Horror High 1 Read Free

listening to old waltzes. The highlight of his night was a cup of warm cocoa before bedtime, with a marshmallow on top on his birthday.
    And he was scared to death, scared beyond death, of Mr Grim-Reaper. The hissing voice, the black robes, the razor sharp scythe, the icy fear that gripped his heart when the man addressed him, made Fearbody’s faint soul nearly abandon his body and flee north to return to its Maker.
    So although Fearbody was prepared to grass up all the other students in his class on Parent-Teacher Night, he didn’t dare dump on Nathan. No chance was old Fearbody going to tell Nathan’s dad what a fully heaps crappo student his son was. If the teacher was haunted by Mr G-R’s agreeable mood, which he was generally in when he wasn’t being bugged by Nathan, Fearbody sure wouldn’t deal with a negative response delivered in that death hiss.
    No way was the truth coming out this Parent-Teacher Night. For the sake of self-preservation, driven near mad by the deepest, coldest, starkest, clutching fear, old Fearbody told Mr Grim-Reaper that Nathan was a prize student his parents should be proud of.
    â€˜Then why,’ hissed Senior menacingly, ‘did Nathan get straight F’s on his last five report cards?’
    â€˜Those F’s?’ stammered Fearbody, his withered old heart striking only one beat in five. ‘Those F’s are good. V-v-very good. They s-s-stand for Fantastic .’
    And Father G-R believed him.
    Ha.

Now here’s a thing. Mr Grim-Reaper was desperate to reward Nathan for something – anything – and frantically searching for a valid reason to justify it. He needed to crank some up-beat vibes with his son, and fast, because as a father-figure his recent record was shoddy to say the least. The timing of Nathan’s positive report on Parent-Teacher Night was a godsend.
    Mr G-R felt wicked guilty about his rotten behaviour and the completely dodgy example he’d been setting his son. And so he should have. The man was old enough to know better.
    Ironically it was the age of the man – 50,000 years – that had spawned the bad behaviour in the first place. Old man Grim-Reaper had celebrated his 50,000th birthday and almost instantaneously experienced an explosive mid-life crisis. He was halfway to 100,000 – prehistoric. My god, where had the time gone? Where was his youth?
    He started behaving irrationally, striving to recapture lost youth in an embarrassing series of foolhardy adolescent blunders. He ditched Mrs Grim-Reaper, took up with a belly dancer named Bambi from the Hellfire Club, bought a red Ferrari convertible and hit the road, yahooing and partying in a shocking display of mindless buffoonery. He realised too late what a ridiculous jackass he must look to his son. What sort of example was he setting the boy?
    Mr G-R was desperately searching for a way to make it up to Nathan when Parent-Teacher Night provided the ideal opportunity. The old boy wanted to bestow on Nathan something they could bond over – something unique, something that’d reconcile the gulf between them – but was worried his son was too young for the scythe he kept begging for.
    What Mr G-R wasn’t worried about presenting Nathan with was the Grim-Reaper ancestral book. I mean, how dangerous is a book? What’s the worst that can happen? A paper cut? Smudgy fingers?
    Boo-hoo.
    Traditionally a child didn’t receive the special Grim-Reaper family book until they were eighteen centuries old and technically an adult, but he felt he could rationalise the gift on the basis of his boy’s great class results and make an exception in this case. Mr G-R had to make an exception – he would’ve done anything to overcome his sense of shame.
    The heaps exceptional ancestral book would settle it.
    Yes, it was a cheap cop-out and a quick-fix solution that stank to high heaven, but so what? Most parents wouldn’t pass the sniff