Horror High 2 (3 page)

Jason-Jock called a secret meeting of the cricket team in his tree house. The players arrived in dribs and drabs, climbing up the rickety ladder and crawling onto the tree house platform, panting like old steam locomotives.

It would've been a bit convenient if JJ hadn't built his tree house sixty-seven metres up the backyard gum tree, but he'd read a real estate book (probably written
by the same sneak scientist) that claimed the top five factors in selecting quality real estate were privacy, a good view and location, location, location. Jason-Jock didn't have any choice on the location, since he had to build his tree house in the oldies' backyard, so he went a bit nuts on the remaining two factors.

Howler was first to arrive. He was always punctual and hated time wasters. He reckoned nothing worth doing should ever take much time and, since he was never batting at the crease for very long, he'd never suffered the embarrassment of publicly disproving his own theory.

Fleabag was next, panting like a resuscitation dummy. He always had a scared, hunted look on his hairy face, and his cricket whites were always freshly laundered. He was packing it now, terrified of heights. The rest of the team often wondered about the connection between Fleabag's many fears and his always washed pants. They wondered, but no amount of curiosity would drive them to investigate further.

Fleabag had no teeth – his baby teeth had fallen out and his adult teeth never came through – and his fur fell out in chunks, due to an unknown allergy. He was a nervous pup, pretty much afraid of everything you could name – postmen, kittens, the wind, country music CDs, nursery rhymes, photos of himself, ice-cream, kites, cakes with pink icing.

He couldn't howl either.

Grubby came next, a tougher kind of werewolf but a heaps scungy and festy sort of dude. Nobody wanted to sit next to Grubby on the benches. At any one time he could be harbouring nits, fleas, lice, ringworm, cattle ticks, jock rot, northside mange and crack rash, and that was
after
he'd been dragged through a chemical bath. He was well-regarded by the team, but even he acknowledged he was a walking, talking body bag of deadly infectious diseases.

Fangbert was the next to arrive and after Jason-Jock he was the best cricketer. He had the longest fangs of all the werewolves
and was kinda vain about them. He cleaned them three times a day, flossed and buffed them, and polished them up with that showbiz oil weightlifters lube their muscles with. He was also pretty cool and the chicks dug him, which irritated the other werewolves no end. They pretended they didn't care and were only interested in cricket, but they all knew if a girl gave them a second look they'd give cricket the flick faster than J-Lo ditching her freshest husband.

Whitetail, Steppenwolf, Clawpaw and Dingus arrived in a group, having stopped along the way to polish off some road kill. They were growing lads, always hungry, always eating, but not always carrying enough pocket money to stop off at the Horror mall for a burger or falafel. Enough said.

Chomper came last. He was always late. Pretty soon he was going to wish he'd never come at all …

 

Jason-Jock called the meeting to order.

‘Right, you guys. I've been consulting my book of magic and I think I've come up with a spell to help us win. It's not a very pleasant spell but I don't see that we have any choice. We've practised and practised, and if there's been any change in our form at all it's that we've got worse. I'm not suggesting we admit defeat and cheat, but as your captain I suggest we admit defeat and cheat. That's my advice.'

What did I tell you about taking advice?

The other werewolves glanced at each other and shrugged. Werewolves don't have any particularly strong feelings about cheating, one way or the other. People ignorantly assume that because they're related to dogs they're some kind of noble beast, with strong morals. Let me tell you, there are month-old leftovers festering away in your skanky long intestine that have more moral fibre than your average werewolf, and living in that biodegradable slop are microscopic critters much less inclined to cheat in order to win a cricket match.

When Jason-Jock mentioned cheating, he wasn't talking about some simple plan like replacing the oppositions' equipment with hollow bats and exploding cricket balls, or burning their eyes with laser beams from a safe distance, or even having them buried in a nest of flesh-eating ants. That would have been lightweight compared to what he had in mind.

No, Jason-Jock's plan was plain wrong, which makes sense since it was lifted word-for-word out of the wrongest kind of wronged-up magic book. And since I don't want to be associated with the plan in any way, I'll let him fill you in on the details …

‘Our problem is we lack skill. Somehow, someway, we've got to acquire skill. The easiest way? To get the skill from someone else, someone good, someone who is acknowledged as a cricket expert.'

The other werewolves looked blank, though Dingus smiled faintly because he was thinking about food – a rotten cat buried in the neighbour's backyard that his mates didn't know about.

Jason-Jock misguidedly took this as a sign they were clinging to his every word. ‘According to my book – which is a genuine magic book, the last in existence in the world – there's only one true and definite guaranteed way to absorb the skill of another player, and that's to literally absorb the player. How do we do that? We dig up the skeleton of a famous cricketer, grind up the bones, mix it with fresh rain-water and drink it. And if we locate a really great dead player, the stuff we drink makes us really great too.'

The other werewolves pulled faces; Fleabag looked terrified; and only Grubby didn't seem too put off. ‘Sounds okay – if it works.'

‘It'll work,' Jason-Jock assured them. ‘I told you – I got it out of this boss magic book, the only one left in the world. Now the big question is, where do we find a great dead player?'

‘Easy,' said Fangbert. ‘We'll get Warney. He's the best bowler in the world, and a pretty cred middle-order batsman, too.'

‘Idiot,' snapped Howler. ‘Shane Warne's not dead.'

‘Oh, yeah,' replied Fangbert, temporarily downcast but then cheering up fast. ‘We could kill him,' he suggested brightly.

‘We're not killing anybody,' replied Jason-Jock. ‘Not this week. We need somebody already dead.'

But Fangbert wouldn't let up. Shane Warne was his fave player; he idolised him. ‘If Warney's still smoking cigarettes, it won't be long before he dies. We could send him a couple of cartons and wait 'til he keels over.'

‘Shut up, Fangbert,' snapped Howler. ‘We can't wait, and anyway, he's not worth waiting for. He's not that good.'

‘He is too!' shouted Fangbert, and leapt to his feet, warm for some form, shaping up for a brawl.

‘Heel!' shouted Jason-Jock. ‘Sit down now! We're not fighting over this. I'm the captain. I make the decisions and I've already found a suitable skeleton – a perfect specimen. It belonged to WG Grace,
a great all-rounder, best player of the 19th century, captain of the English team for twelve years. He's our man.'

‘But where's he buried?' asked Fleabag nervously. ‘It can't be too far away – I can't travel on trains or buses because the noise scares me, and car trips give me nightmares.'

Jason-Jock shook his head. ‘He died in Horror on his last world tour and is buried right here in Horror cemetery. We go for his bones tonight.'

A world-class cricketer buried in Horror? I have to tell you I find that kind of coincidence exceedingly difficult to swallow, like a single dung beetle employed to deal with the contents of King Kong's toilet pan after he's attended the week-long Prune & Bran Eaters' Conference.

I said as much to the publisher. As coincidences go, I told them, this is simply too much. World class cricketer, best in
the history of the game, travels extensively playing all across the globe in hundreds of countries, thousands of different cities and towns, just happens to die right there in Horror and gets dropped in the ground almost in these dudes' backyard?

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.