Read an exclusive extract of Hollow by Lindsey Anderson Beer
Read an exclusive extract from Hollow, the debut novel from film-maker and screenwriter of Pet Sematary: Bloodlines and Sierra Burgess Is a Loser, Lindsey Anderson Beer.
Coming to the 3AM Books list August 2027...
All my life, I was forbidden to tell ghost stories.
But that life is gone now, and I can finally account
for my own haunting.
Sleepy Hollow had its secrets and debts. Our people
wanted, and something wanted them back.
We called him the Headless Horseman.
He rode with furious need, hunting the heads of men
and women to find his replacement.
Of all our ghosts, the Horseman was the most feared,
the most deadly.
For nothing was more ruinous than desire.
~ Katrina Van Tassel
*
I should not be here at night. Hoofbeats approach from the woods. They sound like something else. Heartbeats, uneven as if near death. A pack of wild horses breaks through the trees. I have no one and nothing to protect me.
I am a girl of only seven, my eyes wide and wild as theirs. I look at the iron sky as dusk turns to night, and the fog rolls in with it. What have I done, losing time? I am doomed.
I run, as fast as my small legs can carry me, back toward the main road, but I cannot outrun the fog. I am submersed in it. I feel myself trip over the snaggled roots of a tree rising up as if to snatch me. My foot catches, and my leg twists, broken in an instant.
My child’s body strikes the ground. I try to rise, but ,the pain cuts through me, too sharp to walk. I hear hoofbeats racing toward me through the fog, but I cannot locate their source. I fear the wild horses will trample me and finish me off.
And then something else blows in, a cold that is colder and older than this place. I know what they were running from, though I can scarcely discern him through the mist. I do not need to see him to feel him.
The Headless Horseman.
A path of ice spreads along the earth between us, like an aisle to an altar. I cannot move, my small limbs are blocks of ice that burn. But he does not chase me. He stops, he holds out something: my own head. He has been carrying it for me, keeping me safe.
I reach for it… And I
Chapter One
I awakened, my hand outstretched before me, grasping at something. The air in Sleepy Hollow made dreams hold a little tighter, so that the boundary between sleeping and waking was a thin veil I had to cast off with the bedsheets. I felt a panic I could not yet name, a nightmare only half-remembered, and not the ever-repeating one I’d just had. I blinked until realization flooded in with the too bright morning light, and then my heart leapt with my legs from bed:
I’d overslept!
An unabideable crime on a farm. Guilt was one of many things to be avoided in Sleepy Hollow. Our town had a special way of punishing the guilty.
Sleepy Hollow. My birthright, my home. Most would be troubled by a dream as I just had. But I was from a place infamous for our apparitions. Sleepy Hollow collected the dead and turned them into legend, turned its people into dreamers, and storytellers, or deniers whose disbelief meant nothing to our resident spirits.
Unlike my esteemed parents, my neighbors, I was not one to shiver at ghost stories.
I was not one to tremble at all.
The people of Sleepy Hollow called me a coquette.
Willful. Wild. Insolent. Bluestocking. I did love blue.
They used these words the way they used bridles and reins, far before they called me wicked.
Most important, they called me Katrina Van Tassel.
Katrina Van Tassel.
I was the only child of the great Baltus Van Tassel, a prosperous Dutch farmer, and the woman who was simply Mrs. Van Tassel, or Mother, or Dear, or Wife. Her name had once been Alice.
I threw off my nightgown, pulled on a blue house dress, and fled. Mother would be cross. But then, when wasn't Mother cross? Displeasure, particularly at me, was one of her few defining qualities. At least she had constants.
I reached the stairs. I hoped they would not betray me. Ours was an old house in an old place, with a cantankerous temperament to match. I crept down the wooden steps, mindful of the most onerous planks, more unforgiving than Mother, even. I hoped I could make it past her and into the yard before she noticed I was derelict in my duties.
I took more steps than I took breaths before I reached the bottom.
"Coquette!" I startled as I heard her cry out.
