“Besides, if the theater is torn down,” said Toby, “tonight’s movie will be the last one shown there. Ever! We don’t want to miss that, do we? It’s so unfair. Now we’re going to have to go all the way out to the mall to see movies.”
“Big wazoo!” said Pete, rolling his eyes. If eye-rolling were an Olympic event, Pete would be a gold medalist.
I didn’t stick around to hear the rest of the conversation. Having thoroughly cleaned my dish, I retired to the living room to begin the important task of wondering where my next meal would come from. Howie and Chester joined me.
“Chester,” I said.
“Are you going to tell me you’re worried the Monroes will forget to put food in your dish before they leave?” he asked.
“I most certainly was not!” I replied indignantly. How did he always know?
There was something else I wanted to ask him, of course—something about what he’d said the night before—but I couldn’t bring myself to ask it just then. I don’t know why. Perhaps I didn’t want to have to face the answer I suspected he would give me.
In any event, we weren’t left in peace for long. Mr. and Mrs. Monroe began bustling about, which mostly meant piling things into their car, and it struck me that most Saturdays were composed of piling a lot things into the car in the morning and taking a lot of things out of the car in the afternoon. I never noticed if they were the same things or not, but I’d concluded long ago that it was just one of those bizarre human rituals destined not to make a great deal of sense. Meanwhile, Pete applied himself seriously to the task of finding ever new and creative ways to be annoying, while Toby took Howie and me out for a morning romp. When we got back I went into immediate nap mode.
I was awakened some time later by the sound of Toby’s voice, soft and close, and the feel of his arms around my neck.
“I’m worried about Bunnicula, boy,” he whispered in my ear. “Keep an eye on him, will you? Gee, if anything ever happened to him …”
I whimpered sympathetically and Toby sighed.
“Good old Harold,” he said. “At least I’d still have you.”
A tennis ball bounced off the top of my head.
“Nice catch, Harold!” Pete shouted.
“Mom!” Toby bellowed.
Mrs. Monroe emerged from the kitchen, her arms full of posters similar to the one Pete had been carrying earlier. “Come on, you two,” she said. “We’re going to be late for the rally. And will you please stop fighting? What happened to that promise you made me on Mother’s Day? It’s not even two weeks and the two of you are going at each other like cats and dogs. What am I saying? Harold and Howie and Chester get along better than you do.”
The car horn honked.
“Let’s go,” Mrs. Monroe said. “Your father is getting antsy.”
Toby gave me another squeeze, and the family was gone.
Chester glared at me.
“What?” I said.
“Why did Toby say, ‘At least I’d still have you,’ Harold? Why didn’t he say, ‘At least I’d still have you and Chester’?”
“May I remind you that just yesterday you deposited a hairball in his sneaker?”
“That was hardly my fault! I thought it was Pete’s sneaker.”
“Good point,” I said. “But still you can understand—”
“Yes, yes,” said Chester, dropping to the floor and stretching out. Cats have more ways of changing the subject than kids have excuses for not doing their homework.
Seeing that the subject was changed, however, I decided this was the moment to find out the truth.
“Chester, you said something yesterday,” I began.
“Yes, and I’m sorry, Harold. I never should have called you a mindless mutt.”
“Oh, that,” I said. “I wasn’t talking about that.”
“But it was unkind of me,” Chester went on. “Not to mention redundant.”
“It’s all right, Chester. I don’t even hear your insults anymore.”
“You don’t?”
Ignoring Chester’s wounded look, I persevered. “You said that there was no need to worry about Bunnicula anymore, that the matter was under control. What did you mean by that?”
Chester smiled slyly. “I think you know what I mean. Sometimes it’s best to leave certain things unsaid.”
“But—”
Just then, Howie came bounding into the room. “Don’t go in the yard!” he cried out, his voice full of alarm.
“What is it?” I woofed, racing to the window to see what was going on.
“I just finished reading FleshCrawlers number fifty-two, Don’t Go in the Yard. It’s about this boy named Skippy Sapworthy who moves with his parents into this creepy old house and he’s told never to go into the yard, but one night he—”
“Howie,” Chester said.
“Yes, Pop?”
“The best way to overcome your fear is to face it. Why don’t you and Harold run along and play outside for a while?”
“In the yard?”
“In the yard.”
Howie looked at me. “Want to, Uncle Harold?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t mind a little fresh air,” I told him. “Coming, Chester?”
“Not just now,” said Chester. “There’s something I need to do. But don’t let me stop you. Run along and play.”
It was only moments later as Howie and I were tussling over an old rag in the backyard that Chester’s words hit me.
“What fools!” I exclaimed. “Every day for the last few weeks, Chester has told us to run outside and play and, being the obedient dog-types we are, we do it! Howie, don’t you see?”
Howie looked surprised by my question. “Of course I see, Uncle Harold,” he said. “And I hear and I smell and I taste and I—”
“No, no. I mean, don’t you see what Chester is up to? He’s gotten us out of the house so he can, so he can …”
“So he can what?” Howie asked.
I looked at him blankly. “I don’t know,” I said, “but there’s one way to find out.”
As stealthily as we could, we made our way across the yard, through the pet door and into the kitchen, where we were stopped in our tracks by the strangest sound emanating from the living room.
Slurp, slurp, slurp.
Was it Bunnicula, sucking the juice out of vegetables? It couldn’t be—he was never awake during daylight hours. Suddenly, the terrible truth hit me—it was Chester! Chester had become a vampire! He was sucking the lifeblood out of Bunnicula! That’s why he said there was nothing to worry about anymore. That’s why Bunnicula had become so listless! It was all too beastly to believe, too awful to face, yet I knew I must face it, must fling open the door that separated us, and put an end to Chester’s hideous deeds!
“Be brave,” I told young Howie, without explaining why he would need to be. How could I tell him what lay on the other side of that door, what violation of all that was good and decent accounted for those seemingly innocent slurping sounds?
“Now!” I said, and with Howie at my side, I butted the door open, charged into the living room, and cried out in wild desperation, “The game is up, Chester! I know you’re a vampire! Let the bunny go!”
Chapter 3
Do Not Litter!
“HAVE you completely lost your mind?” Chester asked.
Had I not worked myself up into such a state, I might have asked him the same thing. There he was inside Bunnicula’s cage, all hunched up next to the sleeping rabbit, the hair and whiskers around his lips slick and matted with …
Carrot juice?
“Fine, so you’re not a vampire,” I said, trying to sound calm despite my heart’s pounding reminder that I was anything but. “You are drinking Bunnicula’s carrot juice, though, are you not?”