The Secret Journal of Ichabod Crane: Ichabod's First Entry

[October 4]
One scarcely knows where to start. To commit the facts to writ-

ing—if facts indeed they are, and not the last failing sparks of a
soul being freed from its mortal confines—is to begin to believe
them. Dare I?
I must.
I am Ichabod Crane, born in the year 1749 in the city of Lon-
don in England. I came to the New World in 1770 and followed
the dictates of my conscience to the side of the colonial rebels in
1771.
It seems this is the year 2013 Anno Domini, and I have been
given new life—how, I know not; why, I know not. I am in a cell,
lit harshly by lamps that appear to be hidden behind glass panels
set in the ceiling. The table is made of an unusual stonelike sub-
stance; so too the chair. There is little wood in evidence and some
of the furniture appears to have steel legs. What people are these,
who can spare steel for the legs of chairs?
They believe me a murderer and are not reticent with their ac-
cusations. Yet they have treated me humanely, in marked contrast
to the few interrogations I experienced at the hands of the British
over the past year—or the past two hundred thirty-two years?
Surely it is still 1781 and this is a dream? Or I have died, and the
afterlife is far different than any man might have supposed . . .
cold, as if all the natural odors and moistures of the air have been
removed. Like the air a machine might breathe.
It has been some hours how. The sounds of the language here
are quite strange. Vowels are flat, phrasings staccato and very fast.
This is not the language of angels. Therefore I live—unless this be
the infernal realms! Surely not. My life has had a full complement
of ordinary sins, but I have endeavored always to do what was
© 2014 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.

right. Also, I cannot credit the idea that hell itself would be so cold
and impersonal.
Well, I am no revenant. Rather than the scent of decay, my
nostrils are full of some damnable perfume worn by one of the
constabulary. Frightful. All that remains is to believe I am alive.
Alive again! Yet how?
I am accused of horrific crimes, and I have refused to admit
anything. The men I have killed knew the side they had chosen. I
appealed to these authorities to contact General Washington, and
they responded with astonishment, some with open ridicule. They
even dared question my name—as if they had never heard of a
man named Ichabod!
Gather your head, Crane. You have been in unusual circum-
stances before, and you survived by keeping your wits . . .
I will discern the truth—if, that is, I can keep my head.
At least they have permitted me to write, though if they take this

journal from me it will do nothing to alter their belief that I am in-
sane. Yet I will hold nothing back. I have always used my journals
to collect private thoughts that have yet to take their full shape;
reminiscences, drawings, and documents that may prove useful
later; and any other bits of flotsam that wish to escape my mind
onto their pages.
The act of writing, through its peculiar alchemy whereby the
fruits of the mind are transformed into symbols intelligible to all
literate minds—this is the greatest magic, perhaps. It is without
doubt the greatest tonic for the sanity of a man such as myself, dis-
placed two centuries and given the dark gift of life after death. I
am a revenant in a time not my own, and also it seems a soldier in
a war of whose many fronts I had no inkling—before today.
•8•
I have told my story to the constabulary but will set it down
again here, because during the course of my interrogation I
learned as much from their questions as they did from my answers,
or more. The Hessian mercenary I struck down in 1781 lives
again. It can be no coincidence that I was returned to my senses
at the same time. I shot him from his horse scant miles from where
I now sit, the ball clearly striking him in the breast—but he rose
again and dealt me a mortal wound with his axe. With the last of
my strength I returned his blow, separating his masked and tat-
tooed head from his shoulders. After that, I remember very little.
At triage my wife’s face—oh, Katrina, what became of you in the
years after my passing?—was the last I saw until I emerged from
my sleep in a riverside cave.
The supernatural life given the Hessian surely explains why
General Washington ordered me to seek and kill any man with
the figure of a bow tattooed or scarified on his hand. That symbol
bears investigating, if I am ever to be permitted my freedom.
They have a machine that can distinguish truth from lies by
means of electrical signals transmitted along the skin. What
would Benjamin Franklin have made of this odd descendant of the
key dangling from his kite string? For that matter, of the electrical
light that shines in every room of every building, and from fixtures
within the horseless carriages they call cars?
Despite the machine’s support of my tale, they have deter-
mined me fit for the asylum. One hopes the masters of that Bed-
lam will forbid cloying perfumes. Regardless, I hope to be able to
keep this journal there. Already it has proven a great comfort.
There is another, more practical and pessimistic reason to re-
cord my experience. If I do not survive my battle with the Hessian,
others will step into my place. For those successors (though I hope
they succeed me none too soon!) I write this journal, that it may
•9•
assist them in navigating the thickets of superstition, spycraft, and
malevolence—and the Infinite alone knows what else—that op-
pose us. My role in the colonies’ rebellion taught me that the most
important actions of a war take place on unnamed battlefields.
This may be one of those, and I may die on it; but if I must die, I
would not have all I know perish with the extinguishing of those
final sparks of my brain.
I am afraid, and unashamed of my fear. Only the fool shows no
fear when he fights for his life against an opponent such as the one
we face, and only a fool is unafraid when thrust into a situation ut-
terly foreign, alone.
This is truly a fantastical future into which I have emerged. Chat-

