The carriage raced on with no sign of stopping.
There turned out to be few passengers: a dozen people, plus a little man dozing in the corner, an old woman across from me, and me off to the side. The impression that a frantic hundred had been trying to burst out of the carriage had evaporated. The noise and racket had died down. The impossible and the incomprehensible had stopped being frightening.
We raced through the tunnel for long minutes that turned into hours.
My mind grew tired of twisting itself in knots and switched to practical considerations.
By all estimates, we’d left Moscow long ago. So we were rolling along some secret tunnel to Podolsk? Ah, they must’ve mixed our carriage up with the presidential one! Probably rehearsing the evacuation of Boris Nikolaich and the rest of the democratic bigwigs!
Honest to God, these almost-logical thoughts made me feel better; the wheels started clattering cheerfully and properly: no-men-kla-tur, no-men-kla-tur, no-men-kla-tur…
Aaa-oooh-aaaaah!!!...
I turned toward the scream and froze.
On the floor, writhing in pain, the little man was thrashing. Sores swelled on his body and burst, spraying pus. A gray-brown-green liquid oozed onto the floor.
— V-vvv-vvv-a-aaaauu!
With the little man’s second scream, my paralysis broke.
— Aaaa-aaaaaaa!!! — shrieking back at him, we scrambled away from the poor wretch.
Huddled by the broken-down door, we stared at a scene straight out of a rented VHS tape. The ragged, filthy little man writhed on the floor. His crooked fingers scratched at the floor, plucked at the shoes of the old woman sitting on the bench, watching the nightmare at her feet with icy calm.
The little man’s fingers began falling off and, hissing and foaming, vanishing, like ice on a hot skillet.
— Aaai-yaa-aaaa! — the little man howled, and, sweeping the floor with the stumps of his arms and legs, crawled toward us, leaving a trail of pus and blood. The wretched creature, shaking his head, kept getting closer and closer. And smaller and smaller. He was melting away on the filthy carriage floor.
The distance between him and us kept shrinking. We screamed louder and louder. Our eyes bulged from the noise our own bodies were making. We were boiling over with a mix of fear and disgust. I was definitely on the verge of collapse, and then, suddenly…
…the bubbling, melting husk of the homeless man, on his last breath, stretched out the stump of an arm… froze… and collapsed into a puddle of his own fluid. Collapsed with a deafening hiss, like an ostrich egg on a red-hot baking sheet. Drops of pus hit me. And every single drop began gnawing a hole into my skin! I swear it! Trypophobia turned me inside out.
All of us shuddered. But what was this? The bubbling and melting had stopped. That was it. He was gone! Turned into a shashlik on the grill of the filthy floor… into embers… into ash… Vanished.
Everything went quiet. Everyone went still.
With a sound like a snap of fingers, the old woman vanished. At a second snap, the girl pressed against me vanished. The man in front of me vanished, the woman beside me… Everyone vanished, and I was left alone. The light slowly dimmed, the rumble died away, and I leaned against the door frame. What else was going to happen?
A sudden silence and a burst of bright light striking my eyes pulled me away from what had just happened.
The carriage rolled out of the tunnel and out into open space… into a strange space. I pressed myself to the window and froze. An extraordinary view unfolded outside. This wasn’t the Moscow suburbs. This wasn’t Russia. This wasn’t abroad. This was something else — wondrous, strange, unreal.
