Prologue
I was about fourteen when I first experienced sonder. I cannot remember where it happened—perhaps in the school library, while I was watching the woman who worked there, or perhaps on the school bus. Sonder is the sudden realisation that every person is living a life just as deep as your own, filled with their own inner monologues, fears and dreams. It is difficult to describe the feeling itself rather than merely define the word.
It is like the sea.
When you swim near the shore, surrounded by people, or look at the water from a distance, it seems like nothing more than water, nothing more than waves. There is nothing to fear.
But the moment you swim a little farther from shore than usual—to where the water beneath you is deep enough to stack three or even four people your height, where the surface is still warm but the cold is already swallowing the tips of your toes—fear begins to creep in. You begin to feel the sea for what it truly is. You are afraid of the unknown depths, of some enormous creature that might seize your leg and drag you down. And swimming farther is more frightening still, because beyond that point, the water only grows deeper and darker.
That is sonder.
Even so, in moments like those, I preferred to stop and listen. What was happening down there, beneath the water? Could it speak? I liked feeling that fear of the unknown in every part of my body. I felt the same way around people. As long as you watch them from the shore, everything is fine. But the moment you swim a little too far out, something hidden begins to reveal itself. Not necessarily something beautiful or frightening. Just something.
As a child, I told my parents about all of this, but unfortunately they did not share my way of seeing things. To them, it was nothing more than childish make-believe, adolescent fantasy—the sort of thing that would get very much in my way when I grew up.
And perhaps they were right. I needed to grow up, get my act together and prepare for my exams. Then perhaps everything would have worked out. I would have lived a perfectly ordinary, happy life, taking joy in my children, my work and all the things people are supposed to enjoy. And deep down, that was what I wanted.
But then the voices changed everything.
No, I was not mentally ill, but I was always hearing strange voices calling me somewhere. Sometimes they belonged to people I knew. Mum, for example, calling me from the next room. Once. Then again. Then a third time. I would get up and go to her, only for her to insist that she had not called me. Then I would return to my room, sit down on the bed—and hear her call me again, more insistently this time.
Sometimes I did not go to her at all, because I knew for certain that the next room was completely empty and that I was alone in the house.
Was it frightening? At first, it was more intriguing than frightening. Then I simply grew used to it. It happened so often and, for the most part, posed no threat at all, so there was little reason to be afraid. Only one incident stood out from that familiar routine: one night, a girl who had been dead for several months called to me from the bushes beside the road. I did not go to see what was there. For the first time, I was truly terrified, and I ran as fast as I could.
Mum never took any of it seriously. She insisted that these ‘hallucinations’ were caused by too much time on the computer and would eventually pass. Dad had no time for any of it: he could be away for days at a time, working hard to provide for our family.
The only things my parents took truly seriously were religion and making absolutely certain that, God forbid, I had no contact whatsoever with our relatives who were involved in occult practices.
And we did have relatives like that: Grandma Luka, who lived on the next street, and Aunt Laura, Mum’s sister, who lived in another city and whom I had never met. Although she lived so close to us, I knew very little about Grandma Luka—only that she told fortunes. I was forbidden even to go near her house, though my parents themselves visited her quite often.
Did I find that strange? Absolutely. But what could I do? When you are a child, adults are entitled to their secrets and can explain everything away with just a few words: ‘You’ll understand when you’re older.’
On those days, I would sit alone and imagine that perhaps I had inherited some kind of ritual ability—the sort that supposedly passed from a fortune-teller to her daughter or granddaughter, even though I was neither.
I would spread fortune-telling cards out in front of me and try to discover my future. Would I have a beautiful wife? Would I become rich? Then I would experiment with mirrors, placing one opposite another and setting a candle between them, which was supposedly meant to open a portal into another dimension. Of course, it was all just a game.
I never discovered any ritual or magical abilities within myself. Instead, they seemed to find me.
One day, I was sitting at home doing my homework when I suddenly felt someone watching me. At first, I thought I was imagining it: I was home alone, the doors were locked, and the voices came so often that perhaps the sensation of being watched was simply another hallucination to go with them.
But it did not fade. On the contrary, with every passing second it grew more distinct, as though someone were standing very close by, silently studying me.
