I have the black screen of death

I initially did an erase and install with disk utility and the computer booted up fine.

The next day I got the blinking question mark in the folder at start up. I restarted and since then I’ve got nothing but the black screen.

I have tried to boot in recovery (command R) I have gone through the NVRAM and PRAM reset protocols. Nothing.

I have created a bootable thumb drive with Mojave on it and tried to boot to the thumb drive. Nothing.

I don’t know what OS is on the device. It may have been High Sierra. I have a new drive, not installed yet, and can make a bootable drive with High Sierra on it. Can any one assist with some step by step instructions as to what can be tried next?