(1972) The Halloween Tree (6 page)

Now the boys who landed like a downpour of bright autumn trash were in this order:

Tom Skelton, dressed up in his delicious Bones.

Henry-Hank, more or less a Witch.

Ralph Bengstrum, an unraveled Mummy, becoming more unbandaged by the minute.

A Ghost named George Smith.

J.J. (no other name needed) a very fine Apeman.

Wally Babb who said he was a Gargoyle, but everyone said he looked more like Quasimodo.

Fred Fryer, what else but a beggar fresh out of a ditch.

And last and not least, “Hackles” Nibley who had run up a costume at
the last moment by simply clapping on a white scare-mask and grabbing
his grandpa’s harvest scythe off the garage wall.

All the boys being safely landed on English earth, their billion autumn leaves fell off and blew away.

They stood in the midst of a vast field of wheat.

“Here, Master Nibley, I brought your scythe. Take it. Grab! Now lie
low!” warned Moundshroud. “The Druid God of the Dead! Samhain! Fall!”

They fell.

For a huge scythe came skimming down out of the sky. With its great
razor edge it cut the wind. With its whistling side it sliced clouds.
It beheaded trees. It razored along the cheek of the hill. It made a
clean shave of wheat. In the air a whole blizzard of wheat fell.

And with every whisk, every cut, every scythe, the sky was aswarm with cries and shrieks and screams.

The scythe hissed up.

The boys cowered.

“Hunh!” grunted a large voice.

“Mr. Moundshroud, is that
you!”
cried Tom.

For towering forty feet above them in the sky, an immense scythe in his
hands, was this cowled figure, its face in midnight fogs.

The blade swung down:
hisssssss!

“Mr. Moundshroud, let us be!”

“Shut up.” Someone knocked Toms elbow. Mr. Moundshroud lay on the earth beside him. “That’s not me. That’s—”

“Samhain!” cried the voice in the fog. “God of the Dead! I harvest thus, and so!”

Sssss-whoooshhhh!

“All those who died this year are here! And for their sins, this night, are turned to
beasts!”

Sssssswooommmmmmm!

“Please,” whimpered Ralph-the-Mummy

“Sssssssttttt! The scythe zippered Hackles Nibley’s spine, ripping his
costume in a long tear, knocking his own small scythe free of his hands.

“Beasts!”

And the harvest wheat, flailed up, spun round on the wind, shrieking
its souls, all those who had died in the past twelve months, rained to
earth. And falling, touching, the heads of wheat were turned to asses,
chickens, snakes which scurried, cackled, brayed; were turned to dogs
and cats and cows that barked, cried, bawled. But all were miniature.
All were tiny, small, no bigger than worms, no bigger than toes, no
bigger than the sliced-off tip of a nose. By the hundreds and thousands
the wheat heads snowed up in scatters and fell down as spiders which
could not shout or beg or weep for mercy, but which, soundless, raced
over the grass, poured over the boys. A hundred centipedes tiptoed on
Ralph’s spine. Two hundred leeches clung to Hackles Nibley’s scythe
until with a nightmare gasp he raved and shook them off. Everywhere
fell black widows and tiny boa constrictors.

“For your sins! Your sins! Take that! And this!” bellowed the voice in the whistling sky.

The scythe flashed. The wind, cut, fell in bright thunders. The wheat
churned and gave up a million heads. Heads fell. Sinners hit like
rocks. And, hitting, were turned to frogs and toads and multitudes of scaly warts with legs and jellyfish which stank in the light.

“I’ll be good!” prayed Tom Skelton.

“Lemme live!” added Henry-Hank.

All of this said very loudly, for the scythe was making a dreadful
roar. It was like an ocean wave falling down out of the sky, cleaning a
beach, and running away up to cut more clouds. Even the clouds seemed
to be whispering out swift and more fervent prayers for their own
fates. Not me! not me!

“For all the evil you ever did!” said Samhain.

And the scythe cut and the souls were harvested and fell in blind newts
and awful bedbugs and dreadful cockroaches to scuttle, limp, creep,
scrabble.

“My gosh, he’s a bug maker.”

“Flea squasher!”

“Snake grinder-outer!”

“Roach transformer!”

“Fly keeper!”

“No! Samhain! October God. God of the Dead!”

Samhain stomped a great foot which tread a thousand bugs in the grass, trompled ten thousand tiny soul-beasts in the dust.

“I think,” said Tom, “it’s time we-”

“Ran?” suggested Ralph, not offhand.

“Shall we take a vote?”

The scythe hissed. Samhain boomed.

“Vote, heck!” said Moundshroud.

All jumped up.

“You there!” thundered the voice above them. “Come back!”

“No, sir, thanks,” said one and then another.

And put right foot after left.

“I figure,” said Ralph, panting, leaping, tears on his cheeks. “I been pretty good most of my life. I don’t deserve to die.”

“Hah-hnnh!” shouted Samhain.

The scythe came in a guillotine which chunked the head off an oak tree
and felled a maple. A whole orchard of autumn apples fell into a marble
pit somewhere. It sounded like a houseful of boys falling downstairs.

“I don’t think he heard you, Ralph,” said Tom.

They dived. They fell among rocks and shrubs.

The scythe ricocheted off the stones.

Samhain gave such a yell as brought an avalanche down a small hill nearby

“Boy,” said Ralph, squinched up, balled up, feet against chest, eyes tight. “England is no place to be a sinner.”

Even as a final rain, a shower, a downpour of hysterical
souls-turned-beetle, turned flea, turned stinkbug, turned daddy
long-legs, scurried over the boys.

“Hey, look. That dog!”

A wild dog, mad with terror, raced up the rocks.

And its face, its eyes, something
in
the eyes—

“That couldn’t be—?”

“Pipkin?” said everyone.

“Pip—” shouted Tom. “Is this where we
meet
you? Is—”

But
whoom!
The scythe fell.

And yipping with fright, the dog, bowled over, slid down the grass.

“Hold on, Pipkin. We know you, we see you! Don’t scare off! Don’t—” Tom whistled.

But the dog, yarping with Pipkin’s own dear sweet scared voice, was gone.

But didn’t an echo of his yip come back from the hills:

“Meet. Meet. Meet. Meeee …”

Where? thought Tom. Criminently,
where?

Samhain, scythe uplifted, gazed all about, happy at his games.

He chuckled a most delicious chuckle, spat fiery spittle on his horny
hands, clenched the scythe tighter, swung it up, and froze… .

For somewhere, someone was singing.

Somewhere near the top of a hill, in a small clump of trees, a small bonfire flickered.

Men like shadows were gathered there, lifting up their arms and chanting.

Samhain listened, his scythe like a great smile in his arms.

“O Samhain, God of the Dead!

Hear us!

We the Holy Druid Priests in

This Grove of Trees, the great Oaks,

Plead for the Souls of the Dead!”

Far away, these strange men by their bright fire lifted metal knives, lifted cats and goats in their hands, chanting:

“We pray for the souls of those

Who are turned to Beasts.

O God of the Dead, we sacrifice

These
beasts

So that you will let free

The souls of our loved ones

Who died this year!”

The knives flashed.

Samhain smiled an even greater smile. The animals shrieked.

All around the boys on the earth, the grass, the rocks, the trapped
souls, lost in spiders, locked in roaches, put away in fleas and
pillbugs and centipedes, gaped and yammered silent yammers and twitched
and roiled.

Tom winced. He thought he
heard a million small, oh very microscopic, bleats of pain and release
from around him where the centipedes capered, spiders danced.

“Let free! Let be!” prayed the druids on the hill.

The fire blazed.

A sea wind roared over the meadows, brushed the rocks, touched at the
spiders, rolled the pillbugs, tumbled the roaches. The tiny spiders,
insects, the miniature dogs and cows fluffed away like a million
snowflakes. The tiny souls trapped in insect bodies dissolved.

Released, with a vast cavern whisper, they whistled up the sky.

“To Heaven!” cried the druid priests. “O free! Go!”

