Horror High 2

by Paul Stafford

  Yeah right.

  There are some seriously far-out coincidences occurring throughout history, but this coincidence …

  Let’s just say it’s stretching it, like claiming Michael Jackson is a real boy and not a Pinocchio puppet with a cork nose, or that Ozzie Osbourne’s undies once belonged to Albert Einstein and could calculate pi to 600 decimal points while still providing superior hosiery support.

  I told the publisher: too much coincidence. Way too much. Unbelievable. Inconceivable. In-your-dreamsable. My readers won’t tolerate it, I said – they’re not total idiots.

  I lied about that bit.

  Did the publisher care? Did they listen to my exceptional arguments? According to their research, the intelligence quotient of readers who stoop to this type of literary silage is in the same percentile bracket as a bucket of mullet, with the gullibility of the Tooth Fairy and a brain-bone as thick and impenetrable as an armour-plated, all-terrain vehicle.

  Those were the publisher’s words, not mine. And as answers go, that one was good enough for me. In fact, I have to admit I quite liked it and will be using it myself in the future.

  So we’ll move right along …

  Most kids are put off by graveyards at midnight, but Team Werewolf was made of sterner stuff. Okay, Fleabag wasn’t – he stayed at home, whimpering and wussing it up under his doona because a bee was crawling around outside his window – but the others weren’t expecting him to turn up and didn’t let Fleabag’s absence bother them too much.

  Anyway, there were enough of them to do the job; three on picks, three on shovels and four more to stand around slacking off like a genuine road crew, pretending to keep watch. From a distance it would certainly have looked like a shady operation – a bunch of shifty looking teenagers, up to no good late at night, lurking in the shadows of a deserted cemetery. You never saw a group of hounds look more guilty about digging up bones.

  Luckily no neighbourhood-watching, night-walking do-gooder was out that way to chase the boys off like common mutts, and with the ground wet from recent rain, the workers were able to shift six feet of soil in record time.

  After an hour’s hard digging they struck the top of the coffin with a hollow thud. The coffin was too heavy to lift free of the grave, so they angled crowbars in under the lip and jimmied the lid off with a dry crack of splitting timber.

  And there, dully reflecting the light of the moon, lay the mouldering skeleton of WG Grace, the finest cricketer of his day. His bones were bleached white with age and his bony left hand rested on a dusty old willow cricket bat.

  Jason-Jock lowered himself carefully down into the damp, dark hole. When he’d found his footing on the crumbly sides of the fresh opened grave, he reached into the musty coffin and prised up the skull, gingerly passing it up to Grubby.

  The disease-ridden, idiot werewolf took the skull in his left paw and the jawbone in his right and, fitting the two together, started making it chatter, ‘I’m WG Grace and I’m gonna give you a cricket lesson you’ll never forget!’ he growled out the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Shut up, clown!’ barked Jason-Jock, but behind his back the other werewolves smirked.

  I told you they had no common decency.

  JJ passed up two collar bones, followed by arm bones, leg bones, short bones, long bones and a weird-looking pelvic bone that some tripped-out hippy could’ve made into an excellent wind chime for their veranda. The bones were dropped unceremoniously into a mouldy, old hessian sack, clacking against each other like giant pencils.

  Then JJ picked up the ancient cricket bat, thinking it may contain some good cricket magic, too, but the old thing busted into pieces and he tossed it back in the box. The werewolf cricket captain replaced the lid and scrambled out; they shovelled the soil back in place, slapped each other excitedly on the back and scarpered into the night, howling at the solemn old moon.

  Next day the team met back at the tree house where they’d stored the pilfered bones overnight. Jason-Jock had borrowed his mum’s coffee grinder, and now the werewolves set to reducing the six foot skeleton to a bag of dust.

  I’ve had some crapulent jobs in my time – including writing no-hoper stories for fat-witted teenagers who wouldn’t know a … hang on, that’s this job – but not even I would’ve accepted a prospect as totally incorrect as the one facing the werewolves now.

