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This time the noise had snuck up surreptitiously, at first dulling the senses. Artyom was now sure that all usual sounds had been muted and the noise itself had been inaudible at first, but then it froze the flow of thoughts so they were suddenly covered with the hoarfrost of weakness and, finally, it delivered its crushing blow.
And why hadn’t he immediately noticed that Bourbon had suddenly started talking in terms that he couldn’t possibly have known, even if he had read lots of apocalyptical prophecies? The noise went deeper into Bourbon, as if bewitching him, and a strange intoxication had taken hold. Artyom himself had been thinking all sorts of rubbish about the fact that he mustn’t go silent, that they had to keep talking, but it hadn’t occurred to him to try to figure out what was going on. Something had been interfering…
He wanted to throw all that had happened out of his consciousness, to forget it all. It was impossible to get his head around it. In all his years at VDNKh he had only heard about such things. It had been easier to think that anything he’d heard was just not possible in this world. Artyom shook his head and looked from side to side again.
The same suffocating twilight filled the space. Artyom thought that it had probably never been light here, and that it could only get darker – when the fuel reserves for the fire ended. The clock above the entrance to the tu
‘Is it really evening?’ he asked Khan, puzzled.
‘It’s evening for me,’ Khan replied pensively.
‘What do you mean?’ Artyom didn’t understand.
‘See, Artyom, you obviously come from a station where the clock works and you all look at it in awe, comparing the time on your wrist watch to the red numbers above the tu
He went silent, sipping on his hot tea and Artyom thought it was fu
‘They say that before, when trains used to run, in the wagons they used to a
‘Does it seem strange to you?’ Khan raised his eyebrows.
‘How could they tell which side the platform would be on? If I’m coming from the south to the north then the platform is on the right. If I’m coming from the north to the south then it’s on the left. And the seats on the train were against the walls of the train if I remember right. So for the passengers, the platforms were either in front of them or behind them – half of them on one side and the other half on the other with different perspectives.’
‘You’re right.’ Khan answered respectfully. ‘Basically the train drivers were only speaking for themselves because they travelled in a compartment at the front and for them right was absolute right and left was absolute left. So they must have mostly been saying it for their own benefit. So in principle they might as well have said nothing. But I have heard these words since I was a child and I was so used to them that I had never stopped to consider them.’
Some time passed and then he said, ‘You promised to tell me what happened to your friend.’
Artyom paused for a moment, wondering if he should tell this man about the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of Bourbon; about the noise that he had heard twice now in the last twenty-four hours; about its destructive influence on human reason; about his sufferings and thoughts when he could hear the melody of the tu
‘It’s the voices of the dead,’ Khan said quietly after Artyom had completed his narrative.
‘What?’ Artyom asked, surprised.
‘You heard the voices of the dead. You were saying that at the begi
‘Which dead?’ Artyom didn’t quite understand.
‘All the people who have been killed in the metro since the begi