Дебора Хоу - Return To Howliday Inn

Return to Howliday Inn (Bunnicula)

James Howe

To Zoe

[ 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 I’d packed a night-light.

CHAPTER 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 pet&—we who ordinarily exemplify a calm acceptance of fate to which

2

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

3

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.”

4

“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

5

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!”