Horror High 2 (4 page)

Next day the team met back at the tree house where they'd stored the pilfered bones overnight. Jason-Jock had borrowed his mum's coffee grinder, and now the werewolves set to reducing the six foot skeleton to a bag of dust.

I've had some crapulent jobs in my time – including writing no-hoper stories for fat-witted teenagers who wouldn't know a … hang on, that's this job – but not
even I would've accepted a prospect as totally incorrect as the one facing the werewolves now.

There was no easy way around it. First they had to smash the bones into pieces with a masonry hammer and feed those bits into the coffee grinder. The bones were brittle but it still took hours, and the resulting bone dust came out mixed with coffee grounds, a curious combo of grey and brown – like nothing you're likely to find on the menu board at Starbucks anytime soon. It smelt of desecration and deep dodginess.

Dodginess? According to my spellcheck that word doesn't exist, and it sure doesn't even begin to describe how the evil concoction smelt dry, let alone how it smelt after the bilious brew was infused with water. It was a powdered death shake that even Grubby baulked at.

But drink it they must and drink it they did. One by one, sip for sip, each of the werewolves slowly slurped the sickening slop. To absorb the dead cricketer's skill,
they had to absorb this dead cricketer swill, and if that's cheating buy me a ticket on the next bus home.

Finally, after an hour of gagging and half-barfing gulps, it was gone. Chomper glared at Jason-Jock after the last dregs drained out of his cup.

‘That's the single most disgusting thing I've ever done. This had better work.'

 

What happened next all depends on your definition of the term ‘work'. It ‘worked' on the eleven young werewolves in a most spectacular, volatile and uncompromising manner, causing four days of projectile vomiting, stomach cramps, rampant nausea and explosive buckshot diarrhoea.

They missed three important class tests, a heaps fun school Mufti Day (including a teacher-pupil lung transplant swap) and a vicious schoolyard fist-fight between an ADHD mummie and a cross-eyed imp.

In terms of inheriting WG Grace's superb cricketing skills, the ‘magic' brew
gave the werewolves runs, but not the sort of runs they were hoping for, between wickets after whacking a cricket ball.

The other werewolves were understandably annoyed at Jason-Jock and his rubbish magic book. But, as if they hadn't suffered enough, the worst was yet to come.

WG Grace might have been an exceedingly talented cricketer, but he was also an exceedingly bad-tempered old geezer. Despite being dead nearly 100 years, the fieriness of his temper had not diminished one jot. Now his bones had been disturbed, his skeleton smashed to bits, ground to dust and drunk by a pack of hooligan werewolves. And his favourite cricket bat was busted.

Now – surprise, surprise – he wanted revenge.

The first the young werewolves knew about the hellbroth of trouble brewing was the day after they'd recovered from the poisoning. They were meeting in the tree house, Chomper had just arrived – late as usual – and the team was discussing their options for future life, mulling over what they'd do once they were kicked out of school.

Grubby was going to volunteer for medical experiments. Howler was thinking
he might join a sledge team and race around the Arctic Circle. Fleabag reckoned he might train as an attack dog, and they all laughed at that despite the depressing baseline theme of the topic. Imagine Fleabag as an attack dog, terrified of everything from laughing clowns to kittens.

And imagine being kicked out of Horror High. They didn't have to imagine it anymore. Now it was going to happen, sure as.

During a lull in the lugubrious conversation they heard the ladder scraping against the tree house platform, shaking and juddering and jigging, swaying under the weight of someone slowly climbing up. But who was this? The whole team was present.

A head appeared, grey hair, parted dead in the middle and severely combed down, old-fashioned style. Then a forehead like an ancient tree trunk, deeply lined, and down the lower branches two eyebrows like cockatoos' nests that held glaring black eyes instead of eggs. Then a bulbous red vein-shot nose and a massive bushy beard covering a crazy angry mouth. The
mouth was panting, fighting for breath. ‘Why … the … dickens … did you … build this … blasted thing … so blanking high …'

‘Who are you,' asked Jason-Jock, ‘and what are you doing in my tree house?'

With interview skills like that, JJ clearly had a future on
A Current Affair
.

The old bloke dragged himself up onto the platform and glared poisonously at the team. He was slumped on all fours, hyperventilating, trying to catch his breath.

Finally he hissed, ‘I'm WG Grace and I'm here to teach you a lesson you'll never forget!'

 

It took a long time and a stack of pleadings, wheedlings, excusings and super suck-up entreaties to prevent the 19th-century cricketer from following his original plan of grinding the 21st-century werewolves' bones to dust, as a fitting revenge for desecrating his grave and dishonouring his memory.

