"Metro 2033" - читать интересную книгу автора (Glukhovsky Dmitry A)

CHAPTER 6. The Rights of the Strong

The ceiling was so sooty that there wasn’t a trace left of the whitewash that had once been applied to it. Artyom looked dully at it, not knowing quite where he was.

‘You’re awake?’ he heard a familiar voice, forcing the scatterings of thoughts to build a picture of yesterday’s (was it yesterday?) events. It all seemed unreal to him now. Opaque, like fog, the wall of sleep had separated actuality from recollections.

‘Good evening,’ Artyom said to the man who had found him. He was sitting on the other side of the fire, and Artyom could see him through the flames. There was a mysterious, even mystical quality to the man’s face.

‘Now we can introduce ourselves to each other. I have a regular name, similar to all the other people that surround you in your life. It’s too long and it says nothing about me. But I am the latest incarnation of Genghis Khan, and so you can call me Khan. It’s shorter.’

‘Genghis Khan?’ Artyom looked at the man disbelievingly. Artyom didn’t believe in reincarnation.

‘My friend!’ Khan objected as though insulted. ‘You don’t need to look into my eyes and at my behaviour with such obvious suspicion. I have been incarnated in various other and more easily acceptable forms too. But Genghis Khan remains the most significant stage along my path even though I don’t remember anything from that life, unfortunately.’

‘So why Khan and not Genghis?’ Artyom pushed further. ‘Khan isn’t a surname after all, it’s just an professional assignation if I remember correctly.’

‘It brings up unnecessary reference, not to mention Genghis Aitmatov,’ his companion said reluctantly and incomprehensibly. ‘And by the way, I don’t consider it my duty to explain the origins of my name to whoever asks. What’s your name?’

‘I’m Artyom and I don’t know who I was in a previous life. Maybe my name was also a little more resounding back then,’ said Artyom.

‘Nice to meet you,’ Khan said, obviously completely satisfied with his answer. ‘I hope you will share my modest meal,’ he added, lifting and hanging a battered metal kettle over the fire – it was just like the ones they had at the northern patrol of VDNKh.

Artyom stood up and put his hand in his rucksack and pulled out a stick of sausage, which he’d acquired on his way from VDNKh. He cut off several pieces with his penknife and put them on a clean rag that was also inside his rucksack.

‘Here.’ He extended it towards his new acquaintance. ‘To go with tea.’

Khan’s tea was VDNKh tea, which Artyom recognized. Sipping the tea from an enamelled metal mug, he silently recalled the events of the day before. His host, obviously, was also thinking his own thoughts, and he didn’t bother Artyom.

The madness lashing at the world from the broken pipes seemed to have a different effect on everyone. Artyom was able to hear it simply as a deafening noise that didn’t let you concentrate, a noise which killed your thoughts, but spared your mind itself, whereas Bourbon simply couldn’t stand the powerful attack and died. Artyom hadn’t expected that the noise could actually kill someone, otherwise he would never had agreed to take one step into that black tunnel between Prospect Mir and Sukharevskaya.

This time the noise had snuck up surreptitiously, at first dulling the senses. Artyom was now sure that all usual sounds had been muted and the noise itself had been inaudible at first, but then it froze the flow of thoughts so they were suddenly covered with the hoarfrost of weakness and, finally, it delivered its crushing blow.

And why hadn’t he immediately noticed that Bourbon had suddenly started talking in terms that he couldn’t possibly have known, even if he had read lots of apocalyptical prophecies? The noise went deeper into Bourbon, as if bewitching him, and a strange intoxication had taken hold. Artyom himself had been thinking all sorts of rubbish about the fact that he mustn’t go silent, that they had to keep talking, but it hadn’t occurred to him to try to figure out what was going on. Something had been interfering…

He wanted to throw all that had happened out of his consciousness, to forget it all. It was impossible to get his head around it. In all his years at VDNKh he had only heard about such things. It had been easier to think that anything he’d heard was just not possible in this world. Artyom shook his head and looked from side to side again.

The same suffocating twilight filled the space. Artyom thought that it had probably never been light here, and that it could only get darker – when the fuel reserves for the fire ended. The clock above the entrance to the tunnel had stopped ticking a long time ago since there was no one who took care of such things. Artyom wondered why Khan had said ‘good evening’ to him, because according to his calculations it should be morning or midday.

‘Is it really evening?’ he asked Khan, puzzled.

‘It’s evening for me,’ Khan replied pensively.

‘What do you mean?’ Artyom didn’t understand.

‘See, Artyom, you obviously come from a station where the clock works and you all look at it in awe, comparing the time on your wrist watch to the red numbers above the tunnel entrance. For you, time is the same for everyone, just like light. Well, here it’s the opposite: nothing is anyone else’s business. No one is obliged to make sure there’s light for all the people who have made their way here. Go up to anybody here and suggest just that and it will seem absurd to them. Whoever needs light has to bring it here with them. It’s the same with time: whoever needs to know the time, whoever is afraid of chaos, needs to bring their own time with them. Everyone keeps some time here. Their own time. And it’s different for everybody and it depends on their calculations, but they’re all equally right, and each person believes in their own time, and subordinates their life to its rhythms. For me it’s evening right now, for you it’s morning – and what? People like you are so careful about storing up the hours you spend wandering, just as ancient peoples kept pieces of glowing coal in smouldering crucibles, hoping to resurrect fire from them. But there are others who lost their piece of coal, maybe even threw it away. You know, in the metro, it is basically always night-time and it makes no sense to keep track of time here so painstakingly. Explode your hours and you’ll see how time will transform – it’s very interesting. It changes – you won’t even recognize it. It will cease to be fragmented, broken into the sections of hours, minutes and seconds. Time is like mercury: scatter it and it will grow together again, it will again find its own integrity and indeterminacy. People tamed it, shackled it into pocket-watches and stop-watches – and for those that hold time on a chain, time flows evenly. But try to free it and you will see: it flows differently for different people, for some it is slow and viscous, counted in the inhalations and exhalations of smoked cigarettes, for others it races along, and they can only measure it in past lives. You think it’s morning now? There is a great likelihood that you are right: there’s a roughly twenty five percent likelihood. Nevertheless, this morning of yours has no sense to it, since it’s up there on the surface and there’s no life up there anymore. Well, there’re no more people, anyway. Does what occurs above have value for those who never go there? No. So when I say “good evening” to you, if you like, you can answer “good morning.” There’s no time in this station, except perhaps one and it’s very strange: now it is the four hundred and nineteenth day and I’m counting backwards.’

