Class Six and the Nits of Doom Read online

  Jack looked up at Anil.

  ‘But he’s always been nuts,’ he pointed out.

  ‘Yes,’ said Anil, ‘but only in a harmless stupid sort of a way. The nits of doom have changed him. They’ve turned him vicious!’

  Jack stopped for a moment, gazing at Anil with bright pink eyes.

  ‘Well, you’ve got nits, too, just the same as him,’ he said. ‘My eyes have gone so they can see really tiny things, and I can see them in your hair.’

  Class Six kept one eye on Rodney, but they couldn’t resist shuffling closer to look at Anil’s head.

  ‘I can see the nits quite well against your black hair,’ Jack went on. ‘They’re like tiny white rugby balls, but…hang on, they’ve got things inside them. They look a bit like squid and a bit like cheese graters, and they’re all holding steering wheels.

  Jack went to pick one of the nits out of Anil’s hair, but it whizzed away from his fingers and dived down into one of the holes in Anil’s skin where the hairs came out.

  ‘It’s gone inside your head,’ said Jack.

  ‘Erghhhh!’ said Class Six. ‘Errghhhhh! Errrghhhh! Errrrgghhh!’

  And then they all began scratching like mad.

  ‘It’s no good!’ Emily was rubbing at her head until her hair stood on end. ‘It’s no good, I can feel them burrowing into my head! I can feel them driving through my brain! What are we going to do?’

  Winsome was the only one standing still.

  ‘Keep calm,’ she said, determinedly. ‘Panicking isn’t going to help us. We need to keep calm and try to think what we can do.’

  Anil had his hands clasped to his head.

  ‘But we can’t think what to do!’ he cried. ‘That’s the point. The nits have got right into our brains and they’re changing the way we’re thinking.’

  Emily freaked completely. ‘Get them out, get them out!’ she shrieked. ‘I can’t stand it!’

  ‘Sshh!’ commanded Slacker. ‘Someone will hear you and come and see what’s going on.’

  Class Six wavered.

  ‘Is it murder, do you think, making your teacher disappear into thin air?’ asked Anil.

  ‘Well, even if it is, it wasn’t me!’ said Serise. ‘I didn’t touch her!’

  ‘It was all of us,’ said Winsome, very worried. ‘I wonder if it’s a crime to turn someone into a leopard?’

  ‘But Rodney might be something else by the time the police get here,’ said Slacker, hopefully. ‘He might be something really friendly and nice, like a… hamster.’

  Serise snorted.

  ‘There is no way Rodney could possibly end up being anything at all like a hamster,’ she said. ‘A ten-ton gorilla, possibly, but—’

  ‘Don’t even think about it!’ said Anil, shuddering. Jack suddenly sat down.

  ‘I hate to mention this,’ he said, ‘but talking of gorillas, I’ve got this terrible craving for bananas. And my armpits are really itchy, as well. And—’ He squinted down inside his shirt. ‘Yes, I thought so. I’ve got black hair sprouting out all over my chest.’

  Everyone shuffled away from Jack, remembered about Rodney, and shuffled back again.

  ‘It might not mean I’m going to be a gorilla, though,’ said Jack, thoughtfully. ‘I might just be turning into a chimpanzee. I wouldn’t mind that so much.’

  ‘But what should we do?’ asked Serise. ‘Do we call for help and get taken to prison for murdering our teacher, or do we let one of us be eaten by a leopard?’

  ‘Bags not me to be eaten,’ said Anil, quickly. ‘I’m too bony. Rodney might eat me and still be hungry. It’d be much better to let him eat someone fatter. Hey,’ he went on, brightening, ‘we could say he ate Miss Broom, too!’

  ‘Good thinking,’ said Serise, who was as skinny as a broomstick herself.

  Slacker Punchkin began shaking his head. ‘Well, I think that’s a totally rubbish—’ Then he twitched, and his antennae started to flash alternate red and green.

  Slacker put a meaty hand up to one of them. ‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘I think I’m getting a new radio station.’

  There was a blood-curdling snarl behind them and everyone leapt several centimetres into the air. Rodney was on all fours, now. He seemed to have grown lots of new sharp teeth. A line of glistening spit was hanging down to the floor from one of them.

  Slacker was pushing his front teeth into his gums one by one.

  ‘I can hear wailing,’ he reported.

