Face to Face/Short Circuit

I’m trying to stay calm while I type this. I can’t show weakness. I can’t show fear. I’m trying to write to calm myself but it’s so hard to type on these tiny phone buttons.

I confronted Vasily early this morning. He wasn’t happy with my “upstart attitude” but I eventually wore him down and got my first opportunity to really observe the madman that is Stepan Nikitin, face to face.

He’s short and thin but there’s a certain animal strength to him. A wildness in his eyes, I suppose you could call it. His eyes, incidentally, are a very dark brown. He has dirty blonde hair and a gaunt face with high cheekbones.

He twitched a lot when I first walked in but then he calmed down and started smiling at me, a sinister grin that quickly turned into a low chuckle. He greeted me by name but didn’t respond to any of my questions with anything sensical, just rambling about his “lord and master” and his “divine mission”. There were only two questions he responded to;

Q: “What does this symbol mean?”
A: “It is the Sword of Koschei the Deathless, the name and title which I bear in the name of Lord Koschei. It is my identity.”

Q: “How did you choose your victims?”
A: “I didn’t. He did.”

To be honest, much as it pains me to admit it, I didn’t get much farther than Vasily did, but sparing Nikitin from Vasily’s methods was enough for me, even if I didn’t get much out of him. As much of a sick bastard as Nikitin is, he’s still human and he is sick. He’s clearly not in full control of his actions.

At any rate, I was content to keep interrogating Nikitin until about twenty minutes ago. The interrogation room was designed specifically for holding highly dangerous prisoners and has an electric lock to prevent such prisoners breaking out in the event of a loss of power; there’s no manual override. Unfortunately for me, we’ve just had a blackout. I’m trapped in the interrogation room with Stepan. In the dark.

I’m trying not to get paranoid and failing miserably. I can see something in the dark behind Stepan. Something darker than the darkness, like it’s…realer than it. Darkness is the absence of something but it’s like this thing is a presence. It’s at least twice as tall in the room, hunched over and spreading across its arms across the ceiling. It has arms. It’s…humanoid, and swelling. It just gets bigger and bigger the more I look at it. And I should know it’s not there and I should know that it’s just my paranoia and I should know that it’s not real, but…

…Nikitin keeps talking to me. He keeps laughing at me. He keeps saying the same thing over and over and over and over and over. Eight words. Eight awful words.

“I know you can see him too, lieutenant.”

Futile Devices

More wasted time. Sitting around, drinking awful coffee, making small talk with Vasily’s men while Vasily fails to do his job properly. He only spent an hour talking to Nikitin before he started the torture. He doesn’t understand how to deal with a psychopath; he thinks he can break him but you can’t break someone who’s already broken.

It’s bad enough when a criminal’s human rights aren’t respected but it’s even worse that taking away these rights so frivolously is impeding the course of justice for the victims and preventing closure for their families. I’m going to talk to Vasily the next time he comes out. He’s getting nowhere. It’s my turn to talk.

Moskau

Would you believe that I’ve never been to Moscow before? Not in all my life have I so much as passed through it on a train. The city of a thousand names that are essentially the same; Moscow, Москва, Moskva, Maskava, Moscou, Moskau. I think the Germans have the best name for it. There’s a certain hardness to it that fits this city. Oh, it’s beautiful, but it’s tough and strong. If Russia is a bear, Moscow is its cold, calculating mind and it is this mind that fills the rest of the bear with its strength and fortitude.

Since we arrived, I’ve been doing next to nothing while Vasily has been interrogating Nikitin and getting absolutely nowhere. This is utterly pointless. At least if I was back at my station, I could do something, either do some proper police work or keep gathering evidence against the others. Here, I’m useless. Nothing is happening. Nothing.

After The Storm

I’m in a bit of a hurry, so I’m going to just run through what’s happened since my last post.

Right as I was writing the end of my last post, Chernov came running out of the house to tell me that they’d tracked Nikitin to a warehouse down on the docks and we were to accompany a SOBR unit in order to arrest him. Without getting too bogged down in the technical details; we captured him and placed him under arrest without any casualties.

We brought him back to our special office to process him, only to find that we had a visitor; Vasily Loginov. I didn’t get much of a chance to observe him, as he and Chernov wordlessly stepped into another room together almost as soon as we arrived. There were hushed whispers, followed by raised voices, and then Chernov came out to inform Sidorov and I that Vasily was taking Nikitin to Moscow and that I was to accompany him.

Which is why I’m in such a rush. He’s outside waiting for me right now. I told him to give me a few minutes to call my mother in order to give myself enough time to post this. I’ll be in Moscow tomorrow. I’ll try and post again from there.

Bodies

Nikitin isn’t losing as bad as I thought he was. We found the bodies of a family of four just an hour ago. They’d been dead since the day of his last attack, but no one had noticed. How do you not notice a whole family being wiped off the face of the planet? People give me so little reason to have faith in them sometimes.

I’m in the alley beside the family’s apartment complex right now, having a cigarette. I don’t normally smoke, but everyone needs something to take the edge off once in a while. They were killed in their fucking beds, for fuck’s sake.

Chernov loaned me his iPod to post this, so I’d better delete the history when I’m done. I could get in a lot of trouble if someone found this but that’s why I’m the man who rolls the dice, I guess. I suppose you could say th

shit i have to go i can’t explian why but if everythign works out ill post tomo

i have to ru

Close Call

We had a close call today. Nikitin attacked a woman in my neighbourhood just as I was leaving my house this morning. I interrupted him just as he was starting to strangle her but he ran off while I was trying to help her get breathing again. Luckily, the woman survived, but it was infuriating to be so close and yet so far.

That said, it was very satisfying to throw his taunt back in his face. The only blood on my hands was the blood that woman coughed up on them while I was saving her life.

Nikitin is losing his own game.

People Get Ready

Nikitin has entered the spiral. We got a letter from him earlier today. I can’t remember the exact wording but it was something to the effect of;

“You’ve pushed me too far, gentlemen. You have invaded my home, taken my personal property and interfered with my divine mission. Everything that happens from this point on is your fault.”

We’re not sure if the “divine mission” comment is genuine or an attempt to establish prescendent for a claim of insanity. Either way, it’s likely he’s going to try and strike very soon and I’m afraid we won’t be able to stop him. As random as his victims seemed before, he probably had his own reasons. But now, it looks like he’s going to attack indiscriminately. I can’t remember most of the letter, but the last line is embedded in my mind. I keep seeing it every time I close my eyes.

“Get ready, people. It’s time for the main attraction.”

Runs In The Family

We missed Nikitin by about an hour. I don’t think he realised we were coming but he still didn’t leave a whole lot for us. Well, he left quite a bit, actually, but nothing particularly useful in tracking him down. Some copies of the public records that we couldn’t find when he got his name. We still don’t know how he deleted them from the system but the information in these records isn’t going to help us catch someone like Nikitin. He’s predictably unpredictable, in so far as we can be reasonably sure he’s not going to do anything that would involve information we have on him, like go near a previous place of work or visit his parents.

Or his mother, at least. His father, as it turns out, is in prison in Kemerovo for rape and murder and his relationship with the rest of the family, Stepan in particular, is apparently quite tense, if the cigarette burns where his father’s face should be in all those photos we found is any indication. It’s funny that they hate each other considering that murder apparently runs in the family. At any rate, it looks like we’re back to waiting, for now, but he’s definitely starting to slip up. We’re just waiting for a sufficiently huge slip at this point.