In August 1985, Vladimir Gerbel, a school drawing teacher from the village of Shukonskoye, located on the bank of the Dvinskaya Bay, instructed the students to make and bring figurines from the tree bark.
The presented works, of course, did not go beyond the usual children’s creativity. But one, made by Sergei Radko, attracted attention. More precisely – the material from which it was made. Matte black is certainly heavier than any bark, it had a fibrous structure, resembling a petrified tree.
Where did he come from? On the questions of the teacher the boy answered that he found a “hefty black deck” on the shore three kilometers from the village and with a knife he cut off a small piece from it.
Vladimir Gorbel, unfortunately, was not curious enough. The next day the weather deteriorated, and he decided to postpone the search for the deck until better times. But these times have not come – at least for Sergei Radko. The nine-year-old boy disappeared, and his search did not work. True, some inhabitants of the village claimed that they had seen him on the beach the day before.
A few months later, a short note on the unusual mineral appeared in the Polar Gazette, but there was no connection with the disappearance of the child. Another evidence of a strange find – this time on the pages of the district multiparty “Zaonezhye” (October, 1989):
“A team of workers of the 4th detachment of dredging works of the CRSU during the clearing of the bed of the old Ladoga hydrosystem in a layer of silty sediments discovered a pair of massive black objects with a thickness of 7 and a length of about 3 meters. Their outlines resemble rounded cylinders on both sides; The surface is strongly affected by erosion. Their artificial origin is not ruled out. ”
Over the years, similar cases were recorded in Karelia, in the Murmansk and Vologda regions, in the Komi Republic. But an ominous connection with the disappearance of people was established only in April 1995.
The reason was the disappearance of a group of fishermen in the village of Divya. Early in the morning of February 17, six men – workers of the local forestry enterprise went to ice fishing. And no one returned home the next morning. The lost for several days. Personal belongings were found on the ice, the installed gear glittered in the holes.
Around – neither wormwood nor cracks. A criminal case was opened, but the investigation practically stood still until the middle of April. When the ice shell was opened, six (!) Huge black cylinders were found at the very bottom. They were half-ruined and had considerable cavities inside.
The coincidence of the number of missing in the winter and the number of ill-fated finds was obvious. By the way, they were quickly and fairly labeled with black sarcophagi. The investigator, who was leading the case, was interested: did something like this happen in the past.
The answers were overwhelming. Of the seven documented findings of the black sarcophagus, five were accompanied by the disappearance of people! In fact, they could be more – because tourists or hunters rarely register their route.
Analysis of the material of the sarcophagi showed that their age is 240-270 years. Inside, it was possible to detect formations of biological origin. But all this helped little in answering the main question: what happened to the missing people?
Black sarcophagi again reminded of themselves in 1998. The immediate participant and witness of dramatic events remained alive thanks to a lucky chance, and his story sheds light on a mysterious story.
Nikolay Majewski was a passionate lover of underwater archeology. Being a naval officer and having good diving training, he repeatedly conducted descents in the Gulf of Finland. During one of the dives, he found a massive black object on the bottom near Primorsk, which, in his opinion, was a fragment of an old sailboat. The sailor tried to lift it to the surface.
The material of the criminal case contains a detailed story of Mayevsky about the future:
“I prepared the equipment and ducked. Soon after he left the buoy he found this long fragment, which looked like a gnawed cucumber. He lay half buried in the sand. I tied it up with a thin nylon cord, and I got up. ”
It was not possible to pull the fragment to the shore with the help of the machine. The cord slipped, and the wheels of his Moskvich were stuck in the sand. Then Maevsky decided to securely secure the fragment and raise, tied to the ends of two car cameras. To inflate them, he assumed air from a scuba tank. Memories of what happened in the next few minutes will be surprisingly clear. Although everything did not last long, Mayevsky will remember them as if he had watched the events for many hours.
“This time I grabbed the air perforator to pierce the holes for the lines. The work progressed slowly. Then it seemed to me that the surface of the wreckage was smoking, like a jet of dark steam escaping from under the drill. After I hit a real fountain … Instead of turning off the mechanism, by mistake I increased the air supply. The puncher roared. The sting of the drill cracked something deep in the depths. From the hole flew blood-stained glasses.
I jerked the puncher up. There was a muffled sound, and a large piece broke from the surface of the wreckage. Underneath it a cavity opened, from which a huge cloudy bubble burst out. Then the upper part of the human body appeared. The skin looked surprisingly white. Visibly protruded the clavicle. Below there was a huge ragged wound inflicted by a perforator. A clump of meat hung from the edges. A swirling blood trail spread in the water.
But the worst thing was the face of the prisoner in the tree of the creature. Undoubtedly, human, devoid of the slightest signs of vegetation, it was distorted by a grimace of pain and indomitable rage. The creature looked at me like a vampire from his coffin, frantically opening and closing his mouth. His gaze possessed an attractive, hypnotic power. With my left hand, I tried to push myself away from the wreckage, but the creature suddenly grabbed my wrist.
Fingers clenched with inhuman strength. I felt a sharp pain and suddenly I saw how the rubber of the wetsuit was being destroyed under the hand of the creature. Then I felt a sharp pain, like a burn. Blood rushed – already my blood, and I began to lose consciousness. And the creature pulled me closer, as if trying to absorb. With the last of my strength, I picked up the puncher, which I continued to hold with my right hand, and, having turned on, plunged into the underwater monster. ”
Maevsky remained alive, but lost his hand. According to the doctors, the damaged brush was exposed to the strongest solvent.
So who are they – creatures of black sarcophagi? The key to unraveling, perhaps, is the work of the monk Ignatius Kurlyatev, The Book of Secret Knowledge, written in 1653. The chapter “Miracles and Signs” says:
“And in order to avoid bodily distress and death, aliens are committed to a disgraceful way. Hunting people were equipped especially, stone blood was let into their veins and placed in oak trunks, thrown to the bottom … And they lived there, not dying, not days, but years … and on resurrection they needed living flesh. ”
What the author meant by “stone blood” is unknown, but it seems that in the 17th century a method of immersing a person in a border state (anabiosis) without deep cooling of tissues becomes known in Russia. Uninvited guests from the past waited for their time for a long time – almost three and a half centuries – until the storm or the current could not stand the fossilized tree trunks over the years.
However, it is possible that the mechanism of their return to life is different, but this does not change the situation as a whole. Who knows how many more black sarcophagi hide the coastal waters? And are not they related to many unexplained disappearances? After all, according to Ignaty Kurlyatev, undead needs living flesh …
