The Scent of Wintergreen

This happened during my second year of graduate school, in the old converted warehouse that served as our shared apartment. The place was cavernous, with brick walls and pipes that clanked at odd hours. Five of us lived there: me, Jenna, Marcus, Priya, and our unofficial sixth, a stray cat we called Biscuit. The laundry room was a cramped closet off the kitchen, but we all used the same industrial-sized jugs of detergent and fabric softener, bought in bulk to save money.

One evening, about three months in, Jenna went to do a load. She emerged with a frown, holding up the empty fabric softener bottle. ‘Did anyone finish this?’ she asked. I was on the couch, annotating a dense article. I glanced up. ‘Impossible. I saw both bottles half full this afternoon when I was putting away my groceries.’ We shrugged it off, assuming one of us had used more than we thought. But the next week, the detergent bottle was also nearly empty, though we had only washed two loads collectively.

To understand what happened, you need the layout. My room was at the far end of a long hallway, past the kitchen and the communal bathroom. It had one large window facing the fire escape, and I had pushed my desk against it. The bed was against the opposite wall, and a tall, heavy wardrobe stood in the corner, its doors always slightly ajar. We had a clothesline strung across the middle of the room, from a hook near the ceiling to the wardrobe, where we hung our delicates to dry.

We started to notice small things. The cat would hiss at the wardrobe, but only at certain times, like late at night. Sometimes I’d wake up feeling like someone had been sitting on the edge of my bed, but no one was there. My roommate Sam, who slept on the top bunk, said he heard breathing in the room when he was alone. We attributed it to the building’s old pipes and our overactive imaginations.

Then the bottles started turning up in odd places. Once, I found the fabric softener in the bathroom, cap off, spilled. Another time, the detergent was in the kitchen, with a small, greasy handprint on the side. We had a good laugh about it, assuming one of us was sleepwalking. But then, one night, I couldn’t sleep. I got up to get a glass of water. As I passed the laundry closet, I heard a faint, rhythmic sound, like someone crunching on something. I opened the door and saw the fabric softener bottle on the floor, but it was moving, slowly, as if something was pushing it from inside. I stared, frozen, and then the sound stopped. The bottle was still. I told myself it was a rat, but we never saw any.

A few nights later, I was alone in the apartment, reading in my room. The cat was on my lap, purring. Suddenly, Biscuit jumped off, ears flat, and ran under the bed. A cold draft swept through the room, and the clothesline swayed, though the window was shut. I heard a whisper, barely audible, like a dry rustle. It sounded like my name, but not quite. I stood up, my heart pounding. The wardrobe door slowly creaked open wider, and from inside, I saw a pair of glinting eyes, small and dark, reflecting the dim light. The eyes blinked and then vanished.

I ran to the hall and called for Sam, but he wasn’t home. I gathered my courage and returned with a flashlight. The wardrobe was empty, just old clothes and boxes. But when I shone the light on the floor, I saw a trail of fine, gray powder leading from the wardrobe to under my bed. I knelt and looked. Under the bed, amidst dust bunnies, was a small, leathery object that looked like a shriveled hand. I screamed.

I called my friends, and they came back. We examined the hand, which was mummified and had a ring on one finger. We called the police, but they found nothing else, and the hand was taken for analysis. The next day, the washing supplies were full again, as if never touched. But we knew better. We moved out within a week, but I still think about that hand and the way the softener smelled like wintergreen whenever the wardrobe was open. I never use fabric softener anymore.

Years later, I got a letter from the building’s new tenants. They had found a diary in the walls, belonging to a previous resident who had vanished. The last entry read: ‘They say the house hungers. I fed it my hand, but it wants more. It whispers in the scent of wintergreen.’ I threw the letter away, but I can still smell it sometimes, especially at night.