Simple Truths of Life - страница 5

Having finished eating, I went to the dugout. I calmly went to its entrance and opened the door. There was no one inside. I immediately noticed how coals were smoldering in the fireplace of the dugout, and a barely visible smoke was coming from them. It was at that moment that I for the first time remembered the dream that I had that night…

I immediately went to collect Lena, but she was still sleeping. It was about twelve o’clock, and she often slept for a very long time.

Of course, now I understand that the girl most likely would not go to burn a fire in a dugout in the backyard on a cloudy day – and on any other. I asked another friend if he was in the dugout that day, to which he answered negatively. In addition, he would not leave the coals not extinguished. Each time we burned bonfires, he always extinguished them to the end, being a responsible person. The question of who made the fire that day in our dugout remains unanswered, as well as why I had a dream about it, and why in it I saw someone completely covered in black fur…

It is worth saying that almost all the unusual cases that happened to me before my eighteenth birthday took place in the village.

There was a moment when I woke up in the middle of the night. I heard floorboards bend in the kitchen of our house. The frequency of steps indicated that someone was walking in a slow, calm step. I thought that my mother was returning home from the toilet, but when I turned my head towards the door, I realized that my mother was sleeping in her bed. Nobody else could walk in the kitchen that night – my father was in Moscow, and aunt Liza very rarely went to our Little House during the day, and she certainly would not have walked in our kitchen in the middle of the night in the dark. The Big House has its own exit to the garden.

Another incident occurred when I was sitting on the porch of the Little House while repairing my bike. I remember clearly how I felt then that someone was looking at me from behind. I turned around, but there was nobody – neither in the kitchen, nor on the terrace. But I could feel someone's presence.

Many years later, when I began to sleep on the terrace, something hit twice very hard on the door of the terrace. A couple of seconds before that, my mother went outside, but she never slammed the doors like that, on the contrary, she always closed them very quietly and calmly.

And the other night, when I was lying in the bed of the terrace, preparing to sleep, I felt a cool clot fly slowly over my face.

The next unusual event occurred when, not far from my house, I was digging a hole for a pillar with two village friends. As far as I remember, it was a clear, cloudless summer day. There were three female friends with us. During our excavations, we came across a rounded gray stone. It was a little smaller than a human head, as far as I remember. We noticed that it was as if the features of a human face could be distinguished on the surface of the rock… Having put the gray stone on a bench, we continued digging. Soon we came across a long black stone. Its length was approximately equal to the diameter of the gray stone, and the width was much less than its length. We put it near the gray stone. Not much time had passed when we noticed how from the south a cloud of gray-brown color began to cover the whole sky. It was unusual. But it was another cloud that made us nervous, also quickly moving from south to north… That cloud was black and stretched out across the sky from west to east, but in width it was clearly very narrow – that is, the gray cloud was for some time as if divided into two parts by the black one. The wind picked up. We realized that stones we dug out somehow affect the clouds, however strange it may sound, and we decided to bury them back. Both clouds disappeared very quickly… We never talked about this incident.