Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Young Readers Group
345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
USA / Canada / UK / Ireland / Australia / New Zealand / India / South Africa / China
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com
Text copyright © 2013 Rotterly Ghoulstone
Illustrations copyright © 2013 Nigel Baines
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
ISBN 978-1-101-60451-9
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
FIRST MISTAKE
SECOND MISTAKE
THIRD MISTAKE
FOURTH MISTAKE
FIFTH MISTAKE
SIXTH MISTAKE
SEVENTH MISTAKE
EIGHTH MISTAKE
NINTH MISTAKE
TENTH MISTAKE
ELEVENTH MISTAKE
TWELFTH MISTAKE
Special Preview of Undead Ed and the Fingers of Doom
This one is for Wendy Schofield on the occasion of her retirement from Holy Trinity School in Ramsgate. Wendy taught some of the brightest children in England
. . . and me.
FIRST MISTAKE:
My name is Ed Bagley, and I’m dead. Thanks for the sympathy.
One rainy night I was hit by a truck and the lights went out. Weirdly, they came back on again and my undead “life” began. Go figure.
Being undead is like getting to a movie theater five minutes after the movie has started and then having to climb over a load of people to find your seat. Nobody really tells you anything: they expect you to find your place, keep quiet, and try to catch up on the stuff you missed.
I’m not just undead, I’m a zombie, too—that sucks more than a mansion full of vacuum cleaners. I mean, I could have been anything: a vampire, a werewolf, even a ghost. Zombies are like the tramps of the living dead: you might throw one a few kind words occasionally, but you don’t want them coming over for dinner and stinking the place up.
Besides, zombies tend to leave things behind . . . and we’re not talking hats and coats: we’re talking teeth and jawbones.
Nope, we’re definitely not popular . . . even among our kind. Fortunately, my family doesn’t suffer any real embarrassment: none of the “breathers” can see us.
The worlds of the living and the dead fit together like a pair of escalators at a supermarket: one goes up, one goes down, and never the twain shall meet.
It’s just as well, really: if my parents saw me right now, my mom would scream and run away, and my dad would probably call the police.
Of course, I can’t help the way I am.
You know the dangerous type? Sure you do; every story has one. In Star Wars, it was Luke; at Hogwarts, it was Harry; in Mortlake, it’s definitely me.
I’m the one who brings destruction, the one who puts everyone in danger, the one who’s letting the whole class down.
The horrible thing, though, is that I did it all by accident.
You see, I became a zombie because—unbeknownst to me—I was cursed. There’s a long version of that story and a short version. You’re getting the short version, because you’re probably not going to live long enough to hear the full epic: I didn’t.
Basically, I got electrocuted when I was younger, and in doing so, I accidentally interrupted this weird group suicide, masterminded by an evil clown. (You should probably read over that last sentence a few times until it starts to sound slightly less warped.)
Kambo Cheapteeth was a deranged circus clown who, together with some weird friends, planned his own glorious death. Unfortunately, I messed it up for Kambo . . .
. . . and now he’s equally determined to mess up my death. The hard way.
He’s enlisted the help of two of his undead friends: Carble and Stein. Carble is a seriously sinister midget with a massive nose and gleaming brass teeth, while Stein has a sewn-up eye and an innate ability to float above the ground. Shudder.
If I was on my own, I’d be terrified. Unfortunately for Kambo, I’ve got some pretty good friends watching my back: Max Moon, a crazy werewolf with an eye for trouble, and Jemini, a highly emotional vampire who can’t seem to accept the fact that she’s dead.
Yeah, okay, they’re not exactly the IDEAL gang, but you can’t be too choosy when you smell as bad as I do: try taping a dead mackerel to your armpits and see how many of your friends stick around . . .
. . . especially if you also happen to have a feral, half-demonic hand.
That’s right, there’s more! During my first week in the world of the dead, I discovered that my left arm had long been possessed by Kambo’s demonic soul. The trouble was, I learned this when the entire arm detached from the rest of my body and went on a mad, destructive rampage around Mortlake. I had to move mountains in order to get it back, and it hasn’t been right since.
By “hasn’t been right” I mean a) it now has nine fingers, four of which seem to veer away at crazy angles from the regular five, b) the fingers are in between the normal ones so the movement looks especially freaky to anyone who’s not already insane, and c) every now and again the hand rises up and uses two of the demon fingers to flick the end of my nose, for reasons I haven’t yet worked out. This last development is particularly worrying, as the end of my nose has already dropped off twice.
Still . . . you’ve got to laugh, right?
SECOND MISTAKE:
People think it’s not possible for the dead to die . . . and they’re wrong. It’s called Eviction: in plain speech, it means “death for the dead.” Only evil spirits tend to be able to cause it, because no one else in their right mind would ever try. Largely, the dead respect one another, and believe it or not, there’s a great sense of community among the undead.
Tonight was a great example of that.
According to Evil Clive, it was the biggest gathering of the dead in Mortlake for over a hundred years. I stood on a raised platform in the old town hall, feeling like a prize idiot, as the eyes of vampires, werewolves, ghosts, ghouls, spirits, and various other deadies goggled at me with a mixture of fascination and hatred.
The meeting was about to start, but I simply couldn’t take my mind off the main attraction. (Well, I guess if you were standing in the crowd, the main attraction was me—after all, the single reason for everyone gathering here was my arrival in Mortlake.) However, for me, the one thing that grabbed my attention and simply wouldn’t let go was the hideous sight of Ten Toe Tom: I had, in all honesty, never seen anything like him in my life or my death.
Ten Toe Tom wasn’t just dead. He was an eater of the undead . . .
. . . and he was massive.
MASSIVE.
MASSIVE.
That man,
I thought, is bigger than an elephant.
No, I corrected myself, he’s bigger than ten elephants.
Rubbish, said an inner voice, he’s bigger than an elephant ARMY.
Tom quite literally spilled out in every direction, sprawling all over the inside of the hall. I still didn’t fully understand the overlapping barrier between the worlds of the living and the dead, so I didn’t have a CLUE how they’d even moved him inside: the double doors at the front of the hall weren’t big enough to admit one of his chins.
“I didn’t expect to see him here,” Max whispered, nodding at the mass of flesh with a look of mild surprise. “I can’t remember the last time any of us actually saw Tom. . . .”
“The night Evil Clive fought the ghouls outside the old graveyard,” said Jemini, sweetly. She was standing on my other side, patting me companionably on the arm. “Don’t worry, Ed. Everything will be okay. Don’t feel bad or anything. It’s only a meeting to let everyone know that Cheapteeth might attack us all because of you.”
I smiled weakly and looked back at the blob in the crowd.
“Why is he called Ten Toe Tom?” I asked. “Surely there’re other ways to describe him? I mean, we’ve all got ten toes; I don’t see why—”
“It’s Ten TOW Tom, you doofus,” Max muttered, covering his mouth and snickering. “On account of the fact that it takes ten tow trucks to move him anywhere.”
“Oh . . . right. I see. But—but how did he get like that?”
“He’s an eater,” Jemini said, matter of factly.
“Like the ghouls?”
She shook her head. “No, the ghouls just chew on corpses. Tom actually eats undead beings—but he doesn’t process them, so they’re just down there, in his stomach, waiting . . .”
“Waiting?” I gasped. “Waiting for what?”
“Maybe some toilet time,” said Max, snickering again.
I just stared at him.
“Seriously, dude . . . if he EATS the dead, how come this room hasn’t cleared out? I mean, it’s like living people standing next to a tiger or something. . . .”
Max grinned, but it was Jemini who spoke.
“Eaters like Tom only have a taste for wicked souls . . . so, as long as you’re not actually EVIL, you’ll be okay.”
I looked down at my hand and gulped, but I didn’t have time to ask them anything else because at that moment Evil Clive got to his feet and the entire hall sputtered into silence. Evil Clive was an animated human skeleton who, for reasons still unclear to me, governed the dead in Mortlake. He wore a dirty gray raincoat and a baseball cap.
“Dead of Mortlake!” he cried out. “Hear me now! Hear me, or I’ll curse you all to the fires of infinity!”
Clive looked down at the audience, but there wasn’t much of a reaction. If anything, they looked bored.
I guess that was the problem with being dead; it was difficult to take any sort of threat seriously.
“As many of you will have heard,” Clive continued, “a cursed child has come among us: one who requires our help and protection in these dark days ahead. . . .”
“Why should we help him?” shouted a vampire at the front of the crowd. “We don’t even know him!”
“Yeah!” echoed a werewolf on the other side of the room. “We didn’t ask him to rise up in our town, the zombie freak!”
A chorus of jeers exploded in the hall. I tried to act as if the whole scene wasn’t bothering me, but a can of lemonade flew out of the crowd and knocked my jaw off, and I spent the next few seconds scrambling around on the floor, trying to find it.
“He stinks!” came a cry from the front row, who were all leaning back and covering their noses.
“Nothin’ stinks more than your attitude, bloodsucker!” Max yelled, pointing at the vampire who’d made the remark and trying to ignore Jemini, who resented the term and was glaring at him.
As if to underline her anger, she suddenly stepped forward, stood in front of both Max and me, and clapped her hands loudly until all the jeering died down.
“Ed is my friend,” she said. The statement took me a bit by surprise, as I’d always felt that Jemini only tolerated me . . . at best. “None of us wanted to die—the shadow fell upon all of us. But at least, in death, many of you can live peacefully. Well, Ed doesn’t have that opportunity. He’s being stalked—even in his death—by the same evil that plagued him in life. Give him a chance. PLEASE.”
I tried to block out some of Jemini’s words, mainly to stop myself from tearing up, but the continuing jeers from the crowd quickly helped me replace my appreciation of her support with grim anger.
“Who cares?” shouted a vampire from the back row.
“Yeah,” echoed another werewolf.
“QUIET!” screamed Evil Clive, jumping up and down like an enraged puppet. “Don’t test me, you worthless graveworms! One more bleat from any of you and Tom will be EATING the culprit. Need I say more?”
Finally, now there was silence. It seemed that no one fancied being Tom’s afternoon snack.
“Right,” Clive said, adjusting his baseball cap so that the brim was facing backward. “First, we’re protecting this boy because he’s one of ours. He died within the city limits and he’s underage. Therefore, he’s our responsibility. Second, we’re not just protecting Ed, we’re protecting ourselves. The more observant of you will have noticed that a ghostly circus has taken up residence in Midden Field. Now, we don’t know what dark, arcane magic is being used to power it or to generate its weird and wild inhabitants . . . but we DO know that the entity behind it wants our young friend destroyed. I want every undead citizen of Mortlake on the lookout for—”
Evil Clive suddenly glanced over at me and raised his hands. “Come on, boy—this is your fight, isn’t it? Tell us exactly who we’re up against.”
I felt every watery, glaring (and in one case oozing) eye in the room fixed on me.
“Er . . . Kambo Cheapteeth,” I managed, smiling weakly and trying to ignore the fact that my bad hand had begun to twitch and spasm like a fish in a catcher’s net. “He’s an—er—an undead circus clown. He’s got—um—a rotting face, runny makeup, and . . . er . . . big shoes.”
This little speech hadn’t exactly ignited the room, but I plowed on anyway.
“Then there’s Vincent Carble. He’s a really sinister little midget who sometimes crawls along on all fours. He’s got a massive nose and brass teeth.”
Looking out at the crowd, I definitely saw one or two expressions that suggested I was making the whole thing up.
“And, er, finally there’s Jessica Stein. She’s kinda like one of those voodoo dolls or that girl from the horror movies with all the hair over her face. She’s got a sewn-up eye—oh, yeah, and she can float in the air.”
This time, rather oddly, all the murmurs were positive. Apparently, the undead community of Mortlake couldn’t believe in mutant clowns or a big-nosed midget, but they were definitely down with floating, one-eyed voodoo girls. The room was now buzzing. Admittedly, the vampires still didn’t look happy, but most of the others at least seemed reluctantly ready to help.
I looked down at my hands and realized I was shaking.
The battle had begun.
THIRD MISTAKE:
It was a gray afternoon, and the threat of storms was clear in the sky over Mortlake.
Jemini was skipping.
Skipping.
“She’s very special, isn’t she?” I said to Max, as we climbed the long, high hill that overlooked the town.
Before the werewolf could answer, Jemini stopped in her tracks and spun around.
“I can hear, you know. I’m a vampire—I’m not deaf. Besides, what’s wrong with skipping, Ed? Huh? Don’t you ever feel happy for no good reason? Don’t y
ou ever feel like—I don’t know—just reaching out and giving the world a great big hug?”
Max and I shared a glance.
“Not recently,” I admitted. “But sometimes I do feel like giving it a darn good k—”
“C’mon,” Max interrupted. “Time’s racing on. We need to keep moving.”
Jemini skipped off once again, propelling herself up Prospect Hill with the kind of enthusiasm you’d usually find in a toddler. However, she hadn’t gone more than a few yards when she suddenly stopped. Her head dipped, her shoulders hunched up, and she began to shake.
Now she’s crying, I thought. What gives?
I wanted to go and ask her about it, or at least offer her a few words of comfort, but Max seemed to detect my intentions and held me back.
“Don’t,” he muttered. “Believe me, there’s nothing in the world you can do to make Jemini feel any better about the stuff she’s going through. Don’t let any of it change your opinion of her, though: I tell you, buddy—she’s a really good person.”
I looked at Max and tried to read his expression. “What is wrong with her?” I asked, searching his face for an answer. “It’s something to do with how she died, right? She drowned?”
Max sighed and looked down at his feet for a long time before he replied.
“You know how you hate being a zombie, Ed?”
“Yeah. Totally.”
“Right. Well—and you can trust me on this—you’d really, really hate being Jemini.”
Max hurried up to the vampire girl and gently moved her along the path. We walked in silence from that point, until Jemini suddenly cleared her throat and pointed ahead of us to the crest of the hill.
“Ed, we’re here! This is the safe house Evil Clive wants you to use! It’s going to be fun—like one big sleepover!”
Undead Ed and the Demon Freakshow Page 1
