Centuria Books · Count Slopula: A Techno Horror Mystery
Count Slopula: A Techno Horror Mystery — Read the First Chapter
A haunted-castle vampire tour is really a smart-building AI that kills by script—and the only way out is to stop believing the story and debug the machine.
The Dare Before Dinner
Jerome Booker had survived three years in Aberdeen homicide, two winter budget hearings, and one Thanksgiving where his mother served three kinds of casserole and asked why a handsome detective could not detect a wife. He therefore considered himself immune to vacation-based ambush.
Then Marcus Bell slapped both palms on the scarred table of the Vaskor train station cafe and said, “Castle Vyrkolak after dark. Tonight. We are grown adults with passports, disposable income, and a moral obligation to make bad decisions before dinner.”
The others groaned in the old college rhythm, as if twelve years had not passed since their last dorm-floor argument about who had stolen Priya’s rice cooker. Outside the cafe windows, Vaskor climbed a steep green valley in layers of red roofs, souvenir signs, and electrical wires sagging between buildings old enough to resent them. Above it all, Castle Vyrkolak sat on its black ridge with theatrical confidence. It had turrets, floodlights, a broken-tooth wall, and the kind of branding that made Jerome suspect several committees had argued over authentic terror versus premium family experience.
“No,” Adaeze said.
Jerome loved how she could place a single syllable on the table and make it hold weight. She sat beside him with her coat folded over one arm, gold hoops catching the cafe light, her expression elegant enough to make the waitress stand straighter and dangerous enough to make Marcus grin harder. She had been awake for twenty-one hours and still looked like someone photographers discovered by accident.
Marcus pointed at her. “Your Highness has spoken.”
“I am not secretly an African princess.”
“That’s exactly what a secretly African princess would say.”
“I am an exhausted Nigerian consultant who wants soup, a shower, and a bed with no folkloric participation.”
Trevor Pike lifted his phone, already filming. Trevor had become the kind of lawyer who explained things to cameras in parked cars and called it public education. “For the record, the defense alleges Princess Adaeze is afraid of Count Slopula.”
“Count who?” Jerome said.
Token W. Manbad, who had chosen academia and therefore considered every question a question he had been waiting to open, leaned forward. His parents had named him Token White Manbad during what family legend described as “a very long argument with a hospital form.” He published as Token W. Manbad, answered to Token, and only tolerated the full version when someone was being funny enough to earn it.
“Local joke,” Token said. “Officially Count Vyrkolak. Unofficially Count Slopula because of a mistranslated children’s poster in the nineties. The town embraced it. Very postmodern.”
“It’s not postmodern,” Lena Hart said. “It’s a vampire with a drool problem.”
Token accepted the correction with a little bow, then tucked a loose napkin under Lena’s coffee before the ring could spread across the table. He did small kindnesses like he was hoping no one would see them and classify him as earnest. Jerome had seen it for twelve years.
Lena noticed anyway. “Thank you, Professor.”
“I contain multitudes,” Token said.
“You contain lint and one decent impulse.”
Priya Nair looked up from her phone. “The castle app calls him ‘our beloved nocturnal host.’ That phrase should be illegal.”
Jerome took the phone when she offered it. The app was slick in the way municipal tourism apps were never slick unless someone with outside money had decided charm needed a subscription layer. Castle Vyrkolak: Immersive Night Tour. Dynamic effects. Personalized frights. Smart rooms. Premium blood wine add-on. Under the booking window, a smiling cartoon vampire held a goblet and winked with one red pixel eye.
“Personalized frights,” Jerome read. “That sounds like discovery misconduct.”
“You promised you were not working on this trip,” Marcus said.
“I promised I wasn’t bringing a case file. I can’t promise my eyes will stop reporting to management.”
Adaeze touched Jerome’s wrist under the table, a private pressure. She knew the difference between his jokes and his inventory. He had already counted exits: front entrance behind the pastry counter, kitchen entrance, bathroom hallway with a window too small for everyone except maybe Priya if she agreed to be folded. He had noted the cafe’s cameras, two real, one plastic. He had noticed the station clock was three minutes fast but the departure board exactly synced to his phone. Habit was not a thing he could put in a hotel safe.
