Free Nighty-Nightmare by James Howe

which is a long, long time, he was speechless.
    â€œPop looks sick,” Howie said. “Better bring the cat a tonic.”
    â€œI don’t think it’s medicine Chester needs,” I said. “I think it’s a vacation.”
    â€œLooks like his brain’s started out on one without him,” said Dawg.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œ ‘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
    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.”
    â€œUh, Howie, what are you doing?” I asked.
    â€œIt’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 twitchinghis 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.
    â€œHow 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.