Joe Knight & the Hideous Headmaster (Joe Knight Series Book 2)

A battle through time, secrets, and shadowed halls

Joe Knight’s troubles are just beginning. With a cruel new games teacher, a best friend gone, and his magical piano swapped for an ordinary one, Joe is left adrift—until he finds the battered instrument at Riddle’s eerie music shop. Determined to reclaim it, Joe makes a deal to work weekends, uncovering the piano’s mysterious past and its ties to a dangerous metronome capable of bending time.

As Joe forms an unexpected alliance with fellow dreamer Lily, the pair begin to untangle a deeper threat hiding in plain sight: the Headmaster of Greenfields High is not what he seems. From cursed inventions to fractured friendships and time-twisting choices, Joe faces impossible decisions that could change everything—not just for him, but for the world.

Book Two in the Joe Knight series, Joe Knight & the Headmaster from Hell, is a gripping, time-bending adventure about courage, consequences, and uncovering the truth behind the masks people wear.

Start reading Joe Knight & the Headmaster from Hell today and follow the fight to expose the darkness lurking at Greenfields High.

Excerpt from the book

With Sirgiman, our games teacher from hell gone, blue skies reigned over Greenfields High for almost a week. It was late one lunchtime when the sun went back to hide behind a dark cloud. I will never forget that lunch hour if I live to be fifteen.

I’d been kicking a small stone around the top end of the playground when Todd came running towards me. A few weeks earlier, and I would have run screaming in the opposite direction. A lot had happened since then.

“Joe, you won’t believe this. They’ve reincarnated Sirgiman.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “If you say so, Todd.”

“I’m serious. He looks like him and shouts like him.”

“Who does? What are you talking about?”

Todd looked around to make sure that nobody else could hear this ridiculous conversation. “Our new games teacher. I tell you, Joe, he’s the reincarnation of Sirgiman. Okay, you don’t believe me.”

“Whatever gave you that idea! Teachers get reincarnated all the time. But they have to be dead first. They locked Sirgiman up, they didn’t execute him.”

Todd wasn’t giving up. “Right, answer me this: what was Sirgiman’s first name?”

“Todd, let it go, will you.”

“His first name was Alf, as in Alf Ramsey Sirgiman. Sir Ars, as you called him. And what’s the name of our new games teacher? Ralph, as in Ralph Underwood.”

“Ah, now I get it. Sir Ars becomes Sir RU.”

“ALF becomes RALPH, you idiot. It’s going to take more than sticking an R in front of his name to fool me!”

“Whatever you say, Todd. At least you’ve had the pleasure of meeting him.”

“It was no pleasure, believe me. He’s given me a hundred lines.”

“What for?”

“Running in the corridor. I heard his voice shouting behind me. It was like a firing squad, and it was just him. He’s got Sirgiman’s ugliness, but more of it, if you know what I mean.”

I was getting the idea. But some things you have to see for yourself. And as it turned out, I didn’t have to wait long.

The whistle blew long and hard and, I had to admit, the teacher on the end of it did, from a distance, look disturbingly like Sirgiman. As I moved closer, he still looked like him.

I stood in line, my legs trembling, my stomach dissolving as an old fear took hold. This… thing that stood before us, holding his whistle and scowling like a werewolf with personality problems… well, if I didn’t know better…

“The name’s Underwood.”

That voice. It was like a drill breaking through concrete.

“I’m your new games teacher, you lucky lot.”

I didn’t feel lucky. The unfriendly tone, and the way his eyes cast a beam over the lines of boys, like a searchlight sweeping over prisoners, was pure Sirgiman. There had to be a club where they trained them; legions of PE teachers, churning them out like robots with attitude. And always the same attitude: mean, hateful and sadistic.