‘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.

‘Do you hear how quiet it is? It’s not the motor moving it, you know. The machine room is not working. Ulman facilitated it.’

But of course, that was it. The creak of the stairs and the grinding of the ungreased gears, and all the sounds that the revived mechanism emitted. Was that all? Artyom again heard the disgusting gurgling and slurp that had reached him in the tunnel. The sounds were coming from the depths where the escalators led. He gathered his courage and, approaching the edge, illuminated the inclined tunnel along which the blackish brown ribbon of steps crawled ever faster. For something like a moment it seemed that the Kremlin’s secret had been opened up before him. He saw something dirty, brown, oily, overflowing and unambiguously alive oozing through the slits between the steps. It emerged from these slits in short spurts, rising and falling in step along the whole length of the escalator as far as Artyom could see. But it was not a meaningless fluctuation. All these spurts of a living substance were part of one gigantic whole, which was straining to move the steps. And somewhere far below, at a depth of several dozen metres, this very dirty and oily stuff spread freely about the floor, swelling and clearing away, overflowing and quivering, emitting those same strange and revolting sounds. The arch was like a monstrous jaw to Artyom, the domes of the escalator tunnel a throat, and the steps themselves, the greedy tongue of a terrible ancient god awakened by strangers. And then it was as if a hand touched his consciousness, stroking it. And his head emptied, as in the tunnel. And he wanted only one thing – to step onto the escalator and ride below, where the answer to all his questions waited. The Kremlin’s stars once more flashed before his imagination’s gaze…