Artyom stared at Khan and could not avert his gaze from the man’s face for the duration of his monologue. Indistinct shadows skittered across Khan’s face and his eyes were flaring with some internal fire… Towards the end of the story, Artyom was almost sure that Khan was mad, that the voices in the pipes had whispered something to him too. And though Khan had saved him from death, and shown him such hospitality, the thought of staying with him for any length of time was uncomfortable and unpleasant. He needed to think about how to move on, through the most evil of all the tunnels in the metro, about which he had heard much – from Sukhareveskaya to Turgenevskaya and farther.
‘So, you’ll have to forgive me for my little lie,’ Khan added after a short pause. ‘Your friend’s soul didn’t go up to the creator, it won’t reincarnate and come back in a new form. It joined the other unhappy ones, in the pipes.’
These words reminded Artyom that he had planned to go back for Bourbon’s body, in order to bring it to the station. Bourbon had said that he had friends here, friends who would take Artyom back if they arrived successfully. This reminded him of the rucksack, which Artyom had not yet opened and in which, apart from Artyom’s machine gun, there might be something useful.
But to take it over was somehow frightening and superstitions of all kinds climbed into Artyom’s head and he decided to open it only slightly and to peek into it without touching or moving anything.
‘You don’t need to be afraid of it,’ Khan said to Artyom unexpectedly as though he could feel his trepidation. ‘The thing is now yours.’
‘I think what you did is called looting,’ Artyom said quietly.
‘You don’t need to be afraid of retribution, he won’t reincarnate,’ said Khan, not replying to what Artyom said but to what was flitting about in Artyom’s head. ‘I think that when they get taken into the pipes, the dead lose themselves and they become part of a whole, their will is dissolved into the will of the rest of them, and reason dries up. There’s no more individual. But if you’re afraid of the living and not the dead… Well, then drag this bag into the middle of the station and empty its contents onto the floor. Then no one will accuse you of thieving, and your conscience can be clean. But you tried to save the guy and he would be grateful to you for that. Consider that this bag is his repayment to you for what you did.’
He was speaking so authoritatively and with such conviction that Artyom gained the courage to put his hand into the pack and he started to take things out of it and lay them on the tarpaulin to see them in the light of the fire. There were four extra cartridges for Bourbon’s gun, in addition to the two that he had taken out when he gave the gun to Artyom. It was surprising that the trader had such an impressive arsenal. Artyom carefully wrapped up five of the cartridges he found in their cloth and put them into his rucksack and he put one in the Kalashnikov. The weapon was in excellent condition: thoroughly oiled and looked after. The lock moved smoothly, giving off a dull click when pushed and the safety catch was a bit stiff. All this indicated that the gun was practically new. The handle fitted comfortably into his hand and its shank was well polished. The weapon gave off a feeling of reliability and encouraged calmness and confidence. Artyom immediately decided that if he were to take any one thing from Bourbon it would be this gun.
The 7.62 cartridges that Bourbon had promised him for his ‘hoe’ weren’t there. It wasn’t clear how Bourbon had been planning to pay Artyom. Artyom thought about it and came to the conclusion that it may be that Bourbon hadn’t been planning to give him a thing but, having passed through the dangerous part, he would sling a shot into the back of Artyom’s head and throw him down a shaft and think no more of it. And if anyone had asked him about Artyom’s whereabouts then he would have any number of answers: anything can happen in the metro and well, the boy agreed himself to come along.
Apart from various rags, a map of the metro imprinted with notations that only its dead owner would understand, and a hundred grammes of weed, he found a few pieces of smoked meat in plastic bags and a notebook at the bottom of the rucksack. Artyom didn’t read the book and he was disappointed in the rest of the stuff. In the depths of his soul, he had hoped to find something mysterious, maybe something precious – the reason that Bourbon was so intent on getting through the tunnel to Sukharevskaya. He decided that Bourbon was a messenger or maybe a smuggler or something of the kind. This, at least, explained his determination to get through the damn tunnel at any price and his readiness to be generous. But since there was not much left in the rucksack after he’d pulled out the last pair of linen pieces, Artyom decided that the reason for his insistence had to have been something else. Artyom wracked his brains for a long while about what Bourbon needed at Sukharevskaya but he couldn’t think of anything plausible.
Then he remembered that he had left the poor man in the middle of the tunnel, left him to the rats, even though he had planned to go back and do something about the body. True, he had only a vague idea of how to give the trader his final honours and what to do with the corpse. Burn it? But you needed strong nerves for that, and the suffocating smoke and the stink of the burning meat and burning hair was sure to filter through to the station, and then he wouldn’t be able to avoid unpleasantness. Dragging the body to the station would be heavy and awful. It’s one thing to pull a man along by the wrists if you think he’s alive and you’re pushing away all thoughts of the fact that he is not breathing and has no pulse, but it’s another thing to pull along a corpse. So what, then? Just like Bourbon lied to him about his payment, he might have been lying about his friends here at the station. Then Artyom, having dragged the body back here, might just be putting himself in a worse situation.
‘So what do you do here with those that die?’ Artyom asked Khan after a long bout of thinking.
‘What do you mean, my friend?’ Khan answered a question with a question. ‘Are you talking about the souls of the deceased or about their perished bodies?’
‘About the corpses,’ Artyom growled. He was becoming fed up with his talk of the netherworld.
‘There are two tunnels that go from Prospect Mir to Sukharevskaya, ’ Khan said and Artyom thought to himself that trains went in two directions so they always needed two tunnels. So why would Bourbon, knowing about the second tunnel, want to go towards his fate? Was there an even greater danger hiding in the second tunnel? ‘But you can only go through it alone,’ the man continued, ‘because in the second tunnel, near our station, the ground sags, the floor has collapsed and now there’s some kind of deep ravine where, according to local legend, a whole train fell through the ground. If you stand on one end of this ravine, it doesn’t matter which, then you can’t see the other end, and the light of even the strongest flashlight won’t illuminate the depths. And so all sorts of blockheads say that it’s a bottomless abyss. This ravine is our cemetery. We put all our corpses in there.’
Artyom started to feel ill when he realized that he would have to go back to the place where Khan had picked him up, to drag Bourbon’s rat-gnawed body to the station and then to the ravine in the second tunnel. He tried to convince himself that throwing the corpse into the ravine was the same, in essence, as throwing it into a tunnel because you couldn’t call either one a burial. But just when he was ready to believe that leaving everything as it was was the best solution to the situation, Bourbon’s face appeared in front of his eyes with amazing clarity saying, ‘I’ve died.’ Artyom immediately was drenched with sweat. He got up with difficulty, put his new machine gun on his shoulder and said: