The Dawnvel Druids by - (summer beach reads TXT) 📖

12

There was something terribly wrong with Dawnvel. Bobby only arrived at the academy yesterday, yet he’d already heard a dozen horror stories from the other students.

He stood tentatively by his bedroom window, gazing at the sky as the sun died slowly. He hadn’t been able to relax since he arrived.

The dormitory block was at the far left of campus, so he had a great view of the whole college. Dawnvel’s grand castle stood on the biggest hill he’d ever seen, leering over the town beyond. It was a brooding brown fortress, the rock weathered and crawling with ivy. The castle looked older than Dawnvel’s medieval town itself, like it should’ve crumbled into dust long ago and was chock-full of vengeful ghosts. Bobby didn’t know if it was ghosts bumping off the students, but he wasn’t writing anything off, not after what he’d seen on his train journey here.

He pulled out his old, battered phone the orphanage janitor had been kind enough to give him a year ago and reread the article for the umpteenth time.

He’d looked up Dawnvel academy as soon as he’d been offered a place. It was the only bad review of Dawnvel he could find, but he suspected the others had been deleted, some sort of government conspiracy perhaps.

He'd kept telling himself the article simply couldn’t be true. The writer claimed that last year two students had died and even a teacher had been found with his throat slit. Apparently, a number of strange instances had occurred, which the faculty always had excuses for, like gas leaks and even random acts

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of lightning. Bobby swiped his finger down the screen, rereading the last paragraph of the article:

I know there’s something going on at Dawnvel. Maybe it’s a crime syndicate that uses the school, maybe it’s the government. All I can say is do not go there! I cannot promise you’ll make it out alive.

Dread twisted his guts with one hand and pushed a lump into his throat with the other. At first, Bobby had assumed the ex-student was being dramatic, but now he was realising how right the pupil was. On his first day, he’d seen one girl crying on the phone to her mother, insisting her dormitory was haunted by a poltergeist, and another boy swear to his friends he’d seen a monster in the nearby forest. But that paled to what he’d woken up to today. The staff said a student had decided to drop out, but rumour around campus was that his dorm room had been filled with blood.

And of course, there was the mysterious gang of students everyone had dubbed, the Perfects. Bobby didn’t know much about them, but he’d heard whispers from his classmates’ conversations about how dangerous they were.

Stop thinking about it, you’ll give yourself a panic attack. Bobby lay back on his bed and used his phone to distract himself instead. He went back to looking at internet memes and scrolling through his favourite tumblr sites. At least this place had free Wifi, despite how old it looked. Since he’d never had any friends, (every time he got close he’d end up leaving the area due to a foster family

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breakdown,) the internet had always been his main source of entertainment.

Without it, the soul-crushing boredom would’ve been a hundred times worse.

He enjoyed the fansites and forums on his favourite TV shows. He’d always been drawn to the fantasy and horror shows. Terror at Timbley High was his most beloved show. He sometimes wished his life was solving grisly murders by mythical monsters like the Byron brothers in Timbley, before he realised he was terrified of spiders and mice, let alone stuff like werewolves and mummies.

His stomach rumbled once more and Bobby knew he could ignore it no longer. He had to leave the sanctuary of his room to grab some dinner. It was too early to go to bed and hope everything would magically be better in the morning.

He looked to the empty bed opposite. His roommate might well be a missing student too. Bobby had arrived a week late to the new term. Apparently, his room had been occupied in that first week, but there was no sign of him now.

He’d checked every inch of the room and it’s ensuite bathroom for anything mysterious, but all that turned up was a dead plant on the windowsill.

He considered taking his bag with him as he made to leave his room. The small bag was the only luggage he had for the boarding school, yet it held all of his life belongings. Three sets of clothes, half a bottle of shower gel and a toothbrush. Lucky him. He decided against it and pulled open the ancient wooden door before descending the stairs.

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Curfew wouldn’t be long now, so he had to head to the cafeteria quick. He would’ve been fast anyway, his anxiety overtaking him over what he’d seen on the train.

He passed by the academy’s newer buildings, shiny, silver blocks full of classrooms for every education subject and spaced out around acres of land, complete with both a rugby and football pitch, as well as tennis courts and swimming pools.

