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Dante wrote that the ninth circle of hell was a lake of ice. So it was appropriate that Famine came to Sleepy Hollow in June of the fifth year, not with a drought but with a freak cold snap.
It began at the end of May, when Abbie's visions turned to lank skeletons and bloat-bellied children. The gruesome imagery had happened before, presaging the coming of the Horseman of Death and later the Horseman of Conflict. When three nights in a row saw her wake in cold sweats from nightmares of a starving horse, Ichabod began the next morning to go out and chop firewood into cords, to store up at the cabin. Jenny took the SUV to the Buy Plus and bought out half the canned goods section, adding to their existing stores. Abbie watched outside the window as the lake water churned into spray beneath a sharp spring wind and tried to ignore the growing lines beneath her eyes from lack of sleep.
For two weeks, they waited.
The sky remained overcast. Crows began to gather in the trees above the ridge, a swarming black mass of feathered bodies that greeted each morning with loud cries, harsh as metal scraping glass to Abbie's sleepless ears. Ichabod made her tea to soothe her nerves, his own historical recipe from herbs he'd hunted down in the woods. It tasted deep and faintly bitter, earthy.
Jenny spent the waiting time procuring necessities, stalwart and unemotional as an ancient town's battlements gearing up for siege. The cabin added a barrel of oil and a hurricane lamp to its stores, much to the pleasure of Ichabod, who recognized the design from his own time. Abbie trudged into the station each morning, pacified by Ichabod's tea, and spent her hours catching up on paperwork. Sleepy Hollow was strangely free of crime, as if even the criminal element could sense something coming and feared to disturb the tentative peace in which they found themselves tiptoeing. Above them all, the clouds remained roiling and dark, ominous and low and close.
*
Mid-way through June, the hammer fell. Abbie woke up late, because that morning all the crows were gone.
Outside the cabin by the lake, the water froze over in a single dawn and after that never thawed. Waves locked in their rises and eddies stilled in their swirls, the thick ice too rough for skating. Leaves in the brightest flush of summer shriveled. Crops died on the vine. Each day the ground added another layer of frost to the fragile grass, never melting, the clouds never admitting sunlight but waiting still to rain. As the cold continued, weather forecasts turned from rain to snow. The town hunkered down, fewer vehicles on the roads and no pedestrians lining sidewalks, everyone cowering beneath the threat of the unseasonable weather.
In the mornings, the ever-thicker frost showed the footsteps of animals outside the cabin's porch, the wildlife slowly growing bolder as the freezing temperatures robbed them of food. They snuck close to the sides of the house, gleaning what shreds of warmth slipped through its plaster-caulked walls. At night, Abbie could see their eyes outside the windows, glowing red and gold with the reflection of the light from inside. Chipmunks, squirrels, a marten. As one week of freezing cold stretched into two and then three, the chipmunks disappeared, replaced by tracks from a raccoon, then a wolf. Or perhaps it was a wild dog; Abbie never went outside after dark to get close enough to see it clearly. In the morning it was always gone, only footprints in the frost remaining as proof of its presence.
By day, Ichabod split logs and laid up firewood. He'd been doing it since Abbie's visions began, so they had more than enough already for the cabin. Jenny took the excess into town and sold it to buy food that wasn't canned. Produce had quintupled in price, since everything that reached Sleepy Hollow had to be shipped in out of season. She returned with a few apples, potatoes, carrots. Enough for a stew, with cinnamon baked apples for dessert. The windows to the night outside fogged over, sealing their small trio in and obscuring the glowing eyes outside, the threats waiting in the dark.
*
On the first day of September, the pendulous sky finally broke open and the snow came – thick, impenetrable, and constant. For five days it fell in wild abandon, swirling and dancing with the wind off the lake, blizzarding past the cabin windows and leaving strange designs in crystals on the glass. Jenny tied a string to the doorknob and pressed it into Ichabod's hand as he went out for firewood so that, arms full, he could reliably find his way back.
Within a day, the driveway to the main road was impassable. Abbie's radio informed them that the salt trucks couldn't get out to clear a path through the blizzard. Sleepy Hollow was advised to wait.
That night Ichabod tugged some of the larger tree branches he'd found inside, and they practiced carving together. Ichabod proved adept at children's toys and Abbie learned quickly, but Jenny discovered she had too many years and too much training at using a knife to kill to enjoy the process. Instead she shaved the bark off limbs to prepare the wood and then spent her time twisting hemp string into ropes. The bark and the growing pile of shavings that collected around their chairs went onto the fire as kindling. Days passed with no respite from the snow. A small collection of carved figures took up residence on the windowsill: miniatures of a roughly shaped doll, a raven, an old-style lantern.
The wolf or wild dog who visited at night grew ever bolder as the snow piled up, curling with his back to the heated stones of the chimney, his teeth flashing bone white through the window at any who dared peer out at him. The fire burned continuously now, the space around the chimney the only place where the snow didn't collect, a small circle of damp warmth kept clear by the fire burning on the other side of the stones. In the mornings when Abbie swept the snow away from the porch and door, a lumbering track plowed through the fresh snowfall, about belly high for a large dog or a wolf, marking where the animal trekked in to sleep against the warm stones then stalked out again before morning.
Jenny put them on two meals a day to ration the food.
