first looked at this tail for a long time, silvery-blue,
with iridescence, but then she began to wonder what was going on there in
general. It looks like the odd couple was fighting.
Here the creature swung its heavy paw to
strike the man. The blow should have hit him on the head,
but he caught the paw in his hand and jerked it away. The
creature was supposed to swat him into a flatbread,
but he pushed it away as if it were made of cotton wool. And then
an even stranger thing happened: a shiny blue tail,
8
and the paws, and the long ears – all this began to retract
in a monster, and here he is no longer a monster, but an intelligent
middle-aged man with glasses and a gray business suit. He
straightened his jacket, smoothed his hair, and continued to say
something. The man in black responded
by gesturing violently, showing his displeasure with
everything that was happening. Then the gray suit turned and walked toward
the road, and the other man, hands down, remained standing on the
floor. The grass and ground beneath him were almost extinguished, and it was dark again
,but he couldn’t see anything around him.
Lina backed away from the wall, her heart pounding.
She sat down in the corner, pulled the blanket up to her chin, and tried
to convince herself that this was a dream. She remembered that she and co —
boy had a smartphone, and she began to blame herself for stepping
out without filming the strange couple on it. «Yes, that would solve it
my problem, she thought. «Then it would be immediately
clear whether it was a dream or not.» With these thoughts, she
calmed down a little, reached into her backpack for her smartphone – just
in case, as if she really was recording
something on it, when suddenly she was blinded by an unexpected light – someone
was standing next to the entrance.
9
Five hours earlier, a few kilometers south
.
The light of the setting sun shone through the small
basement window. It moved to the floor and moved smoothly
along, illuminating everything in its path:
white walls, simple wooden shelves. And on them —
beauty. Lots of beauty. A lot of work. Tools, brushes
,and paints.
The workshop was a creative mess, but the work was still going on
they were laid out on shelves in
a certain sequence, depending on the stage of production and the degree