She slept, exhausted from both the day and the dizzying reality that her life had turned inside out, becoming an object that she could at least begin to see as something having a recognizable shape. Beyond that, all bets were off.
Sam couldn’t sleep himself. He had a human of his own, he was lying in the bend of her knees and they were all on this marvelous thing called a bed. Who could sleep?
He looked at the slumbering girl, her butt arched toward the ceiling, arms bent in a pretzel below her stomach and saliva pooling slightly on the pillow below her open mouth, exhaling wheezing half snortles unique to exhausted, happy fourteen-year-olds.
They’re so cute when they’re sleeping, he said to himself. I’m definitely keeping her.
Eager to explore the huge house, Sam jumped to the floor and wandered out of the room and into the upstairs hallway, which seemed to stretch for miles. Light glowed around a half-open door at the distant end. He loped toward it, curious who in this wonderful place would be up so late.
With a long nose, Sam pushed the door open. Uncle Hamish looked up from his desk, wireless spectacles balanced on the end of his nose. His face stretched into a beaming smile.
“Sam the Lion! Our champion! Come here, lad, and let me have a close look at you . . . and that marvelous tuft!” Hamish held his hands out wide, welcoming, warm.
Sam walked carefully toward the man in the pajamas. Hamish swept the dog up into his large hands and held him toward the lamp. With quiet awe, he moved his eyes over the perfect lines of Sam’s profile. “A once-in-a-lifetime masterpiece,” Hamish murmured.
“Thanks,” said Sam, licking Hamish under the nose.
Hamish looked startled. For a moment he considered returning the kiss but instead ran a hand across the top of the Duüglitz tuft, down Sam’s neck and across the length of his lanky back. “You and I are going to be great friends,” said Hamish. “And you are going to go great places.”
Hamish cradled Sam across his arm and walked to the open French doors looking out over the estate and the rolling hills glowing a milky blue below an autumn Vermont moon. He leaned his knees against the stone railing high above the ground, holding Sam up and out so he too could see to the horizon. “The McClouds are back, Sam. You’re going to be the champion of the world, dear boy. My champion.”
Sam hadn’t the slightest clue what that meant. But he knew the hands that held him firmly and that stroked his head with warmth and strength were not unkind. And he liked it.
But there was someone else in the shadows of the great room who had heard these words but did not like any part of them.
Cassius stepped forward out of the shadows of an alcove, the flickering firelight dancing across lips curled up with rage. His teeth—polished to a glistening brilliance with Dr. Doogie’s Doggy Dental Powder—sparkled. His eyes glowed with more than malice.
Murder.
“There is only one champion in this family,” whispered the huge poodle as he crept toward the back of Hamish, still holding Sam into the chilly sky against the low stone railing. “And it is not a ridiculous frankfurter on feet with a bit of laundry lint on his head.”
He stopped two yards from Hamish and Sam, facing the sky, breathing heavily, his breath misting from the cool air of the open window. A single impact at the man’s shoulder blades would send him and this new creature toward the stone porch far below. He hesitated for only one reason:
This was going to scuff his nails.
Still. Sacrifices had to be made.
Cassius bent his rear legs, preparing to spring.
Heidy awoke in her huge room, thirsty. She reached for Sam behind her knees. Not there.
She padded in bare feet out of the room and into the hall, whispering Sam’s name. So many rooms.
Heidy saw light at the end of the hall in her uncle’s study. She moved toward it, a faint feeling of unease urging her feet toward the light.
“Hot cocoa?” said Mrs. Beaglehole, stepping out from the hall’s darkness and in front of Heidy, scaring her. The large woman held a glass in front of the girl.
She was blocking her.
Heidy felt the hair on her neck rise.
“Poor dear,” said Mrs. Beaglehole. “You can’t sleep after the excitement today. This will help.”
“Have you seen Sam?” asked Heidy, suddenly suspicious and ignoring the glass.
“Why, no. But I’m sure he’s near. Go back to bed and I’ll look, dear.”