It was Jason-Jock who finally convinced the angry old coot to forgive them.
He briefed – if ‘briefed' means begging on your hands and knees, crying like a little girl – WG Grace on their dastardly dilemma; how, if they lost the cricket match they'd be expelled from school; how they were sure to lose since they were useless; how they'd dug his bones up because they'd identified him as the finest cricketer ever.

The fuming ghost smiled grudgingly at this, nodded with humility and stroked his stonking great eiderdown beard. ‘Yes, it were true,' he muttered.

Nineteenth-century ghosts are suckers for flattery, a fact worth remembering if you're ever in a tight spot with the Dead.

This ghost was mondo vain about two things: his undisputed cricketing prowess and his heaps chunky beard. It looked like a shimmering waterfall of grey hair pouring out his mouth, tumbling all the way down his shirtfront into his trousers and fanning out into rippling runnels as it slopped into his strides.

He was scarily hairily.

Jason-Jock had already complimented WG's undisputed cricketing prowess, so when the werewolf cricket captain informed the England cricket captain that Principal Skullwater had targeted the werewolves because they were hairy, WG Grace's mind was galvanised.

WG was so hairy that, if reduced to a mathematical equation for purposes of assessment, he'd have been classified ten per cent human, ninety per cent hair.

One hundred and thirty years ago he'd been the butt of everyone's jolly jokes, the prey of every smart alec with a hokey hair harangue. In a period of history when baldness had been all the fashion for men, women, children and even small dogs, WG had been heinously harassed for his hirsute handicap. A modern day fancy-pants sports psychiatrist would've classified him as a certified victim of hairism and sued someone for heaps.

WG had hoped that'd all changed in the passage of a century of enlightened thinking. How wrong he was and how mad that
made him. He frothed at the mouth to hear that in these supposedly tolerant times hair was still such a divisive issue.

He'd hoped society would've evolved and matured in the 90 years he'd been lying in a hole, but he was sadly mistaken. Hippies had come and gone, and now young men with terminal hair issues suffered big-style for their preposterous pelts, their manic manes, their tremulous tresses, their furry fleeces, their creditable curls.

And if WG had spent more time studying his thesaurus instead of combing his absurd shag pile, he could've added a whole bunch more clever and alliterative hair references. He couldn't be bothered (I couldn't either) and now the opportunity has passed forever.

But that's not the point. The point was this: WG Grace had copped all the hairist jokes in his day, and been called everything from ‘bear hair' to ‘mammoth head' to ‘werewolf'. Yes, he'd been called ‘werewolf', as though it was an insult, and that
was the thing that tipped the scale in our hero's favour.

He felt obvious empathy for Jason-Jock and the werewolf team, and at that moment of weakness he decided to help them.

Sucker!

Or maybe they were the suckers. God, did WG Grace work those lazy werewolves. Day after day in the nets – batting, bowling, discussions, lectures, more batting and bowling. Panting laps around the oval, push-ups, star-jumps, more batting and bowling.

They studied footage of their opponents while WG pointed out their weak spots, advising them how to capitalise on these
areas. They watched DVDs of the real pros, the Aussie team. WG laughed at their girly coloured suits festooned with junk food advertisements and mocked Warney's sissy boy-band haircut and lay-around-the-house lardiness.

Fangbert threw his drink in WG's face and the cricket legend ghost chased the werewolf around the oval, swinging a cricket bat, howling with rage and vowing to crack Fangbert's worthless skull like a rotten emu egg.

But all in all the team got it together, and began to actually play like a team. Then, after three weeks of this tedium, dreariness, monotony and mind-numbingly boring training antics that I won't even begin to burden you with, the legendary competition commenced.

 

The Interghouls Cricket Cup is, as everybody knows,
the
event of the sporting calendar for ghoul schools. Sure, everybody pretends that the swimming carnival and the hockey play-offs and the rugby are
just as prestigious, but these are the same single-celled simpletons who tell you it's not important whether you win or lose but how you play the game.

And we all know which vegetable patch these weeds are growing in – and why instead of being treated as heroes they're treated with herbicide – so let's say no more about it. Winning was everything and every student in every ghoul school knew it. They would've gladly died a second time to win the Cup, and the facts speak for themselves.

Death stalked the Cup. Rates of parental homicide went through the roof this time of year, and psychotically angry parents who knocked off their child for losing the Cup were always let off by the courts on the grounds of justifiable homicide. They were given a pat on the back, an excellent meal in the courthouse cafe at the city's expense, and free parking and carwash vouchers for their next court appearance.

The Interghouls Cricket Cup is a sudden death play-off, as you'd expect
from a ghoul school competition. What you might not have expected was that the Werewolves XI, suddenly and impossibly playing tight as any team can play, scorched their more docile opponents, stomped them to Hell and back, winning round after round.

Their skill – and luck – held, and after six matches they found themselves in the finals, pitted against the team that had convincingly held the Cup seven years running, Death Valley High's Vampires XI.