by Alan Nolan
‘Well, that wasn’t so bad,’ whispered Ajay. ‘I thought we got through that quite well.’
‘WE??’ said Sam. ‘What do you mean WE?? I did all the talking!’
‘Well done, both of you,’ said Lucy, joining them again with Nanny Gigg and Bruno in tow. ‘Now, we’ll have to get you to leave by the back door – there’s quite a crowd of fans and press waiting for you at the front.’
‘Good idea,’ said Nanny Gigg. ‘I wouldn’t like to see my precious grand-dog-ter getting hurt in a media frenzy!’
‘I’ve radioed the limo to pull around to the back,’ said Lucy, opening the door and peeping out. ‘Ah! Here it is now!’
The big white limo pulled up to the stage door. ‘Go, go, go!’ said Lucy, and Sam and Ajay made a run for it. Sam bounded into the back seat of the limo, but when Ajay reached the car door, it slammed shut in his face. There was a screech of tyres and the limo drove off – with Sam inside!
Ajay stood surrounded by a cloud of dust, watching the car as it disappeared into the distance. Bruno and Nanny Gigg, having said their goodbyes to Lucy the floor manager (who went back inside to, em, manage the floors), joined Ajay on the footpath.
‘Where’s the limo?’ asked Bruno.
‘Never mind the limo,’ said Nanny Gigg. ‘WHERE’S MY SAM?!’
Chapter Ten
Captive Canine
Sam woke up the next morning and, as usual, her paws immediately went up to her face. Yup. Still a dog.
But, hold on a minute, this wasn’t her bed! Come to think of it, this wasn’t even her bedroom! She opened her eyes to find herself lying on a dirty, hair-covered blanket on the floor of a huge, ramshackle warehouse. In the distance she could hear what sounded like machinery creaking and wheezing. The ceiling of the tumbledown warehouse was high and there were holes in the rusty corrugated sheets of roof metal through which she could see the morning light. She looked left and right, her long ears flopping from side to side. Where the blinking barnacles was she?
Suddenly, the morning air around Sam’s head started to turn a little green in colour. Her doggy nose twitched and then started to shudder as the most horrible smell she had ever smelled in her entire life wafted over towards where she lay.
Sam jumped to her four feet and, without being able to help herself, started to growl.
‘Hey,’ said a chirpy voice, ‘I hope that growl’s not for me!’
From around a rusty pillar trotted a very small dog. He was jet-black in colour, with short hair and small legs that didn’t look strong enough to support the weight of his long body. He was so close to the ground that his lengthy ears dragged along beside him, raising up small clouds of dust. There seemed to be, as he scuttled over to Sam, another cloud hanging around this dog: an invisible cloud of SMELLY GAS.
It’s a little-known fact that dogs’ noses are ten thousand times more sensitive to smell than human noses. Ten thousand times. So when Sam’s nose fully caught that horrible, disgusting PONG, she had a very hard time forcing herself not to high-tail it down to the other end of the warehouse. After a couple of seconds of trying to control her urge to run, her well-mannered side won out and she decided to stay put and greet this stinky stranger.
Sam coughed and put her paw to her nose. ‘Excuse me. Of course I wasn’t growling at you, I just was growling at another– Hold on a minute. I can UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU’RE SAYING!’
‘Naturally,’ said the small dog. ‘I’m a dog, you’re a dog, we all speak the same language.’
‘Holy moley,’ said Sam. ‘I’ve been a dog for nearly four days now and I never thought to try speaking to another one – this is A-MAY-ZING!’
‘Huh?’ said the small dog, who had obviously never watched Bryan Hoolihan’s Midweek Madness. ‘My name’s Stephen, but everyone calls me Stinker.’
‘No kidding,’ said Sam, still holding her paw to her nose. ‘I’m Sam.’
Without thinking, they both went around to each other’s rear end and had a little sniff.
‘Okay,’ said Sam, ‘where are we?’
‘Oh,’ said Stinker, ‘you don’t know?’ He led Sam to the huge metal door of the warehouse; light streamed in around the sides and at the bottom.
‘It’s locked,’ said Sam, pushing against the door with her snout.
‘No prob-lemmo,’ said Stinker, and, crouching even lower to the ground, squeezed his small body underneath the door. A couple of seconds later the door swung open. ‘There’s a switch to open it on the wall outside,’ he said. ‘It’s quite high up, but I can reach it.’ Sam looked up at the switch as she walked through the door. It was about thirty centimetres off the ground.
