The Misfits Club

by Kieran Crowley

  The game is afoot.

  Brian wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean. Even though they weren’t due to meet up for another couple of hours, he turned his bike around and headed in the opposite direction, straight to the twins’ house.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Adamu home was a semi-detached house on an estate on the other side of the town from Brian’s. Unlike Brian and Hannah, the twins had lots of brothers and sisters and their house always seemed to be overflowing with people, especially when their grandparents and cousins visited from Nigeria.

  Brian flung his bike on the garden path and rang the doorbell. A couple of minutes later, the twins’ father, a great big bear of a man, bleary-eyed and dressed in a T-shirt and pyjama bottoms – and with amazingly bouffant bed hair – opened the door. If someone had woken Mucky too early, normally any time before twelve, he’d have thrown a temper tantrum, but Sam and Chris’s dad was a much calmer person.

  ‘I think I should give you your own key, Brian. It’d make my life a lot easier,’ he said, shaking his head ruefully. ‘Make yourself at home. I’m going back to bed.’

  It was only then that Brian remembered it was the twins’ father’s only day off work and his one chance of a lie-in. He’d apologize later. He went into the living room and found Sam fast asleep on the couch. He often spent the night there if he fell asleep watching one of the action movies he loved so much. Brian always liked that living room. It wasn’t anything like as posh as Hannah’s, but it was comfortable. He felt that if he spilled or broke something while he was there that it wasn’t the biggest deal in the world. The house was remarkably quiet.

  He shoved at Sam’s duvet-covered legs with the toe of his trainers. His friend grunted and turned over, burying his face in a cushion. Brian tried again.

  ‘Get lost, Chris, or I’ll batter you,’ Sam said in a muffled voice.

  ‘It’s not Chris – it’s me.’

  Sam sat up immediately, rubbing sleep from his eyes. ‘Hey, what are you doing here?’

  ‘Text from Chris. Something about a game with a foot.’

  ‘Who knows what that guy’s up to,’ Sam said. He climbed off the couch and went to the end of the stairs. ‘Chriiiis!’ he roared.

  ‘Keep it down. I’m trying to sleep,’ his father roared back.

  ‘Sorry, Dad. Won’t happen again,’ Sam shouted.

  A few minutes later, Chris bounded down the stairs, his hair slicked with gel, his cheeks rosy. He was, much to Sam’s irritation, a morning person.

  He had a rolled-up A3 sheet under his arm.

  ‘Morning,’ Chris said chirpily.

  ‘Hey. What’s going on?’ Brian asked. ‘What was that text you sent me?’

  ‘Amelia got a picture of the so-called ghost. Hannah texted me this morning.’

  ‘What?’ Brian was astonished. This was a huge deal and he was only hearing about it now? ‘Let me see it.’

  ‘All in good time,’ Chris said. ‘Almost ready to go? Sam – hurry up and get dressed. We’re meeting them in twenty minutes and then we’re off to the cinema. Mrs F is going to drive us. Want to leave your bike round the back, Brian?’

  ‘You’re really not going to show me the picture? Come on, Chris, don’t be a jerk.’

  ‘He can’t help it – it’s his default setting. I can wrestle it off him, if you like,’ Sam said, coming back downstairs in a clean T-shirt and grabbing a couple of jam doughnuts and a bar of chocolate for breakfast.

  ‘Nah, I’ll wait,’ Brian sighed.

  ‘Dad, we’re heading out,’ Sam roared up the stairs. ‘Did you hear me? We’re going to the cinema.’

  ‘Of course I heard you. There are dead people who heard you. Does anyone care whether I sleep or not? Is it really too much to expect to have one morning to myself?’ his father called back.

  ‘Sorry, Dad,’ Sam shouted. ‘Forgot you were sleeping.’

  ‘I only told you two minutes ago,’ the twins’ father wailed.

  ‘Yeah, sorry for making all the noise,’ Chris bellowed.

  ‘Me too. Didn’t mean to wake you earlier,’ Brian roared.

  They were quickly out of the door and didn’t get to hear his sweary response.

