Charlie Changes Into a Chicken

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 1 (AGAIN)

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  INTERLUDE

  CHAPTER 3 (CONTINUED)

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  THE END

  About the Book

  Charlie is an optimist, but things are conspiring against him. His brother SmoothMove is in hospital waiting for an operation, his parents are trying to hide how worried they are, and the school bully is upping the ante in Charlie’s direction.

  The thing is, Charlie’s never really been stressed before - not properly, sweatily, heartpumpingly, stressed - and with everything going on at home, plus all the normal worries at school, he’s starting to panic. And this is bad, because Charlie’s just learnt that when he gets properly, sweatily, heartpumpingly, stressed, he turns in to an animal, all sorts of animals. A flea. A pigeon. A rhino. Who knows what’s next?

  The school play is only a couple of weeks away, and Charlie is starting to worry. What if he transforms in front of the whole school, while he’s on stage playing Sad Potato Number 1? What if he turns into a naked mole rat or a John Dory in front of everyone he knows, with the spotlight on him? Will he get sent away for Science to deal with? Will his parents crack up with all the extra stress? Will everyone know he’s a freak?

  With the help of his three best friends, Charlie needs to find a way to deal with his extraordinary new talent. And fast.

  About the Author

  Sam Copeland is from Manchester and now lives in London with two smelly cats, three smelly children and one relatively clean-smelling wife. He works as a chicken whisperer, travelling the world using his unique gift to tame wild chickens. Charlie Changes Into a Chicken is his first book. He has threatened to write more.

  For my father, Steve, who taught me

  how to laugh in the toughest times

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  This is Charles McGuffin.

  It isn’t actually him. It’s just a picture of him. OF COURSE. If you hadn’t figured that out, this book will be way too difficult for you and you should probably go and read The Really Simple Book of Dead Easy Stories for Total Numptyheads instead.

  Charles McGuffin was just like you and me. Well, he wasn’t like me because I’m big and hairy, and Charles is small and pretty smooth. So he’s just like you. Except he has a you-know-what, and I’m guessing many of you reading this don’t have a you-know-what. So Charles is like some of you.

  Except for one MAJORLY HUGE, MASSIVE difference.

  He can change into animals.

  As in, one minute he’s a normal boy, the next minute he’s a wolf.

  Or an armadillo. Or a danger noodle (which, as everyone knows, is the actual scientific name for a snake).

  OK, so that probably means Charles is absolutely nothing like any of you because nobody else can change into animals.

  I think it’s probably best if we start this book again, don’t you?

  Just pretend you didn’t read this bit, OK?

  This is Charles McGuffin.

  It isn’t actually him. It’s just a picture of him. OF COURSE.

  Charles McGuffin is absolutely nothing like you or me. He is totally, completely different. Charles is unique. Because Charles can transform into animals. Like danger noodles.

  Now, Charliefn1 was a pretty normal boy until about three weeks after his ninth birthday. He’d just come back from visiting his older brother, SmoothMove, at the hospital for the zillionth time. SmoothMove was quite ill and had been in hospital for ages and ages. This was really annoying because Charlie was convinced he could now beat his brother at FIFA on the PS4 and wanted to prove it. Also, the den in the garden needed mending and Charlie couldn’t do it by himself. And sometimes Charlie just wanted his brother back so he had someone to play hide-and-seek with. Playing hide-and-seek by yourself isn’t much fun – Charlie had tried.

  If you’re very clever, you might have guessed that Charlie’s brother isn’t actually called SmoothMove, but woe betidefn2 you if you were to call him anything else. Charlie’s brother’s actual name was Henry, but after a lifetime of being called Horrid Henry he would punch anybody right on the nose if they called him by his real name. He was twelve years old, sick of hospital and could still easily beat Charlie at FIFA, no matter what Charlie said. And he might have a girlfriend, but he would punch you on the nose if you said, ‘SmoothMove has a girlfriend.’ In fact, you’d do well to come away from any conversation with Charlie’s brother without getting punched on the nose for one reason or another.

