The Pale Lady (Fantasy and Horror Classics)

Alexandre Dumas

Description

This unique volume features the most terrifying tale from Alexandre Dumas’ The Thousand and One Ghosts and presents the gothic vampire tale as a stand-alone short story that is sure to keep you up at night.

The Pale Lady is a gripping vampire tale following Hedwig, a Polish lady, who is sent to a monastery in the Carpathian Mountains for safety. She draws the attention of two very different brothers and soon finds herself in more danger than ever before. A supernatural story featuring creepy castles, misty monasteries, and tragic romance.

From the remarkable author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, The Pale Lady has been translated from the original French and is the perfect dark read for fans of horror and the supernatural.

Sujets

• Fantastique
• Romance fantastique
• Bit-Lit
• Gothic
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Read Books Ltd.
• Date de parution: 03 décembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781447480198
• Langue: English

Extrait

T HE P ALE L ADY
B Y
A LEXANDRE D UMAS
Copyright 2011 Read Books Ltd.
This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any way without the express permission of the publisher in writing
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Contents
Biography of Alexandre Dumas
The Pale Lady
A LEXANDRE D UMAS
Alexandre Dumas was born in Villers-Cotter ts, France in 1802. His parents were poor, but their heritage and good reputation - Alexandre s father had been a general in Napoleon s army - provided Alexandre with opportunities for good employment. In 1822, Dumas moved to Paris to work for future king Louis Philippe I in the Palais Royal. It was here that he began to write for magazines and the theatre.
In 1829 and 1830 respectively, Dumas produced the plays Henry III and His Court and Christine , both of which met with critical acclaim and financial success. As a result, he was able to commit himself full-time to writing. Despite the turbulent economic times which followed the Revolution of 1830, Dumas turned out to have something of an entrepreneurial streak, and did well for himself in this decade. He founded a production studio that turned out hundreds of stories under his creative direction, and began to produce serialised novels for newspapers which were widely read by the French public. It was over the next two decades, as a now famous and much loved author of romantic and adventuring sagas, that Dumas produced his best-known works - the D Artagnan romances, including The Three Musketeers , in 1844, and The Count of Monte Cristo , in 1846.
Dumas made a lot of money from his writing, but he was almost constantly penniless as a result of his extravagant lifestyle and love of women. In 1851 he fled his creditors to Belgium, and then Russia, and then Italy, not returning to Paris until 1864. Dumas died in Puys, France, in 1870, at the age of 68. He is now enshrined in the Panth on of Paris alongside fellow authors Victor Hugo and Emile Zola. Since his death, his fiction has been translated into almost a hundred languages, and has formed the basis for more than 200 motion pictures.
The Pale Lady
ALEXANDRE DUMAS PAUL BOCAGE
* * *
1 Among the Carpathians
I am a Pole by birth, a native of Sandomir, a land where legends become articles of faith, and where we believe in our family traditions as firmly as in the Gospel - perhaps more firmly. Not one of our castles but has its spectre, not one of our cottages but owns its familiar spirit. Among rich and poor alike, in castle and cot equally, the two principles of good and ill are acknowledged.
Sometimes the two are at variance and fight one against the other. Then are heard mysterious noises in passages, howls in old, half-ruined towers, shakings of walls - so terrible and appalling that cot and castle are both left desolate, while the inhabitants, whether peasants or nobles, fly to the nearest church to seek protection from holy cross or blessed relics, the only preservatives effectual against the demons that harass our homes.
Moreover in the same land two still more terrible principles, principles still more fierce and implacable, are face to face - to wit, tyranny and freedom.
In the year 1825 broke out between Russia and Poland one of those death struggles that seem bound to drain the life-blood of a people to its last drop, as the blood of a particular family is often exhausted.
My father and two brothers had risen in revolt against the new Czar, and had gone forth to range themselves beneath the flag of Polish independence, so often torn down, so often raised again.
One day I learnt that my younger brother had been killed; another day I was told that my elder brother was mortally wounded; lastly, after a long 24 hours during which I listened with terror to the booming of the cannon coming constantly nearer and nearer, I beheld my father ride in with a hundred horsemen - all that was left of three thousand men under his command. He came to shut himself up in our castle, resolved, if need be, to perish buried beneath its ruins.
Fearless for himself, my father trembled at the fate that threatened me. For him death was the only penalty, for he was firmly resolved never to fall alive into the hands of his enemies: but for me slavery, dishonour, shame might be in store.
