The Feral Peril

by Paul Stafford

  We’re dropping the H-bomb, baby – humiliation.

  Yes. The winner of the handball championship won the immeasurably, indefinably, incalculably precious prize of horribly humiliating the loser.

  Massive!

  For Horror High students it didn’t get any better than this: to win the prestige of dictating the loser’s punishment, where even if the competitors were best buddies, it’d still be dreadful and appalling. The spectators demanded a dare of evil enormity – they might have come for the handball, but they stayed for the ball-call.

  Forget Armageddon – the aim of this game was harmageddon.

  It was Horror High tradition and it stretched back through the mists of Time – the full-blown, top-shelf, knock-me-down-drag-me-out-and-bury-me-deep humiliation of the ball-call, that most devious dare of derision, disdain and deadly, damnably, devilish disrespect.

  Diabolical.

  Even you get the message: it was no fun to lose.

  ‘Sirius, the whole crowd is talking about just one thing,’ said Lickpenny to his skullduggerous sidekick. ‘The absence of Barnaby Hangdog, the denseness of Geoff Dandyline and the very real possibility that Tony Bones-Jones will again get to inflict his ball-call on some second-rate sucker. Your thoughts?’

  ‘Well, that’s three things, Bill, for starters, but we won’t dwell on your maths skills,’ muttered Skull, chomping hard on his smouldering cigar. ‘Yes, with Hangdog out of the comp, we have a lacklustre field that Bones-Jones should easily dominate, and I predict that the knottiest dilemma he’ll face is conjuring up an original ball-call for the loser. Dead serious. It’ll be tough to top the punishment he inflicted on Barnaby Hangdog last year, but it’s what the crowd expects – nay, demands.’

  ‘Remind us again of the details of that ball-call,’ Lickpenny requested.

  Skull grinned. ‘Well, Bones-Jones and Hangdog weren’t enemies then, so it was fairly mild – Hangdog had to wear a black vinyl Catwoman costume for the rest of the term.’

  ‘Must’ve been pretty hot in that,’ chortled Lickpenny.

  ‘Yes, he was. I nearly asked him out on a date myself!’

  The commentary booth rocked with laughter.

  The truly unnerving element of the Horror High Handball Championship was that the person coming second got hammered, not the person who was beaten in the first round, who was obviously the worst player in the school. No, it was the person who was just one stroke short of being the best in the school, one puny point from greatness, one flimsy flipper shot from fame.

  That person, the heir-to-the-championship, was punished beyond recovery with a ball-call. Mostly they never enjoyed good health again. Certainly their reputation would never recuperate until sometime after the sun burnt out and the planet froze over like a freezer-burned lemonade popsicle.

  The injustice of the scenario is what sticks in my craw. I complained repeatedly but nobody listened. I mean, the sorry victim might have been a remarkable, hyper-talented handball player, best in the school, but on championship day they came unstuck.

  Maybe they were struck down with something relatively mild, like bird flu, a touch of the Black Death or multiple stings from killer wasps. Or maybe it was something serious, like getting dosed up on prune juice by their meddling granny and getting the skitters wicked bad. Whatever it was, they were temporarily weakened and lost, came in second, leaving themselves wide open to the ultimate dreadfulness of the Horror High ball-call.

  Gnarly.

  Let’s move right along then. Time’s a-wastin’ and, since I’m paid by the kilo, I need to add some weight to this bulimic story, initiate whatever legal action is necessary to collect my emaciated pay cheque, then retire to somewhere much less like here and deal with people that look, behave and smell a whole lot less like you.

  Go check the record books – they don’t lie. The history of Horror High handball championships is littered with a long and fanatical casefile of truly malevolent ball-calls. It boggles the mind that decent, upstanding, respectable, well-educated young citizens from civilised homes could come up with such spiteful punishments, but it sure was no surprise those rotten kids from Horror High came up with them.

  The only surprise is that they weren’t worse.

  Let’s select a couple at random. Three years ago the championship saw Martin Mummies-Boy lose to a last-second slice shot from a French exchange student who’d died twice in the French Revolution and knew a thing or two about confrontation.