  As soon as Charlie and his mum and dad got home from visiting SmoothMove, Charlie ran straight upstairs to his bedroom. He dived into his bed, under his duvet, and tried not to think about the ‘big scan’ that his brother had just been telling him about. After a while, he wiped his eyes and propped the duvet up with a tennis racquet to turn his bed into a tent. Once the tent was steady and stopped collapsing, he switched on his torch and began reading his favourite book. Charlie’s favourite book was about volcanoes. It had pictures of massive explosions and orangey-red lava, and he liked to imagine he was escaping certain death by sliding down the volcano, surfing lava and dodging explosions.

  The sound of his parents arguing downstairs rumbled through the house, low like thunder. Charlie closed his book. He couldn’t concentrate. Darkness had fallen outside, and the street light outside Charlie’s window was making uncanny shadows on his bedroom wall. The silhouettes of the tree branches looked a little too much like long, clutching witches’ fingers for Charlie’s liking, so, quick as a flash, he sprang out of bed and pulled his curtains together.

  It was there and then that it first happened.

  It began with a twitching in his eye. Charlie froze to the spot, feeling his eyelid blink manically. His eye had twitched before, when he’d been tired, but this felt different somehow. It felt like somebody had just plugged him into a wall socket. The twitching spread to his other eye, and both eyes were blinking and twitching.

  A feeling burst through the whole of his body, like he’d just been shot through an electrical wire, like he was the electricity. Every part of his body FIZZED and HUMMED. The fizzing and humming became stronger, until he felt he was on fire, but a fire inside a never-ending tube, squeezed and vibrating.

  His skin felt extraordinary. Alive. He looked at his arm and, with some considerable alarm, saw that hair was sprouting out of every part of his skin.

  Weirdly the room was growing larger too. But no, Charlie realized, the room wasn’t growing larger – it was him who was shrinking! Smaller and smaller he shrank, the room growing ever larger around him.

  And his body – Charlie hardly dared look – his body was transforming. Completely. Extra legs were growing out of him (which is every bit as gross as you could imagine). And finally he felt new eyes emerging out of his head (which was possibly even grosser than the new legs).

  Charlie recognized almost immediately that he was turning into a spider.

  And how did Charlie know this?

  He looked at the evidence:

  EVIDENCE 1: Charlie was now tiny. Admittedly he hadn’t been that huge before he changed, but he could see a dried apricot under his bed that he’d been saving for a rainy day, and he was now about the same size as the apricot. And normal nine-year-old boys usually aren’t the size of dried apricots.

  EVIDENCE 2: Charlie counted his legs and he had eight of them, which is about six too many legs for
a human, but just the right number for a spider.

  EVIDENCE 3: He was completely covered in short brown hair. Now, being covered in hair didn’t necessarily stop someone from being human – take Charlie’s Uncle Pete, for instance. Uncle Pete had taken Charlie swimming once and when he took off his T-shirt he had a back so covered in thick tufty hair a gorilla would have been jealous. All the other children had stopped and stared, wide-eyed and jaws agape, as Uncle Pete stepped into the pool, back hair fluttering in the breeze. Charlie had tried to forget this ever happened but the more he tried to forget Uncle Pete’s Hairy Back, the more it stayed in his brain because brains are annoying like that.

  EVIDENCE 4: Charlie was able to look nearly all the way behind himself, without even turning round. He reached up with one of his new, long, spindly black legs and carefully counted his eyes. There were eight.

  Eight legs? Eight eyes? Veeery suspicious.

  So Charlie looked at all the suspicious evidence and added small + hairy + eight spindly black legs + eight eyes together and got spider as the answer because it is a well-known fact that spiders are hairy and have eight legs and eight eyes. It’s a less-known fact that spiders also have eight bums,fn3 which is both disgusting and messy and also costs spiders loads of money in toilet roll.

