(1972) The Halloween Tree (11 page)

“And me,” said Ralph.

“I’m in,” said Henry-Hank.

And, “Me!” “Me!” “Me!” said all the rest.

“Do you know what you pledge, boys? You
do
love Pipkin, then?”

“Yes,
yes!”

“So be it, boys. Chew and eat, lads, eat and chew.”

They popped the sweet bits of candy skull in their mouths.

They chewed. They ate.

“Swallow darkness, boys, give up your year.”

They swallowed hard, so hard that their eyes shone bright and their ears banged and their hearts beat.

They felt something like a cage of birds let out of their chests and
bodies and flying off, invisible. They saw but did not see the years
they gave as gifts wing off round the world to settle somewhere in good
payment for strange debts.

They heard a yell.

“Here!”

And then: “I!”

And then: “Come!”

Bang, bang, bang, the three words, and three sounds of shoes hitting stone.

And along the hall and between the rows of mummies which leaned out to
stop but did not stop, between the silent shrieks and screams,
hellbent, rushing, racing, flinging his feet, pumping his elbows,
puffing his cheeks, shutting his eyes, snorting his nostrils, and bang
bang banging the floor with his up and down, up and down feet, came—

Pipkin.

Oh how he
ran!!!

“Look at him come. Come on, Pip.”

“Pip, you’re halfway!”

“Look at him race!” said everyone with sugar candy in their mouths,
with the honorable name of Pipkin locked in their sweet teeth, with his
savor in their jaws, with his fine name on their tongues, Pip, Pip,
Pipkin!

“Don’t stop now, Pip. Don’t look
back!”

“Don’t fall down!”

“Here he comes, three quarters of the way!”

Pip ran the gauntlet. He was good and fine and fast and true. Between
one hundred waiting mummies he ran without touching and did not look
back and—won the race.

“Pip, you did it!”

“You’re safe!”

But Pip kept running. Not only through the gauntlet of dead ones but the gauntlet of warm sweating alive yelling boys.

He plowed then aside and raced upstairs, gone.

“Pip, it’s all right, come back!”

They ran up the stairs after.

“Where’s he going, Mr. Moundshroud?”

“Well, I should imagine, scared as he is,” said Moundshroud, “home.”

“Is Pipkin—saved?”

“Let’s go see, boys. Up!”

He spun about like a whirlwind. His arms, flung out, cut the air in
slicing grabs and swoops. So fast he spun that he made a vacuum, a
self-made storm. This cyclone, this huge upsuck of air, then seized the
boys by ear, nose, elbow, toe.

Like so many leaves stripped from a tree they yelled themselves into the sky. Moundshroud, raving, sank up. And they, if
that is possible, sank and plummeted after. They hit the clouds like an
explosion of gunshot. They followed Moundshroud like a flock of
north-rushing birds heading home before their season.

The earth seemed to give a turn from north to south. A thousand small
villages and towns spun under, alight with candles flickering in
tombyards through all of Mexico, alight with candles flickering in
pumpkins north of the border across Texas and then Oklahoma and Kansas
and Iowa and at last Illinois and at last:

“Home!” cried Tom. “There’s the courthouse, there’s
my
house, there’s the Halloween Tree!”

They swooped once around the courthouse and twice around the
thousand-pumpkin-burning Tree, and a final time around old
Moundshroud’s tall house with its many gables, many rooms, many gaping
windows, high lightning rods, railings, attics, scrollworks, which
leaned and groaned in the wind their passage made. Dust sifted out of
windows to greet them. Shades flapped in yet other windows like ancient
tongues lolling to be diagnosed by wind-borne small doctors of strange
medicines. Ghosts withered like white flowers, furling and unfurling in
moldered flags which fell to ruin even as they shot by.

And the whole house, circled, was like all of Halloween ever. So cried
Moundshroud, flapping his antique arms and webs and black silks as he
landed on the roof and beckoned the boys to alight and pointed down
through an immense sky window through all the levels of his mansion.

