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

than a wild howling and rustling arose in all the rooms on the second floor.
    However, is it possible to make a foolish little girl change her mind? Therefore I asked her with an air of importance:
    “But who is he, what is he like, this Little Man of Marsh Firs?”
    “I saw him three times and each time from afar. Once it was just before the death of my father. The other two, not long ago. I’ve also heard him perhaps a hundred times. Nor was I ever frightened, except perhaps the last time... just a little, a very little. I went up to him, but he disappeared. It is really a very little man, he reaches up to my chest, skinny, and reminds one of a starved child. His eyes are sad, his hands are very long, and his head is unnaturally long. He is dressed as people used to dress 200 years ago, only in the western manner. His clothes are green. He usually hides from me around the corner of the hall and by the time I run up to him, he disappears, although the hall ends in a blank wall. There is only one room there, and it is bolted with long nails.”
    I felt sorry for her. An unfortunate creature, she was very likely going mad.
    “And that is not all,” she went on. “It’s perhaps three hundred years since the Lady-in-Blue has been seen in this castle – you see that one there in the portrait. The family belief is that she has quenched her thirst for revenge, but I do not think so. She was not that kind of a person. When they dragged her in 1501 to her execution, she shouted to her husband: ‘My bones shall find no peace until the last snake of your race has perished!’ And then for almost a hundred years there was no escape from her. It was either a plague or a goblet of poison poured by some unknown person, or death caused by nightmares. She stopped taking revenge only on the great grandchildren... But now I know that she is keeping her word. Not long ago Bierman saw her on the balcony that is boarded up, and others saw her too. I alone have not seen her, but that is her habit – in the beginning she appears before others, but not to the person she is after. That she does only at the hour of his death... My family will end with me. I know that. Not long to wait for it. They shall be satisfied.”
    I took her hand and pressed it hard, desiring to bring the girl back to her senses, to somehow divert her thoughts from the horrors she was speaking about as if in her sleep.
    “You mustn’t worry. As far as that goes, I’ve also become interested in this. There’s no place for apparitions in the Steam Age. I swear that the two weeks left for me to spend here, I shall devote to solving this mystery. The devil with it, such nonsense! But one thing, you mustn’t be afraid.”
    She smiled faintly:
    “Oh! Don’t mind me... I’m accustomed to it. This kind of a parade goes on here every night.”
    And again the same expression on her face that had spoiled it so, and the one I couldn’t understand. It was fright, chronic, horrible fright. Not the fright that makes one’s hair stand on end for a moment, but the fright that finally becomes a habitual state impossible to get rid of even in one’s sleep. This unfortunate girl would have been good looking, were it not for this constant, terrible fear.
    And notwithstanding the fact that I was beside her, she moved up still closer to me to avoid seeing the darkness behind me.
    “Oh! Mr. Belaretsky, it’s dreadful. What am I guilty of, why must I answer for the sins of my forefathers? An excessive weight has been laid on the weak shoulders of mine. It’s a clinging weight and a heavy one. If you could know how much blood, and dirt, how many murders, orphans’ tears are on every coat-of-arms of the gentry! How many murdered or frightened to death, how many unfortunates! We haven’t the right to exist, even the most honest of us, the very best of us. The blood in our veins is not blue, it’s dirty blood. Don’t you think that we are all up to the twelfth generation