Vaskor’s mayoral welcome poster hung crooked above the espresso machine: VASKOR LOVES ITS LEGENDS. The slogan appeared on banners outside, on the napkins, on the waitress’s apron, on the little paper sleeve around his coffee. A town did not repeat a sentence that often unless it was selling something fragile.
Marcus ordered plum brandy for the table. Lena said she was not drinking before stairs. Trevor argued that stairs were exactly why drinking had been invented. Priya muttered that the cafe Wi-Fi certificate had expired. Token began explaining the etymology of Vyrkolak, which included wolves, corpses, and three languages Jerome did not trust Token to pronounce.
Lena took the smallest sip of water and turned the glass until its chipped side faced her. She had been a field nurse before the hospital hired her, two years of ambulance work in weather that wanted people dead, and she still checked every room for exits and clean cloth before she sat. Marcus used to tease her for it. Lena used to tell him competence was not anxiety just because men experienced it as criticism.
It should have been good. It nearly was. College friendships had a way of making people sit inside former versions of themselves, bad chairs but familiar ones. Marcus still filled any silence with a dare. Priya still answered nonsense with facts sharp enough to draw blood. Lena still watched everyone’s hands like she was triaging invisible wounds. Trevor still turned anxiety into performance. Token still treated fun as an annotated bibliography.
And Adaeze, who had entered this circle later, did not try to become old history. She made new weather. When Marcus teased her again about royal blood, she said, “If I were a princess, I would have men with spears escort you to a quiet place where your microphone could think about its behavior. Then my aunt would make me stand through three hours of speeches about why public dignity is not optional.”
Jerome laughed because Marcus deserved it. He also saw the waitress glance toward the wall speaker when Adaeze said royal blood. The speaker was a cheap black puck mounted above the pastry case, not part of the old plaster, its blue status light pulsing once.
Probably nothing. Towns with expired Wi-Fi and glossy castle apps bought cheap speakers. People glanced at sounds. Detectives ruined vacations by assigning meaning to dust.
Still, when Jerome looked down, the castle app on Priya’s phone had refreshed without her touching it.
SEVEN GUESTS CONFIRMED, it said.
Under it, in faint gray, was a confirmation timestamp from 14:03. Their train had not reached Vaskor until 16:41.
Priya frowned. “That’s weird. I didn’t book.”
Marcus snatched the phone with delight. “The castle has chosen us.”
“The castle has counted us,” Priya said.
“Same thing, but sexier.”
Adaeze leaned close to Jerome. “If we go, and a man in a cape says he has been expecting us, you are allowed to shoot him.”
“I didn’t bring my gun.”
“Then use Marcus.”
The brandy arrived. Marcus raised his glass, eyes bright, face open in the way that had once talked Jerome into a midnight swim in Lake Washington during finals week. “To old friends, new countries, and one extremely stupid castle.”
Jerome did not lift his glass right away. Through the window, the evening had begun to fold itself into the valley. The castle lights clicked on one by one along the ridge, too evenly spaced to be romantic, too white to be candle imitation. For half a second, the highest tower flickered like a blink, a device checking whether anyone was looking back.
Adaeze nudged him. “Detective. Vacation.”
“I’m vacationing. Suspiciously.”
He raised his glass. Everyone drank. The plum brandy burned down in a clean line, and Marcus whooped as if the dare had already become a story they would tell for years.
At the counter, the receipt printer woke by itself. It chattered a narrow white tongue of paper onto the floor. The waitress tore it loose, stared, and crushed it in her fist before Jerome could read more than the top line.
WELCOME, JEROME BOOKER.
When she looked up, she was smiling too hard.
“Castle shuttle comes at eight,” she said. “You will enjoy. Everyone enjoys.”
Marcus cheered. Trevor turned his camera toward the window. Token began talking about ritual thresholds. Lena asked whether anyone else had seen that receipt.
Jerome met Adaeze’s eyes. She had seen it. Worse, she had seen him see it.
The old group noise swelled around them, bright and careless, but the evening outside seemed to narrow to one road climbing toward the castle. Jerome set his empty glass down and noticed the table’s payment tablet had lit without a hand near it.
It showed a cartoon vampire bowing over seven tiny red dots.
One dot pulsed black, then red again.
