The Ghost Rider

CHAPTER ONE

Stres was still in bed when he heard the knocking at the door. He was tempted to bury his head in the pillow to blot out the noise, but the sound came again, louder this time.

“Who the Devil would pound on my door before daybreak?” he grumbled, throwing off the blanket.

He was on his way down the stairs when he heard the hammering for the third time, but now the rhythm of the metal knocker told him who it was. He slid back the bolt and opened the door. There was no need to say, “And what possesses you to wake me before dawn?” for the look on his face and his bleary eyes conveyed the message well enough.

“Something’s happened,” his deputy hastened to say.

Stres stared at him sceptically, as if to say,

“It better be good to justify a visit at this ungodly hour.” But he was well aware that his aide rarely blundered. Indeed, whenever he had been moved to rebuke him, he had found himself compelled to hold his tongue. Still, he would have been delighted had his deputy been in the wrong this time, so that he could work off his ill humour on him.

“So?”

The deputy glanced at his chief’s eyes for an instant, then stepped back and spoke.

“The dowager Vranaj and her daughter, Doruntine, who arrived last night under very mysterious circumstances, both lie dying.”

“Doruntine?” said Stres, dumbfounded. “How can it be?”

His deputy heaved a sigh of relief: he had been right to pound on the door.

“How can it be?” Stres said again, rubbing his eyes as if to wipe away the last trace of sleep. And in fact he had slept badly. No first night home after a two-week mission had ever been so trying. One long nightmare. “How can it be?” he asked for the third time. Doruntine had married into a family that lived so far from her own that she hadn’t been able to come back even when they were in mourning.

“How, indeed,” said the deputy. “As I said, the circumstances of her return are most mysterious.”

“And?”

“Well, both mother and daughter have taken to their beds and lie dying.”

“Strange! Do you think there’s been foul play?”

The deputy shook his head. “I think not. It looks more like the effect of some dreadful shock.”

“Have you seen them?”

“Yes. They’re both delirious, or close to it. The mother keeps asking, ‘Who brought you back, daughter?’ And the daughter keeps saying, ‘My brother Kostandin.’”

“Is that what she says: Kostandin? But, good God, he died three years ago, he and all his brothers …”

“According to the local women now gathered at their bedsides, that is just what the mother told her. But the girl insists that she arrived with him last night, just after midnight.”

“How odd,” said Stres, all the while thinking how ghastly.

They stared at each other in silence until Stres, shivering, remembered that he was not dressed.

“Wait for me,” he said, and went back in.

From inside came his wife’s drowsy “What is it?” and the inaudible words of his reply. Soon he came out again, wearing the regional captain’s uniform that made him look even taller and thinner.

“Let’s go see them,” he said.

They set out in silence. A handful of white rose petals fallen at someone’s door reminded Stres somehow of a brief scene from the dream that had slipped so strangely into his fitful sleep.

“Quite extraordinary,” he said.

“It beggars belief,” replied his deputy, raising the stakes.

“To tell you the truth, I was tempted not to believe it at first.”

“So I noticed. It’s unbelievable, isn’t it. Very mysterious.”

“Worse than that,” Stres said. “The more I think about it, the more inconceivable it seems.”

“The main thing is to find out how Doruntine got back,” said the deputy.

“And then?”

“The case will be solved if we can find out who accompanied her, or rather, if we can uncover the circumstances of her arrival.”

“Who accompanied her,” Stres repeated. “Yes, who and how … Obviously she is not telling the truth.”

“I asked her three times how she got here, but she offered no explanation. She was hiding something.”

“Did she know that all her brothers, including Kostandin, were dead?” Stres asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“It’s possible she didn’t know,” Stres said. “She married so far away …” To his surprise his jaw suddenly felt as heavy as lead, making it difficult for him to speak. What’s wrong with me? he wondered. He could feel a heaviness in his lungs too, as if they had filled with coal dust.

He pressed forward, and the exercise helped to clear his dulled mind.

“What was I saying? Oh, yes … She married so far abroad that she’s not been able to return home since her wedding. As far as I know this is the first time she’s been back.”

