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  Horror High And The Interghouls Cricket Cup

  eISBN 9781742745770

  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 2005

  Copyright © Paul Stafford 2005

  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 interghouls cricket cup.

  For children aged 9–14 years.

  ISBN 1 74166 045 9.

  I. Title. (Series: Horror high; 2).

  A823.3

  Cover illustration and design by Douglas Holgate

  Internal illustrations by Douglas Holgate

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  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

  A Sneak Preview of 'Horror High And The 101 Damnations'

  ‘I’m warning you, all of you! This absenteeism will cease or I promise you a slow, ugly death by dot-to-dot disembowelment, followed by some really serious consequences.’

  The Rollcall Master was addressing the back wall where the dried, curled-up scalps of a dozen former pupils were nailed randomly like a collection of used Odor-Eaters, but the class knew he was watching them through evil eyes in the back of his head.

  Mr Grimsweather was fully cranked in his rant at the class, snarling in top gear, virtually sweating blood. ‘Dire consequences! Hell to pay! I’ll go straight to the School Execution Committee; see if I won’t. Absentees from rollcall better have an exceedingly good excuse or it’s the long drop for them – double death, slow and hideous, then fast and horrible. Am I making myself crystal clear?’

  The class sat statue still, completely silent. The dusty human skeleton hanging lifeless on the wall next to the classroom door looked ready to nod its scaly skull in solemn assent. Since its skull had a metre-long sharpened steel spike hammered right through one ear and out the other, it’d be a pretty cool trick if it could pull it off.

  ‘I’m making myself crystal clear, right?’ persisted Grimsweather. ‘Right. Now, one final time – Jason-Jock Werewolf, are you here?’

  There was a long, long pause before Geoff Dandyline opened his mouth. He just couldn’t help himself.

  Grimsweather instantly shot him a malevolent glare. ‘Yes, Dandyline?’

  ‘Nothing, sir.’

  ‘You opened your mouth to say something fabulously stupid, Dandyline. What were you going to say?’

  Dandyline adamantly shook his head, self-consciously rubbing his latest shocking fatal neck wound. ‘Nothing, sir. Honest, sir. Just drying my teeth, sir.’

  ‘And?’ said Grimsweather.

  ‘And now they’re dry, sir – very nice. Only, I was wondering, like, since you mentioned exceedingly good excuses, I was wondering, like, well, what’s an exceedingly good excuse exactly? Sir.’

  ‘Why, Dandyline?’ snapped Grimsweather. ‘Have you got one for that brainless head of yours?’

  ‘Oh no, sir. I mean yes, sir. I mean …’

  ‘No, Dandyline, I’m mean – mean as marmoset measles, especially when you get me started, so don’t. An exceedingly good excuse for being absent might be a funeral, a reincarnation or a dead-raising. I’d accept coma, car wreck, exorcism, bomb blast, gas explosion, multiple homicide and nasty-painful-death-at-the-hands-of-a-mean-evil-deadly-serious-how’s-your-father?-my-dad’s-great-I-will-KILL-YOU-serial killer. And maybe flu, if you’ve got a doctor’s certificate. Nothing else. Why do you ask, Dandyline?’

  Dandyline shifted in his seat and crossed his legs and dug his fingernails into the palms of his hands and concentrated and really tried, but just couldn’t quite prevent his trademark dumb grin straddling his face like a ferret riding a bush buffalo. His buckteeth danced out of his mouth like a conga line of chalky skeletons.

  ‘Well, Dandyline?’ pressed Grimsweather.

  ‘Quite well, thank you, sir,’ replied Dandyline brightly. ‘Apart from this neck wound which is kinda itchy and festy, but thanks for asking, sir.’

  ‘I wasn’t asking, curse you! Last chance, Dandyline. Where is Jason-Jock Werewolf and why are you grinning?’

  ‘I’m not grinning, sir,’ Dandyline shrugged, grinning. Then he grinned again, only more inanely than usual. ‘I’m just wondering if cricket practice is an exceedingly good excuse, sir?’

  ‘Cricket practice? Cricket practice …’ Grimsweather repeated the word as though tasting it on the tip of his decrepit, black tongue. ‘Cricket practice. Hmm … yes, I think I’d accept that one. Why, Dandyline?’

  ‘Because Jason-Jock is practising with the Werewolves XI team for the Interghouls Cricket Cup, sir. They’ve never won it, sir, they’re desperate, practising twenty-seven hours a day, nine days a week. And while we’re on the subject of sport, sir, I’ll be absent tomorrow practising head bowling. Sir.’

  ‘Head bowling? What the devil is head bowling?’

  ‘It’s tenpin bowling using one’s own head, sir.’ Dandyline gaped so enthusiastically his horse-teeth fanned out like a bunch of freshly peeled bananas. ‘I’m in the regional finals.’