  Mummies-Boy (notwithstanding his many whimpering denials) was well-named, drinking deeply from the well of wussiness and singing a sickly sweet song of sissification. Rumour had it that his mother still bandaged him in the morning. Yet, despite this embarrassing mollycoddling, Mummies-Boy played a surprisingly fierce game of handball, knocking out all opponents until …

  It was a drawn-out final clash and the two players were equally matched in skill and power. There were five-minute long volleys that yielded a point one way and then the other, and the crowd held its collective breath as the game tacked doggedly to match point.

  Then, in a truly inspired move of slick, Old World cheatery, the 18th-century French ghost spooned an easy shot to Mummies-Boy. This – to handball players in the know – is a classic sandbagging tactic, a prelude to some nasty trap, and the mummy fell for it. As the bandage– wrapped Egyptian wuss-wad was sissily spooning the ball back, Frenchy bent over double like a rusty nutcracker and cut the cheese right in the mummy’s face.

  Ask any dairy products expert and they’ll confirm it – the French invented cheese and nobody cuts it finer.

  When the stinky, blue-cheese gas came into contact with the highly combustible 5000-year-old papyrus mummy bandages, they instantly erupted in flames, and the cry-baby crypt-critter was enveloped in a sheet of sapphire fire!

  ‘Ahhh!’ shrieked Mummies-Boy, scrambling around like a goblin with its head sheared off, spreading flame and chaos with every step. As he stumbled about, blind and shrieking from the searing firestorm, the devious French exchange student pounded the ball home to victory.

  Epic!

  The crowd went ballistic!

  And the resulting ball-call? Well, you know the French – they love nudity, the saucy sods. Their ads for everything from electric cars to tinned fruit feature people in the raw, and the French President regularly rocks up to G8 summits in only his birthday suit, war medals pinned tactfully in front of his tackle.

  What can you do? Not much, except report the facts as they happen and respect cultural differences regardless of obvious weirdness.

  The ball-call, once decreed, could not be denied. It forced Martin Mummies-Boy to undertake a leisurely walk down the main street of Horror fully unwrapped, unbandaged, au naturel – a nude, rude, crude, lewd, 5000-year-old dude.

  I’d have sued.

  Ever seen a mummy’s winkie? I have, and I don’t recommend it. Five thousand years of decomposition can do mighty unpleasant things to a fellow. I still have nightmares.

  Other examples of past ball-call horrors in handball hell? Let’s jump back a few generations to 1953; it may have been a good year for red wine, but it was a despicable year for ball-calls. That year Finbar Wolfbreath (our own Fangbert Wolfbreath’s great-grandfather) was soundly beaten by a yeti called Yeti.

  According to school records, the yeti had no other name, having been raised in a cave by parents more concerned with freaking out mountaineers on the isolated slopes of the Himalayas than naming their young son. They’d probably have been dragged in front of the Social Services officers nowadays and fined or jailed or both, but in those days nobody bothered. As it turned out, the yeti parents were well ahead of their times, setting a fashionable trend of single names that was later exploited to great effect by Madonna, Cher and Kylie.

  But enough of that rot. The yeti kid could’ve been named Neil or Nathaniel or even Norbert No-Friends for all I care and all the difference it makes to our story, which is already way off track and losing moment
um in a most disconcerting way.

  So, Finbar the werewolf was soundly beaten by Yeti. It must have been a poor year for handball talent, ’cause, according to History of Horror, the unnamed Yeti beat F. Wolfbreath 21 to 12. The snowman hammered the wolfman, thoroughly thrashed him, no matter which angle you scrutinise it from.

  Now here’s a funny thing (but not funny ha ha). The two combatants detested each other, and the age-old conflict seems to have revolved around the issue of hairiness. Yes, hairiness. These two hated each other hard and prided themselves on their own supersized shagginess.

  Why, you ask? I noticed your knuckle hair and was about to ask you the same thing.

  These fatuous, fatheaded fools were fomenting a furious fight over fuzziness, fleeciness, fluffiness and furriness, as though it was some weird measure of masculinity, like prison tats, muscle cars and uncontrollable alliteration.

