"Now what do we do?" I asked.

         Miss Hayoung was unconscious, the caretaker was slumped in a chair that groaned under his weight, and my friends were staring at the strange pink stains on the floor where Miss Wydre's remains had been."It isn't blood," Zico decided. "More like melted flesh".

        "It's hideous," Eyra shivered. "What do you think we saw? I mean, was Miss Wydre a ghost? Or was she somehow still alive?"

        "She looked like she might have been both," said Zico. "Maybe she's kind of suspended between two worlds...not quite alive,not quite dead..." He nudged Ukwon, who had been down on his knees taking Miss Hayoung's pulse. "Why don't you write her another message?". The caretaker jumped up. A film of sweat glistened on his forehead.

        "No, don't!" he begged. "You saw what happened the last time.She tried to rip out my throat with her claws. If she comes back she might kill me before anyone can stop her"."But why did she try to kill you?" I asked him."Did you ever do anything to hurt her while she was alive?".

        The caretaker shrugged. "How could i have? You see, we all started work here on the same day, ten years ago, when this school was new. We were all strangers to one another. I don't think i ever spoke more than ten words to her before she vanished that very first morning".

        "So you were all new?" Ukwon eyed him curiously. "You, and Miss Wydre, and Miss Hayoung?"

         "And everyone else," the hulking man nodded.

        "But it was only Miss Wydre who vanished?" Ukwon probed. "She was the only one," the caretaker nodded again.

         "But what really happened to her when she vanished?" Zico questioned. "I mean, did you see her face? It looked like she'd been melted ot tortured".He looked at us desperately. "Is that what they do to people in the world behind this board?". The caretaker fell back into his chair. "It's a bad business. I think you should forget it".

        "How can we?" I said firmly. "As Supernatural investigators, this is the most interesting case we've ever worked on. And nothing really makes sense. There are so many things that don't quite connect". I looked around the shadowy abandoned classroom.

       "And everything started here in this room with Miss Wydre's disappearance". i crossed to the whiteboard and ran my hand over its surface. "It looks so ordinary. Like the board you'd find in any classroom , in any high school, anywhere in the world. So what makes this one so different?"

       Eyra stood beside me. "And why is this whiteboard tha gateway to another world?". "Maybe the school was built on haunted ground," suggested Zico. Or maybe it stands in a place where two worlds meet, and maybe one of those worlds is a good world, and one is a bad world, and they're always in conflict".

       "If you say were true, every classroom in our school would be hanted," i argued. "Not just this one"."Maybe someone put a curse on it, or a spell," speculated Eyra.

        "No," Ukwon shook his head. "There's more to it than that".

        He walked over to where Miss Hayoung lay stretched out on the floor. He carefully eased the broken marker pen from her grasp. He examined the broken pen for a moment, then got up and stood in front of the caretaker. "Inseung, you said Miss Wydre might have been infected with something when she used this marker pen. What did you mean?"

        "Well maybe it contained something... like a chemical... like a bacteria...like something we humans don't even know about... maybe when it came into contact with her skin, it did all those terrible things to her..." The caretaker's shoulders rose and fell. "I guess that's why i left that pen on the floor all those years. I didn't want to become infected, too".

        "But i used it and i wasn't infected," Ukwon reminded him. "Maybe you were lucky," the caretaker grunted. "Maybe i was," said Ukwon, a strange expression forming on his face. "Or maybe it was something else".

       "What?" asked Zico

       "Maybe i wasn't infected because i'm not a teacher".