It was Ms Snott’s class first. He settled down at his desk just as she arrived, her wrinkled face immobile as always.
‘Good morning, Ms Snott,’ the class chanted.
She was wearing bright green lycra today with two small daggers strapped to her ankles. ‘Good morning, you horrible little band of garbage guzzlers. Today we are studying …’ she flicked the lights off and the screen lit up, ‘the feeding habits of Zurms. Now, who can tell me all about Zurms? Yes, Princess?’
Ms Snott hadn’t even looked to see Princess Princess’s hand shoot up, beating Mug’s green fungus paw. She just knew the first hand up would be Princess Princess’s.
Princess Princess knew everything.
‘The Giant Zurm or Strawberry-Jammer of Death is under the control of the Greedle,’ parroted Princess Princess. ‘It is the only known creature able to dig holes between universes. No one knows why it does this, as the matter dividing the universes is not thought to contain nutrition of any kind. Instead, Zurms coat their prey in strawberry jam excreted from their rear ends, then wait for the jam to harden and their prey to decompose inside. Then they suck out the sludge because Zurms don’t have teeth.’
‘Correct,’ said Ms Snott, sounding as though today was the most boring day of the most boring year of her life. She started to trim her nails with one of the daggers. ‘Can any of you pus-filled pimple-faces tell me how you can tell a Giant Flower Grub from a Zurm who is going to turn you into a giant Zurm strawberry-flavoured slime-shake?’
‘Giant Slug good to eat too. Slug quiche, slug and chips. Specially when it won’t stop wriggling …’ offered Mug. ‘Maybe Giant Grub taste different from giant worm.’
‘Er, Giant Flower Slugs aren’t in the textbook,’ said Princess Princess.
‘No, Princess,’ said Ms Snott, calmly replacing her dagger. ‘Most of life isn’t in a textbook. The textbook is only about bogeys. Luckily one can go for days, sometimes, without meeting a bogey at all. The friendly Giant Flower Grub lives on the Pretty Nice Really Garden World. It eats the mould spores that attack the daffodils. If you wipe out the Giant Flower Slugs you wipe out the daffodils. Giant Flower Grubs are an endangered species — killing even one of them may mean that there aren’t enough of the others to keep breeding more Giant Flower Grubs. So, if a Giant Flower Grub suddenly crawled up out of the lava …’
Automatically the class looked out through the small round stone-framed window at the lava bubbling below. But to Boo’s relief no grub of any variety appeared.
‘… how would you know what to do?’
Mug tried to raise his fungus paw but Princess Princess’s hand sprang up again. ‘I’d Wham! Bam! Pow! it anyway, till it was grub jelly,’ she said. ‘Just to make sure. Who cares about daffodils?’
‘Quite a lot of people,’ said Ms Snott, showing a hint of interest for the first time that day. ‘I myself am very fond of daffodils. Especially toxic ones that can kill a bogey with one sniff. My mother has won the Best Poisoned Daffodil Award at the All Universes Flower and Toxin Show three times in a row … but enough of that.
‘The important thing is that a certain breed of wasp on the Pretty Nice Really Garden World feeds on daffodil nectar. If you wipe out the daffodils you wipe out the wasps. The wasp larvae feed on the pocpoc fly, which carries a disease deadly to the human inhabitants. So if you kill too many Giant Flower Slugs a lot of people on the Pretty Nice Really Garden World are going to die too.
‘It’s like the feral goats and feral cats in my own world,’ continued Ms Snott. ‘In their own environments the cats and goats play a valuable role. But when humans took them to new places the goats turned forests into deserts and the cats wiped out other species. So, can any of you putrid lumps of decomposing elephant vomit tell me one simple way to know when to Wham! Bam! Pow! goats, cats or Giant Grubs or when to leave them alone?’
Boo wished he could scratch his ear with his hind paw to help him think. Surely there was some heroic way to tell if something was an enemy or not?
Slowly, next to him, Yesterday put up her hand.
‘Yes, Yesterday?’ asked Ms Snott.
‘I don’t think there is a fast way. You’d have to study them till you worked out what was happening. But that would take ages.’
‘Good answer,’ said Ms Snott. ‘Sometimes there isn’t a quick answer. But what about the Giant Grub? It’s coming towards you … close … closer … closer. You don’t have time to study it. If it’s a Zurm it will spread deadly strawberry jam all over your friends. But if you kill a Giant Flower Grub, people in a far-off universe may die instead. So what do you do?’
