User:MonkeyStolen234/sandbox/More Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids

More Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids

Author	Jamie Rix
Audio read by	Bill Wallis
Cover artist	Honeycomb Animation
Language	English
Series	Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids
Release number	4
Genre	Children's horror
Publisher	Scholastic UK (Hippo)
Publication date	19 January 2001
Publication place	United Kingdom
Media type	Print (Paperback)
Pages	304
ISBN	9780439998185
Preceded by	Fearsome Tales for Fiendish Kids

More Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids is a 2001 children's horror short-story collection from Scholastic UK by British author Jamie Rix and is the four book in the Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids book series. It was the first book to be written after the Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids cartoon adaptation by ITV, which aired on CITV. It was also the last book in the original book series before it was retooled in 2007 as Grizzly Tales: Cautionary Tales for Lovers of Squeam!, and is the book with the most stories at 20, whereas the first and second had 15, the third had 16, and the rest that would later follow had seven.

Synopsis

Knock Down Ginger

Entomologist Mr Thrips is a pariah in the town of Nimby. He lives in one of the richest private streets (described as a "millionaire's row") next to people who drive Mercedes-Benz, Jeep and Jaguar cars, sharing a home full of several insect species which made his house look unkempt and creepy. Residents despised him for allowing the street to look uneven and nicknamed the house "Bug City Central", so his neighbours, the Pie family, become determined to get rid of him. At a council meeting, Amelia Pie terrifies the audience with her fears of Thrips' behaviour giving Nimby a bad reputation, which is heightened when Colonel Dithering claims that termites can eat houses. As the audience panics over their eaten houses disallowing them to park their cars and have cocktail parties, Amelia boasts that her son will be the person that will successfully scare Thrips out of town.

Ginger Pie and his friend "Mad" Milo had already been bullying Thrips through vandalising his front garden and writing/yelling insults through his letter box. Milo's lisping sister Liza does not understand why the two boys relish in targeting an innocent old man but she is usually ignored, and Milo spitefully reveals Liza's nickname "Lizzie the Lizard" through reverse psychology. Ginger echoes the town's sentiments and calls Thrips ugly, claiming he looks a lot like the insects he shares his house with, to which Liza points out Ginger's pale skin and pale, red hair, and says "you look like Dracula just drank your blood." Ginger spots Thrips gardening and crosses the road to call him an "insect maniac", but he is terrified when Thrips scolds him in a tranquil fury without turning around to look at him. Milo later suggests that Thrips has literal eyes in the back of his head but Ginger adamantly replies that Thrips might be an insect humanoid, adding that they need to get him out of Nimby. Luckily, his mother already endorses the idea so he and Milo decide to make Thrips' stay uncomfortable by playing Knock Down Ginger. The boys calculate the length of time it takes for Thrips to get out of his armchair to answer the front door as ten minutes, and play Knock Down Ginger all day. Then Ginger jumps over the fence into the back garden to destroy Thrips' giant termite mounds but stops when he feels vibrations from the mud. Suddenly, Thrips appears in the kitchen and Ginger rushes back to the front door to take his turn at the doorbell. The door shoots open and Thrips drags Ginger inside.

Thrips threatens Ginger that he will retaliate just as horribly if Ginger refused to stop with his pranks but Ginger is distracted: insects patterned the walls and flew around the room, and he can feel some land all over his body. He agrees to stop and hears the humming vibrations that he heard from the termite mounds. He opens an opposite door to find a levitating chair, assuming that he had walked in on a magic trick but Thrips explains that his termites are eating the wood inside so fast that it is creating a hovering illusion. He snaps his fingers and the chair disintegrates onto the floor. When Ginger leaves, Milo and Liza are outside panicking for his safety. Ginger warns them that Thrips is not impressed with their behaviour but Milo scoffs at Ginger's sudden reluctance, accusing him and Liza of overreacting as he stomps to the door. Ginger pushes him and his sister out of the way and presses the doorbell. 30 minutes later, despite ringing the bell continuously, there was still no response and a bored Ginger walked home. He checks his pockets for the house keys and presses the doorbell, which makes the ground gradually shake to the sound of high whistling. By the time Ginger realised what was happening, Thrips' termites had eaten through his shoes and the rest of his body. Amelia opens the door to see a wide-eyed, statue-like Ginger, who disintegrates into sawdust when she touches him. She slams the front door to grab a telephone and the house collapses around her. On the other side of the road, Thrips' termites sleep peacefully after their enormous dinner.

