Casper Candlewacks in the Attack of the Brainiacs! (8 page)

“Today, boys and girls, Mr Flanty is going to teach you about pi,” Mr Flanty cooed, lightly strumming the strings. Mr Flanty was the sort of man who saw a lot of musicals and talked about himself in the third person. “Anybody know what pi is?”

Lamp's hand sprang up like it was trying to escape his shoulder. “Ooh! Ooh!”

“No, you lovable scamp,” chuckled Mr Flanty,
“Mr Flanty doesn't mean the type of food.”

“But I wasn't going to say that,” squeaked Lamp. “It's the mathematical constant defined by—”

“Uh-uh-uh.” Mr Flanty held up a silencing finger. “If you don't know, don't guess. Now, who wants to hear Mr Flanty's pi song?”

Not me
, thought Casper. He wanted to plan some menus or get started on the spotted dick. He wanted to win over the villagers with his dad's
Best of British
and ensure victory on Friday. He wanted to be free of the bullies whom he knew would burst through that door any moment now. He did not, on balance, want to hear Mr Flanty's pi song.

“Let's rock!” Mr Flanty bobbed up and down on his stool, strummed a jolly G-major chord and
started to sing.

“
Oh
,
pi's a mathematical constant,

Not a meaty treat you find in your fridge,

If you give it a bit of work, you'll

Find the area of a circle,

Which is useful when you're building a bridge
.”

Mr Flanty bowed to Lamp's rapturous applause before starting up again.

“
Sing it with me now! Three point one four one five nine two…
”

Lamp was the only one singing along to the second verse, but then again he was the only person who knew the lyrics. Casper and the others watched in bewildered abandon.

Ten minutes later, Lamp and Mr Flanty were still at it. Casper wondered how long the second verse would go on, and whether he should duck out at lunchtime. Cuddles was starting to get quite restless too, so Casper gave her his pocketed doorknob to gnaw on.

“
Nine three nine three two five one nine—
”

SLAM!

Mr Flanty's squeal was accompanied by the
six-note
twang
of a dropped guitar.

Filling the doorway was Bash Brewster and his burly brothers, Spit, Clobber and Pinchnurse. “Lunch munny.”

The kids knew what to do by now. Each pulled out their coins and placed them on the desk ready for collection. Lamp pulled out his final egg.

Bash tromped straight to Casper's desk and grinned his toothless grin. “Lunch munny.”

Casper's heart was beating out of his chest. He'd brought defence this time in the shape of his sister Cuddles. But it could go so wrong, and then… Casper shuddered to think of the consequences. He lifted his silvery backpack on to the desk and shakily unzipped it. “It's all in here. Help yourself.”

“Oh. Fanks.” Bash plunged his hairy hand inside Casper's bag and rifled around. He found something hard and sharp. “
Whassis?
”

What he'd found was one of Cuddles's fangs. What Cuddles's fangs had found was a mid-morning snack. The other three Brewsters heard the splintering crunch before they saw what caused it, but when Bash's face contorted with agony they knew something was wrong. The biggest Brewster's arm withdrew from the backpack with a new addition – a snarling baby in a pink all-in-one and a yellow tie, savage jaws locked round his finger.

“AAAAARGH!” roared Bash, jumping up and down and swinging Cuddles round his head like a lousy yo-yo trick. The other Brewsters blundered around, knocking into desks and walls
as Bash clamped Cuddles between his knees to prise his fingers free. With a hefty tug, he flung his hand upwards and Cuddles soared high across
the classroom, landing in the outstretched arms of Snivel.

Casper stared at the carnage and gulped.
“RUN!” He dashed towards the door, closely followed by Lamp, grabbing Snivel with Cuddles on his way out.

The three sets of footsteps clacked down the empty corridor. In all the bluster of the Brewster hysteria, nobody saw them leave.

“Think we're safe. Good catch, by the way!” said Casper.

Snivel blushed. “F-fanks.”

“Why did we leave?” asked Lamp. “I love that song.”

A slam from behind them was followed by a fourth pair of footsteps. The boys spun round in terror, only to see Anemonie Blight rushing towards them.

“Anemonie?” called Casper. “What are you doing?”

“I ain't staying in there, am I?”

“Did they see you leave?”

“What? How do I—”

“THERE THEY IS. GET 'EM!” The brutes emerged from the maths room, snarling like caged beasts.

Casper's insides turned to fondue.

“This w-way!” shouted Snivel, sprinting off down the corridor. With no other option, Casper, Lamp and Anemonie hurried after him.

“Can't believe you let them see you leave!” Casper shouted at Anemonie.

“Shut it, Candlewacks. I ain't giving my lunch money to nobody.”

