The Ghost Rider Read online

  All this passed through Stres’s mind in snatches as his glance embraced the bleak expanse of the plain. The October cold filled the air. Suddenly Stres shivered. Behind a bush several paces off the road he caught sight of the skeleton of a horse standing out in all its whiteness. It was a section of the ribcage and the backbone; the skull was missing. My God, Stres thought to himself a little further on, what if that had been his horse?

  He drew his cloak tighter around him, trying to drive the image from his mind. He felt sad, but it was not a painful sadness. The shape of his melancholy had been softened in the great stretch of plain, in which winter’s approach could be read. What possessed you to come out of the earth, what message did you mean to bring us? Stres was astonished at the question, which had risen like a sigh from the depths of his being. He shook his head as if to clear his mind. He who had laughed so derisively at everyone who had believed that story! He smiled bitterly. What nonsense! he said to himself, spurring his horse. What a gloomy afternoon! he thought a moment later. Dusk was falling as he urged his mount into a canter. All the rest of the way to the village he strove to purge his mind of anything connected with the case. He arrived in the dark of night. The lights of the houses shone feebly here and there. From time to time the barking of dogs in the distance broke the night silence. Stres guided his horse not homeward, but towards the town’s main street. He had no idea why. Soon he reached the vacant lot that stretched before the house of the Lady Mother. There was no other house to be seen. The dark and dismal mass of the great abandoned building loomed at the far end of a desolate field studded with tall trees that now, in the dark, seemed to droop even more sharply than usual. Stres approached the doorway, gazed for a moment at the darker rectangles of the windows, then turned his horse in the direction from which he had come. He found himself among the trees. A man standing where he now stood could be seen from the door.

  The night of 11 October must have been more or less like this one: no moon, but not too dark. It must have been here that Doruntine parted from the unknown horseman. It suddenly occurred to Stres that he had been in this spot before. But his memory of the occasion was all in a muddle, buried under rubble, as it were. For a moment even his horse’s hooves went silent. It was as if he was riding through the air. Rubbish, he thought. His imagination was so disturbed that fragments of the incident were sticking to him like flakes of wet snow. The sound of his horse’s hooves came back to life and soothed him … So this must be where Doruntine parted from the night rider. When her mother opened the door, he was probably riding off, but perhaps she had already seen something from the window. Something that caused that fatal shock … Stres turned his horse again. What discovery had the old woman made in the semidarkness? That the man riding off was her dead son? (“It was my brother Kostandin who brought me back,” Doruntine had told her.) Or perhaps, on the contrary, that it was not her son and that her daughter had deceived her? Maybe, but that wouldn’t explain her shock. Or perhaps, just before they separated, Doruntine and the unknown rider had embraced one last time in the dark— Enough! Stres said to himself sharply, and turned his horse back towards the road. At the very last moment, with the furtive movement of a man trying to catch a glimpse of someone spying on him in the darkness, he turned his head towards the closed door once more. But there was nothing, only the dark night that seemed to be mocking him.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The day after his return from the Monastery of the Three Crosses Stres set to work again to unravel the enigma of Doruntine’s return. He drafted a new more detailed directive, ordering the arrest of all suspects, offering in addition a reward to anyone who helped capture the impostor directly or by providing information leading to his arrest. He also instructed his deputy to make a list of all those who had been out of town between the end of September and 11 October, and to look discreetly into the activities of every person on the list. In the meantime, he ordered one of his men to set out at once for the far reaches of Bohemia, in order to investigate locally the circumstances of Doruntine’s departure.

  The man hadn’t yet left when a second directive, even more compelling than the first, came from the prince’s chancellery, demanding that the entire matter be brought to light as soon as possible. Stres understood at once that the archbishop must have been in touch with the prince and that the latter, aware of his captain’s reluctance to obey Church injunctions, had decided that a fresh personal intervention was required. The directive emphasised that the tense political situation of recent times, in particular relations with Byzantium, required caution and understanding on the part of all officials of the prince.

  Meanwhile, the archbishop remained inside the Monastery of the Three Crosses. Why on earth had he holed up there and not moved on? Stres wondered. The old fox had obviously decided to keep an eye on things.

  Stres felt more and more nervous. His aide was coming to the end of all that research in the archives. His eyes bleary from the long sessions of reading, he went around looking dreamy.

  “You seem sunk in deep meditation,” Stres observed jokingly, at a break in his own hectic schedule. “Who knows what you’re going to pull out of those archives for us?”

  Instead of smiling, the deputy looked strangely at Stres, as if to say you may think it’s a laughing matter, but it will take your breath away.

