Horror High 1 Read online

  Now he knew the secret of the book.

  Lots of books have secrets. In fact, when the book was first invented its very existence was a secret. It was invented by a German gent who was bored to tears sitting on the toilet with nothing to read, so he went and invented the book. It was a secret (from his wife, who kept banging on the door asking what was taking so long) and was even written in a secret language (German, which the German bloke insisted on writing in. And talking in).

  Ever since then many secret books have been written, and even ordinary books can contain hidden secrets. This very book in your hands contains a special hidden secret. Tear out the last ten pages, screw them up into a ball and place them on a section of clear ground, facing west. Put a match to the ball. When it’s completely burnt, carefully collect and crush the ash, and mix it in exactly 600ml of pure rainwater. Add a single drop of your own blood. Pour the mixture on your rose bushes, then turn on the spot three times.

  And the secret? How the story ends, sucker. You sure won’t know.

  But Nathan – who may have been dumber than three mules though smart enough not to burn the last pages of his book – had cracked one of the secrets to harnessing the power of The 101 Damnations.

  He couldn’t use it. His wily father had anticipated his deceitful son’s jive talk, his hollow promises and swindler’s guarantees, and safely ‘locked’ the devious boy out of the book’s potential powers until he was old enough, and responsible enough, to wield it.

  Which sure wasn’t now.

  That didn’t mean others couldn’t use it, however – the Geoff Dandyline Experience had demonstrated that.

  What good did that do Nathan, you ask? Let’s recap his original problem. No scythe, no pocket money to procure scythe, and father determined to prevent boy possessing scythe until boy proved himself responsible. Which wouldn’t be anytime soon, obviously.

  But there is more than one way to skin a skunk (all of them very smelly, I warn you) and more than one way to acquire a scythe. Nathan had cottoned on to a method that couldn’t fail to deliver – door-to-door, guaranteed – provided he could get his britches on some riches.

  It was a mail-order catalogue called Death’s Door that provided Nathan the key to solving his problem of persistent scythe-lessness.

  The mail-order industry has been the curse of society since the ancient Egyptians first invented papyrus and immediately started plaguing their neighbours with offers of superior mummification (‘look young forever – ask me how’), time share pyramids (‘set-in-stone guarantees’) and eternal life with their cat (‘because you’re both worth it’).

  No civilisation has yet worked out how to avoid the junk mail scam job, and the community of the undead is no different. Offers for everything from free dissection knives to barbequed baby brains in brine stuff every letterbox in Horror.

  It’s not fair to say they were all con jobs. Some catalogues were superior to others. Nathan’s mum regularly ordered stuff from Reapers Keepers (‘Cradle to grave, tomb or crypt’) though they often sent the wrong order and drove her insane putting her on hold when she rang to complain and got some call centre in Transylvania.

  Nathan’s dad bought CDs through Eternal Journal (‘meeting your deathstyle needs’) but they were those crap old-timey music CDs dads insist on playing during long road trips to aggravate kids, so let’s not even go there.

  Nathan’s downfall was in his letter slot at school one morning: ‘Death’s Door, door-to-door, guaranteed!’

  Man alive, did Death’s Door have some cool collectables in it. Coffins with DVD and MP3 players, skull stereos with wireless remotes and continuous downloads, body-temp blood fridges that could reorder automatically online when stocks ran low, silver-bulletproof vests, motorised caskets with police radar and GPS navigation devices, Halloween hologram kits, make-a-stake sets for the spoilt suicidal vampire who has everything.

  All awesome and expensive, a fatal combination to an impressionable lad like Nathan discovering a mail-order house of ill repute. And that’s where he first laid eyes on it. Love at first sight. The ultimate scythe. A crucial scythe. A very streamlined, very chic, very exclusive, 100 percent pure platinum scythe. The scythe from Hell.

  Oh baby.

  It was called the Platinum KR. Obviously the KR stood for King Reaper, and that would be Nathan once he got his hands on one. King Nathan the Cool.