Bobby knew he had some brains, but he wasn’t elite-level smart. Only students who could afford the huge tuition fees went here, or else ultra-talented people given scholarships, which made it all the weirder he’d been awarded a place. He was due a bit of luck though, after having a whole life full of the bad.

He walked a neat path surrounded by patches of wild flowers as he read the building’s titles around him. Maths Block or History Block was printed in black lettering above their doors. The campus was huge, but he was starting to find his way around.

He looked for shapes in the early evening shadows, seriously on edge. What he’d witnessed was burned into his brain. He saw the spectral shadow whenever he closed his eyes. It had been a shimmering scarlet haze that vaguely resembled a man, gliding through the air, directly toward his train window. But then the thing disappeared in a blur as his train sped on. None of the other

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passengers had heard or seen anything, just looked at Bobby like he was a lunatic when he asked them. Maybe he was.

His heart screamed at him that he’d seen something real and supernatural, whilst his mind assured him he was seeing things.

He’d seen those ghost hunter shows on TV, but he’d dismissed them as fake.

Bobby hadn’t believed ghosts were real, but he couldn’t deny what he’d seen with his own eyes.

If Bobby hadn’t have needed to be here so badly, he would’ve stayed on the train when it pulled into Dawnvel station and until it was on the other side of the country. He had no time for ghostbusting. But Dawnvel was his last chance. It was a new future he’d never expected to get a chance at. He couldn’t let his wild imagination and too much watching Scooby Doo scare him off. He sure as hell didn’t have a home to return to anyway.

Bobby shook his head as he walked, as if that would stop his mind working overtime like always. He was being stupid, on the off chance he had seen something supernatural, it didn’t mean it would follow him here.

He’d never heard of Dawnvel before he’d applied. The large town was nestled away in the heart of the British countryside between Oxford and London. Bobby had lived all over in his sixteen years, bouncing around as foster family after foster family decided they didn’t want him after all, like finding out the new package they’d ordered was broken.

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Dozens of students milled around the courtyard outside the cafeteria. Most were laughing and chatting, but Bobby noticed they gave a wide berth to a group in the centre. It was three of the Perfects. He thought there might be six or seven of them in total.

He didn’t even notice the boy leaning against the wall behind him until he spoke.

“You alright bro?”

Bobby looked around, making sure it was him being spoken too. The other boy smiled at him warmly. He was African-American, with amber eyes and finely shaped eyebrows.

Before Bobby could formulate a response, the boy stuck out his hand. “My name’s Maurice Michael Jr. But my friends call me Mo,” he spoke with a general American accent.

“I’m Maurice. I mean, hi. I’m Bobby,” he said in a rush.

“Call me Mo.” He took a swig from the can of energy drink he held.

Despite the student’s pleasant demeanour, Bobby still felt awkward.

“You’re one of the new kids, right? Where you from then?”

“I don’t know really. Somerset, I guess.” Bobby replied. “Although I lived in Devon before that, and the New Forest before that.”

“So you moved around a lot then, your parents in the army or sumin?”

“No, they’re dead.” Bobby winced at his accidental bluntness. “Or they abandoned me shortly after I was born. I don’t know which.”

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“Ah, sorry to hear that dude.” Mo’s face fell. “That’s horrible.”

Bobby shrugged. “It’s okay. I never even met them.”

He looked around the courtyard in the silence that followed. His eyes fell upon the Perfects once again. The trio were seemingly discussing something important.

One of them caught Bobby’s eye especially. Her skin was a dark gold and fringe-cut black hair framed a flawless face, set with bright grey eyes. A single golden stud glistened in her nose, and small gold hoops hung from her ears.

“Watch out for that lot,” said Mo.

“Yeah, I overheard the other new students talking about them. Are the Perfects a sort of gang or something?”

“Na, Perfects is what everyone nicknamed them since not only are they top of their class-smart and ridiculously good looking, they’re filthy rich,” Mo said.

“They even have their own house on campus instead of dorms like everyone else.”

Mo pointed toward the tall blond boy in the trio. “That’s Zander Murphy, captain of the football team. Zander’s the ringleader of the Perfects.”

Mo motioned to the other boy, who had long dark hair and was twice as broad as the average man, his shirt straining with all the muscle. “That’s Warren Macleod. He’s the rugby captain and the one even bullies are scared of. You see why they’re called the Perfects now?”

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“Yeah, but why stay away from them?” There were popular kids at every school he’d been too, but people usually flocked to