Yesterday’s hand went up again. ‘I’d stand in front of it. And if it started to ooze strawberry jam over me, I’d know it was a nasty one.’
‘Correct,’ said Ms Snott. ‘Now, let us move on to —’
‘Hey, wait a minute,’ cried Princess Princess. ‘That’s crazy! You’d be risking your life.’
‘Yes,’ said Yesterday quietly. ‘But isn’t that what a Hero does?’
‘Now that,’ said Ms Snott, ‘is the first really correct answer I have heard anyone in this class give. A Hero doesn’t attack at all unless they are sure that what they’re facing is an enemy. Now I think I’ll go up to Rest in Pieces and have a cup of tea and a blueberry-and-tentacle muffin while the rest of you write out what I’ve said, oh, a thousand times. Or maybe I’ll join the others in a nice game of Bogey Bowling. Yesterday, you may go and have an early lunch.’
Ms Snott limped calmly out of the classroom.
Princess Princess flung her gold pen onto her desk. ‘It’s not fair! You just lucked that answer. Now the rest of us have to waste our lunch hour writing down rubbish.’
Mug shrugged, making his fungus wobble. ‘Me thinks her name should be Princess Pea-brain …’ he muttered.
‘I’ll help, if you like,’ said Yesterday quietly.
Princess Princess brightened. ‘Will you?’ She tossed Yesterday her pen. ‘Make sure you do them in my writing, won’t you?’ She strode out the door.
By the end of term, Class 1 were ready to do their first practical Hero exam.
‘It’s all a matter of luck,’ Princess Princess explained to everyone at lunchtime, as the group sat with their lunch boxes on the boulders above the lava. The smoke clouds had parted again today, showing a glimpse of flickering red sky above.
Sometimes Boo wondered what was in the rest of this universe. Were there more volcanoes bubbling all around them?
But none of the students seemed to know, and he didn’t like to ask the teachers. And it was a strict school rule that no one was allowed up the path to the retirement village. Some of the old Heroes were inclined to forget just who was a student, and who was a bogey. And no Hero who had battled the Fire-Breathing Bogeys of Bungus or the Belly-Popping Bogeys of Farrr Offf liked being disturbed, especially not during a game of Biff! Bam! Bingo!
‘We have to wait till Miss Cassandra Finds some bogeys suitable for Level 1 Heroes breaking through to some universe or other from the Ghastly Otherwhen,’ continued Princess Princess. ‘Sometimes Level 1s have to wait for months till the right sort of bogey comes along. We’re not supposed to tackle really dangerous bogeys yet, of course. Just easy ones like poisonous Gurgle Bugs. Then when we beat the easy bogeys we become Level 2 Heroes.’
‘What if we don’t?’ asked Boo.
Princess Princess took a neat bite from her chicken, lettuce, gold dust and tomato sandwich. ‘You’re dead, of course.’
‘Oh,’ said Boo.
‘Unless you manage to escape the bogeys and get back here. Then you have to repeat Level 1 classes. Which would be sooo embarrassing you may as well be dead anyway,’ added Princess Princess.
No one quite knew how Princess Princess knew things like that. Boo supposed she’d got the information from some of the Level 2s, who’d been through all this already. Even the Level 2s and 3s seemed to think Princess Princess was wonderful.
‘I hope we
get a mad robot,’ said T’ai T’ai, polishing her claws on her tunic. ‘I like the way they crunch when you pound them.’
‘Me want biiiigg mutated fly,’ said Mug. ‘Me hate flies. Me have to squirt whole can of fly-spray every morning. Maggots do real bad things to hairstyle.’
Boo didn’t say anything. His Wham! Bam! Pow!s was still clumsy, and a ten-second Zoom! wasn’t going to get him very far with any bogey. He was sure he was going to fail his Level 2 test.
He was just as sure he had to try.
‘Will we all get the same sort of bogey?’ asked Yesterday. She’d forgotten her lunch today, too. In fact, she’d forgotten it every day since Boo had been at Hero School. He’d taken to asking Mrs Bigpaws to pack him a couple of bananas to give to her, because for some reason Yesterday didn’t like rat sandwiches, or even corgi salad. But she loved bananas.
