The Camphor Scent

In 2019, my mother and I inherited a cramped apartment in the industrial district of a city that never truly slept. The previous tenant, an elderly clockmaker named Agnes, had passed away, and her belongings—gears, pendulums, and half-finished timepieces—were still scattered about, as if she had merely stepped out for a moment. My mother, practical and skeptical, dismissed the eerie stillness as the residue of old age. I, however, felt a lingering presence in the ticking of every clock, a soft, rhythmic pulse that seemed to follow me from room to room.

The first sign of trouble came on a Tuesday, when the apartment’s ancient wall-mounted heater, a rusted thing that groaned like a dying animal, clanked to life at 3 AM. The noise was not a simple rattle; it was a series of heavy, deliberate thuds, as if someone were pounding on the pipes from the inside. My two cats, Jasper and Mabel, who had previously been glued to my side, refused to enter the living room where the heater stood. They would sit at the threshold, eyes wide, hissing at the air. No amount of coaxing could persuade them to approach that metal beast, and soon they took to sleeping in the bathroom, as far from it as possible.

A week later, the phenomenon escalated. I was in bed, drifting off, when I heard a cascade of thumps from my dresser. I flicked on the lamp to find that every item—my watch, a stack of books, a ceramic bowl holding loose change, even the heavy wooden jewelry box—had been hurled to the floor, scattered in a pattern that seemed almost deliberate. I sighed, picked everything up, and returned to bed. Within minutes, the same crash echoed through the dark. This cycle repeated three times that night, each time with the objects landing in slightly different arrangements, as if some force were trying to communicate. I never saw anything move, but the air in the room grew cold, and the smell of camphor—a sharp, medicinal scent—began to permeate the space, clinging to my clothes and hair.

Agnes had been an amateur herbalist, and she had installed a peculiar foot warmer in the kitchen, a slab of stone wired with coils, which she used to ward off chilblains. My mother, believing it a fire hazard, unplugged it within a day of our arrival. Yet, no matter how many times we disconnected it, the plug would reappear in the socket, the coils glowing red, and the stone would radiate an unnatural heat. We tried taping the plug, hiding the cord, even wrapping it in newspaper—but every morning, it was back in its place, humming with energy. The camphor smell grew stronger around it, a cloying veil that made my eyes water.

Then came the television incident. I had a habit of turning on the TV for background noise while I prepared snacks in the kitchen. One afternoon, I flicked it on to a news channel, went to pour myself a glass of water, and returned to find the screen black. The remote lay in the exact center of the living room floor, equidistant from the walls, television, and couch—a spot I later measured with a tape measure. I picked it up, but the TV would not turn on. The next day, the same thing happened: I left the TV on, came back to find it off, and the remote again in the middle of the room. I began to test it, leaving the remote in different places, but it always ended up in that precise spot, as if guided by an unknown hand. My mother grew agitated, insisting it was faulty wiring, but I knew it was something more.

The bedroom door, which had always swung freely, began to stick. I would push it open, but it would resist, as though something were holding it shut from the other side. One night, I woke to find the door half-open, a sliver of darkness beyond, and the smell of camphor overpowering. I got up to close it, and when I touched the handle, it was ice-cold. A whisper, barely a breath, seemed to pass through me, saying, ‘Stay.’ I slammed the door shut and didn’t sleep the rest of the night.

My mother, ever rational, finally admitted that something was wrong when she saw the foot warmer turn on by itself while she was boiling water. The stone glowed, the coils hissed, and the camphor scent was so thick she gagged. She turned to me, her face pale, and said, ‘Maybe it’s Agnes. She wants her things back.’ But we hadn’t sold anything; we had kept everything exactly as it was, even her half-eaten jar of honey. I began to research the building’s history, and in a local archive, I found an old newspaper clipping: Agnes had died not of natural causes, as we assumed, but of a fall down the stairs. The police ruled it an accident, but her neighbor, a gossipy woman, claimed Agnes had been ‘seeing things’ in the days before her death, talking to an invisible companion, and that she had been terrified of the camphor plant she grew in her window box.

As the weeks passed, the hauntings intensified. The banging became more frenetic, the TV remote appeared in the middle of the floor even when I was in the room, and the door would open and close on its own. One evening, I was sitting in the living room, reading a book, when the television clicked on by itself. The screen was snow, but through the static, I heard Agnes’s voice—a low, raspy murmur—reciting the time, over and over: ‘Three fifteen… three fifteen…’ The clock on the mantle—hers, with intricate hands—froze at that exact moment, and the camphor smell was so overpowering I had to leave the apartment.

When I returned, I found my mother in the kitchen, staring at the foot warmer. It was glowing, and in the stone’s surface, I saw a face—waxy, wrinkled, with hollow eyes—staring back. I screamed, and my mother grabbed my hand. ‘It’s not Agnes,’ she whispered. ‘It’s something that took her shape.’ That night, we packed a few essentials and fled to a hotel on the other side of the city. We left everything behind, including the cats, who had already vanished a week earlier, leaving only a single tuft of fur on the bathroom floor.

For months, we lived in that sterile hotel room, afraid to look at each other, afraid to close our eyes. The smell of camphor followed us everywhere, clinging to our clothes, our dreams. My mother’s health declined, and she grew distant, murmuring to herself in the middle of the night. I tried to seek help, but every therapist dismissed me. I grew used to the constant ticking from the apartment below, like a metronome counting down to something.

One day, I received a call from the building manager. ‘We need to clear out your belongings,’ he said. ‘The apartment is being sold.’ I didn’t want to go back, but I had to retrieve a few things—my late father’s watch, a photo album. I drove to the old neighborhood, my hands trembling, and climbed the familiar staircase. The apartment was exactly as we left it: the TV, the foot warmer, the clocks, all untouched, except for a layer of dust. The camphor smell was gone, replaced by the must of neglect. I walked to my bedroom, and there, on the floor, was my father’s watch, its hands spinning wildly. I bent to pick it up, and in the mirror above my dresser, I saw a figure—an old woman with white hair and a gaunt face, wearing a floral dress—standing behind me. I whirled around, but there was no one. The watch stopped, its second hand hovering at the twelve. I grabbed the photo album and rushed out, leaving the door ajar.

That night, in my hotel room, I found a small black-and-white photograph tucked inside the album: a picture of Agnes, standing in front of the apartment, smiling. On the back, in spidery handwriting, was an inscription: ‘For the ones who come after, I leave my time.’ The camera flash went off, and in the reflection of the glass, I saw Agnes’s face again, contorted in a silent scream. I dropped the photo, and it fluttered to the floor, landing face up. The camera flash went off a second time, and then a third, each time with a different face in the glass—my mother, my cats, and then my own, eyes hollow, mouth open in a frozen shriek.

I haven’t been back to that apartment since. I now live in a concrete cell, stripped of all clocks and mirrors, with only a single lightbulb that never flickers. But every night, at exactly 3:15 AM, I hear the banging from the walls, and I smell camphor, and I know that time is not on my side. It is a presence, patient and hungry, and it will find me again, for it has my face now, too. And when it comes, I fear I will not be the one to open the door.