METRO 2033 (16 page)

Artyom, remembering that Bourbon had ordered him to stay quiet and to talk to no one, muttered something that could have been interpreted in several ways, leaving the guy to his own interpretation. The duty officer, having given up on getting an answer from him, turned to his mate and started discussing a story told by some guy called Mikhail who had been trading at Prospect Mir a few days ago and had had some trouble with the station’s administration.

Satisfied that they’d given up on him, Artyom sat at the fire and looked at the southern tunnel through the flames. It looked like the same wide and endless tunnel as they had in the northerly direction at
VDNKh
where Artyom had, not so long ago, sat by a fire at the four hundred and fiftieth metre.

By the looks of it, it wasn’t different at all. But there was something about it - a particular smell, brought up by the tunnel vents, or was it a particular mood, an aura, that belonged only to this tunnel and gave it an individuality, made it dissimilar to all the rest. Artyom remembered his stepfather saying that there weren’t two tunnels alike in the metro. Such supersensitivity had developed over many years of trips and not many had it. His stepfather called it ‘listening to the tunnel’ and he had such a ‘sense of hearing’ that he was proud of it and often admitted to Artyom that he had survived many adventures thanks to this sense. Many others, despite their many travels in the metro, had no such thing. Some people developed inexplicable fear, some heard sounds, voices, and slowly lost their minds, but everybody agreed on one thing: even when there wasn’t a soul in a tunnel, it was still not empty. Something invisible and almost intangible slowly and viscously dripped onto them, filling them with its being, almost like it was the heavy cold blood in the veins of a stone leviathan.

And now the duty officers’ conversation was fading into the background as he tried in vain to see something in the darkness that was swiftly thickening about ten paces from the fire. Artyom started to understand what his stepfather meant when he would tell him about the ‘feeling of the tunnel.’ Artyom knew that beyond that indistinct boundary, marked by the flames of the fire, where crimson light mixed with shivering shadows, there were more people, other people - but in that moment he couldn’t quite believe it. It seemed that life stopped ten paces beyond the firelight, and that there was nothing in front of them, only dead, black emptiness, that answered a shout with the deception of a dull echo.

But if you sit for a while, if you plug your ears, if you don’t look into the depths of the tunnel like you’re looking for something but instead you try to dissolve your gaze in the darkness, and to merge with the tunnel, to become a part of this leviathan, a cell in the organism, then through your fingers, that are closing off the sounds of the external world, past your auditory organs, a thin melody will flow directly into your brain - an unearthly sound from the depths, indistinct and incomprehensible . . . It’s nothing like that disturbing, urging noise, spilling out of the broken pipe in the tunnel between Alekseevskaya and Rizhskaya. No, it’s something different, something clean and deep . . .

It seemed to him that he could dip into the quiet river of this melody for short spells, and suddenly he would understand the essence of this phenomenon - not using reason but using an intuition that was probably awakened by that noise from the broken pipe. The flowing sounds from that pipe seemed to him the same as ether, slowly extending along the tunnel, but they had been rotting inside the pipe, infected by something, seething nervously, and they broke out where tension in the pipe became too much, and the rotting matter pushed itself out into the world, taking its sorrow with it, imparting nausea and madness to all living beings . . .

Suddenly it seemed to Artyom that he was standing on the threshold of an understanding of something important, as though the last hour he had spent wandering in the pitch-black darkness of the tunnels and in the twilight of his own consciousness had pulled the curtain of this great mystery slightly to the side, separating all rational beings from a knowledge of the true nature of this new world which was gnawed into the earth’s bowels by previous generations.

But with this realization, Artyom also became scared, as if he had only had a peek through the key hole of the door hoping to find out what was behind it, and seeing only an unbearable light punching through it and singeing the eyes. And if you opened the door then the light would gush out irrepressibly and incinerate the audacious person who decided to open the forbidden door on the spot. However, this light is knowledge.

The whirlwind of all these thoughts, feelings and worries came whipping through Artyom too suddenly and he wasn’t at all ready for anything like it and so he recoiled in fright. No, this was all just a fantasy. He hadn’t heard anything and hadn’t realized anything. It was just a game of his imagination. With mixed feelings of relief and disappointment, he observed how, for an instant, an amazing, indescribable vision was revealed to him. It instantly grew dim, melted, and the mind again was faced with its usual muddy haze. He was afraid of this knowledge and stepped back from it, and now the curtain was lowered again and perhaps forever. The hurricane in his head died down as quickly as it had come and he was left with a devastated and exhausted mind.