Princess Princess shook her head. ‘Depends what turns up. I hope it’s soon. It’s going to be so cool! I’ve got a special costume all made up,’ she added. ‘It’s cloth of gold with diamond spangles and new sandals with diamond heels as well.’
It’s all right for her, Boo thought gloomily. Princess Princess was the most brilliant Hero the school has ever had. Everybody said so. Why, she could tell you what was on page 578 of Volume 6 of The Nasty Book of Nasties AND Wham! Bam! Pow! a brick into the smallest fragments anyone had ever seen. The books in the library almost saluted when Princess Princess stalked past.
I’m not really a Hero, thought Boo dismally. The Hero act with the Greedle that had qualified him for entry was just luck. But if he was sent home he’d never be able to find Mum. He’d let down all of Sleepy Whiskers, too. They were so proud of having a home-grown Hero.
And besides, he realised, I have friends here now. Mug, and even Yesterday.
And if he left the School for Heroes he’d never see Princess Princess again!
20
Exams and Bunny Bogeys
The news came that afternoon.
It was library class. Boo found library class difficult.
It wasn’t that he didn’t like books. He loved their smell. A good book smelt like a whole universe had been crammed within its pages. He even liked reading them, though books didn’t taste as good when you had to turn the pages with fingers instead of licking them.
He also liked the librarian, Mrs Kerfuffle, who was small and round and could show you how to throw a book like a boomerang, so it knocked out any unsuspecting bogey and whirled back to your hand. (She was especially deadly with the dictionaries.)
No, the real problem was the library itself. But then the library was everyone’s problem. Because when you had a ghost library, filled with the wisdom of a thousand dead Heroes, no one ever knew exactly where it would be.
Sometimes it was at one end of the corridor, sometimes at the other. Once, it decided to perch on the giant boulder that led to the skinning pool, and everyone had to climb up to it. Another time it hovered near the ceiling of Dr Mussells’s office and Jones the Janitor (who was deadly with a well-thrown screwdriver) had to bring a rope and hook and they all had to help haul it down.
But when you got into the library it was pretty interesting, as long as it didn’t decide to fly off while you were in it — and as long as you didn’t go into it till the books had finished their morning dagger-throwing practice. And at least the books always returned to their places on the shelves just as soon as they were due, which made life easier for everybody — unless a student accidentally got in the books’ way.
Today the library was floating a few inches above the lunch area. The books had been quarrelling among themselves all morning, but they were quieter now, the small ones doing push-ups together at one end of the library, and the big ones showing off their muscles by the doorway.
Boo had just chosen his books — a small and fairly friendly-looking history of the Ghastly Otherwhen and another called 101 Fun Projects with Cockroaches — when Dr Mussells swung through the library door, his lilac silk shirt billowing. (Somehow ropes just appeared from the ceiling when Dr Mussells arrived. Boo supposed it was just part of being a monkey Hero.)
‘Attention, Level 1!’ he ordered, dangling by one hand from the door jamb and kicking one of the lurking books away with his foot. ‘Miss Cassandra has just reported that there have been a couple of invasions of Level-1-type bogeys from the Ghastly Otherwhen.’
Princess Princess put up her hand. ‘What creatures have invaded, sir?’ she asked eagerly.
‘A small mob of Icy Slithery Things in the Happy To Be Here Universe. It seems the Greedle is after Happy To Be Here’s famous watermelon pizzas. And three Rabbits have invaded the World of Golden Grass. We’re not sure what the Greedle wants with the World of Golden Grass,’ Dr Mussells added, turning swiftly and punching a poetry book that was trying to practise skipping with his tail.
Boo brightened. ‘Rabbit’ was a nice bouncy word. Chasing Rabbits didn’t sound too bad at all! Maybe Rabbits would be terrified by the mere smell of a werewolf and run away …
Suddenly Chapter 243 of Volume 1 of The Nasty Book of Nasties came back to him.
Rabbits
Rabbits are one of the Ghastly Otherwhen’s most vicious small killers. Although Rabbits have no super powers, no one except a trained Hero is able to vanquish one.
Rabbits club their victims to death with their feet, which they use with deadly accuracy against anyone who tries to stop them, and then they eat them. Despite their small size, Rabbits eat almost all the time they are awake. One Rabbit on a diet can consume a small town in a week.
Hero rating: Level 1 and above.
Giant Rabbits: Just as vicious as ordinary Rabbits.