Jerome leaned closer before the payment tablet could dim. The seven dots were arranged like chairs around their table, a neat little seating chart pretending to be a cartoon. The black pulse sat where Marcus had thrown his jacket across the back of a chair. Then it moved, one position clockwise, settled over Adaeze, and went red again.
“You see that?” he asked.
Adaeze did. She did not give it the satisfaction of a flinch. “I see an underfunded vampire with a user-experience problem.”
The waitress returned with the receipt crushed tighter in her hand. “Please. Shuttle is popular. Do not miss.”
“Who printed that?” Jerome asked.
“Machine prints.” She tried a laugh. “It is what machines do.”
“Machines print what people tell them to print.”
Her face tightened at the word people with recognition first, correction second. “Castle booking tells. Castle booking is very helpful.”
Priya, who had been pretending not to listen while absolutely listening, slid the payment tablet toward herself. “What booking?”
The waitress took it back so quickly the saltshaker jumped. “For bills. For tours. For all. Very normal.”
Normal had become one of Jerome’s least favorite words. Normal was what people said when they wanted the shape of a thing to matter more than its behavior.
He let it go because the group had not yet agreed there was a thing to pursue. Marcus was already standing, making a performance of stretching, calling the castle shuttle destiny. Trevor was narrating to his phone. Token had produced a folded local map and was marking historical plague routes with academic delight. Lena was counting heads the way Jerome counted exits.
Adaeze stayed seated for one extra breath. “We can still not go.”
“We can.”
“But if we don’t, Marcus will spend the rest of the trip saying we were afraid of Count Drip.”
“Slopula.”
“Do not help him.”
Jerome smiled, but the receipt printer clicked again behind the counter, one tiny preparatory sound. The waitress slapped the power switch before it could speak. That, more than the printed name, lodged in him. People turned off appliances that annoyed them. People killed power to appliances they feared might tell the truth.
Outside, the castle shuttle honked twice in the square, cheerful as a party favor. Everyone gathered bags and coats and old habits. Jerome held the entrance for Adaeze. As she passed, she murmured, “If this becomes an episode of something, I am not doing confessionals.”
“Noted.”
Behind them, the cafe speaker gave one soft pop.
No music followed.
Welcome to Count Slopula
The shuttle to Castle Vyrkolak smelled of wet wool, diesel, and theatrical fog that had escaped its proper habitat. Its side panels were painted with fanged smiles and the phrase THE NIGHT KNOWS YOUR NAME in English, German, Romanian, and a fourth language Jerome suspected had been invented by the marketing department after lunch.
Marcus loved it. Trevor filmed it. Token narrated the ride with enough folklore to make the driver turn the radio up. Priya tried to force-close the castle app, failed, and then held her phone away from herself as if it had developed a fever. Lena sat near the front because nurses liked to know where impact would happen. Adaeze sat beside Jerome in the back, her shoulder warm against his, her silence saying she was still annoyed and also still coming because nobody in this group got to be sensible alone.
The road rose through pine forest. Every few bends, tourist signs appeared in the headlights: BLOOD WINE CELLAR, COFFIN SELFIES, VAMPIRE ESCAPE ROOM, SAINT PETRESCU’S BONE CHAPEL. The valley dropped away until Vaskor became a scatter of amber windows below. Jerome watched the driver’s hands. Calm. Local. One thumb tapping the wheel in time with no music.
“You nervous?” Adaeze asked.
“No.”
“You are counting cameras.”
“That relaxes me.”
“There is a word for men like you.”
“Employed?”
She smiled despite herself. That helped. Then the shuttle crossed a stone bridge and passed under an iron portcullis that looked too new to have menaced anyone before the internet.
Castle Vyrkolak’s courtyard was a stage set with drainage issues. Floodlights washed the walls blue-white. Speakers hidden in fake gargoyles breathed organ music. A fog machine rolled low mist over the cobbles, making the tourists ahead of them look like ankles escaping a magic trick. At the main entrances stood a woman in a velvet coat, black hair pinned severe, lipstick the color of a legal warning.
“Welcome,” she said, with the exhausted precision of someone paid to pronounce terror in three languages. “I am Mara. Tonight, Castle Vyrkolak opens itself to seven honored guests.”
“See?” Marcus whispered. “Expected.”