Artyom was shaken and sat there trying to understand everything - where his fantasy ended and where reality began - wondering if any of these sensations might be real after all. Slowly, slowly, his soul was filled with bitterness at the fact that he had stood a step away from enlightenment, from the most real enlightenment, but he hadn’t been resolute, he hadn’t dare give himself to the flow of the tunnel’s ether, and now he would be left to wander in the darkness for his whole life because he was once too afraid of the light of authentic knowledge.

‘But what is knowledge?’ he asked himself again and again, trying to give value to the thing that he had just refused in a hurried and cowardly manner. Sunk in his thoughts, he didn’t notice that he had said these words aloud a few times.

‘Knowledge, my friend, is light - and non-knowledge is darkness!’ one of the duty officers explained to him eagerly. ‘Right?’ He merrily winked at his friends.

Artyom was dumbstruck and stared at the guy and sat like that for a while until Bourbon returned and got him up and said goodbye to the officers, saying that he had been detained and that they were in a hurry.

‘Watch it!’ the commander of the post said to him threateningly. ‘I’m letting you leave here with a weapon.’ He waved a hand at Artyom’s machine gun. ‘But you won’t be coming back through with it. I have clear instructions on that.’

‘I told you, you blockhead . . .’ Bourbon hissed to Artyom in irritation after they’d hastily walked away from the fire. ‘So you can do what you want on the way back. But you’ll get a fight. I don’t care. I just knew it, I knew that this would happen, fuck you.’

Artyom said nothing, almost not hearing Bourbon chiding him. Instead, he suddenly remembered what his stepfather said that time when he was explaining about the uniqueness of every tunnel - that each one has its own melody and that you can learn to hear it. His stepfather probably wanted simply to express his thought beautifully but, remembering what he felt sitting at the fire moments ago, Artyom thought that he’d heard just such a melody. What he was listening to, really listening to - and hearing! - was the melody of the tunnel. However, the memory of what happened quickly faded and half an hour later Artyom could not be sure that it had all really happened, and that he hadn’t imagined it, that it wasn’t air blown about by the playing flames.

‘OK . . . You probably didn’t do it on purpose, you’ve just got shit for brains.’ Bourbon said in conciliation. ‘If I’m, like, not very nice to you, I’m sorry. This is stressful work. But, OK, seems we got out so that’s good. Now we have to trudge to Prospect Mir without being stopped. There we can, like, relax. If everything is quiet then it won’t take much time. But beyond that, there’s a problem.’

‘So it’s OK that we’re just walking along like this? I mean that when we go in a caravan from
VDNKh,
if there’s any less than three people then we don’t leave, you need a rearguard, and basically . . .’ Artyom said, looking behind himself.

‘Well, there are plusses of course to going in caravan with a rearguard and all that,’ Bourbon started to explain. ‘But listen here, there’s a concrete minus to that too. I used to be afraid. And forget three people, we used to not go anywhere without at least five people. You think it helped? Doesn’t help in the least. Once we were moving a cargo and so we had protection: two in front, three in the middle and a rearguard - everything as it should be. We were going from Tretyakovskaya to what’s it called . . . used to be called Marxistskaya. The tunnel was OK. But something about it I didn’t like straight away. A certain decaying . . . And there was a fog. You couldn’t see for shit, not five paces ahead - and the flashlights didn’t help much. But we decided to tie a rope to the rearguard’s belt, drawn from the belt of one of the guys in the middle, and up to the commander at the head of the group. So no one would get lost in the fog. And we’re moving at an easy pace, and everything’s normal, quiet, there was no need to rush, we hadn’t encountered anyone yet (touch wood) and we have about forty minutes to go . . . Though we did it faster than that in the end . . .’ His words twisted and he went silent for a little while.

