CURSED PRINT RUN

The bus stopped at a leaning stop, and Vera stepped out into the damp emptiness that smelled of rotten pine needles and salt. The fog here was so thick that it seemed tangible. It settled on her face in fine drops of moisture, making her shrink from the piercing wind.

She walked along a narrow sandy path, guided only by the dull, measured sound of the surf somewhere ahead. At last, out of the grey veil, the outlines of a massive fence of black bog oak appeared, and behind it — the mansion itself. The house in the northern modern style looked both majestic and frightening. Sharp roof spires rose straight into the low sky, the stone foundation was overgrown with dark-green moss, and the narrow, elongated windows on the first floor were tightly curtained with heavy drapes—no signs of life. The house would have seemed an uninhabited crypt if not for a thin wisp of grey smoke lazily rising from the high brick chimney.

Vera approached the heavy forged gate and pulled the steel ring. A sharp, rusty scrape sounded. She took a deep breath, trying to put back on the mask of a self-confident professional, and walked along the stone path to the porch.

She did not have to knock. The heavy oak door opened by itself; from the depths of the house came a sigh of the parquet boards. Inside, a semi-darkness reigned, diluted only by the weak amber glow of old lamps. A dense, unusual aroma hung in the air: the smell of old archives where rare folios have been stored for centuries: bitter cedar, dried herbs, and a sharp, metallic taste of iodine.

— You are persistent, editor. That is your main virtue and your most dangerous vice— a dull, slightly hoarse voice came from the depth of the spacious hall.

Christian sat in a deep armchair by the huge fireplace, where birch logs lazily crackled. He wore a simple black high-neck sweater that emphasized his sickly pallor and sharp cheekbones. The windows behind his back looked straight out onto the seething Gulf of Finland, and it seemed that the huge grey waves were beating right against the walls of the house.

— Mark Aristarkhovich refused to stop the print run. — Vera walked forward without waiting for an invitation and, with a dull thud, set the briefcase down on the low coffee table. — He threatened me. Said that if I tried to leave, he would destroy me the same way he destroyed my father five years ago.

Christian slowly raised his head. In the semi-darkness, his eyes seemed completely black, without pupils. He cast a glance at her right hand, on which Vera was fidgeting with the strap of the watch.

— Mark is only a trader, — the author smirked cynically, and in his voice sounded the fatigue of a man who had not slept for too long. — He knows how to count only numbers and profit. For him, our lives are expendable material for a beautiful binding. Why did you come here, Vera? I clearly told you at night: leave. Staying away from me is the only way you'll live until Monday.

— You promised that we would find the one who rewrote the ending. — Vera took a step forward; her voice grew stronger; the pragmatism of the philologist demanded answers. — I do not know how to run, Christian. I am used to working with text. If this damned book cannot be stopped, then we must edit it. Change the plot. Cross out the scene of my death.

Christian stood up sharply. He was tall and angular, and his movements held a hidden, dangerous strength. He approached the table, took one of the pages of the manuscript, and looked at Vera with gloomy superiority.

— Edit? — he repeated quietly, stepping closer to her step by step. — You think this is ordinary paper waste that can be reshaped at your will for a happy ending? You do not understand the nature of this ink.

He stretched out his palms. In the uneven light of the fireplace, Vera clearly saw that all the skin on his fingers was cut with thin, deep scars of violet color. They formed chaotic, frightening patterns that looked like scraps of ancient words.

— The magic of the text does not come from nowhere — Christian spoke quietly, but each of his words sounded in the silence of the room sharply and heavily, as if someone was striking an old bell. — Every change of reality requires an equivalent exchange. The paper must absorb an emotion, pain, or a memory. Want to see how it really works? How your logic will crumble to dust?

He turned sharply, went to the work desk on which stood a heavy crystal ink well with thick violet liquid, and took a long silver pen. Christian pulled a clean sheet of paper from the drawer, yellowed with time.

— Recall something very important to you, Vera. Something that defines you as a person. Your brightest, lightest memory from youth— he ordered without turning around.

Vera hesitated for a second, but under his hypnotic gaze she gave in.

— My graduation at the university, — she said quietly. — Father was still with me then. He gave me his grandfather's old fountain pen and said I would become the best critic in this country. I remember that day down to the smallest details: the smell of lilac by the main building, the taste of champagne, the color of his old jacket...

Christian quickly wrote several words on the paper with a sharp scrape of the pen. Vera watched spellbound as the violet lines instantly soaked into the dry surface of the sheet, as if going deep into the structure.

Then Christian took a match, struck it against the box, and brought the flame to the corner of the sheet. The paper flared up instantly, but the flame was not orange; it was cold, violet. It left no grey ash behind — the sheet disappeared into the air, dissolving without a trace.

At the same second, Vera felt as if struck by an electric current. Inside her head, something cracked like fragile glass. For a moment, black circles swam before her eyes.

— What... what did you do? — she whispered, grabbing the edge of the table with her hand. Suddenly she realized that an enormous empty hole had formed in her thoughts. She remembered studying at the university, remembered the graduation, but her father's face, his words, the gift—all of it had been erased, turning into a faceless grey haze. The memory had disappeared physically.

— I crossed that day out of your life. — Christian carefully put the silver pen back into the stand and turned to her. In his eyes there was no triumph, only deep, endless sorrow. — Every word written with this ink and destroyed erases a part of reality. Now do you understand? If we try to cross out the scene of your death at the presentation, reality will demand a payment. And that payment may become your personality, your reason, or the lives of hundreds of people who happen to be nearby. The text cannot simply be rewritten. It must be deciphered. We need to find the one who holds the second pen before the ink in the print run finally dries.

