I came to study in the regional center, rented a room in a wooden house on the river bank in the private sector. The place was remote, people used the houses around it as summer homes, nobody ever went there in the fall. There was an abandoned cemetery nearby. Locals showed it to me during the day.
On the first evening, the owner went with a friend across two houses "to sit for a meeting".
I turned on the lights, closed the window with a curtain, studying. Then I realize I've been disturbed by some sound for some time now. Like someone scratching at the window, as if a long fingernail (or claw) was prying at the wooden frame. There is no question of pulling back the curtains and looking out the window - it is scary. It is October, ten o'clock in the evening, it is dark, and the window does not face the street, it faces the garden. The birds are sleeping and people are not walking.
They scratch the frame from outside very persistently. A couple of times I yelled something like "Hey, who's there?" and "Stop it!" each time the outside was quiet for half a minute and then started up again, as if they wanted to open the window from the outside. I think if there was a thief, he would have run away when he heard my voice. A burglar, on the contrary, would have taken out the flimsy frame with a couple of blows.
So I must have listened to those clicks for half an hour, wondering about the natural origin of the sounds, or trying to ignore them. And the sounds got louder and louder, scratching so hard that the glass was tinkling.
Mishka, the owner's cat, is snuggled up on the bed, the village hunter and brawler.
I decided to wake him up - I heard that cats react to all sorts of abnormal phenomena so that it is difficult to make a mistake: hissing at an empty place or rush, or, conversely, scared. And if it's mice - well, whether it's in the wall or under a window sill, then I'll understand it by its reaction (although, I generally already understood - what mice there - so loudly and methodically, but I really wanted to believe that everything is all right).
The cat woke up with a disgruntled look, listened to the sounds from the window - and... opened his eyes, his ears stood up straight, his pupils dilated, and, without taking his eyes off the curtained window, he crawled silently to the floor with his tail tucked. When this brave fighter cat, with his ears pressed tight, crawled silently under the bed to hide, I remember how I ran out of the house, somehow locked the lock jumping hands, jumped out into the street - and there's still a full moon in the sky - a full moon. I ran as fast as I could to the house where the owner was sitting with a friend, and I told him.
He was already drunk and cheerful, - and, he said, I was frightened, but come on, let's go and see together. He said that there was either a branch or an antenna wire had broken off the roof, and it was knocking on the window in the wind. Or maybe someone was playing a joke on you.
The wind was really quite strong. He took a flashlight, and we came together to "my" window.
Needless to say, the nearest branches were about two meters away from the window, and the antenna wire was where it belonged - on the roof and did not break off anywhere. Also, under the window and all the way up the wall of the house - from the very foundation - was the soil, well loosened for a bed, which, of course, had no traces of anyone.
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