Андрей Воронин – CURSED PRINT RUN (страница 1)
Андрей Воронин
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.