"Prague runs on pilsner, trams, and wiring older than your grandmother"
Maya Chen has five days until the job interview of her life, a colour-coded spreadsheet for every one of them, and a voltage-tester pen named Sparky that was her late grandfather's. Her budget books her into the Tesla Coil Hostel in Prague's Žižkov district: a gorgeous, crumbling 1920s building whose neon sign has lost its C, so it reads TESLA OIL. On her first night, Sparky beeps at the front-door handle. Then at the shower.
Nobody listens. Not the fitness influencer in her dorm, who turns her into a viral joke called 'Sparky Girl'. Not the owners in Rotterdam, who call her twenty-three-page safety report 'hysterical'. Only Tomáš, the night manager, who has been quietly buying rubber flip-flops for guests for nine years, understands what she's found. And ever since a little white smart hub was installed behind reception last month, the building has started doing things on its own. The lights flicker in rhythm. The printer types messages nobody sent. The Wi-Fi seems to know her name.
The Halloween foam party is sold out: three hundred and twenty people, fourteen daisy-chained power strips, two industrial foam cannons and a basement that is filling with rainwater. Maya was supposed to be in a quiet hotel room preparing for Monday. Instead she's standing at the end of the bar in a yellow hard hat, holding a pen that won't stop screaming.
Age: 23
Type: Electrical-engineering master's student
Fatal Flaw: Can't stop noticing code violations
Role: Protagonist
Age: 25
Type: "Send it" fitness influencer
Fatal Flaw: Treats every warning as content
Role: Guest
Age: 27
Type: Stand-up comic on a world's-worst-gigs tour
Fatal Flaw: Answers fear with a tight five
Role: Ally
Age: 29
Type: ICU nurse on burnout leave
Fatal Flaw: Finds near-death experiences restful
Role: Medic
Age: 50s
Type: Night manager for twenty-two years
Fatal Flaw: Fatalism, and too many keys
Role: Keeper of the building
Age: ???
Type: Mysterious presence
Fatal Flaw: None documented
Role: Observer
From the Prologue, "The Night Shift"
Jiřina Novotná had cleaned the Tesla Coil Hostel for nine years, and in nine years she had learned that the building talked.
Not in a haunted way. Jiřina did not believe in haunted. She was sixty-one, she had buried a husband and two dachshunds, and she had lived through the Velvet Revolution, three currencies' worth of inflation, and a nephew who sold essential oils on Instagram. Nothing could haunt her. But buildings talked, and this one talked more than most.
The radiators knocked at 2:10 every morning like a drunk locked out of his own flat. The fourth-floor toilet sang a single sustained note, a sort of mournful B-flat, whenever someone on the second floor ran a tap. The stairs creaked in a pattern she could have hummed. And the wiring, the ancient, ropey, cloth-wrapped wiring that ran through the walls like the veins in her own hands, hummed. All night. A low, bored, electric hum, the sound of a fridge thinking about its life choices.
She had grown used to the hum. It meant everything was normal.
Tonight, at 3:14 a.m. on a Sunday at the tail end of October, the hum stopped.
Jiřina froze in the second-floor corridor with her mop in one hand and her phone in the other, a Czech radio soap opera muttering from its speaker. The silence was so sudden it felt like a hand clapped over her ear. She turned the soap opera off. Somewhere below her, in the basement bar, a tap dripped. Somewhere above, a boy snored like a chainsaw in a sleeping bag.
Then the sconces began to blink.
There were eleven of them along the corridor, brass tulips from the 1920s with bulbs that someone had replaced with cheap LEDs, and they went dark and bright together. Dark and bright. Dark, dark, bright.
Jiřina frowned.
Short. Short. Long.
Her husband, Miroslav, God rest him, had been a railway telegraphist before the railways stopped needing telegraphists, and for forty years he had tapped out messages on the kitchen table while he waited for his coffee. Dobré ráno. Good morning. Miluju tě. I love you. Kde jsou klíče? Where are the keys. She had never learned it properly, but she had absorbed the rhythm of it the way you absorb the smell of a man's cigarettes. And this — the lights stuttering along the corridor in perfect, patient sequence — had rhythm. Deliberate rhythm. Short, long, short. A pause. Short, short.
It was not a flicker. A flicker was lazy. This was typing.
"No," Jiřina said aloud, to the lights, in the tone she used for guests who tried to cook instant noodles in the kettle. "No, no. Not tonight."
The lights paused, as if considering her position.
Then they continued.
Fictional reviews of the fictional Tesla Coil Hostel, quoted from the book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "VIBES: 10/10! 🔥⚡" — FreeToWander guest
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "The staff are legends!!" — FreeToWander guest
☠ "variable noted. halloween is fully booked. risk accepted. ☠" — @HostelReaper