“She can’t have known about the death of her nine brothers or she would have come then,” said the deputy. “The dowager complained often enough about her daughter not being at her side during those grief-stricken days.”

“The forests of Bohemia where she lives lie at least two weeks’ journey from here, if not more,” Stres observed.

“Yes, if not more,” repeated his deputy. “Almost at the heart of Europe.”

As they walked, Stres noticed more white rose petals strewn along the path, as if some invisible hand had scattered them during the night. Fleetingly he recalled seeing them somewhere before. But he couldn’t really remember his dream. He also had a faint pain in his forehead. At the exact spot where his dream must have entered last night, he thought, before exiting the same way later on, towards dawn perhaps, irritating the wound it had already made.

“In any event, someone must have come with her,” he said.

“Yes, but who? Her mother can’t possibly believe that her daughter returned with a dead man, any more than we can.”

“But why would she conceal who she came back with?”

“I can’t explain it. It’s very unclear.”

Once again they walked in silence. The autumn air was cold. Some cawing crows flew low. Stres watched their flight for a moment.

“It’s going to rain,” he said. “The crows caw like that because their ears hurt when a storm is coming.”

His deputy looked off in the same direction, but said nothing.

“Earlier you mentioned something about a shock that might have brought the two women to their deathbed,” Stres said.

“Well, it was certainly caused by some very powerful emotion.” He avoided the word terrible, for his chief had commented that he tended to overuse it. “Since neither woman shows any mark of violence, their sudden collapse must surely have been caused by some kind of shock.”

“Do you think the mother suddenly discovered some-thing terrible?” Stres asked.

His deputy stared at him. He can use words as he pleases, he thought in a flash, but if others do, he stuffs them back down their throats.

“The mother?” he said. “I suspect they both suddenly discovered something terrible, as you put it. At the same time.”

As they continued to speculate about the shock mother and daughter had presumably inflicted on one another (both Stres and his deputy, warped by professional habit, increasingly tended to turns of phrase better suited to an investigative report), they mentally reconstructed, more or less, the scene that must have unfolded in the middle of the night. Knocks had sounded at the door of the old house at an unusual hour, and when the old lady called out — as she must have done — “Who’s there?” — a voice from outside would have answered, “It’s me, Doruntine.” Before opening the door, the old woman, upset by the sudden knocking and convinced that it couldn’t be her daughter’s voice, must have asked, to ease her doubt, “Who brought you back?” Let us not forget that for three years she had been desperate for some consolation in her grief, waiting in vain for her daughter to come home. From outside, Doruntine answered, “My brother Kostandin brought me back.” And the old woman receives the first shock. Perhaps, even shaken as she was, she found the strength to reply, “What are you talking about? Kostandin and his brothers have been in their graves for three years.” Now it is Doruntine’s turn to be stricken. If she really believes that it was her brother Kostandin who had brought her back, then the shock is twofold: finding out that Kostandin and her other brothers were dead and realising at the same time that she had been travelling with a ghost. The old woman then summons up the strength to open the door, hoping against hope that she has misunderstood the young woman’s words, or that she has been hearing voices, or that it is not Doruntine at the door after all. Perhaps Doruntine, standing there outside, also hopes she has misunderstood. But when the door swings open, both repeat what they have just said, dealing each other a fatal blow.

“No,” said Stres. “None of that makes much sense either.”

“I agree with you,” said his deputy. “But one thing is certain: something must have happened between them for the two women to be in such a state.”

“Something happened between them,” Stres repeated. “Of course something happened, but what? A terrifying tale from the girl, a terrifying revelation for the mother. Or else …”

“There’s the house,” said the deputy. “Maybe we can find out something.”

The great building could be seen in the distance, standing all forlorn on the far side of an open plain. The wet ground was strewn with dead leaves all the way to the house, which had once been one of the grandest and most imposing of the principality, but now had an air of mourning and desertion. Most of the shutters on the upper floors were closed, the eaves were damaged in places, and the grounds before the entrance, with their ancient, drooping, mossy trees, seemed desolate.

