Sleepy Hollow

Peter Lerangis is the author of the popular book series Watchers (www.morphz.com/watchers/) as well as two best-selling teen horror novels, The Yearbook and Driver's Dead, and many other books for young readers, including It Came from the Cafeteria and Attack of the Killer Potatoes. His new two-book series, Antarctica, will be published in fall 2000. He lives in New York City, due south of Sleepy Hollow, with his wife, Tina deVaron, and their two sons.

Prologue October 1799.Sleepy Hollow, New York.To the New York City Constabulary:Three murders. Need help. Respond immediately.B. Van Tassel It was the most recent of many messages. Each had been more desperate than the one before.Each, of course, had been completely ignored.No one in the police department had heard of Sleepy Hollow.Nor, presumably, had anyone else in the city.To a New Yorker, for all intents and purposes the world ended at Wall Street. One seldom ventured north into the farmlands and swamps of Manhattan Island, let alone over the river to the gentle acreage named for a family known as the Broncks.Sleepy Hollow, a two-day journey farther, might as well have been the moon.What some judged aloofness, New Yorkers called necessity. The city was growing too fast to control. Distant murders held little shock value in a place where death was a daily event. Where streets were littered with victims of passion and pettiness, of debts and grudges held too long. Where yellow fever wiped out thousands, poverty ran rampant, and social services consisted of sixteen constables and forty marshals, three jails, a workhouse, and a poorhouse.In New York, just as in Sleepy Hollow, a wily killer could pull off a perfect crime -- because in 1799 the dead did not tell secrets.If life was a raw and unforgiving public journey, death was a solemn mystery best handled by family and church. A victim who had no kin became a disposal problem for the state. The body was of no use. It held no clues.Unless one knew how to look for them. Copyright copy; 1999 by Paramount Pictures and Mandalay Pictures, LLC. All rights reserved. Chapter One He was dead. No doubt about that.His head bobbed on dark and brackish water, his hair floating among the debris like a weary, lost animal.A drowned river rat,Constable Ichabod Crane had thought at first.Perhaps he should have left it at that, but something about the object had stopped him: the languid movement, the suggestion of weight underneath the hair.Approaching the edge of the Hudson River, Ichabod Crane swallowed hard. At times such as these, he wished he didn't see so much.It was his nature, for better or worse. He carried himself with an edge of caution, a sharp and suspicious eye, and a healthy disrespect for normal police procedure. That made him, among his fellow New York City constables, either the most innovative or the most annoying man on earth.As Ichabod leaned over the pier, his lantern's fight revealed an outline below the surface of the river: a body -- male.With his free hand, he rang his alarm bell as hard as he could.Footsteps echoed from the cobbled streets behind him. "Where are you?" a voice rang out."Over here!" Ichabod shouted. Looking over his shoulder, he saw two familiar silhouettes emerge into the light of a streetlamp -- Constables Green and Witherspoon. "I need your help with this!"Ichabod set down his alarm bell and reached underwater, hooking his arm under the body's shoulders."Constable Crane -- Ichabod Crane?" came Green's wary voice. "Is that you?"The body was heavy, unbelievably heavy. Ichabod planted one foot firmly against a wood piling to keep from falling in. "None other," he grunted. "And not only me. I have found something."The body emerged from the murk. Straining against the weight, Ichabod dragged it onto the dock. Its face was a swollen caricature, a balloon image of a man. Its clothes strained against the bloat of a waterlogged torso. Ichabod forced himself to breathe deeply, to avoid an overpowering wave of nausea."I have found something which was lately a man," Ichabod told the other officers.Even in the darkness, Ichabod could see the faces of his two colleagues. Green murmured something about a wheelbarrow, and then they were gone.How did this