if there was someone lurking in the Van Tassel house, the sooner he discovered them the sooner he could figure out what was going on. The more time went by, the more urgent and less hopeful Young Masbath’s and Katrina’s predicament became.

Ichabod quietly inserted the key into the lock of the front door and opened it. He pushed it open gingerly and stopped in the doorway, listening for another sound inside. There was none and he moved further into the cold house, silently shutting the front door behind him.

Listening for the tiniest noise, his pace was slow and deliberate. If someone was here they would see the light of his lantern, he suddenly thought nervously. But it was preferable to standing in pure blackness.

Suddenly he thought he heard a soft thud above him, like an object hitting the floor, but in a moment there was nothing but silence.

“Who’s here?” he called out after mustering the courage.

But he received no answer. The house remained silent and still.

“I’m imagining things,” he murmured.

Still, he had to make certain. He’d seen the flicker of light in one of the windows on the second floor, and with trepidation he made his way over to the stairs. Their creaking was painfully loud and he climbed the steps one by one, cringing each time he heard the wood squeak or groan beneath his boot and listening to the house intently, trying to hear over his pounding heart and ready to run at a moment’s notice.

After what seemed an eternity he had reached the top of the stairs. He stopped and listened carefully. No one appeared to be in the house now. Yet he was certain that he’d seen a light moving from one window to the next. Perhaps his mind had been playing tricks on him.

“This town will drive me mad yet,” he muttered irritably.

It was warmer on the second floor than it had been downstairs and the smell of burnt tobacco lingered in the air. Someone had been here, smoking. For a moment he thought of the children’s comments about the Van Tassel ghosts, then immediately shook it off. He couldn’t believe that there had been a ghost smoking here. The Hessian was a spirit acting by someone’s will, a mortal someone; even if there was something supernatural occurring here, he was certain that he would find a flesh-and-blood human being behind it.

His footsteps seemed to guide his body without his thinking about it. He turned right and moved quietly down the hall, drawn to the room at the far end. The parlor where he’d encountered Katrina reading and the room that he would always consider the heart of this house. He closed the door behind him, lit the candles in the room and set the lantern down on the end table.

Although this room was on the opposite side of the house, away from where he could have possibly viewed it from his window in the Philipse home, someone had indeed been in here. The fire had ceased burning in the hearth only a short time ago and the smell of burnt tobacco was strongest here. Ichabod knelt down and eyed the newly-formed ash, observed the smell of smoke. Though they seemed to have left before he arrived and it appeared that no one was in the house any longer, he hadn’t missed them by very much time. And perhaps they would show themselves again if he waited long enough.

Had Katrina come home? He couldn’t believe that it was she who was smoking. But who else would be lurking in this room? If she was here, why hadn’t she come forward? Surely she must realize that her neighbors and friends worried about her. And what about Young Masbath?

He straightened up and walked about the room, looking it over. A lightly drawn chalk circle on the floor caught his eye. But there was no evil eye drawn on the inside of it, like he’d seen under his bed when he slept here, like the one she’d drawn in the church. There were no pictures, no symbols drawn inside of this circle, but he spied what appeared to be drops of oil. He frowned, puzzled, then reached out and gingerly touched the oil with his finger. Moments later he felt a slight burning sensation on that part of his skin that had touched the oil and he drew his handkerchief out, hastily wiping it away.

“What on earth?” he muttered.

The twinge of burning subsided a short time later. Ichabod examined the floor inside the circle, but there was nothing else to observe other than the drops of oil. He stood up and moved to the couch near the fireplace, sinking into it with a weary sigh. Katrina had been seated on this couch that early morning when he found her awake, reading. He could still remember every thought that he had, every physical sensation he felt the moment he set eyes on her, dressed only in her thin nightgown and a robe that lay half-open, exposing her bare skin and the top edge of her breasts. The fragrance of honeysuckle seemed to permeate the room again now as he recalled the way her golden hair shimmered in the light of the fire, the way the honeysuckle scent of her intoxicated him when she drew near. They had stood together quietly then, gazing out of the window that overlooked vast open fields, and she had explained that the land they were looking at belonged to Peter Van Garrett. He had given her father an acre of land and a broken down cottage. She had once been poor and living humbly, too, he learned.

She gave him the book of spells then, a gift that he’d refused at first, for he didn’t believe in such things. But she disarmed him, asking how he could be so certain of everything. He had to take it. Then when he opened the front cover and saw her late mother’s name written there his throat had constricted. He was thinking of his own mother who he’d lost at a young age and was deeply moved by the generosity of the gift.

They rode out to the cottage ruins together then and she showed him the hearth where she’d played as a child, drawing in the dirt and eerily imitating the symbols that he’d seen his mother draw in the ashes when he was a boy. It was here that he learned that she shared his love of cardinals.

A loud creaking to his left stirred Ichabod from his reverie and he sat up with a start and turned toward the parlor door. He rose to his feet and reached into the pocket of his frock coat, closing a shaking hand around his pistol.

“Who’s there?” he cried out.

“And I thought you had left this place, Constable Crane.”

The voice was female, familiar, the words crooned, somehow seductive and sardonic at the same time. Ichabod fumbled to extract his gun from his pocket as the door opened.

A figure dressed in white from head to toe stood there, the familiar white veil covering her face. He recognized the vague outline of the crone’s features through the almost transparent white gauze that shielded her visage. But when she reached up and pulled the veil up and back off of her face he realized that he was mistaken.

“But then it was obvious right away that you had a soft spot for my dear stepdaughter.”

He gasped audibly upon finding himself staring open-mouthed at Lady Van Tassel and the world around him seemed to come to a screeching halt. His eyes wandered to the hand that she’d cut, seeking out the wound.

She knew instantly what he was searching for, and she held her palm up to show it to him and grinned. The expression on her face was pure wickedness.

His mind was reeling as he tried to put the pieces together, unable to believe that the reality in front of him could be possible. Everyone knew that she had been killed by the Hessian. He’d seen her corpse, clothed in her velvet dress of rich green and purple, the angry self-inflicted knife cut on her palm clearly visible from the carriage window. She appeared now as she had in life, with her head intact, the nasty cut still on her palm, though it had healed somewhat. But he knew that she wasn’t a ghost.

Gradually he began to grasp what had happened, his mind working in slow-motion, as if through molasses. That corpse had been someone else’s, the identical cut on the palm made by Lady Van Tassel so that everyone would be convinced that it was she who had died. The elaborate scheme that he had imagined Katrina to be guilty of was actually her stepmother’s.

Ichabod tried to speak but the words wouldn’t come. His eyes lost their focus and a long sigh escaped from his lips as he sank to the floor, fainting.

(continue to next part)