  ‘You’re picking up my brain waves,’ quavered Emily, who was as pale and shivery as a blancmange in an earthquake.

  ‘Or mine,’ admitted Winsome. ‘I keep trying to think what to do, but my head’s just full of wailing.’

  Class Six looked at each other.

  ‘Even Rodney looks as if he can hear it,’ said Anil, because Rodney was batting at his ear with a hand which was halfway to being a paw.

  Slacker frowned. He was screwing up his face as if he was listening really carefully.

  ‘Everyone shut up a minute,’ he said. ‘I think I nearly got it in tune just then. I think… Hang on!’ He switched to twisting his chin, and began to look more confident.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘It’s on FM, not digital. It’s someone saying something.’

  Jack began to twist his chin, too. ‘You’re right. It’s a voice, a long way away. I think it’s saying…’

  ‘What?’ said everyone. ‘What’s it saying?’

  Jack looked round at them all.

  ‘Ball the chits,’ he said.

  Serise rolled her eyes.

  ‘Oh you idiot!’ she said. ‘You moron! You utter and complete cretin! Just what is ball the chits supposed to mean?’

  ‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘I suppose we have to find the…er…chits, and then, er…’

  ‘Give me strength!’ said Serise, despairingly.

  ‘Where’s my dictionary?’ asked Winsome. She got it from her drawer and flicked urgently through the pages. ‘Chit… chit… no, it’s not here. It goes straight from chisel to chivalry.’

  Slacker put his hand thoughtfully to his chin—and then suddenly stood up straight.

  ‘That’s it!’ he said. ‘I’ve just accidentally tuned the station in properly. Jack heard it wrong. That wasn’t ball the chits we picked up on our antennae, that was ball the NITS!’

  ‘Ball the nits!’ proclaimed Jack. ‘Hurray! We’ve got it! Er…how can anyone ball a nit?’

  Rodney was almost completely a leopard now. He was crouching on the floor by Miss Broom’s desk, warm and velvet-furred and dangerous. Only his glowing antennae, and the fact that he was wearing trousers and an orange sweatshirt, gave away the fact that he was not a real leopard.

  Slacker put his hand up to his chin again.

  ‘I can still hear it,’ he said. ‘Ball the nits. Again and again. At least, I think…’

  Rodney’s eyes were glowing like the fires at the centre of the earth.

  He stretched out a long arm, and his muscles moved smoothly under his beautiful fur. Each heavy paw looked as if it could knock someone’s head off.

  Class Six had put all the tables between them and Rodney, but it was no use. Rodney crouched for a moment, with only the twitching of the black tips of his ears to show that he had not been turned to stone—and then he sprang.

  They all tried to get out of the way, but there were twenty-nine of them and only a small space behind the tables. The ones at the back fell over chair legs, and the rest fell over them.

  The leopard would have landed in the middle of the whole struggling panicking mass of children if it hadn’t been for his trousers. Rodney’s waistband got caught up round a table leg and he ended up crashing down with a great snarling and cracking of table tops and fluttering of pieces of paper.

  Nearly everyone was too busy trying to disentangle their arms and legs from everybody else’s to think about anything but GETTING AWAY FROM THE LEOPARD, but Slacker had bumped his chin on Anil’s head and he was almost too dazed to move.
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  ‘Ball the chits,’ he muttered, blearily. ‘Ball the nits…’

  He suddenly sat up straight. And then he said ‘Nits!’ in a sharp, loud voice.

  Then he said it again, even louder. ‘Nits!’

  ‘Oh flip, now Slacker’s gone bonkers,’ said Anil, crawling under one of the least smashed of the tables. ‘What’s he keep calling out nits for?’

  Winsome frowned.

  ‘Calling…’ she began, and then her eyes flashed with realisation. ‘That’s what it was. Not ball the nits, it was call the nits!’ She turned to the rest of the class. ‘Quick!’ she shouted. ‘It’s our only chance. Call the nits!’

  Class Six didn’t waste any time arguing. There was a big leopard loose in the classroom, and it had nearly managed to kick its way out of its trousers.

  ‘Nits!’ they called.

  ‘NITS!!’ they bellowed.

  ‘NITS!!!’

  Jack felt it first—a sharp tickle behind his ear. Then Winsome’s elbow twitched sharply for no reason at all. Serise’s foot lifted itself up and began waggling about as if she were trying to kick her shoe off.

