Beside her, Alexey lay fast asleep on his side, one arm flung out of the covers. The room was very quiet, very still, and the moonlight came in at the window. For an instant, in the strange stillness, Helen couldn’t shake off the feeling that her dream was like Olga Feshina’s vision – that it was saying something vital, which she must understand.
But it was only for an instant, for she wasn’t quite awake; and before she even knew it, she was asleep again, and when she next woke, it was bright morning and Alexey was bringing her a cup of tea. She hadn’t forgotten the dream. But in the light of day everything had taken its proper place again, and she knew that it was just a dream, a vivid and symbolic one, sure, most likely brought on by a memory of Alexey saying his grandfather was a lost soul. But nothing like Olga Feshina’s vision at all.
So she didn’t tell Alexey about it, because it didn’t seem important, and as the day wore on and they scrolled their way carefully through pages and pages of information about Gulag prisoners on the Internet, she completely forgot about it. After the frustrating experience yesterday, they’d decided to narrow the search down only to persons accused of the kind of “crime” Lev Kirov had gone down for – not so much politicals or even “anti-socials”, but those accused of “mysticism and occultism”. It seemed a more fruitful line of inquiry in view of the fact the killer was most likely a member of the psychic community in one way or the other, and possibly had inherited the ability from a family member. But it was pointless. There was practically no information available on those kinds of prisoners. On Google books they found reference to a book called The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, and were able to consult some of its pages, but though there were a few references to people being imprisoned for “mysticism and occultism” and possessing banned texts of that nature, there were no actual names named.
They took a welcome break for sandwiches and coffee, fed up of the endless, tedious trawling. The unexpected thing about doing this research though, Helen thought, was that, tiring as it was, the sheer volume of it was enough to muffle the horror of what they were looking for, and enough, almost, to stifle the nagging feeling of unease that they were missing something important, something that was in plain sight and yet invisible. And then Alexey had his idea.
“We need to go at it from a different direction,” he said. “It’s hard for us to really dig properly into the past, just on the Internet, because most of that stuff must be still secret, or no one’s transcribed it – but what about the present?”
“What do you mean? To look at prisoners now?”
“No, no. Instead of the identity of the criminal, maybe we need to focus on their method. See, Lev Kirov was killed by pushing him down the Metro escalator – so that must have been spur of the moment – but the deaths of my father and the others were carefully planned. Nobody knows how it was done. There are such things as untraceable poison – like an injection of potassium chloride which in solution can bring on a heart attack – but I’m sure that was thought of already. But if we’re right about the killer – about them having some kind of psychic talent, I mean – then – maybe that’s how they did it.”
Helen felt the frightening implication drop coldly into her veins. “You mean – they devised some kind of psychic murder method?”
“Yes. It might also …” He paused, as though the words were difficult to bring out. “It might explain how – why – they got close to my father and his partners.”
She stared at him, trying to understand.
He went on, “Let’s say Maxim’s right and Koldun was not a work unit but the development of some kind of device to enhance psychic power. What if, in fact, the device they were developing was a … a weapon, based on an enhancement of the most dangerous kind of psychic power – killing from a distance?”
Helen shivered, as much from the haunted look in his eyes as the vile prospect that his words opened. At such moments, it felt as though he was retreating from her into a nightmare world she couldn’t reach, and it chilled her to the bone. She faltered, “But is that even possible? I’ve heard of people pointing the bone. And curses. But you have to believe in that sort of thing for it to have any effect, don’t you?”
“Yes. And my father wouldn’t have been interested in something as traditional and erratic as that.” His fingers raced across the keyboard, putting in the search term “murder by psychic means”. Up came a whole lot of stuff, most of it about psychics helping police in murder cases, but there were a few pages canvassing the possibility of psychic murder itself. And then they found a website which had a section on what was called “psychic self-defense”, which mentioned three possible methods of psychic murder: a sorcerer’s curse; a desperate energy vampire’s hunger (though that was described as manslaughter rather than deliberate murder); and the skills of a psychic skilled in psychokinesis, or telekinesis as some people called it. The writer went on to say, “in psychokinesis, which literally means ‘mind-motion’, the psychic uses his or her mind to move objects or physically interfere with them in some way. Repressed emotion is often at the base of psychokinetic power: these psychics usually have powerful emotions, rigidly controlled, building into a vast energy that can literally bend reality. Such a person might be able to interfere with the electrical workings of the heart. A famous case in the ’50s and ’60s was that of the Russian psychic Nina Kulagina. In a famous experiment, she showed she could stop and restart a frog’s heart, by the power of her mind. So why not people’s? In fact, Kulagina herself had given a hostile psychiatrist who did not believe in her powers a real fright one day by doing just such a thing, proving that it was possible. But what if the psychic had no intention of restarting the heart? Then it would be murder, plain and simple – and completely undetectable by ordinary means.”
There was no more about heart-stopping experiments on that site, but plenty of Google hits for Nina Kulagina. And a YouTube clip of that “famous experiment” with the frog.
