Ночь, которую запомнишь.
It was October 12, 2001. Technician Grigoriy finished developing the projector just in time for a premiere. It had taken him several weeks of tinkering and a handful of burnt-out components, but the machine finally worked. Its little lens glowed, and the picture it cast upon the wall was almost perfectly steady.
More importantly, it was ready for the premiere of a popular family Halloween film's made-for-television sequel.
Word spread quickly among the mice.
By the time the opening credits appeared, the pups had claimed their places on the floor, spreading sleeping rags on the floor. A communal bowl of cheese sat in the middle of the gathering. It was already half-empty, despite the fact that nobody seemed willing to admit to having eaten most of it.
On the wall, another world unfolded behind the familiar one, a place of cobblestone streets, crooked buildings, jack-o'-lantern streetlamps, and monsters who were, for the most part, perfectly pleasant neighbors. Witches crossed between the ordinary world and the extraordinary one, and an entire family seemed to have made a home on both sides of the divide.
The grandmother had returned.
That earned a cheer from the pups.
The mother was still struggling to maintain some semblance of normalcy, despite the fact that normalcy had never stood a chance in her family. The older sister, meanwhile, had acquired a boyfriend. He was handsome enough, charming enough, and polite enough to get along with practically everyone.
Which, as the pups soon discovered, was precisely the problem.
He wasn't quite what he seemed. He came from somewhere beyond their familiar world, carrying an old grudge, a spell book, and a plan that threatened to unravel everything the witches had built.
One of the pups leaned forward, narrowing his eyes at the screen.
"Professor Vladimir, that boy looks suspicious. What did you say in last class about faces?"
A few of the others snickered.
Professor Vladimir, wherever he happened to be sitting in the darkness, offered no immediate answer.
But it was the spell that truly captured the pups' attention.
It didn't kill anyone. It didn't make the buildings collapse or summon anything with too many teeth. Instead, it did something far more unsettling.
It made everything ordinary.
Beyond the portal, the cobblestone streets turned gray. The glowing jack-o'-lanterns lost their orange warmth. The strange little shops, once bustling with trolls and other curious creatures, became drab and lifeless. Color drained from the world like water from a forgotten painting, leaving behind something that looked less like a place where magic lived and more like a photograph that had been left too long in the sun.
Worse still, the monsters began to forget what they were.
The magic fell silent. The wonder vanished. Everyone shuffled about in cardigans and ordinary clothes, behaving as though the strangest thing that could happen to them was a minor inconvenience on a Tuesday afternoon.
One pup stared at the screen, his ears slowly lowering.
"That's really scary," he murmured through a mouthful of cheese.
Nobody laughed at him. Not immediately, anyway.
The little sister, however, was another matter entirely.
She was small, loud, and gloriously fearless, a tiny whirlwind of misplaced confidence and unpredictable magic. While everyone else lost their powers, hers remained stubbornly intact. Unfortunately, she hadn't yet mastered the art of using them properly.
People froze in the middle of sentences. Arms stopped halfway through gestures. Faces became trapped in expressions of surprise, irritation, or profound confusion.
Every time it happened, the pups erupted into a mixture of laughter and groaning. Some threw their paws over their faces. Others nearly toppled off their sleeping rags.
The youngest pup laughed so hard that he dropped his cheese.
He retrieved it without taking his eyes off the screen.
The solution, when it finally came, was exactly the sort of thing a story like this demanded: an old secret, a forgotten keepsake, and an amulet that had been misplaced by the one person who should have known where it was.
The grandmother remembered just enough, just in time. The amulet had to be used at a precise moment, and for several minutes the pups watched with the kind of breathless concentration usually reserved for thunderstorms and the possibility of a cat entering the barn.
Then the spell broke.
Color rushed back into the world. The jack-o'-lanterns glowed again, the monsters remembered themselves, and the streets beyond the portal regained their peculiar, impossible charm.
The boy returned to gloat, only to discover that he had lost.
He looked less like a grand villain than someone who had been caught doing something foolish and was now struggling to decide whether he ought to be angry or embarrassed. There was something almost honest about his disappointment, something more convincing than the grand declarations of villains who believed themselves invincible.
The pups seemed satisfied with that.
When the credits rolled, Grigoriy's projector clicked softly in the darkness.
Then the lights came on.
Somewhere in the distance, a barn owl screeched.
Every pup went still.
The sound faded into the night, and one by one, the pups settled into their sleeping rags.
Месяц Хэллоуина ещё не закончился.