Horror High 1 Read online

  So although Fearbody was prepared to grass up all the other students in his class on Parent-Teacher Night, he didn’t dare dump on Nathan. No chance was old Fearbody going to tell Nathan’s dad what a fully heaps crappo student his son was. If the teacher was haunted by Mr G-R’s agreeable mood, which he was generally in when he wasn’t being bugged by Nathan, Fearbody sure wouldn’t deal with a negative response delivered in that death hiss.

  No way was the truth coming out this Parent-Teacher Night. For the sake of self-preservation, driven near mad by the deepest, coldest, starkest, clutching fear, old Fearbody told Mr Grim-Reaper that Nathan was a prize student his parents should be proud of.

  ‘Then why,’ hissed Senior menacingly, ‘did Nathan get straight F’s on his last five report cards?’

  ‘Those F’s?’ stammered Fearbody, his withered old heart striking only one beat in five. ‘Those F’s are good. V-v-very good. They s-s-stand for Fantastic.’

  And Father G-R believed him.

  Ha.

  Now here’s a thing. Mr Grim-Reaper was desperate to reward Nathan for something – anything – and frantically searching for a valid reason to justify it. He needed to crank some up-beat vibes with his son, and fast, because as a father-figure his recent record was shoddy to say the least. The timing of Nathan’s positive report on Parent-Teacher Night was a godsend.

  Mr G-R felt wicked guilty about his rotten behaviour and the completely dodgy example he’d been setting his son. And so he should have. The man was old enough to know better.

  Ironically it was the age of the man – 50,000 years – that had spawned the bad behaviour in the first place. Old man Grim-Reaper had celebrated his 50,000th birthday and almost instantaneously experienced an explosive mid-life crisis. He was halfway to 100,000 – prehistoric. My god, where had the time gone? Where was his youth?

  He started behaving irrationally, striving to recapture lost youth in an embarrassing series of foolhardy adolescent blunders. He ditched Mrs Grim-Reaper, took up with a belly dancer named Bambi from the Hellfire Club, bought a red Ferrari convertible and hit the road, yahooing and partying in a shocking display of mindless buffoonery. He realised too late what a ridiculous jackass he must look to his son. What sort of example was he setting the boy?

  Mr G-R was desperately searching for a way to make it up to Nathan when Parent-Teacher Night provided the ideal opportunity. The old boy wanted to bestow on Nathan something they could bond over – something unique, something that’d reconcile the gulf between them – but was worried his son was too young for the scythe he kept begging for.

  What Mr G-R wasn’t worried about presenting Nathan with was the Grim-Reaper ancestral book. I mean, how dangerous is a book? What’s the worst that can happen? A paper cut? Smudgy fingers?

  Boo-hoo.

  Traditionally a child didn’t receive the special Grim-Reaper family book until they were eighteen centuries old and technically an adult, but he felt he could rationalise the gift on the basis of his boy’s great class results and make an exception in this case. Mr G-R had to make an exception – he would’ve done anything to overcome his sense of shame.

  The heaps exceptional ancestral book would settle it.

  Yes, it was a cheap cop-out and a quick-fix solution that stank to high heaven, but so what? Most parents wouldn’t pass the sniff test if it was supervised by a police bloodhound and a qualified stinkologist from Smellwrong University. I know mine wouldn’t. Parents are as on the nose as a 3-year-old cheese, they can’t appear to help it, and Mr Grim-Reaper was no exception.

  He chose his moment carefully. Nathan was hanging in his room. He’d just completed level five of Grand Theft Auto: Holy Orders on the PS3, and was crowing about running a busload of nuns off the highway into a swamp full of crocs just as the level finished.

  The timing was perfect.

  ‘Come into my study a moment, son,’ Mr Grim-Reaper hissed gently, ‘I want to give you something.’

  When they’d both settled into comfortable chairs in the study, Mr G-R began his big suck-up speech. He chose his words carefully.

  ‘I know I’ve been behaving rather … oddly … of late, and haven’t exactly been an ideal role model. Let’s just say I’ve been working through a few issues of my own, issues that a man can’t avoid as he starts to get …’

  ‘Old?’ offered Nathan, and watched his father wince as though taking a bullet in the bum.