  Sometimes, walking to the window as if to rest his eyes on a view of the wide plain, Stres wondered if the truth about Doruntine’s tale might not be completely different from what they all assumed, if that macabre ride with an unknown horseman was in fact no more than the product of the girl’s sick mind. After all, no one had seen that horseman, and Doruntine’s old mother, who had opened the door for her and who was the only witness, had made no such assertion. Good God, he said to himself, could it be that the whole thing never happened? Perhaps Doruntine had somehow learned of the disaster that had befallen her family and, driven mad by the shock, had set out for home on her own. In a state of such deep distress she might have taken much time indeed – months, even years – to complete a journey she believed had taken a single night. That might well explain the flocks of stars she thought she saw streaming across the sky. Besides, someone who believed that the ten-day-and-night journey from Bohemia (for that was the least it could take) had lasted but a single night might well feel that a hundred nights were one. And of course a person in such a state might fall prey to all sorts of hallucinations.

  In vain, Stres sought to recall Doruntine’s face as it had looked when he saw her for the last time, so that he might detect some sign of mental illness. But her image eluded him. In the end he resolved to drive the theory of madness from his mind, for he feared it might dampen his zeal for the investigation. It will all be cleared up soon enough, he told himself. As soon as my man comes back from Bohemia.

  Thirty-six hours after the man’s departure, Stres was informed that some relatives of Doruntine’s husband had just arrived. At first it was rumoured that her husband himself had come, but it soon became clear that the visitors were his two first cousins.

  After dispatching a second messenger to overtake the first and tell him to turn back, Stres hurried to meet the new arrivals, who had taken lodgings at the inn at the crossroads.

  The two young men were so alike in bearing and appearance that they might have been taken for twins, though they were not. They were still tired from their long journey and had not yet had time to wash or change their clothes when Stres arrived. He couldn’t help staring at their dust-covered hair, and looked at them in so odd a fashion that one, with just the hint of a guilty smile, passed his fingers through his hair and spoke a few words in an incomprehensible tongue.

  “What language do they speak?” Stres asked his deputy, who had arrived at the inn shortly before him.

  “God knows,” was the reply. “It sounds to me like German laced with Spanish. I sent someone to the Old Monastery to fetch one of the monks who speaks foreign languages. He shouldn’t be long.
”

  “I have a hard time making myself understood with the little Latin I know,” said the innkeeper. “And they massacre it too.”

  “Perhaps they need to wash and rest a bit,” Stres said to the innkeeper. “Tell them to go upstairs if they like, until the interpreter gets here.”

  The innkeeper passed on Stres’s message in his fractured Latin. The visitors nodded agreement and, one behind the other, began climbing the wooden stairs, which creaked as if it might collapse. Stres could not help staring at their dusty cloaks as he watched them go up.

  “Did they say anything?” he asked when the staircase had stopped creaking. “Do they know that Doruntine is dead?”

  “They learned of her death and her mother’s while on their way here,” the deputy answered, “and surely other things as well.”

  Stres began pacing back and forth in the large hall, which also served as the reception room. The others – his aide, the innkeeper and a third man – watched him come and go without daring to break the silence.

  The monk from the Old Monastery arrived half an hour later. The two foreigners came down the wooden stairs, whose creaking seemed more and more sinister to Stres’s ear. Their hair, now free of most of the journey’s dust, was very blond.

  Stres turned to the monk and said, “Tell them that I am Captain Stres, responsible for keeping order in this district. I believe they have come to find out what happened to Doruntine, have they not?”

  The monk translated these words for the strangers, but they looked blankly at one another, seeming not to understand.

  “What language are you speaking?” Stres asked the monk.

  “I’ll try another,” he said without answering the question.

  He spoke to them again. The two strangers leaned forward with the pained expressions of men straining to understand what is being said to them. One of them spoke a few words, and this time it was the monk whose face took on a troubled expression. These exchanges of words and grimaces continued for some time until finally the monk spoke several long sentences to which the strangers now listened with nods of great satisfaction.

  “Finally found it,” said the monk. “They speak a German dialect mixed with Slavonic. I think we’ll be able to understand one another.”

  Stres spoke immediately.

  “You have come just in time,” he said. “I believe you have heard what happened to your cousin’s wife. We are all dismayed.”

  The strangers’ faces darkened.

  “When you arrived I had already sent someone to your country to find out the circumstances of her leaving there,” Stres went on. “I hope that we may be able to learn something from you, as you may learn something from us. I believe that all of us have an equal interest in finding out the truth.”

  The two strangers nodded in agreement.

  “When we left,” said one of them, “we knew nothing, save that our cousin’s wife had gone off suddenly, under rather strange circumstances, with her brother Kostandin.”

  He stopped and waited for the monk, who kept his pale eyes fixed upon him, to translate his words.

  “While en route,” the stranger continued, “still far from your country, we learned that our cousin’s wife had indeed arrived at her parents’ home, but that her brother Kostandin, with whom she said she had left, had departed this life three years ago.”

  “Yes,” said Stres, “that’s correct.”

  “On the way we also learned of the old woman’s death, news that grieved us deeply.”

  The stranger lowered his eyes. A silence followed, during which Stres motioned to the innkeeper and two or three onlookers to keep their distance.

  “You wouldn’t have a room where we could talk, would you?” Stres asked the owner.

  “Yes, of course, Captain. There is a quiet place just over there. Come.”

  They filed into a small room. Stres invited them to sit on carved wooden chairs.

