Boy Meets Ghoul Read online

  ‘That’s the one.’ Dad nodded, turning off his Best of Queen CD. ‘Nothing but the best for the feet of the future.’

  It really did look like it had fallen from outer space. A giant silver cosmic needle stuck right in the middle of an ordinary brick city. It must have had a hundred floors, each with its own shimmering window looking down at us.

  We’d never stayed anywhere bigger than a Travelodge before.

  It was the kind of place you’d put on tourist posters. A Landmark hotel. The kind of place that . . .

  I reached over and clutched at Kayla’s shoulder.

  ‘Look at it! It’s the kind of place you’d go for a dream holiday.’

  Kayla didn’t reply. I assumed she was basking in the reflected silvery glory of us finally getting to live our best lives, but when I glanced across, she wasn’t even looking in the right direction.

  Instead, she was staring, transfixed, at the glossy black side of the bus beside us.

  ‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ she said, finally, as Mum hauled Jude out of the car to shake him down for crumbs and squashed toffees.

  ‘We are getting out,’ I said. ‘Obviously. Did you think we were just going to look at the giant, amazing alien hotel across the road and then sleep on the back seat of the car?’

  I had a moment’s panic that Dad might yank a tent out of the boot and announce that car-park camping was actually the plan. But he and Mum were starting to unpack our bags and get Jude into his wheelchair. This was really about to be real.

  Kayla was shaking, and it didn’t seem to be from excitement. ‘No, Dylan – we’ve got to get out of here. Right. Now.’

  She started grabbing her things frantically, piling magazines into her bag and throwing the Travel Scrabble board in on top so that SKITTLES (twelve points) and PUSTULES (triple-word score) scattered everywhere. Then she climbed straight into my lap and tugged on the handle of the door on my side.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I spluttered. ‘You can’t just run off into the wilds of Manchester. You don’t know what’s out there.’

  Neither did I, except for two football clubs and some wild, shouty bands my dad liked. But that still didn’t mean Kayla should be in the middle of it on her own.

  ‘I do know what’s out there, Dylan.’ Kayla got one leg out of the car and tried to hop away while I held her back by the other ankle. She’d pulled her jacket up over her head like a paparazzi-shy celebrity. ‘And I can’t let them see me like this. I’m not ready.’

  She got down on to her knees and started crawling alongside the car with her bag clutched to her stomach like a stealthy upside-down tortoise. I slowly climbed out to see what she’d been looking at. It was just a bus. The giant silver space hotel probably had a lot of coach trips coming through.

  But, as I straightened up, I realized how wrong I was. It wasn’t just a bus at all. It had a logo on its side, and it didn’t look like the kind of thing Sunny Dayz Coach Holidays would think of as on-brand.

  It was a skull.

  A huge, grinning skull covering half of the upper deck. Around it hung a shower of glittering raindrops, picked out in what looked like actual crystals. Along the side, they clustered together to form words.

  ‘Now do you see?’ Kayla hissed from her hiding place.

  I did. I couldn’t exactly help seeing, what with it being spelled out in sparkly letters six feet above my head. Feet of the Future might have been the reason Dad had brought me to Manchester this week, but Kayla hadn’t come along to get her trainers dirty.

  In fact, she’d been trying to figure out how to get to Manchester this particular week for months. My dad’s secret football-camp plans had come at just the right time for her – she’d signed up for Feet of the Future’s associated cheer squad immediately and talked my parents into bringing her along with us.

  But it wasn’t really about cheerleading at all. The real reason Kayla wanted to come was that the Deathsplash Nightmares were playing a concert at Old Trafford on the last day of the camp.

  Tickets had sold out in seconds. After all, they only played one UK date each year. But Kayla wasn’t going to let a little thing like tickets stop her. She’d come to Manchester to find a way to see her favourite band.

  And it looked like she’d found one.

  She just clearly hadn’t expected to be parked right next to them when she had a stray toffee squished into her baggy car clothes, and she hadn’t even bothered to do her hair.

  ‘Look, Kayla!’ Mum announced, oblivious to the series of panic attacks my best friend was having on the car park tarmac. ‘Aren’t they that pop group you like?’