  There was no easy way around it. First they had to smash the bones into pieces with a masonry hammer and feed those bits into the coffee grinder. The bones were brittle but it still took hours, and the resulting bone dust came out mixed with coffee grounds, a curious combo of grey and brown – like nothing you’re likely to find on the menu board at Starbucks anytime soon. It smelt of desecration and deep dodginess.

  Dodginess? According to my spellcheck that word doesn’t exist, and it sure doesn’t even begin to describe how the evil concoction smelt dry, let alone how it smelt after the bilious brew was infused with water. It was a powdered death shake that even Grubby baulked at.

  But drink it they must and drink it they did. One by one, sip for sip, each of the werewolves slowly slurped the sickening slop. To absorb the dead cricketer’s skill, they had to absorb this dead cricketer swill, and if that’s cheating buy me a ticket on the next bus home.

  Finally, after an hour of gagging and half-barfing gulps, it was gone. Chomper glared at Jason-Jock after the last dregs drained out of his cup.

  ‘That’s the single most disgusting thing I’ve ever done. This had better work.’

  What happened next all depends on your definition of the term ‘work’. It ‘worked’ on the eleven young werewolves in a most spectacular, volatile and uncompromising manner, causing four days of projectile vomiting, stomach cramps, rampant nausea and explosive buckshot diarrhoea.

  They missed three important class tests, a heaps fun school Mufti Day (including a teacher-pupil lung transplant swap) and a vicious schoolyard fist-fight between an ADHD mummie and a cross-eyed imp.

  In terms of inheriting WG Grace’s superb cricketing skills, the ‘magic’ brew gave the werewolves runs, but not the sort of runs they were hoping for, between wickets after whacking a cricket ball.

  The other werewolves were understandably annoyed at Jason-Jock and his rubbish magic book. But, as if they hadn’t suffered enough, the worst was yet to come.

  WG Grace might have been an exceedingly talented cricketer, but he was also an exceedingly bad-tempered old geezer. Despite being dead nearly 100 years, the fieriness of his temper had not diminished one jot. Now his bones had been disturbed, his skeleton smashed to bits, ground to dust and drunk by a pack of hooligan werewolves. And his favourite cricket bat was busted.

  Now – surprise, surprise – he wanted revenge.

  The first the young werewolves knew about the hellbroth of trouble brewing was the day after they’d recovered from the poisoning. They were meeting in the tree house, Chomper had just arrived – late as usual – and the team was discussing their options for future life, mulling over what they’d do once they were kicked out of school.

  Grubby was going to volunteer for medical experiments. Howler was thinking he might join a sledge team and race around the Arctic Circle. Fleabag reckoned he might train as an attack dog, and they all laughed at that despite the depressing baseline theme of the topic. Imagine Fleabag as an attack dog, terrified of everything from laughing clowns to kittens.

  And imagine being kicked out of Horror High. They didn’t have to imagine it anymore. Now it was going to happen, sure as.

  During a lull in the lugubrious conversation they heard the ladder scraping against the tree house platform, shaking and juddering and jigging, swaying under the weight of someone slowly climbing up. But who was this? The whole team was present.

  A head appeared, grey hair, parted dead in the middle and severely combed down, old-fashioned style. Then a forehead like an ancient tree trunk, deeply lined, and down the lower branches two eyebrows like cockatoos’ nests that held gl
aring black eyes instead of eggs. Then a bulbous red vein-shot nose and a massive bushy beard covering a crazy angry mouth. The mouth was panting, fighting for breath. ‘Why … the … dickens … did you … build this … blasted thing … so blanking high …’

  ‘Who are you,’ asked Jason-Jock, ‘and what are you doing in my tree house?’

  With interview skills like that, JJ clearly had a future on A Current Affair.

  The old bloke dragged himself up onto the platform and glared poisonously at the team. He was slumped on all fours, hyperventilating, trying to catch his breath.

  Finally he hissed, ‘I’m WG Grace and I’m here to teach you a lesson you’ll never forget!’

