Not long ago, I was standing in line at a small airport outside Kiev, jet-lagged from the long flight from JFK, via London. The line crawled forward; everywhere I looked there were soldiers and civilians shouting and smoking. This was a country at war. Finally, I made it to the front of the line and handed my American passport to a customs official.
“What is the purpose of your visit?” the man barked.
“I’m here to report on a story,” I replied.
I had been practicing my explanation on the plane.
“During the second World War, a small town in the north east of the country became known as a ‘hero town’ for its courage and resilience. I’m here to capture the spirit of the town, as the Russian invasion draws near, and tell the story of its people to the world.”
The official stared at me.
“Another war tourist,” he said, and violently stamped my passport with a journalist visa.
I wanted to tell him I wasn’t a war reporter. I was fresh out of college, two months into my first job working on documentaries for a media network. My employer calls itself a ‘multi-platform media ecosystem’ but it’s actually a digital news channel run by journalists with nose rings and sleeve tattoos.
I had just finished a doc about a white supremacist cooking show in Alabama, which got a bazillion hits and was a break-out hit. Next thing I knew, they wanted to send me to a war zone. I said f*ck it, and so there I was, twenty-four years old, being driven through the grim Ukrainian countryside in an old diesel car. Behind the wheel: Frank, a grizzled producer in his 40s—this was not his first warzone—and in the back with me, Petra, a 30-something reporter I’d seen hosting viral videos about domestic terrorists.
“I can’t believe they sent us Gen Z,” Petra said, as we rumbled through the woods somewhere near Luhansk. Petra explained that, since I had left the office in New York, a Russian news service had reported seeing strange evidence in bombed-out Ukrainian villages.
“They found satanic signs spray-painted on the walls of burned buildings, and blood-stained maps and stuff inside,” Petra said. Evidence of rituals. The news report was likely Russian propaganda, she added, but our assignment had changed overnight: We had to find and interview Ukrainian villagers about the role of witchcraft in the escalating conflict with Russia. That would be a hot story.
About a nine-hour drive later we picked up a local translator, a tiny woman with short, bleached hair, who chain-smoked tiny cigarettes. Anya was a local but spoke good English and worked as a ‘fixer’ for various news agencies. She said she could direct us to the right area. The sky was bible-black and starless when we rolled past a hand-painted wooden sign that read: село відьом.
“Village of witches,” said Anya, from the backseat.
“This is like the Salem of Ukraine,” she explained. “Witch trials happened here hundreds of years ago.”
Silently, I thought the original story about hero towns was much more interesting. As if she had read my mind, Anya said:
“Legend has it the peasants here defeated the Nazis using shovels and pitchforks, like in the hero towns.”
There was silence in the car. Then I heard the distant boom of cannon fire.
“Some say the womenfolk used — how do you say — black magic,” said Anya. What really happened remains a local secret.
She pulled out her Android phone and played a video recorded a day or two earlier, not far away. I watched shaky cellphone footage of a Russian tank rolling into a tiny town, against the din of machine gun fire. A local woman yelled obscenities at the driver. Anya translated her rant:
“Do you know where you are?! It’s Konotop. Here every second woman is a witch. Tomorrow you’ll no longer be able to get your d*ck to stand!”
Our car rumbled into a remote village where Anya said that curses and spells remained a part of everyday life.
I saw a hamlet of ramshackle cottages, chimneys billowing smoke into the night sky. The booms from enemy tanks seemed to be getting louder.
Anya guessed we’d have a day or two before the Russian troops arrived, and all hell would break loose.
“Get your footage and get out,” she warned.
We woke in the guest house of a small farm on the edge of town, to the smell of sizzling bacon. I found my colleagues Frank and Petra making a shot list for the day. Anya had arranged for us to meet a woman who lived in the village, who said she had a story to tell about the area’s history of witchcraft.
We met in a small barn outside the woman’s house. She had one tired-looking horse, and not much else. I set up the camera on a tripod and held a microphone, and as she launched into her story, her voice wobbled with emotion. She told of how her ancestor had been an immensely powerful witch, named Irina. Irina was revered by the villagers, and protected their land from harm. But in a moment of envy and maliciousness, a jealous rival betrayed her to a local witch hunter, and she was executed without mercy. They burned Irina at the stake, and scattered her body parts all over the village.
“After she died, the crops failed, and the area fell into a famine for years,” Anya translated. “It was a curse.”
I saw on the camera’s screen in the close up that the woman had started to cry. Anya translated softly.
“When the Nazis attacked, the local women summoned Irina, bringing her back to life, and she helped the farmers defend their land against the evil soldiers. But it came with a price.”
The woman was still speaking, but Anya stopped translating. Her face could not conceal her terror.
Anya’s cellphone cheeped. A contact on the Telegram app told her the Russian attack was imminent, she said. And the troops coming over the hill would be the worst of the worst. Men released from Russian gulags and prison camps.