From among the hundred men left him my father chose ten, summoned the Intendent of the Estate, handed him all the gold and jewels we possessed, and remembering how, at the date of the second partition of Poland, my mother, then scarcely a child, had found unassailable refuge in the Monastery of Sahastru, situated in the heart of the Carpathian Mountains, bade him conduct me thither. The cloister which had sheltered the mother would doubtless be no less hospitable to the daughter.
Our farewells were brief, notwithstanding the fond love my father bore me. By tomorrow in all likelihood the Russians would be within sight of the castle, so that there was not a moment to lose. Hurriedly I donned a riding-habit which I was in the habit of wearing when following the hounds with my brothers. The most trusty mount in the stables was saddled for me, my father slipped his own pistols, masterpieces of the Toula gunsmiths art, into my holsters, kissed me and gave the order to start.
That night and next day we covered a score of leagues, riding up the banks of one of the nameless rivers that flow from the hills to join the Vistula. This forced march to begin with had carried us completely out of the reach of our Russian foes.
The last rays of the setting sun showed us the snowy summits of the Carpathians gleaming through the dusk. Towards the close of next day we arrived at their base, and eventually during the forenoon of the third day we found ourselves winding along a mountain gorge.
Our Carpathian hills differ widely from Western ranges, which are civilised in comparison. All that nature has to show of strange and wild and grand is seen in its completest majesty. Their storm-beaten peaks are lost in the clouds and shrouded in eternal snow; their boundless fir-woods bend over the burnished mirror of lakes that are more like seas, crystal clear waters which no keel has ever furrowed, no fisherman s net ever disturbed.
The human voice is seldom heard in these regions, and then only to raise some rude Moldavian folksong to which the cries of wild animals reply, song and cries blending together to wake the lonely echoes that seem astounded to be roused at all.
Mile after mile you travel beneath the gloomy vaults of the forest interrupted only by the unexpected marvels which the waste reveals to the wayfarer at almost every step, moving his astonishment and admiration.
Danger lurks everywhere, danger compounded of a thousand varying perils; but there is no time to be afraid, the perils are too sublime to admit of common terror. Now it is the sudden formation of cataracts owing to the melting of the ice, which, dashing down from rock to rock, unexpectedly overwhelm the narrow path the traveller is following, a path traced by the sportsman and the game he pursues; now it is the fall of trees undermined by the lapse of time, which tear up their roots from the soil and come crashing down with a sound like that of an earthquake; now it is the onrush of a hurricane which enfolds the climber in storm-clouds riven by the darting zig-zags of the lightning, writhing and coiling like a serpent.
Then, after these Alpine peaks, after these primeval forests, as you have had giant mountains and boundless woods, you next have illimitable steppes, a veritable sea with its waves and tempests, barren, rugged wastes, where the eyes wander and lose themselves on the far-distant horizon. It is not terror now that seizes the spectator, it is irresistible melancholy, a profound sadness. The look of all the countryside, far as the eye can range, is everlastingly the same. You mount only to descend again slopes that are all alike; this you do twenty times over, searching in vain for a beaten track, till finding yourself thus lost in solitude, amid pathless deserts, you deem yourself alone with nature, and your melancholy turns into despair.
Movement seems a vain thing that will advance no whit; you will meet with neither village, nor castle, nor cottage, no smallest trace of human occupation. Only now and again, adding yet another note of sadness to the dreary landscape, a little lake, bare and treeless, without reeds or rushes or brushwood, lying asleep in the bottom of a ravine like another Dead Sea, bars your way with its greenish waters, from which rise at your approach a cloud of aquatic birds uttering long discordant screams. You make a detour; you climb the hill before you, you go down into another valley, you climb another hill, and this goes on and on till finally you come to the end of the range of foothills, which grow gradually lower and lower.
But now, if you make a bend to the south, the landscape recovers all its grandeur again and you catch sight of a new range, higher and more picturesque-looking and more inviting. It is all plumed with woods, and refreshed by countless watercourses. Shade and moisture give back life to the countryside; the tinkle of the hermit s bell is heard, a caravan is seen winding along the hillside. Finally, under the dying rays of the sinking sun, you sight, looking like a covey of white birds crouched side by side, the houses of a village grouped close together to guard against nocturnal attack.
For with life, danger is there again, and it is not now, as in the first range crossed, packs of wolves and bears that are to be feared, but hordes of Moldavian robbers.
However, we drew near our destination in spite of every difficulty. Ten days constant travelling had sped without accident, and already we could make out the summit of Mount Pion, a giant a whole head taller than his fellow gi