Horror High 1 (4 page)

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 per
cent 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 …