Noodles the Cockapoo Stands Guard

Chapter 2

  Noodles threw the chew thing up into the air and ran to the chair by the window. He stood on the chair seat with his front legs up on the chair arm, his nose close to the glass. "Arf, arf!" he called out aloud, quite against orders.

  "Arf, arrrgh, arrr-ruh-uh-ah-Ah-AH-aahhHRrrrrRRRf! Rrroo-oo-ooo-oooo-oooooh," he continued, in ascending tones, ending in a lonely howl.

  In lower almost growly bass notes he added "Woof! oof! rrrrruff!"

  What he meant to say altogether was, "Please don't go," but it didn't come out that way.

  He watched Granny getting into the car. She adjusted the seat a little, fastened her seat belt, adjusted the rear view mirrors slightly, and started the car. "Arf, arf!" he tried again. Then he took a deep breath and sighed heavily as he exhaled. He watched the car roll out down the short driveway and into the street. She was, indeed, gone.

  He was alone in the big house, and he had to guard the whole place all by himself. The enormity of his situation hit him like a big splash of water. It was a big job. "ARF," he said one last time, loudly, and then shook his head and body mightily, as if he were actually wet. His ears flopped like Dumbo ears and his dog tags jingled.

  Noodles settled into the big chair, looking out the window. This was probably the best vantage point for guarding against intruders. He was, after all, only one dog. He couldn't keep all the doors and windows guarded at once.

  Later he would go on patrol around the house, checking up on each door and window in turn, sniffing around the door edges and the window ledges for any signs of suspicious activity. For the present he would station himself here at the front window until the morning traffic died down. Not that there was much traffic on their street. There was fairly little. There was some, though, especially early in the morning, and again late in the afternoon. It seemed best to Noodles to keep the street under surveillance for now.

  Gradually the morning activity outside faded to nearly nothing. Most of the cars went away, taking their people to work. Some of the children went away in the cars with their parents. Probably the children didn't really go to work, Noodles thought. Probably the parents took the children to school, and then the parents went to work.

  Other children, children who didn't go away in cars, passed by the window as they walked on the sidewalk, some alone, some in little groups of two or three. They gathered together at the corner, where they talked and played with each other until a big yellow school bus came. The big yellow school bus took them all away. Noodles supposed it took them to school.

  After that there were no children at all left on the whole street, at least none that Noodles could see.

  He wondered what exactly school was. He imagined it might be something like the obedience training where puppies were sent to learn human language and manners. He felt sorry that the children had to spend most of the day at a place like that, almost every day, and he wondered why humans would do that to their own children. Upon reflection, he decided that maybe he was mistaken in his guess as to what school was exactly. It must be something better than what he thought. Maybe it was really just a nice place where they went to play. That would explain why they didn't go to school in the summer; in summer they could play outdoors in the park every day, so they didn't need anyplace else to go play. Noodles shook his head again, and shook himself all over, as if he might be able to shake off his confusion over the matter.

  It was too big of a puzzle for him to figure out today anyway. He scratched under his chin with his back left foot and then settled back down in the chair.

  Almost no one was left outside for him to watch from the window. Occasionally a gardener did some lawn work on one of the front yards, or a delivery truck arrived and parked at the edge of the street while someone hopped out to deliver something to a house. Later there would be a postman. It all seemed quiet enough for Noodles to leave the window unguarded and go on patrol around the house.

  He stretched and yawned as he stood up in the chair. Then he hopped down onto the floor. He lapped some water from a water bowl as he passed it on the way to the next window. The window blinds on this next window were pulled down, so he couldn't see outside directly. He sniffed all along the bottom edge of the window. Smells of the outside leaked in even though the window was closed. There was the smell of freshly cut grass, because lawn mowing had been taking place in the neighbor's yard on that side. Noodles could smell that a squirrel had gone by recently. He could detect a slight smell of the river on the other side of the park. There wasn't any smell of dead fish, so he imagined the fishermen in the park hadn't done too well at fishing so far today. He stood and peered out for a moment through the crack of daylight between the side of the window and the window blinds. Nothing suspicious visible. The only sounds he heard from this direction were the predictable bird calls and chattering of squirrels, the occasional dog barking, the TV sets and stereos that people had left turned on inside their houses, occasional motorboats on the river, occasional cars passing in the distance a few streets away, the occasional honk of a distant car horn. Nothing out of the ordinary as far as the sounds. So, nothing to worry about at this window for now.

  He turned to inspect all the nearby cracks and edges and undersides of furniture where invading centipedes and spiders might hide. Nothing there.

  So he continued on around the house, like a policeman on his rounds or a soldier on patrol. The windows and the furniture all checked out okay, cleared of suspicion for this round. The fireplace always worried him. There was never anything suspicious that he could point to directly, but it seemed like an exposure. A bird could come down that chimney at any time. A squirrel could do the same. They never did, but Noodles was always on the alert for them to try it.