  Amelia and Hannah were waiting for them when they arrived. They were sitting on the wall outside Hannah’s house, deep in the conversation. They looked as if they had been friends forever. Amelia’s eyes were red from lack of sleep and Brian thought she looked exhausted. Hannah wasn’t in her usual uniform of T-shirt, jeans and trainers. She was a little more dressed up than she usually was, and for once her hair wasn’t scraped back in a ponytail.

  Chris cleared his throat, as if he was about to make a big speech.

  ‘Before we get down to business,’ he began.

  ‘Just get on with it, Chris,’ Brian said. ‘We have to talk about the ghost.’

  ‘Not here,’ Hannah said, looking around to check if anyone was watching her from the house. ‘Too much of a chance that someone’s eavesdropping. We’ll talk at the cinema.’

  ‘Perfect,’ Chris said. ‘And before we discuss it we have to do things properly. This could become our first proper adventure, or mystery, or whatever, in years and according to our constitution . . .’

  He held up a document, an old school copy book. Constitution was too strong a word for it – it was a set of rules for the club that they’d written when they were eight years old.

  ‘Wait,’ Amelia said. ‘Did you just say this could be your first mystery in years? I thought that all you did was investigate stuff. Isn’t that why you’re in the club?’

  The Misfits looked sheepish.

  ‘Weeelll,’ Hannah said. ‘To be honest, we haven’t had that many mysteries recently and the ones we had . . . Let’s just say they didn’t work out the way we would have liked.’

  ‘They weren’t that bad,’ Brian said defensively.

  ‘They weren’t good, buddy,’ Sam said.

  ‘Remember the Case of the Missing Teapot?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘What was that about?’ Amelia asked.

  ‘Pretty much what it sounds like – Mrs Quigley had a teapot. It went missing.’

  ‘Who took it?’

  ‘We never found out,’ Hannah said.

  ‘What happened in the end?’ Amelia asked.

  ‘Mrs Quigley bought another teapot. There’s really not much of a story there.’

  ‘But that can’t have been your only investigation, right? You said one of the reasons you set up the Misfits Club was to solve mysteries.’

  ‘Oh no, we had others. Remember when Sam thought aliens had invaded Newpark?’ Hannah said.

  ‘Oh yeah, that one,’ Chris and Brian muttered.

  They both kept their heads down. Neither of them wanted to catch Amelia’s eye. The alien investigation had been an all-round embarrassment. They had been younger then, but that was no excuse.

  ‘What? There was an alien? You’re joking, right?’

  ‘Oh no, we’d never joke about alien life. Far too serious a subject,’ Sam said solemnly. ‘I had good reason to believe aliens had landed on Earth.’

  ‘You thought you saw an alien?’

  ‘Aliens,’ Sam said, putting the emphasis on the plural.

  ‘This was just after he’d seen E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the first time,’ Hannah said.

  ‘Riiiiight,’ Amelia said slowly, drawing out the word. ‘And the aliens you saw looked like E.T.’

  Sam’s eyes lit up. He was reliving the excitement of that investigation. ‘Not at all. That was the cool thing – they looked exactly like us. Like human beings.’

  Amelia paused for a moment. She looked at Sam with a quizzical expression on her narrow face. ‘You thought aliens were walking among us, disguised as human beings.’

  Sam nodded enthusiastically. ‘They were so lifelike.’

  ‘Sam, how did you know they weren’t actually just human beings?’

  ‘That was the tricky part.’

&n
bsp; ‘They were human beings,’ Hannah said.

  ‘What about Mr Coleman?’

  ‘He wasn’t an alien, Sam. He wasn’t up to anything.’

  ‘He had a very suspicious way about him. He was always looking around him as if he thought someone was following him.’

  Brian had never seen Hannah look so exasperated.

  ‘That’s because you were following him,’ she said. ‘He had to ask your parents to stop you. Remember?’

  ‘Even so . . .’

  ‘Look, we’re wasting time. All that stuff happened ages ago, when we were little kids,’ Chris said. ‘We have a real mystery here.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Hannah said with a smile.

  ‘Yeah, man. The Misfits Club is back in the game,’ Sam said. He held up his hand for a high-five, but no one took up his offer. ‘Aw, come on, guys, don’t leave me hanging.’

  Brian high-fived him to keep him quiet.

  ‘Right, and as soon as we’ve completed our ceremony, we can begin,’ Chris said.

