* * * * *
She had been born Gertruda Rosenkreuz, in the Silesian town of Breslau, in 1879.* This made her twenty-one when she married Swedenborgian missionary Kristoff Hertzmann, of Konigsberg, East Prussia, at the turn of the century. In 1915, however, they were arrested by the czarist secret police in Vladivostok--on the pretext of being German spies--and shipped off to a concentration camp near Siberia's Lake Baikal.
It was there she lost Kristoff to malnutrition...on what would have been their twentieth wedding anniversary.
The following year, after the liberation of that camp by elements of the U.S. 27th Infantry Regiment (one of many Western military contingents fighting against the Bolshevik take-over of Russia), she returned to Breslau. There, she joined a local branch of the German Order of the Eastern Star. A theosophical organization later assimilated by the Depression-era Thule Society. And when the society approached her, in 1929, to request her services as a guide for their Tunguska River expedition, there was only one reason she agreed. To get hold of some Tungusic shaman's "magic" mushrooms and, thereby, determine whether or not her beloved Kristoff had finally been reincarnated.
It was not mushrooms that seemingly answered her question, however. It was the bee sting that temporarily rendered her comatose!
"Kristoff?!" she had exclaimed in her glorified fever dream: "Is that really you?"
"Ja, mein liebchen. I am communicating with you, in this state, to tell you that you have been given a unique opportunity. When you re-awaken, you will have all the power you need to over-throw the present tyrants of this land. And, those who are gradually becoming just like them. Left; right; it is irrelevant which side of the political fence a government claims to occupy. Tyranny is tyranny! And, tyrants must be dealt with, accordingly."
With that, she had opened her eyes and stood back up.
"Klaus? Bernhard? Where is everyone?"
Whereupon, she heard the faintest of shouting and looked down at her feet. To her amazement, she not only found herself naked. She also found that the rest of the expedition had seemingly shrunk!
"Vas ist los...?"
Professor Kraus (using a hand-held megaphone) had explained the truth to her. Specifically; that no one had shrunken. Rather, it was she who had enlarged to supra-normal proportions!
"How are you feeling?" he had finally asked, after completing the recitation.
"To be truthful?" she had replied: "I feel...quite famished. In fact, I feel like there is only one thing that will satisfy my...enormous appetite."
Whereupon, she had immediately repositioned herself so that she was now kneeling on both knees. And, when that had been accomplished, she scooped up four of the expedtion's rank-and-file laborers (two, in each hand) and began to swallow them. Alive, whole, and head-first!
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
(33 YEARS LATER)
"Good Lord!" exclaimed Colonel Phillips: "How'd any of them get out of that alive?"
His double-agent in East Berlin had just finished reading him the Thule Society account, of that bizarre incident, from an old Gestapo file. One of many that the Soviets had captured when they first occupied Berlin in May of 1945.
"According to this?" the double-agent replied: "Chinese mercenaries, supplied by the Bear Eagle Tong of Manchuria (as protection against both Red Army patrols and rogue bands of Cossacks) basically anesthetized her with opium-filled sky rockets! And, when she hit the ground unconscious? She shrank back down to normal size!!"
"After that; she was shipped back to Berlin--under heavy intravenous sedation--and put in cold storage. Literally! As part of proto-Nazi experiments in artificial hibernation."
Colonel Phillips paused to consider all he had just been told.
"So, let me get this straight. You're telling me that the East Germans have now thawed her out--for possible use, by the Russians--as a living secret weapon?"
The double-agent's reply was mildly sarcastic.
"Can you think of any other reason why they'd code-name her 'Rusalka?' After a man-eating mermaid from medieval Russian mythology?"
tbc
Giantess World
Author's Chapter Notes:
STONY TUNGUSKA RIVER,
SIBERIA, USSR
(JUNE, 1929)
SIBERIA, USSR
(JUNE, 1929)
Chapter End Notes:
*Breslau: now Wroclaw, Poland.