Horror High 2

by Paul Stafford

  So you see the predicament. If Horror High lost the Interghouls Cricket Cup and Skullwater lost his whisky-inspired bet, the school lost its portable classroom.

  And if that happened Horror High was severely overstocked with students, with no room to house them. Some students would have to go, and since it was the crappy cricketing werewolves’ fault, guess who was out?

  Not too hard to guess, even for you …

  Principal Skullwater summoned Jason-Jock to his office shortly after his realisation Horror High would surely and definitely lose the Interghouls Cricket Cup and his bet and the school’s lovely new portable classroom.

  Obviously Skullwater couldn’t reveal the details of the dodgy bet, but felt duty bound to warn Jason-Jock what was in store for him and his hairy brethren should they be defeated in the high-stakes match.

  Jason-Jock knocked on the heavy wooden door of the principal’s office.

  ‘Come in,’ barked Skullwater.

  The nervous young werewolf pushed through the door and sniffed the air apprehensively. Something was wrong. ‘You wanted to see me, sir?’

  ‘Ah yes, young Mr Werewolf. Have a seat.’

  Jason-Jock sat, resisting the urge to scratch at a flea outbreak in his left armpit.

  Skullwater straightened his tatty black funeral tie. He had to break the news gently, subtly, with all the caring compassion that modern undead principals are renowned for. ‘Now … yes. If you werewolves don’t win the Interghouls Cricket Cup, you’re out on your useless furry butts. There, that wasn’t so difficult.’

  ‘What?!’ yelped Jason-Jock. ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, it’s like this, and here’s the absolute, deadset, straight truth. As principal of Horror High it’s up to me to make the tough decisions – students understand that and love me for it. And it’s been drawn to my attention that we’re dangerously short on space at this school due to an alarming increase in monsterism. Things are tough all over, so we’re going to have to lose some students. It’s not my fault – honest. It’s all because of the D.E.A.D.

  ‘They’ve done some market research out in the Horror community to determine what people expect from a modern undead school. They hired a team of hack pollsters to gauge the community’s attitude and the results they came back with are interesting and startling to say the least. It seems the good citizens of Horror expect to see ghosts, goblins, mummies and vampires in our schools, maybe even the odd Yeti, Yowie or foreign exchange ghoul, but nobody actually mentioned werewolves.’

  Skullwater shook his head, feigning sadness. ‘Problem is, people just don’t regard werewolves as an essential feature of a modern, balanced community school. Fact is, and here’s the gospel truth – strike me dead if I’m lying – they consider werewolves more animal than human and more suited to the dog pound than a school. Add to this the fact that werewolves don’t do anything very useful and take up valuable classroom space.’

  Jason-Jock was in shock. He didn’t know what to say, so Skullwater kept going. This lie was getting easier and easier to tell the thicker the principal laid it on.

  ‘See, here’s the skinny on our students, according to the community; ghosts are fine, they don’t take up any space at all and we could cram a million into a milk jug. Goblins are useful since they double as garden gnomes. Mummies are pretty much indispensable – they’re handy for extra bandages in case of accidents and extra loo paper in case of emergencies and anyway, everybody loves their mummie. And the vampires keep the sick bay’s blood bank stocked up, of course. But what, I ask you, do werewolves do?’

  Jason-Jock was still in shock, but he stirred in his seat enough to crank an answer out of his numb skull. ‘We keep the feral cats away,’ he offered.

  ‘Feral cats?’ drooled Skullwater. ‘I like feral cats. In fact I love feral cat, roasted with garlic and served with a spicy mint jelly. No, Mr Werewolf, you’ll have to do better than that. Far as I can tell, a werewolf is just a fat kid having a bad hair day, so you’ll get no quarter from me. Here’s the deal – if you werewolves can start pulling your weight and proving yourself indispensable to the school, you can stay. If your cricket team can win the Interghouls Cricket Cup and demonstrate yourselves to be useful after all, you can remain at Horror High. You win – you stay. You lose – you stray. Now get out there in the nets and practise.’

  And that was that.

  Jason-Jock tried explaining the situation to the pack of werewolves flocking nervously around him. They milled about in stunned silence, trying to absorb the news. Nobody spoke.

