Historical Lovecraft: Tales of Horror Through Time (29 page)

RED STAR, YELLOW SIGN

Leigh Kimmel 

T
he halls of the Smolny Institute, Leningrad’s Communist Party headquarters, were quiet at such a late hour. A couple of NKVD guards maintained a bored watch at the security checkpoint. Little challenge to a man determined to avenge his honour upon that cuckold, the City’s mayor.

The sound of footsteps brought Leonid Nikolaev to full alertness. Yes, here was the man who’d made free with his wife, walking down the corridor like he had a right to everything he set his sloe eyes upon. Damnation, but the memory still stung, the humiliation of being mocked by colleagues as the rumours spread about how eagerly Milda had spread her thighs –

Nikolaev’s breath became rapid and his vision blurred. His skin crawled with filth and, although he tried to tell himself it was just because he hadn’t been able to afford to visit the bathhouse in weeks, he knew he was just whistling in the dark.

No time for distractions. Nikolaev tightened his grip on the pistol concealed in his briefcase. The cold metal focused his thoughts. He shut out memories of strange symbols and stranger creatures, of the darkness that had begun calling to him during the impossible brightness of the White Nights six months earlier.

Mayor Kirov turned the corner, still walking as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Watching the back of his rival’s neck, Nikolaev studied the pink flesh of a well-fed senior Party official. The pistol snapped up, as if of its own volition. Nikolaev hardly felt his own hand squeeze the trigger.

His clarity shattered, pistol in hand, Nikolaev stared down at the floor. Sergei Kirov, First Secretary of the Leningrad Communist Party, lay sprawled there, a thin line of blood leaking from his mouth.

“What have I done?” Nikolaev’s voice sounded weak and thin in his ears, and not just from being stunned by the pistol’s report. “Oh, what
have
I done?”

One thing he knew for certain: his life wouldn’t be worth a plugged
kopek
when the NKVD found him and nobody was going to believe he’d done it solely out of sexual jealousy. He wasn’t even sure he believed it himself.

What to do now? If he was going to end up dead anyway, wouldn’t it be better to take his own life than wait for the non-existent mercies of the NKVD? Within his mind echoed memories of voices chanting in languages he’d never learned, yet understood perfectly, telling of the joys of offering oneself and one’s victim up to Their Supremacies the Great Old Ones in an act of murder-suicide.

Nikolaev put his pistol to his own head, but before he could complete the deed, an object struck his hand and the shot went awry. Drained, physically and emotionally, Nikolaev sank bonelessly to the floor beside Kirov.

To: Leningrad Operational Center
From: R’lyeh
Date: December 1, 1934

Their Supremacies wish to remind their operatives of the absolute necessity of maintaining plausible deniability at all times. Although the growing popularity and evident ability of the Kirov human posed a long-term threat to the utility of Communism as a self-limiting tyranny to socially neuter the humans and render them harmless to the purposes of the Great Old Ones, in the short term, the careless manner in which its elimination was achieved poses a far greater risk that our activities will be exposed.

The hastily-organized trip from Moscow to Leningrad had been particularly unpleasant. As a responsible Party and government officer, Nikolai Yezhov was familiar with dropping everything to respond to a crisis.

Never had he made such a trip while grieving, furious and helpless over the murder of an admired colleague. It would’ve been an exaggeration to call Sergei Kirov a friend – the gap in their respective ages and backgrounds was simply too great to bridge at that level. But in the time that they’d worked together in the Central Committee, Yezhov had come to deeply respect Kirov. Cheerful and unassuming, the older man had never looked down upon Yezhov for his short stature or meager education, but had treated him as a comrade in every way.

And now Kirov lay dead, gunned down from behind. When the news reached Moscow, Stalin had wasted no time in calling his key staffers together for an emergency meeting. And when Stalin called, you came, even if you were just sitting down for supper with your family.

Now here Yezhov and his colleagues were in Leningrad, packed into Kirov’s office, which Stalin had made his emergency headquarters. The fury fairly rolled off Stalin in waves as he cursed the city’s NKVD chief for failing to protect Kirov, the first and finest of the Leader’s friends. Never mind that Russian was not Stalin’s native language; he showed a fine and subtle mastery of the exquisite art of Russian malediction.

