A tall, strongly built man. Dark brown-haired with gray-blue eyes; after the hospital, Igor has grown overgrown – he has a thick beard and mustache. His distinguishing feature is his lightning-bolt-shaped eyebrows. His face is substantial but not round. He has a bulbous nose, sunken cheeks, and a low, rounded chin. He often wears a blue sweater, a brown jacket, a brown cap, and a long dark scarf. Even after the hospital, Igor keeps himself in shape – in excellent condition: he works out at home.

By nature, he is calm, although in the past he was an "explosion." Occasionally he can make a sarcastic joke. He is principled and honest. He has no superpowers, but he possesses a sharp mind, an iron will, and an intolerance for any injustice.

Igor Grom – also known as the former police major, senior operative for particularly important cases of the criminal investigation department of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region. Why former? Igor, accused of murdering the "Shadow" and his family, is dismissed from the force, declared mentally incompetent, and sent for compulsory treatment to a psychiatric clinic. Igor was not sick, he was not a murderer... but who would believe him when the label "psycho" had already been pinned on him?

The Snezhnevsky Psychiatric Clinic, under the direction of Rubinstein. He spends at least several months in the clinic, during which Rubinstein injects him with medications that cause him to remember little. All this time, he is taken to Rubinstein for sessions, during which they inject him with an experimental drug, under the influence of which Igor experiences psychedelic visions where he is attacked by distorted versions of himself. In this state, Rubinstein releases him into the hospital corridor, where Igor attacks defenseless patients. Rubinstein explains that he was trying to evoke Igor's "dark double" this way. The idea of "doubles" came to Rubinstein while observing Sergei Razumovsky's dissociative disorder. Rubinstein was obsessed with inducing "illness" in his patients, and he considered Igor an ideal candidate for experiments because he had managed to capture Razumovsky. As the final stage of therapy, Rubinstein places Igor in the clinic's basement, where three patients sit in cages – the Poet, Chrysalis, and the Fire Worshiper – whom the doctor had previously tried to evoke "dark doubles" in, but rejected as failed experiments.

Igor spends a long time in the basement, suffering from drug-induced hallucinations and listening to the ideas of his mad companions in misfortune. But one day, Chrysalis escapes from his cage and unleashes a bloody massacre in the clinic, while the Fire Worshiper starts a fire. The clinic burns down, Chrysalis dies, and Rubinstein and the Poet vanish without a trace.

When the doctor's illegal experiments come to light, Igor's case has to be reviewed. The charges against Igor are dropped due to lack of evidence, but he is not reinstated in his position. He spends some time recovering in a hospital alongside the Fire Worshiper; the latter, possessing a powerful gift of suggestion, implants himself in Igor's consciousness, instilling in him a smoking habit while simultaneously erasing all memories of himself.

After being discharged from the hospital, Igor lives on unemployment benefits. His psyche has never recovered from what happened, and he is constantly tormented by intrusive thoughts, hallucinations, and memory problems.

Igor cannot always distinguish reality from his visions, and his only routine activity is walking his dog. On these walks, Igor – torn from the life he was accustomed to – begins to notice things that ordinary people don't notice, and things he himself never noticed before. His attention is drawn to the same kind of unhappy people as himself, whom others would consider crazy – for example, lonely old women talking to themselves. Through one such old woman, Igor stumbles upon a pair of strange black realtors – Cocytus and Styx – who force elderly pensioners to sign over their apartment rights, after which they kill them with an injection that mimics a heart attack.