‘This is where we are,’ said Stinker, pointing up at the wall of the warehouse with his snout. Sam gaped at a big poster that hung over the door. ‘Can’t read it myself,’ said Stinker. ‘It’s all in human.’
Sam could read it. ‘Don’t worry, I’m actually human – I can read human.’ She told Stinker all about the Brain Swap 3000 and all about Barker being mistreated and how she was now stuck being a dog.
‘Hold on, you’re really a human and not a dog at all?’ asked Stinker, looking her up and down. ‘But you were nice to that poor dog Barker, so that makes you more dog than human in my book.’
‘Thanks,’ said Sam, ‘I think …’
Sam looked up at the poster. It had a familiar, colourful, smiling face on it – it was Jolly Roger, the dog biscuit guy! The poster read ‘Welcome to the Jolly Roger™ Dog Biscuit Factory – the Home of Jolly Roger Dog Biscuits.’ Underneath these words was a picture of Jolly Roger himself holding one of his dog biscuits up to a happy-looking dog and saying, ‘Yarr! Your Dog Will Love ’Em!’
‘That dog in the picture was called Flossie,’ said Stinker, as he led Sam across a dusty courtyard to a large cement-walled building. ‘She tried to escape, and, well, let’s just say it didn’t go so good for her.’
‘Escape?’ said Sam. ‘Escape from what?’
‘From this,’ said Stinker, and he led Sam into the cement building through a big doorway with steel shutters that looked like a gaping mouth.
The noise inside the cement building was deafening. It was the sound of clanking, clanging, clunking machinery, but those metal sounds were mixed together with other sounds – noises that sounded to Sam like muffled barks, neighs, squawks and whinnies.
Along the far wall of the room was a line of big metal machines that went all the way up to the ceiling. Each of them had exposed cogs whirring around and pistons pumping up and down. Conveyor belts emerged from two of the machines, and bright red boxes slid along them.
In the centre of the building was a big vat, made of huge sheets of steel held together with metal rivets the size of dinner plates. Steam drifted from the top of the vat and a green-coloured goo burbled over the side in places.
‘What’s in that?’ asked Sam, even though she was half afraid to find out the answer.
Stinker sighed. ‘Sam,’ he said, ‘look closer at the machines over there. Can you see? Those huge machines make Jolly Roger Dog Biscuits, but they aren’t powered by electricity.’
‘What are they powered by then?’ asked Sam. Her fur was getting itchy and the doggy hackles at the back of her neck were rising. She didn’t like this place.
‘Look at the big air holes in the sides of the machinery. Look right into them,’ said Stinker. ‘What can you see?’
‘ANIMALS!’ said Sam. ‘I see animals! I see dogs, cats, ponies, donkeys, horses, monkeys, parrots, budgies, monkeys, camels, and – are they hamsters? They are all inside the machines!’
As Sam gawked at the machines, a troupe of small brown monkeys with chains around their ankles led a sad-looking, golden-coloured carthorse to the end of the conveyor belts. They listlessly started to load the red boxes onto the back of the four-wheel cart the enormous carthorse was pulling. Sam gasped.
Stinker shook his small head, his long ears raising up dust from the dirty floor. ‘They are made to wal
k on treadmills, on big hamster wheels – all to keep the machinery going. Those poor creatures save old Roger loads of money on electricity by making the machines run by paw- and hoof-power.’
‘They’re made to do it? They don’t have a choice?’ asked Sam, aghast.
‘Hah! Choice?’ laughed Stinker grimly. ‘These poor critters are no better than slaves. They are made to work, fed very little, and when they’re worn out and can’t work any more’ – he nodded his head toward the massive vat in the middle of the room – ‘they end up in there.’
‘They go into the vat? Why?’ asked Sam.
‘Why? To be made into dog biscuits, of course! Old Jolly Roger doesn’t waste anything. When slave animals here have outlived their usefulness, they are chucked into the vat, boiled up and melted down, and then the goo they become is pumped down those pipes’ – Stinker pointed with his snout at three dripping pipes leading from the vat, then he turned his nose towards the machines at the far wall – ‘and all the way into those machines, where the goo is mixed, shaped and baked and comes out the other end as Jolly Roger Dog Biscuits!’