The Upset Stomach

Ethel Turnip enjoyed eating to the point of it being a hobby. She notices an article in the newspaper about a Yorkshire farm that breeds animal stomachs and demands that her parents get her one for a Christmas present as she stands on the kitchen table. When her parents hesitate, Ethel promises to look after it like a pet and she would use it a "second stomach" for herself; she would even call it "Rover". A smelly, gurgling parcel arrived two weeks later with a stomach as big as a basketball, spraying stomach acid that landed on the tablecloth, making it dissolve smokily. Although Ethel regretted the decision, she was grateful that it did as she wanted at the Christmas dinner, but the Rover the stomach was a needy nuisance that always followed her around the house and woke her up at night, and whenever she took the stomach out for a walk, children would cackle until their clothes fell apart. After leaving the stomach in a kennel overnight, Ethel is forced to take the stomach out to walk again to warm it up (only because her father threatened to never serve her oven chips otherwise), so she attempts to abandon it in a park. Unfortunately for her, a policeman returns the stomach home.

Furious, Ethel wakes up early the next morning and stuffs Rover into six plastic bags. She travels to the countryside by bus to throw Rover into a cow herd, telling her parents that Rover died when she returns home. Rover goes on a vengeful rampage and eats everything in the countryside, and continues eating until it arrives home. Rover grows until the Prime Minister sends the British Army out with tanks but the stomach acid melts them, and was dubbed "The Killer Stomach" on the six o'clock news. The Turnip family meet the giant stomach outside their house and Ethel orders Rover to leave, but the stomach ignores her. Mr Turnip notices the rumbling and goes inside to get indigestion tablets, returning to find Rover rolling away and his daughter missing. Violent bubbling is heard and the stomach explodes across the street, and an undigested Ethel is launched through her bedroom window. She was never greedy again, mostly because she could never enjoy food again—floating in Rover's insides had damaged her sense of smell, making everything she ever eats taste offal.

The Gas Man Cometh

The first noise Stefan Krott ever heard in his life was the telephone that rang in the delivery room and it started an obsession with telephones. His parents bought him a toy telephone but he soon grew bored with it and would take the cordless phone to play with, annoying his parents and the people he dialled. His favourite phone calls were prank calls and frequently did them to emergency services, alerting the police to a bugler and the RSPCA to a pelican crossing the road. When his parents removed his access to telephones, he bought a mobile and continued, pretending to be Michael Caine to dinner ladies and telling a school janitor that an escaped horse was in the gymnasium.

At nine-years-old, Mr Stinky called his mobile, so Stefan used his hygiene comedy routine on him until Stinky hung up, but during another prank call much later, a voice briefly intersected the call and threatened, "Stefan, we've got your number." He finished his prank call and hung up, but the phone rang immediately. It was the threatening voice, calling themselves the Gas Man, offering to sell him helium that could change voices when inhaled. Stefan accepts the offer, excited to finally cheat his way into impersonating the Queen, and skips school the next day to wait for the delivery after his parents went to work. At 12:10pm, two men in suits and sunglasses arrived with a man dressed in a boilersuit and baseball cap holding a gas cylinder—the Gas Man with his two bodyguards. Stefan offers to pay but the Gas Man gives the gas cylinder to him for free and leads the bodyguards out of the house.

Stefan reads the instructions thoroughly and rushes to the phone, using the helium every few minutes and speaking whenever the high-pitched vocals began. Every person he called was completely fooled and his belly hurt from suppressing laughter. When he finishes telling a man that he will be sent to the Tower, he realises that he had floated into space and grabs onto a satelite. His phone rings and the caller snaps, "Game over! You lose!" The phone deactivates.

The Urban Fox

One morning, Lord and Lady Blunderbuss move into a busy council estate with their six horses and many beagles. The next day, they invite themselves inside the house of Mr and Mrs Smith, offering to befriend them. Although they are surprised that the elderly couple have no servants nor know any nearby bear-baiting clubs, it seems to be an ulterior motive to spy around the house, and they discover Mr and Mrs Smith's daughter, Parker, and her pet fox eating breakfast in the kitchen. The Blunderbuss couple declare that they will get rid of the fox for their neighbours (despite Parker and her parents protesting that their fox, Elvis, is an honourary family member) and declare that civilised society has no place for foxes. 30 minutes later, a bugle blares outside and the Smith family discover that the Blunderbuss couple had assembled their fox hunting team. Parker tells her parents not to panic and Elvis prepares to outwit his enemy.

The horses and beagles jump over the back garden fences as if they were hurdles as Elvis takes turns in different gardens disguising himself as garden ornaments, such as a bird bath, a satellite dish, a sunbather, a fishing gnome, a croquet hoop. It tired the hunt to the point of Lord and Lady Blunderbuss agreeing that life in the city was not to their liking, so they gathered their exhausted army with their belongings and moved out. A street party was thrown in Elvis' honour where the neighbours expressed their gratitude to the Urban Fox. Meanwhile, the Blunderbuss couple had fled to Scotland to escape from the police, who had penned them a letter ordering them to pay for property damage.