  Charlie sat on the floor and considered his predicament. He had turned into a spider and he had no idea how to spider. He’d had lots of practice being a boy, but zero practice spidering. After a short while just sitting there being a spider, Charlie came up with a plan. The plan had two simple steps. They were:

  Step 1: PANIC!!!

  Step 2: Shout to his mum to come and help. He successfully carried out the first step of his plan. This mostly involved flapping his spindly legs in the air. After he’d panicked for an appropriate length of time, Charlie attempted to carry out Step 2.

  Step 2 was unsuccessful. And why was Step 2 unsuccessful? Have you ever heard a spider shout? No. Of course you haven’t. Because spiders can’t shout. Spiders can’t mutter, whisper, talk, chat, gossip, jibber-jabber or yodel in any way, and they definitely can’t shout for help.

  After a few seconds of silent shouting and furious leg-waving, Spider-Charlie sat on the floor, next to the fluff-covered apricot, and realized that Step 2 of his plan was just not going to work. So he decided to go back and repeat Step 1.

  Now just snap out of it, Spider-Charlie, Charlie thought after a few minutes of spider-panicking. There’s no point in panicking. Things are going to get better, because they can’t get any worse than they are right now.

  Charlie had never been more wrong about anything in his life.

  Things were about to get a whole lot worse.

  Any minute now, it will all be absolutely fine. Everything will be back to normal, Charlie thought to himself wrongishly.

  You see, Charlie is what’s known as an ‘optimist’. That means he looks on the bright side of things, and always expects the best out of life. This is, ordinarily, the best way to be.

  But perhaps being an optimist is not the best way to be when you have just changed into a spider. Then it’s perhaps best if you become something of a ‘pessimist’. A pessimist is the opposite of an optimist. Pessimists always expect the worst to happen such as:

  1. My football team will lose four–nil and I will score four own goals.

  2. I will absolutly fail my speling test on Friday.

  3. After suddenly turning into a spider, things will not suddenly become better but, in fact, they will become much worse because the family cat, a big ginger tom called Chairman Meow, will come into the bedroom and try to eat me.

  But Charlie was not a pessimist. He was an optimist. He was slowly calming down and panicking less because he was thinking positive thoughts.

  This was a very bad idea, because edging through the bedroom doorway was a fat, furry ginger cat called Chairman Meow.

  And Chairman Meow liked to eat spiders.

  And Charlie was a spider.

  You see where this is going? Finally so could Charlie. He froze in terror.

  Chairman Meow’s eyes glinted in the dark.

  Charlie spider-gulped.

  Chairman Meow lay flat, haunches in the air, ears pricked.

  Charlie accidentally let out an eensy-weensy, teeny-weeny little terrified spider-fart.fn1

  Parp-pfft!

  Chairman Meow wiggled his furry bum, getting ready to pounce.

  Time seemed to stretch like a rubber band. Then it snapped. Charlie sprang into action. He skittered under his bed as fast as his eight legs could carry him.

  Chairman Meow leaped after him.

  Charlie ran as far and as fast as he could.

  Chairman Meow couldn’t quite reach Charlie, but began to swipe at him with his fat ginger paws. Charlie ducked and ran and jumped past the jabbing claws. He reached the corner of his room, under his bed, cowering among old lollipop sticks and dusty Match Attax cards, a rotten apple core and a dead snail that he’d kept as a pet until it had escaped and at least now he knew where it had ended up.

  The swinging, swiping claws were getting nearer. Charlie had to think and think fast.

  And then he realized – he would have to spider his way out of the situation. He put one spindly foot against the wall. And then another. And another. And another. And ano– Well, you get the idea. He placed all eight of his feet on the wall. And then he began walking. Up the wall.

  Now this probably feels pretty normal to spiders, but Charlie did not feel it was in the least bit normal. Quite the opposite. In fact, as he climbed up the wall, Charlie would have been screaming at the top of his lungs, if spiders could scream (which as we already know they can’t).

