The Locked Chalkboard

It was a Tuesday afternoon, and the late monsoon rain hammered against the windows of St. Agnes Hall, an exclusive girls’ school tucked into the hills of Baguio. My name is Maya, and I was a sophomore that year, cursed to share a classroom with the so-called ‘golden girls’ of our batch: the debate team captain, the star sprinter, the queen bee, and their acolytes. They fluttered around the room like bright, poisonous butterflies, while I sat in the back, pressing my nose to the cold glass, watching the fog roll down the mountain.

Our adviser, Ms. Villanueva, had been called to a faculty meeting, leaving us to ‘supervised study’—which for the golden girls meant chaos. They had dragged the chairs into a circle, and were gossiping about a new girl who had transferred from Manila. ‘She’s so weird,’ said Bea, the queen bee, flipping her long, straight hair. ‘Her eyes are always darting around, and she won’t talk to anyone.’ I had seen her that morning, a pale girl with dishwater-blonde hair, clutching a worn-out notebook. She sat alone in the corner, ignoring everyone.

As the rain worsened, the electricity flickered, and the lights buzzed. A few girls shrieked in mock terror. Then, as if on cue, the door to the supply closet at the front of the room swung open with a slow, creaking moan. The room fell silent. Bea laughed nervously. ‘Who left that open?’ she said. No one answered. I glanced at the new girl—she was staring at the closet, her face ashen. ‘Close it,’ someone whispered. But no one moved. The door swayed slightly, as if pushed by a ghost.

Then, a sound emerged from the closet: a rhythmic scratching, like nails on a chalkboard, but slower, more deliberate. It sent chills down my spine. The girls exchanged nervous glances. ‘It’s just a rat,’ said the star sprinter, but her voice shook. I stood up, my heart pounding, and took a step toward the closet. The scratching stopped. I felt a cold draft, and the chalkboard behind the teacher’s desk began to move. It slid sideways, revealing a dark gap in the wall, just wide enough for a person to slip through.

I hadn’t noticed before, but there was a strange mark on the chalkboard: a small, black handprint, as if someone had pressed their palm against it and left a stain. The new girl gasped and pointed. ‘He’s here,’ she whispered. ‘He’s been waiting.’ Before anyone could ask who ‘he’ was, the lights went out completely. In the darkness, I heard the scratching again, now coming from the gap in the wall. Then, a soft, almost imperceptible voice said, ‘You shouldn’t have opened the door.’

When the lights flickered back on, the chalkboard was back in place, and the closet door was shut. But the handprint was gone. And the new girl was missing. We searched the entire school, but she was nowhere to be found. The principal called her parents, who said she had never boarded the bus. The police searched the woods, but nothing. A week later, a maintenance worker found a small, black handprint on the back of the chalkboard, as if someone had tried to escape from the wall. And whenever it rained, I could hear the scratching, coming from inside the wall, right behind the teacher’s desk.

To this day, I can’t look at a chalkboard without checking for that handprint. And I wonder, if the new girl had only told us his name, could we have saved her? But I know the answer. He had been waiting in that gap for years, and we, the golden girls and the invisible ones, had finally unlocked his prison with our careless gossip and our fear. And now, he’s always listening, always waiting, for someone else to open that door again.