Stres recalled the burial of the nine Vranaj brothers three years earlier. There had been one tragedy after another, each more painful than the last, to the point that only by going mad could one erase the memory. But no generation could recall a calamity on this scale: nine coffins for nine young men of a single household in a single week. It had happened five weeks after the grand wedding of the family’s only daughter, Doruntine. The principality had been attacked without warning by a Norman army and, unlike in previous campaigns, where each household had had to give up one of their sons, this time all eligible young men were conscripted. So all nine brothers had gone off to war. It had often happened that several brothers of a single household went to fight in far more bloody conflicts, but never had more than half of them fallen in combat. This time, however, there was something very special about the enemy army: it was afflicted with plague, and most of those who took part in the fighting died one way or another, victors and vanquished alike, some in combat, others after the battle. Many a household had two, three, even four deaths to mourn, but only the Vranaj mourned nine. No one could recall a more impressive funeral. All the counts and barons of the principality attended, even the prince himself, and dignitaries of neighbouring principalities came as well.

Stres remembered it all quite clearly, most of all the words on everyone’s lips at the time: how the mother, in those days of grief, did not have her only daughter, Doruntine, at her side. But Doruntine alone had not been told about the disaster.

Stres sighed. How quickly those three years had passed! The great double doors, worm-eaten in places, stood ajar. Walking ahead of his deputy, he crossed the courtyard and entered the house, where he could hear the faint sound of voices. Two or three elderly women, apparently neighbours, looked the newcomers up and down.

“Where are they?” Stres asked.

One of the women nodded towards a door. Stres, followed by his deputy, walked into a vast, dimly lit room where his eyes were immediately drawn to two large beds set in opposite corners. Beside each of these stood a woman, staring straight ahead. The icons on the walls and the two great brass candelabra above the fireplace, long unused, cast flickers of light through the atmosphere of gloom. One of the women turned her head towards them. Stres stopped for a moment, then motioned her to approach.

“Which is the mother’s bed?” he asked softly.

The woman pointed to one of the beds.

“Leave us alone for a moment,” Stres said.

The woman opened her mouth, doubtless to oppose him, but her gaze fell on Stres’s uniform and she was silent. She walked over to her companion, who was very old, and both women left without a word.

Walking carefully so as not to make a noise, Stres approached the bed where the old woman lay, her head in the folds of a white bonnet.

“My Lady,” he whispered. “Lady Mother” — for so had she been called since the death of her sons — “it’s me, Stres. Do you remember me?”

She opened her eyes. They seemed glazed with grief and terror. He withstood her gaze for a moment and then, leaning a little nearer the white pillow, murmured, “How do you feel, Lady Mother?”

Her expression was unreadable.

“Doruntine came back last night, didn’t she?” Stres asked.

The woman looked up from her bed, her eyes saying “yes.” Her gaze then settled on Stres as though asking him some question. For a moment, Stres was unsure how to proceed.

“How did it happen?” he asked very softly. “Who brought her back?”

The old woman covered her eyes with one hand, then her head moved in a way that told him she had lost consciousness. Stres took her hand and found her pulse with difficulty. Her heart was still beating.

“Call one of the women,” Stres said quietly to his deputy.

His aide soon returned with one of the women who had just left the room. Stres let go of the old woman’s hand and walked noiselessly, as before, to the bed where Doruntine lay. He could see her blond hair on the pillow. He felt his heart wrench, but the sensation had nothing to do with what was happening now. An ancient pang that went back to that wedding three years before. On that day, as she rode off on the white bridal steed amidst the throng of relatives and friends, his own heart was suddenly so heavy that he wondered what had come over him. Everyone looked sad, not only Doruntine’s mother and brother, but all her relatives, for she was the first girl of the country to marry so far away. But Stres’s sorrow was quite unique. As she rode away, he suddenly realised that the feeling he had had for her these last three weeks had been nothing other than love. But it was a love without shape, a love which had never condensed, for he himself had gently prevented it. It was like the morning dew that appears for the first few minutes after sunrise, only to vanish during the other hours of day and night. The only moment when that bluish fog had nearly condensed, had tried to form itself into a cloud, was when she left. But it had been no more than an instant, quickly forgotten.