  When somebody did speak it’d have to be Fleabag O’Brian, the least qualified among them to have even a half-baked opinion. Nevertheless Fleabag opened his elongated jaw first. He looked like he was about to cry.

  ‘Cripes. We’ll all end up living back at the pound. I hate the pound. All those stinky kids patting puppies, all those vets administering rabies shots, all those overflowing litter trays. All those nasty kittens …’

  Jason-Jock shook his hairy head. ‘No way. We’re not going to the pound. We’ve got to win the Cup.’

  Howls of derision and helplessness rose from the pack.

  ‘Win?’ yelped Howler Binks. ‘We’ll never win.’ Howler was a fourth-rate batsman, very silly mid-on fielder and general hubbub spokesman of the conference. ‘We’re useless – and I’m the optimist of the team.’

  Jason-Jock wasn’t to be discouraged. ‘Okay, I admit we’re not much good – yet. But we haven’t got a choice. If we give up now, we’re kicked out of school. If we lose the Cup, we’re kicked out. Either way it’s the same result. Or we could try like we’ve never tried before.’

  The others agreed with the noble sentiment, but what were they to do?

  ‘Okay,’ said JJ, ‘here’s the plan. Fleabag, go borrow all the cricket DVDs you can find at the video store – we’re going to study all the famous games of the past. Howler, you hit the library, same deal – get all the cricket books you can find, anything you think might be useful.

  ‘Chomper, go through the sports shed for cricket equipment – we need to get our hands on some decent gear for a change; “borrow” some. Grubby, you take the video camera and secretly get some footage of the opposition teams so we’ve some idea of what we’re up against.’

  ‘Okay,’ replied Grubby. ‘But what are you going to do?’

  Jason-Jock smiled mysteriously. ‘I’m going to consult my secret weapon …’

  Jason-Jock’s secret weapon was a book. A book? Phooey. You were hoping it’d be a light sabre or a set of magic boxing gloves or at least an Uzi with the serial number filed off. Get real – where would a teenage werewolf get his paws on an Uzi? You need a licence for one of those.

  No, it was only a book, but a very special book, or so JJ thought. He believed every little thing that was written in it, the dense fool. It had been sold to him by an out-of-work bookseller posing as an out-of-work magician who was actually an out-of-work scientist.

  Scientists are not to be trusted – fact. It’s got nothing to do with their goofy appearance, though that thing your mother said about always judging a book by its cover is certainly true in this case.

  The fact that scientists have Coke bottle glasses, ears like the sails of a blue-water racing yacht and a flipped-out afro like Hair Bear has got to tell you something’s not right. They hide behind their nerd screen but can’t resist using their big brains for evil rather than good.

  In this case, the scientist who duped Jason-Jock had a great need of money. His mobile phone had been cancelled for non-payment of bills, and he owed his mum for accidental overpayment of pocket money. Not even the fried chicken place would take his cheques anymore.

  Cash was what he needed and he didn’t mind how he got it. The villain sat down and wrote the biggest pile of spuriously spoony hogwash possible, published it and sold it to Jason-Jock from his dodgy bookstore, claiming it was a magic book.

  The book, Everyday Magik By a Magician Who Knows, was supposed to be
a deeply powerful magic source, when it was actually just a deeply powerful hoax. The scientist was a common fraudster, like they all are.

  How do I know so much about scientists? Let me tell you, I’ve been through the wringer with those charlatans. I was once approached by scientists to take part in a paid experiment, living in a share apartment for a month with a tame chimpanzee. The scientists wanted to observe the interaction between a civilised being and a backward primate.

  I behaved brilliantly and was fully blameless but the whole ordeal was disastrous and embarrassing.

  The chimp had obviously been brought up in a bad neighbourhood and its sense of values was whack. It wouldn’t do its share of the cooking or cleaning, hogged the remote control, made long-distance phone calls to the deep jungle that it had no intention of ever paying for, took hours in the bathroom, used my special medicated dandruff shampoo and mocked me mercilessly whenever I wet the bed.

  After a month of this nonsense I was happy to be rid of the troublesome ape and collect my fee. Then I found out I wasn’t the one being paid – the chimp was!

