Right up under the ceiling, high above their heads, another head was hovering in the fog. A head so immense that at first Homer didn’t realise what he was looking at. The titanic creature’s body remained hidden in the dense gloom of the station, leaving its monstrous face suspended, swaying in the air above the tiny little men brandishing their useless weapons: strangely, it seemed in no hurry to attack, allowing them a brief respite.
Numb with horror, the old man sank to his knees, resigned to his fate, and the automatic rifle tumbled out of his hands, clanking pitifully against a rail. Ahmed howled and screeched hideously. The creature shifted forward effortlessly, and all the space in front of them was blotted out by its dark body, as huge as a cliff. Homer closed his eyes, readying himself, saying goodbye . . . He had only one thought left, one regret – a bitter thought searing through his mind: ‘I haven’t finished yet!’
And at that very moment the grenade launcher spat fire and the pressure wave slammed into his ears, deafening them, leaving behind a subtle whistling sound that went on and on. Gobbets of burnt flesh came showering down. Ahmed, the first to gather his wits, tugged the old man to his feet by the scruff of his neck and dragged him away. They ran forward, stumbling over sleepers and getting up again without feeling any pain. They clung to each other, because it was impossible to make out anything through the milky haze even at arm’s length. They raced along as if it was not mere death pursuing them, but something infinitely more terrible – the final extinction and utter annihilation of their bodies and souls.
Demons pursued them, invisible and almost completely silent, but only one step behind, escorting them without attacking, toying with them, allowing them the illusion of escape.
Then the chipped marble walls gave way to the lining of the tunnel: they’d made it through Nagornaya! And the guardians of the station were left behind, as if they had reached the limit of the chains to which they were attached. But it was still too soon to stop. Ahmed strode on in front, feeling for the pipes on the walls, groping for the way ahead and goading on the old man, who was stumbling along, and kept trying to sit down.
‘What happened to the brigadier?’ Homer croaked, tearing off his stifling gas mask as he walked.
‘When the fog ends, we’ll stop and wait. That must be soon now, very soon! Only another two hundred metres . . . Get out of the fog. The important thing is to get out of the fog,’ Ahmed kept intoning. ‘I’m going to count the steps . . .’
But after two hundred steps, and even after three hundred, the haze enveloping them was still as dense as ever. ‘What if it’s spread all the way to Nagatino?’ thought Homer. ‘What if it’s already gobbled up Tula and Nakhimov Prospect?’
‘It’s not possible . . . I must . . . Not far to go now . . .’ Ahmed mumbled for the hundredth time and suddenly froze on the spot. Homer ran into him and they both tumbled to the ground.
‘There’s no more wall,’ said Ahmed, stroking the sleepers, the rails, the rough, damp concrete of the floor in dumb bewilderment, as if afraid that any moment now the ground would treacherously slip away from under his feet in the same way as his other support had vanished.
‘Here it is, what’s wrong with you?’ said Homer groping around for the slope of a tunnel liner, then grabbing hold of it and cautiously getting to his feet.
‘Sorry,’ said Ahmed and paused, gathering his thoughts. ‘You know, back there at the station . . . I thought I’d never get away from the place. The way it was looking at me . . . Looking at me, you know. It had decided to take me. I thought I’d be left there forever. And never buried.’
He had to struggle to force the words out, he didn’t want to let them out for a long time – he was ashamed of screaming like a woman. He wanted to make excuses – and he knew there couldn’t be any excuses. Homer shook his head.
‘Drop it. I pissed my pants, and it’s not bothering me any. Come on, we must be almost there now.’
The pursuit had been called off, they could get their breath back. They couldn’t run any longer in any case, and they wandered along, clutching at the walls as blindly as ever. Advancing towards deliverance step by step. The worst of the terror was behind them, and although the murk was still not receding, sooner or later the predatory draughts of the tunnels would bite into it, shred it and drag the shreds into the ventilation shafts. Sooner or later they would reach a place where there were people and wait there for their delayed commander.