Sam stared at the vat and gulped. The poor, poor animals …
Chapter Eleven
A Dog-Gone Shame
Ajay walked slowly to school the next morning. He had big black rings under his eyes from lack of sleep. After leaving the TV station, he had spent a couple of hours in Clobberstown Garda Station reporting Sam’s abduction and talking to the guards, then he, Nanny Gigg and Bruno had gone back to Clobberstown Lodge to try to figure out who might have taken Sam and why. Ajay’s dad had picked him up at one o’clock in the morning after his taxi-driving shift, so poor Ajay hadn’t had much sleep.
He shuffled along the path outside the school with his head down and didn’t notice Martha Maguire and Abbie Cuffe until he nearly walked into them. Martha was holding up the front page of that day’s Clobberstown Bugle. Ajay lifted his head and looked at it: ‘DOG GONE – INTERNET AND TV SENSATION SAM HANNIGAN ABDUCTED!’ There was a photo of Sam, this time as her real self, with her human red hair and freckles, and beside it a smaller repeat of the photo of Sam as a dog.
‘What are you doing at school, Ajay?’ demanded Martha. ‘Why aren’t you out looking for Sam?’
‘I didn’t know you cared so much about her,’ said Ajay.
‘Yeah, well …’ started Martha, but Abbie jumped in, ‘We know Sam’s really a dog. That’s not a costume she’s wearing. She’s a dog, she’s changed into a dog, she’s really a dog.’
‘Wow,’ said Ajay, ‘you guys are ker-azy. Sam can’t be a dog! She’s in a costume! Collecting for Doggie Dinners!’
‘I thought it was Dinners for Dogs,’ said Martha. She put down the newspaper. ‘Look. We know she’s a real dog. We don’t know how it happened and we don’t really care. But Sam is a St Gobnet’s student and a member of the Cú Chulainn Academy and nobody, and I mean nobody, gets to mess with us. And besides that, her brother is a total babe.’
Abbie looked at Ajay and rolled her eyes. Ajay smiled a bit, despite himself.
‘Okay, okay,’ he said. ‘You’re right, she’s a real dog.’ He told them all about the Brain Swap 3000 and how Sam turned into next door’s dog Barker to play a trick on Barker’s owner, and how the gun had run out of charge and how she was stuck being a dog until today. Actually, he thought, in all the excitement last night, I forgot to check the Brain Swap 3000 – it must be fully charged by now!
‘So, what can we do?’ asked Martha.
‘Well, there’s not much we can do,’ said Ajay. ‘The gardaí are out looking for her, and they told me to go to school as normal and wait for developments.’
‘Wait for developments?’ said Martha. ‘No way, Ajay. We’re going to help find her ourselves. Watch this.’
They had just gotten up to the gate of the school when Martha let out a huge, anguished wail. ‘A-huk-ayaaaaaaaaaahhhh!’ she cried. ‘I’m so upset over Sam Hannigan, I can’t go to school!’
Ms Hennigan, the principal, ran over to the gate with the caretaker Ogg in tow. ‘Oh, you poor thing,’ she said. ‘You must be dreadfully upset! Will I call your mum to collect you?’
‘No,’ cried Martha. ‘That won’t be neccessary. Ajay and Abbie will take me home. They’re upset too.’ She elbowed Abbie in the ribs and both Abbie and Ajay started to sob.
‘Of course you all are upset, everyone is. I want you three to go home and have a nice cup of tea to settle your nerves.’
‘Thanks, Ms Hennigan,’ said Martha brightly, and the three of them turned and walked back down School Road as quickly as they could, sobbing as they went.
Ogg looked after them as they went. Humph, he thought. Ms Hennigan is a big softie. I don’t think they were really crying at all …
As soon as they got around the corner and were out of earshot, the sobbing stopped. ‘Okay, so what’s the plan?’ asked Martha.
‘Only one place to go,’ said Ajay. ‘Clobberstown Lodge! But we need to swing by my house on the way.’
Chapter Twelve
A Malodorous Mutt
‘Oh. My. Dog,’ said Sam, staring at the vat where so many poor animals had met their end.
‘Oh. My. Dog. Biscuits,’ said Stinker. ‘Buy Jolly Rogers, Your Dog Will Love ’Em.’
‘Yarr …’ said Sam quietly. She was thinking queasily and uneasily about all the dog biscuits that Bruno had force-fed her over the years.
