Haunted Legends (3 page)

Enclosed in glass, hung on the wall, was a pair of wooden Dutch doors. There was a plaque saying they were from the original roadhouse that had been torn down and replaced by this building. The doors, hundreds of years old, looked small and dingy. They had been displayed far more prominently when this was still the Knickerbocker Holiday Tavern.

“When the new owners bought the place,” she said, “they had to promise to preserve certain historical aspects.” Then she threw in, “You know, Jay thinks Brom Bones and his gang of night riders used to come down to the old roadhouse to raise real hell.”

Shaking my head at Jay’s obsession, I left her and went on to the restroom, which was modern standard issue, well lighted and with forced air to dry your hands. The old one had featured oaken stalls that could have accommodated carriage horses, and urinals so tall and deep a man could fall in and never be found.

I took a whole painkiller and chewed it for faster action. When I came out the door, I saw, on the wall just outside the kitchen, a picture that had hung behind the bar in the Knickerbocker Holiday. I’d spent lots of time studying it when I was supposed to be at work.

It showed the old inn, circa 1790 to judge from the clothes. It was a two-story building with an attic and weather vanes. A coach had pulled up in front. The coachman flirted with the maid as birds flew about in the trees, dogs lazed in the sun, the passengers filed through the Dutch doors, and fresh horses were led from the stables in back. A country church, a few
scattered houses, a store, and a blacksmith’s constituted a village just off Broadway, some miles north of the tiny city at the tip of Manhattan.

Staring at it, I noticed again that in the midst of all that summer light, the two center second-floor windows in the inn were both pitch dark.

“We used to sit here and wonder what lay behind those windows,” Major Barbara spoke in my ear so suddenly that I jumped. “We conjectured about exotic Dutch voodoo. I remember you told me about a dream or hallucination you had about the place. Do you recall it?”

“I hadn’t thought of it for a long while but it came back to me the other day when you called. In the dream I was standing outside the Knickerbocker but what I was looking at was the two-story structure from this picture. It was dark. The only light was one flickering over the door of the tavern.

“Then in the distance another light was swinging in the dark. Three toots of a horn and a night coach came rolling down Broadway. Right then a pair of lights suddenly went on in the two windows at the inn that are dark in the painting. For some reason that seemed so sinister it scared me.”

A couple of details had slipped my mind but I remembered the fear.

“The old Knickerbocker was so odd, there was no problem believing that whatever was here before it was stranger still,” she said. “Not like now.” She gestured at the lights and flickering TV screens, a flight of wide stairs that hadn’t been there in the old days. “They gutted the whole building.”

We started back to the table. “They let me go upstairs in the old Knickerbocker Holiday, you know,” Major Barbara told me. “They were doing repairs years ago, after you’d left the Flying Dutchman, long before this renovation. It was three stories of storage attic, basically: an amazing pile of brass spittoons, a canopied bed all chewed by rats. And one disturbing item . . .”

She trailed off. I raised my eyebrow in question.

“A large oil painting of a man in eighteenth-century Dutch burgher clothes,” she whispered. “He looked exactly like Bud Van Brunt. And his expression in the picture was demonic, more twisted than the Dutchman at his worst.”

I laughed and said, “Oh, please!” The Major looked very disappointed in me.

When we got back to the table, Dawn Boothby told us, “This has become a group therapy session.”

Doug Lotts said, “I remember the day he insulted my copywriting, my manhood, and my taste in socks. Then, of course, he fired me. Except that time I really left and didn’t go back.” We all applauded

Little Mimsey Friedman downed a colorful drink. “I’d quit a perfectly great job in the promotions department at Lord and Taylor to get married. Then my first husband lost his job and never found another one, ever. To support us both I had to go looking for work. And there was
nothing
! Except, of course, for Van Brunt. A day he didn’t drive me to tears was a day he considered wasted.”

Everyone nodded and drank to that. Aside from Mimsey’s favored position, she also knew more about fashion writing than anybody, including him. Flying Dutchman Promotions provided a weekly column, “Cut on a Bias,” with fashion commentary, mild gossip, and plugs for clothes the stores were pushing.

Client stores could publish the column whole or in part in their local newspapers as advertising. Mimsey wrote that copy for a few years and used that experience as the basis for her very successful fashion career. She still does TV commentary for the spring fashion shows.

All eyes turned to me as I sipped seltzer water. “I was the hippie/faggot/junkie,” I said, feeling loose and stoned. “No office was complete without one in those days.” A couple of people chuckled. “Work for me was a constant round of abuse from Van Brunt. The thing that kept me coming back day after day until he finally fired me was that compared to what was happening down in the East Village where I lived, Flying Dutchman Promotions seemed calm and orderly.”

Said the Major, “You would have been the very life and soul of the party if the Flying Dutchman had been a party. Myself, I needed money. Even compared to London, New York was expensive and I was working as a lowly editorial assistant. I thought everyone who worked in advertising made tons of money. Van Brunt hired me, he said, because he loved my accent and ridiculed me every day I worked there because of it. After a couple of years with him, I sold a very silly murder mystery to a publisher, walked into the office, and quit.”

We went around the table and the rest added their personal stories. The Sunday-evening crowd, such as it was, had thinned out. Customers were sparse up front. The bartender and the server looked bored.

As I got up and stepped away from the table, I had the last of the pills in my hand. I wandered toward the rear, chewing it, sipping my flat soda water.

The velvet cord that would have blocked access to the upper floors hung on a hook. I went up the stairs quickly, not really thinking about what I was doing. The second floor was dimly lit but I could see a perfectly ordinary banquet/reception room. The Major was right about the building having been gutted. They must have raised the ceiling, probably taken most of the third story to do that.