  ‘Well, not old, as such, just – older than he used to be. I mean, 50,000 years isn’t old these days, not with modern medicine and Botox and such. A bloke doesn’t even retire from my game until he’s at least 75,000 years, so let’s have no more talk of old. But certainly, as a man reaches the prime of his life, there are certain readjustments to make. And I realise in retrospect that I may have handled these readjustments quite poorly.’

  ‘Like ditching Mum and shacking up with a tart only a few years older than me?’ offered Nathan helpfully. It didn’t appear to help. The old man dropped his head into his hands.

  ‘I’m sorry, son,’ he moaned through clenched fingers. ‘It’s the biggest mistake of my life. I want to make it up to you.’

  ‘How?’ asked Nathan eagerly, sensing the advantage. ‘By letting me have a scythe?’

  ‘No,’ replied his father. ‘By letting you have something even better.’ He opened his top desk drawer and carefully retrieved a thick, leather-bound, ancient looking book. He stared fondly at it for a few seconds before leaning over to drop it in Nathan’s lap.

  ‘This is your ancestral legacy, son. This is the Grim-Reaper family book. It is older than Time itself, and immensely powerful when used properly. Traditionally it’s handed from father to son on their 18th-century birthday, but in your case I’m making an exception. This is your birthright, my boy.’

  Nathan stared at the front cover, disappointed. A book? What use was a book? He wanted a scythe. He examined the cover, fighting hard to disguise his disinterest. Embossed in heavy gold-gilt, gothic lettering was the title The 101 Damnations. The illustration on the cover showed two adult dogs, white with black spots, surrounded by puppies the same colour.

  ‘That,’ hissed Mr G-R pointing at the cover illustration, ‘is the King and Queen of Bohemia with their family. They were the first people to fall foul of your ancestor, Count Augustus Black Grim-Reaper. The barking of the palace dogs used to keep him awake at night. He tried complaining but the Queen told him to stick it – said they were royalty and their hounds would howl as they wished.

  ‘Count Augustus Black Grim-Reaper used the book to transform the royal family into a pack of spotted dogs. The pups ended up at the pound and the royal couple scavenged scraps from the bins around town, until they were trapped by the dog catcher and minced into dogwurst. Hee, hee, hee,’ he finished, the hissing laugh like a slow tyre puncture.

  Now a surge of energy coursed through Nathan. He peered sideways at his father, grinning maniacally. Suddenly he understood precisely what it was his trembling self beheld. The 101 Damnations was a book of curses.

  Sick!

  ‘Look after it, my boy, and when you come of age I’ll initiate you in its many diabolical uses,’ hissed Mr Grim-Reaper. ‘Until then, do naught with it. There’ll be plenty of time – and abundant opportunity – to use it in the future. Plenty of time. Do not use it yet. Promise me.’

  ‘I promise,’ promised Nathan.

  Yeah right.

  Okay. So there was obviously some powerful trouble brewing. I know what I’d be doing if I got my greasy mitts on some savage tricked-up curse book – promise or no promise – and Nathan was no different.

  He was going to smite his enemies, amuse his friends, impress the girls, bamboozle his rivals, enslave his detractors, crush his teachers, subjugate naysayers, expunge school toughs, traumatise casual observers, horrify local authorities and enrich his bank balance.

  That was the plan for the first day, anyway …

  Nathan slid off to school at Horror High with
uncharacteristic eagerness that Monday, The 101 Damnations stashed safely in his bag. He hadn’t let his dad see him take it because, not surprisingly, he’d hatched an ambitious strategy for his new tome – I’m not talking some lame-o book report for show-and-tell, either.

  First things first; he’d deal with his nemesis, Thomas Thicher, once and for all.

  Thomas, a mutated swamp creature, was nearly two metres tall and made of I-don’t-know-what, but it sure wasn’t slugs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails. More likely enriched uranium, spent fuel rods and dioxin. Whatever the ingredients, he was meaner than mule measles and for some perverse reason felt the need to concentrate his malicious energies on Nathan.