Vera stood, unable to hold back the tears that rolled down her pale cheeks. The logical, pragmatic world in which she had so long hidden from the pain after her father’s disappearance had finally collapsed, leaving her defenseless before the face of an ancient, merciless force.

CHAPTER 4. FIRST BODY

Four days left until the publication of the novel “Ink of Dead Words”. The violet paint smells acrid.

The awakening was sharp, as if from a physical push to the chest. Vera opened her eyes and for several seconds stared motionless at the high ceiling, lost in the semi-darkness, finished with heavy beams of dark bog oak. For a moment it seemed to her that she was still in the cabin of her car falling into the Fontanka, but the measured, sleepy crackle of the birch logs burning out in the fireplace brought her back to reality.

She did not remember how she had fallen asleep right here, in the deep leather armchair of the living room of the mansion in Komarovo. Christian had wrapped her in a heavy woolen blanket that now smelled of smoke and dry pine needles. The icy storm rain no longer beat against the huge panoramic windows, but the grey Baltic fog behind the glass had grown so thick it erased the border between the earth, the black pines, and the Gulf of Finland. The world around had frozen, turning into a soundless grey haze.

Vera carefully lowered her feet onto the cold parquet and grimaced: the right wrist under the watch's leather strap ached again with a dull, exhausting pain. She unfastened the buckle and examined the hand. The violet letters of her own name that had come through under the tender skin at night had become clearer and darker, as if Christian’s oily ink had taken root for good in her capillaries. They pulsed in time with the beating of the heart.

— You slept a long time. The body was trying to compensate for what I took from it— Christian’s quiet, slightly hoarse voice made her flinch.

The author stood at the kitchen island with his back to her. He still wore the same black things — a loose high-neck sweater and crumpled trousers. He was methodically pouring thick black tea into a solid ceramic mug, and fragrant steam with notes of thyme and wild mint rose above the table. Christian turned, came up, and held the mug out to her. Vera, hesitating for a second, took it. Their fingers touched for a moment, and a strange, almost frightening wave of dry, clean warmth washed over her, from which the letters on the wrist weakly responded for a second with a violet flash.

She hastily stepped back, sitting down again in the armchair and pressing her palms to the warm ceramic. The rule of the forbidden zone that they had established at night worked with a creak: his physical presence in this room, isolated by the fog, was felt too sharply. Every movement of Christian, the sharp break of his cheekbones in the semi-darkness, the smell of cedar coming from his clothes — all of this knocked the ground out from under Vera’s feet more strongly than the collapsing world of rational facts.

— We need to work, — Vera took a sip of the scalding tea, trying to make her voice sound as collected and professional as possible. — Yesterday at the publishing house, before my trip to the printing house, Mark Aristarkhovich mentioned Kovrovsky—our main city critic. Mark laughed and said that Kovrovsky was alive and well despite his scathing articles in the press. But I clearly remember that in your draft, on page forty-five, you described his suffocation in detail, down to the smallest physiological details. We need to check the city news.

Christian did not answer. He silently approached the low wooden table, took an old remote and switched on the liquid-crystal television fixed on the wall among the bookshelves. The screen blinked a couple of times, spitting out grey stripes of interference because of the poor connection in the remote forest, but then caught the local Petersburg channel.

On the screen, against the background of a gloomy grey apartment building on the Petrograd Side, stood a young journalist in a thoroughly soaked raincoat. The wind tousled her hair, and her face was pale from excitement. In the background, cutting through the fog, the blue-red beacons of two ambulances and a police van flashed anxiously. The cameraman caught a frame: orderlies were rolling a black plastic stretcher out of the entrance.

“...Tragedy on Bolshoy Prospekt, — the girl spoke quickly and agitatedly, pressing the microphone to her blueing lips. — Today around six o’clock in the morning the well-known literary critic and publicist Anatoly Kovrovsky was found dead in his apartment. According to preliminary data of the investigation, death occurred as a result of an acute attack of asphyxia. Experts speak of a rare, lightning form of pulmonary edema. Yet, the attention of the operatives was drawn by a frightening detail: the entire bedroom of the deceased was literally filled with printed sheets of his last scathing article, and on the lips and face of the man there remained a deposit of an unknown violet pigment of chemical origin...”

Christian pressed the button sharply, and the screen went out with a dry click, leaving behind only the quiet, monotonous hum of the old kinescope.

Vera slowly set the mug down on the table. The tea inside it trembled finely. Her pragmatic world, built on philological facts, quotations, and logic, had finally flown to pieces. The documentary accuracy she had so valued had now turned against her. The situation had gone out of control.

— This is page forty-five — she whispered, feeling icy sweat come out on her back. — Exactly. Down to the last word. Kovrovsky wrote a disgusting review of your previous novel, accused you of charlatanism, and someone... someone took revenge on him with your own text.

She turned sharply to Christian, and in her eyes, despite the forbidden zone, a spark of the former desperate suspicion flared up again.

— Was it you? Answer me honestly, Christian. Without your pathos and riddles. Did you write that paragraph? Did you set your ink on him because of a wounded ego?

The author did not stir. He slowly raised his palms, turning those scars upward, right under the dim light of the fluorescent lamp. Vera saw with frightening clarity that the thin violet lines on his skin had swollen, become inflamed, and that dark droplets of lymph had come from several deep scars at the bases of his fingers. His fingers trembled noticeably, as if from strong hypothermia or a cramp.