The Great Brain Read Free Page B

the jig was up. The canteen staff were tossed into the darkest dungeon in leg-irons and Mr Noel lived on, though he did miss out on his lunch.
    Again, it was too soon to carve Mr Noel’s name on a gravestone.
    Third time lucky. That’s the traditional formula in all decent stories, or soI’m told, so it’s a sure bet it won’t work here.
    The third attempt was electrocution. Everyone’s heard of the electric chair, but who ever heard of an electric toilet? The mysterious assassin figured this novel approach would succeed in killing Horror High’s resident terror, put the anonymous student on the path to a successful career as an inventor and win him bulk friends by causing Mr Noel a heaps hilarious death, all while bringing affordable entertainment to the masses.
    Ambitious.
    Unfortunately for our innovative inventor friend, one of the school’s contingent of cleaning gnomes nipped into Mr Noel’s private bathroom and, contrary to school rule number one, used the teacher’s toilet for number twos. And, doubly unfortunately for the poor cleaner dude, electricity doesn’t discriminate.
    The gnome paid heavily; not only were his remains buried in a matchbox in the pet cemetery and glowed in the dark forthe next sixteen years, but his pitiable parents were billed for the massive power surge that had sucked on the town’s electricity grid like a plague of monster leeches.
    So, you see, attempts on Mr Noel’s life were not only unsuccessful but downright dangerous, especially for gnomes. For this reason the prospect, however remote, of legally and legitimately ridding Horror High of its most detested teacher via the outrageously unfeasible Living-Dead intelligence bet was greeted with cheers and general rejoicing.
    Mick was swamped with offers from enthusiastic well-wishers. A cabal of academic kids offered Mick intensive coaching to ensure him the maximum chance of triumph. The school’s most accomplished cheaters approached him on the sly, offering to wire the zombie zilch-brain with the latest undercover gadgets, gizmos and advancements in electronic cheatery and Bluetooth defraudery. The cream of Horror High’s nerd and geekbattalions pledged to assist him in any way they could and paid homage to him by building a zombie shrine in the darkest corner of the library.
    Suddenly Mick was the most popular dude in the school. It was a revelation to him. All he’d done was lose his temper and make a heaps stupid bet. Now he was treated like a hero and slapped on the back wherever he went.
    Heart-warming.
    It wouldn’t do him any good, though. He was still thicker than two truck tyres, and no amount of well-wishers and do-gooders and nerds and shrines and backslaps was going to change that.
    The tough questions remained unanswered: was Mick destined to lose his bet, his hard-earned McHorror wages, and the absolute final opportunity any kid at Horror High would ever have to rid themselves of the abhorrent Mr Noel? Was it inevitable that, in a bodgy bet based on brain power, Mick would be bent, broken and burnt up like a birch branch at abackyard barbeque? Was there no law against the relentless use of substandard alliteration by retarded, rubbishy writers?
    Was there no justice in Horror?
    Natch.

Pick up on this. Another proverb doing the rounds in Horror was about to get a workout – the one about calamities coming in sets of three. Hot on the heels of the calamitously un-winnable Living-Dead bet was news from the Horror Space Centre that a fiery meteor was streaking through space towards Horror, bringing doom, death, disaster and a hellbroth of trumped-up insurance claims with it.
    The TV was on in the Horror canteen and a news flash chopped through the canteen ladies’ favourite midday soap, Days of Our Deaths . The preamble to the show had just started – ‘Like nails through the coffin lid, these are the Days of Our Deaths’ – when the