  Not any more. Nathan was still tossing up Thomas’s ultimate fate. He hadn’t decided whether he’d turn the bully into a caged, naked pink fairy at Horror Zoo, a scabby alley cat in a dogs-only section of town, a public toilet seat that never got cleaned, or some strain of microscopic bug that lived a long and loathsomely unhappy existence in a constipated elephant’s colon.

  Whatever way, it’d be revenge fine-style for Nathan and a raw deal for Thomas, had it not been for one crucial, essential, long-overlooked but very simple detail …

  And I’m not telling you what it was.

  What do I care? I get paid by the hour and quitting time was nine seconds ago. Get back to me tomorrow. I couldn’t give a spittoon of dressmaker’s drool if this is the world’s shortest chapter. I’m offski. Speak to the publisher if you have a problem with that.

  Adios, suckers!

  Right. Apparently there’s been a record number of complaints about my style of storytelling. Apparently I’m supposed to care enough about my job to avoid such incursions in the future. Apparently, at a click of the publisher’s fingers I can be effortlessly replaced by any number of cheaper, more skilled, more reliable, more trustworthy and infinitely more entertaining writers.

  Apparently my storytelling efforts could in fact be effortlessly replaced with some shonkily pirated software running on your mum’s 1970s cinder block computer.

  We’ll see.

  Horror High always made a big deal of April Fool’s Day. It was one of two major events on the school calendar, the other being Halloween. And while Halloween was all about students getting back to their cultural roots and heritage, Fool’s Day was pure fun.

  An April Fool’s Day committee was formed at the beginning of each school year with the express purpose of coordinating the play-of-the-day.

  Inevitably the committee planned an assault on the big guns of the school hierarchy – Principal Skullwater, Mrs Goatbeard the Deputy Principal, Mr Grimsweather the Rollcall Master, Ms Bitterbum the Head of School Studies. All the other teachers were fair game too, but it was usually these senior luminaries who got it first.

  The student committee elected a different student each year to co-ordinate the Fool’s Day strategy, and this year they elected none other than Nathan Grim-Reaper as chief. Incredible how farfetched coincidences like that crop up in threadbare stories like this, isn’t it? Don’t like it? Join the queue and speak to the publisher.

  The April Fool’s Day student committee had done one thing right in electing Nathan, anyway. They couldn’t have unearthed a bigger fool to command them if they’d set a fool trap on Fool Island baited with dim sims and dingleberries.

  The committee came up with the plan of staging a mock assassination of Principal Skullwater during an assembly in front of the whole school. What a laugh it’d be, they all agreed. Principal Skullwater would be reading some boring notice to the whole school when bam!, he’d be hit by fake bullets and blood capsules. He’d freak! He’d think he was dying!

  What a hoot!

  All they had to do to organise it was locate and hire a mock assassin, and that job fell to Nathan as head of the committee. It was one job – one simple job. You’d think he’d have the smarts for that.

  You’d think.

  Nathan, fool that he was, didn’t know how and where to locate a mock assassin, so he got on the internet, pulled up Google, and filed a search using the words April + Fool + Assassin.

  The results came back within seven seconds. There was only one listing with anything close to the combinations of words. Near enough, thought Nathan, as he read the search engine’s result.

  Yes, near enough, but not always good enough, depending on your outlook. The combination of words might have been close but it certainly wasn’t an exact match. Nathan’s search pulled up a listing for Avril Fule, Assassin. The imbecilic youth rattled off a quick email enquiry and eagerly awaited confirmation of date-availability and costs.

  Clearly business was pretty slack at the other end because Mr Fule’s confirmation came back almost immediately, requesting a partial advance payment (the balance on completion of the job), a recent passport-style photograph of the ‘victim’ and a map to the proposed ‘assassination’ site.

  Nathan scanned a yearbook photo of Skullwater, a map to the school and included details of the committee’s credit card account. He hit send, then sat back and patted himself on his own dense head for a job well-done.

