“No,” I heard Mrs. Monroe say, “you don’t have to go. You can go over to Jared’s house if you want.”
“You’re such a wuss,” Pete said to his brother. “Don’t you want to see it get knocked down? It’s going to be so cool!”
“If you’re going to cheer,” Mrs. Monroe said then, “maybe you should go to Kyle’s house, Pete. Our committee is going to register one final protest. No, it won’t stop the wrecking ball at this point, but it’s important for us to be there as a voice, as a conscience, Pete. The movie house is the most beautiful and architecturally interesting building in Centerville. It should be preserved, not torn down. We live in a throwaway society. Someone has to be there to say, ‘This is wrong.’ Do you understand?”
“Can I have chocolate milk for breakfast?” Pete asked.
Mrs. Monroe sighed. “It’s ‘may I,’ and yes, you may,” she said.
“I want to be a conscience,” Toby piped up. “Like you and Dad. I’ll go.”
Conscience. There was something about that word—and then my fuzzy, half-awake brain remembered.
“Howie!” I cried.
Howie jumped up from where he was sleeping and bumped his head on the underside of the coffee table.
“Ouch! What?” he asked.
I answered with one word: “Bunnicula!”
We were out of the house in ten minutes flat. Okay, we might have been faster if we hadn’t stopped off in the kitchen to have breakfast first. But we needed our strength. Besides, we didn’t want to make the Monroes suspicious.
By the time we got to the theater, a crowd was already beginning to gather. There were even a couple of reporters and TV cameras. And there, standing near the trucks, were several burly men glancing at their watches.
“They’re going to start tearing the building down soon,” I said to Howie. “I hope we didn’t wait too long!”
Making sure we weren’t being watched, we sneaked down the alley next to the theater until we came to a door marked stage entrance. Luckily, it was open, probably to allow the workers to make their final preparations.
“Okay, Howie, this is it,” I said. “We’ve got to move fast. Are you nervous?”
“Wh-h-h-h-ho, m-m-m-m-me?” Howie replied. His tongue was hanging out of his mouth, his breath was coming in quick, short pants. “N-n-n-no, I’m n-n-not n-n-n-n-n-nervous!”
I decided this was no time for a debate. “Good,” I said, “then let’s go.”
The theater was dark and cool inside. Enough light leaked through from cracks and windows here and there to help us see where we were going, but we still managed to bump into things with every fifth or sixth step. Every time we did, Howie would yip excitedly.
“Ssh!” I admonished him. “We don’t want to scare Bunnicula.”
And then softly, softly I called out his name: “Bun-nic-ula! Bun-nic-ula!”
“Bunnicula!” Howie echoed. “It’s us, Howie and Harold.”
The farther we crept into the abandoned theater, the creepier the shadows became, the eerier the silence. At one point, I thought I heard something moving. I stopped and listened and realized that all I’d been hearing was the pounding of my own heart.
We were in the middle of a very large and very empty room. Having never been in a movie theater before, I couldn’t make much sense of it. Then I remembered Mr. Monroe saying that all the seats were being taken out before the demolition began. Apparently, this was the room where people came to watch the movies. There at one end was a big white wall. And there at the other end was a wall with two doors in it. Very high in the center of that wall was a small square opening neatly framing the silhouette of a figure—a figure with two tall ears.
“Bunnicula,” I said in a hushed voice.
Howie heard me and looked up, too.
“But, Uncle Harold,” he said, “How can Bunnicula be awake? It’s daytime.”
“There’s no sunlight in here,” I pointed out. “Bunnicula must think it’s still night. Now come on—we don’t have a moment to lose.”
As we made our way cautiously out of the large, empty room, through one of the doors, and up a set of stairs that would take us—I hoped—to the small square opening in the wall that held our friend Bunnicula, I heard the same clock I’d heard the night before. Only now, it chimed nine times.
Nine o’clock. Why, I asked myself, did that seem significant?
And then I remembered. The demolition was scheduled to begin at nine o’clock this Tuesday morning.
I picked up the pace, and Howie scampered after me. At the top of the stairs, we came to a half-open door. Behind it was a small room—and there on the wall to our left was the opening we’d seen from below. In the shadowy light, I could make out a pair of eyes glistening. Red eyes. Frightened eyes.
“Bunnicula!” I cried.
I was all set to leap up and grab him by the neck when another set of eyes stopped me dead in my tracks.
“Uncle Harold!” Howie called out in alarm. He too had seen them. I could hear him panting rapidly behind me.
“Is it B-Bunnicula’s m-mother?” he sputtered.
Was it? I asked myself. Or was it someone else? Something else? Had Howie’s FleshCrawler books gotten to me? Was I imagining some sort of creature who lived in the movie theater, some beast who was about to leap out from the shadows and attack?
There was no time to waste. Either the beast would get us or the wrecking ball would.
“Who are you?” I demanded. “What do you want?”
“Oh, I think you know who I am,” a familiar voice said. “And I know you know what I want.”
“Chester!” I cried. “But how—”
“How did I get here?” Chester said, stepping out into a pale pool of light. His eyes looked unnatural, possessed. “Oh, it was easy enough, thanks to last night’s handiwork of a couple of criminal kitties. When Greenbriar opened my cage this morning, I made a dash for it before he spotted the open window. I got here moments before you did, Harold. Oh, and by the way, whatever you had planned, forget it. Bunnicula is mine!”
“But what are you going to do?”
Chester bounded up to the opening in the wall with a single leap. Bunnicula barely budged. I could tell the poor thing was terrified.
“What am I going to do? I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” Chester said.
But that was all he had time to say, for suddenly there was a thunderous roar, and before we knew what was happening, the wall to our right exploded.
“Run!” I heard Chester cry.
I looked up at the opening in the wall and to my horror watched as Chester and Bunnicula, locked in a deadly embrace, tumbled from the precipice. The scene from the story Toby had read to me flooded my mind, its words, its images exploding within me even as the room seemed to be exploding around me. I thought of Chester, my dear friend, who had so recently called me traitor, and the words of the story came back to me: “It was the last that I was ever destined to see of him in this world.”
Before the terrible wrecking ball could strike again, I ordered Howie to run for his life. I ran, too. And I didn’t look back.
Chapter 10
One of the Family
“HAROLD!” Toby cried out. “Howie!”
Frantically, I raced toward my young master even as I searched the onrushing crowd for signs of Chester and Bunnicula, hoping against hope that they had miraculously escaped and were somehow already out there in front of the theater. But as Toby threw his arms around me, I knew that the only ones to have escaped were Howie and me.
“Are you okay, boy?” Toby asked. “What are you doing here?”
Mrs. Monroe had picked Howie up and was trying to comfort him, but Howie was squirming to be free.
“We’ve got to go back, Uncle Harold!” he yipped. “We’ve got to rescue Pop and Bunnicula!”