  Spiders might not be able to scream, but they are able to see backwards, and this suddenly became a very useful, actual life-saving ability. Because Charlie saw behind him that Chairman Meow had spotted him. He could feel the cat thudding across the floor towards him through the vibrations in his spider-feet.

  Charlie ran faster.

  Chairman Meow pounced high, stretching to get Charlie.

  He just missed. Charlie ran as fast as he could up to the top of the wall and on to the ceiling just above the wardrobe. He stood spider-still, upside down, utterly terrified, as Meow prowled menacingly below him.

  Now this is as bad as it gets, thought Charlie. It can’t get any worse. It definitely has to get better from here.

  Charlie had still not learned his optimism/pessimism lesson.

  In two swift, lithe leaps, Chairman Meow sprang first on to the bed, and then on to the top of the wardrobe. Without warning, Charlie was trapped upside down in the top corner of his bedroom, looking down at his pet cat, who was now inches away from eating him.

  At no point had Charlie ever imagined that this would be how he would die: turned into a spider and then munched by a furry ginger cat. Life’s funny like that.

  This was it.

  The end.

  Game over.

  And there would be no starting the level again.

  The cat pounced, jaws wide.

  Without knowing what he was doing Charlie jumped. And as he did, something weird shot out of one of his eight bumsfn2 and hit the ceiling behind him. A long silver rope.fn3

  Spider silk!

  Now, Charlie was only nine years old, but he knew – deep, deep down he just knew, with wisdom beyond his years – that this would be the single weirdest, freakiest, most loopyfreaky-bananas moment of his life.

  And as Charlie soared through the air, swinging on his butt-rope, Chairman Meow watching wide-eyed and open-jawed, Charlie felt the electricity shoot through his body again, like he was being blasted up to a satellite and down into a mobile phone. He felt squashed and squeezed and pulled and stretched until he was huge, vast, the size of a boy again, and he could see his own legs back and his own arms, and he fell, fell and finally KER-RASHED on to his bed.

  Charlie was no longer a spider. He was back to being a normal boy.

&n
bsp; He lay there panting, staring at Chairman Meow, who still sat on top of the wardrobe, looking down at Charlie with as much disbelief as a cat can muster.

  Charlie’s bedroom door suddenly burst open. It was his mother, and she looked furious.

  ‘Charles McGuffin! Do NOT jump on your bed! I have told you before: you will break it.’

  ‘But, Mum –’

  ‘Don’t “but, Mum” me. If you break it, then you’ll have to sleep on the floor because we can’t afford to buy you a new one. Honestly – it sounded like you were crashing through the ceiling.’

  ‘But, Mum, I was a spider!’

  ‘Spiders don’t crash around like parachuting elephants.’

  ‘But I changed back into me! Chairman Meow was about to eat me and I jumped out of the way and then when I was flying through the air I changed back into a boy and my bum-silk snapped and I crashed on to the bed.’

  ‘Your bum-what? Actually, never mind. I don’t want to know. Just, next time, try to land more gently. And, Chairman Meow – do not ever try to eat Charlie again.’

  To be fair to Chairman Meow he did look a little shame-faced.

  ‘You don’t even believe me, do you? That I turned into a spider.’ Charlie eyed his mum with a hurt expression. ‘It wasn’t just imagination, you know. It really happened.’

  ‘Of course I believe you.’

  She didn’t. Charlie could tell by her voice and the little smile hiding at the corner of her mouth that she didn’t really think he had actually turned into a spider but that he was just playing a game.

  ‘Now, Spider-Man,’ Charlie’s mum continued, ‘can you crawl downstairs for your dinner?’

  Charlie couldn’t help but smile back.

  ‘Yeah. What is it?’

  ‘Flies.’

  Charlie’s mum winked at him, and Charlie laughed, a lovely warm feeling spreading in his belly. He bolted down the stairs, only now realizing how starving hungry he was. Nearly getting eaten certainly gave you an appetite.

  ‘And anyway,’ Charlie’s mum said as they sat down at the table, ‘didn’t you say you wanted to be a web designer when you’re older?’