John Schettler - Armageddon

“You must go by the way you came,” said Fedorov. “Go quickly now, while you see that light.” The man gestured to the amber glow from below. “And Mironov-never come up this stairway again. Understand? Get as far away from here as you can.”

The stranger had an anguished look on his face, as if he had something more he needed to say, a tormented expression that held Mironov fixated for a time, their eyes and souls locked together in some bizarre twist of time and fate. Yet the man seemed to hesitate, uncertain of himself.

What was this strange look of fear and trepidation in the man’s eyes, thought Mironov. Just as I turned to go down the stairs, the stranger reached out, taking hold of my arm to delay me. He leaned forward, close to my ear and whispered something, his eyes vast and serious, his face like that of a man who was seeing a phantom from another world. The words blurted out, an urgent whisper: ‘Do not go to St. Petersburg in 1934! Beware Stalin! Beware the month of December! Go with God. Go and live, Mironov. Live!’

That was how he remembered it. The man finished, then released Mironov’s arm. He recalled standing there, uncertain, confused for a moment. Then the urgency of the moment compelled him to move, and he stepped quickly down the narrow stairs.

What was he saying about 1934, a year so far away in the future? Who was this Stalin he spoke of? Why should I be wary in December? What did he mean that I should not go to St. Petersburg? He was speaking as though…as though he saw some distant future in the world that had not yet come to pass, some far off doom, for his tone of voice clearly carried the edge of warning.

Mironov reached the bottom of the steps, bemused to find the morning seemed clear and bright again, and still tinted with the red glow of that strange fiery sky. He sat in the dining hall, thinking about all that had just happened. Then he took the man’s advice, deciding he would get himself as far away from this place as possible, heading east to Irkutsk where he had relatives. Yet always the memory of that man’s face, and his strange warning, remained with him.

He eventually made up his mind to travel west again, to Baku where the oil workers had been roused to strike against their corporate masters. The incipient fires of the revolution were burning there, the embers stirred by several nefarious organizers rousting about in the region, fomenting trouble and advocating against the wealthy oil barons.

They wanted their damn oil, he thought, and they would do anything to line their pockets with the gold it would bring, and the power. So Mironov decided he would go to Baku as well, and join the revolutionary movement there, but along the way he stopped again at that same railway inn at Ilanskiy, the very place he had met the stranger that day.

Curiosity…that was what drove him that day. His curiosity surrounded that back stairway like a shroud. He was down in the dining room again when he heard the odd rumble, saw the strange glow in the back stairwell, triggering the memory of that strange event he had witnessed. What was happening? Was there a fire upstairs? He remembered getting up, walking quickly to the stairs to climb them again…and his life was never the same after that, for the world he soon found himself in was not the same either!

He emerged on the second floor, but the inn seemed worn down now, a stark and cold place, with none of the inviting warmth it had offered. He looked about, briefly, then went down the main stairway, to look for the innkeeper. The old grey haired man was gone, yet his portrait was hanging behind the main desk and a young serving woman was tending to the inn instead. What was going on here? He would soon find out more than he ever wished to know.

He went to the window and peered outside to a horrific world where he saw hundreds of people being herded into train cars pointed east. The rail yard seemed infested with the security apparatus of the Okhrana, dark coated men with black Ushankas. They spoke to the people in harsh tones, and some used their rifle butts to beat them if they did not move quickly enough. The scene was so shocking that he withdrew quickly, his eyes finding the serving girl by the desk.

“What has happened?” he asked, shaken by what he had seen.

“What do you mean?”

“The Okhrana…Why are they taking everyone? And the soldiers?

“The war, the work camps, what else?” The woman shook her head. “Comrade Stalin is fighting the Germans with one hand, and his own people with the other. The war will be the end of us. Stalin’s dirty war on life itself. This will be the third train heading east to the camps this week. What… don’t tell me you have escaped from one of those train cars. You cannot hide here! If they find you I will be punished as well!” She looked around, as if she feared the hard men outside would storm in at any moment and take her away with the others.

“Comrade Stalin?” That was the same name the stranger had whispered to him. Beware Stalin!

“What war do you speak of? The revolution? Has it finally happened?”

“What? Don’t be daft. You’ve read the papers. The Germans have reached the Volga! They are after Stalingrad now, and driving on Baku.” There was a newspaper on the counter and she shoved it his way. He took it, his eyes scanning the headlines. It was called ‘Vpered Za Stalina! Forward for Stalin! And a drawing showed soldiers standing proudly with bayoneted rifles.

“Go! If you have escaped then you must get out of here. Head south and hide in the woods! Quickly, or the guards will find you!”

Mironov moved, on instinct, for he had been a fugitive for years now, the Okhrana always nipping at his heels. He started for the door but, as fate would have it, three dark coated men were walking slowly toward the weathered porch. So he turned and ran up the main stairway, thinking he might get through a window and climb down a gutter pipe to find the woods beyond. Yet no sooner had he made the upper landing when he saw more uniformed men coming out of one of the rooms. This sent him rushing down the hall, turning off quickly to the narrow back stairway, which was his only hope of escape now. As he started down into the shadows, there came a dark rumble, as if thunder had broken the sky with the threat of rain.

His boots were hard on the steps as he hastened down, and he hoped no one had heard him. Reaching the bottom, he peered furtively around the edge of the wall into the dining room. All was quiet and empty. There was a fire burning softly on the hearth, and the smell of something cooking. He stepped into the room, clearly confused and somewhat disoriented. There, he saw the world as he might have expected it. There was no sign of the frenetic activity he had seen outside in the rail yard, no soldiers, no trains waiting, no one being herded into the cars.

He looked down at the weathered newspaper in his hand, astonished by what he now read. Stalingrad…a city named after a man called Stalin, the man of steel. Then another article, on Baku where they showed an image of the city nestled on a wide bay at the edge of the Caspian Sea and surrounded by high hills. Mironov had thought to find the revolution there, but the photo showed the ruin and misery of war. The city looked like an industrial slum, yet the article referenced a name. “Kirov yet stands his brave watch on the city,” it read.

There in the photograph he could see the prominent statue of a uniformed man on a high hilltop pedestal of stone. His arm was raised in a proud salutation, as if greeting the masses below while also beckoning to some distant future with the promise of hope. Kirov… Who was that? Something about the name was very appealing to him, and the longer he looked at that image the more he was taken by the odd notion that he was seeing himself there, a distant ghost in a bleak future where every hope had perished but the one he held in his outstretched hand.