Bunny-Rabid lived happily alone in a deep hole in the woods that was made by a meteor that hit the world a long time ago.
For centuries he was undisturbed.
He was so elusive he didn’t figure in myth or fairy tale.
But one day a developer bought the wild land on which Bunny-Rabid lived, and began sending surveyors and workmen into the woods.
Bunny-Rabid disliked this.
He clawed the surveyors to fleshy shreds and performed black magic on the workmen until their sanity turned inside out and they could no longer continue their work.
The developer reported to the police, who duly investigated the surveyors’ grisly deaths, but their findings were inconclusive and they soon gave up.
The invertedly-sane workmen, however, gabbled in their snugly fitting straightjackets about an evil bunnyman who performed horror spells in the woods.
One day, a doctor recorded their gabblings and published them in a book called The Evil Bunnyman and Other Modern Terrors.
A cryptozoologist read the book, gathered a team and ventured into the woods. He brought his son, Charlie.
For weeks the team traversed the wilderness, examining and recording their findings. They were about to turn back when they came upon a hole.
This was Bunny-Rabid’s meteor hole, and he disliked that the cryptozoologist had found it.
Bunny-Rabid waited until dark, then cast a stream of fire out of the meteor hole and emerged in its unsteady, burning light, holding tightly his bone-staff, which curled at the end like a monstrous hook, and spoke the words of insanity into the terrified faces of the cryptozoologist and his team.
They were ill-prepared to hear the swirling speech of whispers as Bunny-Rabid’s gaunt and liquid face scrambled and spun so that his crooked eyes began orbiting his ossified nose, and his ancient maw snarled itself into a string of fangs which encircled his head like a crown of yellowed thorns.
They all went mad.
Except Charlie, who smiled.
It was a hideous smile, full of tenderness and warmth, and it made Bunny-Rabid shiver.
In the nighttime woods behind, the mad ones ran head-long into trees and screamed and murdered one another with their cryptozoology equipment and their bare hands.
But Charlie stepped toward Bunny-Rabid and—horror of unmentionable horrors!—hugged him.
Charlie was mute but Bunny-Rabid heard the boy’s thoughts.
In fact, he couldn’t silence them.
And he could not invert the little human’s sanity.
“You killed my father,” Charlie was thinking, “so from today you are my father, and I am your little bunny son. You will teach me the black magic and other bunny ways, and together we shall live in the meteor hole in the woods.”
No! Bunny-Rabid thundered. Never! Such unnature cannot be!
Yet it was.
Charlie was impervious to all Bunny-Rabid’s spells and violence, and he followed Bunny-Rabid through the woods, thinking his thoughts aloud, day after dreadful day, until Bunny-Rabid grudgingly agreed.
And that is how Bunny-Rabid finally became a father, for which we shall all pay dearly.