  “We had but one goal when we set out,” one of the two strangers continued, “and that was to satisfy ourselves about her flight. In other words, first of all to make sure that she had really reached her own family, and secondly to learn the reason for her flight, to find out whether or not she meant to come back, among other things that go without saying in incidents of this kind.”

  As the monk translated, the stranger stared at Stres as if trying to guess whether the captain grasped the full meaning of his words.

  “For an escapade of this kind, as I’m sure you must realise, arouses …”

  “Of course,” said Stres. “I quite understand.”

  “Now, however,” the visitor continued, “another matter has arisen: this question of the dead brother. Our cousin, Doruntine’s husband, knows nothing of this, and you may well imagine that this development gives rise to yet another mystery. If Doruntine’s brother has been dead for three years, then who was the man who brought her here?”

  “Precisely,” Stres replied. “I have been asking myself that question for several days now, and many others have asked it too.”

  He opened his mouth to continue, but suddenly lost his train of thought. In his mind, he knew not why, he saw in a flash the white bones of the horse lying on the plain that afternoon, as if they had tumbled there from some troubled dream.

  “Did anyone see the horseman?” he asked.

  “Where? What horseman?” the two strangers said, almost in one voice.

  “The one believed to have been her brother, the man who brought Doruntine here.”

  “Oh, I see. Yes, there were women who happened to be close by. They said they saw a horseman near our cousin’s house, and that Doruntine hurried to mount behind him. And then there’s also the note she left.”

  “That’s right,” Stres said. “She told me about a note. Have you read it?”

  “We brought it with us,” said the second stranger, the one who had spoken least.

  “What? You have the note with you?”

  Stres could scarcely believe his ears, but the stranger was already rummaging through his leather satchel, from which he finally took out a letter. Stres leaned forward to examine it.

  “It’s her handwriting, all right,” said the deputy, peering over Stres’s shoulder. “I recognise it.”

  Stres stared with wide eyes at the crude letters, which seemed to have been formed by a clumsy hand. The text, in a foreign language, was incomprehensible. One word, the last, had been crossed out.

  “What does it say?” asked Stres, leaning even closer. Only one word was recognisable, her brother’s name, spelled differently than in Albanian: Cöstanthin. “What do these other words mean?” Stres asked.

  “I am going away with my brother Kostandin,” the monk translated.

  “And the word that’s scratched out?”

  “It means ‘if’.”

  “So: ‘I am going away with my brother Kostandin. And if …’” Stres repeated. “What was the ‘if’ for, and why did she cross it out?”

  Was she trying to hide something? Stres thought suddenly. Looking for a way to camouflage the truth? Or was this a final attempt to reveal something? But then why did she suddenly change her mind?

  “It could be that she found it hard to explain in this language,” said the monk, without taking his eyes from the paper. “The other words, too, are full of mistakes.”

  All were silent.

  Stres’s thoughts were focused on one point: he finally had a genuine piece of evidence. From all the fog-shrouded anguish there had at last come a piece of paper bearing words written in her own hand. And the horseman had been seen by those women, so he too was real.

  “What day did this happen?” he asked. “Do you remember?”

  “It was 29 September,” one of them answered.

  Now the chronology in turn was coming out of that blanket of fog. One very long night, Doruntine had said, with flocks of stars streaming across the sky. But in fact it was a journey of twelve or, to be exact, thirteen days.

  S
tres felt troubled. The concrete, incontrovertible evidence with which he had just been provided – Doruntine’s note, the horseman who had taken her up behind him, the thirteen-day journey – far from giving him any sense that he was finally making some progress and stood on solid ground, left him with no more than a feeling of great emptiness. It seemed that coming closer to the unreal, far from diminishing it, made it even more terrifying. Stres was not sure quite what to say.

  “Would you like to go to the cemetery?” he finally asked.

  “Yes, of course,” chorused the strangers.

  They all went together on foot. From the windows and verandas of the houses, dozens of pairs of eyes followed their path to the church. The cemetery watchman had already opened the gate. Stres went through first, clods of mud sticking to the heels of his boots. The strangers looked absently at the rows of tombstones.

  “This is where her brothers lie,” said Stres, stopping before a row of black slabs. And here are the graves of the Lady Mother and Doruntine,” he continued, pointing to two small mounds of earth into which temporary wooden crosses had been sunk.

  The newcomers stood motionless for a moment with their heads bowed. Their hair now resembled the melted candle wax on either side of the icons.

  “And that grave over there is Kostandin’s.”

  Stres’s voice seemed far away. The gravestone, canted slightly to the right, hadn’t been straightened. Stres’s deputy searched his chief’s face, but understood from his expression that he was not to mention that the gravestone had been moved. The cemetery watchman, who had accompanied the small group and now stood a little to one side, also held his tongue.

  “And there you are,” Stres said when they had returned to the road. “A row of graves is all that remains of the whole family.”

  “Yes, it is very sad indeed,” said one of the strangers.

  “All of us here were most disturbed by Doruntine’s return,” Stres went on. “Perhaps even more than you were in your land over her departure.”