tel slavery is a thing of the past, and distant enough in fact that
Abigail Mills, a black (or African-American, as I have learned
is another nomenclature of this era) sheriff’s deputy, treated my
disbelief as a joke. Perhaps this is part and parcel of her belief that
I am mad, or perhaps she humors me in an effort to draw from me
an admission of guilt in the decapitation of her sheriff. This mix-
ing of races and peoples is evidently taken for granted in the—to
write these words!—United States of America.
I must correct myself. She is no deputy, but a lieutenant in
what appears to be a much better organized constabulary than any
known in the colonies during my time. When I learned this, and
addressed her by her rank, she laughed; apparently these Ameri-
cans pronounce the word “loo-tenant.” A practical people. After
all, why should the English language be beholden to bygone relics
of French origin? Yet I must confess I still prefer “lef-tenant.”
Whatever their pronunciation, how far they have come, that
African-Americans occupy executive authority without remark.
• 10 •
All men are created equal, Jefferson wrote—this America strives
to live that ideal. Doubtless it falls short, as do all human actions
when compared against ideal goals. However, when I consider the
oppression I witnessed during my time in the colonies, I cannot
help but feel pride that I contributed—in whatever slight fash-
ion—to the liberation of the colonies, which over time led to the
liberation of the slaves. And Abigail’s friend and colleague Brooks
bears the traces of yet another history: that of the Asian peoples
finding their way to these shores. Of that I know little, but hope to
investigate more thoroughly.
I feel foolish now for congratulating Abigail on her emancipa-
tion. Whether I will work up the nerve to confess my foolishness,
now . . . that is another matter entirely.
Regardless, Abigail is a young woman of considerable forti-
tude, whatever her pigmentation. She also possesses a quick wit.
“You keep running your fingers over that tabletop like you’re try-
ing to pet it,” she remarked. “Never seen a table before?” I could
not but laugh, for I had indeed been doing exactly that, seeking to
discern by touch of what substance the table might be composed. A
pet table! But soon enough we returned to the drier topics of my
interrogation.
She does not believe me, not yet, but she is of a most pragmatic
cast of mind. If I can contribute to her pursuit of a criminal—a
figure whom she considers a criminal but I know to be something
much worse—she will hear me out. It must be even more difficult
for her. She clings to the rational, to her belief in only the prov-
able world of the senses. This, I believe, is why she intends to enter
an advanced program of education in what they call “profiling.” I
gather it is a systematized means of using the evidence of a crime
to deduce specifics about the unknown criminal, and thereby
speed his capture.
• 11 •
But only a woman fleeing from the inexplicable would seize so
desperately on the tangible to the exclusion of all else. There is more
to the young lieutenant than she has yet spoken of, or I discerned.
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name

that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.
And power was given unto them over the fourth part of
the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with
death, and with the beasts of the earth.
The eighth verse of the sixth chapter of the Revelation of Saint

John the Divine. This verse will not leave my mind. It was marked
in the Bible that lay on my breast while I was in my sleep, a most
precious book that once belonged to George Washington. I have
no memory of how it came to be in my possession, although I knew
General Washington well and suspect one of our allies in the war
against evil must have placed it there during my slumber. The
general and I met frequently throughout the years of the rebellion,
and I told Lieutenant Mills of one such meeting. Since she already
believes me to be a lunatic murderer, no further harm was pos-
sible, I judged, from explaining to her that General Washington
himself gave me the Bible, and told me that the American war for
independence was something much greater than the struggle of
restive colonies yearning for self-determination. No, it was a war
between the forces of light and dark—a framing I understood to
be metaphorical. That war may have taken a hiatus since the Hes-
sian and I fell together in battle in 1781, but it is now brewing once
more—and hurtling toward a conclusion upon which much more
than the fate of one nation depends.
• 12 •
• 13 •

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[October 4]

One scarcely knows where to start. To commit the facts to writ-

© 2014 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.

At least they have permitted me to write, though if they take this

This is truly a fantastical future into which I have emerged. Chat-

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name

The eighth verse of the sixth chapter of the Revelation of Saint

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