  Nathan wouldn’t have been quite so self-congratulatory had he realised Avril Fule was an authentic Mafia assassin, and a total professional in the use and misuse of guns, bombs, numchucks and knives. His proud boast was that he never missed his target. In fact, Fule was the only hit man in the book who offered a money-back guarantee, claimed he’d never yet had to give a refund and pledged to move to a retirement village if he ever did.

  Uh oh.

  What Nathan didn’t know couldn’t hurt him (our cretinous hero actually believed that cliché) and Fool’s Day was still a week away. Nathan had always been a firm believer in organising things early with plenty of time to spare, so he didn’t need to waste another thought on Principal Skullwater’s assassination.

  And neither do we … just yet.

  Right now all Nathan’s thoughts were bent towards activating the boss curse book in his bag. He’d been trying to nut out how to operate the damn thing for days now and the mental strain was sending him spare.

  Nathan had always considered himself a natural at just that sort of caper, programming the video and TV since he was two-and-a-half years old, operating all the rest of the household appliances since he was five, getting around the V-Chip on the computer. He’d openly and shamelessly mocked his poor dad as a moronic muppet for his inability to operate everything from the dishwasher to the toilet roll dispenser.

  It seemed funny then.

  But operating The 101 Damnations was a totally different story. It wasn’t a straightforward device like any of his techo toys or PS3 games, and its controls were nothing simple and obvious like point-and-shoot or set-and-forget or deploy-and-destroy.

  The text of the book itself was written in ancient Latin so there was no operating manual Nathan could consult to offer him guidance. There was no curse verse, no hex effects. There were no illustrations to provide a step-by-step guide, no simple process for enchantment enhancement. There were no buttons to push, no sounds to guide you, no spell bell or charm alarm.

  And I’ve run out of stupid rhyming couplets to describe how thoroughly useless the book was to Nathan, but you get the general idea. It was a hoax, folks.

  He’d tried holding the book in his right hand and intoning a curse, but no joy. He’d switched hands and tried again – der – without luck. He thought carefully about what his father had said when he’d handed the book to him: ‘Do naught with it for now. Do not use it yet. Promise me.’

  He ran those words through his head, looking for hidden meanings or some veiled hint.

  Did ‘Do naught with it’ mean you didn’t do anything, or say anything, just thought it? He tried thinking his curse on Thomas Thicher, but found the oversized oaf in the same shape as before the silent experiment, rather than a pancake-flat wart toad with hindquarters on fire, as mentally requested.

  He thought over the term ‘Promise me’ but
found no hidden meaning there. Didn’t find anything to make him keep his promise either – the fraudulent, double-dealing hound. Some people are just bad eggs.

  And that was Nathan – pure rotten. He tried everything to crank some curses, every angle, nothing worked. He couldn’t curse a baby with scabies, let alone pull off something heaps villainous and awe-inspiring. The book, superior and impressive though it might have been in the right hands, was as useless and pointless as a shiny set of ivory buttocks in the wrong ones.

  What was he to do? All his grand plans now lay in ruins. In frustration he ripped one of the pages out of the book and tossed it to the ground. What use was a book of curses that didn’t curse?

  He retrieved the loose page as it blew across the quadrangle and held it up to the light, checking one last time to ensure nothing was written spy-style with invisible ink. Zero. He absentmindedly folded a paper aeroplane out of the page and hurled it irately into the air, silently cursing it to crash in the quadrangle and explode with the power of an atomic bomb.

  Nathan might have been a dud at curse book operation but he was a first-rate, aeronautically inspired, paper-products engineer. The plane soared about thirty metres, got a good turn of speed up and crash landed, nearly taking Geoff Dandyline’s eye out.

  Dandyline howled in agony and, aiming with his good eye, hurled the plane back at Nathan, shouting, ‘Go to Hell!’

  The plane flew out of Dandyline’s hand, pulled a tight loop and blazed downwards at incredible speed. It didn’t stop when it hit the earth but disappeared into the ground, drilling through the concrete surface, spitting sparks and chunks of earth, boring a fiery hole down, down, down … to Hell.

  Nathan and Geoff Dandyline stood silent, staring at the smoking hole in the quadrangle cement, looking at one another in amazement. And then a big smile crept across Nathan’s face.