(1972) The Halloween Tree (7 page)

The sky was swept clean with brooms.

The sky was yelled clean by boys occupying at least eight of those brooms at once.

And what with changing their cries of fear to cries of delight, the
boys almost forgot to look or listen for Pipkin, similarly sailed off
among island clouds.

“This way!” announced Pipkin.

“As quick as we can!” said Tom Skelton. “But, Pip, it’s awful hard to ride a broomstick, I find!”

“Funny you say that,” said Henry-Hank. “I agree.”

Everyone agreed, falling off, hanging on, climbing back.

There was now such a hustle of brooms as left no room for clouds, and
none for mists and certainly none for fog or boys. There was an immense
traffic jam of brooms, as if all earths forests gave up their branches
in one boom and fling and, scouring autumn fields, cut clean and
throttled tight such cereal grains as made good sweepers, thrashers,
beaters, then flew up.

So here came all the backyard washline prop-poles in the world. And
here came with them, swatches of grass, clumps of weed, brambles of
bush to herd the sheep-clouds and cleanse the stars and ride the boys.

Said boys, each on his own skinny mount, were deluged with beatings and
cuffings of flail and wood. They were punished severely for occupying
heaven. They took a hundred bruises each, a dozen cuts, and precisely
forty-nine lumps on their tender skulls.

“Hey, I got a bloody nose!” gasped Tom, happily, looking at the red on his fingers.

“Shucks!” cried Pipkin, going into a cloud dry and coming out wet.
“That’s nothing. I got one eye shut, one ear bad, and lost a tooth!”

“Pipkin!” called Tom. “Don’t keep telling us to meet you and then we don’t know where!
Where?”

“In the air!” said Pipkin.

“Cheez,” muttered Henry-Hank, “there’s two zillion, one hundred
billion, ninety-nine million acres of air wrapped around the world!
Which half-acre does Pip mean?”

“I mean—” gasped Pipkin.

But a whole bundle of broomsticks banged up in an akimbo dance like a
shuttle of cornstalks across his flight, or a farmland fence suddenly
come antic and in frenzies.

A cloud with
a grand fiend face gaped its mouth. It swallowed Pipkin, broom and all,
then shut its vapors tight and rumbled with Pipkin indigestion.

“Kick your way out, Pipkin! Stomp him in the stomach!” someone suggested.

But nothing kicked and the cloud, satisfied, sailed on Forever’s Bay
toward Eternity’s Dawn, ruminating over its delicious sweet boy-dinner.

“Meet him in the air?” Tom snorted. “Good grief, talk about horrible directions to nowhere.”

“See even more horrible directions!” said Moundshroud, sailing by on a
broom that looked like a wet and angry cat on the end of a mop. “Would
you see witches, boys? Hags, crones, conjure wives, magicians, black
magics, demons, devils? There they be, in mobs, in riots, boys. Skin
your eyeballs.”

And there below, all
across Europe, through France and Germany and Spain, on the night roads
were indeed clusters and mobs and parades of strange sinners running
north, scrambling away from the Southern Sea.

“That’s it! Jump, run! This way to the night. This way to the dark!”
Moundshroud swooped low, shouting over the mobs like a general leading
a fine, evil troop. “Quick, hide! Lie low. Wait a few centuries!”

“Hide out from what?” wondered Tom.

“Here come the Christians!” yelled voices below, on the roads.

And that was the answer.

Tom blinked and soared and watched.

And from all the roads the mobs ran to stand alone on farms, or at
crossroads, in harvest fields, in towns. Old men. Old women. Toothless
and raving, yelling to the sky as the brooms swept down.

“Why,” said Henry-Hank, stunned. “Those are witches!”

“Dry-clean my soul and hang it out to dry if you’re not right, boy,” agreed Moundshroud.

“There are witches jumping fires,” said J.J.

“And witches stirring cauldrons!” said Tom.

“And witches drawing symbols in farmyard dust!” said Ralph. Are they
real?
I mean, I always thought—”

“Real?” Moundshroud, insulted, almost fell from his bramble-cat broom.
“Ye little gods and fishes, lad, every town has its resident witch.
Every town hides some old Greek pagan priest, some Roman worshiper of
tiny gods who ran up the roads, hid in culverts, sank in caves to
escape the Christians! In every tiny village, boy, in every scrubby
farm the old religions hide out. You saw the druids cut and chopped,
eh? They hid from the Romans. And now the Romans, who fed Christians to
lions, run themselves to hide. So all the little lollygaggin’ cults,
all flavors and types, scramble to survive. See how they run, boys!”

And it was true.

