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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.

“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.”

“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 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.

“Amazing stuff, isn't it?”

I looked up at the sound of Chester's voice as he emerged from the kitchen, licking milk from his lips. Now I understood how he'd remained so calm all this time. His brain had turned into a two-week-old banana days ago.

THE rain stopped at exactly three o'clock in the morning. I remember the time because I was awakened just before the clock in the hall chimed the hour. It was not the rain that woke me, however, nor the ticking of the clock. It was a voice.

“Harold,” it whispered in my ear, “something terrible is going to happen.”

Go away, I thought. But the voice persisted.

“Harold,” it intoned. “Wake up.”

I knew that voice. Who else would wake me in the middle of the night just to tell me something terrible was going to happen?

“What do you want, Chester?” I mumbled without opening my eyes.

“I've seen an omen.” He was louder now that he knew he'd succeeded in awakening me. “Don't you want to see it?”

“That's okay,” I said, yawning. “I'll wait for it to come out on video.”

“Very funny. Come on, Harold, it's not every day you get to see an omen.”

I was going to point out that it was night, not day, but I knew that the difference would be irrelevant to Chester.

Howie was awake now too. He raced over to join us. “I want to see an omen, Pop,” he said to Chester. Howie, for unknown reasons, calls Chester “Pop”. “What's an omen?”

“A sign that something terrible is going to happen,” Chester replied.

Howie shook his head. “I've seen signs like that,” he muttered, “NO DOGS ALLOWED. Don't you hate that one? And, oh, here's one that really means something terrible is going to happen: DON'T WALK, when the hydrant is on the other side of the street.”

Chester pretended to ignore Howie. “Come on, you two,” he said. Apparently, he was unimpressed by the fact that I had both my front paws over my face and was loudly snoring.

“Stop faking, Harold,” he said, tapping my eyelids. “Open up. Let's go.”

Much against my will, I followed Chester and the relentlessly energetic Howie into the front hall. It was then that the clock struck three and the rain suddenly stopped.

“Look!” Chester commanded. “There, by the front door.”

I looked, but I didn't see anything I'd call an omen. I told Chester so.

“Look again,” was his response.

And then I saw it.

There, next to the umbrella stand, was Chester's cat carrier. It was open.

“What's that doing there?” I asked.

“And what does it mean?” said Howie.

I felt myself begin to quiver. “It resembles an open mouth,” I sniveled. “It means . . . it means . . . we're all going to have oral surgery! Well, I'm not going! I don't care how cute the dentist is.”

“Harold!” Chester snapped. “Nobody's having oral surgery.”

“Oh. Well, that's a relief.”

“But it does mean we're going somewhere and I don't think we're going to like it.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“'We would have heard about it if it was anything good. You know what the Monroes are like. They tell us everything. But no one has said a word, so it must be a place too . . .
horrible
. . . to talk about.”

There was a scuffling sound in the living room. We turned. Bunnicula was hopping about nervously in his cage. His eyes glistened in the dark.

I ran to him. “Don't worry, little furry friend,” I said. “Nothing terrible is going to happen.”

“Mark my words,” Chester said, “we are doomed.”

WHEN I awoke for a second time that morning, I noticed that the sun was shining. I also noticed that Bunnicula was gone.

This wasn't the first time his cage had disappeared without warning and as there had always been a logical explanation in the past, I didn't panic immediately. No, I waited until I
heard Mrs. Monroe say, “Good morning, Harold, we have a little surprise for you today.”

A fleeting fantasy about chocolate chips in my Mighty Dog aside, I couldn't help thinking that the surprise had something to do with Chester's omen.

Toby bounded into the living room just then, but stopped short when he saw me. His face immediately got what I call its “poor Harold” look. That's when I knew I was in
real
trouble.

He ran over and threw his arms around my neck.

“Don't feel bad, boy,” he said. “It's only for a week.”

A week? Why did this sound familiar? I looked up at the spot where Bunnicula's cage had been and began to whimper.

“Bunnicula's okay, pal,” said Toby. “He's staying with Pete's friend Kyle while we go on vacation. Kyle's dad picked him up real early this morning.
I
said he should go
with you and Chester and Howie, but Kyle really, really wanted him to stay with him, so—”

I was out of there and into the kitchen before Toby could finish his sentence.

“Chester!” I cried. “Bunnicula is gone!” Chester barely looked up from his food dish.

“I told you we were doomed,” he said in the tone of voice he uses whenever he tells me we're doomed, which is on the average of twice a week.

Howie shook his head. “I can't get any more out of him, Uncle Harold,” he said. “He just keeps saying, ‘We're doomed, we're doomed.' Oh, and something about ‘that place on the hill.'”

“That's it!” I said. “The Monroes are going on vacation and we're going back . . . back to Chateau Bow-Wow.”

Howie's eyes were suddenly brimming with tears. “The place of my birth,” he sniffed, “my heritage, my roots. Gosh. Uncle Harold, can we take a camera?”

“That would be nice. What do you think, Chester?”

Chester apparently wasn't in the mood to discuss photographic equipment. “I think,” he said, “that you both underestimate the seriousness of our predicament. We escaped that dreadful place once, Harold. Will we be so fortunate again?”

I was about to reply when out of the corner of my eye I saw Mr. Monroe coming toward me, my collar in his outstretched hands. “Here you go, Harold, ol' buddy,” he said, with a throaty chuckle.

Just as I felt the leather strap tighten around my neck, I heard Chester mutter, “Who knows what new evil awaits us when we return to . . .
Howliday Inn?”

“H
OWLIDAY Inn” was what Chester called Chateau Bow-Wow, the boarding kennel where we'd once spent an eventful week—the very week, in fact, of Howie's birth.

“Aside from your being born there,” Chester told Howie as the three of us lurched about in the back of the Monroe's station wagon on the way to our—what had Chester called it again? Oh, yes, our
doom
—“the place is nothing but bad vibes. In the space of one week, Howie,
one week,
there was poisoning,
kidnapping, attempted murder, howling in the night—”

“That's not so bad, Pop,” Howie said. “Most movies have all that stuff in less than two hours.
And
you have to pay for it!”

“That may be,” Chester said, slipping from sight as he lowered himself to the bottom of his carrier, “but this is not a movie, Howie. It's reality.”

I wanted to remind Howie that Chester's definition of reality was not necessarily a match for Webster's, but I was feeling a little too carsick at the moment to do anything more than groan.