Shadows Between Floors

They called it many things over the centuries: the Hôpital des Sans-Voix when it was a triage house; the Thiers Exchange when smugglers ran ledgers through its stairwells; La Tour Noire when people stopped naming it out loud. Twenty-one floors, all hollowed by time. Stone that bloomed with damp in winter. Windows that wept black rain.

No electricity had run through its veins since the city cut the lines in 1977 after a fire no one could prove or forget. And yet-at night-someone always swore they saw a light: not a candle's shiver, nor a torch's sputter. A perfectly ordinary, municipal yellow light, as if the building had simply refused the century and kept one working thing: its lift.

The curse was not a rumor; it was municipal memory. Anyone who tried to buy the place was dead within months-falls on dry floors, aneurysms during routine checkups, an investor whose heart quit while closing papers were still warm from the copier. Anyone who chipped it or broke it or pried a door died messier. The city eventually stopped listing it. Fines were cheaper than funerals.