Post by LUDMILA ILYUKHIN on May 15, 2011 17:50:45 GMT 1
DECEMBER 1953, SIBERIA
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jD-V8mDU0ec&feature=related)
Camp 117. An impersonal, cold name for a red dot on the map. Almost nobody knew about Camp 117 save for Stalin's circle of political disciples and secret police thugs. Those outside of that very closed circle who knew about the camp's existence thought it was just another Sevvostlag, a Far-Eastern gulag where political prisoners and criminals were sent to be "re-educated through labour".
The camp was built around an old Orthodox monastery. The monks there had all been massacred by deserters from the White Russian army in the later years of the Russian Civil War. The Monastery had stood empty for half a decade before being selected to house prisoners, and then being turned into a fully fledged gulag. Finally, it had been cleared of most of its prisoners and reconverted into what it was now.
A State research facility.
Ludmila had worked for a couple of years at Camp 117, back in the mid 1930s. There were few words to adequately describe the bleak, grey and hopeless prison camp. The monastery rose above the barracks and the barbed wire fences like a dead beast of old, and the camp's guardians and inmates all had the same look of resignation and barely contained despair in their eyes. While she was there, ten guards committed suicide. Their bodies were all quietly taken out of the camp and buried in the forest nearby. Camp 117 was surrounded by impenetrable, almost primal expanses of Taiga, and wolves could sometimes be heard howling in the distance. None of the beasts ever came close to the camp though.
The year was 1954. Stalin had died a year ago, and Khrushchev was now in power. The new Soviet leader had not been as inclined as his predecessor to giving serious thought to such scientific projects as the one taking place at Camp 117, and the people working there had waited for the inevitable order to come.
And now it had come. Camp 117 was to be closed, and the project abandoned.
The project was simply known as Project 12. Another number and cold, featureless anonymity. However, the project's nature was far more disturbing than its name. Back in the 1930s, Soviet parapsychologists had determined that psychic abilities were indeed real. When Stalin had heard of this, he had immediately asked about the discovery's potential military applications. And so, a couple of years later, Project 12 began. It was later discovered that children were the best subjects for psychic experimentation, and orphans from around the USSR were selected and taken to Camp 117. Their latent psychic abilities were further augmented by the use of certain drugs and experiments.
As the years went by, children died and were replaced by many others. All orphans. During World War 2, children from Eastern Europe and Germany were also taken to Camp 117 to participate in Project 12. Capacities such as psychokinesis, remote viewing and ESP were all studied extensively there without any consideration for the childrens' well-being. After all, the Project focused solely on results.
Ludmila could not say it had been an easy experience for her. All the children had displayed frighteningly potent capacities, such as bending bars of metal or reading thoughts. However, there was nothing childlike left in them any more. They were all heavily sedated or withdrawn due to poor treatment. Some of them didn't even talk any more while others spent their days slowly banging their heads against the walls of their cells. Their eyes were dead, their faces were dead.
Their souls were gone.
She had always felt her flesh crawl when watching a "demonstration" or an experiment. Seeing a child bend a metal table leg without even touching it, all the while with a look as dead as a drowned man in his or her eyes, made her experience visceral horror like she had never experienced before. A sense of inherent wrongness, sickness and cold, surgical evil. As the months went by, she began to wonder. Were they actually dead and only kept animate through some evil, un-knowable force? Were the guards alive?
Was she alive?
When the order came to end the project, Ludmila felt an almost palpable sense of relief overcome her. She had rushed out of her quarters in the camp to meet the current head of the project, Boris Torvich, to announce the great news.
"Ah, yes", said Boris grimly. "The whole business is finally coming to an end...but we'll have to do a few things before we all leave and go home."
"-What?", said Ludmila.
"-Well, the kids have nowhere to go. They can't talk, they can't read. They can't even think by themselves any more. The Party and the KGB don't want any of them to be seen by the public or the rest of the world..."
Ludmila had stopped breathing. It couldn't be.
