Perfume in the Night

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I’m asking more for advice or explanations than trying to impress you with yet another story.

We live in our own house — an ordinary suburb built not so long ago. I’ve always liked it: you work in the city but live in a clean and cozy neighborhood of private homes.

I’m a heavy smoker, but my beloved wife категорически forbids smoking inside the house. So I always go down into the yard (my office is on the second floor), whether it’s winter or summer.

Let me say right away — our houses are built in a completely ordinary place, no cemeteries or anything like that.

About a year and a half ago, in winter, strange things started happening. Imagine: winter, a frosty evening, a light breeze. I step outside for a smoke, and in that breeze — which is odd in itself — there’s a steady smell of men’s cologne, as if someone is standing nearby. And what’s even more remarkable — the scent is noticeable only on the porch, right under the door. Five steps lead down. After a few seconds of my presence, the smell begins to dissipate.

Once I went down the steps, trying to find the source of the fragrance, although the nearest neighbors are about thirty meters away — for their scent to reach me would require not a “trail of aroma” but a “shock wave” that would engulf the whole settlement.

The fragrance is very pleasant, not something cheap from a metro kiosk, but it’s clearly “retro.” Those who remember might recall a Soviet cologne called “Ozhon” — it’s something like that.

My yard is spacious, the porch faces a gazebo, and with even a slight breeze there’s nowhere for air to “stagnate.” Yet the aroma is as if someone is standing right beside you. But as soon as I step outside, it moves downward, and when I follow it, it disappears entirely. The first time I went down, I again caught the scent to the side of the porch, downwind. I told my wife; she didn’t believe me.

The smell doesn’t appear every day — once or twice a week, sometimes absent for ten days.

The next evening, when I went out for a smoke, my wife laughingly followed me and went out first. Honestly, I was pleased to see how she grew surprised and stopped smiling. But my wife is an extremely rational and resourceful person. She conducted a whole set of “investigative measures” — crawled over the entire lawn looking for traces of strangers, examined the fence, walked with and against the wind, inspected the basement and its ventilation openings, let the dogs out into the yard, ordered and installed three surveillance cameras, spent several weeks reviewing footage — but nothing. Absolutely nothing. And yet the aroma was there. Not every day, only in the evening when it got dark. The dogs didn’t react at all. But she did get a result, although an unexpected one (she is, after all, an investigator by profession).

One day I was sitting in my office when my wife entered in an unusually formal manner and asked me to go outside and check whether the aroma was present. She said it should be there today. All my questions about what her certainty was based on remained unanswered. She said she would stay inside.

I went out — and indeed, there was the light, pleasant cologne, which began to fade after a few seconds.

When I questioned her later, she said she would soon give me an answer. She asked me to record somewhere the dates when the perfume appeared over the course of a month, but not tell her; she would record dates herself based on indirect signs, and later we would compare.

Intrigued, I created a password-protected document on my laptop and recorded all the dates when the “fragrant stranger” appeared.

In February, it appeared four times.

At the beginning of March, around the 3rd or 4th, after smelling it during another smoke break, I remembered we were supposed to compare notes.

I went back inside. Olesya was busy with something. I brought up the topic. She looked at me strangely and said, “Bring your notes, but don’t show them to me.”

When I brought the printed document, she sat down at the computer and showed me short video files from the surveillance cameras — 28 short clips, each with date and time stamps, one for each day of February. She named four dates when, in her opinion, the stranger had appeared. They matched mine exactly. Honestly, I was stunned.

One of the three outdoor cameras is installed opposite the gable; it captures the porch and part of the wall with windows. On the days when the aroma was present, our two beloved cats — Marta and Vezha — at around 6:30 p.m. would firmly occupy the wide windowsill in the living room. The window faces the same side as the porch. The cats would spend an hour to an hour and a half on the sill.

Now, when I go out to smoke, I first glance into the living room. If the girls are on the windowsill, the perfume will appear again.

What this is, how a smell (if brought from outside) can locally concentrate in one spot and immediately vanish when I step out (sometimes shifting under the porch, as if an invisible person steps back to give me space but doesn’t want to leave), I cannot understand. I told our priest; he had one answer — a restless soul. He prayed for its repose, but the stranger still appears from time to time. Sometimes I even say something aloud to him.

People, what do you think about this?

P.S. We built the house ourselves from scratch. The land used to be a former collective farm field; there have never been any murders or other criminal, mystical events here.