Stres stood at Doruntine’s bed, looking steadily into her face. She was as beautiful as ever, perhaps even more beautiful, with those lips that seemed somehow full and light at the same time.

“Doruntine,” he said in a very soft voice.

She opened her eyes. Deep within them he sensed a void that nothing could fill. He tried to smile at her.

“Doruntine,” he said again. “Welcome home.”

She stared at him.

“How do you feel?” he said slowly, carefully, unconsciously taking her hand. She was burning hot. “Doruntine,” he said again, more gently, “you came last night after midnight, didn’t you?”

Her eyes answered “yes.” He would rather have put off asking the question that troubled him, but it rose up of itself.

“Who brought you back?”

The young woman’s eyes stared steadily back at his own.

“Doruntine,” he asked again, “who brought you back?” His voice seemed alien to him. The very question was so fraught with terror that he almost wanted to take it back. But it was too late.

Still she stared at him with those eyes in whose depths he glimpsed a desperate void.

Get it over with now, he told himself.

“You told your mother that it was your brother Kostandin, didn’t you?”

Again her look assented. Stres searched her eyes for some sign of madness, but could find no meaning in their utter emptiness.

“I think you must have heard that Kostandin left this world three years ago,” he said in the same faint voice. He felt tears well up within him before they suddenly filled her eyes. But hers were tears unlike any others, half-visible, almost impalpable. Her face, bathed by those tears, seemed even more remote. “What’s happening to me?” her eyes seemed to say. “Why don’t you believe me?”

He turned slowly to his deputy and to the other woman standing near the mother’s bed and motioned to them to leave. Then he leaned towards the young woman again and stroked her hand.

“How did you get here, Doruntine? How did you manage that long journey?”

It seemed to him that something strained to fill those unnaturally enlarged eyes.

Stres left an hour later. He looked pale, and without turning his head or speaking a word to anyone, he made his way to the door. His deputy, following behind, was tempted several times to ask whether Doruntine had said anything new, but he didn’t dare.

As they passed the church, Stres seemed about to enter the cemetery, but changed his mind at the last minute.

His deputy could feel the glances of curious onlookers as they walked along.

“It’s not an easy case,” Stres said without looking at his deputy. “I expect there will be quite a lot of talk about it. Just to anticipate any eventuality, I think we would do well to send a report to the prince’s chancellery.”

To His Highness’s Chancellor. Urgent

I believe it useful to bring to your attention events that occurred at dawn on this 11 October in the noble house of Vranaj and which may have unpredictable consequences.

On the morning of 11 October, the aged Lady Vranaj, who, as everyone knows, has been living alone since the death of her nine sons on the battlefield, was found in a state of profound distress, along with her daughter, Doruntine, who, by her own account, had arrived the night before, accompanied by her brother Kostandin, who died three years ago, alongside all his brothers.

Having repaired to the site and tried to speak with the two unfortunate women, I concluded that neither showed any sign of mental instability, though what they now claim, whether directly or indirectly, is completely baffling and incredible. It should be noted at this point that they had given each other this shock, the daughter by telling her mother that she had been brought home by her brother Kostandin, the mother by informing her daughter that Kostandin, with all her brothers, had long since departed this world.

I tried to discuss the matter with Doruntine, and what I managed to glean from her, in her distress, may be summarised more or less as follows:

One night, not long ago (she does not recall the exact date), in the small city in central Europe where she had been living with her husband since her marriage, she was told that an unidentified traveller was asking for her. On going out, she saw the horseman who had just arrived and who seemed to her to be Kostandin, although the dust of the long journey he had just completed made him almost unrecognisable. But when the traveller, still in the saddle, said that he was indeed Kostandin, and that he had come to take her to her mother as he had promised before her marriage, she was reassured. (Here we must recall the stir caused at the time by Doruntine’s engagement to a man from a land so far away, the opposition of the other brothers, and especially the mother, who did not want to send her daughter so far off, Kostandin’s insistence that the marriage take place, and finally his solemn promise, his besa, that he would bring her back himself whenever their mother yearned for her daughter’s company.)

