Kitabı oxu: «CURSED PRINT RUN»

THE CURSED PRINT RUN

A GRIPPING NOVELLA ABOUT THE PRICE OF WORDS AND FORBIDDEN CLOSENESS

Seven days left till the official release of the novel “Ink of Dead Words”. The advance copy is still warm. The ink is still wet.

Junior editor Vera Korsakova comes to the night print shop on the Fontanka to sign the acceptance papers. On page three hundred she finds a handwritten insert in violet ink. It describes her own death with frightening accuracy — today at 00:15 in the cold water of the Fontanka.

The brakes of her old Toyota really do fail. The man she has hated all these months saves her — the author himself, writing under the name Christian.

His ink is not just words. It changes reality. Every line demands payment: a memory, blood, someone else’s life. The publishing house “Slovo” knows about this and uses the magic as a perfect printing press — on blood, on deaths, on million-copy runs.

Vera can no longer stay just an editor. To survive and save those she loves she will have to take the pen herself and rewrite the ending. Even if she has to pay for it with her own memory.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1: ADVANCE COPY

CHAPTER 2. BUSINESS ON BLOOD

CHAPTER 3. HOUSE BY THE BAY

CHAPTER 4. FIRST BODY

CHAPTER 7. CANCELLATION SYNDROME

CHAPTER 8. NIGHT SCARS

CHAPTER 9. FATHER’S ARCHIVE

CHAPTER 11. FORBIDDEN ZONE

CHAPTER 12. BLACK MARKET OF LETTERS

CHAPTER 14. MASQUERADE BALL

CHAPTER 15. YOU ARE CROSSED OUT OF THE INTRIGUE

CHAPTER 16. PROOFREADING FOLLOWS US

CHAPTER 17. THE ENDING REWRITTEN BY HAND

BONUS CHAPTER. EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTIAN

CONCLUSION

AUTHOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

LEGAL NOTICE AND PUBLISHING HOUSE POLICY

INTRODUCTION

This book was born from a simple and scary question: what happens if words start coming true for real?

Not in a figurative sense. Not as a pretty metaphor. But physically — when a line written with special ink reshapes the asphalt, breaks the brakes, erases a person from the lists of the living and leaves someone else’s name on the skin.

I worked a long time in the publishing world and know too well how easily a text becomes a product and a person turns into expendable material for a nice binding. “Cursed Print Run” is the story of what happens when the magic of the word falls into the hands of those who can count only print runs and profit.

At the center is Vera, a junior editor who is used to fixing other people’s manuscripts and believing only in facts. And Christian — the author whose ink stopped being paint a long time ago. Between them is a forbidden closeness that kills faster than any hitman, and a countdown to publication that cannot be stopped by ordinary means.

This novella is not about saving the world. It is about how one person decides to rewrite their own ending, even if it means giving up memory, reason, and the right to a safe, predictable life.

If you love dark Petersburg, the smell of printer’s ink, heroes who do not know how to give up, and magic that always has a price — welcome to this print run.

The ink is still wet. The pages are already turning themselves.

CHAPTER 1: ADVANCE COPY

Seven days left until the publication of the novel “Ink of Dead Words”. The ink is still wet.

The smell of fresh printing ink digs under the skin faster than the cheap coffee from the machine, but to Vera it seemed the only honest smell in this city. At midnight, the oldest printing house in Saint Petersburg on the Fontanka embankment looked like the belly of an ancient steel monster. Heavy rotary presses thudded dully, shaking the century-old brickwork, and above her head, book spreads stretched on conveyor belts flew like endless white birds.

Vera pushed up her glasses that had slid down to the tip of her nose from the damp heat and took another sip from the plastic cup. Bitter, cloying, and completely useless. Her eyes stung from dry fatigue. For the last three weeks, she had lived on three hours of sleep a day, reading, cutting, and literally reassembling other people’s talentless texts piece by piece. At twenty-five, Vera was a junior editor at the prestigious publishing house “Slovo”, which in practice meant only one thing: all the dirty, thankless work fell to her.

