Artyom glanced at the priest apprehensively, but the old man, fatigued by the journey, had sat down on the floor and was staring blankly into the emptiness, paying no attention to their conversation.
Melnik and Ulman returned several minutes later. The party crowded around the stalker, and he put the others in the picture:
‘The station is empty. But it has not been abandoned. In several places there are images of their worm. And something else . . . We found a diagram on the wall that was hand drawn. If one is to believe it, this branch leads to the Kremlin. The central station and transfer to the other lines is there. One of them goes off in the direction of Mayakovskaya. We have to move off in that direction. The track should be free. We won’t poke our noses into the side passages. Questions?’
The fighters glanced at each other, but no one said anything. Then the old man, who had been sitting indifferently on the ground until now, became upset at the word ‘Kremlin,’ and began shaking his head and mumbling something. Melnik bent down and tore the gag from his mouth.
‘You can’t go there! You can’t! I won’t go to the Kremlin! Leave me here!’ the priest began to babble.
‘What’s wrong?’ the stalker asked with displeasure.
‘We can’t go to the Kremlin! We can’t go there! I won’t go!’ the old man kept repeating like a wind-up toy, fidgeting.
‘Well, it’s fine that you won’t go there,’ the stalker answered him.
‘At least, your fellows won’t be there. The tunnel is empty, clean. I don’t intend to go into the branch lines. It’s best that I go straight through, via the Kremlin.’
People started whispering. Recalling the sinister glow on the Kremlin towers, Artyom understood why it wasn’t only the priest who was afraid to show himself there.
‘Everyone!’ Melnik said. ‘We are moving forward. There’s no time to waste. They have a taboo day today and there is no one in the tunnels. We don’t know when it will end, so we have to press on. Get him up!’
‘No! Don’t go there! You can’t! I won’t go!’ The old man, it seemed, had gone totally out his mind. When a fighter approached him, the priest slipped out of his hands with an imperceptible serpentine movement, then with feigned obedience froze at the sight of the machine gun muzzles aimed at him.
‘Well, get lost!’ His triumphant laughter turned into a choking wheeze after several seconds, a spasm twisted his body and he foamed profusely at the mouth. His face became a hideous mask, with his mouth sharply angled upwards. It was the most terrifying smile Artyom had seen in his whole life.
‘Ready,’ Melnik reported. He approached the old man who had fallen to the ground and, hooking him with the tip of his boot, turned him over. The stiffened body moved heavily and rolled over face downwards. At first Artyom thought that the stalker had done it so as not to see the dead man’s face, but then he understood the real reason. Melnik illuminated the tightly drawn wires around the old man’s wrists with his flashlight. The priest was squeezing the needle he had driven into his left forearm in his right fist. Artyom could not understand how he had contrived to do it, where he had hidden the poisoned dart and why he had not used it earlier. He turned away from the body and covered young Oleg’s eyes with the palm of his hand. The party had stopped dead still. Although the order to move had been issued, not one of the fighters had stirred. The stalker looked them over. One could imagine what was going on in the fighters’ heads: just what awaited them at the Kremlin if the prisoner preferred suicide to avoid going there? Not losing any time on opinions, Melnik stepped towards the stretcher with the groaning Anton, bent down and took one of the handles.
‘Ulman!’ he called. After a second of wobbling, the broad-shouldered scout took up position at the second handle of the stretcher. Submitting to an unexpected impulse, Artyom approached them and grabbed a rear handle. Someone else stood beside him. Saying not a word, the stalker straightened up and they moved forward. The others followed them, and the party once more assumed combat formation.
‘It’s not too far now,’ Melnik said quietly. ‘About two hundred metres. The main thing is to find the crossing to the other line. Then, on to Mayakovskaya. I don’t know what’s further ahead. There’s no Tretyak . . . We’ll think of something. Now we have one road. It’s impossible to turn off it.’
His words about the road woke something in Artyom and he again recalled his own trip. Having thought about it, he didn’t immediately recognize what Melnik was talking about but as soon as he heard the stalker’s reference to the dead Tretyak, he started and loudly whispered to him:
‘Anton . . . The wounded man . . . it seems he served in the RVA . . . So he’s a missile man! That means we still will be able to do it! Won’t we?’
