Bunnicula Meets Edgar Allan Crow

ONE

The Letter

The trouble began with a letter that arrived at three o’clock on an early October afternoon. The hour was struck by the grandfather clock not far from where I lay dozing near the front door of the house. Howie began yipping his puppy head off at the unseen mailman on the other side of the door, and before I could think to move, a cascade of paper came showering down on me from the mail slot over my head. All in all, it was an ominous awakening.

“Howie,” I said, shaking off my drowsiness along with the envelopes and magazines, “that’s Joe. He’s not here to rob us; he’s here to deliver the mail. You know Joe. Why do you always bark at him?”

Howie looked appalled that I would ask such a question. “It’s my job,” he declared, “my duty as a canine. Gee, Uncle Harold.” (Howie calls me Uncle Harold even though we’re not related. I guess it’s because he looks up to me—and who can blame him for that?)

Chester jumped down from his favorite chair in the adjoining room and sauntered over. “And you call yourself a dog,” he snickered.

“I am a dog,” I replied defensively. “I just don’t care for the sound of barking. You know that, Chester.”

Chester didn’t respond. Distracted by something he’d spotted in the pile of scattered pieces of mail, he let out a loud gasp.

“What is it?” I asked, the hairs rising along the ridge of my back. If I hadn’t been half-asleep, I might have had the good sense to keep that particular question to myself, knowing as I do that Chester’s gasping is rarely cause for alarm. He is, after all, a cat, which means he tends toward the, shall we say, dramatic.

“Look for yourself!” he went on, jabbing a paw at the envelope lying closest to me. “It’s a crow!”

“Did you say ‘crow’?” Howie asked excitedly. He darted down the hall, through the kitchen, and out the pet door before you could call out, “Be back in time for dinner!”

Chester shook his head. “I fail to understand Howie’s obsession with chasing birds,” he said.

I sighed. “It must be part of his job.”

“Well,” said Chester, “one of these days his ‘job’ is going to get him into a heap of trouble. Crows are not to be messed with, my friend. They’re nefarious. Just look at that one.”

Yawning, I glanced at the crow on the envelope to see what all the fuss was about. What I saw was a crow. On an envelope. I didn’t think it looked particularly nefarious. Of course, I had no idea what “nefarious” meant. When I asked Chester for a definition, he started bathing his tail.

“Aha!” I said. “You’re stalling. You don’t know what ‘nefarious’ means either, Mr. Big Words Fancy Pants!”

Ordinarily, Chester would have been offended by being called Mr. Big Words Fancy Pants, but apparently he didn’t care to be offended. He also didn’t care to define “nefarious.”

“I’ll tell you this,” he went on, dropping his tail. I noticed there was a hair stuck to his tongue. “Crows are omens, Harold.”

I rolled my eyes. Chester sees omens everywhere. Just the other day, he thought he saw an omen in Mr. Monroe’s oatmeal. I pointed out that it was a raisin.

“Raisins can’t be omens?” he’d asked.

I would love to tell you that Chester is a deep thinker, but I don’t think “deep” is quite the right word. I, however, have been known to think deeply on occasion. And that is what I was doing now as I studied the image of the crow on the envelope. It looked familiar somehow.

Just then a key turned in the door. Having a pretty good idea of who would be coming in, I leaped to my feet to get out of the way fast. Pete, the older of the two boys with whom I reside, burst into the house, his flying backpack preceding him. The backpack landed with a thud and slid down the hall toward the kitchen, sending Chester scampering halfway up the stairs to the second floor.

“What’s the matter with him?” Chester hissed. “He’s even grumpier than usual.”

As if Pete actually understood what Chester was saying (which he never does; unlike his younger brother, Toby, Pete is as thick as Alpo when it comes to understanding us pets), he stomped into the living room, kicked the corner of the sofa, and snarled, “I’m never speaking to Kyle again!” It was a good thing Mrs. Monroe wasn’t there. She doesn’t approve of kicking sofas. (She doesn’t approve of chewing pillows, either. But that’s another story.)

Now, I’m not what you’d call Pete’s biggest fan. Toby I can’t get enough of, but Pete? Let me put it this way. Ever since he was five and decided I’d look better with what he called a “military cut,” I’ve tried to steer clear of the kid. It’s been seven years and I’m still not convinced that all my hair has grown back. Still, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. Kyle has been his best friend from even before the unfortunate haircutting incident. They’d had fights before. Friends fight. Why, even Chester and I have been known to have our little disagreements from time to time. But I’d never seen Pete kick a sofa because of Kyle. This was serious.