  One of the rooms upstairs smelled like a little boy. The little boy was Granny's grandson, but he didn't live here anymore. Sometimes Noodles went into that room and rested on the bed for a little while, imagining that the little boy still lived here and would be coming home from school in the afternoon. Noodles would close his eyes just for a few minutes and imagine running and playing in the park with the little boy. The boy would probably give him a better name than "Noodles," too. The other little boys in the park called their dogs more stalwart names, things like King and Rex, Max and Sparky, Shadow and Thunder. Noodles imagined that his own little boy would give him some wonderful new name, and Granny would agree to it, because Granny loved the little boy more than anything else in the world. Noodles knew this was true because Granny had told him the whole story about how the witch had taken the little boy and disappeared with him, taking away the one thing Granny loved the most of anything in the world. Noodles wondered where the witch had taken the boy. Maybe they had gone into the hole in space-time, the one Granny had warned him about this morning, the one that led through the interdimensional rift, whatever that was. That would at least explain why the witch had left the hole in space-time behind. She probably couldn't take it with her if she was going through it. Noodles sighed. Maybe if he could find the mysterious hole in space-time, he could find the little boy, and bring him back.

  Noodles settled himself down on the bed in the little boy's room, facing the open window. The window was open because it had a big flat square metal frame lodged in it. Inside the square metal frame was a five-bladed fan. The fan blades stood permanently still. It seemed as if the fan had just been left there in the window and forgotten, like the scattered toys on the floor and the Anime posters on the wall. It was as if the operation of time passing had been suspended in this room at the instant when the little boy left -- As if a remote control had placed the room forever on freeze frame. If there had been a clock in the room, Noodles was sure the time it displayed would not have changed.

  Noodles liked it that the window was lodged open. That way he could hear better, and he also got to smell all the different smells that told him what was going
on outside. He could hear and smell other dogs walking by on the sidewalk below, and he could hear and smell the people who were walking the dogs. Squirrels, birds, rabbits, cats all had their own special smells. Lawn mowers smelled of gasoline, but that smell was faint compared to the smell of the fresh cut grass they sprayed into the air all around them as they cut their way across the yards. Sprinklers and hoses made water smells like rain. Flowers opening their petals, the leaves in the trees, the kitchens of families cooking lunches, each had its own scent. He couldn't actually see much through the window, visually, but with his other senses he got a full clear image of the abundant activity of life happening in the world outside.

  There was a little balcony just outside the window, bounded by a low wall that would have blocked the view for Noodles even if the fan hadn't been there. On the adjacent side of the balcony Noodles could see another window and a door. He knew that those, if they had been open, would have led into the big room that had been the witch's den. Noodles had been inside that room. He had to patrol it, after all, when he made his rounds. That room had fancy air conditioning, a big television set, computer equipment, and a much bigger bed than the little boy had. What it didn't seem to have, as far as Noodles could tell, was a hole in space-time or an interdimensional portal of any sort. He had noticed a closet with its door closed, and he had never been able to inspect the inside of that. He decided he should probably sniff around the bottom and the edges of that door a bit more thoroughly, whenever he got to that part of his rounds. Maybe if he put one paw under the door and jiggled it a lot, the door might come open. It would be worth a try.

  Contemplating what his approach to finding the portal should be, Noodles found himself wondering if it was certain that Granny's stepdaughter was really a witch. He wasn't always sure he understood everything exactly right. Maybe Granny had actually said something else, and he had misheard the word. Could she have meant ditch, or glitch, hitch, itch, niche, pitch? Rich snitch? Switch? Twitch? None of those made any sense. He shook his head in that rapid shaking motion that means a dog is either wet or very puzzled by the situation. Maybe Granny was just talking about an abstract force of some kind: the evil WHICH had taken her grandson away. Which, w-h-i-c-h, not witch w-i-t-c-h. Maybe the evil was a thing in itself, and the evil had taken the little boy. Noodles reflected on that. Possibly some evil force had taken possession of the stepdaughter, controlling her mind, driving her insane. A parasitic space alien entity might do that, he supposed, or a demon. Perhaps it had taken over her soul and then made off with both her and the little boy. No, he wasn't buying it. Granny would have said "the evil THAT", not "the evil WHICH".

  Noodles stretched like a cat and yawned, then repositioned himself on the bed again, lying curled up with all four paws near his nose, and his nose near the open window. A little breeze stirred, bringing in more smells from across the river. He breathed in slowly and deeply. Then he nestled himself further into the blanket with a little wiggle, and let out his breath again with a long sigh.

  A flimsy mist of fog was coming in with the river air, smelling moist like morning dew, cloaking and blocking other smells the way a darkening sky dims a view of a panoramic landscape scene. In fact the sky was darkening visually too, now that he noticed it. It smelled a bit like rain coming in, but not quite. The fog thickened slowly as it crept into the room and dampened his senses ever so gradually. The less he saw and heard and smelled, the more he thought about ideas. The evil force might have come in through the portal and kidnapped both the stepdaughter and the little boy, he thought. On the other hand, maybe the stepdaughter really was a witch. The simplest explanation is usually the right answer, after all.

  Now, I'm not saying that Noodles fell asleep on duty, resting there on the boy's bed. Also I'm not saying that he didn't. Maybe what happened next really happened. Maybe it didn't. You and I weren't there, so we can't really know. Only Noodles was there. You'll have to judge for yourself whether you think what happened next really happened or not.

  Chapter 3