Page 64 of The Haunting of Paynes Hollow

It’s a horse and rider but…

The horse is green, covered in lake weeds. Huge chunks of flesh have rotted away to the bone, and what remains is pitted, flaps of green skin and horse hair hanging in tatters, as if it’s decomposing. Like the monstrous Austin I dreamed the other night.

And there’s a rider. A rider with tattered clothing and rotted flesh and…

No head.

The rider has no head.

Of course he doesn’t,a voice screams in my head, giddy with maniacal laughter.Because he’s not real. He’s a figment of your imagination, mingling the headless horseman and the drowned dead.

Still, the flashlight beam wavers, my hands shaking, and the horse stops. It turns to look at me, and I see white bone and huge dark eyes. The rider turns too, and he lifts a rotting head by the hair and turns it to look back at me with glowing eyes. Then, even from this distance, I swear those eyes blink.

I turn and run.

I don’t think. I can’t form coherent thought. I run, heart jammed into my throat, blood pounding so hard I am sure I will never hear the horse when it overtakes me and drags me into the lake.

I am going to die. Die, just like—

“Sam?” a garbled voice says, somewhere beside me.

I don’t know how I hear that. I don’t even know how I decipher the word as my name. But, still unable to process thought, I react on instinct and stop.

I stand there, heart cycloning in my chest, sucking up air and thought, until I can do nothing but shake, looking around wildly.

The horseman is gone.

He’s not chasing me. He’s disappeared—

No, there he is… walking into the water.

He’s still where I saw him, but he’s turned toward the lake, and the horse is walking into it, the rider holding his head aloft, eyes glowing, like a macabre lantern lighting his path, as the horse sinks deeper and deeper, until both disappear.

“Sam?”

That garbled voice again, the one that stopped me.

I spin, trying to find it.

There, in the water. Out directly across from me.

Something is walking out of the water.

Someoneis walking out.

I back up slowly. I go to lift the flashlight, but instead, I lift my phone. My finger fumbles to hit the light, and I snap a picture instead, the flash illuminating—

Gail.

My aunt.

Walking out of the water.

“Oh God,” I say, and I run toward her. “Gail!”

She keeps coming, slowly, hunched as if dragged down by her drenched clothing. Her skin is so white it’s bluish gray. I keep running, trying to run, slogging through the cold lake water. She moves at the same pace, slow and relentless.

“Help,” she says, the word as garbled as my name, as if her lips are frozen from the water. I’m no more than ten feet from her when I stop dead, heart launching into my throat.