Spoilsport

The Pinchguts are a mean family. They live in a horrible-looking house that they refused to tend to and the parents are so mean that they named their children Girl and Baby. Baby was the anomaly whereas Girl loved ruining people's happiness by destroying their fantasies: she forcibly shut a ventriloquist's mouth to prove that the dummy was not magical and she revealed Baby's birthday presents before he opened them. One evening, Baby's milk tooth fell out during dinner and he gushed that he was going to get money from The Tooth Fairy. Girl snaps that fairies are not real, but when Baby finds money under his pillow the next morning, Girl insists that it was their parents. Ma and Pa are confused.

In the middle of fighting a bacteria army attempting to climb the toothy castle walls, The Tooth Fairy is played a recording of Girl declaring that fairies are not real by a gum goblin, Head of Intelligence. Excited, she and her team create a plan to avenge the non-believer. At the Pinchguts' home, Baby had not stopped crying so Ma and Pa had locked him in the back garden to sleep off the misery in the dog kennel. Girl was delighted as she settled into bed but woke up to her mouth being clamped open by dental equipment and someone's voice rummaging around her teeth. The voice groaned at Girl's jolting freak-out, claiming that they nearly took the tonsils, and a tooth flew out of Girl's mouth. The Tooth Fairy followed, scolding Girl's skepticism and produces a pneumatic drill, which makes Girl faint. In the morning, Girl had no teeth. Her parents showed no sympathy and made jokes at her expense about dentures, whereas Baby—still in the garden—bounced around, vindicated.

Girl left the house and gave an elderly dog a bone that broke out a tooth, which she left under her pillow to be collected. Despite her team assuming that it was a trap, The Tooth Fairy arrived in Girl's bedroom. Girl grabbed her, armed with a slipper, and demands to be taken to her castle to get her teeth back. The Tooth Fairy explains that Girl's teeth are durable enough for her castle to be repaired but she obeys. The Tooth Fairy's team reluctantly hand back Girl's teeth just as the bacteria army reappear. The leader spots Girl's teeth (now back in her mouth) and his army attack, leaving a brown sludge puddle behind.

Girl's remains were returned to her family and she was buried in a fizzy drink bottle. Ma and Pa were thrilled because they saved money on a coffin and Baby was excited about his next tooth loss. When the Tooth Fairy arrived to collect his next tooth, he told her to send his love to Father Christmas, leprechauns, the Easter Bunny, the stork that delivers babies, and the Yeti; she later did.

Dirty Bertie

Mr and Mrs Barf always laughed at their surname because it sounded like "bath", and because they were the cleanest people around, having three baths a day and basing their married life on the phrase "Cleanliness is next to godliness", hoping that being clean and having a dust-free house will get them into Heaven. Meanwhile, their son, Bertie, was always filthy with food stuck to his clothes. The only time he cared about being clean was when he used his toothbrush to clean the soles of his trainers. When his father asked him to bathe, Bertie refused because it would drown the insects living in his hair, so his parents tried to clean him as he slept, but they were caught by Bertie's homemade booby traps.

Most boys loved being dirty, but Bertie believed they were cowards because they failed to maintain it. When his parents lose their patience, he tells them that he wants a career in this "profession"; an astronaut, he decides, after being pressured into an answer. He leaves his parents astounded and goes into the back garden to build a rocket out of anything he could find. As he played pretend and hunted for aliens, his parents decided to shock Bertie into having a bath by writing a Lonely hearts ad for a girlfriend. The next Saturday, five girls arrived on the doorstep but they were either terrified of Bertie's filth or Bertie was terrified of them—the fifth girl never knocked the front door because she saw the fourth vomiting in a hedge.

The sixth customer was a Bertie clone, who then turned into an alligator-kangaroo-blobby hybrid. This is PygAlien, who had escaped from the planet Tharg because he had accidentally kissed a 900-year-old hag in a discotheque, and crashed his spaceship. Due to Bertie's body odour, Pyg wants to borrow his rocket to get back home, because Bertie smelt like an astronaut. As the two of them go to the garden with Bertie protesting that he is not a real astronaut, the front door bursts off its hinges and lands on Mr and Mr Barf as a wrinkled, long-nosed alien in makeup enters with two walruses in suits looking for Pyg. In the garden shed, Pyg becomes frustrated because Bertie is refusing to show him how the rocket works and knows that Putrid the long-nosed alien is in hot pursuit with her brothers. The shed opens and Putrid enters. She spots Bertie and decides that she prefers him to Pyg because she likes his looks and his smell. The walruses grab Bertie and they all leave for home to get married. Back on Earth, Pyg is living happily ever after with Mr and Mrs Barf as a cleaner Bertie Barf.