Snivel led the three left, down the stairs. Savage hollers from the corridor above told him that Bash and brethren weren't far behind.
Casper didn't dare to look back.

“Do they want our lunch money?” asked Lamp. “I still don't got none.”

“I think they want me,” said Casper. “And Cuddles. Or at least our heads on a stick.” They ducked through the next door on the right and found themselves in a narrow carpeted corridor with paintings of wrongly coloured lions plastering the walls.

Casper sighed. “I think we've lost them.”

“I fink not,” rumbled something massive blocking the end of the corridor. Something massive had a face, a gnarled hand and breath that smelt of tuna. Something massive also had a name – Bash Brewster.

The four screamed and turned on their heels, but the other three Brewsters already blocked the
way they'd come.

“In here!” yelled Casper, swerving through a heavy-looking door to the right. Snivel veered after him, counted in Lamp and Anemonie and slammed the door behind them. Two fat bolts and a wedged chair later, they were safe.

Casper breathed a sigh of relief and turned to view their hiding place. It was a classroom, probably for history, judging by the tinfoil suits of armour and a fossilised teacher slumped at the desk. To the rear was a shelf densely packed with huge dusty old books bound in faded red cloth from the days before paper. (Until paper was invented by Dermot O'Paper in 1662, books were made of all sorts of things – leaves, wool, maidens or thinly sliced ham. Paper didn't properly catch on until the late 1830s.)

Lamp galumphed to the bookshelf, picked out perhaps the hugest and dustiest volume of all (written on papyrus and not maidens, thank goodness) and flipped it open. “Ooh! Medieval tax records!” He flumped into a beanbag in the corner with a face of pure glee and mouthed the words to himself as he read.

On the other side, Bash, Spit and Clobber were using Pinchnurse as a hollow-skulled battering ram.

As Anemonie settled grumpily in a chair, Casper tossed Cuddles on to the floor and rushed to join Snivel by the door.

“It is going to hold?”

“Sh-should do,” trembled Snivel.

“And if not?”

“L-let's not f-fink about it.” Snivel perched
on the edge of the nearest chair to the door, squeaking every time the door banged. “S-sorry,” he whispered. “I'll g-get used to it in a m-minute.”

The bell rang to mark the beginning of the next lesson, but the brutes didn't leave.

“Guess we're having a history lesson, then,” sighed Casper.

“Goodee!” cheered Lamp, and he skipped over to a desk at the front.

“I didn't mean it. I think that teacher's been there for as long as those books.”

The fossilised teacher creaked upright and cleared his throat.

Anemonie screamed.

“While Victorian Britain saw the birth of steam engines, suspension bridges and the humble Penny Black,” the teacher began in an ancient creaky
drawl, “by far the age's greatest invention was the London Sewage System.”

“Yessssss!” whispered Lamp.

Casper groaned and took a seat, half wishing he'd let the Brewsters take his lunch money after all.

The hammering didn't stop once in the whole hour, but even the iron forehead of Pinchnurse Brewster wasn't breaking through that door. (They make the locks to history rooms extra secure in case the facts try to get out.) Casper screwed up some paper and stuck it in his ears to block out the incessant teaching. Then he fed Cuddles a tinfoil suit of armour to keep her happy and tried to scratch out some menu ideas for Friday on a piece of scrap paper. They wouldn't come, though. At the end of the lesson the bell rang and the
fossilised teacher dropped lifeless to his desk once more.

“Well, thank goodness for that.”

Lamp chanted, “Thank you very much for the lesson, Mister Sir,” and returned to the corner with his book.

“Right.” Casper stood up. “Now he's finished we can think of a way to escape. Any ideas?”

Snivel shook his head firmly.

“I'm fine here, thanks.”

Lamp turned a page and gasped at a very informative bar chart.

“Anemonie?”

“Can't believe you got us stuck in here, Candlewacks,” she snarled hatefully at Casper.

“You chose to follow me.”

“I didn't follow you nowhere,” she snarled.
“I'm a lone wolf. You probably followed me.” Anemonie stuck out her pointy tongue.

“Whatever.” Since Casper had met the Brewsters, he didn't really see Anemonie as a threat. Neither did Anemonie, by the look of her sullen frown and wrinkled nose.

Casper searched the room helplessly. “Cuddles, you got any ideas?”

Cuddles was too busy barking into a mouse hole to have ideas.

“Looks like I'm on my own, then.”

Casper had just about checked the windows (both bolted shut) when the bell rang for the next lesson. Like clockwork, the fossilised teacher creaked upright again and Lamp danced forward to his desk. “While Victorian Britain saw the birth of steam engines, suspension bridges and
the humble Penny Black, by far the age's greatest invention was the London Sewage System.”