by James Howe
“Stop this!” the woman cried. “Stop this racket at once, hear? You’ll raise the dead!”
“Too late for that,” Chester cracked and started for a door leading to the rest of the house. Howie and I ran after him, barking all the while, only to be stopped by the shadow that fell across the threshhold of the room.
“What’s all the fuss?” said a voice I recognized as Bud’s. I looked up and saw that he was rubbing sleep from his eyes.
Chester tried to squeeze between Bud’s legs and the doorjamb, but Bud moved just in time to catch him in the ribs. “Now, hold on there, cat,” he said, “where do you think you’re going? Why’s everybody in such a uproar this mornin?”
“I think they’re jes worked up over bein’ out in the rain all night,” the woman said. “Ain’t that so, critters? I’ll give ’em all some breakfast and you go on upstairs and finish yer sleepin’.”
I saw Chester twitching to be free. When his struggles got him nowhere, he sighed heavily and dropped his head. Bud reached down and picked him up. “Nah,” he said. “I hear the others comin’. Why don’t we all have breakfast?” He carried Chester to the kitchen table and sat down.
“Well,” Chester said, over Bud’s elbow, “you’re getting your last request.”
I felt my eyes tearing up again. “I guess breakfast isn’t so important,” I said. “What I really wish is that I could see the Monroes.”
“Looks like you’re getting that wish, too, Uncle Harold,” Howie said. “Here they come.”
All at once the room was filled with people. Toby ran to me and threw his arms around my neck just as I’d imagined only an hour earlier. Mr. Monroe patted me, then scratched me between the ears. Mrs. Monroe cooed at Howie, and Pete ignored us all. It was almost like being home. Almost . . . except for the strange woman with the eagle eyes, the scar-faced dog, the man at the table who wouldn’t let Chester go, and the other man at the door who even at six o’clock in the morning was fondling a knife.
The woman began to busy herself at the refrigerator. “How about some milk, folks?”
“I don’t drink milk,” Bud said. Chester and I exchanged worried glances.
“Now how are you going to grow up to be big and strong if you don’t drink your milk?” the woman said. “Your brother drinks it all the time, and look at him.”
Spud flexed a muscle.
“I’m so glad the animals are safe,” Mrs. Monroe said. She took Chester from Bud and petted him gently. “I was so worried I hardly slept.”
“Well, I told ya Dawg knew his way around here,” said Bud. “I knew there was nothin’ to worry about so long as they was with him.”
“And fortunately we were with you,” Mrs. Monroe said. “I can’t thank you enough for taking us in out of that terrible storm, Bud.”
The other woman shook her head. “I have ta laugh every time I hear him called that,” she said. “It isn’t his right name, you know.”
Chester jumped out of Mrs. Monroe’s arms, landing by my side. “This is it,” he said. “Meet Fritz and Hans, the long-lost Transylvanian twins.”
“No?” said Mrs. Monroe, brushing cat hairs off her borrowed robe.
“Nope. This here’s Buford. And the other one is Spalding. They picked up those silly nicknames at college.”
“College?” said Mr. Monroe.
“Well, shore,” the woman replied. “My boys graduated cum-loudy. Buford here is a architect. Spalding practices law.”
“And one of these days, he’ll get it right!” Bud said with a loud guffaw. Spud crossed the room and whacked him one.
“Boys, boys,” said the woman. “Let’s set a good example for the young’uns.” And she nodded to Toby and Pete.
“Sorry, Mama,” Spud said, chagrined.
“We’ll behave ourselves,” said Bud. “Can I help ya out with breakfast?”
“Shore can, Buford. Why don’t you set the table? And, Spalding, put that knife to use for once and cut us some bread. Before anything else, however, I’d appreciate yer feeding these poor critters what’ve been out all night in the wet.”
Five minutes later, we found ourselves eating chopped steak out of silver bowls. “There must be good money in architecture,” I observed.
“Not if all his houses look like this one,” said Chester.
“Well, in any event, so much for your evil spirits.”
“Yeah, Pop,” Howie said, “these folks are real nice. A little weird, maybe, but nice.”
“Thanks,” said Dawg, slurping thirstily at a bowl of Perrier. “I think so, too.”
I had to admit that Bud and Spud did seem a lot less threatening in the light of day. As Howie said, they were definitely a little weird—eccentric, I guess you’d say—but they were far from evil.
“And the noises we heard last night?” Chester said, exercising his forehead muscles.
“Bud and Spud and the Monroes escaping from the rain,” I said. “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”
“But weren’t there noises before that?” said Chester. “Didn’t we all hear noises throughout the night?”
“That was probably Bud and Spud,” Dawg said. We looked to him for an explanation.
“Well, remember I told you that they were going out looking for something last night? They were going to find ‘it,’ remember? I don’t know what ‘it’ is, but I’ll bet that’s what all the noise was about.”
