Queen of the Dark River

In March 1945, when our troops were liberating Hungary, there were events that even today cannot be given any reasonable explanation—events that cannot be understood, even though it is pure truth, everything really was just like that… A company of soldiers was quartered in an old castle belonging to a count who had fled to the West. Since it was planned to open a museum there, the company commander, Kirill Kondrashin, was strictly ordered to preserve all the cultural treasures of the castle, and especially two old paintings: a sunny landscape with a hunting lodge and a portrait of an astonishingly beautiful young woman. Closer to midnight, when the company was already preparing to sleep in the cozy count’s bedroom where those especially valuable canvases hung, something inexplicable began to happen.

Probably it was all due to the silver crucifix and the medallion mounted on the frames of the paintings. They restrained unknown forces ready to burst out of the paintings. And once you removed them, the invisible boundary separating centuries disappeared…

The author, when he was still a child, often listened to stories from his father, Alexander Bushkov the elder, a participant in the Great Patriotic War—and the boy’s imagination carried him into strange, uncharted worlds filled with wonders, sorcerers, and all sorts of devilment. And much of what he heard—what astonished and delighted him to the extreme—later became the foundation of his books in the “Unknown” series.