The People Potter

In Worcester, 1777, a group of children were playing with a pig's bladder and accidentally launched it through the window of Josiah Reeks the potter's workshop, destroying a career's worth of hard work. He caught them attempting to escape with the pig's bladder and reappeared from his workshop three days later with twelve life-size porcelain statues. This story is known as the legend of The People Potter.

In the present day, there is Greta Gawky, a clumsy girl who was 2 m (6.6 ft) tall. She once went fishing with her father and cast her hook so wildly that a car swung itself into the river after her hook dragged off its handbrake. Children jeered "Lawks, it's Gawks!" when she walked into a classroom before she could knock the blackboard off the wall, and she slapped a dog up a tree when she tried to pet it. Because of her accident-proneness, Greta's parents had hidden a Ming vase behind wellington boots that they hoped Greta would never touch again: when she was nine it fell on the dog and broke two ribs, then she nearly melted it with a candle, then she burnt her parents' homemade protecting cage, and then her head was stuck in it when she and the toilet crashed through the ceiling. Her parents had told her that if she ever touched the vase again, she would become a celery-eating maid in a Clapham Common mansion while they were sold into slavery in Marrakesh. Greta hated celery, so she obeyed the best she could.

To celebrate, Greta is given a tiny porcelain figure of Josiah Reeks. Greta assumes he is a waiter, at first, and her parents gleefully tell her about the People Potter legend. As they cackle, Greta becomes uncomfortable with the figure, particularly after reading a little message on its side that says "I'm coming back from China" if it breaks. This makes her even clumsier than usual—especially when she is the same room with it, feeling the character's eyes watching everything—and during one messy morning, her parents leave with orders to clean the house by the time they return. Greta's cardigan button had fallen off in the commotion and she rushed around to look for it, falling down the stairs and crashing through the floor into the cellar, and then destroying a pipe she tries to climb up and being sprayed through the hole and through the ceiling to the bathroom. Determined to save the Ming vase, Greta attempts to get back to the hallway to check it was still intact by the wellington boots, but it causes a domino effect of destruction through different rooms until the house collapses, save herself and the front door, whereas the Josiah Reeks figure was in pieces. The front door opened to reveal the real Josiah Reeks with a potter's wheel. Later, Greta's parents arrived home with nowhere to live and found a porcelain statue of their daughter. The Ming vase was still intact, however.

It's Only a Game, Sport!

According to the disclaimer, this story was told by an Australian bushman after he had finished drinking six amber nectars. It is about a schoolboy named Bruce, the son of the most famous and successful athletics couple in Australian history, who failed at every sport he touched. He easily lost his temper and would immediately turn to sabotage and excuses. "It's only a game, sport!" his tennis umpire Games teacher groaned when Bruce begged him not to announce the current score, so Bruce bit his leg.

His parents Shane and Sheila, who had both long retired from sports, encouraged the behaviour to the fullest. From birth, they taught him that losing was not an option, even if he had to cheat. When Bruce lost an Egg-and-spoon race with a broom as a partner on Sports Day, they ordered him to steal the hammer from the hammer throwing area and attack the winners. Bruce was later banned from participating in sports, and then expelled after the school burnt down. Bruce had to stay at home because other schools refused to teach him, so Bruce used his free time to invent his own games to play against his younger sister, Kitty, and changed the equipment and/or rules so that he would win all the time.

Kitty was not good at sports either but she had a large interest in nature, so her bigger and aggressive brother already had an advantage on top of his sabotaging: after he won boxing and basketball, they would play "Bush Snooker" with hedgehogs for balls and aim them at kangaroos, but Bruce would untie the kangaroos when it was Kitty's turn so they would hop away. During Trivial Barbeques, Bruce knew all of the questions so he would give his sister the difficult questions, and put a spider in Kitty's pyjamas when he demanded that they raced to be the first one in bed at bedtime. Kitty tolerated the behaviour but she loathed Bruce's threats and his boasts and the name-calling. She suggested that they play Snakes and Ladders and her successful dice rolls put her far in the lead. Bruce's frustration turned him back into a stubborn sore loser who demands that the rules should be changed: ladders send players down and snakes send players up. Kitty agreed and continued winning whereas Bruce reached the top of a ladder. Bruce insisted that the rules should be changed back to normal and accuses her of cheating. He picked up the playing board and threw it out of the house, tripping over the pet koala in the doorway, stumbling over the balcony ladder and falling towards a group of excited snakes.

