RED STAR, YELLOW SIGN

Leigh Kimmel 

The 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.

To: Leningrad Operational Center
From: R’lyeh
Date: December 5, 1934

How can you have been so incompetent as to have allowed the humans’ investigative agencies to locate materials which your ill-chosen and poorly-conditioned tool produced? Already, one of these insufferable creatures has become suspicious and is beginning to look in directions difficult to conceal.

It is absolutely essential that this Yezhov human be neutralized in such a way that involves no mental manipulation, nothing that might arouse further suspicion. It is not sufficient to kill it. Its reputation among its kind must be completely and irrevocably demolished to the point that no one will dare question its fate.

Yezhov knew his old hometown well enough to navigate it in the middle of the night. The Party might look dimly upon a respected member investigating the icy streets and dim buildings without a bodyguard. Especially now, given Kirov’s death and fears of other assassins. But Yezhov suspected his search would be impossible with a strong official escort.

The building housing Nikolaev’s apartment wasn’t that different from the ones Yezhov recalled from his own childhood. Though the city had been the Imperial capital then, the air still reeked of boiled cabbage. The same domestic quarrels still filtered through the closed doors.

The Nikolaevs’ apartment was quiet. The adults were in custody, as suspected accomplices, and the children in one of the special orphanages for children of Enemies of the People. Though the NKVD had hastily searched the place, the officers would’ve been looking for mundane conspiracy clues. Not hints of interference from mysterious entities that could turn a Party man into whimpering mush.

Removing the NKVD wax seal from the door wasn’t precisely normal procedure. But a senior official of the Party Control Commission had wide operational latitude, especially within such an investigation: the murder of the Leningrad Party chief by a disgraced Party member. Still, Yezhov lifted the seal without damaging it. It would be far easier to replace it later, than to acquire another one.

With a creak, the door opened into profound darkness. When Yezhov’s eyes adjusted, he located a light switch. A single bulb cast only a meager reddish glow upon the chambers within. More evidence of the financial turmoil mentioned in Nikolaev’s dairy, amid his confused ramblings about noble heroes and grand blows against the Revolution’s betrayers.

Still, it was sufficient to allow Yezhov to navigate his way through the battered furniture, to look in the various cupboards and drawers for anything out of place. To be sure, the place was somewhat better furnished than those of his childhood, simply because its occupants had been Party members and thus, able to avail themselves of such luxuries as shelves on which to put the volumes of instructional materials they’d accumulated.

He was so busy looking behind and through all those bound volumes for hidden papers that he almost didn’t notice the figurine which had fallen behind the shelving unit. He put his hand down to steady himself while looking at the bottom shelf and suddenly felt something hard and knobby under his fingers. Startled, he pulled it out to take a closer look and immediately wondered what could have possibly struck Nikolaev as attractive about this grotesque creature, like a bat-winged man with staring eyes and a beard of squidlike tentacles.

Unless it was placed here by whoever had tampered with his mind, perhaps as a reminder of their power. No doubt, the NKVD would have seen nothing significant about it and probably never even noticed they had knocked it off its perch during their investigations.

Examining it more closely, Yezhov noticed a peculiar design repeated around its base, a symbol like a twisting, writhing trefoil picked out in yellow paint. Just looking at it made his stomach nauseous and his eyes twitch away. Yes, most definitely some kind of tool of control, but of whom and from where?

Whom could he consult about it, let alone entrust with further investigation? Not Agranov, who clearly despised him. Had Agranov not seen the Northern Lights? Or was Agranov part of a larger plot, one connecting this nasty little figurine with the mysterious and unearthly display in the sky?

Yezhov dropped the figurine into his pocket. Yes, he’d been right to carry out his own investigation. He’d track this filth to its source, reveal to the Party an infection of unimaginable horror and scope. The Party would act to save itself, and reveal its true heroism to the human race.

He barely remembered to replace the NKVD’s wax seal on the apartment door before he left, taking the steps down to the street two at a time in his haste. Overhead, the sky was alive with light. Rising from the neon gloom of Leningrad’s sky-glow, the great streamers of light flashed with frantic intensity like some unearthly creature signalling a desperate message across the sky.

That disturbing light forced Yezhov to avert his eyes from the sky. Looking down, he noticed a mark on a storm-drain grating. The faint mark seemed scratched into the metal, but he was certain the same symbol twisted around the figurine’s base.

Some people liked to claim that the city’s sewer system went all the way back to its founding by Peter the Great, but Yezhov had clear memories of districts without proper sewer service when he’d been growing up. If something unearthly had infiltrated the USSR and was using Party members for its own nefarious purposes, the construction of Leningrad’s modern sewer system would have afforded a perfect cover for the establishment of its base of operations.

Getting the grate pried up without attracting attention to himself wasn’t easy, but he still remembered some tricks from his youth. However, he soon realized he wasn’t as young as he felt. Things that had come easy to a junior metalworker weren’t so trivial to a senior official softened by a decade of Party privilege.

The stench made Yezhov wrinkle his nose. Comfortable living had weakened him in other ways, as well. Only resolve enabled him to push his way in. This business could not be left to fester.

The sound of his footsteps on the access ledge echoed and re-echoed, mixing with the babble of effluent flowing and hitting splashblocks, creating a confusing tangle of noise. More than once, he had to stop and just listen, trying to sort out the various sounds, to recognize anything that didn’t belong.

Yezhov was beginning to wonder if he’d come on a fool’s errand when something he half-saw in the corner of his eye tickled at his awareness. He turned to get a better look, yet found it oddly difficult to focus upon it.