I decided the best strategy was to give my attention to Toby, who was just coming in the door. I greeted him with my usual enthusiasm, which is to say heavy whimpering, a few deep-throated woofs, lots of licks, and what we in the dog trade call the “I’m-your-best-friend-so-please-please-please-don’t-ever-leave-me-again” treatment. Toby bent down and let me lick his face all over, then patted me on the head. He tried to pat Chester’s head, too, but Chester would have none of it. He pulled away, demonstrating what those in the cat trade call the “If-you-think-you-can-make-up-for-leaving-me-by-giving-me-a-lousy-pat-on-the-head-when-you-get-back-you’d-better-think-again-Buster” treatment.

Toby grabbed his brother by his arm and said, “Hey, thanks a lot for waiting up for me!”

“I was in a hurry, okay? It’s not my problem if you can’t keep up!” Pete said, yanking his arm away so hard he almost toppled over. How Toby and Pete have arrived at the ages of ten and twelve without losing body parts I have no idea.

Before Toby could say anything else, Pete’s pocket rang. Okay, it wasn’t really his pocket. It was this thing in his pocket called a cell phone. He’d been given it as a birthday present a few weeks earlier. Why a twelve-year-old boy needs to carry a phone in his pocket is beyond me. All I can say is, it’s only a matter of time until Chester has a cell phone (even if he doesn’t have a pocket), and when he does: Watch out!

Pete pulled the phone out of his pocket, flipped it open, and yelled, “I’m not talking to you!”

People are so amusing. I mean, to tell the person you’re talking to that you’re not talking to them? You have to admit, it’s pretty funny.

Anyway, the next thing Pete said to whoever it was he wasn’t talking to was, “Oh, yeah?” (Pete says, “Oh, yeah?” a lot.) “Well, who cares if you think M. T. Graves isn’t a real person? He is real and he is cool and I don’t care if you and everybody in the whole school or the whole world or the whole universe thinks his books are so over! They are so not—and you know it! They’re awesome! And I wrote to him and told him so. So there!”

Pete snapped his cell phone shut and glared at his little brother, who was staring at him.

“You wrote to M. T. Graves?” Toby asked.

“Yes, I wrote to M. T. Graves. Want to make something of it?”

Toby shook his head. “No, I think it’s cool. I mean, I like the FleshCrawlers books, too.”

That was it! The crow on the envelope was the same as the one on the covers of the FleshCrawlers books. I knew about the FleshCrawlers series because not only did Pete read them all the time, they were Howie’s favorite books as well. Howie read them over Pete’s shoulder and had them all practically memorized. Maybe the picture of the crow on the envelope meant that the letter was from M. T. Graves! I grabbed it with my teeth and trotted over to Pete.

“Get away from me!” he shouted when he saw me coming. Do you begin to grasp why Pete is not my absolute, number one favorite person in the world? “And what are you doing with that letter? Are you going to eat it? Harold, that is so gross!”

I dropped the envelope at his feet and whimpered.

“Do you want to go for a walk?” said Pete. “Toby, it’s your turn to walk Harold and Howie.”

Correction: Pete Monroe is even thicker than Alpo.

“He probably wants his snack,” Toby said. “I’ll get it in a minute. So how come you wrote to M. T. Graves? What did you say?”

“It was an assignment for school. We had to write to an author. Everybody else chose J. K. Rowling or James Howe, but I picked M. T. Graves. And not just because he writes the best books.”

Toby nodded his agreement.

“I also wrote him because his publisher was having this contest called ‘Why FleshCrawlers Gross Me Out the Most.’ I entered the contest with my letter. That’s called killing two birds with one stone. No offense to Edgar Allan Crow.”

“Who?” Toby asked.

“Duh. Edgar Allan Crow. Everybody knows that’s the name of his pet crow. You know, the one on the books. The FleshCrawlers logo! See?”

Pete ran to his backpack, dug through it, and yanked out a copy of The House That Dripped Eyeballs (FleshCrawlers #61). Reading from the back cover, he said, “‘M. T. Graves lives in a creepy castle on a remote mountaintop with only his bats, snakes, alligators, and favorite pet Edgar Allan Crow for companionship/”

No dogs? I thought as I picked up the envelope again and whimpered even louder.

Toby looked over at me. I looked into his eyes. I said with my eyes, Take this envelope out of my mouth. Look at it. Read the letter inside.

“I think Harold’s trying to tell us something,” Toby said.

Pete = Alpo. Toby = genius.

Toby removed the envelope from my mouth. “Look at this!” he cried. “It’s Edgar Allan Crow!”

At that moment Howie came racing in, breathless with excitement. “Did I just hear ‘Edgar Allan Crow’?” he asked, panting rapidly.

“Yes,” I told him, in as calming a voice as I could manage. “Pete wrote to M. T. Graves and—”