But it was very hard to control yourself – especially when you were walking alone. People had lost their minds. They just couldn’t calm themselves down, even when they reached inhabited stations. Then, of course, slowly, they came to themselves again, but they couldn’t make themselves go into the tunnel again – or they would immediately be seized by the same feeling of alarm, familiar to every metro-dweller, and it could turn into a pernicious delusion.

‘Don’t be scared – I’m watching!’ Artyom shouted to the man at the back. And the man nodded, but after a couple of minutes he couldn’t help it and looked behind himself again. It was hard…

‘A guy I know at Seregi also went a little crazy like that,’ Zhenya said quietly, knowing what Artyom had been referring to. ‘To be fair, he had a pretty serious reason for it. He decided to go through that tunnel at Sukharevskaya – remember I was telling you about it? Where you shouldn’t ever go alone and you have to go in a caravan. Well, the guy lived. And, you know why he survived?’ Zhenya smirked. ‘Because he didn’t have enough courage to go beyond the hundredth-metre. When he was heading in he was so brave and resolute. Ha… After twenty minutes he came back – his eyes goggling, his hair standing on end, and he couldn’t pronounce a single discernible word. So, they didn’t get anything out of him – and since then, he speaks incoherently, mostly lowing like a cow. And won’t put a foot in the tunnel – just stays at Sukhareveskaya begging. He’s the local village idiot now. Is the moral of the story clear now?’

‘Yeah,’ Artyom said uncertainly.

The group moved along for a while in total silence. Artyom sunk into his thoughts again and walked like that for a while, trying to think up something plausible to say at the exit post to get out of Rizhskaya.

And so they continued until, after a while, he noticed some kind of strange sound that was getting louder and louder, coming from the tunnel ahead of them. This noise, which had been almost inaudible to begin with, was on the border of audible sound and ultrasound, slowly and imperceptibly gaining strength, so that you couldn’t tell when you’d started hearing it. It reminded him of a whistling whisper more than anything – incomprehensible and inhuman.

Artyom quickly looked over at the others. They were all moving rhythmically and silently. The commander had stopped talking to Kirill, Zhenya was thinking about something, and the man at the back was calmly looking forward, having stopped his nervous backward glancing. They didn’t hear anything. Nothing! Artyom became scared. The calm and silence of the group became even more noticeable against the background of this whispering, which was getting louder and louder – and it was incomprehensible and frightening. Artyom stopped working the lever and stood up to his full height. Zhenya looked at him in surprise. Zhenya’s eyes were clear with no trace of the drugs that Artyom was afraid he might find there.

‘What are you doing?’ Zhenya asked, annoyed. ‘Are you tired or something? You should have said so and not just stopped like that.’

‘You don’t hear anything?’ Artyom asked in bewilderment, and something in his voice made Zhenya’s face change expression.

Zhenya listened harder without ceasing to work the lever. The cart, however, was going slower and slower, because Artyom was still standing there with a confused look, catching the echoes of the mysterious noise.

The commander noticed this and turned around.:

‘What’s wrong with you? Have your batteries run out?’

‘You don’t hear anything?’ Artyom asked him.

And at that moment a foul sensation crept into his soul, that maybe there was no noise and that’s why no one heard it. He was just going mad, he was imagining it out of fear…

The commander gave the signal to stop so that the squeaking of the cart wouldn’t interfere and the grumble of boots would die away. His hands crept up onto his machine gun and he stood motionless and tense, listening, and turning one ear to the tunnel.

The strange noise was right there now, Artyom could hear it distinctly, and the clearer the sound became the more attentively Artyom peered at the commander’s face, trying to make out if he could also hear what was filling Artyom’s consciousness with ever-strengthening agitation. But the features of the commander’s face gradually smoothed out, and Artyom was overcome with a sense of shame. Moreover, he had stopped the group for nothing and had freaked out and alarmed the others as well.

Zhenya, clearly, couldn’t hear anything either even though he was trying. Having given up his work at last, he looked at Artyom with spiteful mockery, looking him in the eye, and asked:

‘Hallucinations?’

‘Fuck off!’ Artyom unexpectedly shouted with irritation. ‘What, are you all deaf or something?’

‘Hallucinations!’ Zhenya concluded.

‘Quiet. There’s nothing. You just thought you heard it probably. Don’t worry, it happens, don’t get tense, Artyom. Go ahead and start up again and we’ll go on,’ the commander said softly, calming the situation, and walking ahead himself.

Artyom had no other option but to return to his work. He earnestly tried to convince himself that the whisper was only in his imagination, that it was just tension. He tried to relax and not to think about anything, hoping he could throw the sound out of his head along with his disturbing and rushing thoughts. He managed to stop the thoughts for a time but, in his empty head, the sound grew more resonant, louder and clearer. He gained strength from the fact that they were all moving further to the south, and when the noise had become so great that it seemed to fill the whole metro, Artyom suddenly noticed that Zhenya was working with just one hand, and that, without noticing it, he was rubbing his ears with the other.

‘What are you doing?’ Artyom whispered to him.

‘I don’t know… they’re blocked… they’re itching…’ Zhenya mumbled.

‘And you don’t hear anything?’ Artyom asked.

‘No, I don’t hear a thing – but I feel pressure,’ Zhenya whispered in response, and there wasn’t a trace of the former irony in his voice.

The sound had reached an apogee and then Artyom understood where it was coming from. It was emanating from one of the pipes that lay along the tunnel walls. It had been used as a communication line and who knows what else. The pipe was burst and the torn black muzzle was emitting this strange noise. It was coming from the depths of the pipe and. as Artyom tried to figure out why there were no wires, nothing, just complete emptiness and blackness, the commander stopped suddenly and said slowly and laboriously, ‘Guys, let’s… here… Let’s have a break. I don’t feel so well. Something in my head.’

He approached the cart with uncertain steps so he could sit on its edge but he hadn’t gone a step before he dropped like a bag to the ground. Zhenya looked at him in confusion, rubbing his ears with both hands and not moving from his place. Kirill for some reason had continued walking alone, as though nothing had happened, not reacting to their shouts. The man at the back sat down on the rails and started to cry helplessly like a baby. The light of the flashlight beamed at the tunnel’s ceiling and, lit from below, the scene looked even more sinister.

Artyom panicked. Clearly he was the only one whose mind hadn’t been dulled by the sound, but the noise was becoming completely intolerable, preventing any concrete thoughts from developing.

Artyom covered his ears in despair and that helped a little. Then with all his might he slapped Zhenya who was rubbing his ears with a silly expression on his face and yelled at him, trying to overcome the noise, forgetting that he was the only one to hear it: ‘Pick up the commander! Put the commander in the cart! We can’t stay here, no way! We have to get out of here!’ And he picked up the fallen flashlight and went after Kirill who was marching like a sleepwalker into the pitch darkness ahead.