  ‘What sort of excuse is that?’ Grimsweather snorted. ‘What sort of sport is that? Head bowling! Do you take me for a complete fool, Dandyline?’

  ‘A complete fool, sir? No, sir – sort of half-finished.’

  ‘Guillotine, Dandyline. Lunchtime. You know the place.’

  ‘No, sir! Please, sir! Each chop shaves a slice off my neck and I’m too young to shave, sir. Please, sir, my neck’s out of slices, I’ve no neck left – I look like a bullfrog, sir.’

  Grimsweather nearly smiled, for the first time ever. ‘You should be grateful, Dandyline – that’s a vast improvement.’

  The trouble started (as it often does in low-carb, fossil-fuelled stories like this) with a bug-house bet between inebriated school principals, a skeleton crushed into powder and blended into some tripped-out hippy health shake (and understandably irate about it), and a naive, adolescent werewolf who believed the solutions to his insurmountable personal problems lay in a book.

  Solutions in a book? Bah. No wonder the dude had problems …

  Anyway, the trouble really started when Jason-Jock Werewolf took stinky advice from a brain-dead, head case bystander, listened to it
and then actually acted on it. The advice was offered by one of those cheapo, project-kit Frankensteins you see loitering around public places trying to look like someone who has a clue, and JJ was fooled. Should’ve changed his name to Jason-Jock Jackass.

  Listen. Don’t ever take advice. Wrong-headed people the world over will try to give you guidance when things get ropey, pretending they’ve been in that exact situation, navigated their way safely through it and learnt grand and prudent lessons, but their advice is always dangerously defective.

  Unless the words of wisdom have come from some officially registered and internationally recognised source of deep wisdom – such as myself – ignore them. That’s my advice.

  For example, Jason-Jock Werewolf was misguidedly advised that the key to overcoming his many nefarious problems, dilemmas and general weirdnesses was to get actively involved in a team sport, such as cricket.

  Yet the insurmountable problems haunting Jason-Jock only intensified as the red six-stitcher cricket ball now whizzed past his bat and crashed through his stumps.

  ‘Howzat?!’

  JJ groaned as he gazed back at the stumps. They had been in a pleasing and precisely upright arrangement – three stumps supporting two bails, all tickety-boo and how-do-you-do – just seconds ago. Now they’d spun out all over the place like a madman’s chopsticks, middle stump flat on its back, bails a metre away in the dirt.

  ‘You’re out,’ shouted the coach. ‘Again. For a duck … again. Quack, quack, quack. Back to the pavilion – next batsman.’

  Jason-Jock shook his head in deep despair. So far today he’d been out nine times for a total score of zero, nine ducks in a row, enough to open a duck farm and sell the eggs for a living. He was the team captain and its best batsman, so you can imagine what the worst ones scored – do the maths, it’ll hurt your brain.

  The other young werewolves crouching in cricket whites on the pavilion benches bowed their heads, muttering darkly while picking at stray fleas. They were doomed and they knew it. And not just doomed as a cricket team either – their future at Horror High was over. They were going to be expelled unless, unless …

  Unless they pulled off the impossible.

  Anybody who knows werewolves will tell you they can be extremely capable creatures when they put their minds to it. They have the heightened senses of a dog, the supernatural abilities of a ghoul, and the never-say-die spirit of a human who thinks there’s nothing peculiar in shedding a quarter kilo of hair on your lounge every time they come to your house to watch the greyhound races on TV.

  All of which means they can pull out some pretty gnarly and difficult stuff when pressed. The ‘unlikely’ they could do easily, being werewolves, and the ‘doubtful’ was pretty much a walk in the park without a leash. The ‘improbable’ was imminently achievable, and even incompetent werewolves could pull off ‘no-chance’ type gigs standing on their hairy heads.

  But the ‘impossible’? As the term ‘impossible’ suggests, that was impossible, even for someone as cool and righteous as myself, which these werewolves definitely weren’t.

  And what Principal Skullwater demanded – winning the Interghouls Cricket Cup – was fully and totally and thoroughly impossible. Yet if they didn’t pull it off the werewolves were out of Horror High.

  Expelled. Evicted. Banished. Exorcised. Forever …

  Principal Skullwater had observed the werewolf cricket team practising in the nets over the last months and been the sorry witness to their inter-class matches these last miserable weeks.

  They were rubbish.

  Skullwater lived and breathed cricket, but at 2305 years of age he found running between the wickets a little beyond him. Still, he followed cricket avidly and made foolhardy, ill-advised and ridiculously ambitious bets on the outcome of certain matches.

  One of these dimbulbous bets had been with Principal Nettlebottom of Death Valley High, concerning the outcome of this year’s Interghouls Cricket Cup.

  The two principals had argued and bickered on the subject during the annual principals’ conference. Nettlebottom reckoned he had an unbeatable team of vampire cricketers at Death Valley High this year. He ranted and raved about them, never letting up for a minute. He got in Skullwater’s scabrous old ear for hours, boasting and bragging long and loud on this theme, and surreptitiously filling and refilling Skullwater’s glass with strong whisky.