  Someone should’ve warned Nathan about dodgy rip off mail-order companies, but nobody did. Someone should’ve told him he was on scam-cam with the whole world watching him get skinned like a stewing rabbit and fleeced like a brain-damaged sheep, but nobody did. Someone should’ve done the decent thing – nobody did.

  I would have, but I got ripped off by the same company nineteen times last year and wanted someone else to get it in the neck for a change. Is that so wrong?

  Criminy, how those pages from The 101 Damnations sold once word got out around the school that Nathan was peddling curses. Because, let’s face it, how else was Nathan going to get his claws on the $375 Death’s Door was charging for the Platinum KR scythe?

  Three hundred and seventy-five bucks! I’d have to write a hundred books a year for ten years to earn that kind of scratch, and they’d have to be good books, too, not swill like this.

  Yes. $375. Nathan was no thief – well, not this week anyway – and pretty quickly clued that he wouldn’t find that kind of bread at the bakery. Instead he started spreading the word that he had gnarly curses for sale, at a price.

  To get the ball rolling, Nathan employed the clever marketing ploy of offering two-pages-for-the-price-of-one (my idea, actually), deliberately targeting students who’d been victims of Thomas Thicher’s bullying, provided they aimed one of the curses at the massively muscled, mal-adjusted, misanthropic miscreant.

  Then he sat back and observed the sadistic fun.

  And fun it was. Thomas had a ghastly day of it, falling bum first into a steaming vat of pig wizzle that materialised where his seat had been (and getting detention for making toilet smells in class), half eating his lunch then realising it was a battered rat (detention for wasting food) and erupting into flames in class (detention for smoking).

  Then, during detention, he simply exploded into a million fiery pieces like a supernova. The Thomas remnants smouldered away for a few minutes before vanishing in a whiff of greasy smoke, and that was it for Tom Thicher. Never-no-more.

  Who missed him? Nobody I spoke to.

  After that, Nathan’s feral curse pages were all the rage and the price started to climb dramatically, a process high-end economists refer to as damnation inflation.

  Remember, there was only one curse per page, only 101 pages and not a page more. Finito. It wasn’t some unlimited spell well, a boundless charm farm, a never-ending book of hex-cheques, a …

  God, don’t start that again, I’ll scream!

  According to the publishers the time has come to lash all the loose ends of this terminally lame and unravelling plot into some kind of coherent whole.

  Like that’ll work.

  Here goes. With Nathan brazenly bartering bits of his birthright book for big bucks, and April 1st blissfully beckoning and blundering about, the forecast was for showers of alliterative ugliness and high pressure cells of mass weirdness on all fronts.

  Two days to go.

  All of the kids who bought hexes were planning to let them loose on that one day of supreme mayhem and frivolity, Fool’s Day.

  Two days to go.

  Not only that, but thanks to Nathan’s world record-breaking imbecility, one of the planet’s top assassins was planning a quick visit to Horror High to whack the school principal.

  Two days to go.

  Not only that, but Nathan’s highly successful and frenzied sales of damnation pages meant he’d finally reached his target of $375, and had sent off to the Death’s Door warehouse for his Platinum KR superior scythe.

  Two days to go – as I said – and now, to really queer the
mix, Nathan’s estranged parents got back together. Very estrange. Don’t get me wrong, that’s an admirable thing to happen; the last thing Horror needed was two of its leading citizens adding to the already appalling number of divorces among the undead. It’s just the background to their reconciliation that ain’t handsome.

  Firstly, and funnily, Bambi the belly dancer from the Hellfire Club was faking bimbo. She was no fool. She was actually a medical student doing a PhD, working nights for extra money. She had a real name that wasn’t ‘Bambi’, had no shortage of brains and zero interest in a sad old loser like Mr Grim-Reaper. First opportunity, ‘Bambi’ snaffled the keys to the Ferrari, ditched the wrinkly old freakshow and sped off in a screech of rubber.

  Mr Grim-Reaper grovelled home to lick his wounds. The house was deserted. Mrs G-R had gone to stay at her sister’s.