Here, Vera. Straight from under the knife. Still warm, the dull voice of the old printer, Uncle Kolya, made her flinch.

He held out a hefty “brick” in a dense technical cover without a picture. It was the advance copy, the very first test print of the book that tomorrow morning was supposed to go into a hundred-thousand-copy print run. The publishing house’s main bet this season. The novel by the mysterious hermit author writing under the pseudonym “Christian”.

Vera took the book. The paper was indeed warm, almost hot, and slightly damp. The title of the manuscript, approved against her opinion, stabbed at the eye: “Ink of Dead Words”.

“Thanks, Uncle Kolya. I’ll quickly check the print quality and sign the papers.” Vera smiled tiredly, heading to a free assembly table under the bright fluorescent lamp.

Christian was the embodied nightmare of any editor. He never appeared in the office, gave no interviews, sent no synopses. His manuscripts arrived by the general director's personal courier, always printed on strange, dense paper and, for some reason, written by hand in an incredibly beautiful, calligraphic script with sharp, flying flourishes. Vera typed this text into electronic format by hand, cursing the author every night. His style was brilliant, dark, hypnotic, but Christian himself seemed to her an arrogant psychopath, reveling in his own inaccessibility.

Vera opened the book at random closer to the end to check the density of the ink fill. Page three hundred.

She slid her gaze over the evenly printed lines, and suddenly her heart skipped a beat. The air in her lungs instantly became thick and cold.

The text on the page was not set in the standard Times New Roman typeface. Right in the middle of the printed block sat a paragraph done in violet, slightly glossy ink. And this handwriting Vera would have recognized out of a thousand. These were Christian’s handwritten corrections. But that was not what frightened her.

Vera quickly read into the lines, feeling a sticky, primal horror growing inside: “…The icy rain obediently washed the dirt from the asphalt of the parking lot on the Fontanka. It was exactly 00:15. Vera came out of the heavy doors of the printing house, buttoning her coat on the move. She did not know that two minutes earlier a man in a dark coat had cut the brake hoses of her grey Toyota. She will turn the key in the ignition, press the pedal, and the car, picking up speed, will roll toward the embankment. The water in the Fontanka tonight will be dark and hungry...”

Vera recoiled from the table, almost knocking over the coffee cup. The book fell from her hands and hit the concrete floor with a dull thud, opening on that very three-hundredth page.

“What kind of idiotic jokes?” she whispered with dry lips.

The girl looked around. The presses still thundered as before. Uncle Kolya had gone to a far machine and was shouting something to his partner. Everything was the most ordinary, routine, down-to-earth.

Vera frantically pulled her phone from her trouser pocket and unlocked the screen. The clock showed 00:05. Exactly ten minutes left until the time indicated in the text.

Her pragmatic mind, nurtured by years of study at the philology faculty, desperately clung to logic. This is just a mean prank! Christian somehow found out which shift she would go to sign the print run, got into the electronic layout, and inserted this nonsense to mock her for cutting his description of Petersburg roofs by three whole pages last month. Yes, this is just the revenge of a wounded author!

But why was the ink on the page violet and three-dimensional, as if applied with a pen only a minute ago? And why did everything inside scream “Run!” at the sight of it?

Vera grabbed her bag from the chair, without even picking up the fallen book. Enough of this night for her. Tomorrow morning she will come to the office on Vasilyevsky Island, throw this copy on Mark Aristarkhovich’s desk and demand to be taken off this project.

She walked quickly toward the exit. The heavy iron door of the printing house opened with a creak, letting her out.

Outside, an icy, piercing October rain was indeed falling—exactly the kind described on the ill-fated three-hundredth page.

Vera ran through the puddles to her old grey Toyota standing alone under a dim streetlamp. Her fingers trembled so hard that she dropped the keys twice before she could open the driver’s door. She slid onto the cold seat, breathing heavily. The phone clock showed 00:12.

— Just a stupid joke — she repeated out loud, inserting the key into the ignition.

