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closely regarding their cursive intentions. Some were coy, some reluctant to say, some off sick from school, some wagging. It was a logistical nightmare, but he had to do it – and do it right – to save himself from Mother.
    Nathan had hoped a few people hadn’t yet used up the damnation pages, that he might get the pages back whole and untarnished, but he might as well have hoped the sun wouldn’t rise on Fool’s Day. Everybody had activated their curses, setting the controls for that one day of maximum foolishness and folly.
    Everybody reported the same thing when they named their victim and laid down their curse: the damnation pagecurled up in their hand and theatrically vanished in a natty puff of thick, grey smoke.
    With this and other relevant information, Nathan compiled a list of everybody he’d sold curse pages to, the name of the person they’d cursed and the exact nature of the curse.
    And, before you ask, no – I won’t outline the spiteful, vicious details of the hundred horrible things students cursed their enemies with, just to give you new ideas for revenge.
    Forget it. I do have certain responsibilities and standards to uphold as a writer, you know, so let’s have a modicum of respect. There are some things I certainly wouldn’t divulge, not even for money. There are some details too harsh for innocent readers, too ugly to disclose to normal citizens, too weird to share with decent people and too gruesome to lay on a respectable audience.
    So here they all are …
Selina Bones-Jones bought page one. She cursed David Dingbrain with 600 years of diarrhoea and hiccups, a sludgy combination.
John Pinhead bought page two. He cursed his Advanced and Vocational Curses teacher, turning Mrs Hancock’s hands into two snapping turtles, her nose into an electric eel and her backside into a dartboard.
Jason-Jock Werewolf cursed Mr Derby the PE teacher, transforming his curly hair into a thousand writhing venomous snakes, all with breath like a cart-horse.
Gary Hooper cursed Damien Frankenstein-Monster, though the boy-creature already wet his pants every day, anyway. Waste of a good curse.
Matthew Mummie cursed Steven Frogsalad with a coronary fart attack. Mummie’s dried-up mummification bandages caught on fire when the curse page smouldered away, and he had to leap into the school pond – much laughter, you should’ve been there …
Cordelia Househaunter cursed Geoff Dandyline with another ten years of …
    Ah, sod it. That’s nowhere near a hundred but I assume you can’t count past six and don’t give a hoot anyway. Tick off whichever excuse you want. Don’t like it? You know which overflowing toilet to lodge your complaint in and who to call for help when you fall in headfirst – not me.
    Anyway, there’s only one curse we’re interested in right now, because it was to really effect the whole outcome of that fated Fool’s Day – Mick Living-Dead’s curse.
    What was it about Mick Living-Dead? Was he born backwards? Was there something in the water he drank as a child? Or is there some other logical explanation why the boy did the things he did?
    I grew up in a bad neighbourhood and that’s always been my excuse, but what about young Living-Dead? He lived in one of the better suburbs in Horror, attended the finest zombie preschool money could buy and had loving parents who bent overbackwards – not easy for zombies – to provide a stable and supportive home environment.
    And how does Mick repay them? By buying a curse page off Nathan and setting off a clone bomb in the school toilets. Rascal. He later claimed he’d planned to trap Mrs Goatbeard in there, to clone her into ten cranky old vice-principals as a revenge against her husband, Mick’s much despised football coach.
    But the plan backfired. Gary Hooper had already cursed Mrs Goatbeard, turning her into her namesake, a bearded goat.