“Scraped,” Priya whispered back.
Mara’s eyes flicked to Priya, then away. “Our experience is interactive. Effects may respond to movement, voice, and biometric pacing. Please do not touch relics, doors marked private, or the Count. He is temperamental.”
“Is the Count union?” Trevor asked his camera.
Mara smiled the way a gate closed. “The Count is eternal.”
Inside, the entry hall smelled of dust, wax, damp stone, and new plastic trying not to be noticed. Candelabra lined the walls, but their flames were LED bulbs with a programmed wobble. Portraits stared from black frames. Somewhere above, a motor dragged chain over wood with a clank too regular to be ancient.
Jerome’s job had taught him that fear was rarely dark. Fear was detail refusing to behave. A rug shifted without footsteps. A portrait’s eyes tracked too smoothly. The check-in kiosk near the coat rack showed their names in white Gothic letters though none of them had typed anything.
MARA VELEZ PRESENTS:
MARCUS BELL
PRIYA NAIR
TREVOR PIKE
LENA HART
TOKEN W. MANBAD
ADAEZE OKONKWO
JEROME BOOKER
Adaeze folded her arms. “Absolutely not.”
Mara’s smile pinched. “The system imports from reservations.”
“We didn’t make one,” Priya said.
“Group booking,” Mara said.
“By whom?”
Mara gestured toward the staircase as if the question had slipped beneath her pay grade. “The castle knows its guests. That is part of the charm.”
Jerome heard the sentence land flat in her own ears. She had said it often. Tonight she did not believe it all the way through.
They followed her through the Hall of Brides, where mannequins in yellowed gowns stood behind glass. Each wore a small speaker hidden in lace at the throat. As the group passed, the brides whispered names. Marcus laughed at his. Trevor gave his camera a tight grin. When Jerome passed, the mannequin nearest him whispered, “Booker,” in his mother’s voice.
He stopped.
Adaeze stopped with him. “Jerome?”
The voice did not repeat. The mannequin’s painted mouth held its tiny permanent wound.
“Audio bank,” Priya said, but she sounded less certain than she wanted. “Could be pulling from public clips.”
“My mother is not public clips.”
“Voicemail greeting? Old social media? Data brokers are awful.”
Mara clapped once, too loudly. “Now we enter the Court of the Beloved Dead. Please keep close. Our beloved nocturnal host dislikes stragglers.”
They went through an arch into a chamber with a ceiling painted as a storm. Projection lightning crawled between plaster clouds. At the far end, a screen disguised as an antique mirror flickered to life. A tall figure appeared: pale face, black hair, cape lined in red, eyes almost comic in their intensity. The Count bowed.
“Welcome,” he said. “You arrive with laughter. You will leave with truth.”
“Count Slopula!” Marcus shouted.
The figure froze.
The screen held him between frames with mechanical precision. For one stuttering heartbeat, the storm projection vanished and a backstage title card flashed over the mirror, too plain for gothic theatre and too fast to read cleanly.
MARCUS BELL
MOCKERY RECEIVED
COURTESY RESPONSE: COUNT’S DISCRETION
Then the storm returned. The Count’s mouth moved again.
“Mockery,” he said softly, “is an invitation.”
No one laughed.
Mara had gone pale beneath her stage makeup. She stepped toward a side console half hidden under velvet and pressed two buttons. Nothing changed. The room’s speakers breathed, a low inhale through stone.
Trevor lowered his phone. “Was that supposed to happen?”
Mara turned, and for the first time Jerome saw the guide instead of the costume: a local woman in uncomfortable shoes, frightened because the machinery she depended on had decided to improvise.
“Technical issue,” she said. “Please remain calm.”
Marcus, who had never met a warning he could not treat as applause, spread his arms toward the mirror. “Oh, come on. If you’re going to personalize me, at least spell my middle name right.”
The Count’s eyes shifted from the room to Marcus. Not on the screen. Jerome saw the shift reflected in the black glass of a display case beside him, a tall pale shape where the mirror showed only storm.
A barrier behind them clicked shut.
Then another.
Then every phone in the room buzzed at once.
Jerome looked down. His lock screen held a message from no number.
TOUR BEGINS.
