The Feral Peril (2 page)

The trouble started (as it often does in surly, steroid-dependent stories like this) with a savage scrap in the school handball championship between two warring siblings, a humiliating radio broadcast that even made
me
blush, and a dirty doublecross that nearly destroyed an honourable secret society dedicated to the downfall of sisters everywhere.

Or maybe the doublecross
did
destroy the secret society; I don't remember. Least-ways, I don't care enough to refer to my notes on Tony Bones-Jones right now. Check it yourself in
History of Horror
, indexed under ‘L' for Losers. Doubtless you'll find your own name there, too.

But enough about you. It was handball season at Horror High, and every student with their brain sewn in the right way had furiously practised and perfected their repertoire of low, bogus shots, devious death-plays, and sweet-and-savage hook-ups. The handball court was marked out in the quadrangle in fresh blood and powdered teeth, and the school maintenance crew had temporarily dismantled the gallows, guillotine and electrified detention cages to set the scene for more painful punishments for the losers.

Fourteen rounds had already been played. The corpses were piling up, and impatient hearse drivers formed a disorderly queue right around the block.

Sirius ‘Dead Serious' Skull and Bill Lickpenny were the championship commentators, relaying the action from a smoke-filled, glassed-in soundproof booth perched on precarious scaffolding far above the handball squall. Loudspeakers mounted around the quadrangle blared their reports, and the sound bounced off the gothic walls of the high school, echoing up and down the long corridors, seeping into the deepest dungeon.

Turned up too loud, as usual.

‘Sirius Skull here, folks, the “Mouth from the South”, calling the games courtside for you today, and it's already been a killer competition with some major upsets – dead serious. Am I right, Bill?'

‘You are, Sirius,' replied Lickpenny. ‘You are, you are, you are. Walk us through the highlights so far.'

Skull grinned and toked hard on his fat, stinky cigar – not an easy thing to do when you don't have lips.

‘Bill, as you well know, I've never been one to glorify violence, but some of this
violence has been glorious. The match between Dwain Frankenstein and Claudia Blood-Drip was as savage as anything I've ever seen – dead serious – and the untimely death of Govinda Graverobber at the hands of Brandon VanChickenhead was as beautiful a display of blatant, notorious cheating as you'll ever see in this world or the next.'

The opinionated chrome dome stopped to take another long draw on his cigar, seemingly oblivious to the dangers smoking posed to a decomposing individual, and the smoke drifted lazily out a jagged hole in the back of his braincase. He shouldn't smoke. After all he, too, was a sportsman, playing in the annual darts finals, clamping the dart between his teeth while his partner hurled the dartboard at him.

Sirius Skull was only allowed out of the school one week a year to call the handball championship, get his darts fix and chain-smoke cigars. The rest of the time he spent on Grimsweather's desk as a
pencil holder with his eye sockets stuffed full of HB pencils.

But his eyes were wide open now. ‘I've had a vision, Bill. I'm seeing into the future, and I see a very obvious winner. But who do
you
think will take the crown this year?'

‘Well, a man would be a born fool to predict the outcome of
this
championship,' replied Bill Lickpenny. ‘So I predict Tony Bones-Jones. You'll remember Barnaby Hangdog very nearly mauled Bones-Jones last year and was definitely the dog to muzzle, but since he's left the school there's no real challenger left.'

Sirius grinned as only a skull can. ‘Yes, if Barnaby Hangdog had put as much practice into keeping his private life private as he put into his handball, he'd be here to challenge Tony Bones-Jones.'

Lickpenny stifled a laugh. ‘Maybe, but we're not here to talk about Barnaby Hangdog's privates … Let's discuss the game at hand.'

Skull nodded solemnly. ‘Too right, and it's anyone's game, anyone could win – dead serious – and nobody even half-smart would try to prophesy
this
outcome. So, I say Tony Bones-Jones to win it all.'

A fanfare of trumpets and a flurry of skyrockets announced the start of another round. Grimsweather lurked, glowering in the background, emanating bad vibes and cheap aftershave. He was the evil umpire: torment, pestilence and certain death stalked in his sinister shadow. But on the plus side he also sold event programs, oversized novelty foam hands and Gatorade. He peddled a few bottles now to monsters too intent on glowering at their opponents to tender the correct change. They stood on the sidelines, flexing and sizing each other up, silently daring anyone to meet their gaze.

The handball championship was the one legitimate venue for settling old scores in a lawful frenzy of blood-letting, and competing Horror High students glared at their enemies with viciousness in their eyes.

The creature created in Horror High's science lab, known only as Botched Experiment, gave Mihn Djinn the hairy eyeball – their hatred for each other was legendary. Wussy werewolf Fleabag O'Brian was well careful not to catch the eye of tiny Catarina Catgirl. He was terrified of kittens, and she hissed at him whenever he slunk by. Nigel Neanderthal held up a hand mirror and mercilessly dissed himself. His arms were so long that every year he stood on the centre line and played against himself, left hand versus right. When lefty lost last year, he abused righty, and it ended in a fist-fight behind the bike shed where Neanderthal, caught in the middle, knocked himself out.

‘Another round,' crowed Skull, ‘and another death. Where will it end?'

‘The morgue, the cemetery or the local butcher's shop is my guess,' replied Bill Lickpenny.