The boys gathered round the skylight window and stared down a stairwell
which opened out at various floors to various times and histories of
men and skeletons and dreadful musics played on flute bones.

“There it is, boys. Will you look? Do you see? There’s our whole
ten-thousand-year flight, there’s our whole trip in one place, from
caveman to Egyptian to Roman front porch to English harvest field to
boneyard in Mexico.”

Moundshroud lifted the vast pane of glass.

“The stairway banister, boys. Ride it down! Each to his own time, his
own age, his own level. Leap off where your costume fits, where you
think you and your disguise, your mask, belong! Git!”

The boys leaped. They sprang down the stairwell to the top landing.
Then, one by one, they popped onto the banister and slid yelling down
through all the floors, all the levels, all the ages of history kept
within Moundshroud’s incredible mansion.

Round-about-down, round-about-down they whisked, they skidded, they shuffled on the waxed rail.

Rrrwhoom-thud! J.J. in his Apeman costume landed in the basement. He
glanced about. He saw cave paintings, dim smokes and fires, and shadows
of hulking gorilla-men. Saber-tooths burned their eyes at him from the
cindered dark.

Down-around rush went Ralph, the Egyptian Mummified Boy, bandaged for all ages, to land on the first floor where Egyptian hieroglyphs strutted in armies of symbol, with squadrons
of ancient birds in skies and flocks of beast-gods and scuttling golden
beetles rolling dung-balls down history.

Crash! Hackles Nibley, with his scythe somehow still flashing in his
hands, hit and almost rolled himself to mincemeat on the second floor
where the shadow of Samhain, druid God of the Dead, raised up his
scythe upon a far chamber wall!

Bang!
George Smith, a Greek Ghost? a Roman Haunt? landed on the third floor
near tar-painted porches which glued old wandering spirits to the sill!

Thud, Henry-Hank, the Witch, plopped down in the fourth landing amid
witches leaping bonfires in English, French, German countrysides!

Fred Fryer? The fifth floor took him in a heap, the Beggar landing
among sounds of beggars begging the country roads of Ireland, starving.

Wally Babb, the Gargoyle himself, flew and crashed on the sixth floor
where walls sprouted elbows and limbs and lumps, grimaces of fine
gargoyle humors and glees.

Until finally
Skeleton Tom skidded off the banister on the topmost floor to tumble
and knock white candy skulls like tenpins in a dire game among the
shadows of crouched women by mounds, with miniature skeleton brassbands
playing mosquito tunes while Moundshroud, far above, still on the roof,
yelled down:

“Well, boys, do you
see?
It’s all one, yes?”

“Yes—” someone murmured.

“Always the same but different, eh? every age, every time. Day was
always over. Night was always coming. And aren’t you always afraid,
Apeman there? or you, Mummy, that the sun will never rise again?”

“Yesss,” more of them whispered.

And they looked up through the levels of the great house and saw every
age, every story, and all the men in history staring round about as the
sun rose and set. Ape-men trembled. Egyptians cried laments. Greeks and
Romans paraded their dead. Summer fell dead. Winter put it in the
grave. A billion voices wept. The wind of time shook the vast house.
The windows rattled and broke like men’s eyes, into crystal tears.
Then, with cries of delight, ten thousand times a million men welcomed
back bright summer suns which rose to burn each window with fire!

“Do you see, lads? Think! People vanished forever. They died, oh Lord,
they died! but came back in dreams. Those dreams were called Ghosts,
and frightened men in every age-”

“Ah!” cried a billion voices from attics and basements.

Shadows climbed walls like old films rerun in ancient theaters. Puffs
of smoke lingered at doors with sad eyes and gibbering mouths.

“Night and day. Summer and winter, boys. Seedtime and harvest. Life and
death. That’s what Halloween is, all rolled up in one. Noon and
midnight. Being born, boys. Rolling over, playing dead like dogs, lads.
And getting up again, barking, racing through thousands of years of
death each day and each night Halloween, boys, every night, every single night dark and fearful until at last you made it and hid in
cities and towns and had some rest and could get your breath.