He went silent, sipping on his hot tea and Artyom thought it was funny when he remembered that at VDNKh the station clock was treated as a holy thing and any failure of it immediately put anyone nearby under the hot hand of blame. The authorities would be astonished to learn that time doesn’t exist, that the thought of it had just been lost! What Khan had just described reminded Artyom of a funny thing that he had been surprised by repeatedly as he grew up.

‘They say that before, when trains used to run, in the wagons they used to announce “Be careful of the closing doors, the next stop is x,y,z, and the next platform will appear on your left or right,” ’ he said. ‘Is that true?’

‘Does it seem strange to you?’ Khan raised his eyebrows.

‘How could they tell which side the platform would be on? If I’m coming from the south to the north then the platform is on the right. If I’m coming from the north to the south then it’s on the left. And the seats on the train were against the walls of the train if I remember right. So for the passengers, the platforms were either in front of them or behind them – half of them on one side and the other half on the other with different perspectives.’

‘You’re right.’ Khan answered respectfully. ‘Basically the train drivers were only speaking for themselves because they travelled in a compartment at the front and for them right was absolute right and left was absolute left. So they must have mostly been saying it for their own benefit. So in principle they might as well have said nothing. But I have heard these words since I was a child and I was so used to them that I had never stopped to consider them.’

Some time passed and then he said, ‘You promised to tell me what happened to your friend.’

Artyom paused for a moment, wondering if he should tell this man about the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of Bourbon; about the noise that he had heard twice now in the last twenty-four hours; about its destructive influence on human reason; about his sufferings and thoughts when he could hear the melody of the tunnel… And he decided that if there was anyone worth telling it all to, then it would be the person who sincerely considered himself to be the latest incarnation of Genghis Khan and and for whom time doesn’t exist. So he started to lay out his misadventure in a muddled, anxious way without observing the sequence of events, attempting to convey the various sensations he felt rather than the facts.

‘It’s the voices of the dead,’ Khan said quietly after Artyom had completed his narrative.

‘What?’ Artyom asked, surprised.

‘You heard the voices of the dead. You were saying that at the beginning it sounded like a whisper or a rustle? Yes, that’s them.’

‘Which dead?’ Artyom didn’t quite understand.

‘All the people who have been killed in the metro since the beginning. This, basically, explains why I am the last incarnation of Genghis Khan. There won’t be any more incarnations. Everyone has come to their end, my friend. I don’t know quite how this has happened but this time humanity has overdone it. There’s now no more heaven and no more hell. There isn’t purgatory either. After the soul flies out from the body – I hope you at least believe in the immortal soul? Well, it has no refuge anymore. How many megatons and bevatons does it take to disperse the noosphere? It was as real as this kettle. And whatever you say, we weren’t sparing of ourselves. We destroyed both heaven and hell. We now happen to live in this strange world, in a world where after death the soul must remain right where it is. You understand me? You will die but your tormented soul won’t get reincarnated anymore and, seeing as there is no more heaven, your soul won’t get any peace and quiet. It is doomed to remain where you lived your entire life, in the metro. Maybe I can’t give you the exact theosophic explanation for why this is but I know one thing for sure: in our world the soul stays in the metro after death… It will rush around under the arches of these underground tunnels until the end of time because there isn’t anywhere for it to go. The metro combines material life with the hypostases of the other world. Now Eden and the Netherworld are here, together. We live amidst the souls of the dead, they surround us in a full circle – all those that were crushed by trains, shot, strangled, burnt, eaten by monsters, those who died strange deaths, about which no living being knows anything and won’t ever be able to imagine. Long ago I struggled to figure out where they would go, why their presence isn’t felt every day, why you don’t feel a light and cold gaze coming from the darkness… You are familiar with tunnel horror? I thought before that the dead blindly followed us through tunnels, step by step, hiding in the darkness as soon as we turn to look. Eyes are useless. You won’t see the dead with them. But the ants that run along your spine, the hair standing on end, the chill which shakes our bodies – they are all witness to the invisible pursuit. That’s what I thought before. But now your story has explained much to me. Somehow they get into the pipes, into the communication lines… Sometime a long time ago, before my father and even my grandfather was born, in the city of the dead, which lies above us, there was a little river. People who lived there knew how to lock this river and to direct it into pipes under the earth where it probably flows until today. And it looks like this time someone’s buried the River Styx itself in these pipes… Your friend was speaking not in his own words – no, it wasn’t him. Those were the voices of the dead. He was hearing them in his head and repeating them and then they absorbed him.’

Artyom stared at Khan and could not avert his gaze from the man’s face for the duration of his monologue. Indistinct shadows skittered across Khan’s face and his eyes were flaring with some internal fire… Towards the end of the story, Artyom was almost sure that Khan was mad, that the voices in the pipes had whispered something to him too. And though Khan had saved him from death, and shown him such hospitality, the thought of staying with him for any length of time was uncomfortable and unpleasant. He needed to think about how to move on, through the most evil of all the tunnels in the metro, about which he had heard much – from Sukhareveskaya to Turgenevskaya and farther.

‘So, you’ll have to forgive me for my little lie,’ Khan added after a short pause. ‘Your friend’s soul didn’t go up to the creator, it won’t reincarnate and come back in a new form. It joined the other unhappy ones, in the pipes.’

These words reminded Artyom that he had planned to go back for Bourbon’s body, in order to bring it to the station. Bourbon had said that he had friends here, friends who would take Artyom back if they arrived successfully. This reminded him of the rucksack, which Artyom had not yet opened and in which, apart from Artyom’s machine gun, there might be something useful.

But to take it over was somehow frightening and superstitions of all kinds climbed into Artyom’s head and he decided to open it only slightly and to peek into it without touching or moving anything.

‘You don’t need to be afraid of it,’ Khan said to Artyom unexpectedly as though he could feel his trepidation. ‘The thing is now yours.’

‘I think what you did is called looting,’ Artyom said quietly.

