This story happened twenty years ago. I was then courting my future wife, and decided to arrange a romantic evening by candlelight at my parents' dacha. I prepared everything in advance, put champagne in a bucket of ice and sit - rehearsing a speech about "will you marry me …".
I looked - my Maya arrived, let the taxi go. I told her from the doorway - an offer, she is in tears of joy. Then we drank a glass, danced … We went out on the porch to breathe before going to bed, I lit a cigarette. The moon, I remember, was huge and so bright, as if candles were burning inside. Maya admired, uttered something enthusiastically poetic, and suddenly … at the neighbors' dacha there was some kind of stirring.
She told me with a smile: "Is there probably a romantic dinner too?" “Hardly,” I replied, “at half past three in the night they will not go for a walk: elderly spouses with their grandson live there. People are very quiet. " “However, there is definitely someone there,” Maia insisted. - Look, something glows in the dark. Probably, the owner also went out to smoke. " Precisely, the light in the dark is clearly visible, even two, only the old man's neighbor does not smoke - I know this for sure: he had a heart attack last year, so he gave up overnight.
Marya Kirillovna, his wife, hardly ever took a cigarette into her mouth. Then who is there under their windows? I tried to make out the outlines of the figure and wondered if it was time to intervene. The fact is that in our dachas they constantly crawled into someone: either the drunks would open the house to have a drink or a snack, then some homeless people would take out the TV, then the addict would go over everything in search of money …
I decided that it was necessary to scare this night guest by all means, even if he just made a mistake due to drunkenness, otherwise he would burst into them, frighten the old people. In short, he must be escorted from their site. I made a sign to Maya to stay quiet, and moved towards the neighbors. I managed to take two or three steps, suddenly we heard a loud growl, and some dark mass rushed through the bushes of raspberries, jasmine, sweeping away everything in the way, disfiguring the beds in our direction.
In outline, it looked like, for example, a wild boar or a bear - the heavy carcass broke branches with a noise. I grabbed Maya by the arm and dragged her from the porch into the house. I barely had time to slam the door when they hit it from the street - I don't even know what, judging by the sound, with a metal instrument. And judging by the footprints that I saw in the morning - steel claws, there were five deep cuts in the tree.
While I was bringing my future spouse to life, they hit the door a couple more times - thank God, our dacha is old, the door is made of solid oak, not plywood, so it is not easy to break it down. Then everything calmed down, Maya and I drank a glass of cognac to relieve stress. She could barely stay on her feet, but with trembling lips said: “Wow, an adventure. Now I will definitely not forget how you proposed to me! Later I always found in her tremendous courage in the most difficult situations. She's scared, and she's trying to joke …
When we walked around the garden in the morning in search of evidence of the monster's raid at night, we saw impressive traces of someone's powerful claws in the beds that my mother was lovingly cultivating. Then, having examined the old suspended staircase to the attic, they found something interesting there too: it looked askance and even somehow bent a little, as if they were trying to wrap it up like a spring. Wow! What a power one must have! And then, if it was a beast - and up to this moment Maya and I thought so - then how dexterous his paws must be in order to spoil a piece of iron ?!
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I stood rooted to the spot until my neighbor Uncle Sasha brought me out of my thoughts, on whose site we noticed a night monster. He put on his glasses, thoughtfully examining his barrel for rainwater, and reasoned with himself: “And who needed to disfigure it like that ?! What a hooligan! I looked around: the barrel was crumpled like an empty cigarette pack. Lord! What does all this mean?
I showed my neighbor the stairs and the footprints on the door, he clicked his tongue and rubbed his beard for a long time - I can't say if he was scared, but he was certainly puzzled. And we decided not to show the consequences of Ha6eia to his wife at all: she's a nervous woman, and without that she is afraid to stay alone at night in our village. “Maybe we’ll watch him at night? I have a hunting rifle …”- suggested a resolute old man.
"Uh-huh," I nodded, though not so confidently. And we sat the whole next night in my car: Uncle Sasha rightly assumed that if we wait for a monster in the garden, he will smell an ambush. And from home, we may not notice him, if he does not play pranks at our dachas, but, say, visits the neighboring one …
And so we spent many hours in my old "Moskvich", entertaining each other with scary stories - although they all frightened us much less than the one that played out last night. Towards the morning, probably at five o'clock, we both fell asleep without seeing anyone. The next night I refused to go on guard, and Uncle Sasha, it seems, was again sitting in ambush with a gun. But all in vain - no more beast with steel claws was shown in our summer cottage cooperative.
Victor KASHEMIROV, Sverdlovsk region