Metro 2034

CHAPTER 3 After Life

Homer thought he would never forget the look he got from the sentry who said goodbye to them at the most northerly guard post. It was the same look people give the body of a fallen hero as the honour guard fires that final volley in salute: a mournful, melancholy kind of look. Saying goodbye forever.

Looks like that aren’t meant for the living. Homer felt like he was climbing up a flimsy ladder into the cabin of a tiny plane that could take off but never land again, because devious Japanese engineers had converted it into a machine from hell. The imperial banner fluttered in the salty wind, mechanics bustled about on the airfield, engines hummed and sprang to life, and a potbellied general held his fingers tight up against the peak of his cap, his puffy eyes glittering with samurai envy…

‘What’s got you in such a cheerful mood?’ Ahmed asked, shattering the old man’s daydream.

Unlike Homer, he felt no urge to be first to discover what was going on at Serpukhov Station. He had left his wife behind on the platform, brooding silently as she clutched their first child’s little hand in her left hand and cradled their second child in her right arm, cautiously nestling the mewling bundle against her breast.

‘It’s like drawing yourself up to your full height – and launching yourself into the attack, charging the machine-guns. The same feeling of reckless elation. We’ll face a hail of deadly fire up ahead,’ Homer tried to explain.

‘What you have is a different kind of attack,’ Ahmed muttered, looking back towards the little patch of light at the end of the tunnel. ‘Custom-made for psychos like you. No sane man would voluntarily go up against a machine-gun. Who needs dumb heroics like that?’

‘Well you see, it’s like this,’ the old man replied after a brief pause. ‘When you feel your time coming, you start thinking: Have I really done anything? Will I be remembered?’

‘I don’t know about you, but I’ve got children. They’ll remember me all right… The oldest, at least,’ Ahmed added gravely after pondering for a moment.

Homer was stung by that, and felt he should make a sharp retort, but Ahmed’s final words had blunted his battle fervour. It was true: it was easy enough for an old man like him, with no children, to risk his moth-eaten skin, but the young man still had a long life ahead of him – too long to be concerned about immortality.

They moved beyond the final lamp – a glass jar with a little electric bulb inside it, set in a frame of thin metal rods. It was full of singed flies and flying cockroaches. The chitinous mass was heaving slightly: some of the insects were still alive and trying to crawl out, like condemned prisoners who had fallen into the common trench with everyone else who was shot, but hadn’t been finished off.

Homer paused involuntarily for an instant in the spot of light that this lamp-grave wrung out of itself – weak and yellow, flickering on the point of extinction. Then he filled his lungs with air and plunged on after the others into the ink-black gloom that extended from the boundary of Sebastopol all the way to the approaches to Tula – if, of course, any station with that name still existed.

She wasn’t alone, that sombre woman with two little children, standing rooted to the granite slabs, the platform wasn’t entirely deserted. A fat man with one eye and wrestler’s shoulders was standing motionless some distance away, watching as the soldiers left, and one step behind him stood a sinewy old man in a private’s pea jacket, talking quietly to an orderly.

‘All we can do now is wait,’ Istomin declared, absentmindedly switching a dead cigarette end from one corner of his mouth to the other.

‘You wait, I’ll get on with my job,’ the colonel retorted obstinately.

‘I tell you, that was Andrei. The leader of the team we sent out,’ said Istomin. He listened once again to the telephone-receiver voice still clamouring insistently in his head.

‘So now what? Maybe they forced him to say that under torture. The specialists know all sorts of different methods,’ said the old man, raising one eyebrow.

‘It didn’t seem like that,’ said the commandant, shaking his head thoughtfully. ‘You should have heard the way he said it. There’s something else going on there, something inexplicable. Something we can’t fix with a brisk cavalry sortie…’

‘I’ll give you an explanation as quick as a wink,’ the colonel assured him. ‘Tula’s been captured by bandits. They set up an ambush and killed our men or took some as hostages. They don’t cut off the power, because they use it themselves, and they don’t want to get on the wrong side of Hansa. But they cut off the phone. What weird sort of business is that – a phone that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t?’