I raised my head and looked out of the window.
A beautiful young woman in a red headscarf was standing outside, staring straight at me.
I was not frightened. She looked perfectly ordinary. Even so, it was strange, and nothing like this had ever happened to me before, so I decided not to look away. It made me feel safer: as long as I could see her, I knew exactly where she was, which meant she could not slip into the house and steal something. At the time, I decided that must be what she was planning.
But the longer we stared at one another, the more my sense of control began to crumble. Suddenly, I felt as though I were floating in the middle of the largest ocean in the world—right at its centre, far from any shore, boat or other human being. Beneath me lay a depth measured in hundreds of thousands of kilometres.
I looked away.
The girl remained there for several hours before abruptly turning around and leaving. I grew uneasy. That evening, I told my parents everything, but of course they did not believe me. They assumed it was another teenage stunt meant to get their attention. I kept insisting that I was not lying, that there was something deeply strange about her, but the more I spoke, the less they believed me. Eventually, Mum promised to stay home the following day so that we could see together whether the stranger returned.
And she came back.
The next day, I saw for the first time what an adult looked like when they were truly afraid. Mum’s hands were trembling as she rushed frantically through the house, opening cupboards, pulling out clothes, books and folders, and stuffing everything into suitcases. She ordered me to do the same, although I had absolutely no idea what was happening. I had rather liked the girl outside. She really was beautiful.
A few hours later, Dad arrived, visibly shaken. By evening, the house stood empty, and we were already on our way to another city, leaving behind everything that only that morning had seemed to be our ordinary life. I kept asking where we were going and what was happening, but to them, I seemed to be nothing more than a tiny fly getting in the way while they faced some enormous threat.
From that day onwards, a great deal changed. Our new house came with rules: if anyone knocked on a window or simply stood looking in, I had to tell my parents immediately.
The new house was much more spacious. Dad finally had a study of his own, where he spent most of his time, although rarely alone. For all intents and purposes, our house had acquired several new residents: strange men who came to see Dad every day, alone or in groups of two or three.
They all dressed differently, but at least one of them would invariably arrive wearing a long coat and a black top hat, whatever the weather. Dressing like that in the summer heat seemed almost suicidal.
My dad was a police officer. He claimed that he had been given a very important assignment at work: they were hunting some international criminal, and these men were his colleagues. But he would not explain why they worked from our house rather than the police station. Or rather, he never refused outright. Instead, he invented a new ridiculous and unconvincing excuse every time—our house was safer, or it was closer for them than the station.
But I knew that police officers did not dress like that.
Once, I tried to spy on them through the partly open door of Dad’s study. They were standing around a table covered in papers, examining something intently, but they quickly spotted me and shut the door. Afterwards, Dad and I had a very serious conversation. He told me never to do anything like that again, or he would be very angry.
From then on, he always kept his study locked.
Mum, on the other hand, began to listen to me more closely. She asked what I saw and heard, and I was pleased because it seemed that she was finally taking me seriously. She was particularly interested in the voices. Every three nights, before I went to sleep, she would sit beside me on the bed and ask whether they ever said anything besides my name or urged me to do anything. But they did not. They never said anything else, and as I grew older, I heard them less and less often. I was more than happy about that.
At our new home, I was strictly forbidden to go outside alone. An adult always had to accompany me: either Mum or one of Dad’s ‘colleagues’. It frightened me and made things rather awkward. Not many children walk around town under the escort of two or three grown men, so making friends was difficult at first.
I did not attend an ordinary school either. My parents said that I would now study from home through a Christian school. All the lessons were online. I was actually pleased—what could be better for a child than not having to go to school? That was where I met my best friend, Patrick. I could talk to him for hours about anything: girls, our lessons, the voices I heard and my parents’ strange behaviour.
Patrick’s favourite subjects, meanwhile, were physics and food. He could place a bowl of soup or porridge in front of himself and calmly devour it while explaining the structure of the universe or quantum mechanics, without the slightest embarrassment at the sound of his own chewing.
Two months later, we moved again. Then again. And again.
And then they moved without me.