‘Yarr, indeed,’ said a voice from behind. Sam spun around on her paws. Looking up, she saw a tall, slender man with a pencil-thin moustache and an ill-fitting wig. He wore a grey suit with a red tie and what looked like an oversized handkerchief in his breast pocket. ‘Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Roger Fitzmaurice.’
‘Jolly Roger! The guy from the TV ads!’ Sam said without thinking.
‘Ahh,’ said Mr Fitzmaurice, one side of his thin mouth stretched up into a crooked smile. ‘So it is true, you are a talking dog!’
Sam gasped. She looked around for Stinker, but he had mysteriously vanished. For a small dog with tiny legs, thought Sam, he can certainly move quickly.
‘Oh my goodness,’ said Mr Fitzmaurice. ‘What is that smell?’ He took the red hanky out of his pocket and held it to his nose – to Sam it looked like the pirate bandana that Jolly Roger wore on the advert. ‘I certainly hope it isn’t you making that smell,’ he said with a sneer. ‘I’d hate to have to throw you into the vat before I got my money’s worth out of you.’
He smiled his crooked half-smile at Sam. ‘You see, my dear doggie, I want to make you a star. I want you to be the lead actor in my new series of Jolly Roger™ Dog Biscuit commercials! Can you imagine it? A real-life talking dog, appearing on every television, laptop and tablet in the land, telling dog owners to buy Jolly Roger™ Dog Biscuits for their beloved mutts! What do you say to that?’
‘I say forget it, it isn’t going to happen,’ said Sam. ‘There’s no way I’m going to help you sell these horrible dog biscuits, especially now that I’ve seen what goes into them!’
Sam stood up on her hind legs. She was nearly as tall as Mr Fitzmaurice. ‘And I’ll tell you another thing, Jolly Roger, I’m going to let everyone know about this evil place. I’m going to go to the police and to the Clobberstown Bugle and to Bryan Hoolihan himself, and I’m going to get this place SHUT DOWN!’
Mr Fitzmaurice smiked his half-smirk. ‘Wilson! Pike!’ he yelled. ‘Here! Now!’
Mr Wilson and Ms Pike scurried up from the depths of the factory to stand beside their boss. ‘Here!’ shouted Mr Wilson. ‘We! Are!’ continued Ms Pike.
‘What took you so long?’ snarled Mr Fitzmaurice. ‘Take this … dog … away and teach it some manners.’
‘You mean, like, table manners?’ asked Mr Wilson.
‘Ps and Qs?’ asked Ms Pike.
‘I mean the type of manners that are taught with this,’ growled Mr Fitzmaurice, holding up a long leather riding crop.
‘Oh, Mr Fitzmaurice,’ said Ms
Pike, ‘that would hurt the poor little thing!’
‘Please don’t ask us to hurt her, Jolly Rog– I mean, Mr Fitzmaurice, sir,’ said Mr Wilson, looking as though he was about to cry.
‘You dim-witted dumb-bells!’ started Mr Fitzmaurice, but that was as far as he got into that particular insult, because at that second a small, tiny-legged dog appeared from behind a pillar and did what he did best – he made a stink. Stinker let go with an ear-shattering, eggy-smelling PPAAAAAARRRRRRRPPPPPPPPP-PPPPP!! that made the walls of the factory building shake and made Mr Wilson and Ms Pike’s eyes water. Mr Fitzmaurice covered his nose and mouth with the red pirate bandana.
‘Get. That. Malodorous. Mutt!!’ Mr Fitzmaurice managed to choke out between taking extremely small breaths. The air was almost glowing green with the putrid smell – a cross between blocked drains, overflowing toilets and the bins on a hot summer’s day.
As Mr Wilson and Ms Pike, their faces green with revulsion at the stench, slowly walked towards Sam, Stinker ran around behind Mr Fitzmaurice’s legs and started barking. ‘What’s up with that dunderheaded dachshund? What’s he barking for?’ gasped Mr Fitzmaurice. ‘Sam!’ shouted Stinker. ‘If the car you’re in on the way to the vet breaks down, what do you do?’
‘You give it a push!’ said Sam, and, rearing up, she jumped up and pushed Mr Fitzmaurice in the chest with her two front paws. Mr Fitzmaurice tripped over Stinker’s small body and went flying backwards, landing on his backside. His wig fell off and his pirate bandana fluttered through the air after him.
Mr Wilson and Ms Pike rushed to help Mr Fitzmaurice up, but he shook them off. ‘Never mind me,’ he shouted. ‘Get that dog!’