‘But his voice, the way it sounded…’ said Istomin, sticking to his point.

‘What way did it sound?’ the colonel exploded, making the orderly move back a few steps. ‘Stick pins under your nails, and we’ll see what your voice sounds like! And with a simple pair of pliers you can change a bass to a falsetto for the rest of a man’s life!’

Everything was already clear to him, he had made his choice. And having resolved all his doubts, he felt as if he were back on his steed, and his cavalryman’s hand was itching for the sabre, no matter how dismally Istomin might whinge.

The commandant took his time before answering, giving the colonel a chance to cool off.

‘We’ll wait,’ he said at last, amicably but firmly.

‘Two days,’ said the old man, crossing his arms.

‘Two days,’ said Istomin, nodding.

The colonel spun round on the spot and tramped off to the barracks: he wasn’t going to waste the precious hours ahead. The commanders of the assault units had been waiting for him at HQ for the best part of an hour, lined up along both flanks of the long planking table. The only empty chairs were at the opposite ends: his and Istomin’s. But this time they would have to start without the commandant.

The station commandant didn’t notice that Denis Mikhailovich had gone.

‘It’s amusing, the way our roles have switched over, isn’t it?’ said Istomin, perhaps talking to himself, perhaps to the colonel.

Swinging round without waiting for a reply, he encountered the orderly’s embarrassed glance and waved his arm to dismiss him. ‘I don’t recognise the same colonel who refused to let me have a single extra man,’ the commandant thought. ‘The old war dog has scented something. But is that nose of his leading him astray?’

Istomin’s own gut feeling told him something quite different: Lie low. Wait. The strange phone call had only intensified his dark premonition: at Tula their heavy infantry would come face to face with a mysterious, invincible adversary.

Vladimir Ivanovich rummaged through his pockets, found a cigarette lighter and struck a spark. And while the ragged smoke rings still rose into the air above his head, he stayed there, rooted to the spot, with his eyes riveted to the dark cavity of the tunnel, gazing spellbound at it, like a rabbit staring into the beckoning jaws of a boa constrictor. When he finished the cigarette, he shook his head again and set off to his office. The orderly emerged out of the shadows and followed him at a respectful distance.

A dull click – and the ribbed vaulting of the tunnel was illuminated for a good fifty metres ahead. Hunter’s flashlight was so large and powerful, it was more like a searchlight. Homer breathed a silent sigh of relief – for the last few minutes he had been tormented by the stupid idea that the brigadier wouldn’t switch on the light, because his eyes could manage perfectly well without it.

Once he set foot in the dark stretch of tunnel, the brigadier had started looking even less like an ordinary man, or any kind of man at all. His movements had acquired a graceful, impetuous, animal quality. It seemed as if he had switched on the flashlight for his companions, but he himself was relying on different senses. He often took off his helmet and turned one ear towards the tunnel, listening carefully, and even bolstered Homer’s suspicions by stopping dead now and then to draw in the rusty-smelling air through his nose.

Hunter glided along soundlessly several steps ahead of the others, without looking round at them, as if he had forgotten they even existed. Ahmed was baffled – he didn’t often stand watch at the southern frontier post and he wasn’t used to the brigadier’s eccentricities. He prodded Homer in the side, as if to ask: What’s wrong with him? The old man just shrugged – how could he explain that in a couple of words.

