The Unhallowed Horseman

Content warning: horror and some gore

It was a particularly rainy All Hollow’s Eve, just on the outskirts of Tarrytown, New York, a sleepy little hamlet nestled in the Catskills of upstate.

There at the covered bridge, just on the outskirts of town was the boundary between two worlds. One being the here-and-now earth dimension most of us are familiar with, and the other being the netherworld part of the multiverse where the Unhallowed Horseman resided.

Many had heard of his tale. A particularly astute scholar by the name of Washington Irving had first introduced Him to the burgeoning American Republic at the turn of the 18th Century. After a particular hard fought American Revolutionary War against the British Crown, a seasonal tale about the quelling of wrong doers was much in order. Readers could satiate their voracious appetites for the enemy, vicariously, through the Horseman’s powerful swing of a battle axe as he lobbed off heads in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow". 

The Native Americans had known of him too. The ill-intentioned phantom had made His rounds near the mighty Hokohonkgus chestnut tree near the Wecquaesgeek burial ground long before Ichabod Crane ever, pardon the pun, reared his head. And many Manitou river spirits used His power to glide effortlessly across the Tappan Zee along the Hudson or the tendrils of the Pocantico River beckoning weary sailers onto Moss Bunkers and jagged rocks. But in this day and age, the old covered bridge seemed to demarcate the delineation between civilization and rustic forest, but also mundane and otherworldly planes of existence.

It was here where Sheriff Eustice Van Wart, a larger than life lawman nearly seven feet if he was a foot, found the crashed Chevy Wideside of a couple of the only High School's small town bullies. They were known to galavant about and even on occasion joyride under the influence, something at first glance had probably been the case here. But upon further investigation it became more and more apparently obvious that what Eustice was dealing with here was no normal teenaged DWI fatality.

For one there was a lot more blood than only the single decapitated occupant could ever provide. If he were to believe the Legend, about the town’s infamous mascot —which he didn’t— it would have been easy to assign this to another instance of the Headless Horseman dispatching of His victims. But police work never was as easy as it seemed, and this case was no different. Whats more, it was getting late and the town’s annual Dutch Down-Home Days festival was getting started. That would mean that every trick-or-treater and Halloween reveler in a forty mile radius was going to be in a particularly mischievous mood. It also meant that Eustice would either have to call the whole thing off (and ruin the one time of year everyone in the town seemed to get along) or do some lazy police work and ignore the problem until after the weekend. It was an easy choice, albeit an irresponsible one.

Eustice made a call into Principal Carter and Mr. Price a few of his personal friends to help search for any remaining bodies. He didn’t want to alarm the general public and by creating a small search party of his inside constituents, he could claim to have done proper procedure in the case anything went wrong. Clearly his morals and sloppy police work were not among his greatest qualities.

As such the three Musketeers began their ardent search among the brambles and underbrush surrounding the small creek area where the truck had crashed and the rider, and most likely its other occupants, had lost their heads. There was a problem, however. Being as this town celebrated it’s Halloween more fiercely than the North Pole on Christmas Eve, his comrades in arms and newly deputized subjects had already begun their untimely celebration and had been nipping alcohol among other party favors. One even had brought a fully loaded shotgun and a flask of a finely aged deep malt. It was a recipe for disaster.

The three split up. Mr. Price headed to the Old Dutch Cemetery were the likes of Andrew Carnegie and the Rockefellers alike were buried, while Eustice went deeper into the woods. A place where his walkie, his only form of communication with Deputy Constance and right hand man, couldn’t reach. No one even knew where Carter had ended up sauntering off to.

To make matters worse it was the Triduum of the Hallows. This may seem insignificant, but holy men and tarot readers alike will tell you that this is the one time of year when the Dead can interact with the Living. Call it Halloween, All Saints Day, Samhain or Dia De Los Muertos if you will, but either way it was amongst the background of these three days, that the newly deceased pickup driver had been found. 

This particular Triduum of the Hallows had long been instated by the Cosmos as one of ultimate retribution. On the grand scale of the multiverse timeline, the Universe reset itself occasionally culling parasites, in this case humans, who were bad for it. Two hundred years might seem like a long time, but on the cosmic scale it was merely a fortnight, if even that. It was time for the ultimate in retribution and the current generation would have to pay dearly for the sins of their fathers. 