  Suddenly all the class were twitching and shivering as strange wiggly feelings ran through them from their toes to their belly buttons and right up to the ends of their eyelashes.

  The Rodney-leopard gave a great angry snarl, but then there was a crack! as if the floor had split in two, and a brilliant flash which meant that all anyone could see for several seconds were floaty orange blobs.

  When the blobs faded, Class Six saw that a big-bosomed figure with sandy hair had appeared at the front of the classroom.

  Miss Broom looked round the classroom at the heap of bewildered children, and all the wrecked tables and chairs.

  ‘Good gracious,’ she said. ‘Great moonbeams above.’

  And she put her hands behind her ears and flipped them three times.

  At once all the splinters and odd pieces of wood from the tables and chairs jumped about, did various somersaults, and slotted themselves neatly back together again. Anil had to duck pretty sharply to avoid being bashed on the ear by a chair back, but in less than a minute Class Six found themselves somewhere that looked like a classroom again, and not like the scene of an earthquake with a bit of car-crash thrown in.

  ‘And now,’ said Miss Broom, turning to Class Six, ‘what about all of you?’

  And Class Six, terrified, knew that any moment now a real live genuine witch was going to find out…

  ‘Great unicycling unicorns!’ said Miss Broom, as a snarl alerted her to the fact that there was a half-boy half-leopard crouching on the floor. ‘I know that vacant look and that slack jaw. Why, it’s Rodney, isn’t it?’

  No one answered. Miss Broom cast a sharp glance round the room.

  ‘Yes, it’s Rodney turned into a leopard,’ Miss Broom went on. ‘How odd. And inconvenient. And dangerous.’

  She glanced round again, and everyone hurriedly looked away, trying to make themselves invisible again.

  It didn’t work, of course. Class Six had been getting less invisible ever since the day they were born, and now, adorned with fluorescent antennae, fur and wobbly trunks, they would have stood out at a Science Fiction convention.

  ‘Great icicles of Snark,’ said Miss Broom. ‘How utterly terrible. I’d no idea what a simple nit infestation could do to human children. I mean, your symptoms are bad enough, but those witch-nits have set up such nasty brain-waves in your poor human heads that they actually sent me most of the way to Timbuktu. You’ve no idea what a shock it was for me to find myself in the Sahara desert. I’m not sure the camels will ever get over the surprise.’

  Miss Broom looked round at them all again.

  ‘This is highly dangerous,’ she said.

  ‘Yes!’ said Emily. ‘Rodney wants to eat us!’

  ‘I can see that,’ said Miss Broom. ‘But that’s not the worst of it. Now, all of you, listen to me. A witch-nit infestation obviously does all sorts of strange things to humans.’

  ‘It gives you green toes,’ said Anil.

  ‘And purple fluff in your belly button,’ said Slacker Punchkin.

  ‘And even worse, they seem to make your veins clog up so in the end they will stop working altogether,’ finished up Miss Broom, sadly.

  Everyone gasped.

  ‘But that would kill us!’ said Winsome, aghast.

  ‘They are nits of doom!’ said Anil.

  ‘I don’t want to die,’ Emily said, very quickly. ‘I don’t want to die! I want to grow up and wear high heels and worry if my handbag’s the right shape!’

  ‘Handbags?’ echoed Serise, outraged. ‘Blow handbags! This is just so unfair. This means I’ll never get to start a weapons factory or become president of the universe.’

  Winsome nodded sadly.

  ‘Or be a doctor,’ she said.

  ‘Or drive a car!’

  ‘Or be a model!’

  ‘Or have my own horse!’

  ‘Or a restaurant!’

  ‘Or a huge train lay-out!’

  Miss Broom shook her head sorrowfully.

  ‘I suppose I must have left the cupboard door unlocked,’ she said. ‘And someone tried my hat on. That must have been Rodney, mustn’t it, as he’s the most changed.’

  Jack spoke up. ‘Will we all turn into animals first?’

  ‘My dear Class Six,’ said Miss Broom. ‘Turn into animals? Die all over the place? Great turnips of Tresco, I hope not! But you must all be very brave and clever. The really hugely important thing is that you mustn’t scratch. You see, all the nits have come out of your pores, now you’ve called them, and they’re sitting on your skin. But if you scratch or move suddenly you’ll frighten them and they’ll go back in and refuse to come out again. So don’t scratch. All right?’