“You have to understand, these men got a chance at freedom, but some of them have done terrible things,” she explained, “they are murderers, all sorts of criminals, Satanists.”
I suddenly wished I was back in Brooklyn.
The woman started to speak again, in a hushed voice. She said there would be a ceremony that night. They were going to invoke the spirit of Irina, to give them strength in the battle to defend their village against the Russians. She asked if we wanted to see it.
“We’ll be there,” Frank said.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Anya said.
“We’ll be there,” confirmed Petra.
*That night the villagers gathered in the square, as a heavy storm swept through the village. The elders lead the way. By candlelight they recited ancient rituals that had been passed down through generations. I noticed Frank surreptitiously recording on his iPhone. I watched villagers sprinkle the ground with sacred herbs. When the time was right, the elders sang the words of an ancient invocation, calling upon the spirit of Irina to come forth and protect them from the Red menace. This would make incredible television, I thought.
As their chants reached a fever pitch, a hurricane whistled through the village, ripping off roofs, damaging buildings. The sky darkened like a painful bruise; purple and red. It seemed as if something was coming — something powerful and ancient. Suddenly, a piercing scream cut through the air. I turned to see Frank drop his iPhone, and clutch his neck. The whites of his eyes turned red. His face purpled. His feet left off the ground and I heard his back and neck snap in a hundred places. His body fell to the ground like a sack of potatoes. I stifled a scream.
The elder women looked at one another, seemingly knowing what must be done next. Finally, one of them spoke, her voice trembling with emotion. I looked to Anya to translate for me, but I saw that her face was emotionless. She was now walking to the center of the town square, as if against her will.
Petra grabbed me by the arm.
“They’re gonna sacrifice her or something!” she hissed.
“No,” I said. “It’s something else.”
The womenfolk made a circle around Anya. They joined hands as the eye of the storm circled above them. A giant crash of lightning knocked everyone off their feet. Everyone except Anya, who stood alone, and was now about two-feet taller, stronger, more muscular. Her short blonde hair had grown into disgusting black dreads, her nails blackened, her hands and fingers were curled and deformed. When she opened her mouth to speak, her teeth were like broken tombstones, her tongue sharp like a serpent’s.
Irina, in full control of Anya’s mouth, and body, growled:
“I have risen.”
With a roar, a Russian tank burst into the village. An enemy plane whizzed overhead, as a building exploded. Bombs tumbled into the village, turning the farms into fireballs. The smell of burning metal and gunpowder clung to my nostrils, as I hung onto a statue in the town square for cover.
I looked up and saw Anya’s face crease with anger. She slipped off her shoes and sank her dirty feet into the earth. She took a moment to center herself and closed her eyes, breathing deeply and focusing her energy as the buildings burned around her. She moved her hands in slow circles, drawing a circle of protection in the earth.
The womenfolk circled around her and joined in a chant, their voices growing louder, more powerful. Soon the energy of the spell was rising, and a shimmering red light appeared around the circle, humming with a power that I could feel vibrating in my teeth, like I was standing against a speaker at a rock gig. The woman beckoned me to join in the circle, to increase the power. I shot Petra a look, but she just turned and ran away in fear.
I took the hand of one villager, then the other, and felt a jolt of electricity. With a satisfied nod, Anya looked up, her gaze meeting each of her sisters in turn. She smiled a wicked grin, threw back her head, and screamed into the heavens. The circle was complete.
We were all witches now.
It was time to fight.
It is hard to explain what happened next. I saw one witch flying through the air astride a pitchfork, blacker and faster than a bat. I saw another woman peel the metal lid off a tank like a can of Pringles. She lifted the driver out with one hand and snapped his neck. I saw a witch turn a helicopter into a fireball with a wave of her hand. Russian soldiers, possessed, turned against each other or ripped out their own eyes. I saw magic and carnage and mayhem.
My hands were tingling with power, and when a Russian soldier grabbed me around the neck from behind, I threw him over my shoulder with such force that he flew 20-feet through the wall of a wooden barn. Next to me. I saw a heart and lungs on the floor. I don’t know who they belonged to. For some reason dead crows fell from the skies.
Eventually the gunfire slowed, then stopped. The only sound was the crackle of a fire burning in a crashed fighter jet, where a pilot hung from the cockpit, the third prong of a pitchfork protruding from his eye socket. I sprinted from the battlefield back to the barn where we had slept that night. I called out for Petra but heard no answer. The house was on fire, but I had time to find my backpack and escape the smoke.
Later, after I had been picked up by a gang of Ukrainian rebels driving a 4x4, and fought my way on a packed train headed east, I pushed my camera’s memory card into my Macbook and opened the image folder. It was empty. I pushed play on my audio recorder and it just made a weird reverse-whine noise and shut itself down. Even my iPhone screen was black and wouldn’t turn on. It was bricked.
Nothing had survived the electrical surges. I was returning to New York with nothing. No one would believe me even if I told them. But I knew the secrets of the village were safe, for now. Until the next invasion.
I never heard from Petra again.