I am generally a logical person. I like causes and effects, reasons and results. Strange, illogical events scare me intensely. They make me feel like the ground is shifting beneath my feet, like the rules I have lived by are being rewritten without my permission.
And I think the house uses this fear of mine to continue its path. It feeds on my uncertainty, my hesitation, my desire to understand. But this fear shouldn't stop me. My affection for Ada made overcoming fear easier for me. She was my anchor, my reason to stay.
On the other hand, I came from war. I had seen things that would make most people catatonic. Survival was more important to me than fear. I had passed the borders of fear years ago, in places where the sky was red and the ground shook. Is there anything higher than death?
I have walked within steps of death. I have seen destruction and annihilation up close. What higher thing could want to scare me?
And yet, here I was, scared of a house.
I heard a faint sound: Odin's tiny paws on the wooden stairs of the hallway connecting to the lower floor. Steps that went down slowly, as if scared of something, and then returned back up. Down. Up. Down. Up.
Ada was absorbed in her favorite series on the TV. The house knew how to distract her from reality. I thought of something a friend used to say: "In the past, televisions were bulky and people were slim. Today, televisions are slim and people are bulky." Ada had become part of the furniture of this house, just another object that sat and absorbed light.
The hallway leading to the lower floor was semi-dark. The light bulb at the top of the stairs had burned out, and no one had replaced it. Shadows gathered at the bottom, thick and patient.
Odin stood at the top of the stairs, looking back at me. He looked anxious, his ears back, his tail low. He was waiting for my decision. If I went down the stairs, he would continue his path. If I stayed, he would come back up.
I took a breath. I took a step.
The wood of the first step groaned under my foot. Then the second, the third. The last step, at the bottom, made a different sound—a dry, old sound, like a bone that hadn't moved for years and was suddenly forced to shift. The sound echoed in the small space.
Now it was just me, and the gaze of Loki and Odin in the semi-dark space of the minus one floor.
I found the light switch by feel and turned it on. A yellow bulb flickered to life, seeming to struggle at first, as if it had to remember how to glow. The light was weak, casting long shadows that stretched across the floor and up the walls.
Minus one had a strange smell. Not just the smell of mustiness, of old things left too long, but the smell of forgotten things. Things that had been deliberately set aside and never retrieved. It smelled like a place where memories go to die. As if the air had stayed here for years and forgotten it had to go out. It was stale and heavy, pressing against my lungs.
You could feel the moisture on your skin—a cool, damp film that settled on your arms and face. But some items in the room, especially some of the books, were completely dry. Their pages were crisp, their spines unbroken. They had been protected somehow, kept separate from the humidity that affected everything else.
Odin was annoyed by the moisture. He shook his fur several times, sneezed, and stayed close to the stairs, as if ready to flee. But Loki seemed not to feel it. He moved calmly ahead of everyone, his tail high, his steps confident. He walked like someone who had lived here for years, who knew every corner and every shadow.
I took a fleeting glance at everything. Time seemed to have stopped here. There were old, faded clothes hanging on a rack—dresses from the 1970s, coats from the 1950s, hats from even earlier. The colors had run, the fabric had thinned, but the shapes remained. Gloves, yellowed with age, lay in a basket. Clocks without hands sat on shelves, their faces blank. A small music box sat on a side table. I tried to read the name of the tune engraved on the brass plate, but the letters were worn smooth.
Statues stood on pedestals, all of them incomplete. One was missing an arm. One was missing a head. One was just a torso, broken off at the waist. But they all had one characteristic in common: none had feet. They were all cut off at the ankles, as if they had been condemned to stand in one place forever. As if they too were condemned to stay.
I glanced at the books on the shelves. For the novel-like ones—the thick, well-read volumes—moisture had settled deep into the words. The pages were wrinkled, the ink was smeared. But for the others—the dry, protected ones—they seemed almost new.
It was as if anything in this house that awakens a feeling, that reminds you of a memory, is forbidden. The damp books were the ones that had been read, the ones that had stories inside them. The dry books were the ones that had been ignored.
Loki jumped onto the bookshelf and fixed his gaze on me.
"Here," his eyes said, "you are condemned to be forgotten. And slowly, you learn the principles."
I stole my gaze away from Loki, looking at the floor, the walls, anywhere but his green eyes.
If you forget memories, you slowly forget yourself. That was what I believed. But maybe the house believed something different.
Odin, apparently, had a different opinion. He padded over to a corner of the room and lay down, his head on his paws.
"Everything here will soon fade away," his posture seemed to say. "Not physically, but in meaning."
I looked at the moisture-damaged books one by one, pulling them from the shelf and opening them carefully. Many pages were completely faded, the ink dissolved into brownish smears. Words were missing. Sentences were cut off in the middle. But one book caught my attention. It seemed to have been read more than the others—the spine was cracked in several places, the cover was worn soft.
The corners of the book had softened from years of moisture, curling inward like dried leaves. At first, I thought it was a diary. The cover was cloth, dark blue, with no title on the front. I opened it carefully, turning the first page.