Melnik looked over his shoulder at the watch commander on the stretcher.
He, it seemed, was really ill. The paralysis in Anton had passed long ago, but now delirium tormented him. His groans were replaced by unclear but furious commands, desperate entreaties, sobbing and muttering. And the closer they approached the Kremlin, the louder the wounded man’s cries became and the more intently he bucked on the stretcher. ‘I said! Don’t argue! They’re coming . . . Hit the ground! Cowards . . . But just how . . . just how are the others?! No one will be able there, no one!’
Anton argued with comrades only he could see. His forehead was covered with perspiration, and Oleg, running alongside the stretcher, took advantage of a short respite while the fighters changed hands to dab at his father’s forehead with a rag. Melnik shined his light at the watch commander, as if trying to understand whether he would come to his senses. His eyeballs flashed back and forth beneath their lids and Anton clenched his teeth and his fists were clenched. He threw his body one way and then the other. Only the canvas straps stopped him from falling from the stretcher, but it was becoming increaingly difficult to carry him.
After another fifty metres, Melnik lifted his hand and the party again came to a halt. A crudely painted symbol was shown in white on the floor: the now customary twisting line thrust its thickened head at a fat, red mark that cut across the line lying ahead. Ulman gave a whistle.
‘The red light’s lit, it says there’s no road,’ someone laughed nervously from the rear.
‘It’s for the worms, it doesn’t concern us,’ the stalker cut him short. ‘Forward!’
However, now they were moving ahead more slowly. Melnik, having put on the night vision device, took up the position at the head of the party. But it was not only out of caution they had stopped hurrying. At the ‘Genshtab’ station, the tunnel began to angle more sharply downward, and an invisible, but tangible haze of some presence was creeping from the Kremlin. Shrouding the people, it convinced them that something inexplicable, huge and evil was hidden there, in the pitch dark depths. It was not the same feeling as Artyom had experienced before. It wasn’t like the dark vortex that had pursued him in the lines at Sukharevskaya, nor like the voices in the pipes, or the superstitious fear generated and fed by the people in the tunnels leading to Park Pobedy. He felt more strongly that this time something inanimate, but alive nonetheless, was concealed. Artyom looked at the stalwart Ulman walking on the other side of the stretcher. He suddenly really wanted to talk with him. It wasn’t important what they talked about. He just wanted to hear a human voice.
‘And why do the stars at the Kremlin glow on the towers?’ The question had been tormenting him.
‘Who told you that they glow?’ the fighter asked with surprise.
‘There’s no such thing there. It’s like this with the Kremlin: each person sees what he wants to see. Some say that it hasn’t been there for ages. It’s just everyone hopes to see the Kremlin. They just want to believe that this holy of holies was left intact.’
‘And what happened to it?’ Artyom asked.
‘No one knows,’ Ulman replied, ‘except your cannibals. I was still young, about ten years old then. And those who did the fighting say that they didn’t want to destroy the Kremlin so dropped some kind of a secret development on it . . . Biological weapons. Right at the beginning. They didn’t notice it right away and didn’t sound the alarm, but when they understood what was what, it was already too late, because it had consumed everyone there, it even swallowed up the people from the neighbourhoods. They had been living outside the wall up to then and felt wonderful.’
‘But how does it . . . swallow?’ Artyom was not able to shake off a vision: of the stars shimmering with the unearthly light on the tops of the Kremlin towers.
‘Did you know there was such an insect as the doodlebug? It would dig a funnel in the sand, and climb down to the bottom and open its mouth. If an ant ran past and accidentally touched the edge of the hole, that was it. End of its career. The doodlebug would move, the sand would pour to the bottom and the ant went straight down, falling into its mouth. Well, it’s the same thing with the Kremlin. It stands on the edge of a funnel it can fall into and will suck you down,’ the fighter smirked.
‘But why do people go inside?’ persisted Artyom.
‘How would I know? Hypnosis, most likely . . . So take for example these cannibalistic illusionists of yours. They almost forced us to stay there . . .’
‘So just why then are we making our retreat towards it?’ Artyom asked with a puzzled look.
