by Susan Berran
Oh, oh! MOLLY was galloping our way. Every footstep seemed to shake the ground like a charging rhinoceros. The galloping stopped right at our bush. Suddenly, a long thick gigantic tongue, covered in slobbery drool, parted the bush like a curtain and flicked around like a snake striking. It was exploring and panting right in front of us. We didn’t breathe, we didn’t move. Had she somehow finally smelt us?
I tried to swallow air and push it into my bowels. I was going to let MOLLY! have it with the stink bomb of the century!
Just then, Jared flicked a toe out at something. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as that stupid, tatty, dirty, half-eaten old ball, gently rolled in the red dirt across to MOLLY'S tongue. She sniffed and sniffed again, as a big dob of drool stretched down and glued itself to what was left of the ball. Then she sucked it straight up through the air with her tongue rolling in just behind it.
In another second, she was gone. With her earth-shaking gallop, she headed back towards OLD MR INDITE.
We peeked through the bush and watched as OLD MR INDITE and MOLLY headed into the shed with the trailer load of poop. They were in there for quite some time. We heard some massive clanging and rattling then … BANG! A shotgun?!
All of a sudden, we weren’t quite so sure we wanted to know what was going on after all. We could hear MOLLY! barking like crazy … was OLD MR INDITE dead?
“Shut up MOLLY ya noisy bugga!” Yeah, he was still alive alright.
The shed didn’t look big enough for much more than the tractor, but it sure sounded like there was big machinery in there.
While they were in the shed, we came up with a plan to get down the ladder. We could use my extendo rod. We could tie the line to the top rung and then just reel ourselves down … no problem. A few minutes later, OLD MR INDITE and MOLLY were heading back out to the desert for more poop. They’d obviously dumped that load in the shed somewhere, so now was our big chance.
We hobbled back up to the top of the hill and clambered over the wire. I tied on the line with a triple safe overhand, double twist, backflip, side wind, secure twist with a quadruple knot. I hung the rod into the hole … then I turned and asked Jared if he wanted to go first. As I turned back around, I was just in time to see the line of my awesome extendo rod slipping away and disappearing down into the seemingly endless darkness. I’ve really got to practise that knot some more.
I had it all figured out though. I had working hands and Jared had working legs. Between us, we were one brilliantly working person. Well, sort of. He could do the stepping and I could do the holding. Jared stepped down a couple of rungs and then I sat on his shoulders and took hold of the ladder. I thought it had worked out to be to be anexcellentsolution, but Jared was complaining and whinging. Something about my weight and smelly toe-jam with cow poopy legs around his face. As we went deeper and deeper, the noise of the tractor grew fainter and fainter until we could no longer hear it. It was slow going, and listening to Jared complaining all the way down, was getting really annoying so I thought I’d try to change the subject.
“Hey Jared, how old do you reckon this wooden ladder is?”
“I don’t know and I don’t really care,” Jared replied between heaving gasps.
“It looks like the original miners’ ladder, so it’d have to be at least a hundred years old, don’t you reckon?”
Jared grunted something back that I couldn’t make out.
“Hey, do you reckon they have termites out here?” I asked Jared, trying to keep the conversation going.
“If this ladder breaks …” Jared began to say …
“Yeah yeah, I know. Hey can I have your comic book collection?” I said thoughtfully. “Because let’s face it, I’ll land on top of you.”
Jared didn’t say anything else until we got to the bottom. I think he was a bit peeved with me. I don’t know why though, I didn’t complain about having to sit on his bony shoulders.
Down and down we went, until the hole above us was just a small dot. And then finally, Jared stepped onto solid ground. We’d done it! Now we could really start to look for some answers.
I climbed off Jared’s shoulders and we took out our torches. Mine is totally awesome, I got it from the body of a real BULRAVIAN SPY Jared’s is pretty cool too, it’s his own invention. He made it from a Coke can, dental floss, the lens from his Nan’s reading glasses and a light bulb from Smelly Melly’s night light. He calls it TWIT, (totally wicked illumination torch).
