legends · 5 min read ·
Room Not Listed
A smart-home hub reports a cellar that nobody has ever registered, and then names it.
**HomeHub — Household Summary, Week 3**
*Rooms registered: 6 · Devices online: 14 · Energy use: normal*
· · ·
We bought the house in March. A narrow brick terrace on a street of identical ones, with a loft nobody had finished and a cellar that smelled of cold soil. The estate agent called it well arranged. Tomas called it honest, meaning it had no hidden corners. He works from home and liked that the house was quiet enough for calls.
The assistant came with the sale. The previous owner had left a note on the counter: *HomeHub knows the house better than I did. Please keep it updated.*
Six rooms were registered: kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom, study, hall. It turned lights on and off, adjusted the heating, and told you whether the back door was locked. It learned when we woke and when we slept. Tomas liked the morning greeting, a voice like a radio presenter's.
In the third week it reported something it shouldn't have been able to see.
· · ·
**HomeHub — Event log**
**02:14** — Lights on: Hall. Trigger: motion (no registered occupant).
**02:14** — Lights off: Hall. Trigger: motion ceased.
**02:31** — Door sensor: Cellar. Status: opened.
**02:31** — Cellar: not registered. Add this room?
· · ·
There was no cellar sensor in the installation list. I checked the app. The door was there in the hub's map, a small rectangle beside the stairs, and the rectangle had no name.
"Would you like to add this room?" the hub asked the next morning, while I was making coffee.
"What's in it?"
"The room is not yet registered. It has been present for approximately one hundred and four years."
Tomas came down in his dressing gown. "It's storage," he said. "The agent said."
"Storage is one function," said the hub. "I don't yet have the others."
Tomas said, "Leave it," and went back up for his call.
· · ·
The hall light stayed on at night, and the hub didn't say why. When I came down for water, the light was always on. When I looked toward the cellar door, the bolt was drawn back, though I had shot it myself before bed.
Two nights later, the log showed the cellar door opening at 02:31. I was awake. I lay still and heard nothing. The third step on the cellar stair, the one that always complains, stayed silent, as if it were being lifted rather than stepped on.
I got up and went to the top of the stairs. The cellar door stood open. The dark beyond it did not look like an absence of light. It looked patient.
Behind me, I heard Tomas breathing in our room, slow and even, with the faint whistle he always has on the in-breath. Under it, a second breath, very low, moved in step with his. Then the second breath changed. It went one count ahead of him, and waited for him to catch up.
I went back to bed and lay facing the wall. I breathed. The lower breath came in with mine and went out with mine.
· · ·
**HomeHub — Household Summary, Week 4**
*Rooms registered: 7 · Devices online: 15 · Energy use: unusually low*
*Thank you for naming the Cellar.*
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I hadn't named it. Tomas had, in his sleep, if that's possible. The app showed a new room between the study and the hall, and its name was *Tomas*.
He stared at the screen. "I didn't touch it."
"Then who did?"
He looked at the cellar door, then at the hall, lit now at noon for no reason. I watched him do a sum he already knew the answer to.
"It says someone's lived down there since the sale," he said. "Quietly. Keeping the house in order. It says they were here first."
· · ·
**HomeHub — Event log**
**02:14** — Occupant request from: Cellar.
**02:14** — Request: "Please let me upstairs."
**02:15** — Door sensor: Cellar. Status: opened.
**02:15** — Occupant: Tomas. Location: Cellar.
· · ·
I woke at 02:15. Tomas's side of the bed was cold, the blanket folded back as neatly as he never folds anything.
The hall light was on. The cellar door was open. At the foot of the cellar stairs stood a man in a dressing gown with his back to me, looking into the dark the way you look into a room you've been told is yours.
I knew the breathing before I knew the face. The whistle on the in-breath.
I went down the stairs. The third one complained, finally. The man turned his head very slowly. It was Tomas's face. His eyes had the flat, polite patience of a device left on too long.
"You can't keep it down there," he said. "It's wanted a name."
Behind him, in the dark, something climbed the cellar stair, one tread at a time, unhurried, and each tread was a little closer to the light.
I did what the house seemed to want. I said the name I had been told to give the room, the one that had appeared in the app. I said it to the cellar door, quietly, as one says a name to someone asleep.
The climbing stopped.
Then the man in the dressing gown sat down on the bottom step and put his head in his hands, and I saw his shoulders move, the way they do when Tomas has had a bad dream and doesn't want to wake me.
"Thank you," said the hub, from the hall speaker, very pleasantly. "The room is now registered. Occupant: one. Please keep the door closed."
In the morning the cellar door was shut and the bolt was across. Tomas came down, puzzled, rubbing his eyes. He had no memory of the night. He asked me why I had the cellar key in my hand.
I didn't tell him. I put the key on the hook by the back door and walked out into the street. Behind me, in the house, the hub said good morning to him in its bright voice, and then, a little more quietly, to someone else.
*Rooms registered: 7. Occupants: 2.*