‘You don’t need to be afraid of retribution, he won’t reincarnate,’ said Khan, not replying to what Artyom said but to what was flitting about in Artyom’s head. ‘I think that when they get taken into the pipes, the dead lose themselves and they become part of a whole, their will is dissolved into the will of the rest of them, and reason dries up. There’s no more individual. But if you’re afraid of the living and not the dead… Well, then drag this bag into the middle of the station and empty its contents onto the floor. Then no one will accuse you of thieving, and your conscience can be clean. But you tried to save the guy and he would be grateful to you for that. Consider that this bag is his repayment to you for what you did.’

He was speaking so authoritatively and with such conviction that Artyom gained the courage to put his hand into the pack and he started to take things out of it and lay them on the tarpaulin to see them in the light of the fire. There were four extra cartridges for Bourbon’s gun, in addition to the two that he had taken out when he gave the gun to Artyom. It was surprising that the trader had such an impressive arsenal. Artyom carefully wrapped up five of the cartridges he found in their cloth and put them into his rucksack and he put one in the Kalashnikov. The weapon was in excellent condition: thoroughly oiled and looked after. The lock moved smoothly, giving off a dull click when pushed and the safety catch was a bit stiff. All this indicated that the gun was practically new. The handle fitted comfortably into his hand and its shank was well polished. The weapon gave off a feeling of reliability and encouraged calmness and confidence. Artyom immediately decided that if he were to take any one thing from Bourbon it would be this gun.

The 7.62 cartridges that Bourbon had promised him for his ‘hoe’ weren’t there. It wasn’t clear how Bourbon had been planning to pay Artyom. Artyom thought about it and came to the conclusion that it may be that Bourbon hadn’t been planning to give him a thing but, having passed through the dangerous part, he would sling a shot into the back of Artyom’s head and throw him down a shaft and think no more of it. And if anyone had asked him about Artyom’s whereabouts then he would have any number of answers: anything can happen in the metro and well, the boy agreed himself to come along.

Apart from various rags, a map of the metro imprinted with notations that only its dead owner would understand, and a hundred grammes of weed, he found a few pieces of smoked meat in plastic bags and a notebook at the bottom of the rucksack. Artyom didn’t read the book and he was disappointed in the rest of the stuff. In the depths of his soul, he had hoped to find something mysterious, maybe something precious – the reason that Bourbon was so intent on getting through the tunnel to Sukharevskaya. He decided that Bourbon was a messenger or maybe a smuggler or something of the kind. This, at least, explained his determination to get through the damn tunnel at any price and his readiness to be generous. But since there was not much left in the rucksack after he’d pulled out the last pair of linen pieces, Artyom decided that the reason for his insistence had to have been something else. Artyom wracked his brains for a long while about what Bourbon needed at Sukharevskaya but he couldn’t think of anything plausible.

Then he remembered that he had left the poor man in the middle of the tunnel, left him to the rats, even though he had planned to go back and do something about the body. True, he had only a vague idea of how to give the trader his final honours and what to do with the corpse. Burn it? But you needed strong nerves for that, and the suffocating smoke and the stink of the burning meat and burning hair was sure to filter through to the station, and then he wouldn’t be able to avoid unpleasantness. Dragging the body to the station would be heavy and awful. It’s one thing to pull a man along by the wrists if you think he’s alive and you’re pushing away all thoughts of the fact that he is not breathing and has no pulse, but it’s another thing to pull along a corpse. So what, then? Just like Bourbon lied to him about his payment, he might have been lying about his friends here at the station. Then Artyom, having dragged the body back here, might just be putting himself in a worse situation.

‘So what do you do here with those that die?’ Artyom asked Khan after a long bout of thinking.

‘What do you mean, my friend?’ Khan answered a question with a question. ‘Are you talking about the souls of the deceased or about their perished bodies?’

‘About the corpses,’ Artyom growled. He was becoming fed up with his talk of the netherworld.

‘There are two tunnels that go from Prospect Mir to Sukharevskaya, ’ Khan said and Artyom thought to himself that trains went in two directions so they always needed two tunnels. So why would Bourbon, knowing about the second tunnel, want to go towards his fate? Was there an even greater danger hiding in the second tunnel? ‘But you can only go through it alone,’ the man continued, ‘because in the second tunnel, near our station, the ground sags, the floor has collapsed and now there’s some kind of deep ravine where, according to local legend, a whole train fell through the ground. If you stand on one end of this ravine, it doesn’t matter which, then you can’t see the other end, and the light of even the strongest flashlight won’t illuminate the depths. And so all sorts of blockheads say that it’s a bottomless abyss. This ravine is our cemetery. We put all our corpses in there.’

Artyom started to feel ill when he realized that he would have to go back to the place where Khan had picked him up, to drag Bourbon’s rat-gnawed body to the station and then to the ravine in the second tunnel. He tried to convince himself that throwing the corpse into the ravine was the same, in essence, as throwing it into a tunnel because you couldn’t call either one a burial. But just when he was ready to believe that leaving everything as it was was the best solution to the situation, Bourbon’s face appeared in front of his eyes with amazing clarity saying, ‘I’ve died.’ Artyom immediately was drenched with sweat. He got up with difficulty, put his new machine gun on his shoulder and said:

‘OK, I’m off. I promised him. We had an agreement. I need to.’ And with that he started to walk down the hall with stiff legs and onto the iron stairs which led down to the tunnel from the platform.

It was necessary to turn on his flashlight even before he went down the stairs. Thundering down the stairs, Artyom stopped dead for a moment, not wanting to step any further. A heavy air blew a rotting smell in his face, and for an instant his muscles refused to obey him. He tried to force himself to take another step. When he overcame his fear and repulsion and started to walk on, a heavy palm was placed on his shoulder. He cried out in surprise and turned around sharply, his chest tight, understanding that he wouldn’t have time to grab the machine gun from his shoulder, he wouldn’t have time for anything…

It was Khan.

‘Don’t be scared,’ he said to Artyom to calm him. ‘I was just testing you. You don’t need to go. Your friend’s body isn’t there anymore.’

Artyom stared at him uncomprehendingly.

‘While you were sleeping, I completed the funeral rite. You have no reason to go. The tunnel is empty.’ And, turning his back to Artyom, Khan wandered back toward the arches.

