He didn’t really need to pack his stuff since he hadn’t unpacked – there’d been no special reason to do so. The only thing he couldn’t work out was how to get his machine gun out of the station so it wouldn’t be noticed, so it wouldn’t attract attention. They were given bulky military 7.62 calibre machine guns with wooden butts. VDNKh always sent their caravans to the nearer stations with these bulky guns.

Artyom lay there, his head buried in the blanket, not answering Zhenya’s puzzled questions: why was he snoozing here when everything was so great at the feast, was he sick or something? It was hot and humid in the tent, and it was worse under the covers. Sleep was a long time coming and, when he finally went out, his dreams were unsettling and muddled, as though he was seeing them through clouded glass. He was running somewhere, he was talking to some faceless person, and then he was running again…

Zhenya woke him up, shaking him by the shoulder and told him in a whisper: ‘Listen, Artyom, there’s some guy here for you… Are you having some trouble?’ he asked carefully. ‘Why don’t I get all the guys up and we’ll…’

‘No, it’s fine, he just needs to talk to me. Go to sleep, Zhen. I’ll be back in a sec,’ Artyom said quietly, pulling on his boots and waiting for Zhenya to go back to sleep. He was carefully dragging his rucksack out of the tent and gathering up his machine gun, when suddenly Zhenya, having heard a metallic clattering, asked again, ‘Now what’s happening? Are you sure that everything’s OK?’

Artyom had to get him off his back by making up a story that he wanted to show the guy a thing or two because they’d argued, but everything would be fine.

‘Liar!’ Zhenya said pointedly. ‘OK, when should I be worried?’

‘In a year,’ Artyom mumbled, hoping that this was inaudible enough, and he moved the tent flap aside and went out onto the platform.

‘Boy, you’re slowing us down,’ Bourbon said through his teeth. He was dressed as before, only he had a long rucksack on his back. ‘Fuck you! Are you planning to drag that big lump across every cordon with you?’ he asked disgustedly, pointing at the machine gun. As far as Artyom could tell, Bourbon didn’t have a weapon himself.

The light at the station was fading. There was no one on the platform, everyone had gone to sleep, exhausted from the feast. Artyom tried to walk faster, worried all the time that he would bump into someone from his group, but at the entrance to the tunnel Bourbon trapped him and told him to slow his pace. The patrolmen in the passage noticed them and asked them from afar where they were planning to go in the middle of the night, but Bourbon addressed one of them by name and explained that they had some business to attend to.

‘Listen, carefully,’ he said to Artyom and turning on his flashlight. ‘Now, there’ll be guards at the hundredth- and two-hundredth metre lines. So you just keep quiet, above all. I will figure it out with them. Shame that you have a Kalash that’s as old as my grandma – you won’t hide that thing… Where’d you dig up such a piece of crap?’

Everything went smoothly at the hundredth-metre. There was a small fire dying out, and two people were sitting next to it, dressed in camouflage. One of them was snoozing and the second one shook Bourbon’s hand like a friend.

‘Business? I seeee…’ he said with a mischievous smile.

Bourbon didn’t say a word before the two hundred and fiftieth metre. He just sullenly marched forward. He seemed sort of angry, and unpleasant, and Artyom was starting to regret that he’d come with him. He stepped away from Bourbon and checked to see that his machine gun was in order, and he put his finger on the trigger.

There was some delay at the last guard post. Bourbon either didn’t know them well, or they knew him too well. The main guy took him off to the side, putting his rucksack by the fire, and asked him a lot of questions. Artyom, feeling pretty foolish, stayed by the fire and sparingly answered the questions of the duty officer. They were obviously bored and had nothing better to do. Artyom knew for himself that if the duty officer was chatty then everything was fine at the post. If something strange had happened there recently, if something had crawled out of the depths, or someone had tried to break through from the south, or they’d heard a suspicious sound, then they would be crowding around the fire silently, saying nothing, tense, and they wouldn’t take their eyes off the tunnel. It looked as though everything had been quiet, and that they could get at least to Prospect Mir without worrying.

‘You’re not from around here I guess. From Alekseevskaya or what?’ The duty officer was trying to elicit information from Artyom and looking at him right in the face.

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…