Heidy nudged the big woman aside and moved toward her uncle’s door. Reaching it, she flipped on the light switch, bathing the room in brilliance. Outside the French window on the veranda, Hamish spun around, Sam in his arms. He looked down to see Cassius behind him, crouched, ears down.
Cassius froze . . . then dropped to the floor, feigning a yawn to mask his murderous rage.
“Heidy. It’s so late,” said her uncle, surprised.
Heidy stood in the study doorway, blinking in the light. “Sam was gone. I didn’t know where he went.”
Mrs. Beaglehole and a pale Miss Violett came up behind Heidy.
“We do now,” Mrs. Beaglehole said with an odd, dark smile. She held up baby Bruno’s knitted sweater.
It had been violently shredded by sharp teeth.
ELEVEN
BEAST
Several months had stripped the trees of all their color, and winter was descending.
The school bus stopped at the gates of the McCloud estate. The door swung open while a dozen faces pushed up against the windows, staring, waiting, expectant.
Inside, the bus driver turned around to face Heidy, sitting three rows back. The girl looked terrified. The bus driver raised an eyebrow: Out.
Heidy took her backpack and held it to her chest. Like a shield. She stepped hesitantly down the steps and onto the dirt driveway, looking around nervously. She looked up at the kids staring down at her from the windows, waiting for something to happen.
Heidy moved toward the house slowly, trying not to make any sounds on the gravel with her shoes. She watched the afternoon shadows of the shrubbery and gate for any sign of movement. The kids’ eyes in the bus did the same.
The driver quickly shut the door . . . but didn’t drive off. She too stared out with wide eyes. Watching. Waiting. Looking.
Heidy glanced up at the looming topiary bushes carved into the shape of huge dogs and shuddered, but not from the growing chill of the late autumn. No, it was from fear of the thing that was surely near.
The beast.
It waited for her.
Somewhere close.
It watched.
Heidy knew, as did the others, that it would soon attack. Without mercy.
Heidy spun. A figure leapt toward her neck from the nose of the huge dog bush overhead.
The kids in the bus screamed, “RUN!”
She did. The beast hit the ground behind her and she could hear its foul, murderous breath exhale. Heidy slipped on the gravel, landing painfully on one knee, her backpack slipping off. She left it behind and made for the safety of the house a hundred yards up the hill.
The beast followed, snapping at her heels, teeth flashing, voice screaming in a primordial howl.
The kids screamed again and pounded the bus’s windows.
She wasn’t going to make it.
As usual.
The beast leapt, its claws digging deep into her argyle sweater. Heidy dropped from the impact, hitting the grassy berm beside the drive. Rolling onto her back, she fought off the snapping jaws while the horrified audience in the bus continued to scream.
The beast’s terrible mouth reached Heidy’s neck and she surrendered to the inevitable, lying back against the ground while his tongue did what it always did at 3:40 P.M. every school day and lathered the lower part of her nose with dog saliva.
The kids in the bus shifted from screaming to cheering. Michael Green turned to Shayla Morphy with a look of triumph: “She made it to the third sprinkler head. She’s getting better!”
Heidy lay on her back in the cold grass, Sam sprawled across her chest, front feet on either side of her neck, licking above her top lip.
“Sam the Lion. Missed me?” asked Heidy.
“Did,” said Sam.
“You wonder how my day was? Ah. Well. Esther Newberg asked to borrow my gym locker because she’d forgotten her combination and then she stole my gym underwear, wrote my name all over it in big letters and pulled it over a helium balloon and sent it up over the school assembly while we sang the national anthem.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“This is why I like dogs,” Heidy said.
“Exactly. We don’t fly panties.”
“How was your day?” she asked Sam.
“Busy. Slept. Ate a potato bug.”
“You didn’t rip up any more of baby Bruno’s clothes?”
“I told you,” sighed Sam. “That wasn’t me.”
“You didn’t puncture his baby bottle with your teeth? Or leave gnawing marks on his crib yesterday?”