It happened sooner than they could possibly have hoped – maybe because time and space were both distorted in the fog. A cast-iron ladder appeared, running up the wall onto a platform, the round cross-section of the tunnel gave way to a right-angled one and a hollow appeared between the rails – a safe refuge for passengers who fell onto the track.
‘Look at that,’ whispered Homer. ‘It looks like a station! A station!
‘Hey, is there anyone there?’ Ahmed yelled as loud as he could. ‘Hey lads! Is anyone there?’ he yelled, overwhelmed by senseless, triumphant laughter.
The yellowish, exhausted beams of their flashlights picked slabs of marble, gnawed away by time and people, out of the hazy gloom. Not one of the bright-coloured mosaics – the pride and joy of Nagatino – had survived. And what had become of the stone-faced columns? Could this really be . . . ?
No one answered Ahmed, but he didn’t despair and carried on calling cheerfully: it was obvious enough, the people had taken fright at the fog and run off – but they couldn’t fool him like that! Meanwhile Homer kept searching anxiously for something on the walls, licking at them with his fading beam of light, while suspicion chilled his blood.
And then at last he found it – iron letters screwed into the cracked marble: NAGORNAYA.
Her father believed it was never accidental when people went back to a place. They returned in order to change something, in order to put something right. Sometimes, he believed, God himself takes us by the scruff of the neck and brings us back to the spot where we accidentally escaped his watchful eye, in order to enforce his sentence – or give us a second chance. That was why, he explained, he would never be able to return from exile to their native station. He had no strength left to take revenge, to struggle, to prove anything. He had long ago stopped wanting anyone’s contrition or remorse. In the old story that had cost him his former life and almost ended his life completely, everyone had got what they deserved, he said. As things turned out, they had been condemned to eternal exile – Sasha’s father didn’t want to put anything right, and in any case the Lord never called into this station.
The rescue plan – to find a car that hadn’t rotted away in over two decades, repair it, fuel it and break out of the narrow circle in which fate had imprisoned them – that plan had been no more than a bedtime story for a long time already.
For Sasha there was another way back to the Greater Metro. When she went down to the bridge on the set day to exchange the clumsily repaired devices, blackened jewellery and mouldy books for food and a few cartridges, sometimes they offered her a lot more.
Training the trolley’s searchlight on her slightly angular, boyish figure, the shuttle traders winked at each other and smacked their lips, beckoning to her and shouting promises. The little girl seemed wild – she glowered at them with her head down, tensed up like a spring, concealing a long-bladed knife behind her back. The loose-fitting man’s overalls couldn’t blur the bold, clear lines of her body. The mud and engine oil on her face only made her blue eyes shine even more brightly, so brightly that some men turned their own eyes away. The white hair, artlessly trimmed with the same knife that was always clutched in her right hand, barely covered her ears, the gnawed lips never smiled.
Soon realising that petty gifts were poor bait for taming a wild wolf, the men on the trolley tried to bribe her with freedom, but she never answered them even once. They decided the girl must be dumb. It was easier like that. Sasha knew perfectly well that no matter what she agreed to, she could never buy two places on the trolley. Peo
ple had too many accounts for her father to settle, and they couldn’t possibly be paid.
Faceless and with adenoidal voices in their black military gas masks, they weren’t simply enemies to her – she couldn’t see anything human about them, not a single thing that could have set her dreaming, not even at night, even in her dreams.
And so she simply set the telephones, irons and kettles down on the sleepers, moved back ten steps and waited for the shuttle traders to take the goods, fling the bundles of dried pork down on the track and toss her a handful of cartridges, deliberately scattering them out of spite, so they could watch as she collected them, crawling on her hands and knees.
Then the trolley slowly sailed off into a different world and Sasha turned round and went home, where a heap of broken household appliances was waiting for her, along with a screwdriver, a soldering iron and an old bicycle converted into a generator. She mounted it, closed her eyes and hurtled away, far off into the distance, almost managing to forget that she could never move from the spot. And the fact that she had made her own decision to reject the offer of pardon lent her strength.