Feeling enormous relief, the young man hurried after him. Catching up to Khan in ten paces, Artyom asked him in an emotional voice:

‘But why did you do that and why didn’t you tell me? You told me yourself that it didn’t matter if he stayed in the tunnel or if he was brought to the station.’

‘For me it doesn’t matter at all.’ Khan shrugged his shoulders. ‘But to you it was important. I know that your journey has a purpose and that your path is long and difficult. I don’t understand what your mission is but its burden will be too heavy for you alone so I decided to help you a bit.’ He looked over at Artyom with a smile.

When they had returned to the fire and sat down on the creased tarpaulin, Artyom couldn’t help but ask:

‘What did you mean when you mentioned my mission? Did I say something in my sleep?’

‘No, my friend, you were silent as you slept. But I had a vision and in it I was asked to help by a person who shares part of my name. I was warned of your arrival, and that’s why I went out to meet you and picked you up, when you were crawling along with your friend’s corpse.’

‘That’s why?’ Artyom looked at him distrustfully. ‘I thought it was because you heard shots…’

‘I heard the shots, there was a loud echo here. But you don’t really think that I would go into the tunnel every time I hear a shot? I would have come to the end of my life’s path a lot sooner and completely ignominiously if I had done so. But this was an exception.’

‘And what about the person who shares part of your name?’

‘I can’t say who that is, I’ve never seen him before and have never spoken with him but you know him. You ought to understand this yourself. I’ve only seen him once and even then not in real life but I immediately felt his colossal strength. He commanded me to help a youth who would come from the northern tunnel and your image stood before me. This was all a dream, but the feeling that it was real was so great that when I woke up I couldn’t make out the difference between dream and reality. This powerful man with a bright shaved head, dressed all in white… You know him?’

At this point Artyom shook and it was as if everything was swimming before him, and the image that Khan was describing was clear in his mind. The man who shared half a name with his rescuer… was Hunter! Khan, Hun… Artyom had had a similar vision: when he couldn’t decide whether to embark on this journey, he saw Hunter but not in the long black raincoat which he’d worn at VDNKh on that memorable day, but in the formless snowy-white garments.

‘Yes. I know this man,’ Artyom said, looking at Khan in a totally new way.

‘He invaded my dreams and I usually never forgive that. But everything was different with him,’ Khan said distractedly. ‘He needed my help just as you did, and he didn’t order me to do it, didn’t ask me to submit to his will but it was more like he was asking me persistently. He wasn’t able to crawl inside and wander through someone else’s thoughts, but he was having a hard time, a very hard time. He was thinking about you in desperation and needed a helping hand, a shoulder to lean on. I extended a hand to him and gave him my shoulder. I went to meet you.’

Artyom was buried in thoughts that were seething and floating up to his consciousness one after the other and dissolving, never making it into words, and then sinking back down to the depths of his mind. His tongue was stiff and the young man took a long time to conjure up even a word. Could this man have really known of his arrival beforehand? Could Hunter have somehow warned him? Was Hunter alive or had he been turned into a bodyless shadow? He was going to have to believe in this nightmarish and delirious story of the netherworld that had been described by Khan – but it was easier and more pleasant to tell himself that the man was just crazy. But the most important thing was that this man knew about the task that faced him – he had called it a ‘mission’ and though he was probably having a hard time figuring out what it was, he had understood its importance and gravity.

‘Where are you going?’ Khan asked Artyom quietly, calmly looking him in the eye as though he was reading his thoughts. ‘Tell me where your path lies and I will help you make your next step towards your goal if it is within my power. He asked me to do that.’

‘Polis,’ Artyom exhaled. ‘I need to get to Polis.’

‘And how do you intend to get there from this godforsaken station?’ Khan inquired. ‘My friend, you should have gone up to the Ring from Prospect Mir to Kurskaya or to Kievskaya.’

‘The Hansa are there and I don’t know anyone there so I wouldn’t be able to get through. And anyway, now I can’t return to Prospect Mir. I’m afraid that I won’t be able to stand another journey through that tunnel. I was thinking of getting to Turgenevskaya. I looked at an old map and it says that there’s a passage there to Sretensky Bulvar. There’s a half-built tunnel there and you can get to Trubnaya through it.’ Artyom took the charred map out of his pocket. ‘From Trubnaya there’s a passage to Tsvetnoi Bulvar, I saw it on the map and from there, if everything is fine, you can get to Polis directly.’

‘No,’ Khan said sadly, shaking his head. ‘You won’t get to Polis via that route. The map is lying. They printed them way before everything happened. They describe metro lines that were never fully built, they describe stations that have collapsed, burying hundreds of innocents and they don’t say anything about the frightening dangers that are hidden along the way and will make most itineraries impossible. Your map is as stupid and naive as a three-year-old child. Give it to me.’ He held out his hand.

Artyom obediently gave him the piece of paper. Khan immediately screwed up the map and threw it into the fire. Artyom thought that this was a bit excessive but had decided not to argue about it, when Khan said:

‘And now show me the map that you found in your friend’s rucksack.’

Rummaging through his things, Artyom found the map but he wasn’t in a rush to give it to Khan, thinking about the unfortunate fate that may lie ahead of it. He didn’t want to be left without any map. Khan noticed his trepidation and hurried to reassure him:

‘I won’t do anything to it, don’t worry. And trust me, I never do anything without a reason. You might have the impression that some of my actions have no point and are even a little crazy. But there is a point. You just don’t get it, because your perception and understanding of the world is limited. You are only at the beginning of your path. You are too young to really know some things.’

Artyom gave Khan Bourbon’s map – he didn’t have the strength to object. It was a yellowed piece of card the size of a postcard and it had pretty sparkling balls on it and the words ‘Happy New Year 2007!’

‘It’s very heavy,’ Khan said hoarsely, and Artyom turned his attention to Khan’s palm which held the piece of card. It suddenly fell to the ground as though the card weighed more than a kilo. A second ago, Artyom hadn’t noticed anything heavy about it when he held it in his hand. Paper is paper.

‘This map is much wiser than yours,’ Khan said. ‘It contains such knowledge that I don’t believe that it belonged to the person who was travelling with you. It’s not even that it is marked up with all these notations and signs, although they probably say a lot. No, it has something about it…’

His words broke off sharply.

