Locked In (6 page)

Jasper clenched his eyes shut again, and breathed deeply. Perhaps if he wished really hard, he would find himself back home in his own bed. Kind of like
The Wizard of Oz.

‘There's no place like home,' Jasper moaned, knocking the heels of his feet together three times. But Jasper knew he wasn't in a movie. This was real. Slowly, he peeled his eyes open.

He tried not to think about monsters eating him alive. Especially as he had just been attacked by something.

Something that was probably coming back.

He blinked, and his eyes began to focus. A tree, the moon, lots of foresty sticks and leaves and … wait. Something was standing over him. Jasper opened his mouth to scream.

The figure shoved a hand roughly over Jasper's mouth. Jasper bit down hard on the hand and hit out at the figure.

‘Ouch!' the attacker cried as Jasper swung it onto the ground and pounced on top of it.

Jasper stopped. As far as he knew, monsters didn't usually say
ouch
. And since when did they have hands?

Jasper had the figure by the hair, his fist raised for another punch. He paused long enough to look at the figure. Head. Hair. Legs. Arms. Body. Pyjamas. Nope, definitely not a monster.

‘Er, sorry,' Jasper said to the boy in front of him, who was dripping blood into the snow from a very sore-looking nose. ‘I thought you were a … you know, monster or something. I just got knocked out by something, and it will probably come back for us.'

The boy looked sheepishly at Jasper and wiped his nose on his sleeve. ‘Um, I wouldn't worry about that. It was kind of, well, me,' he said. ‘Sorry. I thought you were a monster too.'

Jasper's mouth dropped open in surprise. ‘
You
knocked me out?'

The boy shrugged. He was smaller and skinnier than Jasper, and didn't look like he could knock
anybody
out.

Jasper didn't know whether to be mad or not. His head still hurt but, then again, the boy's nose looked kind of painful.

‘Where did you learn to do that?' Jasper asked, helping the boy to his feet.

‘My dad taught me,' he replied. ‘I'm a black belt at karate.'

Jasper was impressed. He knew how to fight with his fists, but karate – now
that
was cool.

‘I'm Felix,' the boy said as he packed cold snow on his swelling nose.

‘Jasper.'

They grinned and nodded at each other. ‘So, did you just have a test too?' Jasper asked.

Felix nodded. ‘Yep. In a room with a Flippelsqueal in the wardrobe. It was horrible,' he added with a shiver. ‘How did you go?' he asked Jasper.

‘Yeah, er … no worries,' replied Jasper. He didn't mention how much he'd wanted to scream when he saw the Snobleshriek.

The Monstrum House School for
Troubled Children ... at 2.45am

‘Scary, huh? I was petrified,' Felix replied.

Jasper raised his eyebrows. ‘You? You could have knocked it out with your karate moves.'

Felix looked embarrassed. ‘I only learnt karate for self-defence because my brothers were always thumping me. But I don't think a kick would work against a Flippealsqueal. The worst thing is, I knew what was coming. I spent all day freaking out about it. My brothers had told me what would happen.'

Jasper was confused. ‘Are your brothers at Monstrum House too?' he asked.

Felix shook his head. ‘Used to be. Apparently I come from a long line of monster-hunters. My brothers weren't meant to say anything, but they let me in on it all the night before I left.'

‘That was nice of them,' Jasper shrugged, trying to get his head around the idea of a family of monster-hunters.

‘Nah – it was more in the
you'd better not wuss out and make us beat you up for ruining our good name
kind of way. Anyway, we'd better get back. I've got Stenka the ice queen for a teacher, and class starts in a few hours,' Felix said, checking his watch.

‘Me too,' said Jasper. He was glad he had met Felix. For a kid who'd been shoved in a monster-hunting school, Felix seemed all right.

No lights shone from the windows of the stone mansion. The flags were completely still. The place looked eerily empty.

As Jasper and Felix ran towards the school building, Jasper's feet felt like they were about to drop off. At least there weren't any prefects around – that they could see. Jasper figured they were probably all too busy dragging kids out of their beds.

‘Finally,' Jasper whispered to Felix, as they crept quietly up to the front doors, just managing to dodge the sweep of the searchlights. He slowly pulled down on the doorhandle. It wasn't locked. They had made it. Jasper smiled at Felix with relief. He pushed the door open.

A dark figure blocked their path.