  ‘Come on, we don’t have to do this,’ Hannah said.

  ‘Oh, but we do – Brian started it by making poor Amelia go through the ritual of Gravest Danger, so we must follow things through to their logical conclusion.’

  Hannah sighed and turned to Amelia. ‘What he’s saying is that this is Misfit business and we can only continue if full members of the Misfits Club are present.’

  ‘Rules are rules,’ said Chris.

  ‘You’re such a rebel,’ Sam said. ‘You’re going to be a really fun grown-up.’

  Chris ignored him and continued. ‘Amelia passed the initiation test, but she’s not yet a member of the club.’

  ‘What do I have to do now? Battle a werewolf, stake a vampire?’ Amelia asked.

  ‘Vampire staking only happens when you’ve been in the club for a year,’ Hannah said. ‘Stand up and raise your right hand.’

  Amelia, suppressing a grin, hopped off the wall and stood before Chris, who was wearing his most solemn expression – that of a grumpy judge. Sam, Brian and Hannah had the decency to look a little humiliated.

  ‘Sorry, Amelia, this is so embarrassing,’ Hannah said.

  ‘There’s nothing embarrassing about being a Misfit,’ Chris said.

  ‘Most of what we do is embarrassing.’

  ‘Embarrassingly cool,’ Chris said.

  ‘I blame you for this,’ Hannah said to Brian.

  ‘I blame myself too,’ Brian said. ‘Sorry, Amelia.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. I don’t mind,’ she said. Although normally she’d have been concerned about looking foolish, now all she wanted was to get to the bottom of her ghost problem. If this is what she had to go through, then so be it.

  ‘OK.’ Chris began to read from the copy book. ‘Do you promise to investigate crime, fight evil and put yourself in peril to right wrongdoings everywhere?’

  ‘This is where you say, I do,’ Brian whispered.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Will you uphold the constitution of the Misfits Club and face down foes both natural and unnatural, human and alien, dead and undead?’

  ‘I’m so ashamed I could vomit,’ Sam said.

  ‘I will,’ Amelia said.

  ‘Do you accept that to be a true Misfit, you must first be true to yourself, that you must not worry about appearing foolish and that who you are is more important than who others want you to be?’

  She hesitated a moment before answering the question.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Then I formally welcome you to the Misfits Club,’ Chris said.

  ‘Thanks. At least there wasn’t a song,’ Amelia joked.

  ‘There is a song,’ Chris said. He began to sing. ‘Oooooh, Misfits, solving all your mys-ter-iiiieeees—’

  He stopped when Sam clattered him round the head.

  ‘Welcome to the coolest club on the planet, Amelia,’ Brian said drily.

  Mrs Fitzgerald emerged from the house and waved at them.

  ‘Are you ready to go?’ she called out.

  THE MISFITS CLUB – CASEBOOK:

  The Case of the Missing Teapot

  Investigators: Hannah, Sam, Chris, Brian

  Report by: Hannah

  Case: On Saturday 14 March, at approximately 10.45 a.m., Sam heard his neighbour, Mrs Quigley, cry out. He reported that she shouted: ‘Where’s my teapot gone?’ Realizing that time is key in all investigations, Sam and Chris rushed over to her house at once. At first, Mrs Quigley appeared hostile (which made Sam suspect that she might be the one behind the disappearance for insurance fraud reasons). Sam reported that she shouted: ‘What, in God’s name, are the two of you doing in my house? I never invited you in.’

  Once she’d calmed down and he’d explained that they were there to help, Mrs Quigley allowed the investigation to begin. Chris followed protocol and called in Brian and Hannah (me). We raced over to the house. Mrs Quigley again became aggressive. ‘I thought you were just going to help me look for it. What’s this investigating nonsense about?’

  We established that the teapot in question was silver and had been bought in the two-euro shop at some point in the previous five years. Mrs Quigley wasn’t able to give us the exact date and time of purchase. Neither was she able to provide us with a till receipt to prove she’d bought it.

  A thorough search of the premises revealed no sign of the teapot (although we did learn Mrs Quigley doesn’t vacuum too often). We interviewed neighbours, who were reluctant to talk, arousing suspicion, as well as the binman who’d collected the rubbish that morning. He was quite rude and remains our main suspect. After a month’s investigation, we had to admit defeat. Mrs Quigley expressed surprise when we turned up at her door to inform her of our lack of progress. ‘Sure, I’d forgotten all about that. I bought another teapot in the supermarket weeks ago.’