  Kayla made a small strangled noise and started to drag herself away across the ground. I could tell she wasn’t herself, because if she had been, she’d have told Mum that they weren’t a pop group, they were the best metal band in the world. And that she didn’t like them – her fandom was the truest, purest form of devotion humans were capable of. And that yes – obviously – it was them. Just in case anyone wasn’t clued in by the skull and water droplets, they’d helpfully spelled it out in metrehigh letters, which Mum sounded out slowly, as if she were reading a foreign language: ‘THE DEATHSPLASH NIGHTMARES’.

  FOUR

  The Nightmares weren’t actually on the bus, obviously. Even Kayla had to admit that the world’s greatest metal band probably weren’t going to be spending their time prepping for the big Ghoulish Games gig by hanging out in the local car park.

  They were staying in our hotel, though.

  As we got closer to the silver space needle – Kayla swaying slightly on still-shaky limbs – we started to notice a crowd around the entrance to the lobby. It was made up of teenagers in Deathsplash T-shirts, clustered blackly together like a low-hanging storm cloud. We watched while a young family tried to get out of the lobby doors, pushing through the tangle of pale, lanky limbs. Some of the more hardcore fans peered suspiciously into their pram, just in case Rick Deathsplash was hiding in there as part of a clever undercover ruse, sucking on a dummy and trying to look discrete.

  ‘Do you think they’re all here for the contest?’ Kayla asked, sounding slightly overwhelmed.

  The Ghoulish Games concert itself wasn’t until Halloween, in five days’ time. But Kayla had found out about a competition the local radio station was running.

  Calling on fans to show who was the ‘coolest ghoul’, it was going to involve a series of challenges, ending in a live final to find the biggest Deathsplash superfan. The winner would get two VIP tickets to Old Trafford for the concert: it was the only way Kayla would have a chance to go. The part of the prize she was most excited about involved getting to meet the band afterwards. She was hoping to stand close enough to be flicked with some of Rick’s hair sweat.

  If her dad had been here, he wouldn’t have let her enter the contest. She’d been trying to make him a Deathsplash fan too, but repeated exposure to songs like ‘Graveyard Gyrations’ and ‘Werewolf in Wonderland’ had only left him convinced that the Deathsplash Nightmares were some undercover cult, trying to lure in innocent teenagers through loud noises and occasionally rhyming lyrics. But Kayla’s dad was at home with a crippling case of man-flu, and my parents were way more easily distracted. We’d thought we just might be able to do it.

  Kayla was right, though. Judging by the fans stalking the hotel, there was going to be a lot of competition.

  ‘Look on the bright side,’ I suggested, as we elbowed our way through the superfans and into the lobby. ‘We’re in the same hotel as Deathsplash now. If you don’t win those tickets, at least you might get up close and personal with them over the breakfast buffet.’

  ‘Rock stars don’t do buffets,’ Kayla countered. ‘They have personal chefs to cook them tailored macrobiotic meals. I read that Jenna Deathsplash will only eat from plates containing something hot, something sweet, something crunchy and something blue.’

  ‘I thought that was the list of what brides wear to their weddings,’ I s
aid, as she let out an exasperated sigh. ‘All right, maybe not something crunchy. Anyway, they can’t all be here for the concert. Some of them are probably football fans too.’

  She sighed mournfully. ‘I don’t think so, Dylan. Why would you think that?’

  I nudged Kayla until she looked in the same direction I was.

  ‘I just have a hunch.’ I grinned. ‘A sneaking suspicion. I think I might be some kind of psychic, actually.’ I nodded my head towards the foyer.

  There, standing in front of the check-in desk, was a couple about my parents’ age. Saying they looked like Manchester United fans was like saying that water was a little bit wet. They were both wearing red, black and gold scarves that read MANCHESTER FOREVER, and jackets with the United crest embroidered on to the back. The man had a cap with the same logo and a red woolly wig sewn under it. A huge flag trailed from one of their bags.

  ‘And there isn’t even a match on today,’ I whispered to Kayla. ‘This must be their casual, everyday look.’