What the hell? How had they ended up back here? Homer feverishly racked his brains for an explanation. Ahmed suddenly shut up when he saw where Homer was shining his flashlight.
‘This station won’t let me go,’ he said in a hoarse, low voice.
The fog enveloping them had grown so thick, they could barely see each other. Nagornaya had slumbered while the men were away, but it had awoken now: the heavy air fluctuated subtly in response to their words and vague shadows stirred in its depths. And not a single sign of Hunter . . . There was no way a creature of flesh and blood could win a battle against phantoms. As soon as the station was weary of toying with them, it had shrouded them in its acrid breath and swallowed them alive.
‘You go,’ Ahmed gasped despairingly. ‘I’m the one it wants. You don’t know, you almost never come here.’
‘Stop talking drivel!’ the old man snapped, surprising even himself with the loudness of his voice. ‘We just lost our way in the fog. Let’s go back!’
‘We can’t leave. Run as hard as you like, you’ll end up back here, if you’re with me. You can break out on your own. Please, go.’
‘Stop it, that’s enough!’ Homer grabbed hold of Ahmed’s wrist and dragged him towards the tunnel. ‘You’ll thank me for this in an hour!’
‘Tell my Gulya . . .’ Ahmed began.
An incredible, monstrously powerful force tore his hand out of Homer’s hand, jerking it upwards into the fog, into extinction. He had no time to cry out, he simply disappeared, as if he had instantaneously disintegrated into atoms, as if he had never existed. The old man screamed and howled for him, spinning round on the spot as if he’d lost his mind, wasting clip after clip of precious cartridges. Then a crushing blow that could only have been struck by one of the local demons landed on the back of his head and the universe imploded.
CHAPTER 5
Memory
Sasha ran over to the window and flung the shutters wide open, letting in the fresh air and the tentative light. The wooden window ledge hung over the very edge of a bottomless precipice, filled with delicate morning mist that would disperse with the first rays of sunshine, and then the view from the window would extend beyond the gorge to the distant mountain spurs with their covering of pine trees and the green meadows extending between them, the matchbox country houses scattered across the valley and the cartridge cases of the bell towers.
The early morning was her time. She could sense the approach of day and always rose before the sun did, waking half an hour ahead of dawn in order to walk up onto the mountain. Behind their warm, cosy little shack, kept so clean that it positively gleamed, a stony track with yellow flowers along its edges wound its way up the slope. Crumbs of stone scattered downwards from under her feet, and in the few minutes it took to reach the summit Sasha sometimes fell several times, bruising her knees.
Lost in thought, Sasha wiped the damp breath of night off the window ledge with her sleeve. She had been dreaming of something gloomy, dark and bad, something that cancelled out the entire carefree life she had now, but the final traces of her alarming visions evaporated with the first touch of the cool wind on her skin. And now she couldn’t be bothered to remember what had distressed her so badly in her dream. She had to hurry to the summit to greet the sun and then hurry home, slithering down the track – to cook breakfast and wake her father, to pack the bundle for his journey. And then, while he was hunting, Sasha would have the whole day to herself, and she could chase the clumsy dragonflies and flying cockroaches through the meadow flowers, as yellow as the patterned panels in the Metro carriages.
She tiptoed across the squeaky floorboards, opened the door a crack and laughed quietly.
It was years since Sasha’s father had seen such a happy smile on her face, and he hated the idea of waking her up. His leg had swollen and gone numb. The bleeding hadn’t stopped at all. They said that bites from the wandering dogs didn’t heal.