They clicked through to watch it, and as the clip rolled on, Helen’s skin goose-fleshed, nausea roiled in her belly, her throat seemed to close up. For the grainy black and white video of the dumpy woman in her dowdy clothes and bun staring at the hapless frog, and it struggling then falling over, reminded her horribly of something else she’d seen recently.
Alexey was pale. She knew he was thinking, feeling, the same thing. She took his hand. He held on to it so hard that later she could still feel the pressure of his fingers against hers. When the clip ended, he said, very quietly, “You said … that video on the card – the one you deleted – it might not be something Dad had … done. What if – what if it was the record of a testing session they made? A test of a psychic who later …” He broke off.
She swallowed. “Do you think this person is related to Nina Kulagina?”
“No,” he said, more strongly. “Her profile doesn’t fit. You saw what it said in those pieces. Not only wasn’t she harassed or persecuted, she was accepted. Rewarded, even, by the government. No. I don’t think it’s anything to do with Nina Kulagina. It’s just someone like her. Who has the same abilities.”
But now Helen started seeing the flaws in the theory. “If your father and his friends had tested this – this person – and they knew that they could kill a sparrow like that – could stop its heart like that Kulagina woman stopped that frog’s,” she said, “then surely they’d have been really careful! And when his partners started dying, your father would have suspected who’d done it. He wouldn’t have been fooled. He’d have gone to the police, surely, told Serebrov. Or at least tried to track them down.”
“Yes, but he might not have been able to find them.”
“Still, he wouldn’t just wait till they got to him, would he? He’d have done something. And remember what it said about Kulagina. She was utterly drained by the effort of the frog thing. And the frog was tiny. If you tried to kill a person that way – imagine the vast amount of psychic energy you’d need. You’d probably put so much
strain on yourself you’d run the risk of triggering off your own heart attack first …”
He looked at her, the color returning to his face. “That’s true. Oh, you’re right, it’s not possible. It doesn’t fit with Dad’s character at all. Unless he was – hypnotized or something. And I can’t see that happening. Not for a minute. Besides, he drowned, and so did the others.”
Paradoxically, she now felt uneasy. Were they being too hasty in discounting the idea? “We should check it out anyway, Alexey. I mean, the video. See if – if there’s any record of anything like it.”
He didn’t say anything so she just entered in the search “sparrow death psychokinesis” first on YouTube – bringing up nothing – then on Google, going more general with “bird heart psychokinesis” and trying out different search terms but not coming up with anything that resembled what they’d seen. So she tried broader terms, such as “Russian psychic experiments” and “Russian animal psychic experiments”. Various things came up, mostly to do with measuring the psychic abilities of animals, or using animals in weird experiments. There were even a few about Ivanov’s experiments with apes and humans in Stalinist times, which Irina had mentioned, and one passing reference to Antonov’s bear project. But that was all. The sparrow video had certainly left no traces on the Internet – but then, why should it? If it was part of Trinity’s ultra-secret project, then it would hardly be in the public domain in any shape or form. And though they’d googled the Koldun project more than once, in several permutations, unsurprisingly there wasn’t a single reference to it on the Internet at all. The Trinity partners would hardly have gone to the trouble of encoding files and then allowed their project to be splashed into cyberspace by some Wikileaks clone.
I shouldn’t have deleted the video, Helen thought. Yes, it seemed like the right thing to do at the time, and yes, there was no person pictured in the video, but perhaps there might have been some other clue. We might have been able to enlarge the pictures, see if anything in the room could be identified, for instance. But now we have nothing and we’re stuck – and someone out there might have the ability to stop people’s hearts.
Because even though she’d tried to persuade herself and Alexey that it was a nightmare story to keep them awake at night, deep down she wasn’t so sure. And all at once she’d had more than enough. “I need to get out, get some fresh air,” she said, getting up.
“Yes,” he said, slamming the lid of the computer down. “That stuff makes you feel sick. Dirty. Let’s go out on the bike.”
He’d never gone as fast as he did that afternoon, taking corners at breakneck speed, sending stones skittering every which way, and it frightened Helen, in a way, but it was a healthy fear, not the ugly thing that had shadowed their day till then. It felt as though they could outrun the shadow of the past, the fear, the horror of it. And she found herself wishing they could just keep going, leave everything behind, everything and everyone, vanish over the horizon, losing themselves in this vast land, and never come back. Never have to look back. Never.
Chapter 33
Maxim had spent most of the day cross-checking the list of psychics Anna Feodorovna had given him, with a list of criminal records. So far he’d drawn a blank. Josef Oberlian, for instance, had nothing in any police record apart from visa matters – which were all in order. And he had no family connection to any Gulag prisoner.
He’d looked up Kirov’s prison record. Just as Anna had said, the man had spent ten years in a Northern Russian prison, but since that time had stayed out of trouble. Then, feeling a little ashamed, Maxim had done a quick check on Anna herself – but apart from a couple of traffic fines, she was pure as the driven snow. Married at the age of twenty-one, divorced five years later, she had no children but two married sisters and a widowed mother living in a small town in the Urals. Her father had died years before. She held a license as a registered psychic, but had also worked in cafes, shops and as a cleaner in a school. Earlier, she had also earned a degree in literature, which appeared to have stood her in no good stead whatsoever. Really, thought Maxim, she and I are peas in a pod, a disappointment, a promise not fulfilled, disregarded flotsam and jetsam in the impatient current of the new Russia, drifting toward our forgotten end.