  The trouble wasn’t long in starting. As mentioned earlier, Mr G-R couldn’t operate anything in the house, from the dishwasher to the toilet roll dispenser. The end result wasn’t pretty and when Mrs Grim-Reaper returned to collect the last of her clothes, she found the house in turmoil, the sink full of skanky dishes and a grown man with embarrassing toilet troubles.

  Mr G-R’s pitifulness melted his wife’s flinty old heart. She sighed, gently shook her head, gave a smile of infinitely sweet sadness, and delivered him a kick in the jatz-crackers that would’ve felled a water buffalo.

  Now they were even.

  After he’d recovered (some several hours later), had apologised for his stupid behaviour fifty-seven times, promised his wife a lovely reconciliation dinner and a blubbering ‘never-again-will-I-stray’ guarantee, he foolishly ’fessed up to giving Nathan the family heirloom book, The 101 Damnations.

  Not smart.

  Mrs Grim-Reaper flipped. She knew her boy much better than her husband did and knew the devious lengths Nathan would go to in order to harness that book’s powers. She got on the blower straightaway, rang Nathan’s mobile at school and left a message demanding he return home on the double, book in hand.

  Nathan, as dire bad luck would have it, had just that minute sold page 100. Which meant there was only one page left. One page! The sacred, revered, ancient, priceless, beloved ancestral book of the Familie Grim-Reaper was in total tatters, completely and absolutely torn to shreds.

  Trouble here.

  No. It would all be okay. Calm down. No need to panic. Deep breaths. It was all under control. Nathan had worked out a way to make it all alright. Trouble-be-gone. He’d thought it through very carefully, worked out some infallible tactics and laid out a very precise strategy. He had a plan that couldn’t fail.

  It failed.

  Luckily he had a back-up plan. His backup plan? Run for cover, hide from mother …

  Listen. There’s nothing even remotely funny about a mother on the warpath. It’s like some mad chemical reaction occurs that transforms a meek and mild old mother into a raging tornado of fire, and you’d sooner be buried alive in a coffin of black plague rats than confront her.

  My own dear mother is as tranquil and serene as a gentle sunset until provoked to anger – then suddenly she’s rampaging and bellowing like a wild mountain gorilla competing on Horror Idol.

  Nathan pulled an old trick. He went and camped at Jason-Jock Werewolf’s joint, having first rung home and left a message on the answering machine about flitting off to a witch-burning expo for Society and Culture for the next two days.

  That gave him a couple of days to attempt to rectify the damage, but what hope did he have? There was only one page left in the book. One stupid, useless page. What possible earthly good was one page? And written in Latin, the language of the Dead.

  The language of the Dead.

  Nathan started thinking then, as in using his brain. He began wondering what exactly was written on that last remaining page. Since it was written in the language of the Dead, and he was deader than dead from Mother’s wrath if he didn’t nut out a way to restore the book, maybe the writing had some relevance to him.

  Maybe?

  I never claimed he was gifted.

  It sure took long enough to translate that page of archaic and longwinded wordage. No wonder Latin was a dead language – it took three lifetimes just to decipher a page, and even then you’d rather pour molten lead in your eye than read it. Talk about dreary. But, when he’d finally decoded it, Nathan knew he was onto something – his only hope of survival.

  When all damnations have been sown,

  from this last, one more can be grown.

  Divide one page to many more,

  a piece to each will full restore.

  A piece to he that thee has cursed,

  miss but one, none reimbursed.

  I hated Latin at school and don’t like it any better now. When I signed up, the publisher promised me three things: coffee breaks with biscuits, a swivelly chair and no Latin. So far, zilch on all three.

  Be warned, reader – publishers are not to be trusted.

  So. The Latin. I’ve read over the verse above (and pretty feeble versing too, in my humble opinion) and as far as I can make out, it meant this: if you’ve used up all the damnation pages then there’s a way of making more from the final page, whoop-dee-doo, lucky you. Next bit, some monotonous flapdoodle about ripping the last page up into a hundred pieces, bling-bling, that sort of thing. Finally, deliver one of those pieces to each of the victims – miss anyone out, you’ll get nowt.