Should he call her? But he’d been away from home for more than twenty-four hours – before he went to the garages, he’d decided to visit one of the high-rise, concrete-panel termite nests two blocks away from the station, clambered up to the sixteenth floor and then passed out. And all that time Sasha hadn’t slept a wink – his daughter never went to sleep until he came back from his ‘stroll’. ‘Let her rest,’ he thought. ‘It’s all lies. Nothing’s going to happen.’ He would have liked to know what she was seeing in her dream right now. He could never completely escape, even in his dreams. Only very rarely did his subconscious release him for a couple of hours for a visit to his carefree youth. Usually he was forced to wander through the familiar dead houses with their scrapedout interiors, and a good dream was one in which he suddenly discovered an untouched apartment full of appliances and books that had somehow miraculously survived intact. As he fell asleep, he always asked to be taken back into the past. He longed most of all to find himself in that time when he had just met Sasha’s mother: when he was only twenty years old and already commanded the garrison of the station, which all its inhabitants still thought of as a temporary refuge, not the general barracks for a slave-labour mine in which they were serving a life sentence.
But instead of that he was tossed back into the more recent past, into the thick of those events five years ago. To the day that had sealed his fate and – even more terribly – his daughter’s fate. In his rational mind he had accepted his defeat and his exile, but he only had to fall into a doze for his heart to start demanding revenge.
Once again he was standing in front of a line of his soldiers with their Kalashnikovs at the ready – in that situation, the Makarov pistol to which his officer’s rank entitled him was worse than useless, except perhaps to shoot himself. Apart from the twenty or so machine-gunners behind his back, there was no one left at the station who was still loyal to him.
The crowd surged and seethed, growing larger and larger, swaying the barrier to and fro with dozens of hands. Then, at a flourish of some invisible conductor’s baton, the ragged hubbub swelled into a coordinated chorus. So far they were only demanding his dismissal, but in another minute they would want his head.
This was no spontaneous demonstration: it was the work of provocateurs sent in from the outside. At this stage it was pointless even trying to identify them and liquidate them one by one. The only thing he could do now to halt the rebellion and maintain his grip on power was order his men to open fire on the crowd. It still wasn’t too late for that.
His fingers clutched an invisible gun butt, the pupils of his eyes raced about under his swollen eyelids, his lips moved, uttering inaudible orders. The black puddle he was lying in spread wider and wider by the minute, as if it was drawing energy from his departing life.
‘Where are they?’
Jerked out of the dark waters of oblivion, Homer started flapping about like a perch caught on a bright spinner, gasping co
nvulsively and gaping at the brigadier with wild, crazy eyes. The massive, cyclopean bulks of the twilight guardians of Nagornaya were still there, crowding together in front of his eyes, reaching out to him with those long, articulated fingers that could easily tear off his leg or crush his ribs. They surrounded the old man every time he closed his eyes, and they melted away slowly and reluctantly when he opened them again. Homer tried to jump to his feet, but the hand that was gently squeezing his shoulder turned back into the steely hook that had dragged him out of his nightmare. Gradually moderating his breathing, he focused on the face furrowed with scars, on the dark eyes that glimmered with an oily mechanical glint . . . Hunter? Alive? The old man cautiously turned his head to the left, then to the right, afraid of finding himself back at the bewitched station.
No, they were in the middle of a clear, empty tunnel – the fog that blanketed the approaches to Nagornaya was barely even noticeable here. Hunter must have carried him for almost half a kilometre, Homer calculated feverishly. Feeling calmer now, he allowed himself go limp, but still asked again, to make sure:
‘Where are they?’
‘There’s no one here. You’re safe.’
‘Those creatures . . . Did they attack me? Knock me out?’ The old man grimaced and rubbed the smarting lump on the back of his head.
‘I hit you. I had to, to stop your hysterics. You could have shot me, firing like that.’
Hunter finally released his vice-like grip, straightened up stiffly and ran one hand along his broad officer’s belt. On the opposite side from the holster with his Stechkin revolver was a leather case, with some purpose that wasn’t clear. The brigadier clicked a button and took out a flat copper flask. He shook it, opened it and took a large swallow, without offering Homer any. Then he squeezed his eyes shut for a second, apparently in pleasure. The old man felt a chilly shudder when he saw that the brigadier’s left eye couldn’t even close properly.
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