The Lavender Scent of Winter

The thing about working the night shift at the old Broadmoor Street car park wasn’t the cold, or the flickering fluorescent lights, or even the rats that skittered in the shadows of the stairwells. It was the quiet. On the upper decks, the silence was so deep it seemed to have a texture, a weight, a pressing awareness. I was a student at the university, and this job was supposed to be easy money. I didn’t believe in ghosts. But I learned that belief has nothing to do with it.

My first week, an older attendant named Clive told me about the ghost of a woman who haunted the lower levels. He said she’d been a singer in the 1940s, and she’d thrown herself from the top of the original structure after her lover, a married man, refused to leave his wife. He said you could hear her humming a lullaby if you listened close. I laughed it off. I’d been raised on logic, on evidence. The most supernatural thing I’d encountered so far was a pigeon that somehow got trapped in the elevator for a week.

But one night, in late January, I was doing my rounds. The car park was nearly empty, just a few cars huddled under the sickly orange lights. I was walking down the ramp from level 6 to 5, and I stopped. A sweet, cloying scent filled the air, like jasmine and old powder. It was so strong I could almost taste it. It was winter, and no one in their right mind would leave a window open or a perfume bottle in a car. The smell faded as I continued, but it left a cold knot in my stomach. I told myself it was just a memory, a trick of the stale air. But every time I was on that ramp, I smelled it. It became a marker, a kind of daily ritual.

Then, about a month in, I heard the children. It was past midnight, and I was in the payment kiosk, drinking weak coffee. The sound was faint, but unmistakable: a child’s voice, calling my name. Not the name on my uniform, but the name my mother used, the one no one knew. I froze. The voice came again, from the direction of the stairwell, a sing-song quality. I opened the kiosk door and listened. The stairwell door was ajar, and from inside, I heard a soft sobbing, followed by the patter of small feet running up. I grabbed my flashlight and pushed the door open. The concrete steps were bare, the yellow paint peeling. But there was a faint, damp smell, like wet wool, and the faint impression of a child-sized handprint on the railing, as if it had just been there.

I climbed, my heart thudding. On the second landing, I saw a small, red rubber ball, the kind you’d find in a schoolyard. It was sitting in the center of the floor, perfectly balanced. I crouched and picked it up. It was cold, and the rubber felt brittle, old. As I straightened, I heard a woman’s laugh, low and throaty, echoing up from below. I dropped the ball and ran down, but when I reached the ground floor, the car park was silent. The ball was gone. From that night on, I started seeing things out of the corner of my eye: a flash of a white dress, a shadow that moved against the direction of the light. The maintenance man told me to quit, that the place was ‘sick,’ but I needed the money.

Late one night, I was doing a final sweep before closing. I went to level 4, the level with the ‘no entry’ sign, the one that was usually padlocked. The padlock was gone. The chain hung loose. I pushed the gate open, and the smell of lavender was overwhelming, so thick it made my eyes water. The level was different from the others: the walls were lined with mirrors, broken and cracked, and the floor was stained with something dark and sticky. In the center, there was a single parking space, painted with a faded white circle. And in that circle, a woman stood, her back to me. She was wearing a blue dress, faded, with small white flowers, and her hair was pinned up in an old-fashioned style. She was humming a lullaby, the same one Clive had described. My breath caught. She turned slowly, and her face was not a face but a void, a dark hollow, and from that hollow, a sound like wind through dead leaves emerged.

‘I’ve been waiting for you, Samuel,’ she said, but her lips didn’t move. The voice came from all around me. I stood frozen, my flashlight beam shaking on her. ‘I’m not to be forgotten.’ She raised a hand, and I saw that her fingers were too long, bent at odd angles. The lights flickered, and when they came back, she was gone. But the smell of lavender was now followed by a smell of rot, of decay. I ran, and didn’t stop until I was outside in the cold night air, gasping.

The next morning, I called in sick. I told my supervisor I couldn’t work there anymore. He sighed, and said, ‘Another one. I’m not surprised. That level’s been sealed since 1952. They never found her body.’ I asked him what he meant, but he just shook his head. I never went back. But sometimes, late at night, I still hear that humming, and the smell of lavender creeps into my dreams, and I know that the woman is still waiting, on that level, for someone else to forget her. And I wonder if she ever truly left, or if she just found a way to carry her scent, and her song, into the minds of those who try to close their eyes to the dark.