The Feral Peril

by Paul Stafford

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Horror High And The Feral Peril

  eISBN 9781742745794

  Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney, NSW 2060

  http://www.randomhouse.com.au

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  First published by Random House Australia 2006

  Copyright © Paul Stafford 2006

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

  Stafford, Paul, 1966–.

  The feral peril.

  For children aged 9–14 years.

  ISBN 978 1 74166 094 4.

  I. Title. (Series: Horror High; 4).

  A823.3

  Cover illustration and design by Douglas Holgate

  Internal illustrations by Douglas Holgate

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Imprint Page

  The Rollcall

  The Lesson

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Unlucky Chapter 13

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Sneak Preview of ‘Horror High And The Interghouls Cricket Cup’

  Sneak Preview of ‘Horror High And The 101 Damnations’

  Sneak Preview of ‘Horror High And The Great Brain Robbery’

  According to the note pinned to the door with a bloody dagger, the renovations in the rollcall room were complete and, for the first time in a fortnight, the class was allowed in. They entered cautiously, shuffling, peering over shoulders and panning slowly around the room. Confused mutterings drifted back from those in the front of the line: ‘There’s nothing different at all.’

  It was true. Nothing apparently had changed since they were last in there. Bloodstains still streaked the walls, as usual. Dried organs and freakish samples of human tissue were strung about like ghoulish Christmas decorations – no change there. The standard instruments of torture hung from the ceiling like rabbit traps in a furrier’s workshop, and the rusty gibbet swung above Mr Grimsweather’s desk.

  The gibbet was empty now, but the class knew it was only a temporary reprieve. Sooner or later someone would irritate the Rollcall Master sufficiently to be routinely slaughtered, their remains to hang in the gibbet till end of term. Soon someone would infuriate Grimsweather, forget their best terrified behaviour and push the Rollcall Master over the edge … please.

  On cue, Geoff Dandyline, grinning like the village idiot winning Nimrod of the Year, stepped forward through the knot of curious students. His buckteeth, which last year received radio signals from the Challenger Space Shuttle, now shot out from his mouth like the cowcatcher on the front of an old-fashioned steam train.

  ‘Grimsweather’s not here.’ He beamed gleefully, dragging a tennis ball out of his pocket. ‘Let’s have a game of handball.’

  ‘Are you mad?’ snapped Jenny Deaths-head. ‘Are you nuts? Grimsweather warned you last time that last time was the last time. If he catches you…’

  ‘But he’s not here to catch me, is he?’ crowed Dandyline, flinging open his arms in an expansive gesture and pointing north, south, east and west like a demented, toothy compass. ‘Do you see a stinky, finky, hinky Rollcall Master with no brain and a big butt named Grimsweather anywhere here? Because I don’t.’

  A chill, polite cough echoed from directly above. In horrified slow motion, Dandyline peered in the one direction he’d failed to look before – up.

  He screamed.

  There was Grimsweather, coiled around the ceiling fan like a boa constrictor. Dandyline buckled to the floor in terror, moaning, shielding his head in his hands. Waiting. Then, when nothing happened after five long seconds, he cautiously opened his left eye.

  He shut it fast. Grimsweather had detached himself from the overhead fan and now crept slowly across the ceiling and down the bloodstained wall like a huge, venomous spider. With a sigh of death breath, the Rollcall Master’s feet found the floor.

  ‘As you can see, class, this is the renovation,’ said Grimsweather, pointing up at the new overhead fan. Its blades were comprised of two arms and two legs, roughly hacked off at the joints. ‘Our new fan. Now we can be cool in the summer heat, thanks to Frank Hobgoblin’s generous contribution of limbs. And now to another person about to make a generous contribution – Dandyline.’

  Silence.

  Dandyline, subscribing to the theory that if you couldn’t see someone, they couldn’t see you, lay on his stomach petrified, head buried in his crossed arms. The class milled closer in silent delight. Good ol’ Dandyline.

  Grimsweather looked like he’d shake apart at the seams with rage. It seemed certain he’d lose it and either cuff or kick Dandyline, but the Rollcall Master managed to control himself at the last instant. He had to. The Department of Education After Death had recently instigated a strict new code of conduct for teachers: they couldn’t strike or boot a student, or they’d be in for it.

  As an experienced teacher of many moons, Grimsweather knew when to cool it. He didn’t want to risk his pension by falling foul of his bosses at D.E.A.D. and getting sacked for whomping a kid. Besides, he knew far more effective ways of disciplining an errant student.

  Like the guillotine.

  ‘I’m going to chop your head off so many times you’ll think you’re a wheat crop being harvested!’ hissed Grimsweather. ‘Your mother’ll have to donate your hat collection to the Salvos, because you’ll have nothing to hang them on when I’m done with you.’

  ‘Please, sir,’ came the muffled howl from Dandyline. ‘Mercy.’

  ‘Mercy!’ shouted Grimsweather, ‘Mercy? Yes, I’ll show you mercy, but you’ll have to earn it. You like to play handball, eh?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Dandyline winced, glancing up. ‘Yes, sir. Don’t know, sir.’