What did Hunter need them for anyway? He was the one who had cast Homer in the role of native guide, but he seemed far more at home in these tunnels than the old man. Of course, if he were asked, Homer could have told him a lot about the places around here, tall tales and true ones – which were sometimes far more fantastic and terrifying than the most incredible yarns spun by bored sentries sitting round a lonely campfire. He had his own map of the Metro in his head, nothing at all like Istomin’s. Where the station commandant’s map had yawning gaps, Homer could have filled all the blank space with his own markings and explanations. Vertical shafts, service facilities standing open or closed up and mothballed, spiderwebs of connecting tunnels between the main lines. On his map, along the stretch of tunnel between Chertanovo and Southern, just two stations down from Sebastopol, a branch line budded off and merged into the gigantic bulge of the Warsaw Metro Depot, criss-crossed with the fine veins of dozens of dead-ends and drainage tunnels. For Homer, with his reverential awe of trains, the depot was an eerie and mystical place, like an elephants’ graveyard. The old man could talk about it for hours at a time – if only he could find listeners willing to believe him.

Homer regarded the line between Sebastopol and Nakhimov Prospect as very tricky. The rules of safety and plain common sense required them to stick together, moving slowly and cautiously, examining the walls and the floor ahead of them closely. Even in this stretch of tunnel, where all the hatches and cracks had been bricked up and triple-sealed by engineering teams from Sebastopol, on no account could they afford to leave their rear uncovered. The darkness sliced open by the beam of the flashlight closed up again right behind their backs, the echoes of their footsteps fractured as they were reflected off the reinforcing ribs of countless sections of tunnel lining, and somewhere in the distance the wind howled, trapped in the ventilation shafts. Large, viscous drops gathered in cracks in the ceiling and fell – perhaps they were just water, but Homer tried to dodge them. Not for any particular reason – just in case.

In olden times, when the bloated monster of a city on the surface still lived its own feverish life, and the restless city-dwellers still thought of the Metro as a soulless transport system – back in those days the youthful Homer, who everyone still called Kolya, used to wander through its tunnels with a flashlight and a metal toolbox.

Entry to those places was barred to ordinary mortals, whose access was restricted to the 150 or so marble halls, polished to a high gleam, and the congested carriages, pasted with bright-coloured advertisements. The millions of people who spent two or three hours in the rumbling, swaying trains every day were unaware that they were only permitted to see a mere tenth of this incredibly vast underground kingdom that extended far and wide below the surface. And to make sure they didn’t start speculating about its true size and where all those inconspicuous little doors and iron shutters led to, or where the dark little branch-lines and connecting passages closed for never-ending repairs actually went, they were distracted by pictures bright enough to dazzle their eyes, provocatively stupid slogans and wooden-voiced commercials that prevented them from relaxing on the escalators. At least, that was how it seemed to Kolya after he first started penetrating the secrets of this state within a state. The frivolous rainbow-coloured schematic of the metro that hung in the carriages was intended to convince the curious that they were looking at an exclusively civilian system. But in reality its cheerfully coloured lines were intertwined with the invisible branches of secret tunnels, from which military and state bunkers dangled like bunches of grapes – and some stretches of tunnel linked up with the tangled catacombs dug under the city by ancient pagans.

During the early days of Kolya’s youth, when his country was too poor to vie with the power and ambition of others, Judgement Day had seemed very far off, and the bunkers and shelters built in anticipation of its arrival had gathered dust. But money brought the return of former arrogance and, with it, of enemies. The rustcoated, multi-ton doors of cast iron were opened again with a rasping creak, the stocks of food and medications were renewed, the air and water filters were rendered fully operational.

And all just in the nick of time.

For Kolya, a poor young man from out of town, to be accepted for a job in the Metro was like joining a Masonic lodge. It transformed him from an unemployed reject into a member of a powerful organisation that paid generously for the modest services he was able to provide and promised to initiate him into the arcane mysteries of the universe. The wages offered in the job announcement seemed very tempting to Kolya, and almost no requirements were specified for would-be trackwalkers.

It was some time before he began to understand, from the reluctant explanations of his new colleagues, just why the Metropolitan was obliged to entice employees with high salaries and bonus payments for occupational hazards. It wasn’t a matter of a heavy schedule, or the voluntary renunciation of daylight. No, it had to do with dangers of an entirely different kind.