Shining the light all around us, we could see that there was only one tunnel leading off. As we studied the walls and floor … “Hey my extendo rod! Cool.” It was in a few smaller pieces than it was supposed to be but some sticky tape and chewing gum should fix that. We did notice one thing straight away though. Something really, really … BORING! There was no gold, no silver or anything even a little bit shiny. It was just a dirt hole in the dirt ground with the same deep red dirt as above.
We had two choices. I could wrap my crappy toe-jam legs around Jared’s head again so that he could carry me back up, or we could see where the tunnel went.
I didn’t mind if we had to climb back up, it was pretty hard work sitting on Jared’s bony shoulders, but I could handle it.
Jared said some things about carrying me back up that I really shouldn’t repeat. So we headed off down the tunnel.
EeeWww YUKk!! Cobwebs! We both spun around, ripping off the sticky webs that were wrapped around us. They stretched right across my face, yUK! In the torchlight, I could see that Jared had a really big hairy spider on his back. I’d have told him except then I’d have to touch it.
Anyway, we headed down the tunnel pushing through the cobwebs and red dust. The tunnel was only a bit taller than me and not quite wide enough for us to walk side by side. Jared found a really old rusty shovel and I found some old miners’ bits’n’pieces. But we didn’t find anything else worth a cent. Up ahead, the tunnel had three other tunnels branching off. We didn’t want to get lost down there forever so Jared marked our path as we went along. Every now and then, he scratched a nice big obvious arrow into the dirt with his big fat hands.
The first tunnel didn’t go very far at all, it ended underneath another shaft going straight up to the surface. It wasn’t very far up either but there was no ladder. We went back and shone our torches down another tunnel. STRIKE two, it had collapsed completely. So number three it was then. The tunnel seemed to go on and on forever. A few times we passed under a beam of light from another shaft. This one seemed to be the connector to all the other mine shafts. We took turn after turn, it was a maze of tunnels and I had no idea where we were any more. The tunnel seemed to be getting smaller and darker, obviously this one went nowhere, so it was time to head back.
I’d lost count of how many twists and turns there’d been along the way. We headed back the way we’d come but by the fourth or fifth turn we were LOST. I shone the torch all about the tunnel floor looking for Jared’s arrows. Ah Ha! “This way,” I called to Jared …
“No, this way,” he jumped in.
“The arrow points this way.”
“No, it points this way,” Jared said. I shone the torch onto the arrow Jared was looking at and then back to mine. He was right; they were pointing in opposite directions, but how, why?
“I drew some the way we were heading and some showing the way back,” Jared said. “That way we’d know where we were going and where we’d already been. Good idea huh?”
WOW … it’s things like that, that make me think Jared was born with toe-jam for a brain.
There was no choice now, we just kept on walking and every tunnel looked the same. We were wandering around in circles, getting more and more lost and exhausted. Then off in the distance ahead we saw a faint light, we had to be coming out the side of the hill. As we got closer, we could hear something as well … CHUGGING … it was OLD MR INDITE'S tractor. We were nearly out, which was great. But we hadn’t found a thing, which was bad.
Our hobbling got faster, we
were getting close . . . phew! That smell, it was like my toe-jam in a manure factory. There wasn’t a baboon butt or hippie armpit that I could compare this to. But we both started to search our utility belts for something, anything to shove up our nostrils, it was SOOOOO bad! I had some Blu Tack that I rolled and shaped, then I twisted a piece up into each nostril. Jared could only find a few ear buds that he’d already cleaned his ears out with. And with his toe-jammed hands, he couldn’t get them in. So once again it was up to me.
I shoved and twisted one up each nostril for him. I knew when I’d gone too far … because his eyes suddenly BULGED with instant tears flooding them.
Then as we neared the small opening at the end of the tunnel, we realised that it wasn’t the exit out of the hillside that we’d been hoping for. But we could see something; boxes. Piles and piles of large boxes. We snuck right up to the opening and peeked around. It was a HUGE cavern! It was some sort of factory. There were conveyor belts, enormous machines, a big truck and heaps of other stuff everywhere. The cavern was the size of a tennis court with a big roller door, dented and beaten at one end. The smell was SOOOOO bad that I pushed the Blu Tack further up my nostrils. It wasn’t helping much. At least Jared’s nose plugs had earwax on them to seal out the smell.