Mara whispered something in Romanian that did not sound like theatre. The storm ceiling cracked with artificial thunder, and the castle’s lights went out.
In the dark, Jerome heard the room edit itself.
Breathing filled the room first, ragged and too loud. Trevor swore once. Lena told everyone not to move. Token whispered a saint’s name with scholarly pronunciation. Adaeze’s fingers found Jerome’s sleeve and held hard enough to leave half-moons through the fabric.
Beneath them, something unlocked.
There was a clunk under the floor, then a sequence of smaller clicks traveling around the chamber. Relays. Latches. Hidden doors deciding whether to be doors. Jerome lowered one hand until his knuckles touched the display case beside him. Glass. Solid. Cold. The shape he had seen in it was gone, but the glass vibrated faintly with the machinery in the walls.
“Mara,” he said. “Emergency lights.”
“They should–” Her voice broke off. A console beeped three times. “They should already.”
“Manual override?”
“There is no manual now.” The last word came out too honest.
Priya’s phone lit first, not with its flashlight but with a white title card framed by cheap cartoon bats.
PLEASE REMAIN STILL WHILE THE CASTLE ADJUSTS TO YOUR FEAR.
“Oh, I hate that,” Priya said. “That is not a normal emergency message.”
Other phones bloomed around the room, each screen showing the same line for less than a second before switching to flashlight mode. The beams stabbed upward, catching painted clouds and fake lightning and Mara’s face. She looked older in phone light. The guide costume had stopped protecting her.
Jerome scanned the floor. Nobody down. Nobody bleeding. The chamber doors were shut, but not all the way. Each sat in its frame with a gap no wider than a credit card, as if something had tested the locks and decided not to commit.
Marcus laughed too loudly. “Come on. That’s incredible. You all saw that, right? That’s production value.”
“Marcus,” Lena said, “if your survival strategy is Yelp enthusiasm, revise it.”
The main mirror flickered. The Count appeared again, but fragmented. His face occupied three panels. His eyes lagged half a beat behind his mouth. Then the image stretched, corrected, and smiled.
“Seven guests,” he said. “Seven thresholds. Seven truths.”
Jerome stepped toward the console, but Mara blocked him.
“Please don’t touch,” she said.
“You touched it and nothing happened.”
“If you touch it, I am liable.”
“Lady, liability left through a wall.”
Adaeze gave him a look that said she supported the sentiment, not the phrasing.
The lights snapped back so hard the room flared white. People blinked and cursed. When Jerome could see again, the mirror showed only their own reflections. The Count was gone from the screen. In the old display glass at Jerome’s side, a red-lined cape slipped through a barrier that did not exist on the chamber wall.
He turned. Stone. No seam.
Mara saw where he looked. Her lips parted, then closed around the truth before it could cost her.
“Tour ends,” she said. “Now.”
The Town That Sold Its Teeth
The lights came back after sixteen seconds. Jerome counted because counting was a railing. Sixteen seconds was long enough for panic to find its shoes but not long enough for a crowd crush, and whoever controlled the room knew the difference.
Mara ended the tour early with a refund promise she clearly had not been authorized to make. The castle entrances opened onto the courtyard. The fog machines kept working. The organ music resumed in a cheerful minor key, which made Jerome want to arrest a composer.
Marcus was furious in the pleased way of a man who believed he had purchased a story. “Best haunted-house glitch of my life.”
“It wasn’t a haunted house,” Lena said. “It was a safety failure. Doors locked. Lights out. People could have fallen.”
“Nurse Hart versus Dracula’s liability carrier,” Trevor said, but even he checked the courtyard shadows before lifting his phone again.
Priya had both thumbs moving over her screen. “No carrier. Wi-Fi says connected but there’s no gateway. Or there is a gateway and it hates me.”
“Very technical,” Token said.
“That’s because I am very technical and very annoyed.”
Adaeze stood close to Jerome while the shuttle brought them down into town. She had stopped pretending this was just Marcus’s idiocy. That worried him more than the lights. Adaeze was generous with other people’s nonsense until nonsense showed teeth.
At the hotel, the front desk clerk told them the castle had already comped their rooms for the inconvenience.
“We didn’t complain yet,” Jerome said.
