The Inner Beast

Autumn of 1799

There were times when Baltus Van Tassel wondered just how much his beautiful daughter Katrina knew. He watched her now playing a light hearted party game, blind folded and spinning around in the center of a circle of handsome young men with her lunging arms outstretched, the words she said striking Baltus in a way they did no one else.

“The Pickety Witch, the Pickety Witch, who’s got a kiss for the Pickety Witch?”

It was only a party game of chance Katrina and the young men played, to see whom would have a kiss bestowed upon them by his lovely daughter, but how coincidental that Katrina would refer to herself as a “witch.” Only Baltus and his late wife ever knew of Katrina’s situation as an infant, how he’d found her in the smoldering rubble of a house in the Western Woods, how young Cloella Van Kelland, who had been her natural mother, lived as an outcast in that house, accused of witchcraft.

Tonight’s party had been thrown to make merry and be a diversion during this time of fear, chaos and murder in Sleepy Hollow. Spirits certainly did seem to be lighter as Baltus observed his guests who were all eating, drinking, dancing and laughing, but he couldn’t help settling his gaze on Katrina again. She seemed to not have a care in the world, and even when headless bodies were found and the grizzly stories of The Headless Horesman were told, Katrina seemed to have no fear. Again Baltus wondered what Katrina knew, but then how could she know? The only soul in Sleepy Hollow who knew was Baltus himself now that his first wife had died.

But was Katrina safe from The Horseman? Would The Horseman spare her should ever the two meet? Would The Horseman himself somehow know Katrina? And did Katrina somehow know that it was her late father’s headless ghost that galloped across Sleepy Hollow, once again terrorizing the countryside lopping off heads?

It had been almost twenty years ago when Baltus had heard the noise of a skirmish in the Western Woods. He’d been on his way to bring provisions and to pay a visit to Cloella Van Kelland, for it had been several months since he’d done so, and as a friend of her late father’s, he felt obligated to see to it that the girl had all she required. But the war and the threat of The Hessian who was known to lurk about in the Western Woods had kept Baltus from visiting young Cloella for almost a year. As well, Baltus’s wife had not been well, they’d lost another child, a third still born baby, and now he and his wife had no hope of ever becoming parents. It had been so difficult to make himself be social, and that included seeing to Ms. Van Kelland before the winter had set in. Baltus had felt badly about shirking off this duty he’d appointed himself to and he hoped that Ms. Van Kelland was surviving the winter well enough.

The snow had finally stopped enough for Baltus to make his way to the old Van Kelland farm, when the sound of a single gunshot rang out across the early December evening. Baltus then noticed the smell of smoke and a great orange glow in the sky from the vicinity of the Van Kelland farm as he galloped his horse in that direction. Before he reached the farm he could hear the sound of some great fight that had suddenly broken out about 100 yards from Cloella Van Kelland’s home. It was not the sound of a large battle that Baltus heard, but a skirmish. However, the shrill swish of a sword told Baltus that the Black Devil was on the prowl. It would be best to lay low and to make haste in route to Cloella Van Kelland. If The Hessian were about, it may already be too late to save her!

The sound of this fight was different from the others though Baltus noted as his horse raced through the snow towards Cloella. He heard The Hessian Beast cry out as if wounded, and there were several voices, at least four, which called to one another and slashed at flesh. Was The Hessian losing this fight? Had a small number of Continental soldiers taken down the Black Devil in the Western Woods?

However Baltus stopped pondering the Hessian’s fate as soon as he neared what had been the Van Kelland house. The building was all but devoured by flames, just a few left flickering in the setting sunlight as great plumes of black smoke rose upwards to the sky. What had happened? Had some colonial soldiers come across The Hessian burning the Van Kelland home and chased him through the Western Woods, eventually catching him? And what had The Hessian done to Cloella Van Kelland? Where was she?

And that’s when Baltus had seen her; slumped to the snow covered ground, her arms tied behind her around the trunk of a tree. The snow she lay upon was soaked red with blood, and a rifle lay only a foot or so behind her, its muzzle still pointing towards her back. Baltus didn’t recall getting off his horse or running to her side, he only remembered kneeling there in the snow, cutting her hands loose and knowing that nothing could be done. There was a bullet hole nearly below her neck and Cloella Van Kelland was slowly bleeding to death.

“Damn the Black Devil! What’s he done to you, child?” Baltus clamored, taking both Cloella’s hands in his and fending off the tears and shock.

To his surprise Cloella managed a faint and tired smile. “Peace, Mr. Van Tassel, I beg you. This was not the Hessian’s doing. I am who fought to win control of the trigger and I am who wounded myself.”

Baltus was horrified. “But why, child?”

Cloella tried to draw a deep breath, but the air would only fill her lungs so far. “To warn The Hessian not to come. Our soldiers tracked him here, made me the bait in their trap, meant to ambush The Hessian here. They tied me to this tree, one of them was foolish enough to prop his musket against the tree…” she paused, her eyes falling closed for a moment but she fought to open them again and made another attempt to breathe that was just barely successful. “They were burning my house, “ Cloella continued, and now Baltus began to see tears welling up in her blue eyes. “I heard him coming! I heard The Hessian riding here, riding to me. I couldn’t let him be ambushed! I couldn’t the love we found with each other be what killed him. I had only one option; the musket leaned against the tree behind me. I kicked at the tree hard until it finally fell where I could reach the trigger, but the muzzle had come to rest behind my head.” Again she nearly smiled a very faint and sad, aged smile. “But The Hessian was coming, my love was riding hard to me. I had no choice, I needed to warn him to turn back. I chose his life over mine.”