It made him feel sad, but also tender. He remembered the feeling he’d had in Oberlian’s apartment the other day. The feeling that he’d lost too much, in his stubborn pride. He didn’t want to make that same mistake again. And so he picked up the phone and invited Anna to dinner that night. She did not sound surprised, only glad, and on the phone her voice was bright as a girl’s.
Heart light, he had then gone looking for Kirov’s papers, that Anna had told him were with a man named Igor Rimsky, the “mutual friend who was writing a book on great modern Russian psychics”. Rimsky proved to be a thin, earnest, ponytailed young man in his late twenties, and he seemed happy enough to show Maxim the papers. Anna had already briefed him, he said. There was a thin bundle of papers, flimsy typescript in a cardboard folder. Maxim flipped through the first couple of pages. He looked at Rimsky and said, “When exactly did Kirov give you these?”
“About a year before he died.”
“I see.” Before Galkin’s death, then – so they probably wouldn’t be of much use. Still, he had to be sure. “I’m afraid I’ll have to take these away for a while.”
“Fine. I’m not up to my chapter on Lev yet. I’m a very slow writer, I’m afraid. Please look after these notes, this is the only copy in existence.”
“Of course. Thank you.”
“It is my pleasure. Anya said you were investigating Lev’s death. That means a lot to her. To me. To all of us who knew him. We had thought no one was interested.”
“Did you have any suspicion at the time that your friend’s death was not accidental?”
“No.”
“Nobody for instance searched Kirov’s apartment after his death?”
“I don’t think so. But Lev wasn’t very tidy, Senior Lieutenant. So if someone had made a mess of things …”
“You wouldn’t have been able to tell.”
“Quite so. But nothing was missing. As far as we could see. Lev had very little worth stealing, of course.”
“And you’re sure he kept no other records of his work than this manuscript?”
“Positive. And only Anya and I knew about the manuscript. Lev was a modest man. I had the devil’s own job even persuading him to let me see it.”
At the door, Rimsky said, “Anya said you had a suspicion a client may have … been responsible for Lev’s death.”
“It’s possible, yes,” said Maxim, cautiously.
“There are no actual records of clients in the papers, Anya told you that, right?”
“She did.”
“He didn’t write about cases. At least not in their actual details. If you get my meaning. But there are some which I would call disguised stories. It’s possible that among those might be something useful.”
“I see. Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it. Good luck.”
Back at his apartment, Maxim started going through Kirov’s manuscript. It was just as he’d suspected, not a memoir or autobiography, but rather a kind of philosophical work, though there were bits and pieces of life history in there to be reconstructed if you cared to, bits of memoir, about his childhood, the prison camp, and other things, especially spiritual experiences, for it was soon clear Kirov had been a devoutly religious man who believed his psychic gift came directly from God. He also believed it should be used only to help other human souls in trouble, but he was not blind to the fact that not every person with psychic gifts felt that way. Though it wasn’t at all the kind of thing Maxim normally liked to read, there was something engaging about it, not a trace of self-pity or self-importance, and he soon began to develop a real respect and liking for the man whose presence seemed so strong in these pages. But as to trying to get hard evidence, to identify anyone from the “disguised stor
ies” or semi-parables that Kirov used to illustrate his work, that was quite another question. And then he came upon one that made the back of his neck prickle.
Two people who share nothing but a similar secret come separately to my door. They are plagued by disturbing dreams about the dead. They do not know each other, they are as different as could be, in surface and in the depths, in body and in soul, in word and deed, tongue and heart.
One serves power and lives in action; the other is a seeker and lives in thought. One walks in the shadows; the other in the light. Yet in each of them I see another shared secret: I see the gift that has only dawned on them late in life. A soul-power that could be very great indeed. And in each of them I sense it could go either way. And so I warn them that to make such a discovery so late can cause a revolution, but whether of velvet or blood only they can choose.
On the face of it, a person who has walked all of life in the shadows may plunge further into the night, while a person who walks in light goes deeper toward the sun. It seems immutable truth. But the truth of the soul is a deep mystery. For while the night may hide the malefactor, it may also be the time of healing sleep; but one can be burned coming too close to the sun.
He re-read the story a couple of times. A psychic gift, discovered late … Could it be that one of the men was Makarov? He could have been described as one who “serves power and lives in action”, who “walks in the shadows”. That could fit with his secretiveness, and with Trinity’s work. But it was possible to see it the other way. He could be the “seeker, the thinker” who “walks in the light” – because bringing things to light was also Trinity’s business, and Makarov had been an investigator – a seeker of truth – and a highly intelligent man, a “thinker”, as much as a man of action.
Trinity: The Koldun Code (Book 1) Page 28