Fast Food

An ambulance carrying a patient in a critical condition has just left the scene of a hit and run. A policeman also travelling with them asks for the patient's side of the story. The patient explains that he saw a car and tried to eat it because he wanted to eat fast food like the rest of the world. The policeman points out that a car is too big to be eaten and the patient admits that he realised before it hit him and looked tinier when it was further away. The paramedics try to move the policeman out of their way so they can inject the patient but the policeman insists that he needs the answers to "save lives". The patient dies, revealed to be a flattened hedgehog.

Sock Shock

Nick loved being the different child: he never wore shoes, wore his hats inside out, and ignored emergency signs in the street. When he waited for his socks to be cleaned one day, the washing machine temporarily froze. Once the washing finished, he opened the door and discovered that one of his socks had disappeared. He called the police and printed out missing posters; no fingerprints were inside the machine. Nick is kidnapped by forty long fingers and dragged inside the washing machine, travelling through the waste disposal pipes and landing in a smelly cave. A match lit a hurricane lamp, revealing a scaly goblin with bulging eyes and sharp teeth. The light also reveals several tiny holes in the walls surrounding them, leading to every washing machine in the world. Nick assumes that the goblin intends to kill him but the goblin denies the thought—the socks he collects are used for injured worms as sleeping bags and the patients insist on different-coloured beds; Nick was a false alarm that he had kidnapped by mistake, thinking he had missed a sock. He puts on makeup and leaves to film an interview for a documentary, telling Nick that he can go back home the same way he came. Now that there was no entity that would be waiting to avenge Nick for wanting to be different, he still never wears shoes.

Revenge Of The Bogeyman

"Digger" Dee always picked her nose wherever she goes. Her parents were disgusted—they wanted a nice, polite girl, not a girl who behaved like a rowdy little boy—so her father yelled that if she dug far enough into her nostrils she might pull out the Bogeyman. Dee was terrified at the thought but she had picked her nose so much that her hand would continue to, without being prompted, as she slept.

One night, a voice wakes her up, ordering her to dig deeper. She looks around her bedroom and the bathroom but finds no one watching her and picks her nose again, pulling out a Yorkshire pudding-looking creature with limbs and a warty face, holding a pickaxe. He is the Bogeyman and is furious that Dee had evicted him from his home. "Just because we're small and easily flicked doesn't mean that bogeys don't have feelings too," he snaps, before eating her.

Dee travels through the Bogeyman's digestive system, sliding through tunnels and landing in caves. A finger pulls her out, belonging to a giant, who flicks her against the wall. Then a giantess steps on her and kicks her across the room into a dog bowl. As she tries to run away, she is found by the giants' son who attempts to eat her, but spits her out in disgust. She lands in the arms of the Bogeyman and promises to never pick her nose again. The Bogeyman is delighted and crawls back into her nose. Dee has kept her promise, but the temptation is too strong so she compensates with ear-picking instead. Unfortunately, she is in danger of pulling out The Waxwoman, who is worse!

Crocodile Tears

Mr and Mrs Howling cried easily. Mr Howling would cry for joy and pride, and Mrs Howling would cry in fear about any negative thought in her mind. Their daughter Gwendolyn exploits this by pretending to cry to get away with not doing homework, getting new outfits, eating fast food, watching the television, and her parents always believe her. One Christmas, one of her forced tears turned into a tear-sized duck, who warned her that Sakusaki the Old Croc—the father of crocodiles—would get her. It opened its bill and a glass tear fell out, showing Gwendolyn's face. Gwendolyn is not convinced and tells the duck that she had heard the story before, but turns worried when her parents take her out to see a pantomime based on Peter Pan and decides to not cry but throw tantrums instead, embarrassing her parents as she fought with audience members in queues and screamed until her parents bought her a programme and the merchandise outside the theatre. Noticing surrounding customers looking irritated by her behaviour, she decides to cry to get some sympathy. Mr Howling gasps as he looks at Gwendolyn's eyes which had turned green. A giant tear falls out and turns into a giant crocodile, which eats her in front of her horrified parents and audience. The crocodile does an impression of Gwendolyn and wails that he ruined the evening. The audience applauds, assuming that it is part of the play, whereas Mr and Mrs Howling mournfully cry for a decade.