  And they say writing poetry is difficult. Hello!

  Ah, April Fool’s Day – what a glorious and underrated occasion. An opportunity for every clown in town to trick, trap, dupe and bamboozle their friends into appearing even bigger dingbats than they actually are, if that’s possible. What could be more fulfilling than dropping a deadly scorpion down your enemy’s undies, phone-ordering three tonne of fresh cow manure to be dumped on your maths teacher’s front lawn, or selling the brand new school ambulance to a wrecking yard for scrap?

  Nothing, that’s what.

  Of course, there’ll always be some folks who aren’t the greatest fans of Fool’s Day. Folks who’ve been regular victims of pranks in the past, who realise they’ll likely be victimised repeatedly in the future and don’t relish the prospect of that future pain and trauma one bit. It’s their right in a civilised democracy to hold and express that opinion.

  Wusses.

  Principal Skullwater was one of them. He’d attempted to ban the event year after year, but was simply ignored by students, teachers and even the P&F. It really steamed his asparagus. Why couldn’t all the students devote their energies to passing tests and completing homework instead of thinking up more degrading, humiliating and shameful pranks to pull on him?

  Good question. And one that Skullwater would be asking for the last time this lifetime, if Avril Fule was successful in today’s assassination attempt. And he was always successful.

  Mummy!

  Now and again everybody – even a writer – has to do a hard day’s work, but it seemed mighty unfair that Nathan’s hardest day’s work ever should coincide with his favourite day ever. Until this year the high point of his calendar had been Fool’s Day, which he might easily have renamed Fun Day.

  Not this year.

  The Latin spell for reconstituting the hundred torn out, sold off, used up pages from The 101 Damnations required Nathan to give each of the spell victims a portion of the final page. In order to achieve this, he had to identify who’d been cursed in the first place.

  Nathan had to retrace his original customers and interview them closely regarding their cursive intentions. Some were coy, some reluctant to say, some off sick from school, some wagging. It was a logistical nightmare, but he had to do it – and do it right – to save himself from Mother.

  Nathan had hoped a few people hadn’t yet used up the damnation pages, that he might get the pages back whole and untarnished, but he might as well have hoped the sun wouldn’t rise on Fool’s Day. Everybody had activated their curses, settin
g the controls for that one day of maximum foolishness and folly.

  Everybody reported the same thing when they named their victim and laid down their curse: the damnation page curled up in their hand and theatrically vanished in a natty puff of thick, grey smoke.

  With this and other relevant information, Nathan compiled a list of everybody he’d sold curse pages to, the name of the person they’d cursed and the exact nature of the curse.

  And, before you ask, no – I won’t outline the spiteful, vicious details of the hundred horrible things students cursed their enemies with, just to give you new ideas for revenge.

  Forget it. I do have certain responsibilities and standards to uphold as a writer, you know, so let’s have a modicum of respect. There are some things I certainly wouldn’t divulge, not even for money. There are some details too harsh for innocent readers, too ugly to disclose to normal citizens, too weird to share with decent people and too gruesome to lay on a respectable audience.

  So here they all are …

  Selina Bones-Jones bought page one. She cursed David Dingbrain with 600 years of diarrhoea and hiccups, a sludgy combination.

  John Pinhead bought page two. He cursed his Advanced and Vocational Curses teacher, turning Mrs Hancock’s hands into two snapping turtles, her nose into an electric eel and her backside into a dartboard.

  Jason-Jock Werewolf cursed Mr Derby the PE teacher, transforming his curly hair into a thousand writhing venomous snakes, all with breath like a cart-horse.

  Gary Hooper cursed Damien Frankenstein-Monster, though the boy-creature already wet his pants every day, anyway. Waste of a good curse.

  Matthew Mummie cursed Steven Frogsalad with a coronary fart attack. Mummie’s dried-up mummification bandages caught on fire when the curse page smouldered away, and he had to leap into the school pond – much laughter, you should’ve been there …