Horror High 1 (5 page)

Listen. There's nothing even remotely funny about a mother on the warpath. It's like some mad chemical reaction occurs that transforms a meek and mild old mother into a raging tornado of fire, and you'd sooner be buried alive in a coffin of black plague rats than confront her.

My own dear mother is as tranquil and serene as a gentle sunset until provoked to
anger – then suddenly she's rampaging and bellowing like a wild mountain gorilla competing on
Horror Idol
.

Nathan pulled an old trick. He went and camped at Jason-Jock Werewolf's joint, having first rung home and left a message on the answering machine about flitting off to a witch-burning expo for Society and Culture for the next two days.

That gave him a couple of days to attempt to rectify the damage, but what hope did he have? There was only one page left in the book. One stupid, useless page. What possible earthly good was one page? And written in Latin, the language of the Dead.

The language of the Dead.

Nathan started thinking then, as in using his brain. He began wondering what exactly was written on that last remaining page. Since it
was
written in the language of the Dead, and he was deader than dead from Mother's wrath if he didn't nut out a way to restore the book, maybe the writing had some relevance to him.

Maybe?

I never claimed he was gifted.

 

It sure took long enough to translate that page of archaic and longwinded wordage. No wonder Latin was a dead language – it took three lifetimes just to decipher a page, and even then you'd rather pour molten lead in your eye than read it. Talk about dreary. But, when he'd finally decoded it, Nathan knew he was onto something – his
only
hope of survival.

I hated Latin at school and don't like it any better now. When I signed up, the publisher promised me three things: coffee breaks with biscuits, a swivelly chair and
no
Latin. So far, zilch on all three.

Be warned, reader – publishers are not to be trusted.

So. The Latin. I've read over the verse above (and pretty feeble versing too, in my humble opinion) and as far as I can make out, it meant this: if you've used up all the damnation pages then there's a way of making more from the final page, whoop-dee-doo, lucky you. Next bit, some monotonous flapdoodle about ripping the last page up into a hundred pieces, bling-bling, that sort of thing. Finally, deliver one of those pieces to each of the victims – miss anyone out, you'll get nowt.

And they say writing poetry is difficult.
Hello!

 

Ah, April Fool's Day – what a glorious and underrated occasion. An opportunity for every clown in town to trick, trap, dupe and bamboozle their friends into appearing even bigger dingbats than they actually are, if that's possible. What could be more fulfilling than dropping a deadly scorpion
down your enemy's undies, phone-ordering three tonne of fresh cow manure to be dumped on your maths teacher's front lawn, or selling the brand new school ambulance to a wrecking yard for scrap?

Nothing, that's what.

Of course, there'll always be some folks who aren't the greatest fans of Fool's Day. Folks who've been regular victims of pranks in the past, who realise they'll likely be victimised repeatedly in the future and don't relish the prospect of that future pain and trauma one bit. It's their right in a civilised democracy to hold and express that opinion.

Wusses.

Principal Skullwater was one of them. He'd attempted to ban the event year after year, but was simply ignored by students, teachers and even the P&F. It really steamed his asparagus. Why couldn't all the students devote their energies to passing tests and completing homework instead of thinking up more degrading, humiliating and shameful pranks to pull on him?

Good question. And one that Skullwater would be asking for the
last
time this lifetime, if Avril Fule was successful in today's assassination attempt. And he was
always
successful.

Mummy!

Now and again everybody – even a writer – has to do a hard day's work, but it seemed mighty unfair that Nathan's hardest day's work ever should coincide with his favourite day ever. Until this year the high point of his calendar had been Fool's Day, which he might easily have renamed Fun Day.

Not this year.

The Latin spell for reconstituting the
hundred torn out, sold off, used up pages from
The 101 Damnations
required Nathan to give each of the spell victims a portion of the final page. In order to achieve this, he had to identify who'd been cursed in the first place.

Nathan had to retrace his original customers and interview them closely regarding their cursive intentions. Some were coy, some reluctant to say, some off sick from school, some wagging. It was a logistical nightmare, but he had to do it – and do it right – to save himself from Mother.

Nathan had hoped a few people hadn't yet used up the damnation pages, that he might get the pages back whole and untarnished, but he might as well have hoped the sun wouldn't rise on Fool's Day. Everybody had activated their curses, setting the controls for that one day of maximum foolishness and folly.

