Once again I found myself in that place, but everything was changed. The sky, trees, roads were no longer the same; the flanks of a cliff were crossed by the paths covered with honeysuckle; of the castle there remained only some ruins, and hemlock and nettles grew in the derted courtyards and the creces of the ground-floor rooms. When I passed near the tomb that had previously stood in the valley and was now no more than a few stones, the blind man was again sitting there, on a step that was still intact. He offered me a bloodstained handkerchief and said, "Bring it to the lady of the castle." I found myself seated in the ruins; the lady of the castle was at my side. We were alone. There was no sound of a voice, an echo, a rustle of branches in the field. Grasping my hands, she told me, "I have come from so far away to see you again. Listen to how my heart is beating...Listen to how my heart is beating!...Fell my forehead and my breast. Oh I am so weary, I ran so fast! I am exhausted from the long wait...It has been almost three hundred years since I last saw you."
"Three hundred years!"
"Do you not remember? We were together in this castle. But they are terrible memories! Let us not recall them."
"That would be impossible; I have forgotten them."
"You shall remember them after your death."
"When?"
"Very soon."
"When?"
"In twenty years, on the twentieth of Januray: our destinies, like our lives, cannot be reunited before that day."
"And what then?"
"Then we shall be happy; we shall realize our vows."
"Which?"
"You shall remember them in due course...you shall remember everything. Your expiation is about to end: you have passed through eleven lives before arriving at this one, which is your last. I passed through only seven; forty years have already elapsed since I completed my pilgrimage in the world. You shall complete yours after the twenty years remaining in this last life. But I cannot linger with you any longer; it is necessary for us to seperate."
"First explain this engma to me."
"That is impossible...Yet perhaps you need to understand it. Yesterday I threw his promise in his face; I restored half of it to you, those two volumes, those memoirs you wrote, those pages so full of affection...you shall have them, if that man who was then so fatal to us does not stop you from having them."
"Who?"
"Your uncle...he...the man of the valley."
"He? My uncle!"
"Yes, did you see him?"
"I saw him, and he sends you this bloodied handkerchief by me."
"It is your blood Arturo," she said, transported. "heaven be praised! He has kept his promise."
As the lady of the castle said these words, she disappeared, and I awoke terrified.
My uncle was still shut up in his apartment. As soon as he reappeared, I rushed into his rooms to get hold of those volumes, but I found only a heap of ashes: he had fed them to the flames. Yet my terror rose when I stirred the ashes and discovered several fragments that seemed written by my own hand! From the few disconnected words that remained intelligible and with a powerful exertion of my memory, I could reconstruct entire sentences that referred to the events obscurely hinted in my dreams. I could no longer doubt the truth of the revelations; and although I never succeeded in recalling all my memories to disperse the shadows that spread over those facts, it was no longer possible for me to gainsay their existence. Thelack castle was often mentioned in the fragments, which also touched briefly on the passionate love that seemed to bind me to the lady and the criminal suspicion that hung over the man of the valley. Furthermore, by a coincidence that was as singular as it was frightening, the night on which I had the dream was precisely the night of the twentieth of January: exactly twenty years, then remained until my death.
Since that day I have never forgotten the prediction; yet although I did not doubt that there was a foundation of truth in the entire collection of facts, I succeeded in persuading myself that my youth, my sensitivity, my imagination had done a great deal to cloak them with authority. My uncle, who died six years later while was away form the family, never made the smallest revelation concerning those events. I did not have any more dreams that could be considered an explanation or continuation of them; and new feelings, new concerns, new passions came to distract me from that thought, establishing a new state of affairs and a new order of ideas to banish my sad, painful worry.
It was only nineteen years later that I persuaded myself, by incontrovertible evidence, that everything I had dreamt and witnessed was real, and that consequently the prediction of my death must come true.
In the year 1849, while traveling in the north of France, I made my way down the Rhine very close to its confluence with the little River Meuse and stopped to hunt in the countryside. Wandering alone one day along the slopes of a small chain of hills, I suddenly found myself in a valley where I seemed to have been on other occasions. No sooner did I have this thought than a terrible memory cast a dull, frightneing light on my mind, and I knew that this was the valley of the castle, the theater of my dreams and my past existence. Although everything had changed, although the fields, deserted before, were now golden with grain, and what remained of the castle were only some ruins half-buried in ivy, I immediately recognized the place, and thousands of memories, never before evoked, crowded into my troubled soul at that instant.
I asked a shepherd what the ruins might be, and he replied, "They are the ruins of the black castle. Are you familiar with the legend of the black castle? Truly; there are many legends about it, and they are not told by everyone in the same way; but if you wish to know the legend as I know it, if--"
"Tell it, tell it," I interrupted him, as I sat down on the grass at his side. And from him I learned a terrible story, a story that I shall never reveal (even though others may learn it in the same way) and on the basis of which I have reconstructed the entire edifice of my previous existence.
When he finished, I was barely able to drag myself to a small nearby village, whence I was conveyed, already ill, to Wiesbaden, and here I have been laid up in bed for three months.
Today, before departing, I induced myself to revisit the ruins of the castle. It is the first day of September; six months are left until the time of my death--six months, less than ten days--since I do not doubt that I shall die on the appointed date. I have conceived the strange desire that some memory of me should remain. Seated on one of the castle stones, I endeavored to summon up all the distant circumstances of this event, and it was there that I wrote these pages in a fit of tremendous terror.
* * *
The author of these memoirs, who was my friend and a literary man of some note, continued on his journey to the interior of Germany and died on the twentieth of January in 1850, according to the prediction he received, murdered by a band of gypsies in the so-called gorges of Giessen near Freiburg.
I found these pages among his many manuscripts and published them.