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And then, long after I’d reached the point where I just couldn’t take any more and couldn’t go on, and did anyway, the trees fell back and I stumbled to a halt at the top of a long gentle slope leading down to a city in the middle of a wide-open plain. There wasn’t much to see: just high stone walls surrounding blunt and functional buildings. Not much bigger than a decent-sized town, really, with only the one road leading in and out. Could have been any place, anywhere. No traffic on the road, no obvious signs of life. Could we have come all this way across a dead land just to reach a dead city?
It didn’t matter. It was shelter. And the mood I was in, I’d burn the whole place down just to build a fire.
The others crowded in beside me, looking down at the city on the plain, too cold and numb and exhausted to ask even the most obvious questions. I started down the gentle slope. No point in arguing anyway. There was nowhere else to go.
We followed the only road to the main gate set deep into the towering wall. The brickwork was seriously weather-blasted, but it still stood firm and strong, which was more than could be said for the massive main gate. Something had torn the gate right off its hinges and left it lying on the cold featureless ground outside the boundary wall. It could have happened yesterday or years ago. There was no way of telling. Inside the towering walls, the city lay still and open and utterly silent. The streets were deserted, with no signs of life in any of the buildings and not a sound anywhere of men or machines. A brief Cyrillic inscription had been carved deep into the stone above the gateway.
“Cyrillic!” said Walker. “We’re in Russia! Anybody read Cyrillic, by any chance?”
“I do,” said Honey.
“Of course you do,” I said. “Know thy enemy. Well, what does it say?”
“Probably Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” grumbled Peter.
“Well,” said Honey, trying to frown with her frozen forehead. “I can read one letter and two numbers. X37.”
“Oh, shit,” I said.
“Somehow it always sounds so much worse when he says it,” said Walker. “What’s wrong, Eddie? Are we to take it you know of this place?”
“If there was anywhere else to go, I’d go there,” I said. “Ru
“I want to go home,” Peter said miserably.
“Russia,” Honey said thoughtfully. “I have contacts here, if I can just find a working comm system . . . What’s so bad about this place, Eddie?”
“Who cares?” said Peter. “It looks warm.”
“This is one of the old secret Soviet science cities,” I said. “Abandoned years ago. X37 means we’re in Tunguska territory, in northern Siberia.”
“Wait a minute,” said Peter. “As in, the Tunguska Event of 1908? That must be what we’re here for!”
“I hope so,” I said. “There’s a mystery in X37 too, but I really don’t think I want to know what it is. X37 was a bad place where bad things happened, and just maybe they still do.”
“It offers shelter and the possibility of warm clothes and food,” said Walker. “First things first.”
And so we became the first people to enter X37 for many years, lambs to the slaughter, walking its empty streets looking for a suitable store to break into. To keep all our minds off the cold and to keep the others from asking too many questions about X37 just yet, I did my usual Drood font-of-all-knowledge bit and filled them in on what I knew of the great Tunguska Event.
In 1908, at 7:17 a.m. on the 30th of June, something hit northern Siberia with enough force to shake the world. There was a huge explosion in the remote and largely uninhabited territory of Tunguska, later estimated to be between ten and twenty megatons—more powerful than any nuclear bomb ever exploded. The force of the explosion felled some eighty million trees, uprooting them and knocking them flat over a range of eight hundred and thirty square miles. The light generated by this impact was so bright and lasting that men in London were able to read a newspaper in the street at midnight.
But the event wasn’t properly investigated until some twenty years later. The First World War and the Russian Revolution got in the way, and the Soviet authorities consistently refused all offers of outside scientific help. In 1928, a team of Russian scientists made the long and difficult journey into the frozen heart of northern Siberia, to investigate, and that’s when the mystery began. Because what the scientists found there made no sense at all.
Everyone’s first thought was that a really big meteor had finally made its way down through the atmosphere and struck us what should have been a killing blow, but there wasn’t any crater. Nothing. Not even a dent in the ground. So it couldn’t have been a meteor. Next thought: a comet. Since comets are mostly composed of ice and gas, it was just possible that a really big comet had made its way down through the atmosphere and exploded at ground level. Such things had been known to happen, on a much smaller scale. But in every such case, the exploding comet had driven certain identifying chemicals and elements into the ground, and there weren’t any at Tunguska. So, not a comet.
Then someone came up with the idea of a great volcanic explosion from underground caused by accumulated pressure. Except that would have left a crater too. There have been more theories down the years: a crashing alien spacecraft, a miniature black hole just passing through, even an escape attempt from Hell. But my family would have known about those. A century after the Tunguska Event, the scientists are still arguing and getting nowhere.
“That’s all very well and groovy,” said Peter. “But that’s there, and we are here. What is this place? Why doesn’t it have a proper name? And, most important, why the Oh, shit?”
“All those old science cities had bad reputations,” I said. “But X37 was in a class all its own. And, it may be coincidence or it may not . . . but we’re not that far from one of the great Drood secrets. Some miles from here, something very old and unspeakably powerful lies sleeping, buried deep under the permafrost. We need to be really careful while we’re here that we don’t do anything that might waken it.”
“Just for the sake of argument,” said Walker, “what would happen if we did?”
“The end of everything,” I said. “The destruction of the world and humanity as we know it. Hell on earth, forever and ever.”
“Ah,” said Walker. “Let’s not do that, then.”
“Best not,” I said.
“You can be such a drama queen sometimes, Eddie,” said Honey. She looked at me suspiciously. “How is it you Droods know so much about this godforsaken area anyway?”
I smiled as much as my frozen mouth would allow. “Wouldn’t you like to know . . .”
We trudged on through the deserted city. Still no sign of anyone. The only sound in the streets was the tramp of our unsteady feet echoing back from blank, unresponsive walls. We were all deathly tired now, inside and out, every movement an effort. I felt like shouting out to challenge the quiet, to see if anyone might answer, but I didn’t. If anyone was still alive in this abandoned place, I was pretty sure they wouldn’t be the kind of people I’d want to meet. And even beyond that . . . this city was too still, too quiet. Like a crouching cat ready to jump out on its prey. It felt like we were being watched. From everywhere.
The streetlamps were out, and there wasn’t a single light burning in any of the windows. No sign of any power in any part of the city. Now and again we’d come across an old-fashioned boxy car with its doors open and its windows and windshield shattered. Great rusty holes gaped in the metalwork, as though it was rotting away. The buildings were all typical old Soviet architecture: massive concrete blocks and brutal stone edifices, with all the character and appeal of a slap round the face. No sign of occupation anywhere.