Artyom looked up and peered at Khan. Khan’s forehead was carved with deep wrinkles, and the dying fire appeared to flash in his eyes. His face had changed so much that Artyom was frightened and wanted to get out of the station as soon as possible, to go anywhere, even back through the terrible tunnel that he had managed to get through with such difficulty.

‘Give it back to me.’ Khan wasn’t asking but was rather giving an order. ‘I will give you another one and you won’t know the difference. And I’ll throw in anything else you want,’ he continued.

‘Take it, it’s yours.’ Artyom easily yielded it, lightly spitting as he uttered the words of agreement.

Khan suddenly moved away from the fire so that his face was in the shadows. Artyom guessed that he was trying to take control of himself and didn’t want him to be witness to his inner struggle.

‘You see, my friend.’ His voice resounded in the darkness, sort of weakly and indecisively, without the power and will it had possessed just a moment before. ‘That’s not a map. I mean, that’s not simply a map. It’s a Guide to the metro. Yes, yes, there’s no doubt that’s what it is. The person who holds it can get across the whole metro in two days because this map is… alive or something. It will tell you itself where to go and how to go, it will warn you of dangers… That is, it will lead you on your way. That’s why it’s called a Guide,’ Khan moved towards to the fire again, ‘with a capital letter. I’ve heard of them. There are only a few of them in the whole metro and this may be the last one. It’s the legacy of one of the most powerful magicians of the last era.’

‘The one who sits at the deepest point in the metro?’ Artyom decided to flash some knowledge at Khan but immediately stopped short. Khan’s face went dark.

‘Never speak lightly about things you don’t know anything about! You don’t know what happens at the deepest point in the metro – and even I only know a little, and God forbid we ever find out. But I can swear to you that whatever happened there dramatically differs from whatever you heard from your friends. So don’t repeat other people’s idle imaginings because one day you’ll have to pay for it. And it has nothing to do with the Guide.’

‘Well, anyway,’ Artyom hurried to assure him, not wanting to miss a chance to switch the conversation to a less dangerous tack, ‘you can keep the Guide for yourself. After all, I don’t know how to use it. And then I’m so grateful to you for rescuing me that even giving you this map doesn’t seem to repay the favour.’

‘That’s true,’ the wrinkles on Khan’s face smoothed out, and his voice became soft again. ‘You won’t know how to use it for a long while yet. So if you give it to me, we’ll be quits. I have a normal map of the metro lines and if you want I can copy the markings of the Guide onto it and you can have it instead. And then…’ He fumbled in his bags. ‘I can offer you this thing,’ and he brought out a strangely shaped flashlight. ‘It doesn’t need batteries. It’s made so that you just charge it like this manually – can you see the two little knobs? You have to press them with your fingers and they manufacture the current themselves and the flashlight shines. It’s not too bright of course but there are sometimes situations when this beam seems brighter than the mercury lamps at Polis… It has saved me many times, and I hope that it will prove useful. Take it, it’s yours. Take it, take it, the trade isn’t fair anyway – it’s me who owes you and not the reverse.’

In Artyom’s opinion, the exchange was actually unusually advantageous. What did he need with a map with mystical properties, if he was deaf to its voice? He would have thrown it away anyway, after turning it over again and again and vainly attempting to read the curlicues painted on it.

‘So now, the route which you sketched out won’t take you anywhere except into an abyss.’ Khan continued the interrupted conversation, holding the map with great care in his hands. ‘Here you go, take my old one and follow it.’ He held out a tiny map, printed on the other side of an old pocket calendar. ‘You were talking about the passage from Turgenevskaya to Sretensky Bulvar? Don’t tell me you don’t know the evil reputation of this station and the long tunnel that goes from here to Kitai Gorod?’

‘Well, I have been told that you mustn’t go into it alone, that it’s only safe to go through in a caravan, and I was thinking to go in a caravan until Turgenevskaya and then to run off from them into the transfer passage – they’re not going to run after me after all…’ Artyom answered, feeling vague thoughts swarming in his head.

‘There isn’t a transfer passage there. The arches are walled up. You didn’t know that?’

How could he have forgotten! Of course, he had been told about this before but it had flown out of his head… The Reds were frightened of the demons in that tunnel and they walled up the only way to Turgenevskaya.

‘But is there no other passage there?’ he asked carefully.

‘No, and the map is silent about it. The passage to lines that are actually constructed doesn’t begin at Turgenevskaya. But even if the passage did exist I’m not sure that you have enough courage to separate from the group and go into it. Especially if you listen to the latest rumours about that lovely little place while you’re waiting to join the caravan.’

‘So what should I do?’ Artyom asked despondently, scrutinizing the little calendar.

‘It’s possible to get to Kitai Gorod. Oh, now that’s a curious station, and the morals there are very amusing – but there, at least, you won’t disappear without a trace in such a way that your closest friends wonder to themselves if you ever existed at all. At Turgenevskaya that can happen… From Kitai Gorod, follow me now,’ he was tracing a finger on the map, ‘it’s only two stations to Pushkinskaya, and there there’s a passage to Chekhovskaya, and another one there, and then you’re at Polis. That would be shorter than the route which you were planning.’

Artyom was moving his lips, counting the stations and transfers on each route. However he counted though, the route that Khan suggested was much shorter and less dangerous and it wasn’t clear why Artyom hadn’t thought of it himself. So there was no choice left.

‘You’re right,’ he said finally. ‘And how often do caravans go there?’

‘I’m afraid not often. And there is one small but annoying detail: in order to go into the southern tunnel to Kitai Gorod, you have to come to our little half-station from the north,’ and he pointed at the damned tunnel which Artyom had only barely made it out of. ‘Basically, the last caravan to the south left a while ago now, and we’re hoping that there’s another group planning on coming through soon. Talk to some people, ask around, but don’t talk too much. There’re some cutthroats around here and they can’t be trusted… OK, I’ll go with you so you don’t get into anything stupid,’ he added after thinking it over.

Artyom was going to put on his rucksack when Khan stopped him with a gesture: ‘Don’t worry about your things. People are so scared of me here that no riff-raff would dare even look at my lair. And while you’re here, you’re under my protection.’

