Return to Howliday Inn

by James Howe

  “As scrumptiously silly as his critters’ earlier adventures.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  PRAISE FOR THE BUNNICULA SERIES

  * “A clever tale abounding with puns, wild chases, and slapstick humor.”

  —SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL, starred review

  “A treat for all ages.”

  “—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY”

  Don’t miss any of the adventures of Bunnicula, the vampire

  rabbit, and his pals Harold, Chester, and Howie!

  How did Rosebud check out from Howliday Inn?

  The Monroes have gone on vacation, once again leaving Harold, Chester, and Howie at Chateau Bow-Wow, which Chester aptly dubbed “Howliday Inn” during their last stay there. The motley crew of boarders may have changed, but the creepy goings-on at Howliday Inn have not. A ghostly voice, buried bones, and a collar with the name “Rosebud” on it suggest that murder may have been added to the services offered at the kennel.

  A pair of yuppie puppies from posh Upper Centerville, two cat burglars (sisters-in-crime) named Felony and Miss Demeanor, a melancholy Great Dane named Hamlet, and a weasel named, well, The Weasel, join the Monroe pets in getting to the bottom of the mysterious happenings. But will they be able to escape the fate that may have befallen Rosebud?

  JAMES HOWE wrote the award-winning bestseller Bunnicula with his late wife, Deborah Howe, in 1977. The couple went on to write one other children’s book, Teddy Bear’s Scrapbook, before Deborah’s untimely death from cancer in 1978.

  After Bunnicula’s publication in 1979, James Howe quit his job as a literary agent to pursue writing full-time. His many other popular books for children include the six sequels to Bunnicula; the Tales from the House of Bunnicula series; the Bunnicula and Friends Ready-to-Read series; the Sebastian Barth mysteries; the Pinky and Rex series; and the picture books Horace and Morris But Mostly Dolores and Horace and Morris Join the Chorus (but what about Dolores?). He is also the author of several acclaimed novels for older readers, such as The Misfits, Totally Joe, Addie on the Inside, and The Watcher, and is the editor of the anthologies The Color of Absence: 12 Stories About Loss and Hope and 13: Thirteen Stories That Capture the Agony and Ecstasy of Being Thirteen. James Howe lives in New York State with his partner Mark Davis.

  Jacket design by Russell Gordon

  Jacket illustration copyright © 2007 by C. F. Payne

  ATHENEUM

  BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  Simon and Schuster · New York

  RETURN TO Howliday Inn

  Other Atheneum Books by James Howe

  Bunnicula: A Rabbit-Tale of Mystery (with Deborah Howe)

  Howliday Inn

  The Celery Stalks at Midnight

  Nighty-Nightmare

  A Night without Stars

  Morgan’s Zoo

  Teddy Bear’s Scrapbook (with Deborah Howe)

  There’s a Monster under My Bed

  Pinky and Rex

  Pinky and Rex Get Married

  Pinky and Rex and the Mean Old Witch

  Pinky and Rex and the Spelling Bee

  Pinky and Rex Go to Camp

  Sebastian Barth Mysteries

  What Eric Knew

  Stage Fright

  Eat Your Poison, Dear

  Dew Drop Dead

  Atheneum Books for Young Readers

  Atheneum Books for Young Readers An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, New York 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 1992 by James How

  Illustrations copyright © 1992 by Alan Daniel

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part or in any form.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11

  The text of this book is set in Garamond #3.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Howe, James, 1946-

  Return to Howliday Inn / by James Howe.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: In this sequel to “Howliday Inn,” the Monroe family pets are again boarded at Chateau Bow-Wow, where some spooky goings-on serve as a distraction from the kennel’s poor food.

  ISBN-13 : 978-0-689-31661-6 (ISBN-10: 0-689-31661-5)

  [1. Dogs—Fiction. 2. Cats—Fiction. 3. Animals—Fiction.

  4. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Title

  PZ7.H83727Re 1992

  [Fic]-dc20 91-29505

  ISBN 978-0-6893-1661-6 (print)

  ISBN 978-1-4424-5250-3 (eBook)

  To Zoe

  Contents

  Editor’s Note

  ONE The Omen

  TWO Gruel and Unusual Punishment

  THREE Things That Go Bark in the Night

  FOUR Rosebud

  FIVE The Meeting

  SIX The Secret of Chateau Bow-Wow

  SEVEN A New Arrival

  EIGHT Voices in the Night

  NINE Where Is Archie?

  TEN A Paranormal Experience

  Epilogue

  [EDITOR’S NOTE]

  IT was summer and I was getting ready for a three-day weekend at the shore. Looking around my office for something to read, I picked up a manuscript that had come in earlier that week from one of my authors: Pickling for Profit and Pleasure. It was clear a title change would be in order, but that aside it just didn’t strike me as beach material. I debated between two other manuscripts—a book by a country veterinarian called Just a Little Hoarse and What to Do about It and a seven-hundred-page first novel entitled Ah, Life!

  Thoroughly discouraged, I told myself I’d pick up a couple of Agatha Christie mysteries at the train station. But then there came a scratching at the door and my weekend reading dilemma was solved.