“And you began to live longer and have more time, and space out the
deaths, and put away fear, and at last have only special days in each
year when you thought of night and dawn and spring and autumn and being
born and being dead.

“And it all adds
up. Four thousand years ago, one hundred years ago, this year, one
place or another, but the celebrations all the
same
—”

“The Feast of Samhain—”

“The Time of the Dead Ones—”

“All Souls’. All Saints’.”

“The Day of the Dead.”

“El Dia De Muerte.”

“All Hallows’.”

“Halloween.”

The boys sent their frail voices up, up through the levels of time, from all the countries, and all the ages, naming the holidays which were the same.

“Good, lads, good.”

Far off, the town clock struck three quarters after eleven.

“Almost midnight, boys. Halloween’s almost over.”

“But!” cried Tom. “What about Pipkin? We followed him through history, burying him, digging him up, walking him in parades, crying him in wakes. Is or
isn’t
he alive?”

“Yeah!” said everyone.
“Did
we save him?”

“Did you, indeed?”

Moundshroud stared. They stared with him, across the ravine to a building where lights were going out.

“That’s his hospital, boys. But check his house. The final knock of the night, the last grand trick or treat. Go ask for final answers. Mr. Marley, see them
out!”

The front door flew wide—bang!

The Marley knocker on the door gaped its bandaged jaw and whistled them farewell as the boys slid down the banisters and raced for the door.

They were stopped by a final shout from Moundshroud: “Boys! Well, which was it? Tonight, with me—trick or
treat?”

The boys took a vast breath, held it, burst it out: “Gosh, Mr. Moundshroud—
both!”

Rap! went the Marley knocker.

Slam! went the door.

And the boys were gone running, running down through the ravine and up along the street gasping hot gusts of air, their masks falling to be trampled until at last they stopped on Pipkin’s sidewalk and looked at the far hospital and back at Pipkin’s front door.

“You go, Tom, you,” said Ralph.

And Tom slowly edged up to the house and put his foot on the front step and then the second step up and approached the door, afraid to knock, afraid to find the final answer about dear old Pipkin. Pipkin dead? Pipkin in a last funeral? Pipkin, Pipkin gone forever? No!

He tapped at the door.

The boys waited on the sidewalk.

The door opened. Tom went in. There was a long moment of the boys on the sidewalk standing cold and letting the wind freeze their most awful thoughts.

Well? they yelled silently in at the house, the shut door, the dark windows, well? well? What?

And then at last the door opened again, and Tom came out and stood on the porch not knowing where he was.

Then Tom looked up and saw his friends waiting for him a million miles off.

Tom leaped off the porch, yelling.

“Oh gosh, oh gosh, oh, Gosh!”

He ran along the sidewalk, shrieking: “He’s okay, he’s all right, he’s okay! Pipkin’s in the hospital! took his appendix out at nine tonight! got it just in time! doctor says he’s great!”

“Pipkin—?”

“Hospital—?”

“Great—?”

The air jumped out as if each had been punched in the stomach. Then the air went in and out again in a great rave, a yell, a ragged shout of triumph.

“Pipkin, oh, Pipkin, Pip!”

And the boys stood on Pipkin’s lawn and the sidewalk in front of Pipkin’s porch and house and looked with numb curiosity at each other as their smiles spread and their eyes watered and they yelled and the happy tears ran down their cheeks.

“Oh, boy, boy oh boy, oh boy oh boy,” said Tom, exhausted, and weeping with happiness.

“You can say that again,” said someone, and they all said it again.

And they all stood there and had a fine happy cry.

And since the whole night was turning soupy with tears, Tom looked around and revved them up. “Look at Pipkin’s house. Don’t it look awful? Tell you what we do—!”

And they ran and each came back carrying a lit pumpkin and lined them up on Pipkin’s porch rail where they smiled outrageous smiles to wait for Pipkin to come home.