Here is a free sample chapter from ‘The Little-Astwick Mysteries - Detained at the Tower’.
The nose imploded with a sickening crunch as the fist of the attacker impacted. The single punch was all it took to down the boy and prevent his surrounding group of friends from retaliating further. The gathered crowd were left disappointed by the sudden conclusion of the fight and started to dissipate.
The boy’s friends scooped him up and dragged him away, one of them holding a handkerchief under the boy’s nose to try and prevent the streaming blood from leaking any further. The attacker was left standing on their own in the playground, no one daring to go near him.
The attacker was breathing fast, still in shock from the events that had just taken place, his hands still balled up into tight fists. He released his fingers and looked down at his right hand and saw the fresh red blood on his knuckles, quickly grabbing his own handkerchief out of his pocket and wiping the blood away.
The playground was now silent and empty. He looked around, feeling completely alone in the world, before sitting down and hugging his knees, his head tucked down between his arms. Unable to control his emotions any longer, tears started pouring down his cheeks. He didn’t want this to happen, but he couldn’t help it. The rage built up inside of him over the weeks and months of constant bullying. He had finally snapped, unable to restrain himself anymore.
Just when he thought things couldn’t get any worse, he heard a voice calling to him. Sadly, it was a voice he knew all too well.
“My office. Now!” barked the voice, from an upstairs window.
He wiped the tears away as best he could with his hands, not wanting to use his now blood stained handkerchief. He looked up at the window where the voice had come from, a room he had been in several times before. The window was on the second floor of the stone and timber mock tudor building, underneath the bell tower that reached up into a point in the sky.
He wanted to run away. To go home and never come back. Instead he found himself walking back into the school building through the old oak door and straight up the stairs to the headmaster’s office.
“Shut the door behind you!” the headmaster ordered.
The attacker complied with the instruction. He stood looking down at his feet, unable to look the headmaster in the eye, knowing he was going to be severely punished.
“Look at me when I’m talking to you!” the headmaster shouted.
He raised his eyes slowly up from his feet, seeing the old wooden floorboards, then the headmaster’s desk, then the headmaster, his long black gown blowing gently in the breeze from the open window. He finally looked at the headmaster’s face, the rage behind the eyes barely concealed by the forced solemn expression on his face. The headmaster took a puff of the pipe in his hand, breathing out a large cloud of smoke, then placing the pipe down onto the desk, next to a thin wooden cane.
The headmaster walked around the desk to stand closer to the attacker, grabbing the long thin cane from the desktop as he passed. He stood directly in front, then swiped the cane onto his open left hand, making a whipping noise as it flew through the air, before coming to a stop when it hit the open hand.
“Back in my day, this is what you would have got!” the headmaster said, holding the cane up vertically in the air to show the attacker, before moving it back down in front of him, stopping it with his left hand again. “But it seems times have changed, so the punishment has changed too.”
“But… but, they started it…” the attacker began trying to explain before being cut off.
“Did I ask for your opinion? Don’t speak out of turn!” the headmaster barked back.
The attacker started sobbing again, his emotions still heated.
“You really are pathetic.” the headmaster said in a condescending tone, accentuating every syllable of the last word. “You know what happens to pathetic little boys who break the school rules?”
“Yes.. yes sir.” the attacker replied through the tears. He had experience of what might be coming from his previous visits to the headmaster’s office. He had after-school detentions, writing lines hundreds of times until his hands cramped up and his writing was unreadable, the headmaster forcing him to continue through the pain.
“You know, but you still haven’t learnt yet. You need to get taught yet another lesson in life.” the headmaster replied back. “This time I have a special punishment lined up for you. No matter how much you cry and sob, no one will come and save you. You need to learn some self control, some self discipline.”
The headmaster walked over to the wall to his left and retrieved something from the deep pocket in his black gown, before inserting it into a slot in the wall. After turning the key, he retrieved it and put it back in the deep pocket for safe keeping. A loud clunking sound came from somewhere within the walls and suddenly a narrow doorway appeared that wasn’t there moments before.
“Four hours should do the trick.” the headmaster spoke, pointing with the cane outstretched into the darkness.
The attacker walked slowly towards the narrow gap that had appeared, stopping on the threshold, unwilling to step any further.
The headmaster grabbed the attacker around the shoulder with his left hand, then said “This is for your own good, Godfrey!”, pushing the boy into the darkness, the door slamming shut behind him with another loud clunk.
The Little-Astwick Mysteries - Detained at the Tower, is available now on Amazon Kindle, Paperback and Kindle Unlimited.
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