“Nor did I eat the gardener.”
“Uncle doesn’t know what to think. Miss Violett thinks it’s Cassius. Mrs. Beaglehole told Uncle that it must have been you. She wanted to check your gums for splinters.”
“Anyone check Beaglehole’s gums?” asked Sam.
Heidy studied Sam’s eyes, not his teeth. She laid her head back down and stared up at the gathering clouds. A snowflake landed on her nose. “You just wouldn’t do those things. I know it. You couldn’t hurt anyone.”
“I feel bad enough about the potato bug.”
Heidy stroked Sam’s head, kissed him on his forehead and then gently pushed his head down so his long nose lay under her ear, where she could feel his breath on her neck, warm, moist, safe. She laid both her hands across his back as if someone were about to pluck him from her grasp. She felt his chest rise and fall with his breathing. Now snoring.
She couldn’t help but match her breaths with his. They breathed as one.
And slept.
From the second-story window of Mrs. Beaglehole’s room, Cassius sat staring down at Heidy below with Sam sprawled across her neck. One thought circulated through his beautiful head: That should be me.
Cassius looked up into the sky while the winter’s first good whopper of a storm began to move in, the darkness descending across the rolling hills. A gathering gale pushed frozen rain bouncing off windowpanes, sounding like needles falling on glass. The poodle’s black eyes became even blacker.
It is time, he thought.
TWELVE
SCREAMS
As always, Sam woke up for his 5:55 A.M. pee. He uncurled from Heidy’s inner knee, slipped from her bed and padded down the stairs and outside through the kitchen dog door.
Sam stood on the top step and sniffed with distaste the freezing dawn gloom beyond the porch overhang. Winter’s first snow was falling fast and thick. “How uninviting,” he said. He turned and looked at the rows of potted petunias that Uncle Hamish kept safely out of the weather, near the warmth of the house.
He lifted his leg and watered the one on the far right. It looked the most needy.
Returning inside to the kitchen, he was surprised to see Cassius, who normally slept until noon in his curlers. The poodle trotted up to him with a look of deep concern on his face.
“There’s a crisis, dear Sam. Poor baby Bruno is missing from his crib!”
“Missing?” said Sam. “He can’t even crawl. Do human babies fly?”
“I fear he’s been taken. Go, please check the eastern ridge. I thought I saw a dark figure moving up there through the blizzard. You’re better in the snow than me. My fur catches the flakes like Velcro and I freeze into a dogsicle. I’ll wake the others.”
“Right!”
Sam sprang with urgency. He turned and tore back through the kitchen dog door, into the driving snow and toward the eastern ridge beyond the aspen grove. He was forced to bound like a rabbit, his short legs struggling in the deepening drifts. He was past the aspens and close to the crest of the ridge before it even occurred to him how preposterous a thing it was that Cassius had just said. Come to think of it, Cassius was built perfectly for bounding around in a Vermont blizzard—plenty of fluff for insulation and pole-like legs.
If anyone was suited for becoming a dogsicle in the snow, it was Sam, not Cassius.
Just as this bit of obviousness was breaking through the early-morning fog of his still-sleepy brain, he saw the baby.
As soon as Sam left the house, Cassius turned and loped back behind the kitchen to the cook’s quarters. He entered Miss Violett’s room and stopped. He could hear the measured breaths of the woman and confirmed that she was still asleep. He continued into the adjoining small sewing room that had recently been turned into a nursery for Bruno. He looked at the crib, its front wall hanging down, exposing the empty interior. His chew marks were all around the clasp. Bruno’s blankets were ripped apart and strewn about the room just as Cassius had left them a few moments before.
Cassius decided the scene needed a coup de grace . . . a final colorful brushstroke to the masterpiece.
The poodle knelt down and took his right paw into his mouth. He hooked his sharpest tooth between the tough pads and sank it deep into the softer pink flesh below . . . just enough to break the surface. Then he rose on his hind legs until his front feet lay on the baby’s bedding. He held his paw over the white linen adorned with colorful cartoon characters . . . and carefully let three bright red drops of his own blood fall just to the side of a stuffed bear’s head.