I was fifteen when it happened. Mum cried for a long time and begged me to understand that they had to do this. Dad maintained the affected sternness often worn by men with a military past, and he seemed genuinely convinced that I was already grown, that I was a man and therefore capable of dealing with absolutely anything.
They were sending me to spend the summer with my grandmother—the very same grandmother whose house I had been strictly forbidden to approach only a few years earlier. Did that seem strange to me? Of course it did. Did it seem strange that Mum was crying over leaving me with my own grandmother for only three months? Absolutely. But I put it down to women being overly emotional.
Grandma turned out to be a remarkably kind woman. She held Mum, comforted her and assured her that she was doing the right thing. That everything would be all right.
A month later, I learnt that my parents had been murdered.
Their badly mutilated bodies were found in one of the new houses they had moved into. Several of the men in black were found dead beside them. And all my questions died with them.
Who had we been running from all that time? Why had we been running at all? Who were the men who had practically lived beneath the same roof as us? And most importantly—who was the woman in the red headscarf?
At one point, I began to suspect that my parents had been some kind of drug lords. Or perhaps they were involved in some other serious crime. That would explain why we moved so often. It would also explain Dad’s ‘colleagues’, who kept coming to our house: ordinary criminals with whom he planned new crimes.
But it explained neither the woman in the red headscarf nor the manner in which they had all been killed.
As my father’s only relative, Grandma Luka was told every last detail by the police. She flatly refused to tell me anything, however, claiming that I was still too young. As a result, all I knew was what I had managed to overhear.
The neighbours had heard no noise. Two of Dad’s colleagues died when their hearts ruptured in the hallway, three were burned alive in the bathroom, and my parents were beaten to death with a blunt object in the living room.
Who could have done all of that?
Silently. Without witnesses. Without a fire.
It remained a mystery I wanted to solve, but at the time I had no access to police reports, no photographs from the crime scene and no adult willing to speak to me honestly.
All I had was Grandma Luka, her house and the feeling that she knew far more than she was saying.
She really was something of a witch. She earned her living by reading cards, palms, coffee grounds and God only knew what else. Clients came to see her often. They might stay for anything from a few minutes to several hours, and they always left happy and satisfied.
I asked her to teach me the craft, but after several failed attempts, we gave up. Grandma said that only women could tell fortunes.
I spent the rest of my free time online, searching for murders that had taken place under similar circumstances. But there were none. And if there had been, the police had done an excellent job of hiding the details from the prying eyes of journalists.
Whenever the grief became too much, only school and my conversations with Patrick could distract me. He could tell that I was struggling and often steered the conversation elsewhere: sometimes he would start an argument about physics, sometimes he would tell me something ridiculous, and sometimes he would simply pretend that anything could be endured as long as we talked about anything except death.
One day, our Christian school gave us an assignment to make a family tree—a large poster bearing the names of our parents, grandparents and anyone else we could remember. I do not know why, but the assignment mattered to me. Perhaps, after my parents’ deaths, I was particularly desperate to understand where I had come from and who had come before me.
I went to Grandma with my questions, but she was reluctant to discuss the subject. She claimed that Grandad had died of an illness many years earlier, that she herself had worked as a fortune-teller all her life, and that Dad had been their only son and had joined the police when he was still very young. She knew no one on Mum’s side of the family.
Once I realised that I would get nothing more out of her, I decided to search for answers myself and climbed into the attic. I had been up there before to carry boxes of rubbish at Grandma’s request, and I remembered seeing old photographs and newspaper clippings among them. Perhaps there would be something useful there.
Against the far wall lay a thick photo album filled with pictures of Grandma’s family. Settling myself as best I could on the creaking floorboards, I opened it to the first page.
The photographs were perfectly ordinary. People posed in small groups, staring solemnly into the camera or smiling awkwardly. One showed Dad, still very young, standing with his friends. Another showed Grandma at around twenty; her photograph had been labelled. After that came faces I knew absolutely nothing about.
Just an ordinary family photo album.
I chose several photographs for my family tree and was about to leave when something suddenly occurred to me: this entire album was devoted to Dad’s family. Mum must have had one of her own—somewhere up here in the attic, among the belongings that had been sent to us after her death.