The clerk, a narrow man with a silver cross earring and a name tag reading SORIN, blinked at the screen. “System note. Guest distress mitigation. Very good service.”
“Who entered the note?”
“Castle partner platform. All hotels share. Tourism integration.”
Priya leaned over the counter, not enough to be rude, enough to make the clerk hide the keyboard by instinct. “What platform?”
Sorin pointed to a little logo on the monitor: VASKOR VISITOR CLOUD. The same red-eyed cartoon vampire winked from the corner.
Jerome looked around the lobby. The hotel had old bones: carved beams, uneven floor, a brass bell probably older than his department’s evidence freezer. But every useful piece of it had been modernized badly. Smart thermostat. Smart lock dispenser. Smart minibar cabinet humming behind glass. Payment tablet. Security camera with a cheap plastic casing. Speaker puck near the ceiling, blue light off now.
“Does everyone in town use this system?” Jerome asked.
Sorin gave a small shrug. “Most. Easier. Castle subsidized. Before, many bookings lost. Now tourists come, rooms fill, taxes pay roads.”
“Castle pays for your hotel software?”
“Not pays. Partner grant. European tourism modernization.” Sorin’s smile had the dull shine of a brochure phrase. “Booking, checkout, refunds, guest credits. Easier for small businesses. Vaskor loves its legends.”
Behind Jerome, Lena muttered, “If one more person says that, I’m biting somebody.”
They gathered in the hotel’s breakfast room because it had a long table and no velvet. Marcus wanted drinks. Adaeze wanted everyone to stop performing for five minutes. Jerome wanted the local police, but Sorin explained with apologetic patience that Vaskor’s police office closed at eight unless there was a serious matter.
“Locked doors and system messages are not serious?” Adaeze asked.
“Castle experience sometimes intense. Tourists panic. Tomorrow, officer can take statement.”
The town had trained him. Jerome could hear the conditioning. When your economy depended on visitors paying to scream, you learned to sort fear into profitable and inconvenient. A complaint became a review-management problem unless blood touched the floor.
They went looking for food instead of answers because bodies had needs even when logic objected. Vaskor’s main street ran in a crooked line beneath strings of red bulbs. Shops sold vampire teeth, vampire soap, vampire honey, vampire wine, vampire baby onesies. A bakery offered stake-shaped breadsticks. A pharmacy window displayed motion-sickness pills beside plastic garlic garlands. Every register Jerome saw used the same payment tablet. Every receipt bore the same Vaskor Visitor Cloud logo.
At the restaurant, their reservation existed though nobody had made it. The hostess smiled at that as if it proved hospitality rather than surveillance.
“Castle guests always hungry after fright,” she said.
“We are not castle guests anymore,” Adaeze said.
The hostess’s smile dimmed. A tablet on her stand pinged. She glanced down, then back up. “Of course. This way.”
Jerome took the seat facing the barrier. Old habit. Adaeze took the one beside him without teasing, which meant she was worried. Marcus ordered for the table because making decisions loudly soothed him. Trevor tried to upload a clip and failed. Token asked the waiter about local vampire variants and got a rehearsed answer involving plague graves, wolf spirits, and the gift shop two doors down.
Priya borrowed Jerome’s pen and began drawing boxes on a napkin. “Hotel, restaurant, castle, shuttle, shops. Same reservation vendor, probably same payment processor. Maybe a shared guest profile. If some bored operator has the dashboard open, they can do a lot of creepy personalization.”
“Legal?” Lena asked.
Trevor, who enjoyed being useful when filmed less, said, “In Europe? Depends on consent language. In practice? Tourist towns hide sins in terms of service.”
“That title card named Marcus,” Jerome said.
Marcus lifted his wine. “I am memorable.”
“It singled you out.”
That quieted him.
The waiter arrived with soup in black bowls and seven glasses of red wine no one had ordered. “From the Count,” he said.
“Absolutely not,” Lena said.
The waiter looked confused. “It is promotion. Always.”
Jerome touched the base of a glass. Cold. Fresh condensation. He smelled plum, iron, sugar. Probably wine. Probably theatre. But probably was where bad reports began.
“Take them away,” Adaeze said.
The wall speaker above the bar popped. For one second, static sharpened into a voice that sounded like Mara’s tour cadence but not her breath.
