It was almost midnight when Zayden Carter left the library. His backpack dug into his shoulder and his head throbbed from too many hours of statistics. He should've gone straight back to the dorms like everyone else, but instead he cut through the older wing of campus.
Most students avoided it. The walls there sweated mildew, the fluorescent tubes hummed and sputtered like dying insects. But Zayden like it. It was quieter, lonelier, and when he needed to think, he silence helped.
He turned a corner and stopped short. Two girls were standing near the stairwell, voices hushed, eyes darting nervously like children caught somewhere they shouldn't be. Zayden didn't mean to eavesdrop, but their words spilled into the hallway.
"...I told you. It's true. Room 304. The blackboard writes by itself."
The other girl gave a nervous laugh. "You're crazy. Chalk doesn't move on its own."
"I'm serious! It writes names. And the person's dead by the next day. Dead."
Zayden froze. He shifted his weight and the floor creaked beneath him. The girls flinched, turned. Their eyes widened when they saw, then they hurried off, whispering furiously.
He stood there a moment, their words sticking in his head like burrs. The blackboard writes names... the person dies. Ridiculous. Some ghost story to scare freshmen.
Still, he didn't move toward the dorms. His curiosity tugged at him, stronger than common sense. Instead, he went up the stairs, following the chill draft that seeped through the cracks of the old building.
The third floor was darker than the rest. Half the ceiling lights had burned out, and the ones that remained buzzed faintly, giving off a sickly yellow glow. The numbers on the doors were faded, but he found it: 304. The brass plate hung crooked, one screw missing. The door itself was ajar, as though waiting for him.
Zayden pushed. The hinges groaned.
The smell hit first—stale air, dust, something sour like old chalk left in water. His phone light cut across rows of desks. Abandoned. Cobwebs clung to corners. A single moth fluttered drunkenly in the beam.
At the far end of the room, the blackboard stretched across the wall. His chest tightened at the sight of it. It was just slate and wood, empty, harmless. But the stories wouldn't leave his head.
He forced himself to step closer. His sneakers left prints in the dust. He raised the light. Nothing. Just an old board, scratched from decades of lessons no one remembered.
Zayden let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. "See? Nothing," he muttered. His voice sounded too loud in the empty space.
Then—clink.
A piece of chalk rolled off the tray beneath the board and snapped in half on the floor.
Zayden's skin prickled. He swallowed. The building was old, maybe it had shifted.That was all. He crouched, staring at the chalk in the dust. He almost convinced himself—until the other piece of chalk stirred.
It rose. Slowly. Upright. As if held between invisible fingers.
Zayden couldn't move.
The chalk touched the blackboard with a squeal that made his teeth ache. And then it began to write.
One stroke. Then another. White dust sprayed as the chalk carved letters across the slate.
Z.
Zayden's breath caught.
A. Y. D. E. N.
When the chalk clattered back onto the tray, the silence that followed was worse than the sound.
On the blackboard, in uneven, jagged capitals, his name stared back at him:
ZAYDEN.
He staggered back, nearly knocking over a desk. His phone shook in his hand, the beam bouncing wildly across the walls. His mouth was dry.
"Who's there?" His voice cracked. "Stop screwing with me!"
No answer. Only the echo of his own panic.
He stumbled backward, turned, ran. The hallway stretched endlessly, every shadow alive. His footsteps hammered the floor, too fast, too loud. By the time he burst outside into the cold night air, his lungs burned, and sweat chilled his skin.
The old building loomed behind him, windows dark and hollow like blind eyes.
Zayden pressed his hands to his knees, sucking in the air. He told himself he'd imagined it. Stress, exhaustion, maybe even a prank. Anything but what it looked like.
But he knew what he had seen. He knew what the chalk had written.
The blackboard had spelled his name.
And Zayden Carter had never been so sure of his own mortality.
He lingered outside longer than he should have, pacing the cracked pavement under the yellow glow of a flickering streetlamp. Every shadow seemed sharper now, stretched too far across the ground. Even the rustling of leaves made him twitch.
Zayden kept glancing back at the windows of the old wing, half-something pale pressed against the glass, gone in a blink. He told himself it was just the reflection of his phone light, but the thought burrowed in and refused to leave.
"Names don't kill people," he whispered to himself, gripping the strap of his backpack. "Chalk doesn't move. It can't."
But even as he muttered the words, his eyes stung with the truth he didn't want to admit: the board had written his name, and he hadn't dreamed it.
When he finally forced himself toward the dorms, every step felt heavier, as though something invisible was pulling at his heels. He tried to picture tomorrow, waking up, laughing about it with his roommate. But the rumor returned, unshakable: the person's dead by the next day.
And as Zayden pushed into the safety of the lit hallways, the warmth of the dorms swallowing him whole, he realized sleep would not come easily. Not tonight. Maybe not ever again.