Horror High 1 (3 page)

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.

Now
he knew the secret of the book.