Fires burned all over Europe. At every crossroad and by every haystack
dark forms jumped in cats across flames. Cauldrons bubbled. Old hags
cursed. Dogs frolicked red-hot coals.

“Witches, witches, everywhere,” said Tom, amazed. “I never knew they were so many!”

“Mobs and multitudes, Tom. Europe was flooded to the dikes. Witches underfoot, under bed, in the cellars and high attics.”

“Boy oh boy,” said Henry-Hank, proud in his Witch costume. “Real witches! Could they talk to the dead?”

“No,” said Moundshroud.

“Jump up devils?”

“No.”

“Keep demons in door hinges and squeal them out at midnight?”

“No.”

“Ride broomsticks?”

“Nope.”

“Put sneezing spells on people?”

“Sorry.”

“Kill folks by sticking pins in dolls?”

“No.”

“Well, heck, what
could
they do?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing!” cried all the boys, affronted.

“Oh, they
thought
they could, boys!”

Moundshroud led the Team down on their brooms over the farms where
witches dropped frogs in cauldrons and stomped toads and snuffed mummy
dust and cavorted in cackles.

“But, stop and think. What does the word ‘witch’ truly mean?”

“Why—” said Tom, and was stymied.

“Wits,” said Moundshroud. “Intelligence. That’s all it means.
Knowledge. So any man, or woman, with half a brain and with
inclinations toward learning had his wits about him, eh? And so, anyone too smart, who didn’t watch out, was called—”

“A witch!” said everyone.

“And some of the smart ones, the ones with wits, pretended at magic, or
dreamed themselves with ghosts and dead shufflers and ambling mummies.
And if enemies dropped dead by coincidence, they took credit for it.
They liked to believe they had power, but they had none, boys, none,
sad and sorry, ‘tis true. But listen. There beyond the hill. That’s
where the brooms come from. That’s where they go.”

The boys listened and heard:

“The Broomworks makes

The Broom that looms

On sky in gloom and rising of the moon

That broom which, groom to witch, flies high

On harvestings of stormwind grass

With shriek and sigh to motion it

In ocean-seas of cloud, now soft, now loud… !”

Below, at full-tilt, a witch-broom factory was filled with commotions,
poles being cut, and bound with broom-bushes which, no sooner tied,
took off up chimneys in flights of spark. On rooftops, hags leaped on
to ride the stars.

Or so it seemed, as the boys watched and voices sang:

“Did witches feel the night wind in their bed

And reel and dance with devils and the dead?

No!

But that is what they bragged and claimed and said!

Until whole continents, hellbent

Named ‘witches’ of the Innocent,

And did conspire

To burn old women, babes, and virgins in a fire.”

Mobs raved through villages and farms with torches, cursing. Bonfires
flared from the English Channel to the Mediterranean shore.

“Through all of Germany and France,

Ten thousand so-called evil witches

Hung to kick their final antic dance

No village but what shared a dread uproar

As each side named the other for a devil’s pig,

Old Satan’s sow, the Demon’s maddened boar.”

Wild pigs, with witches glued to their backs, trotted roof tiles, flinting sparks, snorting steams:

“All Europe was a cloud of witches’ smoke.

Their judges often bound and burnt with them

For what? A joke!

“Until:
‘all men
are spoiled with guilt!

All
sin,
all
lie!’

So, what to do?

Why,
everyone
must die!”

Smoke churned the sky. At every crossroads, witches hung, crows gathered in a feathered darkness.

The boys hung from their brooms in the sky, eyes popped, mouths wide.

“Anyone want to be a witch?” asked Moundshroud, at last.

“Er,” said Henry-Hank, shivering in his witch’s rags, “n-not
me!”

“No fun, eh, boy?”

“No fun.”

The brooms flew them off through chars and smokes.

They landed on an empty street, in an open place, in Paris.

Their brooms fell over, dead.

“Well, now, boys, what should we
do to scare the scarers, frighten the frighteners, shiver the
shiverers?” called Moundshroud inside a cloud. “What’s bigger than
demons and witches?”

“Bigger gods?”

“Bigger witches?”

“Bigger churches?” guessed Tom Skelton.

“Bless you, Tom, right! An idea gets big, yes? A religion gets big!
How. With buildings large enough to cast shadows across an entire land.
Build buildings you can see for a hundred miles. Build one so tall and
famous it has a hunchback in it, ringing bells. So now, boys, help me
build it brick by brick, flying buttress by flying buttress. Let’s
build—”

“Notre Dame!” shouted eight boys.

“And all the more reason to build Notre Dame because—” said Moundshroud. “Listen—”

Bong!

A bell tolled in the sky.

Bong!

“… help … !” whispered a voice when the sound had died.

Bong!

