The first, most terrible weeks of the Great Patriotic War. The Germans are rapidly moving east, cutting off individual formations of the Red Army from the main forces and leaving demoralized enemy soldiers in the rear. Here, in the partisan Belarusian forests remaining behind the front line, mysterious and terrible events are taking place that contradict historical materialism. It seems that fascist Germany is testing a new monstrous weapon in the occupied territories, raising the dead and endowing them with incredible strength and bloodthirstiness... The truth will have to be found out by the war correspondent Ivan Lopukhin, who was surrounded and joined the partisan detachment, the owner of a mysterious talisman, which he got from an old sorcerer in the swamps Finland.