I began rummaging through the old clutter and soon found the album I was looking for. It was old and worn, with faded roses on its cover. Inside were photographs of Mum as a young woman and hundreds of other people I did not recognise. Some had names written beneath them; others did not. Several of the pictures showed young men in military uniforms, taken back when they had fought against the Nazis.
Tucked between the album’s pages was another thin book with a battered dark-blue cover. It bore neither a title nor a crest—only a faded inscription in English: ‘Class of 1986’. At first, I assumed it was an ordinary school yearbook belonging to Mum and was about to put it aside, but curiosity got the better of me.
The first few pages did indeed contain photographs of pupils: captions, surnames, strict uniforms and serious faces. Nothing unusual. At least, not at first.
After that, the photographs grew stranger and stranger.
One showed a little girl sitting at a wooden table with her back to the camera. A slender candle burned in front of her, and she held one hand calmly above the flame. The fire almost touched her fingers, yet she did not even flinch, as though she could feel no pain at all.
In another, a boy stood beside the wall of an old house, looking towards the photographer. He appeared to be an ordinary boy in workman’s overalls—except for his shadow. It fell across the wooden boards behind him, but when I looked more closely, it seemed to be facing in a slightly different direction from the boy himself, as though it belonged to someone else.
The next photograph showed an elderly woman I did not recognise. She stood on a porch, smiling warmly and lifting the hem of her skirt as though she were revealing some innocent joke. But instead of human legs, a pair of large hooves protruded from beneath the fabric.
There was another girl as well. She stood against a bare wall, holding a pigeon in her hands and pressing it gently to her chest.
Then I saw a man dressed in work clothes. He stood beside an old wall, gazing somewhere past the camera. At first, the photograph seemed almost ordinary, but a moment later I realised that an enormous empty hole gaped in his head.
It was not a wound. There was no blood and no trace of disease—only a neat, impossible emptiness where part of his head should have been.
I studied the photographs for a long time, trying to understand what I was looking at. Photoshop? Back then? Some strange trick of old film? Or something for which I simply had no rational explanation?
There were many more photographs, and near the very end I found one of a young woman who looked remarkably like Mum. She stood among the other pupils, gazing off to one side as though she had wandered into the frame by accident and tried to turn away at the last possible moment. Beneath the photograph was her name: ‘Laura’.
Mum’s sister. Now, at least, I knew what she looked like.
I leant closer to examine the caption, but an old, yellowed photograph suddenly slipped out of the album and slid beneath my hand. I picked it up, absently brushed the dust away with my thumb—and froze.
A beautiful young woman with curled hair stared back at me. Her face was only vaguely familiar, but her gaze... I felt as though I could have recognised that gaze among a thousand others.
My stomach dropped.
It was as though I had once again found myself in the middle of the largest ocean in the world.
It was the same girl who had stared through my window.
I snatched up the photograph and raced downstairs to Grandma.
‘Who is she? Who is this woman?’ I demanded, pointing at the yellowed photograph with trembling hands.
‘I don’t know,’ Grandma replied casually. ‘Someone from your mother’s side of the family. I never knew any of them personally.’
I told Grandma that this was the girl who had stared through our window before we moved for the first time, and that Mum had been terrified of her. Grandma merely shrugged and said she knew nothing about it. I then brought down all the other photographs from the attic to show her, but she decided that I was playing some kind of joke and that they had all been Photoshopped.
That evening, after going to bed, I spent a long time staring at the stranger’s photograph. How had she managed not to age? If it really was her, she should have been... forty, like my mother, or sixty, or eighty—any age at all, really, but certainly not twenty or twenty-five. Or perhaps the woman I had seen that day had not been her at all, but her daughter?
Those were the thoughts running through my mind as I drifted off to sleep.
By then, two more people had joined Patrick and me—Mill and Emma. We had met through an online game and soon began talking almost every day. I told them everything: about my parents, the woman in the red headscarf and the strange book filled with photographs.
I planned to show them the photographs when we met in person, but even without seeing them, we all reached the same conclusion: I needed to find my only relative on Mum’s side of the family—Aunt Laura. If anyone knew even a fragment of the truth about my family, it was her.
As it turned out, finding her was not particularly difficult. By then, she was one of the most famous witches in England. The problem was something else. I was murdered.
