Prime Vampire Territory by Emily Howcroft

Staff pick - Teens Category

The human mind is a strange creature. It has the power to create marvellous wonders, but tends to stick to its ordinary routine. It’s very picky what it chooses to believe as well–some things are extremely peculiar, but are accepted without a second thought. Others blend in, yet are lingered upon by the brain like some stubborn stain that refuses to wash away.

I suppose this was the case with my classmates. They were nice enough, a little abnormal in some ways, but I’m sure they thought the same of me. Nevertheless, the facts remained–their minds were so jaded by the modern world that they simply couldn’t (wouldn’t?) see what I could.

Magic.

It’s there, you know. Loitering in the cracks of the earth where the twisted idea of normality has failed to seep its evil fingers. Dawdling in the nooks and crannies, long forgotten by human society but not yet vanished from the face of the globe. If your mind is like so many others and refuses to believe me, I’ll prove it. Ever felt the sting of a mosquito, or the bite of an insect?

Those were pixies, seeking their next meal. Ever lost socks in the dryer? That’ll be a goblin, forming his hoard from your unicorn knee-highs.

The reason I’m telling you this is because I’m hoping—no, praying—that the written word will prove more powerful than the spoken. Nobody believes me when I tell them the tale of the tenth grade camping trip, so I’m forming a narrative in the desperate gamble that someone will recognise the truth within this fantasy before I am captured in the Place of Madness.

Our story begins when twenty-one Year Tens were positively kidnapped and transported to a barren field kilometres away from civilisation, and told they would be surviving there for the next week. It was supposed to be a ‘group-bonding exercise’ to ‘strengthen our friendships’, but as the stormy weather dampened the mood, all it did was encourage rowdiness and general hooliganism while the supervisors cowered over hot cups of tea in their shack.

I, gifted with a healthy amount of common sense, noticed the signs of intrusive wrath amongst the magic-folk before anyone else even began to consider the prospect that something was afoot. It started as most catastrophes do, with small nuisances. Brendan, an annoyingly handsome and unfortunately dim seventeen-year-old (he’d been held back a few years), lost his left shoe in a deep mud puddle. The majority of the camp just assumed it was bad luck on his part, but I was the only one who recognised the antics of a Kappa hiding in the wetlands. Then Lillian, a tall, blonde-haired girl with glasses, suffered an inflamed bite on her ankle. It was automatically put down to an insect, but the marks were oddly humanoid and I recognised that a malicious faerie was at fault.

The incidents only swelled from there onwards, rising from minor inconveniences to major issues. Food supplies dwindled, either pronounced missing or contaminated with some poisonous substance sourced from deep amongst the trees. The brakes on one of the buses were torn, nearly resulting in a tragedy involving a certain Miss Perrier as she visited the local village to find groceries. Shortly afterwards, Mr Thompson was given a bandaged hand after an episode with the faulty gas cooker, and the school’s mascot, a raggedy ginger tomcat unoriginally named Tom, was last seen strolling into the forest and never seen again.

The camp’s leaders decided it was a string of bad luck born from being in the wrong place at the wrong place, and did their best to keep student morale high. They were wrong in their judgements and inaccurate in their conclusions, for I could see through it all and they were terribly mistaken. I saw the teeth marks of an elf on the broken wires, the hidden, highly explosive garnetweed tucked beneath the cooker. I was the one who found Tom’s mangled body, burnt by a dragon’s flame behind the gear sheds.

By this point, dear reader, I’m sure you’re questioning my credibility. I’m sure your mind skips over my repugnant tales, selling them short as fantastical stories for primary school children, just like the white-coated doctors and nurses do. But if that is what you believe, then answer me this dear reader–where did my classmates go? Certainly, they must have gone somewhere–I ask you—nay, I implore you—to find an answer to the mystery of the chips of bone discovered after the camp, the blood stains painted in jagged patterns across the panicked footprints. No? You can’t?

Of course not.

But that’s all right. I wouldn’t expect you to–your mind simply doesn’t allow you that privilege. It doesn’t work like mine, it works like the minds of my unfortunate classmates. I believe that if you were there, on that fateful camp with me, you, too, would have blindly followed Brendan and his goons like sheep to a shepherd. You, too, would have believed that a hike up a mountain on overgrown paths was a good idea. You wouldn’t have faked a stomach ache like I did. You wouldn’t have watched from the tents as I did, sitting there with a growing ball of dread. You would have been one of them, marching off with a stupid grin lacing your features, unaware of the danger you faced as you walked yourself straight into prime vampire territory.