DAISY AND THE TROUBLE WITH LIFE
DAISY AND THE TROUBLE WITH ZOOS
DAISY AND THE TROUBLE WITH GIANTS
DAISY AND THE TROUBLE WITH KITTENS
DAISY AND THE TROUBLE WITH CHRISTMAS
DAISY AND THE TROUBLE WITH MAGGOTS
DAISY AND THE TROUBLE WITH COCONUTS
DAISY AND THE TROUBLE WITH BURGLARS
DAISY AND THE TROUBLE WITH SPORTS DAY
DAISY AND THE TROUBLE WITH PIGGY BANKS
Published for World Book Day 2016:
DAISY AND THE TROUBLE WITH JACK
Also by Kes Gray:
JACK BEECHWHISTLE: ATTACK OF THE GIANT SLUGS
RHCP DIGITAL
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RHCP Digital is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
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First published 2016
Text copyright © Kes Gray, 2016
Cover illustration © Nick Sharratt, 2016
Interior illustrations copyright © Garry Parsons, 2016
Character concept copyright © Kes Gray and Nick Sharratt, 2016
The moral right of the author and illustrators has been asserted.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978–1–448–19737–8
All correspondence to:
RHCP Digital
Penguin Random House Children’s
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL
To the Adams Family
The trouble with vampires is people shouldn’t be allowed to dress up as them.
Or talk about them. Or even think about them. Especially at Halloween. Vampires can be really scary at Halloween. So can all the other Halloween scary things. Not that anything scares me or anything. It’s just that when people like Jack Beechwhistle keep talking about scary things at school ALL THE TIME, including vampires, then after a while, things can get a bit scary-ish.
Nothing scares me most of the time, at least not during the daytime anyway. Vampires don’t scare me in the daytime, zombies don’t scare me in the daytime or ghosts or werewolves or even the hooley-hooley man. They did scare me a little bit on actual Halloween night, but that was different, because Halloween night is the scariest night in the world, especially if you go trick-or-treating for the first time with an actual vampire, who isn’t an actual vampire, but you think she is, because she told you she is, but then she tells you she isn’t, but by then you’ve already decided she is, because grown-ups aren’t meant to tell fibs or even say the word vampire, especially if you haven’t been trick-or-treating before. WHICH ISN’T MY FAULT!
Did you know Halloween is short for ‘Hallo, we know something you don’t know’? I didn’t either. Jack Beechwhistle told me as soon as I walked into school with Gabby last Monday.
The trouble with someone telling you that they know something you don’t know is it makes you want to know what it is.
Even if it’s Jack Beechwhistle doing the telling. Trouble is, I’d forgotten it was the beginning of Halloween week.
The trouble with Halloween week is I didn’t know that there was even such a thing as Halloween week. I thought there was just Halloween night. But Jack said he wasn’t waiting until Saturday for Halloween to begin. As far as he was concerned, we should start getting afraid on Monday.
Not just afraid either. Very afraid.
When me and Gabby told him we weren’t afraid of anything, Jack said he knew things that were so scary they would make the blood freeze in our veins.
Plus, if we didn’t believe him, then we should ask Colin and Harry.
The trouble with Colin and Harry is they are Jack Beechwhistle’s best friends, so they agree with everything he says. Even if the things Jack says are a bunch of whopping fibs.
Me and Gabby told all three of them that we absolutely totally weren’t listening to anything they had to say about Halloween week, and that if they kept saying things that were scary, we would tell Mrs Peters. Mrs Peters is our teacher and she can be proper scary.
Trouble is, instead of saying more scary things to us, Jack said them to other people instead.
“Hallo, we know something you don’t know!” he said, getting everyone to gather around him in the playground and then making evil slurping noises with his mouth.
The trouble with Jack making evil slurping noises is that it makes you want to hear what he is going to say next. So we had to listen. Especially as it was a story about a haunted drinking fountain.
According to Jack, the drinking fountain in our playground gets its water from the wicked well.
The trouble with the wicked well is it’s full of wicked frogs and wicked newts, which means if you drink from it at midnight on Halloween night when there’s a full moon, you’ll be chased by werewolves.
Me and Gabby told everyone that everything Jack was saying was a lie. But Jack said, if we’d never drunk from our school fountain at midnight on Halloween night when there was a full moon, how could we be sure?
Which was kind of true and really annoying, because we couldn’t prove he was fibbing.
Jack said the only way to defend yourself against werewolves is to shoot them with a gun that fires silver bullets. Or a crossbow that fires silver crossbow bolts. Or a massive castle catapult that fires silver boulders. Werewolves are allergic to silver.
There were other scary things he said too.
“Did you know that if you hang your coat up on a certain coat hook in the classroom at midnight on Halloween night when there is a full moon, then the ghost of an evil headmaster from ten centuries ago will float down the corridor wearing your coat and going ‘WOOOOOOOO!’?”
Me and Gabby told everyone that there were no such things as haunted coat hooks or haunted headmasters, but Jack said, if we’d never hung up a coat in school at midnight on Halloween night when there was a full moon, how could we be sure?
Which was kind of true again, and even more annoying this time – because do you know what he said next? He said that the most haunted coat hook in our classroom was the one I hang my coat on!
And the second most haunted was Gabby’s!
And he didn’t stop there either.
He told us that pencil cases can be haunted,
pencil sharpeners can be haunted,
rubbers can be haunted,
even bendy rulers can be haunted. What a load of fibs!
Trouble is, Colin and Harry totally backed him up, so some people in our class thought it was true. Paula Potts wouldn’t even open her pencil case when we sat down for lessons in case a haunted compass tried to stab her.
And it didn’t stop there either. Jack didn’t stop telling scary stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or even Friday. He kept telling us things we didn’t know and didn’t even want to know ALL WEEK!
When I met my mum after school on Monday, I told her all about Jack.
“Daisy,” she said, “Jack and his friends are just trying to give you the heebie-jeebies. There are no such things as werewolves, werefoxes, werechickens or wereanythings.”
“What about werepuddles?” I asked. “Jack says, if you tread in a puddle at midnight on Halloween night when there’s a full moon, you’ll turn into a weregoldfish.”
