Free Neverland Academy by Daelynn Quinn

passed, his own son, Tucker, took over the academy. For the first few
years, everything remained the same. But then he started seeing things, having
strange visions.”
    “He’s
the one who built the church, right?” Daphne asked.
    “Yeah.
He . . . um . . . thought he was the Son of God. One morning his wife woke up
and found him naked and nailed to a cross. Nobody knew how he had done it, but
it ended up in all the local papers. He died shortly after that. Now you can only
imagine how a boy who was raised by such a lunatic would turn out.”
    Finn
and Daphne had come to an intersection and turned right. She was following his
lead and, being so engrossed by the story, had paid no heed to where they were
going.
    “Walter
Trappe wasn’t crazy like his father. In fact he took his grandmother’s maiden
name to distance himself from Tucker’s memory. But he was pretty sick and
twisted. There’s not much information on him, but it’s believed that he
tortured students and fathered several children with the staff.”
    Daphne
and Finn turned again.
    “Vernon
Trappe, our headmaster’s own father, didn’t actually grow up here like the
others. He had been sent away for most of his youth, probably because Walter
wanted him out of the way to perform his nasty deeds. He came back and took
over the academy when Walter died. He knew very little of the plantation’s
history and when he had discovered the old slave tunnels, he had the entrance
sealed in concrete.”
    “But,
we just came in the entrance,” Daphne noted, “didn’t we?”
    In
the faded light that reflected off the walls she could see a dimple appear on
Finn’s face. He smirked.
    “Like
I said, he didn’t grow up here. So he didn’t know that there are many entrances
to the tunnels. The one he sealed up was in the former slave quarters. You saw
that house behind the church, right?”
    Daphne
shook her head. She hadn’t seen it on the way to the academy because of the
darkness, and that hadn’t been part of the tour that Trappe gave.
    “The
slave quarters were rebuilt and now it houses the staff.”
    “Wait.”
Daphne stopped and looked at Finn. “You said there are many entrances. Where
are the others?”
    “There’s
one out in the woods to the east and another one in the old cotton field.”
    “So
why did we use the one that’s right in the middle of the academy where we could
be seen? Isn’t that unnecessarily dangerous?”
    Finn
laughed. “Of course! That’s what makes it so fun!”
    Daphne
wanted to shove him. It’s not that she didn’t like taking risks—she did
it all the time. But on a night like tonight when she was already on edge, he
was pushing her to her limits. She had her hands drawn out, ready to push, when
a cracking noise startled her.
    “What
was that?” she whispered.
    Finn
stopped laughing and listened. “Stay here,” he said, handing her the
flashlight. “I’ll go check it out.” Daphne watched him until he disappeared
into the darkness of the tunnel. She was alone.
    Daphne’s
legs were achy and her soles pulsed with the pain of walking for the past two
hours straight. She wanted to sit down or even lean against the wall. But when
she flashed the light over the bricks she’d thought twice. A spider the size of
a small gerbil, three times bigger than any she’d ever seen before, scampered
up the wall to its web near the ceiling. In the intricate lacework were what
looked like little, round, white balls of cotton. Daphne knew they weren’t
cotton, though. They were eggs. She stood like a statue in the middle of the
tunnel, unmoving except for the rise and fall of her chest.
    Nearby,
she heard a scraping sound. Then a pulsing. Footsteps. And they were getting
closer.
    Daphne
swung the flashlight around in both directions, settling on the one that the
sound seemed to be coming from.
    “Finn?”
Her voice sounded like a squeak of a tiny mouse, barely escaping her lips. She
took a tentative step forward and then