The Soap Dish Collector

I was nineteen when I finally moved out of the creaking Victorian on Maple Street, a house that had been in my family for generations. My grandmother left it to my mother, and we’d lived there since I was seven. The house was beautiful, with its mahogany banisters and stained-glass windows, but it had a sickness. I didn’t realize it until I was twelve, on a night that would etch itself into my bones.

It was past midnight. The house had that deep, humming stillness that makes you feel like the walls are breathing. I padded to the bathroom at the end of the hall, my bare feet slapping against the cold hardwood. I flipped the light switch, and the fluorescent tube buzzed to life. I didn’t close the door all the way—old habit. I was just about to wash my hands when I glanced at the mirror.

The shower curtain, a heavy blue plastic thing with mildew spots, rippled. There was no draft. The window was shut, the vent was silent. The movement was deliberate, like something had brushed against it from inside. And then I heard it—a whisper, thin and sibilant, leaking through the water-damaged tiles. ‘He sees us.’ Another voice, higher, giggled. ‘No, he doesn’t. He’s too stupid.’

I froze, my hand hovering over the tap. The curtain moved again, a slow bulge as if a body were pressing against it from the other side. The voices grew clearer, speaking in a language that wasn’t quite English, or maybe it was, but twisted. They were talking about me, about what they’d do to my toes, my hair, my dreams. I didn’t wait to hear more. I bolted from the bathroom, slamming the door behind me, and didn’t sleep that night. From then on, I never used that bathroom unless the shower curtain was open, and even then, I kept my back to the mirror.

Years passed, and the house’s quirks became a part of my existence. It wasn’t just the bathroom. My cell phone vanished from my bed while I was talking to Mom in the kitchen. I called it for hours, the ring echoing somewhere in the house, until I found it in the bathroom, sitting on the soap dish, turned off and cold. Lighter, earrings, books—they’d disappear from my desk, my dresser, my pockets, and reappear weeks later in the strangest places: inside a shoe, under the kitchen sink, balanced on top of the grandfather clock. I never saw anything move. I’d just turn around and there it’d be, waiting for me.

The worst was the day my grandmother’s locket, the one my mother cherished, went missing. I was only nine. I’d taken it to school without permission, hidden in my pocket, and when I came home, it was gone. I wept for days, and my mother thought I’d lost it. But three months later, I found it in the bathroom, on that same soap dish, the chain neatly coiled like a sleeping snake. I never wore it again.

I graduated high school and moved out, eager to leave the whispering and the shifting and the sense of being watched. I got an apartment in the city, bright and new. I told myself it was just my imagination, a kid’s fears, a house’s creaks. But last week, my new girlfriend, Mara, mentioned she’d lost her favorite bracelet. I helped her search, but we couldn’t find it. I shrugged it off. These things happen.

Tonight, I was brushing my teeth when I noticed something glinting in my bathroom. I didn’t have a shower curtain—just a glass door. But there, on the soap dish of my modern sink, lay Mara’s bracelet, folded into a neat wreath. Around it, arranged like a macabre altar, were my missing lighter, a tarnished earring I hadn’t seen in years, and a photograph of me as a child, grinning, with the locket around my neck.

I stared at them, my heart thundering. The bathroom light flickered. The faucet dripped once. And from behind me, so close it tickled my ear, came a soft, careful voice: ‘Welcome home.’