She was not, however, addressing me. Preoccupied with my greater crimes, she had not noticed I had risen late, nor that I stood here now. I felt an instant release in my chest, and my breath returned to me. She was in the kitchen with Father, working dough with the conviction of a murderer. “Coquette! That’s what they call her, you know.” I lingered in the hallway, listening.
Father was already smoking his pipe at this early hour, though not early enough for either of our purposes.
Baltus Van Tassel, with his silver still shining, as his gold dwindled. Season by season, Father had dispensed of our servants, save for one lone farmhand, his cousin, Dirk. For as vast as our fields were, the Van Tassel name was at present far richer and more impressive than our ledgers. The various creatures of Sleepy Hollow had not yet corrected their accounting of us.
He took the time to exhale long and slow as he often did, hoping to give Mother space to calm herself, or change what her mind had fixed upon. She was a woman whose eyes and attention narrowed on to a singular thing, however small, and would not release it. “My Dear. A sharp tongue will not harm her prospects. Her other gifts are too many.”
My gifts. He meant my youth and beauty, for that is all they valued in me. They had spoken of it far earlier than was appropriate, in conspiracy of their great fortune in my long, silken brown hair. My large chestnut eyes that looked interested even when they were not. My full lips, and slender waist. These would sell very well, along with my name: Katrina Van Tassel.
“The party,” Mother added. “She will contest it, of course.”
“You know best here, Dear,” Father said, already retreating from her and matters outside his masculine depths. At his footsteps, I hurried back to avoid getting caught. I ducked into the nearest room, his study, where I was seldom allowed, trading one violation for another.
Mid-October morning sun turned the dust in his study to burnt gold. His massive, cherry wood desk. The sturdy windsor armchairs. The various wall ornaments of resplendent pewter. Everything about this room was substantial. I went first to his bookshelf. The Dutch Statenbijbel, our family Bible, his psalter, devotional works by Dutch Reformed authors, almanacs, leather-bound ledgers. All stood erect, arranged with care to tell of importance and propriety. Nothing called to me here. Not like the books I kept hidden underneath my bed.
I was a bluestocking, a literary woman, a scathing word I wore proudly. I loved Catharine Macaulay, England’s first female published historian., Elizabeth Carter’s translation of Stoic philosophy, Epictetus, the crown jewel of bluestocking collections. And even, if I dared confess it, Judith Sargent Murray’s "On the Equality of the Sexes," torn from a page of Massachusetts Magazine! Such texts would put Mother and Father in early graves! As would how I had procured them.
I turned away. My gaze caught something white reflecting the light on that grand desk. I scanned the papers: ledgers and letters from Albany from the type of men you are damned to cross. I saw the words pay, or else. My eyes doubled back on the threat:
‘Your land will be forcibly forfeited if you do not pay by November’s end.’
Forcibly forfeited. November’s end. End. End. End.
I stood there reading the rest, until the story of the Van Tassels and our fortune evaporated like a particularly convincing apparition. I had not understood just how fragile and precarious our situation was. But then, disregard for danger was one of my many faults.
Father found me. He did not reprimand me for my intrusion. He stood in the doorway for a long moment. "Bad season upon bad season."
Liar! Ire rushed through me, landed on my cheeks.
He drew in a puff of his pipe as he stepped into the room, collecting the right words. "We will survive, Kat. But to turn it around…"
"You will marry," Mother cut in from the doorway, to the point as her favorite kitchen knife she was presently waving around. My eyes flicked to the blade, catching the light. Mother wanted more than to survive. She wanted the comfort and prosperity her marriage and Father’s name had promised a woman of her good breeding. “Of course, there is no finer match than Brom Van Brunt.”
She meant no match more valuable.
Like ours, the Van Brunts were one of the original families of Sleepy Hollow. They were the richest of all the rich families here, and Brom Bones was their eldest son, the most eligible, pompous bachelor in the Hudson.
He stood to inherit the Van Brunt manor, the various businesses, the lion’s share of their incomprehensible fortune. In preparation for that great honor, he had moved to Albany once the first hair had sprung from his chest (and yes, I recalled the mad boy telling me!), for schooling and then to apprentice beneath his grandfather before he passed.