The Pie Man

From since he was born a few days ago, Donald always sucks his thumb, even as he sleeps. No one knew why and had numerous theories, but a midwife warns that The Pie Man might visit him he never stopped. The Pie Man (also known as the Patty Man and Filo Fella) chopped off the thumbs of thumb-sucking children and used them to hold up his pies' pastry tops. As they leave the hospital, Donald's parents decide to stop him by pulling his hand away, but are unsuccessful because their son's mouth had a strong grip, so they tickled his nose as he slept and slid a dummy into his mouth before he sneezed. This later backfired as Donald grew up and sucked it everywhere he went and whenever it was taken away, Donald substituted it for anything he can find, and had destroyed several objects in the living room, his parents told their doctor. The doctor suggests trying to throw the dummy away but during the first attempt with Donald's father on rollerskates, Donald drew breath so hard that the dummy flew out of the bin and back into his mouth.

By eleven-years-old, Donald was still sucking his dummy and every person he walked past in the street stared. The family visits Loch Ness and show Donald the monster's alleged sighting, where his mother pulls Donald's dummy out with a monkey wrench and throws it into the loch. Donald jumps in to rescue it but retreats when he hears growling. As the family leave in the car for home, Donald is restless as his parents are still celebrating. He sticks a thumb into his mouth and is contented as his parents drive back, buy scuba diving equipment and dive into Loch Ness to find the dummy. Donald rejects the dummy because his thumb tasted better after all.

At home, a pie seller arrives at the front door. Donald's parents run to his bedroom door and order him not to suck his thumb as Donald watches the salesman from his bedroom window. The salesman travels up on the steam from the pies and Donald lets him in. An empty pie dish is taken out of the man's basket and asks for Donald's hands, but Donald refuses to stop sucking. The man tries to pull his hands away but they did not move. Donald gloats, making the man smirk, and Donald is pushed into the pie dish. Donald's parents break into the room and discover that their son is missing but a steaming pie is resting on the window ledge.

Bunny Boy

Bill hated vegetables to the point of making Tubs the neighbourhood rabbit sneak into the garden to feast on his mother's vegetable patch every night. His mother decides to stand guard with a shotgun which prevented Bill from leaving the garden gate open. The next morning, she serves him a freshly-grown cabbage for lunch. Bill paints it like a football and leaves it for the dog to bite, buries it and pretends that he has discovered a bomb with homemade signs, tells the police that he has found a decapitated head, but his mother would find the cabbage, wash it and place it in front of him again. Desperately, Bill snatches the cabbage and hides it under his anorak as he sneaks out of the house to find Tubs through Farmer Popple's cornfield. Bill rests by Tubs' rabbit hole as Tubs joined him to nap; a shadow casts over them as Popple's combine harvester runs them over.

Bill wakes up in hospital and is sent home the next day. Every vegetable his mother served him he would gleefully eat and would wake up every morning with soil in his mouth after having a recurring dream about a rabbit eating everything in the garden. One day, Bill discovered that he had grown a fluffy tail and runs out of the bathroom to show his mother, discovering the doctor he had met in the hospital in the kitchen. "I knew this would happen," the doctor sighs, and explains that the combine harvester accident had mutilated Bill and Tubs so much that it was difficult for the surgeons to differentiate human and rabbit remains, meaning that Bill's rabbit instincts were going to develop at some point. Bill's mother demands that her son should be changed back but the doctor claims that it is impossible. Bill uses his giant rabbit feet to kick open the back door and hops into the garden and never comes home again. He now lives in a nearby burrow and only visits the garden at night for dinner, as he hears his mother's loud sobs.

Spit

A little boy spits on the pavement. He had actually spat on a giant's shoe, so the giant responds by spitting on him.

Superstitious Nonsense

Penelope Jane had legally changed her name to Pylon because "Jane" was Gaelic for "pie-shoveller". She was intensely paranoid, refusing to say (or be involved with) the number "six", shaking hands with the postman to receive positive letters, telling her mother to put on a shirt before her trousers to prevent ants, and reciting the alphabet backwards so that her clothes would stay clean. One day, her parents (Mr and Mrs Gaslamp) notice an alder tree in the garden, which her father attempts to pull out. Pylon claims that it is the sign of a witch as Mr Gaslamp successfully removes it and decides to divorce her parents for ignoring her.

After visiting the library the next day, she lies to her parents that a vampire will attack her if she does her homework and that teachers cause insanity. Her parents agree to never send her back to school and give her all the money in their bank accounts. Pylon uses the money for a trip around the world and returns to her peasant parents demanding that they give her custody of the house because of an Incan belief she discovered in Peru. Mr and Mrs Gaslamp move out, leaving Pylon with everything.

On Friday 13th, Pylon prepared preventatives for her house. She panics when she realises that she had broken several of her own rules as she had walked to the shop, and breaks several more when she rectifies her mistakes. She drags a giant metal box into the garden and climbs inside to save herself, which was then crushed by a cow that fell out of the sky. Mr and Mrs Gaslamp move back into their home and install a plaque for her grave with a rhyme about how grateful they were she had gone.