The engine purred as usual. Vera turned on the wipers, which began smearing water across the windshield with an unpleasant squeak. She shifted the gear lever, took the car off the handbrake and... out of habit, pressed the brake pedal a little harder to hold the car before driving out.

The pedal sank softly to the floor with no resistance.

Vera’s breath caught. She pressed again, and again, harder. Nothing. The brake pedal had gone to the floor. The car, pulled by the slope of the old asphalt, slowly rolled forward — straight toward the low granite curb beyond which the icy water of the Fontanka blackened. The flash of the headlights caught the dark, hungry waves of the river.

— No, no, no! — Vera screamed, yanking the handbrake, but the old cable snapped with a metallic crunch somewhere under the bottom.

The car was accelerating. The speed was low, at most twenty kilometers an hour, but the door locked from the inside would not yield, and ahead, only five meters away, waited emptiness and death. The phone clock lit up: 00:15.

Suddenly the side window exploded with a crash, showering the cabin with a thousand small shards. Cold air and the smell of wet wool hit Vera in the face. Someone’s strong hand in a black leather glove burst into the cabin, gripped the steering wheel tightly, and twisted it hard to the right.

The Toyota spun. There was a deafening scrape of metal against the granite parapet. The car jumped, hit the curb with a wheel, and with a heavy sigh stalled half a meter from the drop.

Vera sat, clutching the seat tightly, unable to move. Her heart was pounding somewhere in her ears like a crazed printing press.

The car door was yanked open from outside. In the opening stood a tall man in a thoroughly soaked black coat. The hood had fallen back, revealing sharp cheekbones as if carved from marble and tousled dark hair from which water was dripping. His eyes, deprived of any color in this darkness, burned with fury.

Christian. The author of “Ink of Dead Words”. Somehow Vera, who had never met the writer before, recognized him at once. The man was breathing heavily. Vera shifted her gaze to his hand holding the car door. The leather glove was torn, and from under it, right across the back of the hand, thin scars-letters glowing violet snaked.

Christian leaned sharply forward, grabbed Vera by the shoulders, and literally pulled her out of the cabin into the pouring rain. The tension between them was so dense you could touch it.

As if through a thickness of water, Vera heard the phrase: “You must learn about the order and the curse…” Suddenly her right wrist felt as if scorched by heat; it ached with sharp, unbearable pain. Vera lowered her gaze and cried out at the unreality of what she saw: through the layer of skin, violet letters had come through like scars.

CHAPTER 2. BUSINESS ON BLOOD

Six days left until the publication of the novel “Ink of Dead Words”. The ink is starting to thicken.

Morning sun broke through the grey Petersburg haze, but this light seemed unnaturally white, almost hospital-like. Vera sat in the back seat of a taxi, pressing her forehead to the cold side window, and watched the granite embankments floating past. Thoughts appeared and vanished, lazy and sticky; they created a whirlpool in her head, a chaos that caused physical pain. The rain had stopped, leaving behind only dampness, the smell of wet asphalt and a sticky, suffocating feeling of unreality. Christian had left at night as suddenly as he had appeared. He dissolved into the fog by the Fontanka, leaving her alone with the broken window of her old car, the jammed handbrake and the burning wrist. The letters under the skin no longer glowed with violet neon, but they ached with a dull, exhausting pain, like an old burn scar.

The city around lived its ordinary, noisy, and deeply indifferent life to other people’s troubles. People hurried to the metro stations, wrapping themselves in scarves; by the roadside kiosks it smelled of over-fried coffee and fresh pastry, at the crossroads cars lazily argued with their horns. No magic. No curses. An ordinary Petersburg morning. For a few minutes Vera even believed that the night nightmare had appeared to her because of the wild fatigue accumulated over the weeks. But the violet outline of her own name on the right hand, reliably hidden under the wide leather strap of the watch, sobered her better than any ice-cold shower. It was real.

