The Beast of Seabourne (2 page)

“Really? I hadn't noticed,” Ruff said, brushing cheese-and-onion crisp crumbs off his jumper before draining the remains of the Tango in one swallow.

Oz snorted and began wrapping the tank in some old sheets he'd brought from home.

“It is safe to just leave it here overnight, you reckon?” Ellie asked.

Oz pointed to a disgusting grey-and-black stain in the shape of a giant, two-headed, squashed toad that stretched halfway up one wall. “It'll be fine. I know it's horrible and fungoid but I chose it for exactly that reason. No one comes in here because of the damp.”

“You sure about that?” Ruff asked, frowning.

“How many times have we been in here and never been disturbed?” Oz countered.

Ruff cocked his head sideways. “Loads, I know, but I'm sure I can hear—”

“I'm telling you…” Oz went on, but froze as he picked up what Ruff had already heard.

“…strictly out of bounds,” came a strident voice from the corridor outside.

“Oh, sugar. It's Swinson,” Ellie hissed, grabbing Oz's arm and staring in horror at the door.

“What are we going to do?” Ruff asked in a panicky whisper.

Oz's insides contracted with a sickening swoop. No one ever came to this block of musty old classrooms. He searched frantically, but there was nowhere to hide, no other door to escape through. There was nothing they could do, unless… “Soph?” Oz implored, swinging his desperate face to the avatar.

“You wish to remain concealed?” Soph asked.

“Too buzzard right we do,” Ruff blurted.

“Then please sit quietly and do not make a noise.” With that, she faded into nothingness.

“But…”

The door crashed open, and two people stood in the doorway. Bright sparks flickered at the edge of Oz's vision, as blood drained from his face into his hollow legs. He had to fight a terrible urge to duck under the desk. There, almost filling the doorway, loomed Valerie “the Volcano” Swinson, deputy headmistress at Seabourne County School. She'd earned the name from the combination of an explosive temperament and a body shaped like an inverted traffic cone. As usual, she wore her gull-wing glasses on a string around her thick neck, but her customary pursed, accusatory expression dissolved into frowning disappointment as she peered into the dingy room. Framed in the doorway beside her was a pretty, immaculately dressed girl wearing a malicious smile, which also dissolved into instant confusion as she, too, surveyed the emptiness.

“Well?” demanded the Volcano.

“But I…I watched them come in here. I heard them talking,” the girl protested.

The Volcano's eyebrows arched. “They seem, however, to have vanished into thin air. More importantly, this room is strictly off-limits while the education department finds the funding for repairs and re-plastering. And though I am grateful for you bringing this supposed transgression to my attention, Phillipa, in this instance it seems that you are mistaken. Though I agree this is exactly the sort of place I might expect to find Mr Chambers and his little troupe flagrantly flouting school rules, it is clear that they are not here.”

Oz's heart thundered in his ears. It felt as if it had travelled up to just behind his Adam's apple and was trying to drum its way out through his mouth. Ruff, Ellie, and Oz, sitting just feet away from the door, looked at one another in white-faced disbelief. Phillipa “Pheeps” Heeps, with whom Oz had a long and bitter history, was bug-eyed, looking for signs of occupation.

Several times her gaze raked across him, but her eyes slid off as if he wasn't there. Behind her, two of her clones—part of an entourage that usually followed Pheeps around like sheep, labelled by Ruff as “Pheeps' Creeps”—pushed their way in, their faces instant pictures of stunned bewilderment. Oz could only stare in wonder at them, standing no more than a few feet in front of his nose, looking right at him. Looking and not
seeing
anything. The Volcano sighed and turned to the three girls.

“I suggest the three of you go back and make the most of what remains of the lunch break. I will keep an eye out for Oscar Chambers and his cronies, don't you worry.”

She herded Pheeps and her Creeps out and slammed the door behind her.