Head in the Clouds

Brian the "Butterfly Brain" was always daydreaming, which makes him forgetful. The last time his parents would see him every morning would be at breakfast because they would have to look for him hours later when he had not returned home because he was lost somewhere in town. One afternoon, he accidentally walked a different direction and stopped in a field with two kites flying in the sky above him. He pretends to be a kite as he runs down a hill but a strong wind trips him up, and he falls over, snapping his head from his neck and launching it into a tree. He can still feel his body as if it was still connected together but his toes could feel sensations from his mouth and eventually found his head resting on bracken.

Headless Brian leaves the field and walks through the town, holding his head by his side. He enters a store named The Body Shop where the shop assistant examines his head, discovering that Brian's head was full of clouds. The shop assistant offers Brian a choice between switching heads with an available spare or waiting an hour to clean out the head. Brian chooses the latter option and is given a red ticket and an irreplaceable silver key. Brian enters the waiting room and daydreams that he is Rapunzel and tosses his hair for his prince to climb, throwing the key and ticket out of a window. When the shop assistant called him for collection, Brian's body cannot find his ticket, but the shop assistant is hesitant to give him his head's box, no matter how much Brian begged. The shop assistant allows Brian to take the box home to wait for the eyes to open so that he can unlock it, but Brian realises at home that he cannot find his key either. The eyes in his head open and flinch at the giant clouds surrounding his face.

When the Bed Bugs Bite

Hannibal loves the sound people make whenever he bites them. For nine years, he had bitten everything, from people to animals to objects, which had made his teeth sharpen into fangs. His embarrassed parents hoped that he would change but Hannibal enjoyed the attention he got and had chewed at their earlobes and removed some of their fingers. One evening, they confront him with a broken car headrest and a bill from the Natural History Museum to pay for teeth damage on T-Rex bones but Hannibal ignores them and eats it, so they send him to bed early and snap that they hope that bed bugs bite him. Hannibal falls asleep, confused by his parents' threats, and has a nightmare about a giant "queen bug" flying through a busy street, touching children (including Hannibal) which makes them disappear; Hannibal is teleported to his bedroom where the queen bug is waiting, who drips black saliva over him that hardens like a cocoon.

Hannibal wakes up disturbed, but continues his biting behaviour throughout school time, and was later suspended after he bit the headmistress' bottom. His enamel begins to itch and the teeth bite at their own accord. When they bite through a lollipop lady's sign, she is hit by a truck and bounces onto the pavement, which gave the truck a huge dent, and stands up to check on Hannibal, feelers exposed under her hat.

At home, an exterminator dressed in black on a motorbike arrives to remove the bed bugs from Hannibal's room. She prepares her vacuum cleaner and is directed to his bedroom. Hannibal is ordered to demonstrate how he sleeps. The exterminator pushes the vacuum cleaner through Hannibal's pyjamas and leaves once the rattling in her cleaner had disappeared. As Hannibal slept, insects from his pyjamas crawled around his body and bit into his flesh, as he had another nightmare about the queen bug dressed in black. In the morning, he terrifies his parents at breakfast and leaves for school, terrifying everyone he walks past, and causes the school playground to run amok. The headmistress yells for someone to contact an exterminator and Hannibal looks in a nearby window, discovering his reflection looking like a bed bug humanoid. A motorbike enters the playground, driven by the exterminator, who crushes him with a shoe. Faraway, an old lady, who lives in a block of ice between the Napashere's Land of Dreams and the Valley of Nightmares, presses the erase button on her answerphone.

The Decomposition of Delia Deathabridge

Delia is the daughter of Oxford University professors, so she refused to participate in schoolwork and mocked students that obeyed. One day, her English class discovered that their teacher was going to be absent for several weeks and had been replaced by the substitute teacher, Ms Whetstone. Delia fails to outwit her and is ordered to complete her homework as the rest of the class read. Delia declares that she has no need but Whetstone smugly suggests that Delia should be given homework more difficult. Delia reluctantly writes an essay—titled "My Worst Nightmare"—about a warty, bearded, big-footed beast breaking into her bedroom and turning her stupid, but stops in the middle of a sentence when the school bell rings.

At home, Delia abandons the essay and shoves the exercise book under her bed. When she goes to bed, the book shoots across the floor and shakes, filling the air with foot odour. In the centrefold is a picture of a man with long fingernails, which moved and ordered her to release him by finishing the story. Whetstone is unimpressed when Delia claims that the beast she wrote about prevented her from finishing the essay and forces her to finish within the lesson. Delia quickly erases any negative adjectives and writes a happy ending that the now-friendly, wish-granting troll would disappear. Whetstone rejects the essay, believing that the twist ending does not work, and adds with a sadistic smirk that she will rewrite it for her; Delia faints.