Artyom left his rucksack by the fire but he took his machine gun with him anyway, not wanting to be separated from his new treasure, and he hurried to follow Khan who was walking in a leisurely fashion towards the fires that were burning on the other side of the hall. He noticed with surprise how under-nourished tramps, wrapped in stinking rags scuttled away from them as they passed and Artyom thought that people really were probably afraid of Khan here. He wondered why…

The first fire swam by but Khan didn’t slow his pace. It was a very tiny little fire, barely burning, and there were two figures sitting next to it, tightly pressed to each other, a man and a woman. They were whispering quietly in an unknown language, and their whispers dispersed, not quite reaching Artyom’s ears. Artyom was so fascinated that he almost turned his head. He could hardly resist looking at this pair.

In front of them was another fire, a big, bright one and a whole camp of people were settled around it. Fierce looking peasant types were sitting there, warming their hands. Loud laughter thundered and the air was so torn with the sound of noisy arguing that Artyom became a bit scared and slowed his pace. But Khan calmly and confidently walked up to the seated men, greeted them and sat down by the fire so that Artyom could do nothing else but follow his example and sit down next to him.

‘… He’s looking at himself and sees that he has the same rash on his hands, and something is swelling and hard and really painful in his armpits. Imagine the horror, fuck’s sake… Different people behave in different ways. Some shoot themselves straight away, some go crazy and start throwing themselves at other people trying to hug them so they won’t die alone. Some run into the tunnel beyond the Ring to the backwaters so they won’t infect other people… There are all sorts of people. So this guy, as soon as he sees all this, asks his doctor: is there any chance I can get better? The doctor tells him straight: none. After the appearance of this rash you have about two weeks to live. And the battalion commander, I see, is already quietly taking his Makarov out of its holster just in case the guy starts to get violent…’ The man speaking was a thin old guy with a bristly chin in a quilted jacket with a voice faltering out genuine anxiety as he looked at the grey watery eyes around him.

And though Artyom did not understand what it was all about, the spirit with which the story was told and the pregnant silence among the recently riotous group made him shudder and ask Khan quietly about it in order not to draw any attention to himself.

‘What’s he talking about?’

‘The plague,’ Khan answered heavily. ‘It’s started.’

Those words emitted the stench of decomposed bodies and the greasy smoke of cremation fires and echoes of alarm bells and the howl of manual sirens.

At VDNKh and its surroundings there had never been an epidemic; rats as carriers of infection were destroyed, and there were also several good doctors at the station. Artyom had only read in books about fatal infectious diseases. He came across some of them when he was very young and they had left a deep trace in his memory and long inhabited the world of his childhood dreams and fears. Therefore when he heard the word ‘plague’ he felt a cold sweat on his back and a little faint. He didn’t ask Khan anything more, but listened with an unhealthy attention to the story of the thin man in the quilted coat.

‘But Ryzhii wasn’t that type, he wasn’t a psycho. He stood there silently for a minute and says: “Give me some cartridges and I’ll go. I can’t stay here with you anymore.” I heard the battalion commander sigh with relief straight away. It was clear: there’s little joy in shooting one of your own even if he’s sick. They gave Ryzhii two horns. And he went to the north-east, beyond Aviamotornaya. And we didn’t see him again. But the battalion commander asks our doctor afterwards about how long it takes the disease to act. The doctor says the incubation period is a week. If nothing appears a week after contact with it then you’re not infected. So the battalion commander then decides: we’ll leave the station and stay there for a week and then we’ll see. We can’t be inside the Ring, basically – if the infection penetrates the Ring then the whole metro will die. And so they stayed away for a whole week. They didn’t even go up to each other – because how could we know who was infected among us. So there was this other guy, who we called Cup because he really liked to drink. Everyone kept away from him since he’d hung out with Rizhii a lot. When he approached anyone they would run to the other end of the station. Some guy even pointed his barrel at him, telling him to, like, push off. When Cup ran out of water, the guys shared with him of course – but they did it by putting it on the floor and then walking away and no one got near. After a week he went missing. Then people were saying different things, some were even telling lies and saying that some beast had dragged him off but the tunnels there are quiet and clean. I personally think that he noticed a rash on himself and his armpits were hurting so he ran off. And no one else from our forces was infected and we waited a little longer and then the battalion commander checked everyone himself. Everyone was healthy.’

Artyom noticed that despite this assurance, the space around the story-teller was empty even though there wasn’t much space at the fire altogether and everyone was sitting close together, shoulder to shoulder.

‘Did it take you a while to get here, brother?’ A thick-set bearded man in a leather waistcoat asked him quietly but clearly.

‘It’s about thirty days since we came out from Aviamotornaya,’ the thin guy replied looking at him uneasily.

‘So I have news for you. There’s plague at Aviamotornaya. There’s plague there – do you hear?! The Hansa have closed it as well as Taganskaya and Kurskaya. They’ve called a quarantine. I have acquaintances there, Hansa citizens. And there’s flame-throwers standing at the passages to Taganskaya and Kurskaya and everyone who comes within range is blasted. They’re calling it disinfection. Apparently, some have an incubation period of a week and for others it takes longer, so you obviously brought the infection back,’ he concluded, viciously lowering his voice.

‘What, oh come on guys? I’m healthy! See for yourself!’ the little guy jumped up from his place and started to convulsively strip off his quilted coat and to show the dirty body underneath it, hurrying, afraid that he wouldn’t convince them.

The tension mounted. There was no one left near the thin man, they’d all crowded at the other side of the fire. People were talking nervously and Artyom heard the quiet clanking of gun locks. He looked at Khan questioningly, pulling his gun from his shoulder to firing position, pointed forward. Khan kept his silence but stopped him with a gesture. Then he quickly got up and walked away from the fire without a sound, taking Artyom with him. At about ten paces he froze and continued to look at what was happening.

Quick and busy movements were visible in the light of the fire and they looked like some kind of primitive reckless dance. Talk in the crowd went silent and the action continued in ominous silence. Finally, the man succeeded in pulling off his undershirt and he exclaimed triumphantly:

‘See! Look! I am clean! I am healthy! There’s nothing there! I’m healthy!’

The bearded guy in the waistcoat pulled a board out of the fire that was burning on one end and carefully approached the thin guy looking at him with disgust. The skin of the overly talkative guy was dark with dirt and glossy with grease, but there was no trace of a rash as far as the bearded guy could see and so after a thorough inspection he commanded him:

‘Raise your arms!’