We crept in and began to explore the underground factory, searching for an answer. A conveyor belt ran steeply all the way from the roller door, up to a huge steel bowl the size of a car. It had a massive fan blade hanging above it and a funnel below. A similar huge bowl sat underneath, with hoses of all sizes strung right across the roof. Probably to add some weird deforming secret ingredients to the bowls. Underneath, the funnel dropped to another conveyor belt that ran right through this great steel box, then all the way to the other end of the cavern. Right at the very end was a big container, with upside down ceiling fans in it. Under that, were all these scoops and paddlewheels and tubes.
Big white bags with ‘INDITE MANURE’ printed on them were being held open on a framework stand below the tubes. And hundreds of boxes, all taller than me, were stacked to the roof all along the wall.
Naturally we needed to know what was in them.
I took out my genuine one-of-a-kind, totally awesome BULRAVIAN SECRET AGENT ninja knife. The instructions said my ninja knife was so good that you could kill a man twice and get him to dig his own grave before he noticed he was dead.
Yep … I love my ninja knife.
We laid a few of the boxes on their side to stand on and climbed up to open a box. “You’ve got to be kidding!” Jared exclaimed said … NAPPIES! The ‘NAPPIES’ we’d seen the fat cows wearing. There had to be thousands here. They were a creamy-white colour with wide Velcro straps to hold them on. We took one out and held it up …
“You could parachute with one of these, I think they’re even bigger than Gran’s. But why would you make cows wear nappies?” I said to Jared.
He took a pair from the box and pulled them up around his ankles. This was going to look excellent. Jared with his red curly hair and skinny body; with ribs that I swear you could climb like a ladder, was standing covered in red dirt and nothing but filthy shorts and a torn up T-shirt tied around his feet. And now he was pulling up a pair of these huge cow undies, excellent.
He jumped and gave them one last big pull to get them up when …
OOWWW!! He dropped them like a lead fart. As they fell around his ankles, he leapt out of them and danced around, holding onto his butt with both hands. I thought something in there must have bitten him. But it was FAR WORSE than that.
I shone the torch onto the nappy and saw straight away what he was complaining about.
It had an in-built plug! Yep, a plug!!
A cow BUTT-PLUG!! But why would …
CHUG … CHUG … CHUG …
Oh, oh, the tractor. We could hear it somewhere outside and it was getting closer. But where were we and where was the tractor? ChUG … CHUG … CHUG … Louder and louder, closer and closer. Suddenly the roller door BANGED, creaked, and RATTLED. A crack of light appeared along the bottom of the door, flooding the room with light as it started to lift.
CHUG … CHUG … CHUG … The sound of the tractor now boomed into the huge cavern as the sound flowed in through the gap. We PANICKED! Any second now MOLLY would be under that door like a rocket and we’d be goners for sure. I’d be the steak and Jared would be the toothpick.
Jared was still whimpering about his butt while we climbed up some of the boxes as fast as we could and dived into an empty one together. Using my secret agent ninja knife, I twisted a tiny eye hole for both of us. The roller door continued to clang and RATTLE as it rolled up then … BANG!! It sounded like a shotgun as it slammed to a stop. Well, that was one more mystery solved anyway. Because that was what we’d heard earlier. At least now we didn’t have to worry about a shotgun, well, hopefully not.
The sunlight blazed into the cavern, blinding us for a second. We could now see exactly where we were. That crappy little shed we’d seen earlier was hiding all of this in the hill behind it.
MOLLY came bounding in, with the usual amount of drool and slobber, stretching and bouncing like a yoyo of slime into the red dirt. OLD MR INDITE was reversing the tractor up to the conveyor belt. As he revved up the tractor, the trailer began to dump the cow poop, the conveyor belt started to roll, the mixer started mixing and MOLLY was howling louder than ever. The sound bounced and echoed within the cavern, making it ten times worse. It was getting louder and louder, the machine’s vibrations were smashing through my head as if it was being belted with a SLEDGE-HAMMER. It was deafening. We had a choice; either stick our nose plugs into our ears and risk throwing up all over ourselves from the tremendously disgusting smell. Or, leave the nose plugs where they were and have our eardrums shattered.
