No one believed me, but I was certain of one thing:
Every night, exactly at midnight, for a few seconds, the windows in the basement floor would breathe. That floor was alive.
Not alive in the way the upper floors were—with their warm lights and orderly furniture—but alive in a deeper, more secret way. The kind of life that hides in shadows and waits.
That floor was where a jet-black cat with green, marble-like eyes kept to itself. His fur was so dark it seemed to absorb the light around him, and his eyes glowed faintly, like two distant stars trapped in a small, patient body. And sometimes, from the empty space of that room, sounds would emerge—sounds that resembled a conversation. Not words I could understand, but the rise and fall of voices, the rhythm of a dialogue between two people who no longer existed, or perhaps between the house and something else entirely.
I remember a few years ago, when I wanted to choose Turkey to live in, Ada offered me to stay with her in this house. She showed me all the floors with a quiet pride, as if each room held a secret she was half-willing to share. She said, "Choose any room you want for yourself, except the minus one floor." Her voice was light, but her eyes were serious. I didn't ask why. I should have.
But it didn't work out for me to stay. I left by my own will. And no matter how much I think about it now, I can't remember at all what my reason for not staying was. It's as if that memory—the real reason—was taken from me, gently and quietly, like a book pulled from a shelf and never returned.
In the heart of a green townhouse complex, a little away from the city noise and the main road—where trees have more to say than people, where the wind carries the smell of earth and rain more often than the smell of exhaust—there stands a villa with a simple yet beautiful facade, number seven. It belongs to a very kind woman.
The villa is eye-catching at first glance. The brickwork is warm, the windows are large and old, and the garden in front is wild enough to be charming but kept enough to show care. But when you look at it longer—when your gaze lingers on its silence—there is something uneasy about it. Not threatening, exactly, but present. Like a held breath.
Villa Entrance:
When you enter the villa, after passing a short hallway—tiled in small, faded mosaics that might have once been cheerful—you reach the ground floor. The kitchen and living room catch your attention immediately with their low but warm lights. The light doesn't come from overhead fixtures but from table lamps and wall sconces, casting soft shadows that seem to move when you're not looking directly at them.
Everything on the ground floor is perfectly tidy. Perhaps a little too tidy. The kind of tidy that suggests someone is constantly arranging and rearranging, as if the house itself disapproves of disorder. On the wooden dining table, with its pinkish tablecloth that looks hand-stitched and old, you see a teacup. It doesn't match the neatness of the house. It's slightly chipped, and its pattern is faded. But that cup seems like it has always been there. Only if you pay very close attention do you realize it seems to be moved occasionally—an inch to the left one day, a few centimeters to the right the next.
The large, old windows overlook the back garden. They are tall and arched, with wooden frames that have been painted white so many times the layers have thickened into something almost sculptural. They give the reception area a royal feel, as if the garden beyond is not just a garden but a kingdom seen from a castle. The reflection of the interior in the glass is never quite right. Sometimes you see an extra chair. Sometimes a figure stands where no one stands. It always shows something more or less than what is actually there.
A large mirror hangs on the wall. It perfectly reflects the aquarium in the corner—the bubbling water, the slow-moving fish, the small castle decoration inside. But sometimes, when you glance at the mirror, you feel the fish are standing completely motionless, dazed and stunned. You can only see this from the mirror. When you turn to look directly at the aquarium, the fish swim as if nothing happened.
It seems the old folks were right. Mirrors show us the real world.
There is a rocking chair by the window. Its occasional movement is completely normal for Ada—or so she says. She never seems to notice when it rocks on its own. And two tall lamps stand on either side of the room, like guardians. Their shades are made of amber glass, and when the light is low, they cast a honey-colored glow that makes the shadows seem softer, kinder.
Second Floor: The Rooms That Are Awake
As you go up the wooden stairs—each step creaking in a slightly different pitch, like the keys of an old, out-of-tune piano—you see three bedrooms.
The largest is Ada's room. It has a balcony overlooking the garden, and the curtains sometimes move even when there is no wind. Not a draft, exactly, but a deliberate sway, as if someone invisible is gently brushing past them. The guest room is always cold. Not unpleasantly so, but noticeably. When you sleep there, you wake up several times during the night with the feeling that someone is trying to wake you, that a voice is calling your name from just outside your range of hearing.
And then there is the "Pro" room—the wardrobe room. It has closets full of beautiful clothes, organized by color and season and occasion. But occasionally, the place of the clothes changes. A silk blouse will appear among the winter sweaters. A pair of jeans will hang where the formal dresses should be. It is as if someone is always trying to maintain order in the closets, but someone else is quietly disrupting it. Pajamas never stay in the pajama section. Old clothes sneak into the new, fashionable section as if they are ashamed of their age and want to pretend otherwise. Each piece seems to know what date and era it belongs to. The vintage dresses never mix with the modern ones. The coats from the 1990s keep their distance from the jackets from last year.