  There were numerous schoolyard brawls between these two tufted toughs, so when they finally shaped up on the handball court, there was serious hairy honour at stake. And when Yeti won, and won convincingly, he saw an opportunity to stamp his authority on the rivalry once and for all. The ball-call? Criminy. It was a truly spiteful effort; I can hardly write it.

  Finbar Wolfbreath had to be a sheep for a day.

  Doesn’t sound too bad, you say? Shows what you know. The werewolf was rounded up by savage sheep dogs, shorn bald to the skin with blunt shears, submerged in a blue-dye tick bath, drenched with foul-tasting veterinary potions, earmarked with a plastic tag, tail-docked, mulesed (look it up, it’s ghastly bad), force-fed raw oats and mouldy hay and compelled to wear a sign around his neck: Baaaa! I am a sheep!

  I reckon he got off lightly. Principal Skullwater stepped in to contain the situation just as the piteous werewolf was about to be castrated …

  I mentioned the above punishments were representative of average ball-calls. What I didn’t mention was that there existed a category above ‘average’ – a category of secret punishment lying so far out in the weeds of evilness that the winner’s dare was not required to be made public.

  These were the tall-calls. They were very rare, very unpopular (the crowd was robbed of a public humiliation), and very, very bad news for the loser.

  In the entire history of Horror High, there’d only been one tall-call. One. They were that rare. It meant the recipient was truly, deeply despised, was to suffer a cruel and unusual punishment, and was to learn the hard way that life could be very unfair.

  And Tony Bones-Jones was about to be at the centre of all this ugliness.

  What was so special about young Master Bones-Jones that’d draw him into an infamous and unthinkable and irretrievably stinkable tall-call? What made him such a stand-out candidate for retribution? What made him so homogenously hated?

  His sister, Selina Bones-Jones, of course.

  Let’s take time out from my busy schedule to talk about love. It’s not often I get to lecture on that topic, being chained to a desk and forced to report the lowbrow and loathsome lottery of life at Horror High.

  Love, loving, love songs, love hearts, love birds, love letters, love matches and lovage in general are not common topics in my line of work, and, now that we’re here, I’m going to damn well make the most of it.

  (While we’ve gone drippy on love, don’t forget that fake Gucci watch. Her birthday? Valentine’s Day? Some suck-up apology you owe her? Surely you’ve screwed up big-time recently. This’ll cover it up real nice. Cheap. Mention this ad for five per cent off.)

  And if you can control your urge to derail my story and cease bugging me to sell you a watch, we might just get back to the spiel. (Bike shed, cash, alone.) We were discussing love. There wasn’t much of it going around at Horror High, with Cupid almost never showing his shabby, shrunken head, and then suddenly there were two residents of that unscrupulous school struck silly with it, simultaneously.

  Serious.

  I won’t keep you in suspense guessing who they were; with your rampant ADHD and shameful addiction to carbonated sugar water, you’ll probably blow a valve, which I’d probably get blamed for and definitely get billed for. The two lovelorns were Selina Bones-Jones and Barnaby Hangdog.

  Yes, you read it right – don’t bother getting your eyes checked. If you’re off to the doctor, get your money’s worth and have a brain scan instead.

  Selina Bones-Jones in love is understandable. Lively young girl, pretty skull, straight teeth, heaps pallid complexion like Gwyneth Paltrow, high cheekbones – a real glamour. What red-blooded young man wouldn’t want to jump her bones?

  Yes. Pretty, young Selina was in lurv. Happy days. Or they would have been happy days if it wasn’t for the sad but undeniable fact that hers was a love that dared not speak its name, a love representing the ultimate unnatural union, a doom-struck love that could never be, as long as grasses grow and rivers flow.

  Selina, like other high-quality people I could name (me), had made the classic error of falling in love with the wrong person. Or, in her case, the wrong species of person.

