It all began ten years ago when a solitary figure climbed the stairs to the fourh floor of the school building.

     She stopped outside the door to classroom 44 and smiled to herself. "44" The Chinese number meaning Double Death.

She wondered whether her students would be frightened when they arrived for school in an hour's time. No, she decided, they wouldn't. Young people didn't believe in old superstitions like that.Her name was Miss Wydre, and she was a new teacher starting work at a new high school year.

     She opened the door and stepped into the empty classroom. It had a musty smell, and little specks of dust seemed to float in the air like tiny insects. Long fingers of early morning light stretched across the desks and floor

    Miss Wydre was a very good teacher, a little fussy perhaps, but very dedicated. And that was why she had come upstairs so early. She wanted to write her lesson pointers on the whiteboard to save time in class. She set her books down on her table and looked around for a marker pen. She checked her notes and got to work. The marker squeked its way across the board as she wrote:

MAIN CITIES OF EUROPE

     She wast lost in concentration, printing her words with precision,and so did not notice the first signs of danger. Like when the skin of her face slowly began to blister and crack open. Nor was she aware thet her forehead had begun to buckle and melt.

     It was only when something stung her eye that she paused. Perspiration, she tought , realizing that she felt strangely warm. She wiped her eye and discovered her fingertips were covered with a mysterious flesh colored substance."How odd", she muttered to herself. She looked back at the whiteboard and frowned. Everything she had written on it was gone. How could that be? She touched the board, wondering why its surface was blank and notice her finger had left a pinkish smudge.

     A numbing sensation was spreading through her nerves. She lifted a hand to touch her cheeks and caught her breath. Where were her cheeks? They feltlike sponges and her chin seemed soggy. Maybe she was coming down with a fever, she gasped. She snapped open her bag and pulled our her mirror. An instant later she reeled back. The face reflected in the little square of glass was not her own. It was more than a skull, the remains of her bones, sagging and sinking, and her eyebass blank and swollen. Her jaw was jelly, drooping and trickling down her neck like pink lava. Her hair was like withered straw, dead and dry.

       The mirror slipped from her skinless fingers and shattered at her feet. Her body was contracting, her stomach caving in on itself, and her legs were tingling with her pain. Miss Wydre felt as though she were growing older, as though her body were living years in minutes. She opened what was left of to scream, only to discover her lungs did not respond to her commands. They had turned into sludged. In her last moments of conscious thought, Miss Wydre wearily wondered why she was dissolving. She turned to the board, her melting fingers lifting the marker pen

       She needed help, and if she couldn't speak the word, at least she could write it. She had barely managed to print the letters H E L when the whiteboard began to shimmer as though it were a sheet of water ruffled by a breeze on a hot day. The pen fell from her skin-dripping fingers and rolled away.

        And then the whiteboard had become simply white space and she was through it and beyond it. When it rippled again, she was no more, Miss Wydre had ceased to exist.

        An hour later, when the first people came in search of her, three letters printed on the whiteboard greeted them....

H E L