Nighty-Nightmare (10 page)

“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
]

I
T 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.