  It took a long time and a stack of pleadings, wheedlings, excusings and super suck-up entreaties to prevent the 19th-century cricketer from following his original plan of grinding the 21st-century werewolves’ bones to dust, as a fitting revenge for desecrating his grave and dishonouring his memory.

  It was Jason-Jock who finally convinced the angry old coot to forgive them. He briefed – if ‘briefed’ means begging on your hands and knees, crying like a little girl – WG Grace on their dastardly dilemma; how, if they lost the cricket match they’d be expelled from school; how they were sure to lose since they were useless; how they’d dug his bones up because they’d identified him as the finest cricketer ever.

  The fuming ghost smiled grudgingly at this, nodded with humility and stroked his stonking great eiderdown beard. ‘Yes, it were true,’ he muttered.

  Nineteenth-century ghosts are suckers for flattery, a fact worth remembering if you’re ever in a tight spot with the Dead.

  This ghost was mondo vain about two things: his undisputed cricketing prowess and his heaps chunky beard. It looked like a shimmering waterfall of grey hair pouring out his mouth, tumbling all the way down his shirtfront into his trousers and fanning out into rippling runnels as it slopped into his strides.

  He was scarily hairily.

  Jason-Jock had already complimented WG’s undisputed cricketing prowess, so when the werewolf cricket captain informed the England cricket captain that Principal Skullwater had targeted the werewolves because they were hairy, WG Grace’s mind was galvanised.

  WG was so hairy that, if reduced to a mathematical equation for purposes of assessment, he’d have been classified ten per cent human, ninety per cent hair.

  One hundred and thirty years ago he’d been the butt of everyone’s jolly jokes, the prey of every smart alec with a hokey hair harangue. In a period of history when baldness had been all the fashion for men, women, children and even small dogs, WG had been heinously harassed for his hirsute handicap. A modern day fancy-pants sports psychiatrist would’ve classified him as a certified victim of hairism and sued someone for heaps.

  WG had hoped that’d all changed in the passage of a century of enlightened thinking. How wrong he was and how mad that made him. He frothed at the mouth to hear that in these supposedly tolerant times hair was still such a divisive issue.

  He’d hoped society would’ve evolved and matured in the 90 years he’d been lying in a hole, but he was sadly mistaken. Hippies had come and gone, and now young men with terminal hair issues suffered big-style for their preposterous pelts, their manic manes, their tremulous tresses, their furry fleeces, their creditable curls.

  And if WG had spent more time studying his thesaurus instead of combing his absurd shag pile, he could’ve added a whole bunch more clever and alliterative hair references. He couldn’t be bothered (I couldn’t either) and now the opportunity has passed forever.

  But that’s not the point. The point was this: WG Grace had copped all the hairist jokes in his day, and been called everything from ‘bear hair’ to ‘mammoth head’ to ‘werewolf’. Yes, he’d been called ‘werewolf’, as though it was an insult, and that was the thing that tipped the scale in our hero’s favour.

  He felt obvious empathy for Jason-Jock and the werewolf team, and at that moment of weakness he decided to help them.

  Sucker!

  Or maybe they were the suckers. God, did WG Grace work those lazy werewolves. Day after day in the nets – batting, bowling, discussions, lectures, more batting and bowling. Panting laps around the oval, push-ups, star-jumps, more batting and bowling.

  They studied footage of their opponents while WG pointed out their weak spots, advising them how to capitalise on these areas. They watched DVDs of the real pros, the Aussie team. WG laughed at their girly coloured suits festooned with junk food advertisements and mocked Warney’s sissy boy-band haircut and lay-around-the-house lardiness.

  Fangbert threw his drink in WG’s face and the cricket legend ghost chased the werewolf around the oval, swinging a cricket bat, howling with rage and vowing to crack Fangbert’s worthless skull like a rotten emu egg.

  But all in all the team got it together, and began to actually play like a team. Then, after three weeks of this tedium, dreariness, monotony and mind-numbingly boring training antics that I won’t even begin to burden you with, the legendary competition commenced.

