The Ghost Rider Read Free

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 firstshock. 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 mostimposing 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