Homer had a sceptical mind, he didn’t believe in the ever-present dark rumours of ghosts and ghouls. But one day his friend failed to return from checking a short dead-end stretch of tunnel, and for some reason they didn’t bother to search for him – the shift foreman just shrugged helplessly. And his friend’s disappearance was followed by the disappearance of all the documents testifying that he had ever worked in the Metro. Kolya was the only one still so young and naïve that he refused to accept this disappearance and eventually one of his senior colleagues whispered in his ear, gazing around as he did it, that his friend had been ‘taken’. So who, if not Homer, should know that bad things used to happen in Moscow’s subterranean depths long before life in the megalopolis died, scorched by the withering breath of Armageddon.

After losing his friend and being initiated into forbidden knowledge like that, Kolya could have taken fright and run, abandoned this job and found another. But instead, his marriage of convenience with the Metro developed into a passionate love affair. When he’d had his fill of wandering around the tunnels on foot, he underwent the rites of initiation as a driver’s mate and established himself in a more solid position in the complex hierarchy of the Metropolitan.

And the better he got to know this unacknowledged wonder of the world, this labyrinth with a nostalgic yen for antiquity, this ownerless, cyclopean city that was an inverted reflection in the brown Moscow earth of its prototype up above, the more deeply and selflessly he fell in love with it. This man-made Tartarus was indisputably worthy of the poetry of the genuine Homer, or at least the fleet pen of Swift, who would have seen it as a greater joke than Laputa. But the man who became its secret admirer and artless singer was Kolya – plain, simple Nikolai Ivanovich Nikolaev.

It was absurd.

Anyone reading the Russian folk tale The Stone Flower might feel that he could love the Mistress of the Copper Mountain – but love the Copper Mountain itself? And yet the day came when Kolya’s love was requited with a jealous passion that took away his family, but saved his life.

Hunter froze abruptly on the spot and Homer, hunkered down under his snug feather quilt of memories, had no time to pull back: the old man ran into the brigadier’s back at full tilt. Without making a sound, the brigadier flung him aside and froze again, lowering his head and turning his mutilated ear towards the tunnel. Like a bat mapping out space in its blindness, he was picking up wavelengths that only he could hear.

But Homer picked up something else: the smell of Nakhimov Prospect, a smell that was impossible to confuse with any other. They’d certainly got here quickly. He just hoped they wouldn’t be made to pay for the ease with which they’d been let through. As if he could hear Homer’s thoughts, Ahmed shrugged the sub-machine-gun off his shoulder and clicked off the safety catch.

‘Who’s that up there?’ Hunter suddenly boomed, turning to the old man.

Homer chuckled to himself: who could tell what hellish beasts they might find? The wide-open gates of Nakhimov Prospect were like a funnel, sucking in from above creatures that defied the imagination. But the station had its permanent residents too.

‘Small… With no hair,’ said the brigadier, trying to describe them, and that was enough for Homer. It was them.

‘Corpse-eaters,’ he said in a low voice.

From Sebastopol to Tula, and maybe in other parts of the Metro as well, this old, clichéd Russian insult now had a different, new meaning. A literal one.

‘Predators?’ asked Hunter.

‘Scavengers,’ the old man replied indecisively.

These repulsive creatures that simultaneously resembled spiders and primates never risked openly attacking human beings and fed on carrion dragged down from the surface to the station they had made their own. A large herd of them nested at the Prospect, and all the tunnels nearby were filled with the sickly-sweet stench of decomposition. At the station itself the sheer pressure of it made men feel dizzy, and many of them found it so unbearable that they pulled on their gas masks on the approaches to the station.

Homer, who remembered this distinctive feature of Nakhimov Prospect only too well, hastily pulled the mask of his respirator out of his knapsack and put it on. Ahmed, who had packed hurriedly, gave Homer an envious glance and covered his face with his sleeve: the repugnant vapours emanating from the station gradually enveloped them, spurring them to move on quickly.