The unfortunate fellow quickly threw his arms up, giving the people crowded on the other side of the fire a view of his armpits which were overgrown with fine hairs. The bearded man made a show of holding his nose as he got closer, meticulously examining and looking for buboes, but he couldn’t find any symptoms of plague.

‘I am healthy! Healthy! Are you convinced now?’ The little man cried out, almost hysterical now.

There was a hostile whisper in the crowd. Taking stock of the overall mood and not wishing to succumb to it, the thickset man declared:

‘Well, let’s assume that you’re healthy. That still means nothing!’

‘Why does it mean nothing?’ The thin man was taken aback and immediately drooped.

‘That’s right. You might have not got sick yourself. You might be immune. But you can still carry the infection. You had contact with that Rizhii guy? Were you in the same force? Did you talk with him, share the same water? Did you shake his hand? You shook his hand, don’t lie brother.’

‘So what, what if I shook his hand? I didn’t get sick…’ The man replied at a loss of what to say. He was frozen powerless, and persecuted by the gaze of the crowd.

‘So. It isn’t impossible that you’re infectious, brother. So, I’m sorry but we can’t risk it. It’s a prophylactic brother, you see?’ The bearded man undid the buttons of his waistcoat, baring a brown leather holster. There were encouraging outbursts and more sounds of snapping gun-locks among the crowd at the fire.

‘Guys! But I’m healthy! I didn’t get sick! Look, see!’ The thin man again raised his arms but now everyone just winced disdainfully and with evident aversion.

The thickset man took his pistol from its holster and pointed it at the guy who it seemed couldn’t understand what was going on and he was muttering that he was healthy, squeezing his quilted coat to his chest: it was chilly and he had already started to get cold.

Then Artyom couldn’t stand it. Pulling at his gun-lock, he stepped toward the crowd, not exactly knowing what he was about to do. There was a lump in the pit of his stomach and one stuck in his throat too so he wouldn’t be able to utter a word. But something in this person, in his empty and desperate eyes, in the senseless, mechanical mutterings, had hooked into Artyom and had pushed him to take a step forward. It wasn’t clear what he was going to do next but there was a hand on his shoulder and God what a heavy hand it was!

‘Stop,’ Khan ordered him quietly, and Artyom was as frozen as a corpse, feeling that his brittle determination had been shattered against the granite of someone else’s will. ‘You can’t help him. You will either be killed or you will bring fury on yourself. Your mission will not be completed in either case and you should remember that.’

At that moment the thin man suddenly twitched, yelled, clinging to his quilted jacket and with a wave he jumped onto the path and dashed into the black trough of the southern tunnel with superhuman speed, squealing, as wild as an animal. The bearded man jerked and was after him, trying to take aim at his back but then stopped and waved a hand. This was already going too far, and all of them stood on the platform knew it. It wasn’t clear if the chased man remembered what he was running into, perhaps he was hoping for a miracle, or maybe fear had wiped everything out of his head.

After several minutes, there was a howl which tore painfully into the dull silence of the terrible tunnel and the echoes of his footsteps went suddenly silent, as if someone had turned off the sound. Even the echo died immediately, and silence reigned again. This was so strange, so unusual to human hearing and reason, that the imagination tried to fill the gaps and it seemed to them that they could hear a far-off cry. But everyone understood that it was an illusion.

‘Jackals always know when one of their pack is sick, my friend.’ said Khan and Artyom almost fell backwards as he noticed the predatory fire in Khan’s eyes. ‘The sick one is a burden to the pack and a threat to its health. So the pack kills the sick one. They tear him to pieces. To pieces,’ he repeated, as though he was relishing what he’d said.

‘But these aren’t jackals,’ Artyom finally found the courage to object to Khan, who he was suddenly believing to be the reincarnation of Genghis Khan. ‘These are people!’

‘And what would you have them do?’ Khan parried. ‘Degradation. Our medicine is at the level of jackals. And there’s as much humanity in us too. So…’

Artyom knew how to object to this too but arguing with his only protector at this wild station was not appropriate. But Khan who had been expecting an objection evidently decided that Artyom had given up and he turned the conversation to a different subject.

‘So now, while the subject of infectious diseases and the methods to fight them will dominate our friends’ discussions, we need to forge some iron. Otherwise they might decide not to move ahead for weeks. Even though weeks around here can fly past unnoticed.’

The people at the fire were excitedly discussing what had happened. They were all tense and upset, the spectral shadow of the terrible danger had covered them, and now they were trying to decide what to do next, but their thoughts, like those of lab mice in a labyrinth, were going in circles as they helplessly poked into blind alleys, senselessly rushing back and forth, unable to find the exit.

‘Our friends are very close to panic,’ Khan commented smugly, smiling and looking gaily at Artyom. ‘Furthermore, they suspect that they just lynched an innocent man and this act does not stimulate rational thinking. Now we are dealing not with a collective but with a pack. A perfect mental state for the manipulation of their psyches! The conditions couldn’t be better.’

Artyom felt uneasy again seeing the triumphant look on Khan’s face. He tried to smile in response – after all Khan wanted to help him – but the smile came out pitifully and unconvincing.

‘The main thing now is authority. Strength. The pack respects strength, and not logical argument,’ Khan added, nodding. ‘Stand and watch. You’ll be able to go on your way in less than a day’s time.’ And with these words, he took several long strides and wedged himself into the crowd.

‘We can’t stay here!’ His voice thundered and the conversation in the crowd went silent.

People listened to him carefully… Khan was using his powerful almost hypnotic gift of persuasion. With his first words, there was an acute feeling of danger hanging above each person, and Artyom doubted that anyone would choose to remain at the station after this.

‘He infected the air here! If we breathe this much longer then it’s over. Bacilli are everywhere here, and we will definitely get hooked by it if we stay here any longer. We’ll die like rats and we’ll rot right in the middle of this hall on the floor. No one will choose to come and help us – there isn’t a hope! We can only count on ourselves. We need to get out of this demonic station, which is seething with microbes, as soon as we can. If we leave now all together then it won’t be hard to get through the tunnel. But we have to do it quickly!’