The publishing house “Slovo” was located in the historical center, in a restored three-story mansion on Vasilevskiy Island. Inside, everything breathed that very European polish which their general director valued so much: expensive oak shelves with the company’s best releases, muted light, soft carpets that completely muffled footsteps, and the polite, barely audible hum of employees’ voices. This empire of success was built on letters.

Vera wasn't walking; she was almost running down the third-floor corridor, ignoring the greeting nods of colleagues and designers. She clenched her handbag so hard that her knuckles turned white. She needed to see Mark Aristarkhovich. Right now, before the fear completely paralyzed her will.

She pushed the heavy door of the general director’s office without knocking, breaking all possible rules of corporate etiquette.

Mark Aristarkhovich, as always impeccable, in a grey three-piece suit of individual cut and with perfectly styled grey hair, sat behind a huge table of solid dark walnut. He unhurriedly drank espresso from a tiny porcelain cup and looked through the pre-order graphs on a tablet. The office smelled pleasantly of expensive perfume, with subtle notes of fine tobacco and conditioned air.

— Verochka? — he raised a carefully plucked eyebrow in surprise, assessing her disheveled look, pale face, and bruises under the eyes. — Why aren’t you at home? Uncle Kolya already reported last night that you checked the advance copy and signed the papers. Well done, dear; the print run has already gone to the rotary presses. The book is breaking all sales records even before the official release. We will skim the cream of this season.

— Mark Aristarkhovich, stop the presses. — Vera approached the table, leaned on the lacquered surface with trembling hands, and looked the boss straight in the eyes. — This book cannot be released. It cannot be given to people at all. It is dangerous.

The director set the cup down on the saucer slowly, with a light clink. The expensive porcelain rang too warningly in the silence of the huge office. Not a shadow of fright appeared on his face, only a slight, condescending irritation with which adults usually look at capricious or overworked children.

— Dangerous? And how exactly? Has our secretive genius Christian again overdone the anatomical details in the murder scene? Vera, drop this philological snobbery. This is a high-flying thriller. The reader wants blood; he wants to feel fear, and he pays good money for it.

— It is not about the text on paper — Vera exhaled noisily, feeling how her pragmatic mind was finally surrendering under the pressure of facts. — The plot of the book comes true in reality. At night in the printing house I opened the three-hundredth page. Christian had handwritten a correction in violet ink. In it, in every detail, it was written that the brakes of my car would fail at a quarter past midnight on the Fontanka and I would fly into the river. And they really did fail, Mark Aristarkhovich! I was saved by the author himself, who came there because he himself got scared of that line.

Mark Aristarkhovich froze. For a second, his gaze turned cold, calculating, and sharp, but then he leaned back against the high leather chair and laughed quietly. His smile was warm, inviting, but his eyes remained completely dry and motionless.

— Verochka, my dear. You have overworked; you have classic burnout syndrome. Christian has a heavy, sticky style; he professionally presses on a strengthened psyche. I myself sometimes sleep with the floor lamp on after his drafts. But the brakes in an old Japanese car break because of metal wear and bad weather, not because of lines in a novel. Kovrovsky, our main city critic, has been pouring dirt on Christian in the press all week too, shouting on every corner that the author has written himself out and it is time to throw him in the dump of history. And so what? Alive, healthy, probably right now scribbling another nasty thing in his blog.

— Kovrovsky is dead, — Vera interrupted him quietly, almost soundlessly. — Look at the internal crime reports for the morning if you don’t believe me. He was found two hours ago in his own bed. He suffocated. And around the body, pages of his own scathing article were carefully scattered. This is page forty-five of Christian’s new novel. I proofread that paragraph the day before yesterday afternoon and asked the author to soften the scene. He refused.

The director’s laughter cut off instantly, as if the wire through which it came had been severed. Mark Aristarkhovich slowly stood up from the table, walked to the huge panoramic window overlooking a quiet Petersburg side street, and put his hands behind his back. The silence in the office became tangible, heavy. One could hear how, in the corner, the old floor clock with a pendulum ticked measuredly and dully. Each swing brought the deadline closer.