But Hunter didn’t seem to smell anything.

‘Something poisonous? Spores?’ he asked Homer.

‘The smell,’ Homer mumbled through his mask and wrinkled up his face.

The brigadier examined the old man searchingly, as if trying to work out if Homer was making fun of him, then shrugged his massive, broad shoulders.

‘The usual,’ he said and turned away.

He shifted his grip on his short automatic, beckoned for them to follow him and moved on ahead, stepping softly. About fifty steps further on, the hideous stench was joined by an obscure murmuring. Homer wiped away the perspiration that had started streaming down his forehead and tried to curb the galloping pace of his heartbeat. They were really close now.

The groping flashlight beam finally found something. It swept the darkness off broken headlights peering blindly into nowhere, off the glass of dusty windscreens cobwebbed with cracks, off light-blue metal panelling that stubbornly refused to rust. There ahead of them was the first carriage of a train that blocked the throat of the tunnel like a gigantic cork.

The train had died ages ago, it was beyond all hope, but every time he saw it Homer felt like a little boy, he wanted to climb into the devastated cabin, caress the keys and switches of the instrument panel, close his eyes and pretend that once again he was dashing through the tunnels at full speed, pulling behind him a string of brightly lit carriages filled with people – reading, dozing, gazing at advertisements or struggling to make conversation above the rumble of the engines.

‘If the alarm signal “ATOM” is given, drive to the nearest station, stop there and open the doors. Assist the efforts of civil defence units and the army to evacuate the injured and seal off the stations of the Metropolitan…’

The instructions on what train drivers should do on Judgement Day were precise and simple. Wherever it was possible, they were carried out. Most of the trains that froze at the platforms of the stations had fallen into a lethargic sleep and gradually been cannibalised for spare parts by the inhabitants of the Metro, who, instead of spending a few weeks in this refuge, as promised, had been detained here for all eternity. In a few places the trains had been preserved and converted into homes, but that seemed blasphemous to Homer, who had always seen trains as possessing a distinctly animate essence – it was like having your favourite pet cat stuffed and mounted. In places that were unfit for human habitation, like Nakhimov Prospect, the trains stood, gnawed on by time and vandals, but still intact.

Homer simply couldn’t take his eyes off the carriage. A phantom alarm signal wailed in his ears, drowning out the ever-louder rustling and hissing sounds from the station, and a deep, low siren blasted out the signal that had never been heard before that day: one long blast and two short ones: ‘ATOM’!

A lingering clang of brakes and a bewildered announcement in all the carriages ‘Ladies and gentlemen, for technical reasons this train will not proceed any further.’ It was too soon yet for the driver mumbling into the microphone, or Homer, his mate, to grasp the anguished hopelessness of those hackneyed words. The rasping sound of hermetic doors straining shut, separating off the world of the living from the world of the dead forever… According to instructions, the gates had to be finally locked no later than six minutes after the alarm was sounded, no matter how many people were left on the other side. If anyone tried to prevent the gates closing, the recommendation was to shoot at them.

Would a little police sergeant, who guarded his station against homeless bums and drunks, be able to shoot a man in the stomach because he was trying to hold back the immense metal behemoth, in order to give his wife, who had broken her heel, time to run inside? Would a high-handed turnstile-woman in a round uniform cap, who had spent her thirty-year career in the Metro perfecting two skills – not letting people through and blowing her whistle – be able to refuse entrance to a desperately panting old man with a pathetic row of medal ribbons? The instructions gave them only six minutes to change from a human being into a machine. Or a monster.

Women squealing, men clamouring indignantly, children sobbing desperately. The staccato popping of pistol shots and rumbling bursts of automatic fire. Recorded appeals to remain calm, relayed through every speaker in a metallic, passionless voice – they had to be recorded, because no human being, knowing what was happening, could possibly have kept his presence of mind and simply said it like that, indifferently: ‘Do not panic…’

Tears, prayers…

More shooting.

