"Though he had seen many specters and been more than once beset by Satan, he would have passed a pleasant life in spite of the devil and all his works if his path had not crossed a being that causes more perplexity than ghosts, goblins, and the whole race of witches: a woman."
-Washington Irving, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"
***
By the time Adrian thought better of the whole thing it was too late to turn back. It was October, and the moon was full, and on a dare he'd agreed to walk to the harvest party by the old forest trail past the cemetery, which is to say, the haunted road.
At the time it had seemed important to prove that he could do it. After all, he was a man now (in his own estimation, at least). Old enough to be married, in fact, and hadn't that been the very reason he wanted to be at the harvest party to begin with? Because Abigael Williams would be there?
And Connor Blithe had accused him of being a coward right in front of her, so Adrian couldn't let that go unanswered. Abigael would want no coward for a husband.
But that was then. Now Adrian leaned against a fir tree, watched the white moon creep through the branches, listened to the call of the whippoorwills, and realized he might be the stupidest man in Virginia.
Dead leaves crackled under his boots. He wrapped the blue wool scarf that his mother had made for him tighter around his neck. If only he took after his mother's side of the family these things wouldn't happen to him. But he was his father's son, and he couldn't help being a Burns.
Burns: A name for fools and madmen, his mother had always said. And when Father objected that it was a good Ulster name, Mother reminded him that if Ulster was so good they'd never have left that was always the end of the conversation.
Though he never said so while his father was around, Adrian was of the opinion that his mother was right, because what had their branch of the Burns line ever been remembered for except running off half-cocked and meeting a bad end?
From Ulster to Galloway to Virginia, the Burns family curse always caught up sooner or later. Five years ago, for example, Adrian's father chased after a bear armed only with what he realized too late was an unloaded rifle.
It might have been a fairly respectable way to go by Burns standards, but rather than let the bear kill him he'd insisted on climbing a tree and trusted the wrong branch, and fell headfirst into a pond that turned out, after all, to be less than a foot deep.
Family legend has it that in the old days you always buried a Burns man on the spot he died, so the rest of the hunting party spent some time debating whether to drag him out or leave him in. Both options presented some merit.
Adrian cleared the thorny brambles from the path with a stick as he moved along. A persistent owl seemed to be following him, for he was sure he heard the same plaintive cry now that he had half a mile back. It was probably a bad omen, but he was still glad for the company.
It was late October, not quite yet All Hallow's but close enough that the woods would be thick with spirits. Connor had told Adrian he'd seen a genuine Black Shuck in these woods last October, and that the ghostly hound had left footprints that glowed like hot coals and smelled of sulfur.
Adrian hadn't believed him. The Shuck was a story from the Old Country, so what would it be doing all the way out here?
But Shawnee Bill once told Adrian about the winter his uncle became possessed by a spirit they called the wendigo, and had taken to the eating of human flesh, and had run off like a mad animal into these very woods and supposedly he lurked in them to this very day. That was an American story, so Adrian put more stock in it.
All the stories he'd ever heard from the grandmothers and grandfathers in the village came back to him now:
How a headless man loitered near the crossroads begging for alms, and how if you didn't give him a coin he'll chase you with his long legs that never tire, until you're lucky enough to pass by a churchyard, at which point he'll vanish in flames.
How Archibald Bale once shot at a coyote that turned out to be a witch in disguise, and how she'd come howling and scrabbling at his door every night since until he shot himself with the very same rifle.
How Leta Howl vanished ten years ago and then appeared to her mother in the middle of the night to tell that she'd fallen down an old well and broken her neck, and turned her head all the way around to prove it, and the village men did in fact find her bones down the well when they went looking.
And hadn't Adrian's own mother, always so practical and never one to truck with idle foolishness, always hung a horseshoe over each window and laid a broomstick over the threshold to keep the spirits out? And looked askance at any candle that burned brighter for no reason? These woods were thick with spooks; every Virginia man knew that.