Oz, realising that he'd been holding his breath, exhaled gratefully and swallowed his pulse, but his relief was short-lived. Next to him, Ruff was turning an alarming shade of purple, one hand clamped firmly over his mouth. Oz glared at him desperately, but all Ruff could do was shake his head, a look of total mortification on his face, when at that moment, from behind his hand, a loud and prolonged Tango-induced
burp
erupted.

Oz looked at Ellie staring in utter disbelief at Ruff, who had clamped a second hand over his mouth to quell the laughter—or worse, another burp—that now threatened. Oz was forced to take the more drastic measure of chomping down on his knuckles to stifle a guffaw.

Without warning, the door burst open, and Pheeps thrust her beady-eyed face back in again.

“Phillipa, I must insist that you give up this nonsense,” warned the Volcano from the corridor beyond.

“But miss, I
know
I heard a noise this time and”—she sniffed the air, frowned, and muttered—“I can smell orange Tango and cheese-and-onion crisps…”

“Just the ancient plumbing and the fungus on the walls playing tricks with your senses,” said the Volcano. Though Pheeps ranked amongst the Volcano's select list of favourite pupils, it was clear from the deputy head's irritable tone that she was losing patience fast. “Come along, I've had enough of this nonsense. Cafeteria!
Now
.”

She reached out and yanked the door shut once more. A drum roll of footsteps receded down the corridor, followed by the Volcano's ponderous footfalls, fading into silence.

Another wave of barely constrained laughter convulsed Oz's chest in a Muttley wheeze. He sat bent over, eyes shut, trying to think unfunny thoughts and failing miserably.

Several rib-aching seconds later, Ellie got up and tiptoed to the door, opened it an inch, and peeked through the crack. Satisfied, she turned and hurled an accusation at Ruff: “You total gonk.”

“Sorry,” Ruff replied, still wearing a mortified expression. “It was the Tango. Always makes me burp.”

“It does if you drink half the can in one go,” Ellie blurted.

This made Oz's shoulders heave even more. He'd covered his face with his hands and felt a dribble of saliva escape the corner of his mouth, but he was so helpless with laughter, he couldn't so much as speak, let alone think about wiping his chin. Finally, he peeked through his fingers, to find that Soph had reappeared and was watching the three of them.

“Okay, Soph,” he said, blowing out air and wiping his eyes. “How did you manage that?”

“You mean the holoshield?”

“Making us invisible is what I mean.”

“It is a simple projection of an image of the place you were sitting, taken before you sat there. What they saw from the door was how the room looked before we entered it.”

“Simple,” Ruff said with a little shrug before sending Soph a look of awe.

“Did you see Pheeps' face?” Ellie asked.

“Looked like she'd swallowed a snail,” Oz said, grinning.

The bell went for the end of lunch, and Soph faded back into the aether, leaving Oz with the difficult decision of what best to do with the tank.

Oz's mum had delivered the water cycle project earlier that week, when she'd picked him up from orchestra practise after school. He'd sneaked it into the fungoid room completely unseen, gambling on no one visiting the contaminated block and driven by a desperate need to show it to Ellie and Ruff and involve them in the final touches. Suddenly, after what had just happened, the wisdom of having it in school at all, with Pheeps and the Volcano on their case, seemed quite dodgy. Nevertheless, it was here now, and it was too delicate and cumbersome an object to lug around.

“Why don't we put it in the room next door?' Ellie suggested. “In case You-Know-Who decides to snoop.”

“Brilliant,” Oz said. “It's just as bad as this one.”

They carried the box through, put it above a dilapidated cupboard, and covered it with a sheet.

As they made their way to registration, Ruff kept doing impressions of Pheeps' horrified expression, much to Ellie's amusement, but Oz wasn't taking much notice. After the elation of their narrow escape, his mind had turned to what the Volcano would have done had she found them in Room 62, and it was not a pleasant thought. She would have confiscated the project, for starters, and probably disqualified them just for spite.