  Turning to point them out to my parents, I saw Dad standing frozen behind Jude’s chair. He already had the pair fixed with a glare hard enough to punch a hole in concrete. I groaned, because I knew exactly what he was thinking:

  Challenge accepted.

  When it came to football, Dad considered himself a cut above other, less dedicated, fans. He’d even got me kicked off the school football team by being too enthusiastic on the sidelines (although that was less down to his homemade banners and chants, and more because he’d started picking fights with the ref). At Woking FC matches, he was usually the only person with his face painted in the team’s colours, and he’d run down the side of the pitch with a flag even when they didn’t win. Dad loved a competition.

  I just hoped the poor strangers at the desk were getting out of the hotel today, before Dad could turn them into his unwitting arch nemeses.

  Or maybe they wouldn’t have to.

  As Kayla and I watched, Dad left Mum to look after Jude and the bags and made a mad dash towards the toilets. With any luck, it was a sudden bout of food poisoning – something bad enough to put him off getting into any weird fan wars with complete strangers.

  Mum was rummaging through her bag for the things we needed to check in, when out of the corner of my eye, I noticed someone acting strangely. A tall boy with pale copper curls and his jacket collar pulled up so high it hid most of his face was edging across the hotel lobby to join the football-mad pair at the desk. They had to be his parents. I recognized his hunched-over posture as the same one I adopted when I was out with Dad on match days. A combination of trying to be as inconspicuous as possible and hoping that the ground might be kind enough to open up and swallow you whole. There never seemed to be a sinkhole around when you needed one.

  But I recognized something else too. A few somethings, as it happens. That hair, for one thing: the perfect autumn-leaf combination of orange and gold. Even though his current posture made him look like he was auditioning for the main part in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, I could tell that when he straightened up, he’d be broad-shouldered and athletic.

  With perfect, straight white teeth, and skin that had never heard of acne.

  And a laugh I could pick out from a hundred different crowds.

  All right, some of that wasn’t what I recognized – it was just what I knew.

  Because I knew the boy by the desk. Way, way better than I’d like.

  Kayla was a few seconds behind me, but she spotted him too. ‘Isn’t that –?

  I swallowed down the sudden nervous lump in my throat and nodded. ‘Mm-hmm.’

  ‘What’s he doing here?’ she whispered urgently.

  He was my first big crush. Freddie Alton, sports captain at our school. Freddie of the perfect hair, perfect face, and perfect penalty score. Freddie Alton, who I’d never managed to say a whole word to, despite having known and fancied him since I was twelve. Not that he knew that. Whenever he was around, all the words dried up on my tongue. Trying to get a sentence out was like hunting for a vowel oasis in an endless vocabulary desert.

  You see, I had this old habit of finding it hard to talk to people I had crushes on. I thought meeting Leo had cured it, but this crush was different. This was Freddie.

  Freddie who, I was rapidly figuring out, must also have been booked on to the Feet of the Future week by his own football-mad dad.

  Kayla nudged me. ‘Well, if nothing else, at least you’re not going to have the most embarrassing parent on the sidelines this time.’

  There was that small olive branch of mercy. I thanked every lucky star I could think of that Dad seemed to have moved into the hotel loos permanently, so he couldn’t show me up for once. And that’s when I heard it.

  ‘TWO-FOUR-SIX, YEAH – MY BOYS ARE PLAYING FOR MANCHES-TER!’

  At the front desk, Freddie and his parents looked up, looked at me, and then looked over to where Dad was emerging from the bathrooms in his head-to-toe brand-new look.

  FIVE

  Unbeknown to any of us, Dad had splashed out on a whole new kit for this trip. Gone was his old, so-threadbare-it-was-almost-translucent, 70s strip, to be replaced with a brand-new set in Woking FC’s colours, with the shirt customized to read Kickin’ Kershaw on the back.

  Which was great, because now if anyone wondered whether it was me, Dylan Kershaw, who had the most embarrassing dad in the world, they’d have a handy visual clue.

  And if they had doubts about just how embarrassing Dad was, they’d be able to tell by the way he still thought you could make words ‘cool’ by leaving off the g at the end.

