Dream… Reality… Was it in a dream… or in real life? Sixty years ago, Marusya Petrovna saw THIS, and then remembered it her entire life. Everyone she tried to tell about what she—an eight-year-old girl—witnessed on the night of the murder of the famous illusionist and hypnotist Simon Valenti and his assistant Asya Mordashova, who were touring their city, didn’t believe her. “A child’s unhealthy fantasies,” people said then—“the ravings of a mad old woman,” they say now.
It was a terrible story. And a few months before these double murders, Mordashova’s children disappeared—a boy and a girl. Now, after all these years, the nightmare seems to be returning. What is Simon Valenti’s great-nephew doing here? Why has he settled in the remote provincial town of Dvurechensk? What is he looking for? And again, as it was then, the boy Misha Utkin disappears—and Dasha, Marusya Petrovna’s granddaughter, receives a terrifying drawing that foretells death…