  At once Class Six’s skins begin to shiver and itch.

  And itch and itch and itch.

  Class Six clenched their fists and screwed up their faces and tried as hard as they could not to scratch, even though they had little tickles and prickles and creepy feelings as if spiders were running about all over them.

  ‘I’ve just got to scratch,’ said Jack desperately.

  ‘Don’t!’ said Winsome.

  ‘I must!’ said Anil. ‘I feel as if I’ve got earwigs in my ears.’

  ‘Don’t!’ said Winsome.

  ‘It’s no good,’ gasped Serise. ‘We’re all going to die!’

  ‘I can’t stand it!’ squeaked Emily. ‘I’ve got to scratch, I’ve got to—’

  ‘Great bananas of Bongo!’ exclaimed Miss Broom. ‘My dear Class Six, what am I?’

  Class Six blinked at her.

  ‘Winsome,’ Miss Broom said. ‘You tell them. What am I?’

  Winsome frowned with concentration, holding her hands together to stop herself scratching. ‘You’re a…a…a…ditch, Miss Broom.’

  Miss Broom laughed a strange mad laugh that raised the fur on the back of all their necks.

  ‘Nearly right,’ she said. ‘I’m a witch. That’s what I am, a witch, a witch, a WITCH! That means, amongst other things, that I’m the best teacher in the world. I can take you down to the centre of the earth to see the continents floating along on their oceans of molten rock. I can take you up in an invisible balloon to watch the comets screaming through the sky. I can show you the secrets of the gnome-finch, the way you make ear wax, and how the hippo cleans its teeth.’

  Anil sighed and sat down on his hands.

  ‘That all sounds so brilliant,’ he said longingly. ‘I wish…I do wish I wasn’t going to die. I’d love to learn all that stuff.’

  ‘You haven’t got time just to tell us about the ear wax, have you?’ asked Winsome wistfully.

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ said Miss Broom. ‘Because this is really much too serious. In fact, I think you had all better sit at your tables.’

  Numbly, Class Six did as they were told.

  ‘Now,’ said Miss Broom sweetly.

  And s
he began to dance.

  It was an old-fashioned sort of dance. It looked the sort of thing a cannibal might do round a cauldron; or perhaps like the dance a bear might do who was celebrating finding an enormous hive full of honey.

  Class Six watched her, and even though Miss Broom looked really funny they didn’t feel like laughing at all.

  ‘Look!’ shouted Serise.

  There was a thing like a tiny white rugby ball flying through the air towards the front of the classroom.

  ‘There’s another one!’ cried Slacker.

  They were everywhere now, a whole blizzard of tiny white capsules, streaming through the air and heading for…

  Miss Broom shivered happily and patted gently at her springy sandy hair.

  ‘Lovely,’ she murmured, as Class Six gaped in horror. ‘Beautiful. There’s nothing like a community of nice active witch-nits charging round one’s veins to perk up one’s magic. But only if one is a witch, it seems. Otherwise I’m afraid these nits really are agents of doom.’

  There was a kerfuffle at the front of the classroom and Rodney’s head and pink bare shoulders popped up behind Miss Broom’s desk. He gazed round at everyone, screamed, and ducked down again.

  Slacker put up a huge hand to feel for his antennae. They weren’t there.

  ‘I can’t pick up Foodie FM any more,’ he said. ‘Blow it! There was going to be a recipe for blackberry and ginger crumble on the half hour.’

  ‘My arms have got shorter,’ whispered Jack, as if he could hardly believe it.

  ‘And my trunk,’ said someone.

  ‘And my chest isn’t hairy any more.’

  ‘But of course,’ said Miss Broom. ‘Well, I couldn’t let my whole class drop dead, could I? People would have noticed. Your parents might have been upset. Complained, even. Especially if you’d all turned into leopards first.’

  ‘So do you mean…we’re cured?’ asked Winsome, hardly able to believe it.

  ‘Of course!’ said Miss Broom. ‘Well, you’re back to normal, anyway. Yes, just as you were before, except for being a little older and possibly just a tiny bit wiser. And as for the nits, snacking on your odd non-witchy brainwaves has perked them up no end. Yes, I can feel them fizzing away inside my brain like sherbet.’