  Kickin’.

  Playin’.

  Stylin’.

  Slowly dyin’ of total mortification.

  I could see Freddie Alton gradually regaining his composure as I lost mine. It was fine to have cringeworthy parents, just so long as they weren’t the worst in the room.

  His parents had come dressed as the window display in the Manchester United tourist shop. My dad had gone one step further. He was wearing two giant foam hands, with which he was doing a triumphant pointy dance to punctuate his chants. One of the hands read DYLAN across the palm. The other read JUDE. He had a massive scarf draped over his shoulders, big enough to hold up and use as a banner. I could just about make out that it said KERSHAW BOYS SCORE FOR GLORY.

  I didn’t know about the other Kershaw boy – Jude was looking pretty delighted by Dad’s attempt at outdoing a cheerleader, but he could barely read, so he couldn’t possibly understand the true horror. Meanwhile, I was feeling about as unglorious as I ever had.

  Dad was eyeballing Freddie Alton’s parents like he was daring them to one-up this.

  Freddie’s parents narrowed their eyes right back.

  I didn’t even want to look at Freddie’s reaction, but somehow his flawless face caught my attention anyway, and I was surprised to see something other than total, mocking humiliation there. It almost looked like he understood.

  Like a cowboy in a Western as the clock ticks round to high noon, Dad sauntered towards the desk.

  The rest of the lobby turned slowly to see how Freddie’s dad would respond to this intrusion on his superfan territory. Women clutched their children closer. The girl behind the desk shivered in fear.

  Freddie’s dad lifted his chin, folded his arms, and got nudged firmly out of the way by Freddie’s mum, who stepped forward to face Dad head-on.

  I knew what the look in her eyes was saying as soon as I saw it: Challenge accepted.

  ‘Dylan, darling, get Kayla’s bags and go and wait by the exit, please. Once we’ve checked in, we can go and find our room in the outbuilding.’

  Mum barrelled into me, on a mission to stand Dad down before tensions escalated and a two-person football riot broke out in the lobby of our gleaming, cosmic hotel. But what she was saying didn’t quite make sense.

  ‘The exit?’ Kayla asked.

  At the same time, I was asking, ‘The outbuilding?’

  ‘Y
es.’ Mum tutted impatiently. ‘Didn’t you see it on the other side of the car park? That’s where Feet of the Future are putting us up. It’s all self-catering, of course – communal bathrooms, that kind of thing. This place just handles the keys. You didn’t think we’d be in the main hotel, did you? The prices must be astronomical. The rooms probably come with their own linen!’

  Mum’s preferred holiday destinations were usually caravan parks, where you paid as few pounds as possible to bring your own food and bedsheets and made your own fun. She’d never understood that I wanted to have fun made for me, just once. Or at least a bed made for me in the morning, using sheets that didn’t have racing cars printed on them and that I hadn’t used since I was five.

  I gave Kayla a mournful look. My dreams of staying in the silver space needle had just fallen to earth with a crash. I was too depressed to even try to croak out a hello to Freddie, though I was sure I saw him look over as his parents ushered him past us, making swiftly for the same doors. His mum was obviously already plotting the outfit upgrades she’d need to outdo Dad.

  Miserably, I trailed over to where Jude and Kayla’s three pink suitcases were waiting. Each case was about as big as my brother’s powerchair.

  ‘We’re staying in the outbuilding,’ I told Jude.

  ‘Outside the building?’ he asked, looking suddenly distraught. ‘But I’ll be cold!’

  ‘We’re staying in a building called an outbuilding,’ Kayla explained, catching up with me.

  She pointed at the glass doors, where we could just see a squat red-brick square sitting huddled on the other side of the car park. It didn’t gleam space-age silver. It didn’t gleam at all. It just sat there, dull and unimpressive, behind the gang of Deathsplash fans with their faces pressed to the lobby windows.

  Kayla sighed. ‘It must be some sort of overflow building for the hotel.’

  ‘Yeah, like a drain overflow,’ I said glumly.

  ‘Don’t be such a wet wipe,’ Kayla clucked. ‘If it’s good enough for Freddie—’