But it was the gleeful anticipation in Pheeps' face before she saw the room empty that really made his insides squirm. Oz wasn't sure why she hated him so much, but hate him she did, from the deep, dark depths of her evil little soul. A soul she'd inherited from her father, Dr Lorenzo Heeps, an interfering ex-colleague of his dad's, who had only reached his position of Vice Chancellor of the University because Michael Chambers was no longer around to challenge him for it…

Oz squeezed his eyes shut, letting the ache that suddenly throbbed in his chest peak and die away. He'd become accustomed to it flaring whenever thoughts of his dad caught him unawares. Like with a nagging tooth, he coped with it but never managed to suppress it altogether.

The discussion with Ellie and Ruff had already stirred the murky waters of his guilt. Whereas Soph and Penwurt were intriguing mysteries to his friends, to Oz they were the keys to a prickly riddle that nettled him awake at night to lie wide-eyed and discontented, listening to his mother's restless pacing and his own fractured heart beating, wondering why all this weirdness was happening to him. Soph and Penwurt were undoubtedly the keys to the artefacts, to finding out what had really happened to his dad, to the ache that burned inside and never really went away. And Pheeps had once again managed to reach out a meddling hand to stoke the embers of his forebodings.

The girl had talent, he had to admit.

Of course, it might have been sheer bad luck that the Volcano was in the vicinity of Room 62 today, but it was far likelier Pheeps had summoned her from the staff room through sheer spite. The year before, Pheeps had plotted to have him water-bombed in the school dance and revelled in making Oz's life as generally unpleasant as possible at Seabourne County School. It would be the highlight of her year if he got into trouble with the Volcano.

Yet, even worse than Pheeps' hateful interfering was the fact that her smarmy dad was in cahoots with Jack Gerber, a powerful businessman whose agents had once set fire to Penwurt's basement in trying to get their hands on Soph and the artefacts.

Ellie turned back and glimpsed Oz's expression.

“You okay, Oz? You look like you've seen a ghost—”

Oz cut her off. “No, not a ghost, just a monster. The ugly side of Pheeps.”

“Is there another side?” Ruff asked.

Oz sighed. “I don't know. Thing is, I never know how much of her plotting and scheming is just meanness and how much of it is spying for someone else.”

That left the other two exchanging worried glances. Neither of them spoke. There was no need. They all knew that, until the science project was over and done with, they'd all have to be on their guard.

Oz was still pondering their narrow escape when Miss Arkwright, 2C's form tutor, breezed through the door of Room 33, wearing her uniform of flowery maxi, leather sandals, peasant blouse, and bobbly cardigan. Her cheeks were slightly flushed from hurrying, and her frizzy hair was held back from a pretty, makeup-free face by a brightly hued Alice band. She was, as usual, late. She plonked her battered leather bag on the table, took out some papers, and shuffled vainly through them.

“Right, settle down,” she said loudly, not looking up, an order that resulted in the class taking no notice whatsoever. She sighed and tried again, upping the volume by a decibel or ten. “I said
settle down
.”

The noise in the room dipped by three or four notches, except from the back of the class where it was at its most raucous. That was the domain of Lee Jenkins, Kieron Skinner, and their hangers-on.

Today, Jenks had brought in a digital pen recorder capable of sampling sound bites, which it could then insert into prerecorded songs. The idea was to substitute one's own voice for a section of the song in a kind of micro-karaoke. Oz had seen this sort of thing advertised everywhere. Meant for making your own ringtones and the like.

But Jenks, being Jenks, had not recorded his own voice. He'd gone for a barking dog, an impression of a cow mooing, and, of course, the noise of someone blowing a raspberry.

“At least I hope it's someone blowing a raspberry,” Ellie said when she'd heard it the first time, her face contorting in disgust.

Much to the delight of his cronies, ferret-faced Jenks kept replaying the famous chorus of “We Will Rock You” over and over, with his special modification to the lyrics being a raspberry “
Brrrp
” in place of the third word.