  ‘I used to play handball, and I was first-rate too, until the Black Plague killed off all the decent opposition in my village.’ Grimsweather drifted off momentarily, reminiscing about the good old days of disease and famine before snapping back to reality. ‘I tell you what, Dandyline. Since I’m in a good mood, we’ll have a game. If you win, you live. If you lose … chop, chop.’

  ‘Really, sir?’ said Dandyline, not sure if it was a trick. Despite being a total clyde in everything else, he was a handy handball player, nearly as slick as Tony Bones-Jones, who looked set to tan this year’s championship.

  ‘Yes, really,’ replied Grimsweather, looking almost human again. ‘Where’s your ball?’

  Dandyline tossed the tennis ball to Grimsweather.

  ‘Death Castle
rules,’ stated Grimsweather.

  ‘Sure,’ Dandyline agreed, grinning, his plate-size teeth refracting the sunlight like a disco ball. Death Castle rules meant the winner was the first to one – a very sudden-death play-off.

  Grimsweather smiled coldly, drew a line down the middle of the room with a piece of chalk and pointed his finger. The ball leapt to his command and slammed across the room, shooting out towards the baseline. Instantly, Dandyline was lunging, grunting, contorting, diving, desperately returning the barrage of shots. He had the devil’s own job as the ball flipped around the room like a live swordfish, plunging high, low, left and right at near lightning speed, wherever Grimsweather pointed his finger.

  Ten, twenty, thirty plus times the ball crossed and re-crossed the line. Dandyline rushed around, sweating like a crooked cop in court for corruption, but Grimsweather didn’t have to move at all – he just wagged his finger and the ball bolted to wherever he pointed.

  Outside, a cloud shifted and the sun’s rays bounced off Dandyline’s choppers, beaming like a halogen searchlight straight into the Rollcall Master’s eyes and blinding Grimsweather as effectively as laser surgery without anaesthetic.

  ‘Aaah!’ the teacher howled, collapsing in agony. ‘Aaaaaaaah!’

  Dandyline took careful aim as the ball landed on his side and walloped it deep into the back of Grimsweather’s side of the court, where it rolled slowly to the corner of the room and into a rat’s nest.

  ‘I win, sir!’ Dandyline yelled delightedly. ‘I win! You have to let me go.’

  ‘What?’ screeched Grimsweather, eyes scrunched closed in agony. ‘What? You cheated! You blinded me! Do you really think I’ll let you get away with that? What sort of lamebrain fool do you take me for, Dandyline?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir,’ replied Dandyline. ‘I can’t read the label from here – and neither can you now.’

  Grimsweather nearly smiled, despite the savage, searing blindness, and he was calm when he finally spoke. ‘Give my regards to the guillotine operator, Dandyline. Lunchtime.’

  The trouble started (as it often does in surly, steroid-dependent stories like this) with a savage scrap in the school handball championship between two warring siblings, a humiliating radio broadcast that even made me blush, and a dirty doublecross that nearly destroyed an honourable secret society dedicated to the downfall of sisters everywhere.

  Or maybe the doublecross did destroy the secret society; I don’t remember. Least-ways, I don’t care enough to refer to my notes on Tony Bones-Jones right now. Check it yourself in History of Horror, indexed under ‘L’ for Losers. Doubtless you’ll find your own name there, too.

  But enough about you. It was handball season at Horror High, and every student with their brain sewn in the right way had furiously practised and perfected their repertoire of low, bogus shots, devious death-plays, and sweet-and-savage hook-ups. The handball court was marked out in the quadrangle in fresh blood and powdered teeth, and the school maintenance crew had temporarily dismantled the gallows, guillotine and electrified detention cages to set the scene for more painful punishments for the losers.

  Fourteen rounds had already been played. The corpses were piling up, and impatient hearse drivers formed a disorderly queue right around the block.

  Sirius ‘Dead Serious’ Skull and Bill Lickpenny were the championship commentators, relaying the action from a smoke-filled, glassed-in soundproof booth perched on precarious scaffolding far above the handball squall. Loudspeakers mounted around the quadrangle blared their reports, and the sound bounced off the gothic walls of the high school, echoing up and down the long corridors, seeping into the deepest dungeon.

  Turned up too loud, as usual.

  ‘Sirius Skull here, folks, the “Mouth from the South”, calling the games courtside for you today, and it’s already been a killer competition with some major upsets – dead serious. Am I right, Bill?’

  ‘You are, Sirius,’ replied Lickpenny. ‘You are, you are, you are. Walk us through the highlights so far.’

  Skull grinned and toked hard on his fat, stinky cigar – not an easy thing to do when you don’t have lips.

  ‘Bill, as you well know, I’ve never been one to glorify violence, but some of this violence has been glorious. The match between Dwain Frankenstein and Claudia Blood-Drip was as savage as anything I’ve ever seen – dead serious – and the untimely death of Govinda Graverobber at the hands of Brandon VanChickenhead was as beautiful a display of blatant, notorious cheating as you’ll ever see in this world or the next.’

