Seventeen-year-old Lena begins noticing strange traces inside a Prague tenement, where the walls seem to remember the people who lived there and something in the building seems to know her name.
Prague always looked oldest in November. Rain polished the cobblestones until they shone like dark glass, and the narrow streets around the Old Town swallowed sound the moment the bells stopped ringing. Lena had walked this route enough times to know every shopfront, every cracked lintel, every window that went gold for a second before evening swallowed it again. Tonight, though, the houses seemed to lean closer, their façades too high, their windows too watchful.
She had only been living here with her mother for a few months, long enough for the city to feel both familiar and temporary, like a room she was renting from someone who might come back at any moment. School was no better. Her classmates talked about exams, cities they planned to escape to, the exact life they meant to build after graduation. Lena listened, but lately she had been noticing other things instead: the way light gathered in doorways, the way silence changed from one street to the next, the way some places felt crowded even when no one was there.
The light above their entrance was flickering again when she reached the building. Lena slowed, rain dripping from the edge of her hood. At the foot of the doorway sat the grey cat from across the street, the one the neighbours all called Alfred as if he belonged to the house more than any person did. He looked up at her, then toward the dark corridor behind her, his ears angled forward.
"All right," Lena whispered, and scratched under his chin. "What are you staring at?"
Alfred didn't blink. The building did something strange then, a tiny shiver of brightness through the bulb overhead, and the corridor light went out. Lena sighed, fished out her phone, and switched on the torch. The beam cut across the peeling walls, the old banister polished by years of hands, the board with the residents' names. Everything looked ordinary enough to pass for boring.
Then a voice brushed the air so lightly she almost mistook it for the rain. Not from upstairs. Not from the street. From the walls themselves.
"Lena..."
Her fingers tightened around the phone. Alfred sprang up and pressed against her ankle, as if warning her not to go in. Lena stared at the shadow the beam had caught beside the name board: a tall boy in a long coat, only there for a heartbeat, his outline thin as smoke. She looked twice. The shape was gone, but the corridor had changed anyway, as if it had just exhaled.
The light above the landing flickered once, twice, then began pulsing in a slow, deliberate rhythm, like a signal meant for her alone. Lena lifted one foot toward the first step and felt the whole building waiting with her.
Somewhere above, something answered.