Just like the symbol repeated endlessly upon the figurine in Nikolaev’s apartment. Yezhov focused directly on the bricks and, by force of will, closely examined the delicate lines traced there in yellow paint. By examining only a portion at a time, he was able to see enough to feel confident that yes, he was looking at that same symbol.

At the knowledge that he had to be very close to his quarry’s lair, Yezhov’s heart began to pound. He had to pause to calm himself, to think clearly. He had to think of a way to reliably locate that mysterious yellow sign when it was all he could do to look at it.

It took a little trial and error to discover that his peripheral vision was actually a more reliable way of detecting a sign. Each time he got that twitchy feeling, he would look just enough to confirm that yes, the yellow sign was indeed painted there, and then move forward in search of the next one.

Ahead came a sharp sound, not a splash but a sucking, like something soft being pushed or drawn through an opening too narrow for it to pass easily. The back of his neck prickled and he flattened himself against the filthy wall, looking ahead for whatever had made it.

In the dim light of the purplish fungi that clustered on the walls, Yezhov was able to get only a confused impression of vast eyes like glowing saucers, surrounded by a mass of squirming tentacles patterned in colours that shifted and shimmered before his eyes. He unholstered his pistol. Aim at the eyes. The brain should be right behind it.

The first shot went wild, ricocheting off the wall with a shower of sparks astonishingly bright to his dark-adapted eyes. He advanced the next chamber, fired. The monster emitted a horrific scream that brought bile to the back of Yezhov’s throat and the thing thrashed its tentacles, sending raw sewage spraying in all directions.

Yezhov fought the urge to flinch, forced himself to keep firing until the hammer clicked onto an empty chamber. He’d failed to bring additional rounds, a lapse that would now cost him his life.

Filled with dread, Yezhov slowly realized he heard human voices now, instead of the keening of that hideous monstrosity. His knees went weak with relief.

Yezhov shouted over his shoulder, “It’s down here. I think I’ve wounded it.”

And then he was joined by two young NKVD men, both armed. When the first one’s pistol shots located the creature, the second raised a tube to his shoulder and fired a device that filled the tunnel with a trail of brilliant light. Its projectile slammed into the tentacled nightmare, which dissolved into a ball of fire. Moments later, there was nothing left but a foul, burning stench.

One of the NKVD men looked at him. “Comrade Yezhov, that was very foolish of you, trying to take on a Lloigor by yourself.”

They believe. They understand. “So, that’s what that thing was. I presume it left that symbol.” Yezhov gestured vaguely in the direction of the Yellow Sign marked upon the nearby wall.

The NKVD officer nodded. “Yes, it’s one of servants of the Ancient Power Beyond the Stars.”

“And it’s what was controlling Nikolaev, setting him on Kirov?”

That got an even more energetic nod from the NKVD man, whose eyes seemed unnaturally bright in the stygian gloom. “Exactly. We’ve destroyed the puppet master, but its dupes and servants are scattered throughout the USSR. Nobody can be safe until we’ve rooted out all of them, everywhere.”

Yezhov gestured back the way they had come. “Then there’s no further purpose in remaining down here. We’ve got work to do, and we’d best be about it.”

To: R’lyeh
From: Leningrad Operational Center
Date: December 6, 1934

Inform Their Supremacies the matter has been successfully resolved. The attention of the Yezhov human, which had apprehended at least some part of our true nature, has been deflected, albeit with the sacrifice of one of our number. It will now be a simple matter to convince the Yezhov human to take command of the punitive organs of the USSR and carry out a vast extermination program, believing that it is thus eliminating the remaining agents of Their Supremacies. Because it will act of its own free will, based upon our disinformation and not from any compulsion on our part, it will be remembered for a thousand years as one of the greatest monsters of history. Any human who may uncover any hint of our involvement in the matter will not dare to speak of the matter, lest it, too, be condemned by its fellows as an apologist for mass murder, a moral monster of the worst sort.

Nikolaev went to his death in the same squalid, pitiful manner he’d lived his life, protesting a confused innocence. Yezhov noted the number of senior officials, tasked with the investigation, who found convenient ways to absent themselves from the execution.

Yezhov himself wanted to be elsewhere. Only a substantial bracer of strong drink let him endure the sight of that pathetic little man being led to his doom. There could be no other way. Yezhov wanted his daughter to grow up proud of a father who did not shirk even the unpleasant parts of duty to Party and State.

Now it was time to complete what had been started here, to extirpate, root and branch, the foul influence of the tentacled nightmare he’d encountered beneath the streets of Leningrad. Of course, nobody would ever believe a story about an ancient monstrosity from beyond the stars, so it must be phrased in terms that Stalin and the other senior officials of Party and government would understand, of a Trotskyite-Zinovievite conspiracy of wreckers and assassins. But, in the end, the effect would be the same: the cleansing of the sacred Motherland of a power that could destroy it.

Leigh Kimmel lives in Indianapolis, Indiana, where she is a bookseller and web designer. She has degrees in history and in Russian language and literature. Her stories have been published in Black October, Beyond the Last Star and Every Day Fiction. Leigh is working on a novel.

The author speaks: “Red Star, Yellow Sign” was inspired by my study of Russian history. Historians have called the Kirov murder “the mystery of the century” because of the many questions surrounding it: Did Stalin order the killing? Did Nikolaev have protection at high levels? Did Nikolaev even pull the trigger, or was he a patsy for an NKVD assassin? Thus, it seemed natural to ask, What if ancient eldritch entities had interfered in this critical moment of history?