Horror High 1 Read Free Page B

beheld. The 101 Damnations was a book of curses.
    Sick!
    â€˜Look after it, my boy, and when you come of age I’ll initiate you in its many diabolical uses,’ hissed Mr Grim-Reaper. ‘Until then, do naught with it. There’ll be plenty of time – and abundant opportunity – to use it in the future. Plenty of time. Do not use it yet . Promise me.’
    â€˜I promise,’ promised Nathan.
    Yeah right.

Okay. So there was obviously some powerful trouble brewing. I know what I’d be doing if I got my greasy mitts on some savage tricked-up curse book – promise or no promise – and Nathan was no different.
    He was going to smite his enemies, amuse his friends, impress the girls, bamboozle his rivals, enslave his detractors, crush his teachers, subjugate naysayers,expunge school toughs, traumatise casual observers, horrify local authorities and enrich his bank balance.
    That was the plan for the first day, anyway …
    Â 
    Nathan slid off to school at Horror High with uncharacteristic eagerness that Monday, The 101 Damnations stashed safely in his bag. He hadn’t let his dad see him take it because, not surprisingly, he’d hatched an ambitious strategy for his new tome – I’m not talking some lame-o book report for show-and-tell, either.
    First things first; he’d deal with his nemesis, Thomas Thicher, once and for all.
    Thomas, a mutated swamp creature, was nearly two metres tall and made of I-don’t-know-what, but it sure wasn’t slugs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails. More likely enriched uranium, spent fuel rods and dioxin. Whatever the ingredients, he was meaner than mule measles and for some perverse reason felt the need to concentrate his malicious energies on Nathan.
    Not any more. Nathan was still tossing up Thomas’s ultimate fate. He hadn’t decided whether he’d turn the bully into a caged, naked pink fairy at Horror Zoo, a scabby alley cat in a dogs-only section of town, a public toilet seat that never got cleaned, or some strain of microscopic bug that lived a long and loathsomely unhappy existence in a constipated elephant’s colon.
    Whatever way, it’d be revenge fine-style for Nathan and a raw deal for Thomas, had it not been for one crucial, essential, long-overlooked but very simple detail …
    And I’m not telling you what it was.
    What do I care? I get paid by the hour and quitting time was nine seconds ago. Get back to me tomorrow. I couldn’t give a spittoon of dressmaker’s drool if this is the world’s shortest chapter. I’m offski. Speak to the publisher if you have a problem with that.
    Adios, suckers!

Right. Apparently there’s been a record number of complaints about my style of storytelling. Apparently I’m supposed to care enough about my job to avoid such incursions in the future. Apparently, at a click of the publisher’s fingers I can be effortlessly replaced by any number of cheaper, more skilled, more reliable, more trustworthy and infinitely more entertaining writers.
    Apparently my storytelling efforts could in fact be effortlessly replaced with some shonkily pirated software running on your mum’s 1970s cinder block computer.
    We’ll see.
    Horror High always made a big deal of April Fool’s Day. It was one of two major events on the school calendar, the other being Halloween. And while Halloween was all about students getting back to their cultural roots and heritage, Fool’s Day was pure fun.
    An April Fool’s Day committee was formed at the beginning of each school year with the express purpose of coordinating the play-of-the-day.
    Inevitably the committee planned an assault on the big guns of the school hierarchy – Principal Skullwater, Mrs Goatbeard the Deputy Principal, Mr Grimsweather the Rollcall Master, Ms Bitterbum the Head of School Studies. All the other teachers were fair game too, but it was usually these senior luminaries