Emotion gripped my throat. My choked, unsteady voice betrayed the girlishness that still clung to me like a ghost. “I have not seen Brom since we were children, and you know the Van Brunts and Van Dijks have had designs on –” Designs on Brom marrying Nora or Emma Van Dijk, Brom’s near equals in good fortune.
“He was always a headstrong boy, wasn’t he? You can convince him otherwise.” Convince him otherwise. I paled to think what she had in mind.
“Sell your fine manor,” I all but spat. “Leave me my horses.” And they were mine, I had corralled and broken every one of them.
“My horse maiden,” Father said, giving me a soft, sad little response imitating a smile.
Mother looked at me with anger. “You wild, impertinent thing. You are the most valuable animal we have.” She wiped her free hand on her apron, like a butcher wiping off blood.
I ran toward the stables. I could already hear the chickens and pigs and other creatures in their pens, demanding their overdue morning feed.
“Yes, yes, we all want something!” I countered, fighting the urge to cry. I refused to give in to such childish emotion. After all, I was a woman now, with a woman’s body, and all it could do for the highest bidder.
I had not thought to grab my cloak in my hasty exit and the air was cold for an October day, but my anger burned bright enough to warm me. I could feel my parents staring at me from the front door. Mother, hand on wide hip, Father, hand on narrow pipe. Opposite, but the same, conjoined as they were in their scheming and lies.
Bad seasons! The farm was fine, our animals healthy, our fields full. Dirk and I made sure of it. We broke our backs daily to do so. It was their lavish spending, his management of our fortunes, his escapades in Albany and elsewhere. Father’s many mistresses were the worst kept secret in Sleepy Hollow, perhaps unknown only to Mother, and only because her ears and mind refused it.
“Katrina, we’re not done with this discussion,” he said, as firmly as he could muster, which was not firm at all, in that way that fathers seldom could be harsh with their daughters.
“There is nothing to discuss,” Mother tore in again, the knife still in her hand, though not her sharpest weapon. “Let your daughter huff like a mule!” Your daughter, as if she had no claim on me, bore no responsibility for the blasphemy I had somehow grown in to despite her best efforts. As I stalked away, I could hear her rant about herself and her mother. She was invoking the psalms, as if God himself might intervene to fix me, if Father would not.
The space between the house and the stables had never seemed so far. I could hear my own indignant breaths in my ears. She was right, I was huffing and puffing like one of our stubborn animals. Everything I saw, the land I had grown up on that had belonged to Van Tassels for generations, now took on the aspect of a cage.
Our Dutch barn, the schuur, with its massive timber frame, and the sleeping quarter of our lone remaining farmhand, Dirk, a cage for grain. Our dairy byre, a cage for cows. The small brick smokehouse, a cage for the slaughter. The springhouse for cold storage; the corn crib; the wagon house; the carriage house; the cider mill; the press house; the pigsty; the poultry yard; cages, all, dividing the work between men and women, husbands and wives, their roles and lives divided on the property they shared in function, but not in law.
I worked the farm. I spent my life in service of it. But the farm was Father’s. Mother was Father’s. I was Father’s. If I wanted more, I could be a widow, or a ghost.
Finally, I reached the stables. Like everything else on our property, they offered an illusion of prosperity, with rows of well-groomed, well-fed animals that Father had not purchased at market like the other gentlemen of Sleepy Hollow. His “horse maiden” had procured them for him, my wildness that Mother so detested here quite handy.
I grabbed my horse, Sinew, a mare who was not quite white, not yellow. I had always thought her the color of aged paper, like one of my treasured books, but today, she struck me as the color of Grandmother’s wedding dress. The type a good Dutch girl kept in her kist, her hope chest, along with her burial gown. I had no such hopes.
Anger shook through my whole body. I saddled Sinew as quickly as my trembling hands could manage. I mounted her, and together we breached the stable door, two co-conspirators, she my only ally.
As I rode out of the stables, Mother threw up her arms at me. “Where do you think you’re going?”
I ignored her, galloping past it all.
I rode as fast and as hard as I could to the only place I ever wanted to be.
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