Krorai House

The first time I caught that scent, I was thinking about something embarrassingly mundane:whether to get up early for breakfast tomorrow so I could avoid my mother’s “Do you have an interview today?”

Outside, the night rain of Villenova fell. Water dripped from the eaves and the streetlights trembled on the surface, stretching into thin, broken gold lines. My parents were asleep; only the soft hum of the refrigerator filled the house, like a conversation left unfinished.

I sat at the desk from my childhood, a stack of old papers pinned beneath glass—certificates, report cards, photocopies of diplomas. Each page insisted I had once been “good at getting things right.” None of them would buy me a job.

I closed my laptop like shutting on a wasted afternoon, slipped into my coat, and eased the door shut.

Villenova’s night was cold and clean. The cobblestones of the old quarter swallowed footsteps so only the rain crawling down the walls remained. Laughter from a distant bar came as if through glass, far from me.

I followed the river. The water was black and glossy; the wind under the bridge carried rust and the briny tang of algae. Near Pier Seven, the aroma slid into my nose—

Not perfume, not coffee.

It was the sweetness of wood lightly kissed by flame, laced with spice, like someone had ground a dry winter and scattered it into the air.

I stopped.

The rain hadn’t stopped and the wind hadn’t changed, yet the scent grew clearer, too deliberate to be chance. It was more like someone in the dark had tied a line to me and tugged.

I turned down a narrow alley, following it. There was no street sign, the damp walls sprouted dark moss. It wasn’t a place cities were supposed to have—a blank on the map, or maybe somewhere someone wanted hidden.

At the end of the alley hung an old lantern.

The paper was yellowed, the edges charred; when the wind blew it nodded. Beneath it hung a wooden sign, the characters somewhere between seal script and not, thin as if carved by a blade:

“Krorai House”

I didn’t recognize the name, but my heart jumped unreasonably the moment I saw it. Not from nervousness—some stranger recognition my body had before my mind.

A bronze bell hung on the door. I pushed it.

The bell didn’t ring right away.

I was over the threshold when, a beat late, it gave a soft ding. The sound was light, yet it felt like it struck a tooth.

Inside was warm, almost impossibly so. Outside was late autumn, yet here felt as if someone had tucked a fire inside the walls. The air was thick with scent—sweet, spicy, bitter, astringent, layered like unseen veils pressing into the skin.

Shelves were lined with ceramic jars and glass bottles. Each mouth was sealed with wax, stamped with tiny seals—patterns like bird claws or some ancient symbol.

Labels were handwritten: cinnamon, frankincense, myrrh, clove.And others I hadn’t seen: Night Return Seed, Sand-Gold, Crimson Snow.

I stared at “Night Return Seed” for a couple of seconds, feeling as if the words were faintly moving—not visually, but in some unreasonable way, as if I was reading them and they were reading me.

Behind the counter sat an old woman.

Her silver-white hair was neatly coiled; her skin was aged yet carried an odd sheen, like paper carefully waxed. When her eyes met mine they reminded me of a deep well—calm on the surface, hiding years below.

She didn’t say “welcome.”

She just looked at me, as if confirming something long overdue.

Then she hummed softly:

“Shouldn’t you go home… shouldn’t you go home…”

The melody was as slow as an ancient bell, the notes drawn out, like drifting from a distance. For a moment I almost thought I heard birdsong—somewhere in the shop, there was a faint reply as if someone mimicked a bird.

She stopped singing and said evenly, “You can smell it, which means you finally reached here.”

I frowned. “Reached here? I was just passing by…”

“Not ‘just’.” She cut me off as if correcting my word choice. “The scent knew you.”

She took a small glass bottle from under the counter, its cork tied with red thread, and pushed it toward me. It was only a handspan away, yet I felt it radiating heat, as if a breath were sealed inside.

“Smell it,” she said.

I didn’t move. My throat tightened.I didn’t know what I was afraid of—afraid of a shop, a bottle, an old woman singing “go home”? It sounded ridiculous.

She didn’t rush me, only said softly, “Cinnamon. Caravans along the road loved to carry it. Sweetness covers bitterness, fire suppresses cold.”

