When I had read it before, I’d been so sad for her, that her love had been taken so brutally, but she had been left with a child — his child.
The Headless Horseman’s child.
As far as I’m aware, the original Katrina Van Tassel was an only child.
Which means…
My blood runs cold.
Does this mean that he’s my ancestor?
From that point, did the Van Tassel line descend from him?
Our whole bloodline stemmed from the very monster who hunts us.
The realisation coils around my chest like a tightening rope, squeezing the air from my lungs. I drop the diary as if burned, and it lands with a dull thud.
Is this why Dad took the diary? Another way of “protecting me”? Stopping me from learning the truth?
If I’m descended from them, from their baby, what does that mean for me?
I think back to the first time I came face-to-face with the Horseman, the way he had stopped when he had looked at me, the hesitation in his movement. I thought it was because he was only after the six men from the Order. But even after that, he hadn’t attacked. I thought it was luck, or that he had spared me by chance.
But what if he recognised me?
I have no idea if I look anything like my ancestor, Katrina. But what if the Horseman sensed me as family?
I shudder.
I pick up the diary again. The Horseman isn’t just some faceless monster anymore.
He was a man who had fallen in love, and Katrina had loved him back. They had planned a future, a life, with a child on the way, and it had all been brutally taken from him.
And her.
I lean back in my father’s chair and exhale.
Oh god, I really am starting to sympathise with the Horseman. How has this happened?
In her diary, Katrina said the townspeople described him as a demon. But he had just been a man looking for revenge for everything he’d lost. They took his head and in doing so, they’d inadvertently cursed him to remain trapped here in a ghostly half-life, cut off from the woman he loved and a child he never met. No wonder he wanted revenge.
Everything he lost…
I sit up a little straighter, thoughts tumbling around in my head.
I think back to the line in the diary about Katrina hearing hooves outside her window at night.
What if the reason he’s trapped here is because he’s still looking for them? Katrina and the baby? Ghost stories are always about unfinished business, aren’t they?
He’s searching for them, his lost love and their child. He wants to be reunited.
How many times has he ridden through this town, searching for them?
It makes my heart hurt just thinking about it, but a new plan is starting to form.
I push myself up from the chair, my legs unsteady beneath me. Perhaps I’m on to something, but I need someone who knows Sleepy Hollow’s town history far better than I do.
Maybe the way to stop all of this isn’t with weapons, or with traps or spells. Maybe it’s with love.
