The day dragged on, thick and slow; the house stretched time along with the silence.
Anya left her room and simply began to walk, trying to convince herself that the space around her was ordinary: walls, corners, stairs, air. Nothing extra, except memory.
She walked slowly, lingering over small things: the seam between tile and wall, where the grout was a little darker; the polished stair rail, over which her palm slid too easily; the way the light from the window lay across the floor and cut it into even rectangles. The house had been scrubbed so clean it seemed staged for display; any life inside it was supposed to proceed according to instructions.
By lunchtime, she went down to the basement, where it was cooler. The lamp under the ceiling made everything gray and flat—without shadows or hiding places, like a hospital corridor.
Anya walked as far as the sofa and stopped. Her gaze fell of its own accord to the place where she had recently come to on the floor. She did not look at it for long, only noted it to herself: rough and cold.
Then she raised her head. On a beam near the ceiling hung a hook, with a thin, sticky cobweb clinging to it.
Anya froze beneath it for a second. Her throat tightened involuntarily, as if before a word that could not be spoken.
She swallowed and grew angry at her own weakness. She stepped over to the chair, pulled it closer, and climbed onto it. Her fingers touched the cobweb; it stuck to her skin. Anya grimaced and jerked her hand down. The clump fell onto her shoulder, and she immediately brushed it away with her palm, as if brushing off someone else’s memory.
She looked at the hook once more. Exhaled. Climbed down, pushed the chair aside, and left that place without quickening her step.
In the evening, Viktor came home. The house filled with his presence: the lock clicked, his footsteps crossed the floor in an even rhythm, and quiet sounds of movement began in the kitchen.
He found her in the living room. Anya was sitting on the sofa, leafing through a book simply to keep her hands occupied.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
“What have you been doing?” he asked casually.
Anya raised her eyes. For a second, she considered how to say it so that it would sound true even to herself.
“Walking. Wandering around the house. I don’t know… it makes me calmer. When I’m moving, it doesn’t feel as if the walls are pressing in.”
Viktor slowly nodded.
“Did it help?”
Anya listened to herself honestly.
“A little. Though…” She fell silent. “It will still be worse at night.”
The word “night” sounded unexpectedly simple—human.
“If you want, we can leave the light on,” Viktor said.
She was genuinely surprised.
“We can?” she asked, and her voice came out thinner than she had intended.
Viktor nodded.
“We can.”
Late that evening, she lay down in bed. A soft light burned in the room, making the surroundings less dangerous: the wardrobe was only a wardrobe, the walls only walls, and the shadows along the baseboards merely part of the room.
Anya lay there and, from time to time, glanced at the door. It seemed to her that if she stopped looking, it would open again.
She woke after midnight. She needed to use the bathroom. A trivial need, made especially humiliating by fear. She suddenly understood that she was not afraid of “death” or of “Viktor,” but of something elementary: stepping out into the corridor, where it was darker than in the room, and where the silence grew denser.
She sat up in bed and hugged her knees. She remained like that for a while, not moving, listening to the house. All she could hear was her own breathing.
“This is stupid,” she tried to tell herself.
But her body did not agree.
She got up only on the third attempt. Slowly, she approached the door and carefully opened it a crack. Light from the room spilled into the corridor and cut through the darkness in a narrow strip. Anya stood there for a second, looking at that rectangle of light on the floor as proof that the world still obeyed rules.
She flung the door open and went out quickly, almost on tiptoe, trying not to look to either side. In the bathroom, she turned on the light, washed her face with icy water, and held her hands under the stream until her fingers stopped trembling.
When she returned, she shut the door and leaned back against it for a second, closing not the room, but the boundary.
She sat down on the bed, exhaled, and suddenly understood: the fear had retreated. It had not disappeared completely, but it had weakened noticeably. The light and the brief trip into the corridor had done their work. The house had become simply a house again. The night, simply night.
Anya lay down and stared at the ceiling for a long time, until her breathing became even. And only on the edge of sleep did a quiet, heavy thought rise inside her: tomorrow, she would have to sleep without the light. Because otherwise she would not be able to finish what she had planned.
She closed her eyes and, after a while, fell asleep.