  For there on the other side stood my old friend and valued author, Harold X., an enticing manila envelope gripped between his teeth. Gently, he laid it into my hands and before I could so much as ask if he’d join me for a bowl of cappuccino at the trendy little cafe that had just opened across the street, he was gone.

  With eager anticipation, I opened the envelope and read the letter clipped to his manuscript.

  My dear editor and friend,

  Enclosed, please find my latest effort. As in the past, it is based on real events from my life and the lives of my family, the Monroes, and my friends, Chester and Howie. Bunnicula was staying with a neighbor at the time these particular episodes occurred. He was fortunate to have been elsewhere, for this was a terrifying adventure indeed. As an old and tired dog, I could well do without such adventures. But as an author, how can I be anything but thankful for them? After all, I doubt your readers would be terribly interested in a mystery called Why Is My Food Dish Empty?

  And so, here is the story of my fateful return to the place Chester once dubbed “Howliday Inn.” As always, I look forward to your response to my work and, I hope, its eventual publication.

  Yours sincerely,

  Harold X.

  I tucked Harold’s manuscript between the sun block and bug spray in my tote bag. I was ready for my weekend—or so I thought.

  If only Td packed a night-light.

  [ ONE ]

  The Omen

  IT was the third straight day of rain. The third day of listening to Mr. Monroe whistle the score of The Phantom of the Opera through his teeth while indexing his collection of meatless soup recipes. The third day of Mrs. Monroe’s saying, increasingly less cheerfully, “Channel Six says it’s going to clear by morning.” The third day of Pete whining about what a rotten summer it had been and Toby asking When was it going to stop because how could he try his new skatebo
ard? and Were they going to go on vacation even if it kept raining? and Why couldn’t they ever rent the movies he wanted at the video store?

  Not that the Monroes were the only ones getting, shall we say, edgy. No, even we pets—we who ordinarily exemplify a calm acceptance of fate to which humans can merely aspire—even we were losing it. My first inkling of this came when I found Howie racing around the basement on his little dachshund legs going, “Vroom, vroom.”

  “Uh, Howie, what are you doing?” I asked.

  “It’s the challenge of my career, Uncle Harold,” Howie panted excitedly. “I’m chasing hubcaps at the Indianapolis Five Hundred.”

  I would have had a little reality chat with Howie then and there if I hadn’t caught myself that very morning gazing into the mirror on Mrs. Monroe’s closet door and wondering if the time hadn’t come for me to try something different with my hair.

  Even Bunnicula, usually the calmest of us all, had taken to hopping around his cage as if the floor were covered with hot tar and twitching his nose so rapidly you would have thought he’d suffer from whisker burnout.

  Surprisingly, only Chester seemed unaffected by the elements. Or perhaps I should say that if he was affected, it was not in the way one would have anticipated. As the rest of us grew more irritable, Chester mellowed.

  “How do you do it?” I moaned on the third night, as the rain continued to pelt the windows and I tried in vain to find an acceptable spot for settling down to sleep. At this point, every square inch of carpet looked the same and I was desperate for a change. Chester, meanwhile, was curled up happily shedding on his favorite brown velvet armchair, an open book in front of him and a contented-on-its-way-to-becoming-smug smile on his face.

  “Why aren’t you going crazy like everybody else?” I demanded. “What’s your secret?”

  His smile grew more knowing. “Books,” he said, with a nod to the one in front of him, “are not only windows to the world, dear Harold, they are pathways to inner peace.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve tried books,” I said. “Fifteen minutes and all I ended up with was cardboard breath.”

  “Try reading them instead of chewing them,” Chester advised.

  “Oh.” This hadn’t occurred to me.

  Chester is a big reader. The problem is that his reading often gets us into trouble—especially considering the kinds of books he likes to read.

  “So what are you reading about now?” I asked. “The supernatural?”

  “The paranormal,” he said.

  “Well, that’s a relief. Pair of normal what?”

  “No, Harold, not a ‘pair of normal,’ the paranormal. How shall I explain this? The paranormal are experiences that are . . . beyond explanation. Like Bunnicula, for example.”

  Chester believes our little bunny is a vampire.

  “Or Howie.”

  “Howie?”

  “I’m still convinced he’s part werewolf. That’s no ordinary howl on that dog.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “Or,” Chester went on, if I may use the expression with regard to a cat, doggedly, “haven’t you ever felt that something was about to happen, you just knew it in your bones, and then, bam! it happened?”

  A chill ran down my spine. “Chester!” I cried. “I had a paranormal experience just the other night.”

  Chester’s eyes lit up. “Really? Tell me about it, Harold.”

  “Well, it was after dinner and I was lying over there by the sofa, where Howie’s sleeping now and . . . I was yawning and I felt my eyes growing heavy ...”

  “Yes? Go on.”

  “And I had this overpowering feeling that I was about to . . .”

  “What, Harold? Oh, this is really exciting. Go ahead.”

  “That I was about to fall asleep. And I did.”

  Chester looked at me for a long time without speaking. “And do you have the feeling that you’re about to experience pain?” he asked at last.

  “You mean right now? Well, no.”

  The book fell off the chair. It landed on my paw.

