The door creaked open.
The sound echoed through the abandoned corridor, too loud for a building that had once been the best school in the world. I hesitated before stepping inside. Something rustled in the darkness above me, a dry, secretive sound, as if the air itself were shifting to make space for my presence.
I stared, but I could see nothing beyond the vague shapes of old suitcases piled against the walls. The attic smelt damp, stale, and faintly sweet, like things forgotten for too long. I wedged the door open with my foot, and light poured into the darkness in a narrow, trembling blade.
The floor was unfinished. Exposed beams crossed the space like fragile ribs. I balanced upon them carefully, because I knew that if I stepped onto the plaster, I could fall straight into the classroom below. That room, they said, had been sealed after the last student disappeared.
A cobweb brushed my face. I flinched as I felt the sudden tickle of a spider crawling across my cheek. The air grew darker and colder the farther I moved from the door. Moth-eaten rugs lay folded in the corners, smelling sharply of mothballs. Thick dust powdered every surface, softening edges, swallowing time.
This was where the lesson was taught.
Not in classrooms. Not with books or screens. Here.
The school had once been famous. World leaders, innovators, and visionaries had walked its halls. The brochures spoke of excellence, discipline, and brilliance. But none of that explained why so many of its former students went on to become something else entirely: figures people followed without knowing why, voices that gathered attention effortlessly, faces that seemed to draw agreement out of thin air.
They said those students had won the White Hand.
No teacher ever explained how.
In the age of technology, there were no teachers for this lesson.
I moved deeper into the attic, my breath slow, deliberate. The silence pressed against my ears. Then I saw it.
A hand.
It rested on a wooden crate near the far wall. Quite still. White as marble. Perfectly clean, untouched by dust. At first, I thought it was a sculpture, some forgotten symbol left behind by a previous generation.
Then it moved.
Not suddenly. Not violently. One finger twitched, almost lazily, as if testing the air. I froze, my heart pounding so loudly I was certain it would give me away. The hand did not reach for me. It simply waited.
I understood then what the school never put into words.
Winning the White Hand was not about strength or intelligence. It was not about courage, either. It was about stepping forward without being told how. About choosing movement over instruction. Presence over permission.
The hand shifted again, turning slightly toward the light. I sensed—not heard, not saw—that it was measuring me. Weighing something invisible.
I took one more step along the beam. The wood creaked softly beneath my foot. Dust rose and hung in the air like breath.
Behind me, the darkness seemed to close in. Ahead of me, the hand remained still.
If I reached it, I would never be the same. If I turned back, I would leave empty-handed, and nothing in my life would ever truly follow me again.
So I reached out.
And the light went out.
The darkness did not feel empty.
It pressed against me, heavy with expectation. I sensed the hand before I saw it again, no longer white but luminous in its own way, as if it absorbed everything around it. The silence thickened, charged with a force that was neither sound nor thought, but something closer to gravity.
I understood then what winning meant.
The White Hand did not grant power. It demanded it. Not authority, but presence. It drew energy from those who dared to reach without guidance, who stepped forward without permission in a world obsessed with instructions and algorithms.
The school had been abandoned because it no longer fit its time. In an era of technology, leadership was taught through screens, formulas, simulations. But this lesson could not be explained. It could only be taken.
When my fingers touched the hand, I felt nothing human. No warmth. No pulse. And yet something moved through me, aligning thoughts, stripping hesitation, sharpening intention. The darkness receded, not because the light returned, but because I no longer needed it.
Those who left this place carried no diploma. No proof. Only a certainty that others would feel. People would listen. Follow. Trust. Not because they were convinced, but because something around them had shifted.
That was why the school had closed its doors.
Not because the lesson failed.
But because too few were willing to reach out.
Bonus: see the video: Stephen King talks about his writing process.
- The best description of writing a novel that I ever heard, it’s actually in Thomas Williams’s book, The hair of Harold Roux, which is about a novelist trying to write a novel and it just covers like one or two days in this process, and a lot of things happen to him. It’s a fabulous book but he says that writing a novel is like building a little campfire on an empty dark plane and one by one these characters come out of the dark, and each one has a little pile of wood and they put it on the fire, and if you’re very lucky before the fire goes out. It’s this big bonfire and all the characters stand around it and warm themselves and that’s the way it’s always been for me.
@Yolanda Muriel 
yolandamuriel.com 