And precisely six minutes after the alarm, one minute before Armageddon – the rumbling funereal clang as sections of hermetic doors lock together. The reverberating clicks of the bolts. Silence.

The silence of the crypt.

They had to walk along the wall past the carriage. The driver had braked too late – perhaps he had been distracted by what was happening at that moment on the platform… They clambered up a cast-iron ladder and a moment later they were standing in an amazingly spacious hall. No columns, just the half-cylinder of a single semi-circular vault, with egg-shaped recesses behind the lamps. An immense vault, arching over the platform and both tracks, together with the trains standing on them. The structure is incredibly elegant – simple, divinely light and uncluttered. Only don’t look down at your feet, at the floor ahead of you. Don’t let yourself see what the station has been turned into now. This grotesque graveyard, where no rest could possibly be found, this macabre meat market, piled high with gnawed skeletons, rotten carcasses, chunks ripped off someone’s trunk. The vile creatures have greedily dragged in here everything they could grab anywhere within their extensive domain, more than they can devour immediately, reserves for future use. These reserves putrefy and decompose, but the brutes carry on accumulating them incessantly.

In defiance of the laws of nature, the heaps of dead meat moved as if they were breathing, and a repulsive scraping sound could be heard on all sides. The beam of light picked out one of the strange figures: long, knotty limbs; flabby, grey, hairless skin, hanging down in folds; a crooked spine, dull eyes blinking weakly, immense ears moving as if they had a life of their own.

One creature gave a hoarse cry and trudged unhurriedly to the open doors of a carriage, stepping with all four of its arm-legs. Other corpse-eaters started climbing down off other heaps in the same lazy fashion, hissing indignantly, sniffling, baring their teeth and snarling at the travellers.

Standing erect, they barely came up to Homer’s chest, and he was short. He also knew perfectly well that the beasts were cowardly, that they were unlikely to attack a strong, healthy man. But the irrational horror that Homer felt at the sight of the creatures was rooted in nightmares, in which he lay all alone, exhausted and abandoned in a deserted station, and the beasts were creeping ever closer. Like sharks in the ocean, who can scent a drop of blood from kilometres away, these creatures could sense the approach of death, and they hurried to be there when it arrived.

Senile anxiety, Homer told himself contemptuously – he had once read a whole raft of text books on applied psychology. But that wasn’t much help to him now.

The corpse-eaters weren’t afraid of people: using up ammunition on the repulsive but apparently harmless devourers of carrion would have been regarded as criminal waste at Sebastopol. The convoys passing through tried not to take any notice of them, although sometimes the corpse-eaters behaved provocatively.

They had bred in huge numbers here, and as the three men moved further in, crushing someone’s small bones under their boots with a sickening crunch at every step, more and more of the beasts reluctantly tore themselves away from their feasting and wandered off into cover. Their nests were in the trains, and Homer loathed them even more for that.

The hermetic doors at Nakhimov Prospect were open. It was believed that if you moved through the station quickly, the small dose of radiation you received was no danger to health, but it was forbidden to halt here. That was why both of the trains were relatively well preserved: the windows were all in place, the stained and soiled seats could be seen through the open doors, the light-blue paint showed no signs of peeling off the metal flanks.

Towering up in the middle of the hall was a genuine burial mound, built from the twisted skeletons of unknown creatures. As he drew level with it, Hunter suddenly stopped. Ahmed and Homer glanced at each other in alarm, trying to work out where any danger could come from. But the reason for the halt turned out to be something different. At the foot of the mound two small corpse-eaters were stripping a dog’s skeleton, champing and growling with relish as they ate. They hadn’t hidden in time: either they were too absorbed in their meal and didn’t notice the signals from other members of their tribe, or they simply hadn’t been able to control their greed.

