Locked In (3 page)

‘And then we arrive back where we started – except not,' said Jasper.

He heard the faint whispering again. ‘And what's with that whispering?' he asked Saffy.

She looked at him strangely. ‘I can't hear any whispering,' she said.

A group of older kids strode in formation towards the plane. They looked as if they had muscles growing on top of muscles. They were so huge they could have stepped out of a comic book. They wore black camouflage suits with heavy black boots. Every one of them had black hair, cut short and slicked back. They were definitely not the kind of kids you would mess with. Jasper wondered how long it'd be before he ended up in a fight – and probably
lost
a fight – with one of them.

‘Ah,' said Saffy, ‘the welcoming party.'

The Prefects

The older kids herded the new arrivals through the snowy field towards the old mansion.

Jasper felt uneasy not knowing where he was. He wondered if he could somehow get his bearings from the stars at night, but with all the snowy cloud cover, he didn't think he would have much luck. And then there was the small fact that he didn't know much about stars.

‘How are we supposed to nick off from school if we have no idea where to nick off to?' he mumbled.

Saffy smirked. ‘A school hasn't beaten me yet,' she replied smugly. ‘Kids from my old school called me Houdini.'

Jasper noticed Saffy carefully surveying their surroundings. He remembered how she'd looked at the map at the other Monstrum House campus, and wondered if she was thinking of an escape plan.
He
certainly was. He'd taken a mental note of the forest, potential points of weakness and details that might prove useful.

Saffy nodded confidently. ‘Give me a week, and I'll be outta here.'

‘Quiet!' one of the older kids ordered. Jasper and Saffy fell silent. Jasper gave the boy a mock salute behind his back, making Saffy snort back a laugh.

The boy turned and glared at her, and Saffy faked a cough. ‘Dry throat,' she said.

The boy sneered and spoke softly into a two-way radio, before walking on.

They entered the mansion through the large wooden doors, just as they had at the first Monstrum House. Their footsteps echoed along the same cold stone floor. The marble staircase was the same too, right down to the tattered rug that ran the length of the stairs. But the paintings were different. Instead of stern-looking generals staring down at them, the frames were full of shadowy battle scenes.

Underneath the paintings stood a line of statues of children, all of them caught with shocked expressions on their faces. A marble plaque above them said:

LEST WE FORGET.

Cheery
, Jasper thought,
and seriously weird
.

He peered down a corridor and saw a few older kids walking between classes. They wore hoodies and tracksuit pants like the new kids, but their hoodies were red and blue instead of brown. They looked friendly enough, unlike the kids that were marching them along.

‘Do you reckon this lot are prefects or something?' Saffy whispered to Jasper, nodding towards their guides.

‘Must be, but they look more like relations of the Incredible Hulk,' Jasper whispered back. He imagined the prefects' skin turning green and their muscles ripping through their clothes. His fingers were itching to draw them. He thought of his room at home, the walls covered with comic strips he had drawn. Then he remembered he didn't have his backpack with his sketchbook in it anymore. They'd been told to leave all their possessions on the plane.

‘No personal possessions allowed,' a passing teacher commented. Jasper wondered if he had spoken out loud.

‘What?' Saffy asked, outraged. ‘That is so bogus. I've got a brand-new kickboxing mag in my backpack. It cost fifteen bucks!'

The teacher ignored her and kept walking.

The new students were led into the middle of a large, empty hall. An enormous school emblem hung at one end, and Jasper noticed for the first time that it had a big net in the middle.
No wonder I feel trapped,
he thought.

4

A tall, thin woman in a grey suit walked up and down the row of new students. Her hair was the brightest white Jasper had ever seen, and stuck out from her head in a crazy mohawk. Her face was sharp and angular, and looked hard enough to bounce rocks off.

The name tag pinned to her chest said ‘Stenka'. She didn't look like someone you'd want to argue with.

She marched between the students, handing out bright green smocks. Each smock had a student's surname embroidered on the front and back in gold letters. Even though they'd only just arrived, Stenka seemed to know exactly which smock belonged to which student.

Stenka

‘The smocks are to be worn for your first week,' she said icily.

A groan went up around Jasper. ‘Is she
serious?'
a girl behind him moaned.

Jasper wondered what the purpose of the smocks was. None of the other kids he'd seen in the school were wearing them.

Saffy sighed as she checked out her smock, but she didn't look particularly worried.