And now, with a wave of Stalin’s hand, the disgraced city chief was dismissed. His colleagues didn’t even watch as he slunk away. They’d already brought the assassin forward.

The man they brought in hardly looked like a dangerous killer. Scarcely taller than Yezhov himself, Nikolaev more closely resembled a homeless person swept up from the gutter by the
militsia
for parasitism. Sunken eyes stared from an ashen, haggard face. When the city chiefs released his arms, he collapsed on his knees. Blinking like a sunstruck owl, the man stared up at Stalin.

“Wh-who are you?”

Stalin scowled. Around the room, Party officials tensed, expecting an explosion of outrage. Yezhov recalled his own first meeting with the Leader. Then he realized that Nikolaev, as a lowly functionary, would never have seen the pockmarked Georgian behind Stalin’s official image.

Yezhov grabbed Stalin’s portrait from the wall and held it before Nikolaev. “This is Comrade Stalin. He has come to investigate what has happened to Comrade Kirov.”

Nikolaev’s wailed tearfully, “What have I done? What have I done?”

Stalin leaned forward, his fierce hazel eyes fixing Nikolaev like those of a hunting tiger. “I am told that you fired the shot which killed Kirov.”

Nikolaev gulped audibly and nodded, his lips trembling too much to form words.

However, his visible distress didn’t keep Stalin from pressing the issue. “So, why did you do it?”

Nikolaev murmured, “They needed it removed.” Then he suddenly shook his head as if clearing it and spoke again, louder. “What is a man supposed to do when another man puts the horns on him?”

The second was a line fairly guaranteed to prick Stalin’s Georgian sense of familial honour. It might have actually worked, except that Stalin’s hearing was sharp enough to pick up that first, half-mumbled reply.

“Who needed what ‘removed’?” Stalin grasped Nikolaev by the front of his threadbare shirt, pulled him up to better examine him. “Was this someone in the Party, perhaps a Trotskyite or a Zinovievite mole, working on orders to do the Party harm?”

Yezhov braced for an outburst of Stalin’s notorious anti-Semitism. Having a Jewish wife had made Yezhov acutely aware of that particular hot button of Stalin’s.

But no, Stalin didn’t get a chance, for Nikolaev pointed directly at Leningrad’s deputy NKVD chief. “Why are you asking me? Ask him.”

Stalin’s swarthy features darkened as the blood went to his face. “Don’t get smart with me, you worthless little pipsqueak. Now, tell me who put you up to this crime.”

Nikolaev nodded slowly, as if unable to keep his head upright. “You yourself said –”

Stalin slapped Nikolaev across the mouth, so hard the little wretch went sprawling across the floor. “Get him out of here, now.”

The Chekists were particularly rough in dragging Nikolaev away. One of them even landed him a few blows on particularly painful places. Yet, he remained oddly insensate, as if something were not connecting properly within his mind.

Yezhov looked around at the other senior Party officials who filled the room. Had any of them noticed the peculiarity of the assassin’s behavior, the sense that he was not only not in his right mind, but that his mind might well have been tampered with in some way?

But Stalin was already calling for Nikolaev’s wife to be brought in. Interrupting the Leader was not exactly conducive to good health and long life.

To: R’lyeh
From: Leningrad Operational Center
Date: December 2, 1934

May we remind Their Supremacies that we took the normal precautions of implanting our tool with a compulsion that would ensure its self-destruction when it completed its assignment? We could not have foreseen that this compulsion would have been interrupted in its execution.

However, it appears that we will be able to divert attention to local divisions within the humans. The Stalin human is particularly obsessed with personal enmities and will pursue them beyond all rational limits. With proper direction, we will be able to use it to prune out certain problematic elements in the organization.

Even through a crackly telephone line, there was something wonderful about hearing, “I love you, Papa,” in the soft lisp of a child’s still-growing mouth. Yezhov smiled, imagining he could smell his daughter’s milk-scented hair. “I love you too, Natashenka.”

His attention interrupted, Yezhov looked up to see Agranov just outside the office door. Better get off the phone.

Agranov wasn’t quite frowning, but it was hard to miss the tightness at the corners of his lips as he said, “A little
personal
conversation, Comrade Yezhov?”