  The Interghouls Cricket Cup is, as everybody knows, the event of the sporting calendar for ghoul schools. Sure, everybody pretends that the swimming carnival and the hockey play-offs and the rugby are just as prestigious, but these are the same single-celled simpletons who tell you it’s not important whether you win or lose but how you play the game.

  And we all know which vegetable patch these weeds are growing in – and why instead of being treated as heroes they’re treated with herbicide – so let’s say no more about it. Winning was everything and every student in every ghoul school knew it. They would’ve gladly died a second time to win the Cup, and the facts speak for themselves.

  Death stalked the Cup. Rates of parental homicide went through the roof this time of year, and psychotically angry parents who knocked off their child for losing the Cup were always let off by the courts on the grounds of justifiable homicide. They were given a pat on the back, an excellent meal in the courthouse cafe at the city’s expense, and free parking and carwash vouchers for their next court appearance.

  The Interghouls Cricket Cup is a sudden death play-off, as you’d expect from a ghoul school competition. What you might not have expected was that the Werewolves XI, suddenly and impossibly playing tight as any team can play, scorched their more docile opponents, stomped them to Hell and back, winning round after round.

  Their skill – and luck – held, and after six matches they found themselves in the finals, pitted against the team that had convincingly held the Cup seven years running, Death Valley High’s Vampires XI.

  You might’ve noticed that clever sleight-of-hand tactic at the end of the last chapter. It’s a pretty convenient way of covering a whole lot of story in a very few sentences, and since I’m paid by the page I can legally pad half this story with out-of-date stock market columns and copyright-expired strip cartoons and still come away with the same pay cheque.

  Pretty sweet hook-up, eh?

  You probably think it’s your right to be provided with every comical, quirky detail about the werewolves and their high-jinx cricket antics, since that’s what the book’s back cover advertised and what the publisher is paying me for. I can respect that. I think you’re right. Really.

  What I can’t do is linger around here until April Fool’s Day to hold a mirror up so you can swap notes with the Fool of the Year. Maybe we can arrange for an autograph and get ourselves back to the story, if you don’t mind.

  You may glare down your nose at these unworthy tactics, since it means you’re denied all the nitty-gritty details and noteworthy incidents of those previous six matches against the likes of the Skulls XI and the Savage Cannibals X (who ate their eleventh team-mate for lunch). But why bother sharing pointless stuff like Howler setting the umpire’s breeches on fire by accident, trying to light a skyrocket; or Dingus spiking the opposition’s drink bucket with laxatives then accidentally drinking four tumblers himself; or Fleabag, runni
ng scared, toppling headlong into a garbage can full of snapping turtles that were meant to be the raffle prize.

  You don’t need to know about the match accidentally scheduled on National Nude Day where both sides, the umpire and the spectators all participated in the raw – an AO episode.

  You wouldn’t be interested in the match that fell during International Elvis Week, when everyone turned up in big hair, garish glitter suits and 20kg of extra lard strapped to their butts, mumbling ‘Thank you very much’ and ‘This one’s for my momma’ every time they hit the ball.

  And if you persist on the complete low-down on these mangy werewolves and their six long gone but celebrated cricket matches, if you absolutely demand complete documentation and the entire transcript, here’s a piece of advice for you – why don’t you apply for my job and I’ll take yours. I’m sure I’m up to it. Can’t be too difficult being a juvenile delinquent …

  The Vampires XI were so confident of year-after-year victory they’d taken to drinking human blood out of the ornate silver cup, permanently staining it a rank, murky purple.

  Now, as their teams met on the field of final conflict, they hissed murderously at the werewolves. These bloodsuckers were definitely open for business.

  Fleabag whimpered, looked like he’d wet his pants, but Jason-Jock said, ‘Don’t worry. Be cool.’

  That was easy to say, but JJ was worried and far from cool. Things had started bad and rapidly got worse. They lost the toss and the vampires elected to bat, making the most of the lack of light.

  Say what? Lack of light? You read it right. See, those villainous vampires got to the head of the cricket committee, sucking on his neck until the owner agreed to reschedule the final match for twelve hours later than usual, ensuring the first ball was bowled at midnight rather than the standard midday.