But bigger. Nastier, too.
Hero rating: Level 3 and above.
Vulnerable points: Please advise publisher if found.
Boo gulped. Maybe Rabbits wouldn’t be as scared as he’d hoped. Please, he thought, let me get the Icy Slithery Things.
‘Squeak,’ said the mouse, peering out of Boo’s pocket. Boo hastily shoved it out of sight.
Princess Princess’s hand shot up again. ‘Who gets to fight which bogeys, sir?’
‘Miss Cassandra drew lots.’ Dr Mussells smiled his blinding grin as he swung back and forth. ‘Lots of adventure then. Get it? He-he-he! Now, T’ai T’ai the Bold, Fedor the Ferocious and Princess of Pewké will go out against the Icy Slithery Things. And Mug, Yesterday and Boojum Bark will fight the Rabbits. The rest of you will have to wait until more bogeys are sighted. Hopefully it won’t be long before there’s another invasion,’ he added comfortingly. ‘The Greedle always seems hungrier at this time of year!’
Boo gulped. He and Mug — the two most hopeless Heroes in the class! And Yesterday! Although at least Yesterday was better at Hero skills than him — and more intelligent than Mug. Even an elderly flea with flu would make a better Hero than him and Mug, he thought dismally.
They were doomed … he heard the echo of Miss Cassandra’s words. Doom, doom …
It isn’t fair, he thought. Without me, Yesterday and Mug would have a chance. They’d get a real Hero to complete their team. Maybe …
Suddenly Mr Hogg’s pink face appeared at the door. ‘Excuse me, Dr Mussells. A message from Miss Cassandra. The Icy Slithery Things have melted. An unexpected heatwave, I believe. The watermelon pizza is safe.’
‘That’s not fair!’ Princess Princess stood up, her hands on her hips. ‘I’m top of the class! I should have first go at getting up to Level 2! Dr Mussells, I demand that my group gets the Rabbits!’
‘You demand?’
For the first time Boo saw Princess Princess embarrassed. ‘Well, er, I mean … may I please go and hunt the Rabbits, sir?’
‘Very well. You may join Mug, Yesterday and Boojum Bark.’
‘What? That’s not what I meant! I’m not going Rabbit-hunting with a zombie and a part-time woof-woof! Boo can’t even Zoom! properly! And his Wham! Bam! Pow! is a joke. Count me out!’
&n
bsp; Dr Mussells dropped down onto the library carpet, punched a stray thesaurus and looked at Princess Princess coolly. ‘You either go with the others and try to pass your test or you leave the School for Heroes. Which is it to be?’
Princess Princess stared at him. ‘You can’t expel me! I’m a hereditary royal Hero! And the best student in the class!’
‘Two choices,’ said Dr Mussells, peering under a dictionary and coming up with a banana. ‘Go hunt the bogey, or go home.’
Princess Princess stuck out her chin. ‘You seem to forget I’m a princess.’
Dr Mussells ignored her. He seemed more interested in peeling his banana.
‘I’m going to be the best Hero this school has ever seen. Everyone says so.’
Dr Mussells sniffed his banana, then offered it to the dictionary. The book took a small bite. ‘You have three seconds to decide,’ said Dr Mussells. ‘Home or bogeys. One. Two …’
Princess Princess glanced around the classroom, as though hoping her father’s army was going to charge to her rescue.
The class avoided her gaze. Princess Princess sighed dramatically. ‘Bogeys. But you wait till I’m a Level 20 Hero and put this in my memoirs. When do we go?’ she added.
‘Now,’ said Dr Mussells, in between bites of his banana. ‘The school minibus has logged the distress call, so it will find the way through the wormholes. It’s ready to take you.’
The school minibus was parked by the gaping mouth of the wormhole, its tyres gently steaming on the hot rock. Boo stared at the bus curiously. It looked like an ordinary bus, apart from a few scorch marks on the sides and the bat perched on the windscreen wiper.
Princess Princess stepped into it first. She’d changed into her new Hero costume, two gold frills for a skirt and three frills for a top, with a lot of Princess Princess in between. Her sandals were gold too, with silver laces halfway up to her knees.
She still hadn’t said anything to any of the others. She planted herself on the back seat, carefully spreading out her skirt so there was no room for anyone else.
Lessons for a Werewolf Warrior Page 11