‘Those aren’t questions for me, but for the boss. But I understand that you have to be outside and look at the walls and towers for it to grab you. But it seems we’re already inside . . . What is there to see here?’
Melnik turned round and angrily hissed at them. Ulman immediately stopped short and shut up. And a sound his voice had been covering up could be heard. Was it a soft gurgling coming from the deep? A rumbling? It didn’t seem to presage anything terrible, but it was persistent and unpleasant, and there was no way of ignoring it. They passed by a trio of powerful pressurized doors arranged one behind the other. All the doors were opened wide, invitingly, and a heavy iron curtain was raised to the ceiling. ‘Doors,’ Artyom thought. ‘We are on a doorstep.’
The walls suddenly parted, and they ended up in a marble hall, so spacious that the beam of the powerful flashlights hardly reached the opposite wall. The ceiling, in contrast to other secret stations, was high here and thick, richly adorned columns supported it. Massive gilded chandeliers, turned black by time, still flashed brilliantly in the beam of a flashlight. The walls were covered with huge mosaic panels. They depicted an old man with a beard with people in work clothes smiling at him, and young girls in modest garments and light white headscarves, and soldiers in out-dated service caps, a squadron of fighters being carried along the sky, a rumbling tank column and finally the Kremlin itself. There was no name at this surprising station, but its absence was just enough to understand where they were. The columns and walls were covered with a thick layer of grey dust. It was obvious that no feet had encroached here for decades; and it was strange to think that even the intrepid savages had fled this place Further on there was an unusual train on the track. Its only two carriages were heavily armoured and painted in a protective dark green colour. The windows had been replaced with narrow slits resembling gun slots. The doors, one on each carriage, were locked. It occurred to Artyom that perhaps the inhabitants of the Kremlin had not been able to use their own secret track for escape. They got to the platform and stopped.
‘So this is what it’s like here . . .’ The stalker lifted his head toward the ceiling, as far as his helmet allowed him. ‘How many tales I’ve heard . . . But it’s not like that at all . . .’
‘Where to now?’ Ulman asked.
‘No idea,’ Melnik confessed. ‘We have to investigate.’
This time he didn’t abandon them and the people slowly moved around all together. The station resembled a conventional one in some respects: along the edges of the platform two tracks had been built and an elongated hall ended in two escalators, forever stopped, that exited to magnificent rounded arches. The one closest to them went up and the other plunged to a quite unimaginable depth. Somewhere here, there had to be an elevator. The former residents of the Kremlin would hardly have had, as mortal beings have, two minutes to creep down an escalator.
Melnik was spellbound and so were the others. Trying to reach the high arches with their beams, scrutinizing the bronze sculptures installed inside the hall, admiring the magnificent panels and astonished by the grandeur of this station, a true underground palace, they even began to whisper so as not to violate its peace. Looking along the walls with admiration, Artyom completely forgot about the dangers and about the priest who had finished himself off, and about the intoxicating radiance of the Kremlin stars. Only one thought remained in his head: he was trying so hard to imagine how unspeakably beautiful this station must have been in the bright light of those magnificent chandeliers.
They were approaching the opposite end of the hall where the steps of the down escalator began. Artyom wondered what was concealed down there. Another station perhaps, from which trains were sent directly to secret bunkers in the Urals? Or tracks leading to countless corridors of dungeons? A deep fortress? Strategic reserves of weapons, medicines and foodstuffs? Or simply an endless dual ribbon of steps leading downward, as far as the eye could see? Wouldn’t that deepest point of the metro of which Khan had spoken be located here? Artyom imagined the most improbable pictures, deferring that moment when, reaching the edge of the escalator, he would finally see just what really was located below. That’s why he was not first at the handrail. The fighter who had just been telling him about the doodlebug had reached the arch earlier. Uttering a shriek, he shrunk back in fright. And a moment later it was Artyom’s turn. Slowly, like certain magical creatures, which had been sleeping for hundreds of years, but were suddenly were awake and flexing muscles that had become numb from ages of sleep, both escalators began to move. The steps crawled downward with a strained creak. It was inexpressibly eerie . . . Something here did not add up, did not correspond to what Artyom knew and understood about escalators. He felt it, but was unable to grasp the slippery shadow of understanding by the tail.