‘Somewhere in the middle, this guy Tolyan asks the rearguard something. But the guy doesn’t answer. Tolyan waited and asked again. Nothing. Tolyan then pulls on the rope and the end of it appears. It’s been bitten right through. Really - bitten through and there’s even some wet gunk on the end of it . . . And the guy is nowhere to be seen. And they didn’t hear a thing. Nothing at all. And I was walking with Tolyan myself. He showed me the end of the rope and my knees quaked. Of course we shouted back at him for the sake of it but didn’t hear anything. There wasn’t anyone there to answer. So we exchanged glances - and went forward so that we were at Marxistskaya in no time.’

‘Maybe the guy was playing a joke?’ Artyom asked hopefully.

‘A joke? Maybe. But he hasn’t been seen since. So, there’s one thing I’ve understood: if it’s your time, it’s your time and no guard’s going to help you. Only you go a little slower. And I go everywhere in a twosome, with a partner if you like, except in one tunnel - from Sukharevskaya to Turgenevskaya, which is a particular situation. If something happens then they’ll drag you out. And quickly. Get it?’

‘Got it. So, they’ll let us into Prospect Mir? I still have this thing . . .’ Artyom pointed to his machine gun.

‘They’ll let us onto the radial. But to the Ring - definitely not. They wouldn’t let you in anyway, and with that cannon you don’t have a hope. But we don’t need to get in there. We don’t need to hang around there for much time anyway. We’ll just make a stop and then go on. You . . . have you ever been to Prospect
Mir?’

‘Only when I was little. But otherwise not,’ Artyom admitted.

‘Well, why don’t I get you up to speed then? Basically, there aren’t any guard posts there, they don’t need them. There’s a market there, and no one lives there so everything is fine. But there’s a passage there to the Ring, which means to the Hansa . . . A radial station which doesn’t belong to anyone, but the Hansa soldiers patrol it, to keep order. Therefore you have to behave yourself, got it? Or else they’ll send you to hell and they’ll deny you access to all their stations. So when we get there, you crawl onto the platform and sit quietly. And that samovar of yours,’ he nodded at Artyom’s machine gun, ‘don’t go waving it around. I have a . . . I have to sort something out with someone so you’ll have to sit and wait. We’ll go to Prospect, we’ll have a talk about how to get through that damn passage to Sukharevskaya.’

Bourbon went silent again and Artyom was left to himself. The tunnel wasn’t too bad here, the ground was a little damp, and there was a dark, thin stream following the rails, headed in the same direction as they were. But, after a while, there was a quiet rustle and squeaking sound which sounded to Artyom like a nail scratching along glass and it made him wince in aversion. The little beasts weren’t visible yet but their presence could already be felt.

‘Rats!’ Artyom spat out the vile word, feeling a chill pass along his skin. They still visited his nightmares, although his memories of that terrible dark moment when his mother and their entire station were drowned in a flood of rats were almost erased from his memory. Were they actually erased? No, they had just gone deeper, like a needle that wasn’t pulled out but gets stuck in the body. It travels around, having been pushed in by an insufficiently trained doctor. At first it will hide and stay still but after a time an unknown force will set it in motion and it will make its pernicious way through the arteries, the nerve ganglions, ripping up vital organs and dooming its carrier to intolerable torment.

The memory of that time, of the blind fury and insatiable cruelty of those beasts, of the experiences of horror that the steel needle left deep in his subconscious only came to disturb Artyom at night. And the mere sight of them, even the vague smell of them, created a sort of electrical discharge in him, forcing his body to shudder in reflex. For Artyom and for his stepfather, and maybe for the other four who escaped with them on the trolley that day, rats were something much more frightening and loathsome than for the other inhabitants of the metro.

There were almost no rats at
VDNKh:
there were traps everywhere and poison had been spread around so Artyom had become unused to them. But they swarmed through the rest of the metro, and he’d forgotten about that or, rather, avoided thinking about it when he had taken the decision to go on this journey.

‘What’s up boy - you afraid of rats?’ Bourbon inquired maliciously. ‘Don’t like them? You’re painfully spoilt . . . but get used to it. They’re everywhere . . . But that’s OK, it’s good even: you won’t go hungry,’ he added and winked while Artyom was starting to feel nauseous. ‘But really,’ Bourbon continued seriously, ‘you’re better to be afraid where there’s no rats. If there’s no rats then there’s been some bad trouble. And if there’s no people either then you want to be afraid. But if the rats are running then everything’s normal. Business as usual. Get it?’