The Headless Horseman keeps a steady pace down the country road, carries a lantern, and stops for nobody. He stands six feet in the saddle and sits so stiffly that from a distance he looks like a wedge balanced on a barrel. His greatcoat is charcoal, spattered with road mud to the hip, and the collar stands high enough to hide the place where a neck should be. Above it there is no head, only a column of cold orange mist that trails behind him like chimney smoke on a windless night. A frayed crimson scarf is knotted at the collar, for no reason anyone has worked out.
The right hand is the thing to watch. The glove is brown leather and too large for the wrist, and it holds a jack-o'-lantern by the stem, carved with square teeth in a patient grin. When he meets someone on the bridge at Glenkettle he lifts it a little to one side, the way a man nods to a neighbor, and rides on. He eats nothing. He does take oats. From the first frost until the last pumpkin is off the vine, households along the orchard road past Marshplow set a scoop of oats in the horse trough at dusk and leave the lid off. By morning the trough is empty and the boards are wet, and nobody on that road has been ridden down since the habit began.
The horse stands seventeen hands, with a barrel chest and an ink-black hide that takes the lantern light like water. Frost clings to the mane. The eyes are ember orange, and the hooves throw sparks off wet gravel strongly enough to scorch the verge. A pumpkin vine has rooted in the saddle strap and sprouts a little more each autumn. Wherever the horse passes, seeds scatter across the road, and a small trade has grown up around them. Gravel combers rake the approach to the bridge at first light and sell the seeds to growers who swear they sprout true. Fenna Gault, who has combed that stretch for most of her life, says the seeds are always warm and that the horse has never once stepped on one.
On the crossroads oak the rider is most often seen stopped, the mist tilted a little to the left, as though he were listening to something far down the road or counting it. He holds that angle for the length of a long breath, then turns the lantern toward the fog and moves on. Nobody at Glenkettle or Marshplow has heard a sound he could be listening to. Nobody knows what he is counting, or what number he is waiting to reach.
- Classification
- Spectral rider, Hollow Rider kind
- Habitat
- Country roads, bridges, old orchards
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- Rider 6 ft tall, horse 17 hands
- Activity
- Seasonal
- Realm
- Autumn roads of the Wayside Dead
- Binomial
- Equus acephalus sylvanus
- Diet
- None; takes oats left in troughs
- Temperament
- Aloof, restless, oddly courteous