The handball championship was
the
annual must-win event at Horror High; no other competition mattered. Sure,
everyone
said
the Interghouls Cricket Cup, the head-bowling tournament and squash (where students dropped one-ton weights on opponents) were fully crucial, too, but they were liars. Those sports were for wusses – only the handball mattered.

It was considered much more serious than death, which, as every ghoul knew, was only a transitory, mildly objectionable phase like acne, anthrax and another tedious season of
Big Brother
. Forget death. Death was what you prayed for if you lost the handball championship. Death was the box you ticked in preference to coming second.

The unique nature of the Horror High rules of handball combat meant that, although winning was a joyous event, the winner didn't actually have anything to show for it in terms of cash and sponsorships. Yet it was still considered
the
most desirable championship to win,
ever
, because losing meant suffering. Losing meant torment. Losing meant becoming the next unhappy victim of a punishment
so squalid and ruinous that being buried alive in a coffin full of fractious cobras seemed a desirable alternative.

No, losing was not an option. Play hard and, above all, win. Cheat, swindle, defraud and bilk the opposition of their rightful, legally won points, and do what you have to do – because winning is
survival
.

What's that you say – no prizes? Don't be soft. Forget prizes. We're discussing a much more valuable commodity than any medal, plaque or silver cup; something that runs much deeper than accolades, praise and school honour. We're yapping about something so precious it transcends standard measurements of wealth.

There are many things of value in the world. There's cash; there're diamonds and rubies; there're fake Gucci watches. (
I'll sell you one, lovely gift for your girlfriend; she'll never know it's counterfeit
.) There're blue-chip stocks and shares, gold bullion. There's lots of valuable commodities out there, and some – like my pay
cheques – are seemingly impossible to get your hands on. Some are so valuable you only hear them spoken of in whispers, and some seem downright mythical. But as for finding something as valued as the spoils of Horror High handball combat, forget about it. This was the big one, the mother of all prizes. (
Don't forget about the Gucci watch
–
meet you behind the bike shed, bring cash.
)

We're dropping the H-bomb, baby –
humiliation
.

Yes. The winner of the handball championship won the immeasurably, indefinably, incalculably precious prize of horribly humiliating the loser.

Massive!

For Horror High students it didn't get any better than this: to win the prestige of dictating the loser's punishment, where even if the competitors were best buddies, it'd still be dreadful and appalling. The spectators demanded a dare of evil enormity – they might have come for the handball, but they stayed for the ball-call.

Forget Armageddon – the aim of this game was
harm
ageddon.

It was Horror High tradition and it stretched back through the mists of Time – the full-blown, top-shelf, knock-me-down-drag-me-out-and-bury-me-deep humiliation of the ball-call, that most devious dare of derision, disdain and deadly, damnably, devilish disrespect.

Diabolical.

Even
you
get the message: it was no fun to lose.

 

‘Sirius, the whole crowd is talking about just one thing,' said Lickpenny to his skullduggerous sidekick. ‘The absence of Barnaby Hangdog, the denseness of Geoff Dandyline and the very real possibility that Tony Bones-Jones will again get to inflict his ball-call on some second-rate sucker. Your thoughts?'

‘Well, that's three things, Bill, for starters, but we won't dwell on your maths skills,' muttered Skull, chomping hard on his smouldering cigar. ‘Yes, with Hangdog
out of the comp, we have a lacklustre field that Bones-Jones should easily dominate, and I predict that the knottiest dilemma he'll face is conjuring up an original ball-call for the loser. Dead serious. It'll be tough to top the punishment he inflicted on Barnaby Hangdog last year, but it's what the crowd expects – nay, demands.'

‘Remind us again of the details of that ball-call,' Lickpenny requested.

Skull grinned. ‘Well, Bones-Jones and Hangdog weren't enemies then, so it was fairly mild – Hangdog had to wear a black vinyl Catwoman costume for the rest of the term.'

‘Must've been pretty hot in that,' chortled Lickpenny.

‘Yes, he was. I nearly asked him out on a date myself!'

The commentary booth rocked with laughter.

 

The truly unnerving element of the Horror High Handball Championship was that the person coming
second
got hammered, not
the person who was beaten in the first round, who was obviously the
worst
player in the school. No, it was the person who was just one stroke short of being the
best
in the school, one puny point from greatness, one flimsy flipper shot from fame.

That person, the heir-to-the-championship, was punished beyond recovery with a ball-call. Mostly they never enjoyed good health again. Certainly their reputation would never recuperate until sometime after the sun burnt out and the planet froze over like a freezer-burned lemonade popsicle.

The injustice of the scenario is what sticks in my craw. I complained repeatedly but nobody listened. I mean, the sorry victim might have been a remarkable, hyper-talented handball player, best in the school, but on championship day they came unstuck.

Maybe they were struck down with something relatively mild, like bird flu, a touch of the Black Death or multiple stings from killer wasps. Or maybe it was
something serious, like getting dosed up on prune juice by their meddling granny and getting the skitters wicked bad. Whatever it was, they were temporarily weakened and lost, came in second, leaving themselves wide open to the ultimate dreadfulness of the Horror High ball-call.

Gnarly.

Let's move right along then. Time's a-wastin' and, since I'm paid by the kilo, I need to add some weight to this bulimic story, initiate whatever legal action is necessary to collect my emaciated pay cheque, then retire to somewhere much less like here and deal with people that look, behave and smell a whole lot less like you.