Doruntine told me that her brother’s behaviour seemed rather strange, since he did not get off his horse and refused to go into the house. He insisted on taking her away as soon as possible, and when she asked him why she had to leave in such haste — for if the occasion was one of joy, she would don a fine dress, and if it was one of sorrow, she would wear mourning clothes — he said, with no further explanation, “Come as you are.” His behaviour was scarcely natural; moreover, it was contrary to all the rules of courtesy. But since she had been consumed with yearning for her family for these three years (“I lived in the most awful solitude,” she says), she did not hesitate, wrote a note to her husband, and allowed her brother to lift her up behind him.

She also told me that it had been a long journey, though she was unable to say exactly how long. She says that all she remembers is an endless night, with myriad stars streaming across the sky, but this vision may have been suggested by an endless ride broken by longer or shorter intervals of sleep. It is interesting to note that she does not recall having travelled by day. She may have formed this impression either because she dozed or slept in the saddle all day, so that she no longer remembers the daylight at all, or because she and her escort retired at dawn and went to sleep, awaiting nightfall to continue their journey. Were this to prove correct, it would suggest that the rider wished to travel only by night. In Doruntine’s mind, exhausted as she was (not to mention her emotional state), the ten or fifteen nights of the trip (for that is generally how long it takes to travel here from Bohemia) may have blended into a single long — indeed endless — nocturnal ride.

On the way, pressed against the horseman as she was, she noticed quite unmistakably that his hair was not just dusty, but covered with mud that was barely dry, and that his body smelled of sodden earth. Two or three times she questioned him about it. He answered that he had been caught in the rain several times on his way there and that the dust on his body and in his hair, thus moistened, had turned to clots of mud.

When, towards midnight on 11 October, Doruntine and the unknown man (for let us so designate the man the young woman took to be her brother) finally approached the residence of the Lady Mother, he reined in his horse and told his companion to dismount and go to the house, for he had something to do at the church. Without waiting for an answer, he rode towards the church and the cemetery, while she ran to the house and knocked at the door. The old woman asked who was there, and then the few words exchanged between mother and daughter — the latter having said that it was she and that she had come with Kostandin, the former replying that Kostandin was three years dead — gave to both the shock that felled them.

This affair, which one is bound to admit is most puzzling, may be explained in one of two ways: either someone, for some reason, deceived Doruntine, posing as her brother with the express purpose of bringing her back, or Doruntine herself, for some unknown reason, has not told the truth and has concealed the manner of her return or the identity of the person who brought her back.

I thought it necessary to make a relatively detailed report about these events because they concern one of the noblest families in the principality and because they are of a kind that might seriously trouble people’s minds.

Captain Stres

After initialling his report, Stres sat staring absently at his slanted handwriting. Two or three times he picked up his pen and was tempted to lean over the sheets of paper to amend, recast, or perhaps correct some passage, but each time he was about to put pen to paper his hand froze, and in the end he left his text unaltered.

He got up slowly, put the letter into an envelope, sealed it, and called for a messenger. When the man had gone, Stres stood for a long moment looking out the window, feeling his headache worsen. A crowd of theories jostled one another to enter his head as if through a narrow door. He rubbed his forehead as though to stem the flood. Why would an unknown traveller have done it? And if it was not some impostor, the question was even more delicate: What was Doruntine hiding? He paced back and forth in his office; as he came near the window he could see the messenger’s back, shrinking steadily as he threaded his way through the bare poplars. And what if neither of these suppositions was correct, he suddenly said to himself. What if something else had happened, something the mind cannot easily comprehend? Who knows what lies hidden inside us all?

He carried on staring at the windowpane. That rectangle of glass which, at any other time, would have struck him as the most ordinary and innocent thing in the world now suddenly seemed fraught with mystery. It stood in the very midpoint of life, simultaneously separating and connecting the world. “Strange,” he mumbled to himself.

Stres managed to snap out of his daydream, turned his back on the window, called his deputy and strode down the stairs.

“Let’s go to the church,” he said to his deputy when he heard the man’s footsteps, then his panting, at his back. “Let’s have a look at Kostandin’s grave.”

“Good idea. When all is said and done, the story only makes sense if someone came back from the grave.”

“I wasn’t considering anything so ludicrous. I have something else in mind.”