  Pretty soon the combination of whisky and braggy drove Skullwater to the point of no return, and he slurringly made a very dumb bet using the kind of snaggle-toothed language all principals use when they’re completely trolleyed on strong liquors.

  It wasn’t until Skullwater returned pie-eyed to school and slowly recovered from the cracking aftermath that he realised just how dreadful Horror High’s werewolf cricket team was, and just how very dumb his corresponding bet had been. He was in deep trouble.

  Trouble? He was cactus.

  Now the principal was really starting to agonise over it. Was this evidence of the gypsy curse returning? Was it a sign it was back, the relentless curse that had blighted his third life back in Roman Britain, then thoroughly soiled his eighth life in the Middle Ages? The curse that returned twice as strong in his eleventh life, forcing him to spend most of his days in the court of Vlad the Impaler, dressed in a clown suit and jumping through hoops like some retarded circus goat?

  The same curse had cost him his chance at the presidency of the Oddfellows’ Society in 1756 and recurred again in the 1930s when all his valuable shares in handkerchief futures crashed during the Great Depression. You’d think during a great depression that hankies would be at an excellent price, everybody depressed and dejected and moping on down.

  You’d think.

  But that’s where the curse bit deepest – it turned everything normal abnormal, everything downsideup to upsidedown.

  It wasn’t the first time Skullwater wished he had refrained from snickering and hooting out loud when that 93-year-old gypsy woman fell headlong into a stinky overflowing latrine, back in the days of the Roman occupation of ancient London. But considering the circumstances, who wouldn’t laugh?

  He wouldn’t, that’s who. Not now, knowing what he knew.

  The ancient gypsy crone had cursed him five ways to Fingleton, and it was a quality curse that followed Skullwater throughout his many unhappy lives, sticking to him like a stink sticks to baboons.

  They sure didn’t make blights like that anymore, and now it appeared Skullwater’s long-wearing, all-weather, frequent-flier-points curse was back. He hadn’t cured himself of it last time round like he’d hoped, even with a humungous dose of antibiotics.

  The mere memory of that mordant and mortifying medication made Skullwater wince. The antibiotics gave him the runs like the fudge falls in Willy Wonka’s factory, a wicked rash ’round the rude regions, and a head as seedy and degenerate looking as a pineapple plucked lengthways out the wrong end of a rhinoceros.

  But it didn’t shift the curse one inch …

  Of all the foolish things to wager, Principal Skullwater and Principal Nettlebottom had bet their schools’ latest acquisitions – the rare, valuable and totally essential portable classrooms each school had just received from the Department of Education After Death.

  D.E.A.D. was notoriously tight with money and Horror schools were rarely granted the extra portable classrooms they so sorely required. Both schools were bursting at the seams and these portable classrooms represented the only chance the schools had to adequately house their overflow of students.

  Right now extra classes at Horror High were being conducted under trees, in stormwater drains, in the bus shelter and under a tatty white canopy constructed from two enormous pairs of Y-fronts stolen off a rock troll’s clothesline and stitched together with wire. None of these solutions was anywhere near ideal, though the Y-fronts doubled up nicely as a spare movie screen for the school’s ratty old film projector.

  Now the parents of Horror were up in arms, and not just about the
stolen undies.

  Just like any normal society, the community of the undead wanted to raise their children with higher expectations and better access to education than they’d had. They paid their taxes and figured the least the government could do was provide a decent school system for their ungrateful, delinquent kids, so they could learn their times tables and how to spell rite before they finally ended up in juvie.

  That’s what parents wanted and they might as well have asked for a cherry on top, too, because D.E.A.D. was not in the business of pleasing parents or schools. They figured the schools could look after themselves since there were plenty of Y-fronts hanging on plenty of clotheslines just begging to be stolen, with the added advantage that rock trolls can’t chase thieves further than twenty steps.

  But this was also an election year and the Horror Council had to somehow make it look like they cared about educating the young undead, and protect their phoney-baloney jobs. They had a meeting to discuss how they could successfully con the voters this time around.

  With the crucial election looming, and every likelihood that voters were not going to be satisfied with thunderbags-related solutions, the council bit the silver bullet and spent some serious money for a change.

  Both schools were granted portable classrooms, and they were pretty flash, too – reverse-cycle aircon, double-glazed windows, online computers, broadband streaming, the works. They even had their own toilet blocks stuck on their rear, just where you’d expect to find a toilet.

  The bean counters at D.E.A.D. made it explicitly clear to each principal – this generous gift was definitely a one-off. The schools had sod all chance of getting another one of these huge-o, expenso, portable classrooms before the next Ice Age, and since the next Ice Age in Horror wasn’t due until the same year Hitler’s lawyers got him past the pearly gates and into Heaven, the schools had better look after them.