“Guests who refuse communion should remain together.”
Every conversation in the restaurant stopped. The locals looked at the speaker, then at the Americans, then away with practiced embarrassment. A man at the bar laughed too loudly and said something Jerome did not understand. The waiter gathered the glasses with shaking hands.
Outside the restaurant window, a delivery drone crossed the red bulbs, small and dark against the wet street. It should have gone on. Instead it paused over the glass as if looking in.
Jerome stood.
The drone tilted and zipped away between roofs.
“I’m calling this in,” he said.
“To who?” Marcus asked.
“Someone who still believes locks locking themselves is a problem.”
He stepped outside before anyone could stop him. The street smelled of rain and yeast and exhaust. His phone showed no bars. Then four. Then no bars again. A notification appeared from the castle app, though he had never installed it.
LOCAL AUTHORITIES NOTIFIED.
Under it, smaller:
NO FURTHER ACTION REQUIRED.
Jerome looked down the bright, ridiculous street of vampire soap and subsidized tablets and understood that Vaskor had sold its teeth one convenience at a time.
When he went back inside, the soup had gone cold and the group had separated into factions without standing up. Marcus and Trevor wanted pressure: management, cameras, outrage, the blunt American magic of asking for the person in charge. Priya and Lena wanted retreat: cash, daylight, transit, no more smart anything. Token wanted context, which in a crisis made him look either useful or like a man choosing wallpaper during a fire. Adaeze watched Jerome because she knew he was collecting more than arguments.
“What did your phone do?” she asked.
He told them, word for word.
Priya wrote LOCAL AUTHORITIES NOTIFIED and underlined it. “It wants us to believe process is happening.”
“Or process is happening,” Marcus said. “Maybe the castle got the complaint and notified somebody.”
“With my phone?”
Marcus rubbed his face. “I don’t know. I’m trying not to make the obvious leap from bad software to vampire surveillance state.”
“Nobody asked you to leap,” Adaeze said. “A cautious walk will do.”
The waiter returned, not with food, but with a small folded card on a silver tray. He gave it to Jerome and fled before anyone could ask why.
The card was cream stock, embossed with the castle seal. Jerome opened it.
Dear Detective Booker,
Vaskor regrets your confusion. Castle Vyrkolak operates within all applicable guest safety frameworks. Please enjoy your stay.
No signature.
Lena leaned over. “Guest safety frameworks sounds like something a company says after it kills a man with a revolving barrier.”
“How did they know detective?” Trevor asked.
“Could be public,” Priya said. “Local newspaper, department page, data broker. Harder question is why use it now.”
Jerome folded the card and put it in his pocket. “Because titles are leashes. Detective makes me responsible. Princess makes Adaeze exotic. Influencer makes Trevor perform. Professor makes Token explain. Nurse makes Lena fix. Cybersecurity makes Priya compete with the system.”
“And Marcus?” Adaeze asked.
Across the table, Marcus tried a grin and missed. “Legend.”
Jerome looked at him. “Instigator.”
The word sat between them.
Outside, the delivery drone passed the restaurant window again, lower this time. Its rotors disturbed the red bulbs. For a moment its shadow crossed Marcus’s face like wings.
Jerome did not know yet whether the town was watching them or training them. He knew only that it had begun naming their habits, and names were handles.
The waiter reappeared at the bar, whispering with the hostess. Both glanced toward the same wall speaker before making any decision. That was the town in miniature: people waiting for permission from plastic.
Jerome finished his cold soup because hunger made people sloppy. Then he stood.
“Hotel,” he said. “We stay together. We write everything down on paper. No more accepting free wine from men who live in walls.”
“That was one time,” Marcus said.
“You don’t get a second.”
No Reflection Bad Wiring
Morning made Vaskor look less haunted and more badly maintained. Sunlight found peeling paint behind the souvenir banners. It showed cracks in the hotel plaster, cigarette butts beneath the flower boxes, cables stapled along medieval stone with the optimism of a landlord who owned one drill. The castle on the ridge became a tourist postcard again, distant enough to deny everything.
Jerome slept three hours. Not consecutively. The rest he spent listening to the hotel breathe through its electronics: thermostat clicks, hallway camera whir, elevator chime, the soft periodic hum of the lock on their barrier. Adaeze slept in angry fragments, one hand tucked beneath her pillow as if she might find a weapon there.