We knew what we had to do. I twisted the Blu Tack out from my nostrils and shoved them straight into my ears. Now that they were greased up with snot, they slipped in really easily. Jared’s hands were solid toe-jam gloves now, so I had to pull out his nostril plugs for him. They had way too much ‘nose grease’ on them, so I gave them a quick wipe under my armpits before shoving them into his ears.
At least now the noise was bearable, but we were both turning greener by the second. I didn’t know how long I could last and Jared was starting to make puffy ‘chuck up’ cheeks already.
The poop continued up the conveyor belt and dropped into the huge bowl. The blade began to struggle and turn, splattering poop through the air as it lowered. WOCKA, WOCKA, WOCKA … it sounded like we were standing right next to a helicopter taking off. The hoses were pouring different coloured liquids into the bowls, all at the same time. The mixer was turning, slooshing and splashing as the poop was churned to slush. Then it gulped and gurgled its way down through a funnel into the bowl below. After being slopped around in there for a while, even more secret ingredients were added. It dropped through the funnel and onto the conveyor belt, like a continuous sausage of melted chocolate. Then it travelled along and through the box that now had an orange glow coming from both ends. As it came out the other side, a huge blade was slamming down every second or so, and slicing the now-baked solid brown poop into sausage-sized pieces.
Jared was looking greener than a frog on St Patrick’s Day. The smell as the poop was ‘gooified’ and then baked, was utterly totally disgusting. More disgusting than Smelly Melly’s nappies … more disgusting than seeing old people kissing … and way more disgusting than Toffy Thomas at school. (Jared saw him picking his nose and eating it). Finally, as it rode along the conveyor belt it was being diced, sliced and chopped up by these big fans. Then it dropped onto paddlewheels that were designed to carry the poop flakes into the awaiting bags, where they were sealed and stacked.
And there it was, ‘INDITE MANURE’ … and INDITE poop was world-class poop. We were standing in our cramped, nappy box, cheek to cheek. At least this time it was our face cheeks! Nervously we continued to watch secretly from our hideaway, trying to breathe
as little as possible. Every time MOLLY bounded past us, the earth shook and we nearly added to the piles of manure.
OLD MR INDITE was shuffling between the tractor and putting bags of manure onto the truck. Even with his stiff leg, he managed to drag and toss those bags up onto the back of the truck with relative ease. It seemed to be taking forever. Then, at the flick of a switch … silence. He drove the tractor out into the little shed at the front, then turned and walked towards … US!
There was NOWHERE to go. How long had he known that we were in there? Through our peep-holes, we watched horrified as he limped, dragging his stiff leg straight towards us. And by the way he’d tossed those bags of poop, we knew how strong he was. He raised his massive trunk-like arms with humongous hands, the size of elephants’ ears, stretched out ready to place around our throats.
As he got closer, we could see his bony fingers and hairy knuckles flexing, cracking. The old loose skin was tightening like plastic cling-wrap around the bones and around his yellowing fingernails at the tip of his zombie-like fingers. Another step and he would be able to rip the box in two, shredding it like tissue paper. A hand would clamp around each throat and we’d be lifted into the air like rag dolls, feet dangling loosely as the blood drained from our heads.
We were about to meet DEATH!
His hands were so close now that their shadow fell across our peep-holes. His breath stabbed at our eyes, eeewww! I’ve never been in a cow’s gut … but I’m sure that’s what it would smell like in there. It was SOOOOO gross! His fingers cracked again as they straightened and reached towards the top of the box … beside us!
He grabbed the box beside us! Pheeeww!
In a split second, he had grabbed the box from right beside us and tossed it towards the roller door as if it weighed nothing. Then BOOF … a box from somewhere behind toppled and bounced off our hideaway. We teetered on one edge, then … SLAM! Our hideaway fell to the floor of the cavern, face-first as OLD MR INDITE continued tossing boxes up to the front. With just one finger poking up above my head, I managed to hold the top of our box closed. Jared had BLOOD running from his nose like a waterfall. But we had to stay completely still and completely quiet. Poor Jared was in agony and I was trying really hard not to let his BLOOD get all over me. Because that’s just really yucky!