They flew. They vanished in the air with a great sigh of thanks and much gratitude.

Sanhain, God of the Dead, shrugged, and let them go. Then, just as suddenly, he stiffened.

As did the hidden boys and Mr. Moundshroud, crouched in the rocks.

Through a valley and across the hill ran an army of Roman soldiers, a
troop on the double. Their leader ran before them, shouting:

“Soldiers of Rome! Destroy the pagans! Destroy the unholy religion! Seutonius so orders!”

“For Seutonius!”

Samhain, in the sky, raised his scythe, too late!

The soldiers slammed swords and axes into the bases of the holy druid oaks.

Samhain shrieked in pain as if the axes had chopped his knees. The holy
trees groaned, whistled, and, with a final chop, thundered to earth.

Samhain trembled in the high air.

The druid priests, fleeing, stopped and shuddered.

Trees fell.

The priests, chopped at the ankles, the knees, fell. They were blown over like oaks in a hurricane.

“No!” roared Samhain in the high air.

“But yes!” cried the Romans. “Now!”

The soldiers gave a final mighty blow.

And Samhain, God of the Dead, torn at his roots, chopped at his ankles, began to fall.

The boys, staring up, leaped out of the way. For it was like a giant
forest falling all in one fall. They were shadowed by his midnight
descent. The thunder of his death came before him. He was the greatest
tree in all existence ever, the tallest oak ever to plummet down and
die. Down he came through the wild air, screaming, flailing to hold
himself up.

Samhain hit the earth.

He dropped with a roar that shook the bones of the hills and snuffed the holy fires.

And with Samhain cut and down and dead, the last of the druid oaks fell
with him, like wheat cut with a final scythe. His own huge scythe, a
vast smile lost in the fields, dissolved into a puddle of silver and
sank into the grass.

Silence. A smoldering of fires. A blowing of leaves.

Instantly the sun went down.

The druid priests bled in the grass as the boys watched and the Roman captain prowled the dead fires kicking the holy ashes.

“Here we shall build our temples to our gods!”

The soldiers lit new fires and burned incense before golden idols which they set in place.

But, no sooner lit, than a star shone in the east. On far desert sands, to camel bells, Three Wise Men moved.

The Roman soldiers lifted their bronze shields against the glare of the Star in the sky. But their shields melted.

The Roman idols melted and became shapes of Mary and her Son.

The soldiers’ armor melted, dripped, changed. They were dressed now in
the garments of priests who sang Latin before yet newer altars, even as
Moundshroud, crouched, squinting, weighed the scene, and whispered it
to his small masked friends:

“Aye, boys,
see? Gods following gods. The Romans cut the Druids, their oaks, their
God of the Dead, bang! down! And put in their own gods, eh? Now the
Christians run and cut the Romans down! New altars, boys, new incense,
new names …”

The wind blew the altar candles out.

In darkness, Tom cried out. The earth shuddered and spun. Rain drenched them.

“What’s happening, Mr. Moundshroud? Where are we?”

Moundshroud struck a flinty thumb into fire and held it up. “Why, bless
me, boys. It’s the Dark Ages. The longest darkest night ever. Christ
long since come and gone in the world and—”

“Where’s Pipkin?”

“Here!” cried a voice from the black sky. “I think I’m on a broom! It’s taking me—away!”

“Hey, me too,” said Ralph and then J.J., and then Hackles Nibley, and Wally Babb, and all the rest.

There was a huge whisper like a gigantic cat stroking its whiskers in the dark.

“Brooms,” muttered Moundshroud. “The gathering of the Brooms. The October Broom Festival. The annual Migration.”

“To Where?” asked Tom, calling up, for everyone was making traffic on the air now in whisking shrieks.

“The Broom Works, of course!”

“Help! I’m flying!” said Henry-Hank.

Whisk. A broom whistled him away.

A great brambly cat flashed by Tom’s cheek. He felt a wooden pole between his legs jump up.

“Hang on!” said Moundshroud. “When attacked by a broom, only one thing to do, hold tight!”

“I’m holding!” cried Tom, and flew away.