Just then, Bud, who had left the room while we were eating, appeared at the door with a cage in his hand. He held it high so that no one could see its contents.
“And now we have the answer,” Chester said. “If it’s a rabbit, you can bet these two clowns were named Fritz and Hans long before they were Buford and Spalding, or Bud and Spud.”
“Mama,” Bud announced, “this is for you. We was goin’ to save it for Mother’s Day, but we know how much you’ve wanted one. You keep such an eye out on us, we couldn’t look during the day. We had to wait till a clear night to fetch one.”
“Oh, now, Buford. Cut the preamble and just gimme! I’m dyin’ from the suspense.”
“Well, all right, Mama,” said Bud, lowering the cage. “Here it is, then. It’s all yers.”
Everyone’s eyes were on the cage as it came into view. I don’t know about anyone else, but I was ready to see a rabbit there . . . a rabbit perhaps with fangs . . . a rabbit with red eyes. The last thing I was expecting was. . . .
“A baby skunk! Oh, boys, come here and let me give you a hug.”
“Happy Mother’s Day,” said Bud.
The two sons dutifully kissed their mother’s cheeks as she took the cage from them. “Well, hello, you little darlin’,” she said to the thing in the cage. “We’ll have to get you descented. But first you’ll need a name. What am I going to call you?”
“Skunnicula?” I suggested to Chester.
“Ha. Ha. Very. Funny,” he replied through gritted teeth. Then, mumbling something about “lunatics,” he wandered off to a corner of the room, where he curled up for a nap.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, joining him. “Suffering from post-Saint-George’s-Day let-down?”
He grunted and shut his eyes. Soon Howie and Dawg were huddled in the corner with us, and we were feeling the warmth of the early morning sun as it poured in through a window. I was lost in my own thoughts about the night we’d just passed, a night full of adventures and dreams. It had been fun in a way; at least that’s the way it seemed, now that it was over. It was scary being lost in the woods, but I realized that the greatest fears had been caused by my own imagination—that, and Chester’s story, which I laughed now to think I had actually believed.
I picked up only snatches of the conversation in the room. I heard Pete asking for permission to call his friend Kyle ... yes, so early in the morning because Kyle was going away for the rest of the day . . . and no, it couldn’t wait, it was important, really important. I heard him talking in a hushed voice on the phone, then getting excited, then shouting: “It�
��s happened! It’s happened!” I heard his mother ask what all the commotion was about. And then I heard him say something about rabbits.
My eyes opened first. Then Chester’s. Then Howie’s. And finally Dawg’s. We all listened as Pete explained his phone call.
“It’s my other merit badge project,” he was saying. “The secret one. Kyle bought a rabbit, see. And I’ve been taking Bunnicula over to his house, and, well, we’re going to get badges in rabbit raising. And last night they had their first fryers, that’s what you call the babies, see, and one of them . . . this is the best part, it’s so cool . . . one of the little boy bunnies looks just like Bunnicula!”
Chester’s eyes glazed over. He didn’t move. And for the first time since I’ve known him, which is a long, long time, he was speechless.
“Pop looks sick,” Howie said. “Better bring the cat a tonic.”
“I don’t think it’s medicine Chester needs,” I said. “I think it’s a vacation.”
“Looks like his brain’s started out on one without him,” said Dawg.
“I thought we were on a vacation, Uncle Harold,” Howie said. “It’s been fun, hasn’t it? Even the scary part, right?”
I nodded and started to drift off to sleep. It hadn’t been such a bad vacation, really. There was only one thing missing. Right then, I couldn’t place it. But then the smell woke me and I remembered.
S’mores. Fresh from the microwave.
Toby gave me the first one out. Good old Toby. As I chewed contentedly, the Monroes began to sing.
“ ‘Someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah, someone’s in the kitchen I know-oh-oh-oh.’”
Howie, Dawg, and I howled along. And everyone was happy.
Everyone but Chester, that is. He hadn’t left his spot in the corner. His eyes were staring off into space. His lips were moving, but not in rhythm to the song. It wasn’t until we stopped singing that I caught a few words, and even then I wasn’t sure what to make of them.
Perhaps you, dear reader, will know what he meant when he said, “When the moon comes out on Saint George’s Day, the son also rises. And he’s here to stay!”
[ AUTHOR’S NOTE ]
I HAVE TAKEN LICENSE with the date of Saint George’s Day, a holiday observed in England on April 23. My source—and Chester’s—is Bram Stoker’s famous novel, Dracula, which gives the date as May 5.
Harold X.
The bunny’s back!
Here’s a look at the next Bunnicula adventure,
[ 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 skateboard? 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 fell 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. “1 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 pho
ne 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. Yd 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?”