Last Floor: A Room for the Unknowns
There is a small room with a large balcony facing the silence. Not the silence of an empty house, but the silence of a place where sound goes to die. If you stand on this balcony at midnight and look up, the stars seem more numerous than usual, scattered across the sky like salt spilled on black velvet. The moon looks brighter, closer, as if you could reach out and touch its cool surface.
But when you look down—when your gaze drops from the sky to the garden below—it feels as if someone is staring at you from between the trees. Not moving, not approaching, just watching. You look for the moon's reflection in the small artificial pond in the middle of the garden, and after a moment you realize something is different. The reflection is wrong. It shows the moon, yes, but the water is too still, too dark. And then you notice: there are no fish in the pond. There never have been. And yet the water moves sometimes, as if something beneath the surface is breathing.
The townhouse lights are usually on. There is nothing to fear—or so the neighbors tell themselves. The streets are safe, the nights are bright. But the lights around the villa grow dimmer as midnight approaches. Or perhaps they just seem that way in the mist of the night. The fog here has a weight to it, a thickness that swallows light and softens edges until the world looks like a watercolor painting left out in the rain.
When you close the door to this room, the sounds from elsewhere in the house become clearer and closer. The creak of a stair, the rustle of a curtain, the faint whisper of the aquarium pump—all of them seem to gather at this door, pressing against it like children trying to hear a secret.
On this floor, there is a circular hollow in the wall next to the door. It is relatively medium-sized, about the width of a dinner plate, and it connects directly to the minus one floor. It was built so that from the last floor, you could call someone on the minus one floor without anyone hearing your voice. A person could lean into the hollow, speak softly, and their words would travel down through the walls to the floor below. It's clever, a piece of old architecture that speaks to a time when houses were built with secrets in mind. But in my opinion, it is truly mysterious. Because sometimes, when no one is calling, you can still hear whispers coming up from that hole.
Throughout all these floors, time is different. Sometimes it passes very slowly—an hour in the house feels like a minute outside. Sometimes it races—a nap of twenty minutes somehow consumes an entire afternoon. Exactly when you think you've been in the house for an hour, you step outside and realize several hours have passed. Or the opposite. I haven't figured out its calculation yet. But in the end, I am sure of one thing: clocks are useless here. The hands move, but they don't measure anything real.
And now, Minus One
Where time is alive and real.
The wooden stairs that lead down to minus one are older than the others. Their surface is worn smooth by decades of footsteps, and even when no one is walking on them, they seem to remember. When you go down, you hear the sound of someone descending ahead of you—soft, rhythmic, patient. And sometimes, behind you, you hear the echo of the same footsteps, as if your own shadow is following you down.
Here, old and sometimes antique items are lined up in a heavy silence. They are inherited from ancestors I never met, from a lineage that Ada never speaks of. There is a grandfather clock with no pendulum, a painting of a woman whose face has been scratched out, a set of silver candlesticks tarnished almost black. Each piece seems to carry a story or a memory with it—not just any memory, but the kind that weighs on the soul.
Sometimes a faint smell of moisture drifts through the space. It is not unpleasant, exactly, but it is persistent. It smells like old paper, like basements after a flood, like something that has been closed for too long and has forgotten what fresh air feels like. Mixed with that smell is something else—something forgotten, something that hovers at the edge of recognition before slipping away.
There are old books on the shelves, their spines cracked and faded. Their order changes occasionally—a volume of poetry will move from the top shelf to the bottom, a novel will shift three places to the left—but they are always arranged by year. Not by author, not by title, but by the year they were printed. As if the house cares more about when a story was born than who wrote it.
Some of the shelves are empty. Not recently emptied, but as if they have always been that way, like gaps in a smile where teeth were pulled long ago. And yet, even though no one frequents this floor much, you see no sign of dust. The surfaces are clean. The glass of the display cases is clear. It is as if someone dusts here every day with a feather duster, moving silently through the darkness, touching nothing but somehow keeping everything clean.
And finally, if the lights are completely off—if you stand in the absolute dark of minus one—you feel something in the darkness changing its place. Not moving, exactly, but shifting. A presence that was on your left is now on your right. A cold spot that was near the door has traveled to the far corner. You cannot see it, but you can feel it rearranging the room around you.
Secrets from the past have taken shape here. They carry a memory with them, even if they don't speak. Even if they have forgotten their own origins, they remain, heavy and patient, waiting for someone to acknowledge them.
On this floor, time is completely real.