It didn’t take Stanley long to guess what his teacher was cross about. Mr. Baldengrumpy was obsessed with walking properly in lines. He made the class practice fire drills three times a week. Three times a week he marched them up and down the halls, teaching them to be quiet by yelling at them. He said they had to learn to exit the building in a slow and orderly manner in case there was ever a real fire. If there was ever a real fire, he wanted to be sure his class could exit the slowest.
One of Mr. Baldengrumpy’s rules was that they had to walk up the stairs on the left, down on the right. Stanley didn’t mean to be a troublemaker, but he was always forgetting.
“Well, you can just march back down there and come up again on the right side,” Mr. Baldengrumpy barked.
“Er, but I thought you said we were supposed to come up on the left?” Stanley meekly replied.
“Don’t get smart with me, young man!” Mr. Baldengrumpy fumed.
So Stanley trudged all the way back down the stairs and came up again on the right side, which is to say, the left.
In class, Stanley was in trouble again before he could even take his book out for the first lesson. He was just minding his own business while the rest of the class copied out some spelling words when for no reason at all Felicity Lickspittle piped up from the desk in front of him, “Mr. Baldengrumpy, Stanley has a toy in his desk.”
Mr. Baldengrumpy stopped writing on the chalkboard and glared down at Stanley, whose first reflex was naturally to shove Zombiekins deeper into his desk. But that only made his teacher more cross.
Stanley handed Zombiekins over and Mr. Baldengrumpy set it on a table at the front with a sniff of disgust.
“Now don’t interrupt my lesson again, young man,” he warned.
Stanley wanted to point out that he wasn’t the one who interrupted in the first place—that actually he had done his best to cover things up so they could all carry on with the lesson like nothing happened. But something about the look on Mr. Baldengrumpy’s face told him there was no point splitting hairs.
As soon as Mr. Baldengrumpy turned back to the chalkboard, Felicity looked around and stuck her tongue out at Stanley.
9
IT WAS A LITTLE WHILE LATER THAT STANLEY’S school day really took a turn for the worse.
The trouble started halfway through first period, when Mr. Baldengrumpy brought out a projector. The class cheered. They were going to watch a movie!
Mr. Baldengrumpy explained he had a science film for them called Our Neighbor, the Moon.
The class groaned. Did he have to ruin everything by making it so “educational”?
But Mr. Baldengrumpy just started the film anyway and sat down at his desk to pretend to mark homework. Within minutes he had dozed off behind a stack of books and the whole class was educated half out of their minds.
“If I was any more educated, I’d be in a coma,” grumbled Fiona. “Why do we have to watch this?”
“This is the lamest space movie ever,” griped Kathleen. “When are they gonna blow something up with lasers?”
“Shhhh!!!” hissed Felicity, hunched over a notebook taking color-coded notes.
Stanley, meanwhile, was doing his best to pay attention to the movie because he didn’t want to get in any more trouble with his teacher.
So nobody noticed when the small stuffy on the edge of the front desk, illuminated by an image of the full moon, twitched one floppy bunny ear and shivered like someone stirring from sleep. . . .
Slowly, one of its eyes blinked open, gazing straight ahead with a cold blank stare . . . .
Stanley was finding it hard to concentrate on the film. Normally he loved space movies, but this one was seriously lacking in the freaky-aliens-with-deathrays department. It was just a lot of boring moon footage with a voice droning out such fascinating facts as how many paper cups you would have to stack one on top of the other to reach the moon.
Stanley wondered how they figured that out. He imagined a team of space scientists stacking paper cups day after day. They would’ve needed really tall ladders.
Suddenly, though, a shriek from the desk in front of him shattered his concentration.
“Mr. Baldengrumpy!” Felicity wailed. “Stanley’s doll just bit me!”
10
MR. BALDENGRUMPY STOPPED THE MOVIE. SOMEbody flicked on the lights.
Zombiekins was sitting motionless on the edge of the front desk. Just a harmless stuffy, albeit with a somewhat macabre, half-dead appearance. But Felicity shrank from it in terror, holding her math book in front of her like a shield.
“I-it bit me right here,” she claimed, pointing to a spot on the back of her wrist.
There wasn’t a mark, as far as Stanley could see, but naturally Mr. Baldengrumpy believed her anyway.