The epilogue reveals that Delia returned to school the next day as a ditz but worse. It is revealed that Whetstone's rewrite was about a troll breaking into Delia's house and pushing his fingernails into her ears, bursting her brain lobes. Then he eats Delia's intelligence and leaves to write the Encyclopædia Britannica.

The Grass Monkey

Ten-year-old Spike has spiky hair, large ears and lives with his ill mother in a caravan. They owned an underweight cow named Ruby but they did not live near a grassland so she could not produce milk. One morning, Spike leaves for school but failed to shut the front door properly, and Ruby watches a brown-tailed creature sneak inside. When school is over, Spike goes to a hairdresser's to sweep trimmed hair off the floor. That day, a beautiful girl with blonde hair was the only customer, who shooed him away when he tried to sweep around her chair. She is Esmerelda who aspires to become a fashion model, preparing to enter the annual Miss Golden Locks competition with a £50 prize, a modelling audition, and a dedicated float in the summer parade. A lovestruck Spike offers her a mug of tea but she pushes it out of his hand, dampening his school trousers.

Her parents barge into the shop and scold her for disobeying them, which begins an argument as Esmerelda protests that she knows that she can trust the hairdressers to not damage her hair. Spike interrupts with a shriek as the hot tea soaks through to his legs so Esmerelda claims that she and Spike are in a relationship. Spike is confused but thrilled, and does not suspect Esmerdelas scheming. Before she is forced to leave with her parents, she asks him to steal shampoo and give it to her at home. Despite his hesitance, Spike takes a dozen shampoo bottles when Sandra the hairdresser is out of the room and stuffs them in a bin bag full of trimmed hair. When he arrives home, he showers and changes his clothes and covers his body with the hair, remembering when he overheard Esmerelda telling Sandra that she is attracted to hairy men. Suddenly, his mother stands by the front door and explains that a monkey-looking hobgoblin had visited her in the morning to grant her a wish. She shows him magical grass seeds to plant once a day but Spike is distracted and leaves to deliver the shampoo.

Esmerelda screams when she sees Spike, assuming he is a monkey, but claims that she saw rats when her parents catch her. Spike shows her the shampoo he brought but Esmerelda is furious because he had forgotten the Nowtincide shampoo and orders him to get it tomorrow otherwise she will lose the Miss Golden Locks competition. The next day, Spike is still guilty while his mother begs him to look at the fresh grass that Ruby was eating. After school, he arrives at the hairdresser's, discovering Sandra waiting for him at the front door to fire him. Esmerelda kicks him in the knee when he tells her that he cannot get any new shampoo for her. Spike runs home, steals the magic seeds and offers them to her. Esmerelda ignores his warning of eating one seed and eats everything out of the sack.

The next morning, Spike's mother is devastated that she cannot find her magic seeds and an excited Esmerelda knocks on the caravan door with her blonde hair now a train of grass. All she needs to do is dye it blonde, she explains, but grass grows rapidly and covers her entire body. Ruby rushes towards her and eats her before Spike could react, but the magic seeds continued growing inside her stomachs, turning her fur into grass. She never produced milk again, but Spike and his mother became millionaires that travelled the world, showing off Ruby the Mow Cow who appeared in freak shows and television commercials.

Themes

• "Crocodile Tears" = play-on words for "crocodile tears" & duck appeared from tear is from "tear duct"
• "The People Potter" = "Gawky"
• "Head in the Clouds"

Publication history

This was the only book in the original series that did not have an illustrator, whereas the previous three's first editions had Bobbie Spargo (Grizzly Tales, Ghostly Tales) and Ross Collins (Fearsome Tales). The front cover was designed by Honeycomb Animation, the producers of the animated adaptation, in the style of the CITV series; the first series had just aired the year before in 2000.

The book is said to have officially gone out of print in 2010. It was briefly available on Kindle in 2011, published by Orion.

Pub. date	Format	No. of pages	Publisher	Notes	ISBN	Ref.
19 January 2001	Paperback	304	Scholastic Limited	Under Scholastic's (now defunct) Hippo children's book branding	ISBN 9780439998185, 0-439-99818-2
1 September 2001	Audio Casette	—	Chivers Children's Audio Books	Read by Bill Wallis	ISBN 0754052559, 978-0754052555
2011	E-book	117			ISBN 9781908285072, 1908285079
c. 2014	Amazon Audible	5:19:26	Brilliance Audio	Audio from Chivers	ASIN B00550KXSY
16 August 2016	Amazon	ISBN 9781531813994

References