Page 1 of The Haunting of Paynes Hollow
One
The morning of my grandfather’s funeral, I open the last email he sent me, the one that’s been sitting in my inbox for six weeks. Sitting there unread, and even now, I don’t feel the slightest twinge of guilt about that.
I pop it open, read and—
Fuck.
The text is innocuous enough.
Dear Samantha,
I think you need to see this.
Douglas Payne (your grandfather)
Who the hell signs an email to their twenty-six-year-old granddaughter that way? The same guy who insisted on calling me Samantha when from birth I was Sam, named after a character in a book my mother loved. As for the “your grandfather” part, that was just him being passive-aggressive, because he’s a jerk.
Wasa jerk.
Damn it.
I sit up in bed and roll my shoulders, as if I can slough off the prickle of guilt. “Douglas Payne (your grandfather)” never deservedmy guilt. Never deserved my respect. Never even deserved my love. He’d wanted the respect, and he’d sure as hell wanted the guilt, but the love was immaterial. He did not give it, and he did not expect to receive it. As for the respect, he forfeited that when he cut my mother off without a cent after my father’s death.
My father’ssuicide,which is how Dad chose to deal with the fact that I’d caught him burying Austin Vandergriff.
I instinctively stanch the surge of rage. Then I pause, letting it wash away the irritating wisps of that misplaced guilt.
I cross my legs and pat the bed for my cat, Lucille. Then I remember Lucille is gone, put down last week because I couldn’t afford to treat her cancer. Grief washes over me, only to lift guilt back to the surface. The guilt of grieving over a cat but not my grandfather.
Well, one had been there for me, and one had not.
I wipe away tears and go to delete the email, only to remember why I’d cursed. Not because of the message, but because of the podcast link below.
My finger hovers over that link. Hey, maybe it’ll be so bad that I’ll have an excuse to skip the funeral.
I can’t do that. I’m going for my aunt. I owe Gail that and more. So much more.
I click the link, and as soon as I see the episode title, I exhale in a long hiss.
Paynes Hollow: The Bermuda Triangle of Upstate New York?
“The Bermuda Triangle isn’t a thing,” I mutter. “It had a normal amount of accidents for a high-traffic zone.”
I know that’s not the point, but I still seethe. At least the title tells me this will be nonsense. Thankfully, there’s a transcript, so I don’t need to listen to the episode.
Paynes Hollow is swathed in shadow when I visit. Massive maples and oaks cast the world into shade and shadow, the only sound the distant roar of Lake Ontario. It’s an emptyplace, desolate and overgrown, the wind howling through the trees, wisps of fog settling over the land. The kind of place where you feel as if you’ve stepped back in time, and the Headless Horseman will ride out at any moment.
I snort. “Wrong part of the state, dumbass.”
“Sleepy Hollow” was set in Tarrytown, just north of Yonkers, over a hundred miles from Paynes Hollow. While my grandfatherdidclaim that Washington Irving wrote his story after a visit to Paynes Hollow, that was just more of his bullshit.
Also, it’d be weird to have the wind howlingwhileit’s foggy, and the idea that Paynes Hollow is a desolate wasteland is ridiculous. I remember forests and beaches and a picture-perfect summer getaway spot, bustling with visitors.
I keep reading.
It’s not the Headless Horseman that resides in Paynes Hollow, though. It’s the Grim Reaper himself, riding across the land and slicing down the unwary. Yet the dead here don’t fall to the ground. They disappear.
For two hundred years, people have vanished around Paynes Hollow. Hikers. Boaters. Campers. Even local residents. Gone without a trace.
