Victor Pavlovich, retired colonel of the chemical troops, a participant in the liquidation of the consequences of the Chernobyl accident His behavior, ability to behave, special army specificity of presenting events - everything suggests that this person is simply unable to fantasize, and even more so to fantasize so well that one can safely write an exciting fiction novel based on his stories. A down-to-earth person - what is there! No offense will be told him.
- It was in July 1986, the same one, Chernobyl. Of the damned year. I was only a captain then, I commanded a company. And they threw our company into the very hell of Chernobyl - to Slavutich. The inhabitants of the city were then massively relocated to anyone where.
Our part was stationed in the Zhytomyr region, just in the Ovruch region, just a few tens of kilometers from Chernobyl. In general, we carried out decontamination in Slavutych. Our company deactivated a new, five-story apartment building, only two years old. The tenants were evicted long ago, the apartments were practically empty. In some places there was some small furniture or rags - stools there or rugs. We burned them right away. And a private from the second platoon, Vasya Nesterov from Vologda, was the first to get into a small one-room apartment in which some old woman lived.
The old woman was evacuated to Kiev along with the furniture, and on the wall in the room several souvenir masks were left hanging from all the property. Larger than such masks, oval, creepy, with a strange painting, like letters. African masks, and real ones, were probably sculpted by some Negro sorcerer. There were four masks, as I remember now.
I ordered to burn them, but one mask suddenly disappeared somewhere. Only three pieces flew into the fire. The flames were impressive. But for some reason the masks did not burn, although they were made of some kind of wood. I had to chop them to pieces, while junior sergeant Mikheenko beat himself in the leg with an ax. I earned a deep scratch. But the masks, which became splinters, burned out completely. True, the smoke from them was black-black, as if the car tires were on fire. About a week later, we returned to the unit's location, picked up radiation, went through a medical examination, took a course of treatment and continued to serve.
As I remember now, it was on August 8 of the same 1986 year. I slept at home, the political officer of the unit calls me right in the middle of the night, he says, come quickly, we have an emergency. I immediately ran to the unit. And that's what happened there. The orderly "on the nightstand" stood near the armory. He said it was about two in the morning. And then from the location of the company, where the soldiers' beds were standing, a cry is heard. The orderly woke up the company duty officer and rushed to the location with him.
They turned on the light, and there private Nesterov on his bed wheezes, groans and whispers that his snake is strangling. It looks like epilepsy. While they were running after the doctor to the medical unit, Nesterov died. It turns out that he was shouting. It is clear that all the command of the unit fled. Emergency all the same. It’s a pity for the guy, he had only half a year before demobilization, but here it is. And he never had epilepsy. This is the first time. Perhaps the radiation has affected. Everything would be fine, but only a pathologist, doing an autopsy, noticed that Nesterov died not from epilepsy, but from mechanical asphyxia of the respiratory system and a fracture of the cervical vertebrae. They strangled him, in a word.
What started here! Investigators came in large numbers, special officers. The interrogations began, the soldiers did not find a place for themselves, each of them was interrogated a dozen times. For some reason, one special officer drew attention to the testimony of the company officer on duty, who heard the words of the dying Nesterov that he was being strangled by a snake. And I paid attention because another private, an Irkutsk resident Igor Petrov, assured that he saw this very snake, such a thick one, three meters long, black, it crawled out from under the radiator and crawled into bed to the sleeping Nesterov.
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For a long time that special officer tortured Petrov with questions, several dozen times specifying how the snake looked. And then he brought some peasant to Petrov, who looked like a scientific worker. Petrov repeated his description of the snake to him. I still do not understand why they paid so much attention to this mysterious snake. That scientist, in a conversation with a special officer, called the snake "totem patron", I remember this word well. They talked about some kind of cult of people-snakes. Then a man came from Moscow, as much as from Moscow State University. Some kind of professor. It was he who declared that somewhere in the barracks there must be a "fetish" hidden. And what it is, he did not say.
We didn't find any fetish because we didn't know what to look for. Nine days after Nesterov's death, we were going to take away Nesterov's bed, the soldiers began to roll up the mattress, and under it was discovered the very oval African mask, one of four that disappeared during the decontamination in Slavutych. Apparently, Nesterov then hid her and took her to the barracks. I took the find to the political officer, and he almost fell off his chair when he saw such a miracle. Our special officer was called, and he immediately called back his colleague, who was interested in the snake.
This colleague, when he saw the mask, ordered everyone to move away from it. And he ordered me and the political officer to wash my hands with some kind of chemical similar to ammonia, which he brought with him: this mask, they say, is impregnated with some kind of solution that causes hallucinations and easily penetrates the body through the skin, and this chemical neutralizes it … Of course, we washed our hands. This visitor took the mask with him. And for some reason they took from me and the political officer a non-disclosure agreement, for ten years. Why ten? I can not tell. And I can't explain what kind of mask it was, either. Nobody told me this. But that all this really happened - I can guarantee it!
“Interesting newspaper. Oracle №3 2012