— You are a smart girl, Vera, — the director began, without turning his face to her. His voice had lost its former paternal softness, becoming dry, even, and frighteningly businesslike.

— And your father was a very smart man. Too smart for a simple investigative journalist. That is exactly why I took you on without experience when he disappeared without a trace five years ago.

I thought you had inherited his analytical mind, his ability to see the structure, and not a tendency to cheap mystifications and panic.

Vera flinched at the mention of her father; everything inside clenched from the old pain, but she forced herself to stand straight.

— You knew, — she exhaled, feeling a bitter lump rising to her throat. — You knew from the very beginning that Christian’s books possess this terrible power. You are using him.

Mark Aristarkhovich slowly turned. His well-groomed face no longer wore the mask of a caring mentor; before Vera stood a cynical, hard media magnate who was used to breaking other people’s lives for profit and print runs.

— I know only one thing: Christian brings this publishing house millions — he stated, taking several steps back to his table. — Forty thousand pure pre-orders have already been placed for this novel across the country. The contract with large retail chains and investors is signed. Missing the publication deadlines will destroy “Slovo” in one day. We will go under the hammer. I don’t give a damn about coincidences and your fears, Vera. The presses are working and will keep working. The book will come out exactly in a week, as planned.

— But on the three-hundredth page it is written that I will be killed at the official presentation of the novel! — Vera finally broke into a shout, frantically tearing the watch from her hand and thrusting the wrist forward. — Look at this! This is his handwriting! The ink is coming through right under my skin; it burns!

Mark indifferently slid his gaze over her hand. His pupils widened for a fraction of a second, but he immediately took hold of himself. He didn't even try to touch her wrist, as if he were panicking about getting dirty or catching an unknown disease.

— Listen to me carefully, — the director leaned over the table, resting his palms on the wood, his voice dropped to a sinister, piercing whisper. — Your father, five years ago, also tried to dig under the Order, tried to find out where Christian gets this ink and paper from. And where is he now? Shall I remind you? Do you want to repeat his fate and disappear forever from the lists of the living? You will stay on this project. You will be Christian’s personal lead editor right up to the day of the release. Your task is to control every step of his, every line this psychopath puts on paper. If you go to the police, to journalists, or try to run from the city, I will destroy your reputation and your life so that they will not even take you as a waste paper sorter at the dump. Do you understand me, Vera?

Vera looked at him and, with horror, understood: this man really would not stop. Christian’s magic for him was not a curse or a tragedy, but an ideal fail-safe printing press generating unlimited power and colossal money. On blood, on deaths — he did not care.

— You are free, — Mark Aristarkhovich demonstratively sat back in the chair and took the tablet in his hands, showing that the audience was over. — Tomorrow by two o’clock in the afternoon I expect from you a full report on the intermediate proofreading of the advertising materials for the press. And finally, tidy yourself up. You are the face of our company, not a station beggar.

Vera slowly, almost blindly, put the watch back on her hand, carefully hiding the violet brand, and, with effort, moving her disobedient legs, left the office. In the corridor, she was almost knocked down by the modest, always-stooping chief editor, dragging a huge stack of old archive documents. He slowed down, adjusted the glasses in a cheap frame that had slipped to the side, and looked at Vera with a strange, too-long and attentive gaze.

— Vera, are you all right? — he asked quietly, with some insinuating concern, glancing at her right hand. — You are unusually pale today. You know, the violet shade does not suit you at all. Right now, warmer, living colors are in fashion. Take care of yourself.

Vera was hit by an icy heat from the tips of her fingers to the crown of her head. She stepped back, frantically pressing her right hand to her chest. How does this quiet little man know about the violet color?

— Everything is fine, just a bit dizzy — she threw and almost ran toward the stairs, feeling how the luxurious walls of the old mansion were slowly beginning to squeeze around her, turning into a stone trap.

She no longer had a choice. The world around was collapsing, and the only person who knew the rules of this mad game was the gloomy hermit author. She needed to go to Christian urgently.