His stride lengthened as he said to himself, why am I taking this business so much to heart? After all, there had been no murder, no serious crime, nor indeed any offence of the kind he was expected to investigate in his capacity as regional captain. A few moments ago, as he was drafting his report, this thought had come to him several times: Am I not being too hasty in troubling the prince’s chancellery about a matter of no importance? But some inner voice told him he wasn’t. That same voice told him that something shocking had occurred, something that went beyond mere murder or any other crime, something that made assassination and similar heinous acts seem mere trifles.

The little church, with its freshly repaired bell tower, was now very near, but Stres suddenly veered off and went straight into the cemetery, not through the iron grille, but through an inconspicuous wooden gate. He hadn’t been in the cemetery for a long time, and he had trouble getting his bearings.

“This way,” said his deputy as he strode along. “The graves of the Vranaj sons must be over here.”

Stres fell in step beside him. The ground was soft in places. Small, soot-blackened icons streaked with candle wax added to the serene and melancholy atmosphere. Some of the graves were covered with moss. Stres stooped to right an overturned cross, but it was heavy and he had to leave it. He walked on. He saw his deputy beckon in the distance: he had found them at last.

Stres walked over. The graves, neatly aligned and covered with slabs of black stone, were identical, made in a shape that suggested a cross as well as a sword, or a man standing with his arms stretched out. At the head of each grave was a small niche for an icon and candles. Beneath it the dead man’s name was carved.

“There’s his grave,” said the deputy, his voice hushed.

Stres looked up and saw that the man had gone pale.

“What’s the matter?”

His deputy pointed at the grave.

“Take a good look,” he said. “The stones have been moved.”

“What?” Stres leaned forward to see what his aide was pointing to. For a long moment he examined the spot carefully, then stood up straight. “Yes, it’s true. There’s been some disturbance here.”

“Just as I told you,” said the deputy, his satisfaction in seeing that his chief shared his view mixed with a new surge of fear.

“But that doesn’t mean much,” Stres remarked.

His deputy turned and looked at him with surprise. His eyes seemed to say, sure, a commander must preserve his dignity in all circumstances, but there comes a time when one must forget about rank, office and such formalities. A battered sun strove to break through the clouds. They looked up, in some astonishment, but neither uttered the words each might have expected to hear in such circumstances.

“No, it doesn’t mean anything,” Stres said. “For one thing, the slabs could have subsided by themselves, as happens eventually in most graves. Moreover, even if someone did move them, it might well have been an unknown traveller who moved the gravestones before perpetrating his hoax to make it look like the dead man had risen from his grave.”

The deputy listened open-mouthed. He was about to say something, perhaps to raise some objection, but Stres carried on talking.

“In fact, it is more likely that he did it after leaving Doruntine near the house. It’s possible he came here then and moved the gravestones before he went off.”

Stres, who now seemed weary, let his gaze wander over the field that stretched before him, as if seeking the direction in which the unknown traveller had ridden off. From where they stood they could see the two-storey Vranaj house, part of the village, and the highway, which disappeared into the horizon. It was here on this ground, between the church and that house of sorrow, that the mysterious event of the night of 11 October had occurred. Go on ahead. I have something to do at the church …

“That’s how it must have happened,” Stres said. “Unless she’s lying.”

“‘Unless she is lying?’” his deputy parroted. “And who, sir, might she be?”

Stres didn’t answer. The sun at their back, though still a little hazy, now drew their shadows on the ground.

“She … Well, Doruntine herself, or else her mother. Or anybody: you, me … What’s so mysterious about that?” Stres exclaimed.

His deputy shrugged. Little by little the colour had returned to his cheeks.

“I will find that man,” Stres said suddenly, raising his voice. The words came harshly through his teeth, with a menacing ring, and his deputy, who had known Stres for years, felt that the passion his chief brought to the search for the unknown man went well beyond the duties of his office. As they walked away, the deputy allowed himself to glance now and again at his boss’s shadow. It revealed more of Stres’s disquiet than the man himself. It even seemed to him that one of the two halves of Stres’s twin characters was standing beside the other, to help him solve the mystery.