People made noises of agreement. The majority of them couldn’t, like Artyom, protest against the colossal force of Khan’s persuasion. In following Khan’s words, Artyom obediently worried about all the circumstances and feelings that were proposed in them: the feelings of threat, the fear, the panic, the weak hope which was growing as Khan continued talking about his suggestions for escape.

‘How many of you are there?’

Immediately several people started counting the gathered group. There were eight men, not counting Artyom and Khan.

‘That’s means there’s nothing to wait for! We’re already ten people so we can get through!’ Khan stated and, not allowing the people to come to their senses, he continued, ‘Gather your things, we need to leave within the hour! Quick, let’s get back to the fire, you also need to get your belongings,’ Khan whispered to Artyom, tugging him towards their little camp. ‘The most important thing is that they don’t realize what’s going on. If we delay, they will start to question whether it is worth it for them to leave and go to Chistye Prudy. Some of them were headed in the opposite direction, and others just live here, and they have nowhere else to go. It seems that I’ll have to take you to Kitai Gorod, otherwise, I’m afraid that they’ll lose direction or they’ll just forget where they’re going and why.’

Quickly putting Bourbon’s fancy things into his rucksack while Khan rolled up his tarpaulin and put out the fire, Artyom saw what was going on at the other end of the hall. People who were initially animated and quickly gathering up their households were moving less and less certainly. Someone now was squatting by the fire and another was wandering towards the centre of the platform for something, and there were two people discussing something amongst themselves. Having understood what was going on, Artyom pulled on Khan’s sleeve.

‘They’re discussing it,’ Artyom warned him.

‘Alas, it’s an inherent human feature to discuss things,’ Khan answered. ‘Even if their will is suppressed and even though they are in fact hypnotized, they will still gravitate towards each other and start talking. Man is a social being, and there’s nothing you can do about it. In any other situation, I would accept any human activity as a divine concept or as the inevitable result of evolution, depending on who I was talking to. But in this situation, the fact that they’re thinking is not good. We need to interfere here, my young friend, and to direct their thoughts along the most useful path,’ he concluded, putting his enormous travelling pack on his back.

The fire was put out and the dense, almost tangible darkness squeezed them on all sides. Reaching into his pocket and getting out his flashlight, Artyom pushed on its button. Something buzzed inside the device and the lamp came to life. An uneven, flickering light splashed out from it.

‘Go on, go on, press it again, don’t be afraid,’ Khan encouraged him, ‘it can work better than that.’

When they went up to the others, the stale tunnel drafts had had time to blow through their minds so that they were less than convinced in Khan’s proposition. The strong man with the beard stepped forward.

‘Listen, brother,’ he carelessly turned to Artyom’s companion.

Without even looking at him, Artyom could feel the air around Khan electrify. It seemed that such familiarity had incensed Khan. Of all the people Artyom knew, it was Khan that he would least like to see furious. There was also the hunter, but he seemed to Artyom to be so much more cold-blooded that it was impossible to imagine him in a rage. He would probably kill people with the same expression on his face that other people have when they were washing mushrooms or making tea.

‘We’ve been discussing it and we think,’ the thickset man continued, ‘that you’re chasing snowstorms here. For me, for example, it’s completely inconvenient to go to Kitai Gorod. And those guys are against it too. Right Semenych?’ He turned for the support of the crowd. Someone in the crowd nodded in agreement, though rather timidly. ‘Most of us were going to Prospect Mir, to the Hansa, until the business in the tunnel started up. So we’re waiting here and then moving on. Nothing is left here anyway. We burned his things. And don’t try to get us thinking about the air. This isn’t pulmonary plague. And if we’re infected, then we’re already infected and there’s nothing to be done. It’s more likely that there wasn’t any infection here to start with so you can get lost, brother, with your propositions!’ The bearded man’s manner was becoming even more familiar.

Artyom was a little taken aback by this onslaught. But, stealing a look at his companion, he felt that the guy was in trouble. There was that blazing orange internal flame in Khan’s eyes and there was such savage malice and power coming from him that Artyom felt a chill, and the hair on his head began to rise, and he wanted to bare his teeth and roar.

‘Why did you kill him if there was no infection after all?’ Khan asked insinuatingly, with a deliberately soft voice.

‘It was prophylactic!’ the thickset man answered with an insolent look.

‘No, my friend, this isn’t medicine. This was a crime. What gave you the right to do it?’

‘Don’t call me friend, I’m not your dog, OK?’ the bearded man growled. ‘What right did I have? The right of the strong! Haven’t you heard of it? And you’re not exactly… We could get you and your foundling too! As a prophylactic measure! Got it?’ With a gesture already familiar to Artyom, the man pulled open his waistcoat and put his hand on his holster.

This time Khan didn’t manage to hold Artyom back and the bearded man was in the crosshairs of Artyom’s machine gun before he could even unbutton his holster. Artyom was breathing heavily and could hear his heart beating and the blood pounding in his temples, and there wasn’t a reasonable thought in his head. He knew only one thing: if the bearded man said one more thing or if his hand continued on its way to his pistol’s handle then he would immediately pull the trigger. Artyom didn’t want to die like that poor guy had: he wouldn’t let the pack tear him to pieces.

The bearded guy froze in place and didn’t make a move, with evil flashing in his dark eyes. And then something incomprehensible happened. Khan suddenly took a big step forward, looked the man in the eye and said quietly:

‘Stop it. You will obey me. Or you will die.’

The threatening gaze of the bearded man faded, and his hands were powerless, hanging down beside his body. It looked so unnatural that Artyom had no doubt that it was Khan’s words and not the machine gun that had had an effect on the man.

‘Never discuss the rights of the strong. You are too weak to do that,’ said Khan and he returned to Artyom, without even disarming the man.

The thickset man stood still, looking from side to side. People were waiting to hear what Khan was going to say next. His control over the situation had been restored.

‘We will consider the matter closed and that consensus has been reached. We leave in fifteen minutes.’ And turning to Artyom he said, ‘People, you say? No, my friend, they are beasts. They are a pack of jackals. They were preparing to tear us apart. And they would have. But they forgot one thing. They are jackals but I am a wolf. And there are some stations where I am known only by that name.’

Artyom was silent, dumbstruck by what he had seen, finally understanding who Khan reminded him of.

‘But you are a wolf cub,’ Khan added after a minute, not turning around but Artyom heard the unexpectedly warm notes in his voice.