Free Horror High 2 by Paul Stafford Page B

fleas. They were doomed and they knew it. And not just doomed as a cricket team either – their future at Horror High was over. They were going to be expelled unless, unless …
    Unless they pulled off the impossible.
    Anybody who knows werewolves will tell you they can be extremely capable creatures when they put their minds to it. They have the heightened senses of a dog, the supernatural abilities of a ghoul, and the never-say-die spirit of a human who thinks there’s nothing peculiar in shedding a quarter kilo of hair on your lounge every time they come to your house to watch the greyhound races on TV.
    All of which means they can pull out some pretty gnarly and difficult stuff when pressed. The ‘unlikely’ they could do easily, being werewolves, and the ‘doubtful’ was pretty much a walk in the park without a leash. The ‘improbable’ was imminently achievable, and even incompetent werewolves could pull off ‘no-chance’ type gigs standing on their hairy heads.
    But the ‘impossible’? As the term ‘impossible’ suggests, that was impossible, even for someone as cool and righteous as myself, which these werewolves definitely weren’t.
    And what Principal Skullwater demanded – winning the Interghouls Cricket Cup – was fully and totally and thoroughly impossible. Yet if they didn’t pull it off the werewolves were out of Horror High.
    Expelled. Evicted. Banished. Exorcised. Forever …

Principal Skullwater had observed the werewolf cricket team practising in the nets over the last months and been the sorry witness to their inter-class matches these last miserable weeks.
    They were rubbish.
    Skullwater lived and breathed cricket, but at 2305 years of age he found running between the wickets a little beyond him. Still, he followed cricket avidly andmade foolhardy, ill-advised and ridiculously ambitious bets on the outcome of certain matches.
    One of these dimbulbous bets had been with Principal Nettlebottom of Death Valley High, concerning the outcome of this year’s Interghouls Cricket Cup.
    The two principals had argued and bickered on the subject during the annual principals’ conference. Nettlebottom reckoned he had an unbeatable team of vampire cricketers at Death Valley High this year. He ranted and raved about them, never letting up for a minute. He got in Skullwater’s scabrous old ear for hours, boasting and bragging long and loud on this theme, and surreptitiously filling and refilling Skullwater’s glass with strong whisky.
    Pretty soon the combination of whisky and braggy drove Skullwater to the point of no return, and he slurringly made a very dumb bet using the kind of snaggle-toothed language all principals use when they’re completely trolleyed on strong liquors.
    It wasn’t until Skullwater returned pie-eyed to school and slowly recovered from the cracking aftermath that he realised just how dreadful Horror High’s werewolf cricket team was, and just how very dumb his corresponding bet had been. He was in deep trouble.
    Trouble? He was cactus.
    Now the principal was really starting to agonise over it. Was this evidence of the gypsy curse returning? Was it a sign it was back, the relentless curse that had blighted his third life back in Roman Britain, then thoroughly soiled his eighth life in the Middle Ages? The curse that returned twice as strong in his eleventh life, forcing him to spend most of his days in the court of Vlad the Impaler, dressed in a clown suit and jumping through hoops like some retarded circus goat?
    The same curse had cost him his chance at the presidency of the Oddfellows’ Society in 1756 and recurred again in the 1930s when all his valuable shares in handkerchief futures crashed duringthe Great Depression. You’d think during a great depression that hankies would be at an excellent price, everybody depressed and dejected and moping on down.
    You’d think.
    But