  To add insult to injury it turns up on Oprah and fully bags me out to the hooting audience, laying it on so thick about me wetting the bed that Oprah nearly wet herself. In order to not get laughed at by complete strangers, I had to wear a fake moustache and curly red wig for the next three years.

  Don’t talk to me about scientists.

  But Jason-Jock was gullible enough to think the crap magic book was real magic truth and followed its directions, instructions and hoaxy spells to the letter. He didn’t know about scientists, or maybe he was just soft in the head.

  He ran his clawed paws down the contents page and found the chapter titled ‘Winning at Cricket’. He read the instructions and smiled to himself wolfishly, as werewolves often do.

  Now they’d be okay. Now he knew how to win the Cup. Now their future at Horror High was assured. Now he’d be a hero …

  Hero. Zero. Dero. All pretty similarly spelt. Guess which term best describes this bozo …

  Jason-Jock called a secret meeting of the cricket team in his tree house. The players arrived in dribs and drabs, climbing up the rickety ladder and crawling onto the tree house platform, panting like old steam locomotives.

  It would’ve been a bit convenient if JJ hadn’t built his tree house sixty-seven metres up the backyard gum tree, but he’d read a real estate book (probably written by the same sneak scientist) that claimed the top five factors in selecting quality real estate were privacy, a good view and location, location, location. Jason-Jock didn’t have any choice on the location, since he had to build his tree house in the oldies’ backyard, so he went a bit nuts on the remaining two factors.

  Howler was first to arrive. He was always punctual and hated time wasters. He reckoned nothing worth doing should ever take much time and, since he was never batting at the crease for very long, he’d never suffered the embarrassment of publicly disproving his own theory.

  Fleabag was next, panting like a resuscitation dummy. He always had a scared, hunted look on his hairy face, and his cricket whites were always freshly laundered. He was packing it now, terrified of heights. The rest of the team often wondered about the connection between Fleabag’s many fears and his always washed pants. They wondered, but no amount of curiosity would drive them to investigate further.

  Fleabag had no teeth – his baby teeth had fallen out and his adult teeth never came through – and his fur fell out in chunks, due to an unknown allergy. He was a nervous pup, pretty much afraid of everything you could name – postmen, kittens, the wind, country music CDs, nursery rhymes, photos of himself, ice-cream, kites, cakes with pink icing.

  He couldn’t howl either.

  Grubby came next, a tougher kind of werewolf but a heaps scungy and festy sort of dude. Nobody wanted to sit next to Grubby on the benches. At any one time he could be harbouring nits, fleas, lice, ringworm, cattle ticks, jock rot, northside mange and crack rash, and that was after he’d been dragged through a chemical bath. He was well-regarded by the team, but even he acknowledged he was a walking, talking body bag of deadly infectious diseases.

  Fangbert was the next to arrive and after Jason-Jock he was the best cricketer. He had the longest fangs of all the werewolves and was kinda vain about them. He cleaned them three times a day, flossed and buffed them, and polished them up with that showbiz oil weightlifters lube their muscles with. He was also pretty cool and the chicks dug him, which irritated the other werewolves no end. They pretended they didn’t care and were only interested in cricket, but they all knew if a girl gave them a second look they’d give cricket the flick faster than J-Lo ditching her freshest husband.

  Whitetail, Steppenwolf, Clawpaw and Dingus arrived in a group, having stopped along the way to polish off some road kill. They were growing lads, always hungry, always eating, but not always carrying enough pocket money to stop off at the Horror mall for a burger or falafel. Enough said.

  Chomper came last. He was always late. Pretty soon he was going to wish he’d never come at all …

  Jason-Jock called the meeting to order.

  ‘Right, you guys. I’ve been consulting my book of magic and I think I’ve come up with a spell to help us win. It’s not a very pleasant spell but I don’t see that we have any choice. We’ve practised and practised, and if there’s been any change in our form at all it’s that we’ve got worse. I’m not suggesting we admit defeat and cheat, but as your captain I suggest we admit defeat and cheat. That’s my advice.’

  What did I tell you about taking advice?