The boys looked and saw a kind of scaffolding reared up in half a
belfry-keep upon the moon. At the very top hung a huge bronze bell that
was tolling now.

And from inside that bell with every crash and bang and gong this small voice shouted:

“Help!”

The boys looked at Moundshroud.

Their eyes blazed a question:

Pipkin?

Meet me in the air!
thought Tom.
And there he is!

There, hung upside down over Paris, his head for a knocker, was Pipkin
in a bell. Or the shadow, ghost, or lost spirit of Pipkin, anyway.

Which is to say there was a bell and when it sounded the hour, why that
sound was made by a flesh-and-blood clapper which knocked the rim.
Pipkin’s head banged the bell. Bong! And again: Bong!

“Knock his brains out,” gasped Henry-Hank.

“Help!” called Pipkin, a shadow in the bell, a ghost chained upside down to strike the quarters and the hours.

“Fly!” cried the boys to their brooms, but their brooms lay dead on the Paris stones.

“No life in them,” mourned Moundshroud. “Juice, sap, and fire all gone. Well, now.” He rubbed his chin to sparks. “How do we get up to help Pipkin, with no brooms?”

“You
fly, Mr. Moundshroud.”

“Ah, no, that’s not the ticket. You must save him, always and forever,
again and again, this night, until one grand salvation. Wait. Ah!
Inspiration. We were going to build Notre Dame, correct? Well then, let
us by all means build it, there! and climb our way up to hard-skulled
knock-the-bell sound-the-hour Pipkin! Hop it, lads! Climb those stairs!”

“What
stairs?”

“These! Here! Here! And here!”

Bricks fell in place. The boys leaped. And as they put a foot up, out, and down, a stair came under it, one stone at a time.

Bong! said the bell.

Help! said Pipkin.

Feet galloping empty air came down to tap, rustle, clomp on—

A step. Another step.

And yet another and another climbing empty space.

Help! said Pipkin.

Bong! again went the hollow bell.

So they ran on emptiness, with Moundshroud prodding, shoving after.
They ran on pure windy light only to have bricks and stones and mortar
shuffle like cards, deal themselves solid, take form beneath their toes
and heels.

It was like racing up through a cake that built itself layer on stone layer, and the wild bell and sad Pipkin shouting and pleading them on.

“Our shadow, there it is!” said Tom.

And indeed the shadow of this cathedral, this splendid Notre Dame, was
tossed by moonlight all across France and half of Europe.

“Up, boys, up; no pause, no rest, run!”

Bong!

Help!

They ran. They began to fall with each step, but again and again and
again steps came in place and saved them and ran them taller so the
shadow of the spires loomed tall across rivers and fields to snuff the
last witch fires at crossroads. Crones, hags, wise men, demon lovers, a
thousand miles off, snuffed like candles, whiffed to smoke, wailed and
sank to hide as the church leaned, tilted across the heavens.

“So even as the Romans cut down druid trees and chopped their God of
the Dead to fall, we now with this church, boys, cast such a shadow as
knocks all witches off their stilts, and puts seedy sorcerers and trite
magicians to heel. No more small witch fires. Only this great lit
candle, Notre Dame. Presto!”

The boys laughed with delight.

For the last step fell in place.

They had reached the top, gasping.

Notre Dame cathedral was finished and built.

Bong!

The last soft hour was struck.

The great bronze bell shuddered.

And hung empty.

The boys leaned to peer into its cavernous mouth.

There was no clapper inside shaped like Pipkin.

“Pipkin?” they whispered.

“… kin,” echoed the bell in a small echo.

“He’s here somewhere. Up there in the air, meet him’s what he promised.
And Pipkin falls back on no promises” said Moundshroud. “Look about,
boys. Fine handiwork, eh? Centuries of toil done in a fast gallop and
sneeze, right? But, ah, ah, something beside Pipkin’s missing. What?
Glance up. Scan round. Eh?”

The boys peered. They puzzled.

“Er—”

“Don’t the place look awful plain, boys? Awful untouched and unornamented?”

“Gargoyles!”

Everyone turned to look at…

Wally Babb, who was dressed as a Gargoyle for Halloween. His face fairly beamed with revelation.

“Gargoyles. The place’s got no gargoyles.”

“Gargoyles.” Moundshroud uttered and ululated and beautifully ribboned
the word with his lizardly tongue. “Gargoyles. Shall we put them
on,
boys?”

“How?”

“Why I should think we could whistle them in place. Whistle for
demons, boys, whistle for fiends, give a high tootling blow for
beasties and ferocious fanged loomers of the dark.”

Wally Babb sucked in a great breath. “Here’s mine!”

He whistled.

All whistled.

And the gargoyles?

They came
running.