The windows that would have overlooked the uninspiring streetscape were covered over. On all four walls were murals of vaguely “ye olde New York” themes: paintings of carriages and town houses, sailing ships in the harbor, all against the background of a city where church steeples still dominated the landscape. No old oils of the Dutchman were on view, however.

Then I heard a noise and looked around. A door I hadn’t noticed swung open. A figure, big and bald, was backing through it: I saw Van Brunt and froze.

But that only lasted until the guy turned and was revealed as olive-skinned, possibly Latino, possibly Middle Eastern. He was burly, maybe thirty, with a shaved head and a cardboard box under one arm. He may have been the manager or maybe one of the owners.

He locked the door behind him—no doubt they used what remained of the upper floors as storage—and then saw me. “Hey, guy,” the accent was hard to place. “We’re closed up here.”

Keeping the slight smile and careful distance of someone used to herding drunks, he gestured for me to precede him down the stairs. “Plenty of room here,” he said as he walked past our table.

The Major caught all that, guessed where I’d been, and gave a satisfied little nod.

Jay Glass, waving a scotch and soda for emphasis, was saying, “I think Van Brunt had a curse handed down from Brom Bones, maybe earlier. But to him it wasn’t a curse. He reveled in being as complete and utter a monster as possible. Where the ancestor won Katrina Van Tassel by evoking the Headless Horseman, he did the same with anybody who crossed his path.”

The Major said, “We think of ghosts as coming from the past but maybe they exist altogether apart from Time.”

The others nodded with sage, drunken understanding and I saw that the group session had gone to another place.

Mimsey Friedman spoke up. “I saw Van Brunt, maybe ten years ago.” I was about to say he would have been dead for some years. Then I looked at everyone’s intent expressions and shut up.

“My marriage to Joachim had finally crashed and burned,” she said, and I remembered hearing she had broken up with a European designer about then. “Boris and John were wonderful to me. They have a lovely little farm on the Hudson near the Mohawk Valley and I stayed there a lot that summer.

“It’s not a working farm of course, but they have gardens and a small herd of sheep, gray ones with lovely black faces—quite decorative—that graze in the fields. They had geese in a pond and an old retired New York City Police horse named Crispin, the gentlest animal in the world. He’d nuzzle you until you yielded up the sugar lumps he knew you had.

“They had a local man who came by and took care of the animals. I never much noticed him—he was quite anonymous. Then, at the end of the summer, he had to be away and he got someone to take his place. I remember it was a hazy August afternoon. There was thunder up in the mountains but no lightning or rain.

“I saw a figure walking across the pasture toward Crispin and something about him was so familiar. He noticed me at the same time, paused, and turned to look my way. It was Bud Van Brunt and he stared at me for a long moment like he knew who I was and wanted me to know he was there.

“I packed and left that day. Boris and John eventually persuaded me to come back and I never saw that man again. But it wasn’t the same. Even Crispin seemed jumpy after that.”

Everyone was silent, seemingly chilled. But I thought I knew what was afoot and smiled.

“I wonder,” said the Major, “what Eddie Ackers saw the night he staggered in here to die.” She was going to add more but at that moment, Benicia the server came over to the table and said, “Folks, I’m afraid we’re closing a little early.”

That broke the spell. Quite quickly for people in very late middle age who were all more than a bit smashed, we figured out the bill and got ourselves together to depart. It was a little past midnight but we were about the only customers.

Sunday nights are the one time Manhattan really does seem quiet and almost deserted. We said our farewells out front. Dawn and Doug both lived in New Jersey and hurried off to the Herald Square Path station assuring us that they’d be in touch.

Jay Glass and Mimsey shared a cab to the Upper East Side. They both seemed troubled—part of the act, I thought.

The Major and I lived downtown and we were going to walk. “What if the idea that Brom Bones scared Ichabod Crane with a carved and lighted pumpkin head was a scam?” she asked as we crossed the street. “What if he actually summoned the Headless Horseman?”

And I replied, “Nice performance from Mimsey. She, you, and I’m guessing Jay had fun running that return of Van Brunt scam on the rest of us. It reminds me of the old days.”

She paused on the curb and looked down at me. “Back in the old days your sense of the uncanny was more acute. You had no trouble recognizing that there was evil in Bud Van Brunt. You’ll have to take my word for it, but outside of a couple of hints I got from her at Eddie’s funeral, I didn’t hear Mimsey talk about this until tonight. Jay did once tell me he’s convinced some great misdeed or evil occurred on the spot back in Colonial times. But he’s obsessed with this subject.”

I was amused.

“In fact,” she said, “I wanted you here tonight because you were the one I worried about. I remembered how disturbed you were forty years ago about Van Brunt—we’d call it sexual harassment today. I remembered your dream of the night coach and the light in the windows. I thought maybe Van Brunt had his hooks into you as he did with Ackers.”

To clear my head of this nonsense, I turned to look back at KNICKS in all its renovated tackiness. What I saw was a roadhouse in a country village. The only lights came from the stars, the waning half moon, and a pair of candles flickering in the middle windows of the inn.

In the moment that I stared, the lanterns on the night coach swung into sight. A couple of details of my old dream that I’d forgotten came back: the pumpkin-headed coachman in his box, the face of Van Brunt staring at me out the coach window.

“Instead,” Major Barbara said, watching the way my jaw dropped, “it’s Mimsey we have to worry about. That poor kid was desperate to support
herself and that worthless first husband and Van Brunt got a bit of her soul. And from the way he’s behaving, I’m afraid Jay Glass is another one Van Brunt seduced.”

“Always at the center of things,” I said, and felt the October chill and was no longer stoned. “But not us,” I said.

“No. We’re minor characters.”

“Like Doug and Dawn.”

“Yes,” she said, “we lucky bystanders.”

Afterword