Everybody reported the same thing when they named their victim and laid down their curse: the damnation page
curled up in their hand and theatrically vanished in a natty puff of thick, grey smoke.

With this and other relevant information, Nathan compiled a list of everybody he'd sold curse pages to, the name of the person they'd cursed and the exact nature of the curse.

And, before you ask,
no
– I won't outline the spiteful, vicious details of the hundred horrible things students cursed their enemies with, just to give
you
new ideas for revenge.

Forget it. I do have certain responsibilities and standards to uphold as a writer, you know, so let's have a modicum of respect. There are some things I certainly wouldn't divulge, not even for money. There are some details too harsh for innocent readers, too ugly to disclose to normal citizens, too weird to share with decent people and too gruesome to lay on a respectable audience.

So here they all are …

1. Selina Bones-Jones bought page one. She cursed David Dingbrain with 600 years of diarrhoea and hiccups, a sludgy combination.
   
2. John Pinhead bought page two. He cursed his Advanced and Vocational Curses teacher, turning Mrs Hancock's hands into two snapping turtles, her nose into an electric eel and her backside into a dartboard.
   
3. Jason-Jock Werewolf cursed Mr Derby the PE teacher, transforming his curly hair into a thousand writhing venomous snakes, all with breath like a cart-horse.
   
4. Gary Hooper cursed Damien Frankenstein-Monster, though the boy-creature already wet his pants every day, anyway. Waste of a good curse.
   
5. Matthew Mummie cursed Steven Frogsalad with a coronary fart attack. Mummie's dried-up mummification bandages caught on fire when the curse page smouldered away, and he had to leap into the school pond – much laughter, you should've been there …
   
6. Cordelia Househaunter cursed Geoff Dandyline with another ten years of …
   

Ah, sod it. That's nowhere near a hundred but I assume you can't count past six and don't give a hoot anyway. Tick off whichever excuse you want. Don't like it? You know which overflowing toilet to lodge your complaint in and who to call for help when you fall in headfirst – not me.

Anyway, there's only one curse we're interested in right now, because it was to
really
effect the whole outcome of that fated Fool's Day – Mick Living-Dead's curse.

What was it about Mick Living-Dead? Was he born backwards? Was there something in the water he drank as a child? Or is there some other logical explanation why the boy did the things he did?

I grew up in a bad neighbourhood and that's always been my excuse, but what about young Living-Dead? He lived in one of the better suburbs in Horror, attended the finest zombie preschool money could buy and had loving parents who bent over
backwards – not easy for zombies – to provide a stable and supportive home environment.

And how does Mick repay them? By buying a curse page off Nathan and setting off a clone bomb in the school toilets. Rascal. He later claimed he'd planned to trap Mrs Goatbeard in there, to clone her into ten cranky old vice-principals as a revenge against her husband, Mick's much despised football coach.

But the plan backfired. Gary Hooper had already cursed Mrs Goatbeard, turning her into her namesake, a bearded goat. Funny, nobody – not even fellow teachers – actually noticed the difference, though she spent both recess and lunch in the staffroom. But she couldn't open the staff toilet door with her cloven hoofs and as a result had to relieve herself out on the front lawn. Consequently, she wasn't first into the staff toilets as usual.

First in, for the first time ever, was Principal Skullwater. Mick Living-Dead had taken his curse page and carefully
smeared it all around the toilet seat as he'd recited the cloning curse. He'd done a good job of it – there was no shifting it. So when Skullwater came out of the bog, having shifted whatever he was in there to shift, he came out in multiple copies.

The nature of the curse meant that ten seconds elapsed before each subsequent clone popped off, so the original Skullwater had no notion of what had happened. He stood washing his hands at the sink, straightening his tie in the mirror, checking for nose hair and thinking he wasn't a bad looking bloke for 2305 years old. Then, seconds after he left, another came, then another, and another – ten principals in total, enough for any school, no matter how rowdy.

 

Parked outside the school was a black sedan with heavily tinted windows, a skull logo on the car door and the number plates KILL-U. Seated inside was Avril Fule, excellently evil e-assassin.