But the words were not stable. As I watched, they seemed to move. The ink was alive on the page. Sentences shifted, sliding left or right. Words distanced themselves from each other, then came back together. Each time I tried to focus on a line, a sharp pain twisted behind my eyes, a headache that bloomed from the center of my skull.
The heavy atmosphere of minus one wouldn't let me turn more pages. It pressed down on me, on my thoughts, on my ability to concentrate. As if an event in my brain was constantly causing memory degradation. I couldn't hold onto the words. They slipped away as soon as I read them.
Loki asked me with his eyes, "You don't remember, do you?"
"No," I said out loud, my voice small in the heavy air. "I don't remember."
"Because the forbidden things here force your brain to erode," he replied, still without sound. "And memory without emotional connection doesn't hold an image. Now, tell me, what is the name of the book?"
I looked at the cover again. The letters swam before my eyes. I really couldn't even read the title. The horror of forgetting—of losing the ability to recognize something so simple—took over my entire being. My hands shook.
"This book cannot be read here," I whispered.
Odin got up and padded over to the small window of the minus one floor. It was a tiny window, set high in the wall, just below the ceiling. A few beams of grey light filtered through the dirty glass. "Here," he seemed to say, "get some fresh air."
He was right. Next to this window, everything seemed different. The air was cooler, cleaner, less heavy. It was the only part of the house where you still felt the scent of real, flowing life—the smell of rain on earth, of leaves, of the outside world. And then I heard it: the sound of my phone notification, a soft chirp from my pocket.
I immediately pulled out my phone and checked the screen. Here, even my phone's clock and date seemed updated. But it was impossible. I had only been here one night—one sleep, one waking—but the date on my phone said that several days had passed. "Impossible," I said out loud. "Something is wrong with my phone."
I checked my messages. The message I had sent to my family—"I've arrived, safe"—wasn't there. Instead, there was a different message, one I didn't remember writing: "I've arrived, but it seems different here than before. Everything is fine, and I want to rest."
The message had been edited. The words had been changed.
The house didn't want me to stay here. But no one was supposed to come to help me. I had to leave here myself, on my own, without the house getting hurt.
But what had kept me here? What invisible thread tied me to this place?
I looked at Odin and Loki. Their gaze was simultaneous, united.
"We," they seemed to say together, "and all the memories in this house, are being forgotten. We want to stay real."
Their gaze was beyond that of an animal. It was too knowing, too patient. They gave me a strange feeling, a prickling at the back of my neck. Those eyes seemed like they had once experienced humanity—like they had once been people, or had lived close enough to people to absorb their longings and regrets.
I wanted to ask what they used to be. As if they read my mind, Odin stepped forward and answered without sound:
"Don't ask what I was. I was someone who remembered too much. I clung to memories."
Odin wasn't afraid of the house. He was afraid of being forgotten. That was worse. That was the true punishment.
Loki added, "And he still hopes we can be saved."
Both of them seemed to have once been pain. Not just in pain, but made of it. They were formed from very bitter experiences and memories that, instead of adding to their wisdom, punished them with suffering every time they were recalled.
The house believes that without memories, we will have a better, fantasy life. Every day is a new day. We won't suffer. We won't feel pain. I cut off this thought in my head.
But we won't live really, I thought back at them. We won't live.
Odin continued, "We can even love our pains."
"Odin," loki said out loud, his voice startling me, "you're a stupid dog. You're willing to suffer but keep all those memories? Understand, one day they left you because they thought…"
Odin barked loudly. The sound echoed off the walls of minus one, sharp and sudden.
He said quietly—or rather, his eyes said quietly—"Fine, I'll shut my mouth. But know that you'll stay in this state forever. Why? Because you're afraid of facing reality."
"Just shut up," Loki's eyes snapped. "Every time you bring up this argument, exactly here, where our mother (Ada) can hear us best… Just when I want to accept this situation, you open a new door of hope for salvation. When I want to hope again, you disappoint me again. It's clear what's wrong with you, you sick multiple personality!"
When the argument continued—when Loki banged his paw against the door and then against the wall, as if emphasizing each word—it seemed the air of minus one became more suitable for staying. The moisture lessened. The temperature rose. The house liked opinions that agreed with its own.
Their arguments branched out so much that I could hardly focus. It was my first time having a telepathic conversation with others—and with two animals, at that. It was very hard to trust my mental data. But they were so clear, so forceful, that not trusting them was a mistake.
But I was completely sure of one thing: I was that hope Odin was talking about. I was the one the house was scared of. I repeated to myself: I am brave, and I will find this secret.
At that same moment, from upstairs, Ada started calling. "Odin, Loki, what's wrong with you? Have you torn the house down? What's going on down there?"
They both immediately ran up the stairs, their paws skittering on the wood.
Before going up, I decided to take with me the book whose name I couldn't even read. I tucked it under my arm. Maybe upstairs, in the daylight, the atmosphere would be more suitable for reading.