“No! Love for The Hessian, child? No! You are delirious! We must get you to a doctor now!” Said Baltus, not believing what he heard and feeling a very new kind of horror creep into him. Cloella Van Kelland professing love for the Black Devil? She loved The Hessian Horseman, with the sharp-toothed smile who loved blood and carnage? Had she truly been a witch all this time?

“Have you seen him, Baltus?” Cloella asked, her eyes filled with tears and her voice weak. “Have you seen The Hessian?”

What was he supposed to say? He hadn’t even accepted that such a thing as this had happened. “No, I haven’t seen him, child.”

Cloella slumped more in Baltus’s embrace. She too had heard the skirmish and she knew the painful cry of The Hessian when she heard it. Now she cried, felt weaker, wanted only to join her husband. But she couldn’t, not yet. “Baltus,” she said, and it took so much effort to push words from her mouth. “The porch steps, look under the porch steps.”

What had she meant? “Child,” Baltus said desperately, not understanding, not understanding any of this. How had such things happened? “Cloella,” he said again, but the girl was now dead weight in his arms, her head falling over to the side away from him, her blue eyes staring blankly off in the direction the skirmish had taken place. “No!” Baltus cried and shook her, but she did not respond. With a heavy sigh, he lowered her body to the ground, standing up and looking over her with a mix of mournfulness and dumbfounded-ness on his face. Baltus had no idea what to do next or if he should even be standing around here if what the girl said about The Hessian was true. Baltus did not want to be standing over the body of The Hessian’s alleged beloved when The Black Devil would come riding up. Fear over took Baltus and he stumbled away from Cloella’s body, too shocked and too scared to think. And that’s when he heard it, a tiny cry, a muffled gasp from under what remained of the front porch stairs of the house.

Cloella’s last words came hurtling to Baltus again. He turned and ran the remaining few steps towards the porch, tapping the flat stones that made up the foundation, and when he did, he could hear an infant crying. Without thinking Baltus raced up the four steps to the porch and began hacking away at the wood floor with the hilt end of some soldier’s sword. The wood broke away easily as it had been weakened by the fire, and Baltus soon found himself peering down at a baby, swaddled in a woolen blanket, and looking up at him with deep dark brown eyes. Baltus nearly fell into the hole he’d bashed into the porch as he leaned down to pull the baby into his arms, and when he did so he noticed how protected the infant had been by the stones that surrounded her. The air beneath the porch was warm, but not hot from the fire and there were no traces of smoke or smudge from the blaze either. Cloella had been smart to place the baby here; the infant had survived unscathed.

The reality of what had occurred and that there was really a child in his arms did not hit Baltus until he was riding out of the Western Woods that evening. He’d seen four Colonial soldiers limping away in the distance, dragging their dead and wounded with them. When Baltus looked to his left to see what it was the small group was walking away from, he saw the immense twisted tree, the root system having pushed the massive tree up onto it’s own sort of mountain, the tree everyone said was a “Gateway to Hell.” At the tree’s base Baltus then noticed a great black horse laying dead a top a huge mound of earth. From the mound of earth a large sword with a serpent’s head at the hilt protruded. The Hessian’s grave; The Horseman was dead.

Baltus felt so drained, he couldn’t take anymore. So much had happened tonight, so much had been revealed. He looked down at the shivering baby his arms and suddenly felt nothing but pity for her. Her sweet and caring mother was dead and had lived the last few years of her life rejected by society and misunderstood. Her father, perhaps also misunderstood and rejected, was also dead. Baltus hugged the little girl closer to him and brushed her strawberry blond curls back under the woolen blanket around her face. The baby’s hair was lighter than her mother’s had been, but her features were Cloella’s. However those eyes, those piercing eyes that seemed lit with the brightest of fires, they must have been The Hessian’s. Baltus vowed then and there to raise the child as his own, and to never tell anyone but his wife of her parentage. And so he hadn’t.

But now, twenty years later, The Horseman rode again, once more holding the entire community of Sleepy Hollow in fear. Yet Katrina didn’t seem to feel that fear, and she’d always proudly worn the golden star pendent with a pearl in the center that Baltus had found folded into the woolen blanket she’d been wrapped in that night twenty years ago. Did Katrina somehow know? Had Cloella managed to reach out to her from the afterlife? Had The Horseman?

There was much speculation amongst the rampant fear for why The Horseman had returned from the grave to once again chop heads. Some said Satan now employed The Hessian as his mercenary and had sent him to collect souls. Others believed The Hessian had been stirred back to life by a deep feeling of rage and vengeance at his death. But most said The Horseman returned in search of a head to replace his own if he could not get his own head back. Baltus however had his own theory. The Hessian was buried at the foot of the “Gateway to Hell.” Cloella’s body rested a mile away at the ruins of her family’s home. Their daughter was alive and well and enjoying life as a Van Tassel. Some said that the only word the Hessian was ever known to speak was also his last word; just before his own sword severed his head, some claimed the name of the witch, “Cloella” was whispered between his pointed teeth. It wasn’t a head the Horseman came in search of every night. It was his heart.