He examined himself in the rear vision mirror, straightening his tie, checking for nose hairs and thinking he wasn't a bad looking bloke for a cold-blooded killer. Maybe he'd meet a nice lady teacher at work today, he thought, as he checked his briefcase.

Therein lay the evil tools of his trade. An M16, a Glock 9mm, a TEC-9, an Uzi semi-automatic, an Ingram M-11, a stun grenade, a hand grenade, a smoke grenade, a confetti grenade (for children's parties), a grenade launcher (so his arm didn't get sore tossing such a wide variety of grenades) and an axe (for chopping firewood for the weekend barbeque).

He double-checked everything, made sure the axe was loaded and the guns were razor sharp, ticked off on spare ammunition clips and snapped the briefcase shut.

Time to go to work.

There's simple and there's simple, but was there ever a simpler job than this? Avril Fule took three steps through the front gate of Horror High and there was Principal Skullwater tying his shoelace. Fule checked and double-checked, comparing the target with the mugshot photograph, stood behind Skullwater, put the Glock to the back of his head and fired.

We've all seen schlock horror films so I don't need to go into graphic details about blood spatter, brain scatter and the attendant gore fest from the point-blank head shot. In a school with over thirty student vampires, a bit of blood here or there wasn't even noteworthy, so Avril Fule was able to pack his hand gun, brush a speck of Skullwater off his shoe and abscond. It was a job well-done – the easiest twelve bucks he'd ever made – but as Fule was stepping out past the gate, he glanced sideways across the quadrangle.

Who should he see but Skullwater, scolding a student for being out of uniform.

Fule did a quick double take, shook his head in disbelief and unpacked his hunting rifle. A quick look through the rifle's telescopic sights confirmed his suspicions – Skullwater alive and unharmed – but a quick shot from the rifle and the principal lay spread-eagled on the pavement, half his head missing. The tardily dressed student shrugged, stepped over the prone body of
the ex-principal and ran off to get in the reserves line for handball.

Fule shrugged, wrote the first murder off to mistaken identity and was walking out the gate again when Skullwater walked in, nodding and smiling a friendly ‘good morning' at the heinous hit man. It was like giving him the forked fingers and Fule responded with lightning rapidity, dropping a hand grenade down the principal's pants.

Boom.

Again Fule went to leave, when an announcement blared over the loudspeaker: ‘Good morning, students. This is Principal Skullwater reminding you of the special April Fool's Day assembly this morning. And I'm warning you, there'd better not be any Fool's Day pranks involving me.'

Now Fule was starting to think he'd lost it. Was somebody playing an April Fool's joke on
him
? They'd better not be – he'd killed people for less, a lot less. He decided to track down the student who'd hired him
– some idiot named Nathan Grim-Reaper – and pop a cap in him just for good luck.

Teach these kids to fool around with a serious man.

But first he had to do the job he'd been paid for, the job he'd guaranteed. He was starting to take this personally. Was he losing his touch? Washed up? Was it finally time for retirement? And what sort of life expectancy could he anticipate in a retirement home full of ex-assassins, all arguing over who should have the remote control?

Two more Skullwaters crossed his path while these thoughts were charting their troubled way across the hired killer's higher consciousness. He dispatched one principal with his axe and garrotted the other with his trick tie. But by now the assassin was deeply worried.

Worried? His stomach ulcer was growing a stomach ulcer. See, life as an ex-assassin is no bed of roses and you're only as good as your last job. It's not like teachers or world presidents who get all
sorts of lurks and rewards for their retirement years, like unlimited free money and canteen food and stuff.

No. Even though assassins have to apply through the same government department as teachers and world presidents, and even though they all have exactly the same qualifications, hit men got righteously shafted in their twilight years.

Retired assassins got diddly except stabbed in the back, shot through the heart, strangled, poisoned or boiled in oil, and some even went out painfully.

Avril Fule knew this better than anyone. His father had been an assassin, as had his father's father. Fact is, his father's father assassinated his father before he assassinated him, and then Fule Junior topped the old boy for good measure.

Family do's can get very complicated sometimes.

So Avril Fule was not in a screaming hurry to retire, a fact I'm sure you've now
become thoroughly cognisant of. (The publisher insisted I check – thinks you're idiots.)