  The opinionated chrome dome stopped to take another long draw on his cigar, seemingly oblivious to the dangers smoking posed to a decomposing individual, and the smoke drifted lazily out a jagged hole in the back of his braincase. He shouldn’t smoke. After all he, too, was a sportsman, playing in the annual darts finals, clamping the dart between his teeth while his partner hurled the dartboard at him.

  Sirius Skull was only allowed out of the school one week a year to call the handball championship, get his darts fix and chain-smoke cigars. The rest of the time he spent on Grimsweather’s desk as a pencil holder with his eye sockets stuffed full of HB pencils.

  But his eyes were wide open now. ‘I’ve had a vision, Bill. I’m seeing into the future, and I see a very obvious winner. But who do you think will take the crown this year?’

  ‘Well, a man would be a born fool to predict the outcome of this championship,’ replied Bill Lickpenny. ‘So I predict Tony Bones-Jones. You’ll remember Barnaby Hangdog very nearly mauled Bones-Jones last year and was definitely the dog to muzzle, but since he’s left the school there’s no real challenger left.’

  Sirius grinned as only a skull can. ‘Yes, if Barnaby Hangdog had put as much practice into keeping his private life private as he put into his handball, he’d be here to challenge Tony Bones-Jones.’

  Lickpenny stifled a laugh. ‘Maybe, but we’re not here to talk about Barnaby Hangdog’s privates … Let’s discuss the game at hand.’

  Skull nodded solemnly. ‘Too right, and it’s anyone’s game, anyone could win – dead serious – and nobody even half-smart would try to prophesy this outcome. So, I say Tony Bones-Jones to win it all.’

  A fanfare of trumpets and a flurry of skyrockets announced the start of another round. Grimsweather lurked, glowering in the background, emanating bad vibes and cheap aftershave. He was the evil umpire: torment, pestilence and certain death stalked in his sinister shadow. But on the plus side he also sold event programs, oversized novelty foam hands and Gatorade. He peddled a few bottles now to monsters too intent on glowering at their opponents to tender the correct change. They stood on the sidelines, flexing and sizing each other up, silently daring anyone to meet their gaze.

  The handball championship was the one legitimate venue for settling old scores in a lawful frenzy of blood-letting, and competing Horror High students glared at their enemies with viciousness in their eyes.

  The creature created in Horror High’s science lab, known only as Botched Experiment, gave Mihn Djinn the hairy eyeball – their hatred for each other was legendary. Wussy werewolf Fleabag O’Brian was well careful not to catch the eye of tiny Catarina Catgirl. He was terrified of kittens, and she hissed at him whenever he slunk by. Nigel Neanderthal held up a hand mirror and mercilessly dissed himself. His arms were so long that every year he stood on the centre line and played against himself, left hand versus right. When lefty lost last year, he abused righty, and it ended in a fist-fight behind the bike shed where Neanderthal, caught in the middle, knocked himself out.

  ‘Another round,’ crowed Skull, ‘and another death. Where will it end?’

  ‘The morgue, the cemetery or the local butcher’s shop is my guess,’ replied Bill Lickpenny.

  The handball championship was the annual must-win event at Horror High; no other competition mattered. Sure, everyone said the Interghouls Cricket Cup, the head-bowling tournament and squash (where students dropped one-ton weights on opponents) w
ere fully crucial, too, but they were liars. Those sports were for wusses – only the handball mattered.

  It was considered much more serious than death, which, as every ghoul knew, was only a transitory, mildly objectionable phase like acne, anthrax and another tedious season of Big Brother. Forget death. Death was what you prayed for if you lost the handball championship. Death was the box you ticked in preference to coming second.

  The unique nature of the Horror High rules of handball combat meant that, although winning was a joyous event, the winner didn’t actually have anything to show for it in terms of cash and sponsorships. Yet it was still considered the most desirable championship to win, ever, because losing meant suffering. Losing meant torment. Losing meant becoming the next unhappy victim of a punishment so squalid and ruinous that being buried alive in a coffin full of fractious cobras seemed a desirable alternative.

  No, losing was not an option. Play hard and, above all, win. Cheat, swindle, defraud and bilk the opposition of their rightful, legally won points, and do what you have to do – because winning is survival.

  What’s that you say – no prizes? Don’t be soft. Forget prizes. We’re discussing a much more valuable commodity than any medal, plaque or silver cup; something that runs much deeper than accolades, praise and school honour. We’re yapping about something so precious it transcends standard measurements of wealth.

  There are many things of value in the world. There’s cash; there’re diamonds and rubies; there’re fake Gucci watches. (I’ll sell you one, lovely gift for your girlfriend; she’ll never know it’s counterfeit.) There’re blue-chip stocks and shares, gold bullion. There’s lots of valuable commodities out there, and some – like my pay cheques – are seemingly impossible to get your hands on. Some are so valuable you only hear them spoken of in whispers, and some seem downright mythical. But as for finding something as valued as the spoils of Horror High handball combat, forget about it. This was the big one, the mother of all prizes. (Don’t forget about the Gucci watch – meet you behind the bike shed, bring cash.)