*
With two days left until October, the first pause in the storm found Abbie and Jenny outside with shovels, clearing a path to the woodpile and a space for the door to swing freely. They discovered deep drifts, blown up by the mirror-shard wind off the lake until they reached roof-high against the east side of the house. They discovered the body of a squirrel, thin and frozen to death at the bottom of the woodpile. Abbie scooped it onto the rusted edge of her shovel and carried it over to beside the chimney in the small circle of clear ground there, reasoning that the wild dog might want the meat still. The next day dawned still snow-free, and the little body was gone.
October passed in boredom and increasing claustrophobia, the smoke from their cabin the only thing stirring the grey sky for miles. The birds had long ago flown south. Each day the weight of the low grey ceiling on the world grew more oppressive. The sun hadn't been seen for months. The silence of the snow's dance across the lake grew thicker, ever encroaching, floating swirls of ice eddying into curls and mounded to dunes by the inexorable fancies of the wind. None of them spoke the words, but the thought grew in the little cabin like a seed between them all. It colored even the casual way their hands brushed acknowledgment as Ichabod exhausted the last of his herbal tea: something was coming. Surely something was coming. An eternity of such frozen waste was unthinkable. They'd go mad. Perhaps they were already going mad.
November found them eating one meal a day.
*
The storm peaked for good on the night of December 22nd, howling unrelenting gasps across the lake, cracking the forest trees with ice and the weight of snow, snapping teeth down the chimney. It sounded like a chorus from hell, and the three of them huddled beneath a blanket on Jenny's bed, not daring sleep. Abbie twisted one of Jenny's hemp ropes between her fingers in tightening patterns. Ichabod murmured prayers in barely-audible Latin.
The noise settled in the hour before dawn, which broke over the horizon like a breath held too long in burning lungs. On the morning before Christmas eve, the sky dawned clear – not grey or pink or pale blue, but almost white from the radiance of the snow. Abbie didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Jenny did both for her when she looked at the calendar and noticed the notation for Midwinter on the day before.
“Midwinter. Shortest day of the year. They're vulnerable to sunlight, Abbie, and this started in June when the sun started waning. Today's the day when the light starts growing again.”
*
Famine rode in on a black horse, stark against the unrelieved pallor of the snow upon the lake, bleak and final when Abbie stepped out to sweep back from the porch.
“Crane,” she called back into the cabin's interior, not taking her eyes off the spectre approaching in the distance. Her voice disappeared into the hungry stillness of thin and frozen air, but sounds from within indicated that Ichabod was stirring and heard the warning she'd intended.
Famine wore a heavy cloak, tattered enough to show holes even from afar. It swept about whatever body the horseman may have had, twisting in impossible ways. Sometimes the folds collapsed and the holes aligned so that she could see through to the shoreline of the lake on the other side, and it looked for mind-bending milliseconds as though the cloak contained no body at all. His mount was skeletal, the horse that she had dreamed long months ago, drooping flesh clinging weakly to thick bones. The protruding joints at hip and shoulder, outlined by the utter lack of muscle on the beast, creaked and swayed in the air as it moved, like the stumps of macabre wings beating in time to its terrible gait.
“At least now that it has shown itself, there will be no more of prolonging of this awful interlude,” Ichabod said as he ducked out through the doorway, passing over her service revolver as he came. The gun likely wouldn't do any good, as they'd learned when she'd tried to use it to stop the Horseman of Conflict a year earlier, but it felt good in her hands. Thick, steady. Even as the cold and lack of food depleted their bodies and tested their wills, famine could not touch their ammunition stores.
Ichabod himself held the sawed off shotgun that Sheriff Corbin had favored for property protection and running off pests. Seeing Crane with it brought a different sort of pang for Abbie, memories of Corbin taking her to the range and showing her how to use it, how to recock it one handed with a swing and a twist of wrist. She remembered standing with Ichabod, teaching him the same things at the same range. The past layered over itself, leaf upon frozen leaf, Crane and Corbin and teaching and violence and safety. Jenny had fired the gun with a manic smile on her face, holding off a group of Hessians long enough for Abbie and Ichabod to trick Conflict into a devil's trap and send him back to hell. The detritus of her past piled up like leaves, compressed and ground down beneath the snow.
Famine slowed to a walk across the lake. The bones of his haggard horse croaked like the groaning of tree branches frozen through and swaying in a gale.
Above them, the chimney belched up a stream of black smoke. Jenny had awakened, then. She'd have the M16 already, probably sneaking around the side of the cabin in case the element of surprise could give them an advantage. There were claymores buried in the surrounding woods for added firepower, but the mines would be muted through the thick snow, and wouldn't work at all if the danger came in from the shoreline. An oversight, obvious now.
The horse stopped about ten meters from shore. Even the wind stilled, no sound at all in the air or the trees. The world waited, trembling with how absolutely pure the cold suddenly seemed.
The sun broke over the black line of trees on the horizon. In a gust of wind that didn't stir a single hair around her face, the Horseman disappeared into a swirl of snow that wafted up, drifted outwards, dissipated. Neither Abbie nor Ichabod moved. Into the slowly breaking day, a dog howled from the woods behind them.
“He'll return,” Ichabod said.
“Yeah.” Abbie looked down reflexively to check that the safety was on her service weapon and that she'd unchambered the round. “But we survived this round.” Jenny appeared around the edge of the cabin, shouldering her gun. “Let's break out the last of the Swiss Miss mix to celebrate.”
She could see her breath in the air and her tears would start to freeze along her lashes soon, but the sun felt warm upon her face.
*