‘The smocks are to enable the prefects and other students to learn your names,' Stenka said, as if in answer to Jasper's thoughts. ‘We are a very ...' Stenka paused to think of the right words ‘...
close
community here at Monstrum House,' she smiled. It was not a nice smile.

‘Swap?' Saffy whispered to Jasper as the rest of the new students pulled their smocks on over their hoodies. She was holding her smock out towards him, a grin spread across her face. Jasper grabbed it and pulled it on, trying not to laugh out loud.

A clip-clopping echoed around the walls, and an old man on a grey horse trotted into the hall. He wore a bright purple cape and a plumed helmet, and he held a covered cage of some sort.

‘I would like to introduce you to Principal Von Strasser,' Stenka said, smiling even more widely.

Jasper had to hold back a chuckle. The guy was ancient and looked completely dotty.
Did she say principal?
Jasper couldn't believe it. He was like something out of a dodgy medieval movie.

Principal Von Strasser

‘Welcome to Monstrum House,' Principal Von Strasser announced in a gravelly voice.

The prefects applauded loudly, and glared at the new students until they joined in.

‘You may have noticed that this is no ordinary school. Here you will learn things you never thought possible,' Principal Von Strasser proclaimed, as he pranced up and down the the rows of students on his horse. ‘You will learn the most important survival skills, and you will be expected to
use
them.'

Jasper wondered if survival skills included dressing up like a loon and riding around on a horse.

The principal paused and glanced at the prefects. ‘Thank you for your help, prefects, but I believe you have somewhere to be?'

There was a moment of confusion before the prefects realised they were no longer required. The head prefect gave an order to the rest, and they nodded at Von Strasser before jogging out of the hall.

Von Strasser peered down at the new students from his horse. ‘At Monstrum House,' he rasped, ‘you will not be expected to learn trivial, unimportant things like English, geography and maths. Oh no ...'

Jasper glanced at Saffy. ‘Now we're talking,' she whispered.

‘At Monstrum House,' Von Strasser continued, ‘you will be taught how to hunt.
Monsters
.'

A stunned silence met his announcement. Surely they had misheard him.

He's completely bonkers,
Jasper thought.

‘You might think monsters aren't real,' Principal Von Strasser addressed the silenced room. ‘Your parents probably
told
you that monsters aren't real. But they
are
real. And you
know
they are real.' He fingered the cage held in his hand.

There was a nervous twitter of laughter around the room. Everyone had spent their whole lives being told not to believe in monsters, and here was a crazy, wrinkled old man telling them that monsters actually existed.

‘Strange things happen every day,' Von Strasser continued as he clip-clopped along the row of students. ‘Curious disappearances, random attacks. These,' he said, ‘are the work of monsters.' Any quiet sniggers in the room had now died. ‘But not all monsters are violent. Some prefer simply to frighten people. That is what they are doing in your bedroom at night, by the way.'

This is crazy,
thought Jasper. But he felt his guts twisting into an uncertain knot.

Von Strasser's horse came to a halt right in front of him. The horse looked Jasper dead in the eye and snorted. Von Strasser peered at Jasper from underneath his feathered helmet.

‘Aahh, Mr McPhee. Glad to see you finally made it,' the old man whispered with a conspiratorial wink. ‘Although it appears that you have mixed up your smock with that of Ms Dominguez,' he said, flicking his eyes towards Saffy. ‘And just so you know, it is much harder to stuff a banana skin in a horse's tailpipe than a car's.'

Jasper felt his jaw drop open slightly.

The principal paused. ‘The smocks,' he reminded them.

Jasper and Saffy quickly swapped their smocks over. ‘I don't know how that could have happened,' Jasper mumbled.

‘I'm sure,' Von Strasser replied, just the hint of a smile playing at the corner of his mouth.

The horse snorted again, stomping its foot impatiently before clopping away.

Von Strasser surveyed the new students. ‘This school has a long history as one the best monster-hunting schools in the world,' he boomed. ‘We have produced some of the top monster-hunters, and our Hunts are highly successful. But monster numbers are growing. They are everywhere. Indeed, each of you has already encountered a monster, even if you didn't know what it was at the time.'

‘After all,' Von Strasser continued, ‘if monsters aren't real, then why does the door to your wardrobe always hang open just a little bit, when you know you closed it before turning off the light?'