Cassius stepped back, satisfied. He looked toward the still-sleeping Miss Violett in the adjoining room. He set his feet wide, arched his back, adopted a convincing expression of alarm on his bony face . . . and began barking.
Miss Violett’s screams started very soon after.
THIRTEEN
FIRED
At the top of the eastern ridge, Sam looked down through the blowing snow at the bundle of blankets tucked into a small blueberry bush. With a long nose, he prodded the folds until Bruno’s little face emerged. The baby yawned, stretched and looked up at Sam. He smiled as the snow tickled his nose.
Sam was confused. But only for a second, for his own nose had picked up a familiar scent as he pushed the blanket open, a scent easily identified in a house with only two dogs.
Cassius.
His mouth. His saliva. His hair spray.
The morning fog suddenly cleared in the dachshund’s now-racing brain. The fur along his backbone stood up as the final scent he sniffed overwhelmed his senses:
Danger.
What Sam didn’t sense at that moment was that the threat wasn’t to baby Bruno . . . but to himself.
Sam pulled the blanket folds back over the face of the giggling Bruno, grasped the material and pulled the heavy bundle from the bush and onto the soft snow.
He heard Cassius barking.
Turning at the sound, he saw Miss Violett in the distance stumbling up the ridge and through the storm, toward them. Behind her came Uncle Hamish and Heidy—everyone in their nightclothes despite the cold.
But Cassius was ahead of them all, barking, baying. He would reach Sam and the baby in seconds. One thought crowded out all others in a dachshund brain still churning, trying to make sense of it all:
Keep the baby away from Cassius.
Sam spun and ran down the opposite side of the ridge, his neck muscles bulging as he struggled to keep his head high, the bundled baby dangling under his mouth.
Miss Violett saw this and screamed again. Behind her,
Heidy and her uncle pushed through the snow with frantic urgency. “SAM! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? SAM!!” screamed Heidy, her voice hysterical and breaking from a swirling mix of confusion and fear.
Sam reached a low stone wall, which blocked further retreat. He set baby Bruno carefully against the wall and turned to face the quickly closing Cassius. Violett, H
amish and Heidy reached the top of the ridge and looked down on the two dogs, now facing off.
Sam was outmatched and he knew it. The poodle was five times his size and weight. The little dog planted his feet wide, placing himself between Cassius and the child. He put his head low. “I don’t understand any of this,” Sam said. “But I know you’re not touching the baby again.”
“Yes,” said Cassius, slowly, evenly. “I am.”
Sam locked terrified eyes at Cassius, his lips curling high in anger for the first time in his brief life. He spat forth a vicious snarl, punctuated by barks and the snapping of his teeth that echoed through the small valley.
And it was here, in a distant icy meadow below a black sky at the dawn of a terrible day, that Sam would demonstrate the other thing besides kisses that dogs uniquely offer people willingly:
Their lives.
But the people watching from the ridge above that day didn’t see this. All they saw was a crazed, probably very ill dachshund intent on killing an infant and threatening anyone that would stop him.
Cassius stepped toward Sam, who made a lunge at the big dog before spinning around to move back toward baby Bruno, where he would make his last stand.
This is when Uncle Hamish raised his rifle and fired.
FOURTEEN
DESCENT
Sam lay on his side in the snow and was even more unsure about what was happening than he’d been just seconds before. He knew there was a searing pain across the top of his head but didn’t know that it was from a bullet that had grazed his skull, leaving an ugly gash oozing the scent of blood: a first for the dachshund.
He couldn’t move, but his vision cleared and he could see Heidy clawing through the snow trying to get to him.
He watched Uncle Hamish still in pajamas drop the gun and tackle her just as she reached him, Heidy’s hair tangled and her mouth open. Sam’s ears were ringing too loud to hear that she was screaming.
Flawed Dogs Page 4