Adrian wondered what that sound was, and realized that his teeth were chattering. He made them stop. He decided he would whistle to pass the time, but it suddenly didn't seem like a good idea to make so much noise.
Instead he thought about Abigael. It would be less than an hour before he reached the Williams' now. Was she waiting for him? Was she even, perhaps, worried about him? Would she run to the door to greet him, and look amazed when he commented that a brisk night walk had done him good?
And now Miss Williams, have you saved me a dance? I really think it's time you and I—
Adrian almost walked into the fencepost. It was all that was left of a fence that once surrounded the old graveyard.
Though it was dark, Adrian could just make out the markers, as crooked in the ground as that post, leaning this way and that. Nothing, it seemed, could stand up straight in this place.
Many of the graves were unmarked, just heaps of earth increasingly hard to distinguish as the shrubs and weeds crept in.
Most of these, he knew, were those who had died in the first winter here, the Williamses and Brightlies and Campbells from the Old Country. There were a few Burnses here too, of course.
They said that the spirits of the children who died that winter sometimes cried I their graves, and that the ghosts of their poor mothers, dressed all in black, walked the old graves, watering the ground with tears, and from them grew the little white bleeding flowers the place was known for.
Adrian was not sure if he believed the story, but just a year ago the Hutchinson widow tried to move into one of the abandoned cottages at the graveyard's edge and came back after a week because she said she couldn't stand the sounds of the sobbing and the screaming at all hours. In fact, Adrian could see her cottage from here...
He shook his head to snap himself out of it. There were no ghosts in the graveyard tonight, as far as he could see. He'd collect his bounty and be gone, then. He was supposed to pick some of the flowers here, to prove that he'd made the journey.
Forcing his feet to move, Adrian passed the crooked fencepost and tramped between the overgrown plots. He remembered that white lights called ghost candles are supposed to appear above the graves. He walked a little faster. The familiar owl called out again. It had become a comforting noise by this time.
There, in the grass, near a grave with a rare stone marker, a patch of the white flowers bobbed in the night breeze. Bloodwort, they were called; an ugly name for such a pretty thing, though Adrian knew it was because the juice in the stem was red as blood.
It was too cold and too late in the season for such blossoms, but here they were anyway, as they always were. Adrian's fingers stopped a few inches from the flowers and he glanced at the headstone. He couldn't make out the name on it.
Was it right to take flowers off of a grave, even if they'd only grown here by themselves? He'd come all this way, and without them he'd have no way of proving it...
And then he heard it: a low, plaintive cry drifting on the wind.
He'd mistaken it for an owl's shriek before, but now there was no taking it for anything but a woman's sobbing voice. And a moment later Adrian realized the truth: It wasn't a natural woman at all!
He jumped up, whirled around, backed away and almost tripped. His heart sped up and blood pounded in his ears. Then he turned, he ran, he stumbled and fell and stood and ran again. Let Connor or Abigael or anyone else call him a coward if they wanted to. Some things were simply not worth being brave about.
He ran to the widow's cottage. The door stuck, but one firm push opened it, and he slammed it behind him. He looked around for a stray horseshoe or broomstick the widow may have left behind, but there was nothing but an old bed.
The keening cry came from outside again, and Adrian reflected that running into his father's bear actually didn't seem so bad right now. For that matter, he'd take the Black Shuck, the wendigo, the headless man, and any number of graveyard spooks all at the same time.
Anything but the banshee.
He'd heard the stories all his life. Some said she was a ghost, and others a wicked kind of fairy woman, and some said she was another sort of thing altogether, called bane sidhe, baboan sith, caointeach, the Washer of Shrouds, the Woman of the Tombs, the White Lady of the Highlands.
All stories agreed on two points, first being that to hear her cry was the worst of all omens, and second that she had a predilection for certain families. And she'd set her eye on the Burns clan a long time ago.
There was some dispute about whether she'd had a hand in Adrian's father's death, for some said it was an ordinary bear who chased him to his death, while others contend that the animal had made cries no natural bear would.
