Chapter Twenty-one
Ghoul Games Week

Aside from being the nicest teacher at Scary School, Ms. Fang is also a world-class checkers player. Last summer, she went back home to Transylvania to play in the Vampire Checkers Championship.

She made it all the way to the finals and was matched against five-time checkers champion Count Checkula for the grand prize. By the end, she was down to one piece left against his four kings. In an amazing maneuver, she performed a quadruple jump to win to the game. The problem was, she was moving at super-fast vampire speed, which is so fast that it looks like a blur to human eyes. In her excitement, she knocked the top checker off the last king, and it shot around the room as fast as a bullet.

The vampire crowd ducked out of the way as the flying checker ricocheted off walls and poles. Ms. Fang tried to catch it, but it slipped through her hands and hit her right in the left fang, which popped out of her mouth. Not only did she lose her fang, she lost the game as well, because knocking a checker off the board is an automatic disqualification in vampire checkers.

Ms. Fang was crushed. That’s why she was in such a foul mood the first day of school.

However, she found redemption during the school year when the students in her checkers club went on to win the state championship, led by their captain, Wendy Crumkin. Now they faced the ultimate test in the Ghoul Games, as they would be matched against the number-one ranked checkers team in the world from Bloodington Elementary in Transylvania.

It was May 10, the first day of the Ghoul Games.

The week leading up to this day had been a resounding success by all counts. The students from all the different Scary schools were getting along, making new friends, and learning about the lives of all the different Scary kids from all over the world.

Petunia and Frank made friends with three zombie girls from the School for the Mostly-Dead. Rachael and Raychel found four more Rachels to be friends with from four different schools—Scream Academy, Wolfsbane, Ogre Prep, and Bloodington Elementary.

Everyone was supposed to be practicing for their Ghoul Games events, but they ended up taking time off to participate in all the fun activities going on.

Johnny, Ramon, and Peter went bowling with the three giants they were going to play against in basketball. Lindsey taught pixies how to play hopscotch. Jason and Fred joined a pack of werewolves from Wolfsbane and learned how to howl at the moon.

Charles Nukid and Cindy Chan were joined in class by a group of young dragons from Firecrest. On Saturday afternoon, there was a big water balloon fight at Scary Park, and the young dragons let Cindy and Charles ride them so that they could drop water balloons from the air. Then, Frank N. Stein pulled up in a brand-new truck, and a whole family of freshly made monsters unloaded box after box of freshly made donuts for everyone at the park.

The night before the Ghoul Games, there was a giant slumber party inside Petrified Pavilion. All the kids were put into four-member teams with students from all the different schools. Each team was given a list of items to find on a great scavenger hunt all over the school grounds.

A team composed of Cindy Chan, Pob-Lob the monster, a Scottish dragon named Errrragonne, and a vampire named Sunny collected the first item on the list when they managed to snatch Dr. Dragonbreath’s magical dragon glasses by singing him his favorite song, “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Dr. Dragonbreath was crying so hard, he blew the magical glasses right off his nose and into the hands of Cindy Chan. Then the team jumped onto Errrragonne’s back and flew away before Dr. Dragonbreath could catch them, which was all but impossible without his glasses.

In the end, however, the team that collected the most items was the team of Wendy Crumkin, Count Checkula Jr., Gurk, and a giant kid named Lenny. They were the only team able to bring back a particularly vicious Venus flytrap named Orf from Scary Garden.

While every other team got caught in the jaws of the Venus flytraps and had to be freed, Wendy was the only one who knew the secret of taming them, thanks to her hours of extracurricular reading. She told her team that all they needed to do was make the Venus flytrap laugh and it would be helpless. Luckily, Lenny was an aspiring comedian and he told Orf the Venus flytrap his very best joke. You can actually hear Lenny tell you the joke himself at ScarySchool.com, so I’m not going to spell it out for you here, because I wouldn’t do it justice. It’s all in the delivery.

When Orf started laughing, Gurk yanked him out of the ground and ran toward the pavilion. Count Checkula Jr. was tickling Orf’s roots to make sure he wouldn’t stop laughing and eat one of them.

When the scavenger hunt was over, all the students convened back inside Petrified Pavilion, and each member of the winning team was given a giant shining trophy in the shape of a hyena—the most fearsome scavenger in the animal kingdom.

As Wendy, Count Checkula Jr., Gurk, and Lenny held up their trophy, the hall was filled with a symphony of cheers, roars, grunts, groans, shrieks, howls, hoots, growls, and screeches the likes of which no one had ever heard.

Before everyone went to sleep, a student from each school got to come up to the stage and tell the scariest story he or she or it knew.

It was the most fun week anyone ever had.

As the children slept peacefully that night at the end of the great slumber party, Mr. Wolfbark lurked in the hall of Petrified Pavilion, supervising in coordination with the other teachers.

For a moment, he considered howling at the top of his lungs, just for the joy of giving the children an awful fright right when they were feeling most secure, but then he thought better of it.

Let the human children have a last good night’s sleep, Wolfbark thought to himself. For tomorrow, they shall all be dead.