They screwed up their eyes in the glare of the brigadier’s flashlight and carried on chewing, starting to withdraw slowly in the direction of the nearest carriage, but suddenly, one after another, they somersaulted backwards and flopped down onto the floor, like empty sacks.

Homer gazed in amazement at Hunter, who was putting a heavy army pistol with a long cylindrical silencer back in his shoulder holster. His face was as inscrutable and lifeless as ever.

‘They must have been very hungry, I suppose,’ Ahmed muttered under his breath, examining the dark puddles spreading out from under the dead beasts’ smashed skulls with squeamish interest.

‘So am I,’ the brigadier responded incomprehensibly, making Homer shudder.

Hunter moved on without looking round at the others and old Homer thought he could hear that low, greedy growling again. What an effort it cost him every time to resist the temptation to put a bullet into these vermin! He had to coax himself, calm himself down, and eventually he got the upper hand and demonstrated to himself that he was a mature individual who could tame his nightmares, who refused to let them drive him insane. But Hunter apparently had no intention of even trying to fight his impulsive desires.

Only what were those desires?

The silent demise of two members of the herd galvanised the other corpse-eaters: scenting fresh death, even the boldest and the laziest of them moved off the platforms, wheezing and whining faintly. They crammed into both trains and fell silent, lined up at the windows and crowding in the doors of the carriages. These creatures didn’t show any rage or desire for revenge. Once the team left the station, they would immediately devour their own dead relatives. ‘Aggression is a quality of hunters,’ thought Homer. ‘Those who feed on carrion don’t need it, just as they don’t need to kill. Everything living dies sooner or later, it will all become their food anyway. All they have to do is wait.’

The beam of the flashlight revealed the repulsive faces pressed up against the other side of the dirty, greenish panes of glass, the misshapen bodies, the clawed hands groping restlessly at the inside of the satanic fish tank. In total silence, hundreds of pairs of dull eyes doggedly followed the movement of the team as it walked by, the creatures’ heads turning uncannily in precise synchronisation, watching intently as the men moved away. The little freaks sealed in flasks of formalin at the Kunstkamera Museum would have watched the visitors like that, if their eyelids hadn’t prudently been sewn shut.

Despite the approaching hour of reckoning for his godlessness, Homer still couldn’t bring himself to believe in either the Lord or the Devil. But if Purgatory did exist, this was exactly how it would have looked for the old man. Sisyphus was doomed to battle against gravity, Tantalus was condemned to the torment of unquenchable thirst. But waiting for Homer at the station of his death was a train driver’s jacket and this bloodcurdling ghost train, with its monstrous gargoyle passengers: the mockery of vengeful gods. And on leaving the platform, the train would drive straight into one of the old legends of the Metro, with the tunnel looping round into a Möbius strip, a dragon devouring its own tail.

Hunter had lost interest in the station and its inhabitants and the team crossed the rest of the hall at a brisk pace: Ahmed and Homer could hardly keep up with the brigadier’s impetuous stride.

The old man felt the urge to turn round, shout, fire – to scatter these insolent freaks and banish his own painful thoughts. But instead he trudged on with his head lowered, concentrating hard to avoid stepping on anybody’s rotting remains. Ahmed hung his head too, absorbed in his own thoughts. And in their hasty flight from Nakhimov Prospect, no one thought of looking round any longer.

The patch of light from Hunter’s flashlight scurried rapidly from side to side, as if it were following an invisible gymnast under the dome of this baleful circus, but even the brigadier was no longer taking any notice of what it picked out.

A set of fresh bones and a half-gnawed skull – clearly human – glinted briefly in the beam and immediately disappeared back into the gloom, unnoticed by anyone. Lying beside them like a useless shell were a steel army helmet and a bulletproof vest.

Over the peeling green paint of the helmet a single word had been stencilled in white: ‘Sebastopol’.