‘Cut the chatter!’ interrupted Melnik, fiercely. ‘Don’t you know librarians can’t stand noise? For them, noise is like waving a red rag in front of a bull?’ He swore and indicated the door to the reading room to Ten.
Ten nodded. Staying close to the walls, they began to slowly move towards the huge oak door panels. Neither Artyom nor Daniel was less than a step behind. Melnik was the first to go in. Leaning with his back against one of the door panels and raising his rifle so that the barrel pointed up, he took a deep breath, let it out, and then sharply pushed the panel open with his shoulder, simultaneously pointing the barrel at the opened black mouth of the Main Hall.
They were all there in an instant. The hall was a room of incredible size, with a ceiling that disappeared twenty metres above the floor. Just as in the vestibule, heavy, thick vines with flowers hung from the ceiling. The walls of the hall were covered in the same unnatural morning glories. On each side of them there were six giant windows, where a part of the glazing remained unbroken. However, the illumination was very weak: light from the moon barely penetrated a dense tangle of fat, gleaming stalks.
Earlier, rows of tables had been arranged to the left and right, to accommodate readers. Much of that furniture had been hauled off, and some had been burned or broken, but about a dozen tables remained untouched. These stood closer to a decorated, cracked panel at the opposite wall, in whose exact centre rose a sculpture that was indistinct in the semi-darkness. Plastic signs reading ‘Observe silence!’ were screwed onto surfaces everywhere.
The silence here was completely different from that of the vestibule. Here it was so thick, you could almost touch it. It seemed to entirely fill this ancient, rough hall, and you felt afraid to disturb it.
They stood there, searching the space in front of them with their flashlights, until Melnik concluded, ‘Probably the wind…’
But at that very instant, Artyom noticed a grey shadow that crossed in front of them, between two broken tables, which disappeared into a black gap in the bookshelves. Melnik saw it, too. Placing his night-vision device to his eyes, he jerked his rifle up and, stepping carefully over the moss-overgrown floor, started to approach the mysterious access.
Ten moved after him. Even though Artyom and Daniel had been motioned to remain where they were, they couldn’t stand it and also followed the stalkers. Remaining at the entrance alone was too spooky. At the same time, Artyom could not resist looking around with delight at the hall, which retained vestiges of its former grandeur. This not only saved his own life, but everyone else’s, too.
Galleries encircled the entire perimeter of the room at a height of several metres; these were rather narrow walkways enclosed by wooden railings. You could look through the windows from the galleries, and furthermore, there were doors leading to office spaces both in the wall they were standing next to and in the walls on both sides of the ancient panel. The gallery was accessible via twin stairs that were located on both sides of the reading sculpture or via an identical set of stairs that ascended from the entrance.
And it was down those stairs that humped, grey figures now descended, deliberately and silently. There were more than a dozen of them, creatures that did not quite melt into the gloom. They would have been about Artyom’s height if they hadn’t been bent over double so that their long forelegs, which amazingly resembled arms, all but touched the floor. The creatures moved on their hind legs, taking waddling steps, yet with surprising nimbleness and silence. From a distance, they most closely resembled gorillas, pictures of which Artyom had seen in his childhood in a biology book his stepfather had tried to teach from.
Artyom had no more than a second for all these observations because, as soon as his flashlight beam fell on one of the humped figures, casting a sharp, black shadow on the wall behind it, a diabolical chirring sound rang out all around them, and the creatures, no longer attempting stealth, rushed down.
‘Librarians!’ yelled Daniel, with all his strength.
‘Down!’ ordered Melnik.
Artyom and Daniel threw themselves to the floor. They chose not to fire, recalling the stalker’s warning that shots, or any loud noises, would attract and aggravate librarians. Their hesitation was dispelled by Melnik, who threw himself to the floor next to them and was the first to open fire. Several creatures fell down with a roar; others threw themselves headlong into the darkness, but only in order to steal closer. After several instants, one of the monsters suddenly appeared two metres from them and made a long jump, attempting to seize Ten by the throat. Falling onto the floor, Ten managed to cut the creature down with a short burst.
‘Run! Get back to the round room and try to get to the archives! The Brahmin should know how to get there; they teach them that! We’ll stay here, cover you, and try to fight them off,’ said Melnik to Artyom, and without a further word crawled off to join his partner.
Artyom motioned to Daniel and both bolted for the exit, staying low to the ground. One of the librarians sprang from the darkness to meet them, but it was swept away in a hail of lead. The stalkers were keeping an eye on the pair.
Exiting the Main Reading Room, Daniel darted back to the vestibule from where they had come. For an instant, Artyom thought that his partner had been frightened by the librarians so much that he was trying to run away. But Daniel wasn’t running for the stairs that led to the exit. Going around them, he ran past the surviving card catalogue cabinets to the opposite end of the vestibule. There, the room narrowed and ended in three pairs of doors, in front and on both sides. The right-hand doors led to a staircase where absolute darkness prevailed. Here the Brahmin finally stopped to catch his breath. It took Artyom a few seconds to catch up, as he had never expected such agility from his companion. Standing still, they listened. They heard gunfire and cries from the Main Hall, so the fight was continuing. It wasn’t clear who would get the upper hand in the battle, and they couldn’t waste time waiting to see who won.
‘Why are we going back? Why did we start out going the other way?’ asked Artyom, catching his breath.
‘I don’t know where they were taking us.’ Daniel shrugged. ‘Maybe they intended to take us some other way. The elders taught us only one way, and it leads to the archives exactly from this side of the vestibule. Now we go up the stairs one floor, then along the corridor to another set of stairs, then through the duplicate card catalogue, and then we’ll be in the archives.’
He pointed his rifle into the darkness and stepped into the stairwell. Artyom followed, lighting the way with his beam.
There was an elevator shaft in the middle of the stairs; it went down about three floors and went up about the same distance. Apparently, the shaft had once been glassed-in, as in places, sharp glass shards, now frosted with decades of dust, could still be seen poking out of the cast-iron structure. The square well of the shaft was girdled by rotted wooden stairsteps that were strewn with broken glass, spent brass cartridges, and dried piles of excrement. There was no trace of railings, and Artyom had to press himself against the wall and carefully watch where he stepped so as not to slip and fall into the opening.
They went up one floor and found themselves in a small square room. There were three outlets from here, too, and Artyom realized that, without his guide, it was unlikely he’d find his way out of this labyrinth. The left-hand door led to a wide, dark corridor whose end he could not see by the light of his flashlight. The right-hand door was closed and had been boarded up in criss-cross fashion for some reason. On the adjacent wall was written, in soot: ‘Do not open! Deadly danger!’