  Remember, Selina was from a very good family. The Bones-Jones ancestry stretched all the way back to King Olaf the Terminally Weedy, sometime in the fifth century. In the eighteenth century, her ancestors sailed across endless oceans to the New World, hidden below deck in a cask of soup bones, and from there they quickly spread to populate the globe, colonising and skeletonising.

  Familial expectations were high. Mr and Mrs Bones-Jones had scrimped and saved and sacrificed, working their fingers to the bone to give Selina and her brother, Tony, the best start in life. The oldies were determined their poky progeny wouldn’t go feral like some of the roughneck, bogan kids in Horror.

  Kids like local dog-boy Barnaby Hangdog.

  Barnaby Hangdog really was a bad dog. He mauled the postman, chased cars, hounded cat-people, dug holes in the park lawns, and deposited pungent ‘visiting cards’ on the lawns of Horror’s most illustrious and respectable citizens. He even sported a Bad Boy sticker on his skateboard, and we all know what that means. So when it transpired that Selina was secretly in love with Barnaby Hangdog, and this fact was exposed, the bonedust really hit the fan.

  Aren’t words wonderful? A word like ‘transpired’ used in the above sentence seems to imply the illicit love affair between bone-girl and dog-boy was discovered by accident, and a word like ‘exposed’ sounds like you’re sunbathing without factor 30 sunscreen. And that would completely exonerate the one person who had everything to do with this red-hot info becoming public – Selina’s low bro, Tony. Tony Bones-Jones was fully, totally and solely responsible for dragging the dodgy doggy details of the love affair out into broad daylight for the town’s titillation.

  Tony had discovered the dirty little secret when he’d picked up the blower one evening to make a phone call to his best mate, Phillip Ooze. It was the kitchen extension, one of three phones in the house. He was about to apologise for interrupting somebody’s call – he didn’t know whose at that stage – when a throaty voice blurted, ‘I love you with all my heart. You rule my world. You control my kennel. You dominate my doghouse!’

  He nearly dropped the phone, thinking this unpleasantness was a crank call directed at him, but breathed a deep sigh of relief when he realised the call was meant for another. Tony shut his yap tight and started listening intently, wrapping his fingerbones over the mouthpiece to prevent his own fascinated breathing from being heard. The voice repeated its heart-felt proclamation.

  The voice, he would soon learn, belonged to Barnaby Hangdog.

  And the reply to those charmingly eager entreaties? A longingly whispered, ‘I love you, too, Barnaby. With all my ribcage and sternum. And if I had a heart, it would be yours forever.’

  Tony Bones-Jones hung up before he got too nauseated by all the sickly treacle flowing down the phone lines. This was interesting. This was very interesting.

  It goes without saying that a state of permanent warfare existed between brother and sister in
the Bones-Jones house, like all normal households. Abhorrence, loathing and repugnance was the rule rather than the exception, and the permanent state of play was straight-off-the-plate hate.

  Bad medicine.

  Most times Selina was ahead on points, simply because she was smarter, more devious and infinitely more evil. Her parents were right to place so much hope in her – she has a great, dark future in Horror.

  Has? Or had. Because, let’s face it, reputation is everything in a sophisticated necropolis like Horror. Someone like me can walk proudly through Horror Mall with head held high, acknowledging the polite bows of the mayor or police chief or zoo keeper, while lesser mortals have to skulk around with blankets over their heads like common criminals or brain-damaged trolls.

  Yep – it’s all about rep. And Selina’s was about to be shot to hell.

  Tony clocked her movements secretly, soon realising the two lovebirds clandestinely conversed every night at precisely 7.31, straight after Horror & Away. Yes, it’s sad – not even a city as civilised as Horror has yet sussed out how to ban crappy soaps.

  Night after night, regularly as clockwork, Selina and Barnaby smoothed the creases in each other’s hearts. And on one unforgettable, romantic night, Barnaby Hangdog chose to recite some starry-eyed love poetry he’d penned for his little bony butterfly. Tony Bones-Jones had rigged his iPod recorder microphone to the kitchen phone extension. And the verse went a little something like this:

  My love for you will never die,

  I see your skull – I want to cry.

  Howling’s how I state my feeling,

  One look from you and I am reeling.