“What road?” I thought. Where did these caravans come from?She said it like I should know.

I reached for the bottle; the moment my fingers touched the glass—

It was warm.Not warmed by someone’s hand—it felt like body heat.

I jerked my hand back, my fingertips tingling.

The old woman watched me, a faint corner of her mouth lifting. “Afraid?”

I forced it down. “Just strange.”

“You’ll find stranger things,” she said. “But you’ll always come back.”

Just then, a sound came from the stairs.

A creak.

Like a floorboard stepped on.

I turned my head. There was a flight of stairs to the second floor, black like a well. At the top, a door; a thin line of light leaked from its crack, as faint as moonlight through paper.

A shadow moved behind it.

A chill ran down my spine. “Someone… upstairs?”

The old woman seemed not to notice. Her gaze remained on my face, unnaturally calm. “Don’t go up.”

“Why not?”

She didn’t answer, only hummed again, “Shouldn’t you go home…”

The sliver of light suddenly brightened, as if someone pressed their face to the door. The next second, the door clicked open by itself.

A girl stood in the doorway.

A pale blue dress, fabric worn like it belonged to another era. Long hair down, skin so pale it was almost translucent. But her eyes blazed, as if someone had lit a flame in her pupils.

She saw me and looked as if something struck her.

The next second, she ran down the stairs.

Her steps were frantic, as if she feared I would vanish. She nearly threw herself in front of me, her ice-cold fingers gripping my arm so tightly it hurt.

“You came back!” Her voice trembled, eyes instantly reddening. “You really came back—”

My mind went blank.

I had never seen her.Yet her excitement held no doubt—she was convinced I was the one she had waited for. That desperate joy of “what was lost is found” on a stranger’s face made my back crawl.

I instinctively backed away and hit a shelf. The jars shivered, the bird-claw seals trembling.

“You’ve got the wrong person,” my voice rasped. “I don’t know you.”

She froze, as if my words pierced her. She stared hard, trying to overlap me with some memory.

Then she whispered my name:

“…Wyatt.”

Every nerve in me flared.

I hadn’t said my name here.I wasn’t even sure I’d seen anyone in this alley.

I spun around to look for the old woman—to see if this was some bizarre trick.

The counter was empty.

The chair was there, the warm glass bottle still on the counter, but the old woman had vanished as if she had never existed. It was just me and this girl with red eyes locking on me.

Stranger still—she seemed completely unaware that the old woman was gone. She never looked that way; her gaze clung to my face, as if I were the only coordinate left.

My throat dried. “Just now… there was an old woman.”

The girl frowned, as if the words made no sense. “Old woman? It’s only me here.”

I could hear my heart pounding.

This wasn’t “scary.”This was “wrong.”

As if there was a rule in the shop: once I saw the girl, I could no longer see the old woman. They were two faces of a lantern—confirm one, the other extinguished.

I wrenched free of her grip and ran.

The bell over the door rang a beat late again—ding—as if laughing behind me.

The alley’s cold wind hit my face, and I realized I was shaking. The scent didn’t dissipate; if anything it clung to my collar, pressing into my skin.

I walked home quickly, almost too afraid to look back.

But at my door, I stopped.

A cuckoo sat atop the mailbox.

It cocked its head, black eyes like nails. It called softly, sounding like a hushed whisper:

“Shouldn’t you go home.”

I forced myself to ignore it and reached for my keys. My hand went into my pocket and touched something hard.

I froze.

Pulling it out—it was a small piece of wood, thin, like a fragment snapped from an ancient bamboo slip. The grain was dry, edges gritty, as if carried from the desert.

There were characters on it.

Not Chinese.

Deep black ink spelled, sharply,—

WYATT

I stood at my own front door, feeling a chill crawl from my feet to the back of my neck.

Because I was certain: I hadn’t bought anything tonight.More certain: no one would use something like a relic to write a modern person’s name.

The cuckoo called again.

This time, it sounded more like a reminder—

What I just escaped was only the entrance.Not the exit.