‘Out of bed, are we?' a voice sneered viciously. Jasper recognised the scarred face and hard eyes of the prefect immediately. He hadn't seemed nice in the food hall, and Jasper didn't think he looked particularly nice now. ‘Right. Come with me,' Bruno snarled.

Bruno

10

Jasper and Felix only just made it into their Species Studies class on time. Bruno had made them spend the rest of the night in the freezing laundry, handwashing the prefects' dirty clothes in giant tubs of cold water. By the time the gong sounded to wake everyone up, Jasper and Felix's hands were like cold sultanas.

And now they were in Species Studies, listening to Stenka talk about different kinds of monsters. Saffy had also made it into Class 1B and took a seat next to Jasper and Felix.

The Species Studies classroom wasn't like any other Jasper had been in. A fire burned merrily behind the teacher's desk, and instead of rows of desks and chairs for the students, each kid had their own comfy armchair or couch. It
looked
comforting, but it was a strange place to be taught about monsters – especially when the teacher was anything
but
comforting. The combination made Jasper feel a bit queasy.

‘This one!' Stenka snapped her stick against the board, her mohawk vibrating with the impact, ‘is a Sizzleguzzler.'

Jasper stared at the picture of the monster – a slimy, wart-covered, toad-like creature that looked like something that had been splattered in the middle of the footpath.

‘Sizzleguzzlers belong to the Muncher order of monsters. Munchers eat people. Or parts of people,' Stenka said matter-of-factly, as if it were the most ordinary thing to be teaching kids.

‘There are four distinct monster orders, as identified by Henrik Schnellman,' she went on. ‘He was the founder of Monstrum House and the first person to devote his life to the study of monsters. Eventually he was eaten.'

Jasper drew a cartoon of the Sizzleguzzler licking its lips and drooling over Henrik Schnellman's half-eaten leg.

‘The particularly nasty Munchers completely devour their victims, which is why some people disappear without a trace.' Stenka paused and smiled fondly at the picture of the Sizzleguzzler on the board again. Its mouth hung open, and a long line of dark, swirling drool dripped from its tongue. ‘The process can be long and painful. The Sizzleguzzler, for example, will take about a week to digest a fully grown person.'

Jasper wondered how long it took a Sizzleguzzler to digest a teenager, but he decided he didn't really want to know.

Sizzleguzzler Mmm, yum yum!

He actually thought the monster looked kind of cool – it was gross but funny. A pile of vomit with legs. Although perhaps it wouldn't be so funny if you were the one being slowly digested.

‘The drool sizzles through the people it eats, like an acid,' Stenka was saying cheerfully.

‘So how do we kill it?' asked Saffy.

‘Oh no,' Stenka whispered. ‘Monsters can't be killed. Only caught and ... changed. We'll get to that later. But you –
you
can be killed. SIZZLE!' she added loudly for emphasis, smiling.

There was silence in the classroom.

‘How do we change them, then?' asked Saffy, not giving up.

But Stenka ignored her. ‘Now, on to the two most common monster orders,' she went on. ‘The Screecher and Scrambler orders. Monsters in the Screecher order frighten people. Most of the monsters you have come across under your beds and in your wardrobes belong to the Screecher order.'

Stenka pointed to a few pictures of Screecher monsters on the board. Jasper couldn't help but notice that Felix was looking particularly uneasy.

‘Screechers do not eat people,' said Stenka. ‘Their aim is to frighten you. But, like all monsters, they will bite when cornered. And the effect of a monster bite can sometimes be a fate worse than death.

‘Then, there are the Scramblers,' Stenka continued. ‘Scramblers are basically nuisance monsters. They hide things, confuse brain signals – whatever they can do to annoy their victims. Have you ever had that dream where you're running and running but never seem to get anywhere?' Stenka waited for the murmur of agreement to die down. ‘Chances are a small type of Scrambler was inside your ear, making you feel all that frustration.'

Jasper knew that dream. He'd had it before. He couldn't believe there had been monsters inside his ears!

‘Other larger species of Scramblers play practical jokes to confuse and annoy their victims,' Stenka told the class.

‘But that's not very bad, is it?' interrupted Saffy. ‘Not like being eaten.'

Stenka turned towards Saffy. ‘What you don't seem to understand,
Ms Dominguez
, is that while only a Muncher will eat you, a Scrambler could easily fry your brain, like water thrown over a computer's hard drive. And while a Screecher's aim is to frighten rather than kill you, many of their victims are frightened to
death
.'