  “Ow!” I cried.

  “Never discount the paranormal,” were Chester’s parting words, and he jumped down and headed toward the kitchen in search of a midnight snack.

  I wanted to whimper but no one was around or awake enough to hear. This made me ask myself the question, If a tree falls on a dog in the forest, does the dog make a sound? I was eager to share this provocative conversation starter with Chester when my gaze fell on the open pages at my feet. I began to read.

  Harriet M. of Niskayuna, New York, reports the fascinating case of the phantom telephone conversation. “I had been talking with my sister Shirley for seventeen minutes late one afternoon before I noticed that the phone plug was disconnected,” she writes. “The next day I told Shirley what had happened and when. Stunned, she informed me that she had had oral surgery just two hours prior to the phantom conversation and her mouth was wired shut. She would have been incapable of speaking to me even if the phone had been hooked up!”

  Incredibly, Harriet herself suffered such extreme tooth pain the following day that she too was forced to undergo emergency oral surgery. While under the effects of anesthesia, she recalled her sister’s words during their nonexistent (??) conversation: “That new dentist is so cute. I’d do anything to see him, wouldn’t you?”

  “Amazing stuff, isn’t it?”

  I looked up at the sound of Chester’s voice as he emerged from the kitchen, licking milk from his lips. Now I understood how he’d remained so calm all this time. His brain had turned into a two-week-old banana days ago.

  THE rain stopped at exactly three o’clock in the morning. I remember the time because I was awakened just before the clock in the hall chimed the hour. It was not the rain that woke me, however, nor the ticking of the clock. It was a voice.

  “Harold,” it whispered in my ear, “something terrible is going to happen.”

  Go away, I thought. But the voice persisted.

  “Harold,” it intoned. “Wake up.”

  I knew that voice. Who else would wake me in the middle of the night just to tell me something terrible was going to happen?

  “What do you want, Chester?” I mumbled without opening my eyes.

  “I’ve seen an omen.” He was louder now that he knew he’d succeeded in awakening me. “Don’t you want to see it?”

  “That’s okay,” I said, yawning. “I’ll wait for it to come out on video.”

  “Very funny. Come on, Harold, it’s not every day you get to see an omen.”

  I was going to point out that it was night, not day, but I knew that the difference would be irrelevant to Chester.

  Howie was awake now too. He raced over to join us. “I want to see an omen, Pop,” he said to Chester. Howie, for unknown reasons, calls Chester “Pop”. “What’s an omen?”

  “A sign that something terrible is going to happen,” Chester replied.

  Howie shook his head. “I’ve seen signs like that,” he muttered, “NO DOGS ALLOWED. Don’t you hate that one? And, oh, here’s one that really means something terrible is going to happen: DON’T WALK, when the hydrant is on the other side of the street.”

  Chester pretended to ignore Howie. “Come on, you two,” he said. Apparently, he was unimpressed by the fact that I had both my front paws over my face and was loudly snoring.

  “Stop faking, Harold,” he said, tapping my eyelids. “Open up. Let’s go.”

  Much against my will, I followed Chester and the relentlessly energetic Howie into the front hall. It was then that the clock struck three and the rain suddenly stopped.

  “Look!” Chester commanded. “There, by the front door.”

  I looked, but I didn’t see anything I’d call an omen. I told Chester so.

  “Look again,” was his response.

  And then I saw it.

  There, next to the umbrella stand, was Chester’s cat carrier. It was open.

  “What’s that doing the
re?” I asked.

  “And what does it mean?” said Howie.

  I felt myself begin to quiver. “It resembles an open mouth,” I sniveled. “It means . . . it means . . . we’re all going to have oral surgery! Well, I’m not going! I don’t care how cute the dentist is.”

  “Harold!” Chester snapped. “Nobody’s having oral surgery.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s a relief.”

  “But it does mean we’re going somewhere and I don’t think we’re going to like it.”

  “Why do you say that?” I asked.

  “’We would have heard about it if it was anything good. You know what the Monroes are like. They tell us everything. But no one has said a word, so it must be a place too . . . horrible . . . to talk about.”

  There was a scuffling sound in the living room. We turned. Bunnicula was hopping about nervously in his cage. His eyes glistened in the dark.

  I ran to him. “Don’t worry, little furry friend,” I said. “Nothing terrible is going to happen.”

  “Mark my words,” Chester said, “we are doomed.”

  WHEN I awoke for a second time that morning, I noticed that the sun was shining. I also noticed that Bunnicula was gone.

  This wasn’t the first time his cage had disappeared without warning and as there had always been a logical explanation in the past, I didn’t panic immediately. No, I waited until I heard Mrs. Monroe say, “Good morning, Harold, we have a little surprise for you today.”

  A fleeting fantasy about chocolate chips in my Mighty Dog aside, I couldn’t help thinking that the surprise had something to do with Chester’s omen.

  Toby bounded into the living room just then, but stopped short when he saw me. His face immediately got what I call its “poor Harold” look. That’s when I knew I was in real trouble.

  He ran over and threw his arms around my neck.

  “Don’t feel bad, boy,” he said. “It’s only for a week.”