Chaginsk

When three thirteen-year-old boys—Kostya Lapshin and his friend Maksim Kupriyanov—disappear without a trace in the forest, the local authorities of the district town of Chaging write it off as an accident. They got lost. They ran away. Why go back to this wilderness?

Having become an accidental witness to the tragedy, Viktor even years later cannot forget what happened.

A brave investigation brings him closer to the truth—but what price will he pay for it?

“An account that I became an unwilling witness and participant in still doesn’t let me go—almost twenty years later. Besides, the images of that strange and terrible summer are still before my eyes, and I can’t shake the feeling that they haunt me. It’s as if a ringing thread stretches behind me—the one I carelessly caught on the shore of faraway Ingir—pressing down, not letting me be, pursuing me through time in an incomprehensible way. And what happened back then stands behind me today.

It’s hard to say that those few days completely ruined my life, but it definitely tore it off its own path. In all my failures and mistakes I see the shadow of that June; in every defeat there’s the trace of that defeat; the good that could have happened but didn’t—and never will. That summer was my last summer. Since then I walk through autumn, and my paths get shorter and shorter. New days frighten me; in the steps of the passing days I hear hopelessness, and nothing can be fixed—I’ve long come to terms with that. But I want to understand.

I want to understand exactly who was behind it. And here it isn’t even about justice.

Thousands go missing in Russia every year. Some are found; others are found later. The rest are never found. What happens to those people remains a mystery. In June of 2001, I brushed up against the secret—and the secret poisoned me.

Back then, I only felt it—just for a moment. But today I’m sure: that one time in my life I encountered true evil. And it seems this evil put me through a severe test…

Eдуард Веркин’s new novel, by the well-known author of adolescent fiction and the bestselling “Island of Sakhalin,” is a magnum opus—an entire world in which our present and our past are reflected. Monsters from children’s fairy tales exist. And they go after you…”