King Stakh's Wild Hunt by Uladzimir Karatkevich Read Free Book Online

listened. My hearing is very good, but only after a minute did I indeed hear what she had heard. Somewhere in the hall, to our left, the parquet was creaking under someone’s footsteps.
    Someone was walking through the long, endless passages. The steps quieted down for a moment, then were heard again. Tap, tap, tap... went those stamping feet.
    “Miss Nadzeya, what on Earth’s the matter with you? What’s happened?”
    “Let me be! It’s that Little Man! He’s here again, coming after my soul!”
    From all this I understood only that somebody was amusing himself with stupid jokes, that somebody was frightening a woman. I paid no attention when she seized me by the sleeve in an attempt to hold me back. I grabbed the poker from the fireplace and rushed off down the steps into the hall. This took only a moment and I opened the door with my foot.
    Half of the tremendous hall was drowning in darkness, but I could very well see that no one was there. Nobody was there! Only the footsteps were there, they sounded as previously, somewhat uncertain, but quite loud. They were near me, but little by little they moved farther on to the other end of the hall.
    What could I do? Fight an invisible person? I knew that would come to naught, but I thrust the poker straight into the space where I heard the steps. The poker cut the emptiness and with a loud ring fell to the floor.
    Funny? At that moment, as you may guess, I was far from laughing. In answer to my vainglorious knightly thrust something groaned, followed by two, three steps – and vanished in silence.
    Only at that moment did I remember that my hostess was alone in that tremendous, poorly-lit room, so I hastened back to her.
    I had expected to find her unconscious, gone mad with fright, to have died, anything except what I did see. Lady Yanovsky was standing at the fireplace, her face severe, gloomy, almost calm, with that same incomprehensible expression in her eyes.
    “In vain you rushed off there,” she said. “Of course, you saw nothing. I know, because only I see him and sometimes the housekeeper does, too. And Bierman has seen him.”
    “Who is ‘he’?”
    “The Little Man of Marsh Firs.”
    “But what is he, what does he want?”
    “I don’t know. He appears when somebody in Marsh Firs must die a sudden death. He may wander around a whole year, but in the end he’ll get what he’s after.”
    “It’s possible,” I joked unsuccessfully, “He’ll keep wandering for yet another seventy years, before your great grandchildren bury you.”
    She threw back her head.
    “I hate those who get married. And don’t dare to jest on this subject. Eight of my ancestors perished in this way. They are the only ones about whom we have records, and the Little Man is always mentioned there.”
    “Miss Yanovsky, don’t worry, but our ancestors believed, by the way, in witches, too. And there have always been people ready to swear they had seen them.”
    “And my father? My father? This was not notes, this I heard, this I saw myself. My father was an atheist, but he believed in the Little Man, even he believed until the very day when the Wild Hunt put an end to him. I hear him, you understand? Here you cannot convince me otherwise. These steps were heard in our castle almost every day before my father’s death.”
    What could I do? Convince her that it had been auditory hallucinations? But I did not suffer from any hallucinations. I had distinctly heard steps and groans this time. To say that it was some cunning acoustic effect? I do not know whether that would have helped, although half the rumours about ghosts in old houses are based on just such tricks. For example, the famous ghost in the Luxemburg Palace in Dubrowna was finally discovered in the shape of a vessel filled with mercury and gold coins which some unknown joker had bricked up about a hundred years earlier in the flue on the sunny side. No sooner did the night’s cold make way for the sun’s warmth,