The Ghost Rider Read Online Free Page A

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 narrowdoor. 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 anyoffence 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.