The day after Sella's horrific death, the atmosphere at SMK Negeri 04 was still shrouded in deep mourning, mixed with mystical rumors that were spreading more wildly by the hour. The first recess bell rang shrilly, breaking the silence in the corridors. Yet the school cafeteria, usually loud with students' jokes and laughter, now felt much dimmer and emptier.
I sat in the corner of a wooden cafeteria bench beside Rika, who was busy stirring her sweet iced tea with a plastic straw. Her face still held a pale cast, exactly like she had looked at the mourning house yesterday afternoon.
Suddenly, Nina and Ria approached our table, followed by Anti—the quiet Beauty and Makeup student with thick glasses. Nina wasn't carrying a bowl of food or a glass of anything. Her puffy, sleep-deprived eyes fixed on the three of us with an intensely curious gleam.
"Lana, Rika," Nina whispered, leaning over our table to make sure the students at the next table couldn't hear her. "We have to try it again."
I watched Rika nearly choke on her own saliva. "Are you crazy, Nin? Sella really died yesterday! Don't you remember how panicked we were in class?"
"That's exactly why!" Nina cut in firmly, her voice half a whisper but filled with pressure. "The board predicted Sella's death before any of us knew she had hung herself. It knew something we didn't! Aren't you curious? It was like Sella was trying to tell us something."
I tried to cut in, but Ria immediately interrupted, her brow furrowed.
"Lana, Rika. This time we'll play somewhere completely safe," she coaxed, her expression pleading. Her thin hands gripped the black-cloth-wrapped Ouija board tightly beneath her arm. "Anti unlocked the old abandoned classroom building behind the laboratory. It's deserted there. No teachers or school staff will pass by."
I glanced at Anti. The girl with glasses merely nodded, revealing a rusty iron key in her palm. "I got the key from my uncle, the school groundskeeper, this morning. That room has been tightly locked for five years."
Anxiety and the pull of an unsolved mystery churned in my chest. The image of Sella floating yesterday afternoon, along with her broken-off message naming "Mr. Im—," continued to haunt my thoughts. In the end, I nodded helplessly, agreeing to go with them.
The old abandoned classroom building stood at the very back of the school grounds, hidden behind the dense foliage of an ancient banyan tree and overgrown bushes. The air inside the eight-by-six-meter room was intensely damp, cold, and smelled of rotting dust mixed with bat droppings. Its wooden windows had been nailed shut from the outside, leaving only thin slivers of midday sunlight filtering through the gaps between the boards.
In the middle of the room, four old wooden benches had been arranged in a circle. Nina, Ria, Anti, and Rika sat around the Ouija board spread across a dusty plywood table. The tips of their index fingers rested on an ancient, yellow-gold metal coin.
I pulled over a broken wooden chair and sat in the corner of the room, about three meters from their circle. I flatly refused to touch the coin. Grandma with the dragon-headed staff and the betel-chewing woman stood on either side of my chair, looking around the locked room.
Nina began to close her eyes, leading the summoning chant in a trembling, monotonous voice amid the room's dimness:
"Wooden board, golden coin, beings of darkness passing by... Come, come, gather here..."
When she recited the chant for the third time, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. A sudden, bone-piercing chill blew in from the corners of the tightly locked room.
That was when my vision surpassed the limits of ordinary human sight.
Inside the empty room, which at first had contained only the five of us, horrifying shadows slowly took shape from the darkness along the walls. The room suddenly filled with dozens of ghosts. Their faces were as pale as those of drowned corpses, and their bodies were all incomplete in some way.
There was a woman with long, loose hair and half of her face destroyed and peeled away; an adult man in shabby clothes with no right arm; and bluish-faced children crawling and twisting across the wooden ceiling. They all crowded around the table, their empty, blackened eyes radiating an overwhelming aura of hunger.
As soon as Nina finished reciting the chant, the ghosts let out silent howls and fought among themselves, scrambling to touch the ancient coin and possess the Ouija board. My eyes watered as I stared at the crowd of invisible creatures pressing closer and closer around my friends' circle.
I screamed silently inside my head, hugging myself in the corner of the chair. The Ouija game was no longer merely a simple summoning of spirits. It had become a supernatural gateway, opening a portal for dozens of wild astral beings at the school.
Suddenly, the crowd of disfigured ghosts was forcibly split apart. A figure floated forward from the middle of them, pushing the other creatures back.
It was Sella. But her appearance this time was far more horrifying than it had been at the mourning house that afternoon. Her brown complexion looked bluish-white, like ice. Her neck hung broken to the right at an unnatural angle. Her blackened tongue protruded far beyond her bruised lips, while her round eyes bulged upward, exposing almost all of their whites.
With a single invisible knock, Sella's apparition forced its way through the golden coin on the wooden board.
SREEEKKK!
The ancient coin beneath Nina, Ria, Anti, and Rika's fingers suddenly jerked wildly and violently. Rika shrieked in shock, but her finger seemed magnetically bound to the golden metal surface.
The coin shot across the board, spelling out the letters one by one: A - K - U S - E - L - L - A. M - A - I - N Y - U - K.
"Sella!" Nina squeaked in shock, her body trembling violently as she stared at the coin moving on its own. "She... she's really Sella!"
The metal coin didn't stop. Its movements grew more aggressive, gouging the surface of the wooden board and producing a shrill scraping sound as it spelled out the next message: C - A - R - I O - R - A - N - G B - E - R - I - N - I - S - I - A - L I.
"The initial I?" Ria whispered hoarsely, sweat dripping from her forehead. "Who has the initial I?"
I suddenly remembered Sella's hysterical scream in the school health room yesterday: "Imran! Let me go!" And her broken-off words at the mourning house: "Mr. Im—"
Mr. Imran! The new Art History and Culture teacher had the initial I!
Before I could open my mouth to shout a warning, a tremendous boom thundered from outside the building.
KRAKABOOM!
A deafening crash of lightning and thunder slammed into the roof of the old building, shaking the entire ground and the walls of the locked room. The violent shock made Nina, Ria, Anti, and Rika jolt in terror. Their fingertips all broke away from the ancient coin at exactly the same instant!
At that precise moment, the golden coin flew into the air and split in two on the table.
I jerked my head up. Sella's apparition, with its broken neck and bulging eyes, suddenly tilted its head back. From its ruined throat came an incredibly shrill, piercing laugh that echoed through every corner of the enclosed room.
"Xixiixixixi... Hahaha...!"
Sella's apparition shot upward at terrifying speed, flying through the room's dusty wooden ceiling until it vanished without a trace, leaving behind a thin, foul-smelling smoke that slowly dissipated in the midday air.