  Main Suspect 1: Surly binman (suspected by Brian, Chris and Hannah)

  Main Suspect 2: A very strong magpie, since they love shiny things (suspected by Sam)

  Case Status: Open

  CHAPTER NINE

  Brian was annoyed. All of this delaying before they started on their investigation was not top-notch detective work as far as he was concerned. Sherlock Holmes and Watson would never sit silently in the back of a car while they were driven to the cinema by one of their friend’s mothers. At least not when they had an important case to solve.

  Mrs Fitzgerald dropped them off at the door of the Central Cinema, a five-screen multiplex on the edge of town.

  ‘What time will I collect you?’ she asked through the rolled-down car window.

  ‘We might go for a pizza after the film,’ Hannah said. ‘I’ll ring you when we’re ready.’

  ‘OK. Have you got your phone? Is it charged up?’

  ‘Yes, Mam.’

  ‘And your wallet? Have you enough money? Did you bring a pack of tissues with you?’

  To Hannah’s relief, a car behind her mother’s Space Wagon beeped at her to drive on and she had to cut the conversation short. Hannah didn’t hang around. She was through the front door and into the lobby of the cinema before the others had even begun to move.

  It was busier in the cinema than it was in the rest of the town. Since the summer holidays had started, the Central was showing films at half price every day at noon.

  The smell of freshly popped popcorn hung deliciously in the air.

  ‘Are we actually going to watch a film?’ Amelia asked.

  ‘We have to. Just in case my mother checks me for ticket stubs afterwards and asks what the movie was about. I’ll get the tickets,’ Hannah said.

  Brian knew what she was doing. Any time he hadn’t enough money, which was quite often these days, Hannah seemed to sense it. She’d pay for things so he didn’t have to embarrass himself by searching his pockets for money he knew wasn’t there. She always looked out for him.

  He was distracted from his thoughts by a familiar squeaky voice.

  ‘Hey, guys.’r />
  Horace McCarthy was a small, nervous boy who was in Brian’s class in school. He was always deathly pale and his resting facial expression was seriously worried.

  ‘Hey, Horace,’ Sam said cheerfully as Hannah returned with the tickets.

  ‘What are you guys going to see?’ Horace asked.

  ‘Mouse Number 72,’ Hannah said.

  ‘I thought we were going to see The Mystery of Banshee Towers,’ Chris said.

  ‘Yeah, Mouse Number 72’s a kids’ movie,’ Sam moaned. ‘If anyone sees me going in to that, my reputation will be ruined. People think I’m cool, y’know.’

  ‘Oh, Sam, they really don’t,’ Chris said, giving his brother a sympathetic pat on the shoulder.

  ‘What are you going to see, Horace?’ Brian asked.

  ‘Zombie Bloodfest 2: The Ripping,’ Horace squeaked. ‘My brother’s an usher here, so he lets me in. He used to work with my dad in the gift shop, but he got fired for being useless.’

  ‘Isn’t that film a little gory for you?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘It is if Zombie Bloodfest 1 is anything to go by. I was so terrified the night I saw it I couldn’t even cross the hall to the bathroom even though I really needed to pee.’

  Hannah introduced him to Amelia. ‘She’s the newest member of our club.’

  Horace looked crestfallen, but he tried to cover it up.

  ‘I didn’t realize the Misfits Club was taking on new members,’ he said, his eyes watering a little. ‘Good for you, Amelia. You’ll have fun. I always thought—’

  ‘Looks like you’re not the only zombie fan today,’ Brian said, interrupting.

  Declan Grabbe, aka Smasher, was heading into screen number two, the screen that was showing Horace’s zombie film. If Horace hadn’t been deathly pale already, his face would have drained of colour at that moment.

  Smasher was a year older than Brian and had been in primary school with him until the year before. He’d hit a growth spurt when he’d turned thirteen and could now easily pass for a very large adult or a small house.

  ‘He’s huge,’ Amelia gasped.

  ‘And that’s when he’s far away. Up close he’s absolutely enormous,’ Brian said.