Yezhov smiled, although he doubted it really covered his embarrassment at having been found out. “I suppose it could be considered an abuse of government resources, but our daughter’s just settling in –”

“I hadn’t heard Yevgenia Solomonovna was expecting –”

Yezhov’s cheeks burned. “She wasn’t. She didn’t want her literary salon interrupted, so I took her to one of the orphanages around Moscow and we adopted a little girl.” He clamped down on the rush of words, annoyed that he’d let himself get caught by surprise. It wouldn’t do at all to blurt out how he’d picked that particular orphanage because a girlfriend of his had left a baby there a few years earlier and his wife’s desire for a child provided perfect cover to retrieve his own. Though he pointedly ignored how often Yevgenia’s literary lion-hunting ended in her bed, Yezhov avoided drawing attention to his own affairs.

Yevgenia had been a bit nonplussed that little Natasha was turning out to be quite the daddy’s girl, but was rapidly reconciling herself to this unexpected turn of affections. She’d even convinced herself that she had picked Natasha because the girl’s eyes reminded her of his own.

But there was no time to dwell upon it, not when he needed to get Agranov’s attention away from the whole matter. He made a show of brushing his hands off. “Right now, we’ve got work to do, so let’s be about it.”

Together, they walked down to the official car that waited in front of the reclaimed Smolny Institute to take them to Leningrad NKVD headquarters, where Nikolaev was being held in the investigative prison. In spite of the early hour, it was already dark. Yezhov remembered Leningrad’s winter darkness well from his own childhood, but Agranov seemed unsettled.

At least the Northern Lights were reasonably bright in compensation. Yezhov grinned at Agranov, pointing out the fact.

Except that the NKVD officer just looked up and frowned. “I don’t see them. Some skyglow from the city lights, but nothing like the stories I’ve heard about the Leningrad auroras.”

Yezhov looked up. Far overhead, titanic streamers of terrible, deep purple light shimmered, writhing into loops that reminded him of an octopus’ tentacles.

When Agranov insisted that he saw nothing except some faint wisps of cloud, Yezhov decided not to push the matter. They had orders from Stalin, to squeeze all possible information from the pathetic Nikolaev. Standing here arguing about the Northern Lights would accomplish nothing.

Still, they made the trip to NKVD headquarters in awkward silence, punctuated from time to time with uneasy attempts to discuss the case. Yezhov was actually somewhat relieved to arrive, even if it did mean having to descend into the prison levels to get to the interrogation room.

As the NKVD representative, Agranov handled the actual interrogation. Yezhov observed, his presence required because Nikolaev’s actions had reflected badly on the Party Control Commission.

It still didn’t make dealing with Nikolaev any more pleasant. When brought in, the man shook so badly he couldn’t walk without support. Nikolaev sagged into the chair like a sack of meat and bones, bereft of any animating spirit. Agranov had been pushing him hard for the last three days. Tonight, Yezhov thought the prisoner close to hysterics and more babbling nonsense.

There is definitely something wrong with that man’s mind
. Trying to distract himself from what was about to unfold yet again, Yezhov looked through some of the evidence for the case.

A battered, much-handled book was supposed to be a diary found in Nikolaev’s apartment. It detailed his developing plans for a grand political act. A blow against those he perceived as having betrayed the October Revolution? Thumbing through it, Yezhov noted the progressively-sloppier handwriting. It seemed much more a mirror of Nikolaev’s mental disintegration.

At a sudden sharp cry, Yezhov looked up and gave Agranov a frown of disapproval:
Not so hard, Comrade – Stalin wants us to squeeze him for information, not smash him to pieces
. Satisfied his message had been received, he returned his attention to the diary.

Oddly, the vocabulary changed along with the handwriting. Nikolaev was supposed to be of humble origins and minimal schooling, a former metalworker. Yezhov himself had been a voracious reader, trying to mitigate his own truncated education. But, over the last year, Nikolaev’s diary entries had begun using elevated words and phrases, difficult for Yezhov to parse without a dictionary. Why would an obsessive traitor wish to better himself through schooling. Or was it schooling?

Was this evidence the man’s mind had been tampered with? Yezhov was reluctant to mention it to Agranov, after the latter’s blind scorn about the Northern Lights. No, better to do some investigating on his own, starting with Nikolaev’s apartment. When he had incontrovertible evidence of his suspicions, facts that couldn’t be dismissed because of his personal shortcomings, then he would present it to the Party leadership.