If this Horror High job was as big a fiasco as it was shaping up to be, Fule was looking at forced retirement up on Boot Hill. Three more Skullwaters had now been through his hands, one literally, as he wrung the neck of the ancient principal like a wiry chicken.

The next one he dispatched with a medieval samurai sword so razor sharp he over-swung and removed not only Skullwater's head, but also the head of some cretinous geek standing nearby, name of Geoff Dandyline.

He'd have to remember to send a sympathy card to the family.

The third principal was knocked down with a stun gun, popped in a sack with a taipan and left at the mercy of the world's deadliest snake poison.

Another Skullwater, another miserable death, run over repeatedly with the school's ride-on lawnmower. Bits of the
aged principal helicoptered out, spraying gore over nearby eyewitnesses and sending a wrinkled hand Frisbee-ing over to the handball court, where it neatly deflected a late cut shot and stymied a certain victory for the dude in king square. This player, who was challenging the dude in ace square, called ‘Interference' and it was granted – a civilised and honourable outcome.

There are some things more sacred than a dead principal and handball is one of them.

Actually handball's just the top of a long list of things more sacred than a dead principal. I don't have time to recount it here, but you can order a copy of the list from P.O. Box 12, Horror Post Office. Enclose a $20 note or cheque made out to me, and I'll be sure he gets it.

More Skullwaters came tripping across the school oval, picking on kids for minor offences and setting defaulters onto scab duty, collecting litter.

Avril Fule was bricking it now. It was a
nightmare worse than
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
. He kept taking them out, but they kept coming back in. He killed Skullwaters with a gas gun, a dart gun, a shotgun, a spear gun, a nail gun and a glue gun (wherein he glued Skullwater's goolies to a school bench and drove a steamroller over him).

How many Skullwaters is that dead now? Twelve? Fifteen? Two dozen? I've lost count. And there were only ten clones in the first place you say? And I actually look like someone who cares?

Fule cared – he was cared to death. The joke ended here and it was time to kill the joker – the one who was to blame for putting the contract out and calling the hit in. He started stopping students and asking who Nathan Grim-Reaper was and where he could be found – and they told him.

Nice one, guys.

With friends like those, who needs enemas?

Meanwhile, the only thing keeping Nathan one step ahead of an angry and professionally humiliated Avril Fule was that the boy was tracking down curse victims, giving them a 1/100th piece of the last page from
The 101 Damnations.

It wasn't easy and some of the victims had assumed some pretty strange forms, but by far the most difficult was Thomas Thicher. Yes, remember him? He'd completely disappeared. When Nathan questioned the kid who'd cursed the bully last, it turned out Big Tom's remains were residing up the wrong end of a stinky old donkey living at a retired donkeys' farm on the edge of town.

We're not going to go into the surgical particulars of how Nathan retrieved Thomas's remains – this is not that sort of story, thankfully – but if there was one happy ending in this otherwise sorry saga, it's that Tom was actually grateful for being rescued from that dark, unhappy place, and didn't bully Nathan anymore.

Isn't that sweet?

Not so sweet was the fact that by this stage Fule was seeking Nathan full-time. He'd shot, bombed, gassed, axed, electrocuted and guillotined every Principal Skullwater he'd come across, but they just kept popping up.

It was diabolical, but even Diablo denied any involvement in what was happening here.

By the time Fule had whacked the last of the sultana-wrinkly principals, it
was
his last. He was exhausted, shattered, defeated. Finally, overcome with emotion, he collapsed sobbing in the quadrangle, another broken man, another April Fool's Day victim.

For shame.

A teacher came over to comfort him, asked who his mother was and if she'd be home from work yet, and rang her. Fule's mother picked him up from school, lent him a hanky to blow his nose and carted him off to the assassins' retirement home. It was much nicer than he'd expected – the
others didn't try to kill him and the food was nowhere near as bad as he'd been led to believe.

Avril Fule had whacked every Skullwater clone, stopping just short of killing the genuine, authentic, indisputable, original-edition Principal Skullwater. It was that close.

I find that sort of coincidence deeply suspicious myself. I pointed it out to the publisher, who told me to pull my head in, mind my business, just write it as it happened and stick to the facts.

What does it matter? I figure this story is so terminally unhinged it wouldn't matter now if Shrek or Catwoman or even Michael Jackson bounced in to write the last pages.

It sure couldn't do any harm …