"...they'll have to stay in Camp 117. "
And then he handed her a revolver. The gun slapped heavily into her palm, like a declaration of death. To Ludmila's eyes it was the blackest, ugliest and most evil object she had ever set eyes upon, but the thought of what lay ahead was what made her sick and terrified.
"-Boris. I can't. No...no, just no."
"-You know what disobeying the orders will earn you", said Boris. "Besides, you won't be alone. I'm doing the other batch."
Ludmila's nose caught Boris' scent. Alcohol. He'd been drinking. No doubt he couldn't face doing it without vodka in his bloodstream, but Ludmila was perfectly sober and felt like she was about to implode from sheer horror at the task that lay ahead. However, she did not disobey orders, ever. Besides, didn't the Party know best?
"-Right", she said, her voice oddly choked. "I'll do it."
_______________________________________
Half an hour later, the children Ludmila had to "take care of" had been assembled in the front court-yard. There were ten of them, all lined up. A light layer of pure white snow covered the ground, and Ludmila's boots crunched noisily as she approached the children. There were boys and girls. Some looked like they were seven, others looked like they were thirteen. They were all thin, pale and ragged.
And all had that same, dead look in their eyes.
Ludmila glanced at the two guards who were with her. One of them was an old man, the other looked to be in his mid thirties. They stood in utter silence, not even moving in the cold winter air. Ludmila then began to slowly load the revolver she'd been given. One bullet, two bullets...each bullet representing a life. Each child had his own bullet, his own little piece of destiny, his own share of death. But did it matter to them? They had no fear of what was going to happen. They did not cry or protest, they simply stood. One of them knelt since she'd forgotten how to walk.
Slowly, Ludmila went behind the first child. Even more slowly she raised the revolver and placed the barrel against the back of his head. The boy had an odd, fixated smile on his face. A smile so empty and dead it could have been stitched to his face from a dead person. Ludmila hesitated. Time seemed to slow down to a painful crawl.
And then, she pulled the trigger.
There was a single, loud detonation that crashed through the icy air. The boy fell forward, blood and fragments of his skull cascading forward. All at once, the world sped up. Breathing raggedly, Ludmila moved on to the next child and pulled the trigger. Bang, one life. Bang, two lives. BANG, four lives. Again and again she pulled the trigger. As she performed the horrible task, tears began to stream down her cheeks. She'd go mad once this was done. Once they were all dead, she'd go completely mad. She'd scream and scream before putting the gun to her temple and ending her own pathetic life. As she moved up the line, she became a tool. Her hand acted by itself, pulling the trigger, pulling the hammer back, repeating.
And then, she got to the end of the line. The last child. A scrawny, eight year old girl from Warsaw who had arrived in 1946, when Ludmila was still in Berlin. She stared right ahead, not even noticing the slight pressure of the gun barrel against the back of her head. As Ludmila pulled the hammer back with her thumb, the child blinked, but her expression never changed.
A final gunshot rang out, and it was over.
Ludmila's mind and body seemed to slow down. Exhaustion overcame her. Her hand, who had held and operated the gun without fail suddenly let go, and the revolver dropped into the snow. A few snowflakes came down from the sky, and the Rusalka turned to look down at her work. All the children lay in the snow, which was soaked red. On some she could see their eyes, staring out into nothingness. They were like dolls. Porcelain dolls in the snow. And someone had spilled red wine around their heads.
Little angels with red halos.
Ludmila slumped down onto her knees. She felt bile in her throat, and without shame bent forward and vomited into the snow. The guards still stood, aloof, cold. Indifferent. Like telegraph poles. Then, Ludmila began to cry. A part of her wanted to reach for the revolver, to end it all now, to welcome the cold, empty void of death. However, she had no strength left. She felt broken, her sobs came out like strange, broken mechanical sounds like a wind-up toy someone had dropped onto the floor and now refused to run in a straight line.
Ludmila had always strained to be closer to humanity. But that day, in the cold reaches of Siberia, her convictions were shaken to the core. Were humans truly human? Or just cold, mechanistic creatures of repetition and dogma?
And in the end, what was she?