On this particular instance the Universe gave people something they could easily absorb, rather than a Cthulhu or unimaginable creature, it would serve vengeance in a form commonly known among their ranks. In fact, Irving’s rendition of the Headless Horseman was on every police car, fire truck and municipal building. What’s more, it was Halloween and the town’s most famous antihero was also their mascot. As such, the real Unhallowed Horseman could run about in full view, with free range, horse and all, without anyone nearly batting an eye.

On this particular night, a rather unruly teen by the name of Vincent Douglass had a particular set of problems. He had been implicated as being present during a death at the local gothic town hall library two nights prior, by the mere fact that he alone had left his student ID card with the now deceased librarian, Mr. Martin. On top of that, when he had told his girlfriend Rayna, about the matter, he had, as promised, spoken to her father about it as well. A one in the same Deputy Constance. It hadn’t turned out well. During their brief altercation Vincent had accidentally assaulted the officer as well implicating himself in a fire which burned the Van Tassel manor to the ground, and possibly had caused another accidental death. He ended up being immediately imprisoned prior to the big annual festival. 

Now on Devil’s night of all nights, he was missing. Deputy Constance found himself the only sane and capable police officer in the literal one-horse town. The body at the covered bridge proved to be the third in as many days, and now he couldn’t reach, nor find, the sheriff. 

But the Great Entities that oversee all space and time couldn’t care less about such terrestrial problems. There’s was a much bigger problem of setting the multiverse upright on it’s axis again, and they were on a very limited timeline, which might not show up again until half a century later. 

And so it began. Rule-breaking teenagers in corn mazes having lascivious and drunken transgressions with their classmates met the sharp end of the Horseman’s blade. Still others being adulterers, robbers and leches met untimely ends with the dull blunt end of his death instrument. Additionally, those with particularly heinous thoughts or more sinister actions were dragged along rocks and ravines by a bullwhip around the ankle until their bones became brittle, having their heads eventually lobbed off.

It wasn’t until back at the old covered bridge that Deputy Constance finally had a standoff with the legendary Horseman. It was here he faced his worst fears and decades of propaganda and pop culture informing him that the Horseman was indeed a force to be reckoned it. It was here that he too found the crashed vehicle and what was left of the joyriding teens. It was here he met Vincent, his daughter’s suitor, and the potential perpetrator of murderous crimes. It was here that neither entity from earthly or otherworldly dimension wanted to cross, except out of a sheer sense of duty. And it was here that the Unhallowed Horseman appeared before Constance with the fresh blood of Sheriff Eustice Van Wart still wet on its war implement. 

The lard icing seasonal cookies and dry roast coffee from that morning twisted and churned deep inside the Deputy’s lower intestine. It was now a choice of fight or flight, which anyone in their right mind would have chosen the latter. But if anything had been ingrained in Constance’s psyche during his time battling foreign wars overseas, it was that a steely resolve and a clear conscience was enough to win any battle, or proudly die trying. 

It was perhaps this very reason that the Horseman chose not to perform its sole task as judge, jury, but mainly Executioner. Instead it decided to exonerate Constance from the current task at hand. Besides if history served correctly, he had a daughter on the verge of adulthood and she surely would be a more challenging subject.

Vincent looked on with awe, before himself running away. Neither of them knew the totality of the carnage that had been caused that night, but soon both would. The town would never be the same and in fact would remove its logos and affiliation from everything Horseman related. All Hallow’s Eve wouldn’t be celebrated there quite the same, ever again.

The old covered bridge would eventually be ruled off-limits by local legislation, and remained an area uninhabitable, at least by the living. It too, however, remained to be a portal between worlds and dimensions. Regardless, one thing was sure… Call it a cosmic miscalculation or a banishment of sorts for fighting destiny, but for whatever reason one Thing was left behind. Unfortunately for those in the town, he was without any semblance of a clear head on his beefy shoulders. And somewhere deep in the woods near the mighty Hokohonkgus chestnut tree near the Wecquaesgeek burial ground…

THE UNHALLOWED HORSEMAN RIDES ON!!!!