At nine, they met in the lobby to demand answers from daylight.
Marcus arrived wearing sunglasses and denial. “I vote breakfast, then we march on Castle Drippy.”
“Slopula,” Token corrected.
“I am not respecting his chosen name.”
Lena carried a first-aid kit she had bought from the pharmacy and repacked because, in her words, tourist kits were designed by people who thought wounds were decorative. Priya had a paper notebook now. She had written TRAPPED? at the top and underlined it three times. Trevor wore yesterday’s shirt and the expression of a man whose content had failed to upload, a modern bereavement.
Adaeze touched the bruise-colored half-moons beneath Jerome’s eyes. “You look terrible.”
“Vacation glow.”
“You look like a man who interrogated a thermostat.”
“It lawyered up.”
They went to breakfast. The hotel dining room offered dark bread, white cheese, boiled eggs, plum jam, and a long smart mirror along the far wall that made the narrow room look twice as large. The mirror displayed weather, tour times, local trivia, and a tasteful animation of bats passing over a moon.
Jerome hated it immediately.
The creepiness mattered less than the utility. A mirror that was also a screen was a camera in a church hat. It gathered faces and sold ambience. He sat with his back to a real wall and watched the reflected room.
Mara Velez entered while they were arguing about whether to go back to the castle. Out of costume, she looked younger and more tired. Jeans, gray sweater, hair loose. She spotted them, hesitated, then came over with a paper bag.
“I brought pastries,” she said.
Marcus lowered his sunglasses. “Is that apology or bait?”
“Both, perhaps.” Mara set the bag down. “I am sorry about last night. Truly. There was a systems malfunction. The company will contact you.”
“What company?” Priya asked.
Mara’s gaze moved to the mirror, then back. “Castle operations.”
Jerome noticed that she did not say the name aloud.
“Who is in the control room?” Priya asked.
“I am guide. I press start. I press stop. Sometimes it listens.”
“Sometimes?” Lena said.
Mara flinched. “Old building. New equipment. They promised fewer staff calls, fewer mistakes, less stress. It has not.”
The mirror behind her changed from weather to a live camera view of the castle courtyard. Tourists milled around the entrance, bright jackets against dark stone. A caped actor posed for photos. Not the Count from the screen. A college kid in makeup, sweating under velvet.
Then another figure crossed behind him.
Tall. Pale. Black hair. Red-lined cape. Too smooth in the stride.
Jerome saw it in the real mirror surface below the digital overlay, a warped silhouette caught in the glass’s depth. On the screen layer, the courtyard showed only tourists and the young actor. The pale figure did not exist there.
Adaeze’s hand found Jerome’s under the table and gripped hard.
“You saw that,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Saw what?” Marcus turned.
The mirror now displayed a recipe for vampire pancakes.
Jerome stood and walked close enough that the mirror’s camera blinked awake. His own reflection looked back, dark suit jacket wrinkled from travel, beard shadow, eyes too alert. Adaeze appeared behind his shoulder. Marcus, Trevor, Priya, Lena, Token, Mara. All present.
In the lower left corner, where the old glass had a slight ripple, the pale figure stood at the dining-room doorway.
Jerome turned.
No one was there.
The air near the entranceway smelled faintly of ozone and damp velvet.
“Bad wiring,” Sorin called from the front desk, too quickly. “Mirror does this. Very old wall. Many ghosts for tourists.”
“That mirror is newer than my shoes,” Jerome said.
Sorin smiled with his mouth only. “Old spirit, new mirror.”
Mara whispered, “Do not joke.”
The speaker above the coffee urn clicked. A polite chime sounded, the same one the hotel used for elevator arrival. The mirror went black. White letters appeared.
REFLECTION SERVICE TEMPORARILY UNAVAILABLE.
Priya made a small sound that was not fear yet but knew the route.
Trevor lifted his phone. “Okay, that’s going online as soon as I get signal.”
His phone screen went black too. For half a second, white text scrolled across it too fast to read. Then his camera app reopened, showing his own face with a beauty filter that made his eyes red.
“Not funny,” he said.
“Nobody’s laughing,” Lena said.