  The other werewolves glanced at each other and shrugged. Werewolves don’t have any particularly strong feelings about cheating, one way or the other. People ignorantly assume that because they’re related to dogs they’re some kind of noble beast, with strong morals. Let me tell you, there are month-old leftovers festering away in your skanky long intestine that have more moral fibre than your average werewolf, and living in that biodegradable slop are microscopic critters much less inclined to cheat in order to win a cricket match.

  When Jason-Jock mentioned cheating, he wasn’t talking about some simple plan like replacing the oppositions’ equipment with hollow bats and exploding cricket balls, or burning their eyes with laser beams from a safe distance, or even having them buried in a nest of flesh-eating ants. That would have been lightweight compared to what he had in mind.

  No, Jason-Jock’s plan was plain wrong, which makes sense since it was lifted word-for-word out of the wrongest kind of wronged-up magic book. And since I don’t want to be associated with the plan in any way, I’ll let him fill you in on the details …

  ‘Our problem is we lack skill. Somehow, someway, we’ve got to acquire skill. The easiest way? To get the skill from someone else, someone good, someone who is acknowledged as a cricket expert.’

  The other werewolves looked blank, though Dingus smiled faintly because he was thinking about food – a rotten cat buried in the neighbour’s backyard that his mates didn’t know about.

  Jason-Jock misguidedly took this as a sign they were clinging to his every word. ‘According to my book – which is a genuine magic book, the last in existence in the world – there’s only one true and definite guaranteed way to absorb the skill of another player, and that’s to literally absorb the player. How do we do that? We dig up the skeleton of a famous cricketer, grind up the bones, mix it with fresh rain-water and drink it. And if we locate a really great dead player, the stuff we drink makes us really great too.’

  The other werewolves pulled faces; Fleabag looked terrified; and only Grubby didn’t seem too put off. ‘Sounds okay – if it works.’

  ‘It’ll work,’ Jason-Jock assured them. ‘I told you – I got it out of this boss magic book, the only one left in the world. Now the big question is, where do we find a great dead player?’

  ‘Easy,’ said Fangbert. ‘We’ll get Warney. He’s the best bowler in the world, and a pretty cred middle-order bats
man, too.’

  ‘Idiot,’ snapped Howler. ‘Shane Warne’s not dead.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ replied Fangbert, temporarily downcast but then cheering up fast. ‘We could kill him,’ he suggested brightly.

  ‘We’re not killing anybody,’ replied Jason-Jock. ‘Not this week. We need somebody already dead.’

  But Fangbert wouldn’t let up. Shane Warne was his fave player; he idolised him. ‘If Warney’s still smoking cigarettes, it won’t be long before he dies. We could send him a couple of cartons and wait ’til he keels over.’

  ‘Shut up, Fangbert,’ snapped Howler. ‘We can’t wait, and anyway, he’s not worth waiting for. He’s not that good.’

  ‘He is too!’ shouted Fangbert, and leapt to his feet, warm for some form, shaping up for a brawl.

  ‘Heel!’ shouted Jason-Jock. ‘Sit down now! We’re not fighting over this. I’m the captain. I make the decisions and I’ve already found a suitable skeleton – a perfect specimen. It belonged to WG Grace, a great all-rounder, best player of the 19th century, captain of the English team for twelve years. He’s our man.’

  ‘But where’s he buried?’ asked Fleabag nervously. ‘It can’t be too far away – I can’t travel on trains or buses because the noise scares me, and car trips give me nightmares.’

  Jason-Jock shook his head. ‘He died in Horror on his last world tour and is buried right here in Horror cemetery. We go for his bones tonight.’

  A world-class cricketer buried in Horror? I have to tell you I find that kind of coincidence exceedingly difficult to swallow, like a single dung beetle employed to deal with the contents of King Kong’s toilet pan after he’s attended the week-long Prune & Bran Eaters’ Conference.

  I said as much to the publisher. As coincidences go, I told them, this is simply too much. World class cricketer, best in the history of the game, travels extensively playing all across the globe in hundreds of countries, thousands of different cities and towns, just happens to die right there in Horror and gets dropped in the ground almost in these dudes’ backyard?