(1972) The Halloween Tree (8 page)

The unemployed of all midnight Europe shivered in their stone sleep and came awake.

Which is to say that all the old beasts, all the old tales, all the old
nightmares, all the old unused demons-put-by, and witches left in the
lurch, quaked at the call, reared at the whistle, trembled at the
summons, and in dust devils of propulsion skimmed down the roads,
flitted skies, buckshot through shaken trees, forded streams, swam
rivers, pierced clouds, and arrived, arrived.

Which is still to say that all the dead statues and idols and semigods
and demigods of Europe lying like a dreadful snow all about, abandoned,
in ruins, gave a blink and start and came as salamanders on the road,
or bats in skies or dingoes in the brush. They flew, they galloped,
they skittered.

To the general
excitement and amazement and much babbling shout from the fringe of
boys leaning out, Moundshroud leaning with them as the mobs of strange beasts came from north, south, east, west to panic at the gates and wait for whistles.

“Shall we drop white-hot boiling lead down on them?”

The boys saw Moundshroud’s smile.

“Heck, no,” said Tom. “Hunchback already
did
that years ago!”

“Well, then, no burning lava. So shall we
whistle
them up?”

They all whistled.

And obedient to summons, the mobs, the flocks, the prides, the crush,
the collection, the raving flux of monsters, beasts, vices rampant,
virtues gone sour, discarded saints, misguided prides, hollow pomps
oozed, slid, suckered, pelted, ran bold and right up the sides of
Notre Dame. In a floodtide of nightmare, in a tidal wave of outcry and
shamble they inundated the cathedral, to crust themselves on every
pinion and upthrust stone.

So here ran
pigs and there climbed Satan’s goats and yet another wall knew devils
which recarved themselves along the way, dropped horns and grew new
ones, shaved beards to sprout tendril earthworm mustaches.

Sometimes a swarm of only masks and faces scuttled up the walls and
took the buttress heights, carried by an army of crayfish and
wobbly-crotchety lobsters. Here came the heads of gorillas, full of sin
and teeth. There came men’s heads with sausages in their mouths. Beyond
danced the mask of a Fool upheld by a spider that knew ballet.

So much was going on that Tom said: “My gosh, so much is going on!”

“And more to come,
there!”
said Moundshroud.

For now that Notre Dame was infested with various beasts and spidering
leers and gloms and masks, why here came dragons chasing children and
whales swallowing Jonahs and chariots chockful of skulls-and-bones.
Acrobats and tumblers, yanked out of shape by demidemons, limped and
fell in strange postures to freeze on the roof.

All accompanied by pigs with harps and sows with piccolos and dogs
playing bagpipes, so the music itself helped charm and pull new mobs of
grotesques up the walls to be trapped and caught forever in sockets of
stone.

Here an ape plucked a lyre; there
floundered a woman with a fish’s tail. Now a sphinx flew out of the
night, shed its wings and became woman and lion, half and half, settled
to snooze away the centuries in the shadow and sound of high bells.

“Why, what are
those?”
cried Tom.

Moundshroud, leaning over, gave a snort: “Why those are Sins, boys! And nondescripts. There crawls the Worm of Conscience!”

They looked to see it crawl. It crawled very fine.

“Now,” whispered Moundshroud softly. “Settle. Slumber. Sleep.”

And the flocks of strange creatures turned about three times like evil
dogs and lay down. All beasts took root. All grimaces froze to stone.
All cries faded.

The moon shadowed and lit the gargoyles of Notre Dame.

“Does it make sense, Tom?”

“Sure. All the old gods, all the old dreams, all the old nightmares,
all the old ideas with nothing to do, out of work, we
gave
them work.
We
called
them here!”

“And here they will remain for centuries, right?”

“Right!”

They looked down over the rim.

There was a mob of beasts on the east battlement.

A crowd of sins on the west.

A surge of nightmares on the south.

And a fine scuttle of unnamed vices and ill-kept virtues to the north.

“I,” said Tom, proud of this night’s work, “wouldn’t mind
living
here.”

The wind crooned in the mouths of the beasts. Their fangs hissed and whistled: “Much thanks.”

“Jehosophat,” said Tom Skelton,
on the parapet. “We whistled all the stone griffins and demons here.
Now Pipkin’s lost again. I was thinking, why can’t we whistle
him?”

Moundshroud laughed so his cape boomed on the night wind and his dry bones jangled inside his skin.

“Boys! Look around! He’s still
here!”

“Where?”

“Here,” mourned a small faraway voice.

The boys crickled their spines looking over the parapet, cracked their necks staring up.

“Look and find, lads, hide and seek!”

And even in seeking they could not help but enjoy once more the
turbulent slates of the cathedral all fringed with horrors and
deliciously ugly with trapped beasts.

Where was Pipkin among all those dark sea creatures with gills gaped
open like mouths for an eternal gasp and sigh? Where among all those
lovely chiseled nightmares cut from the gallstones of night-lurks and
monsters cracked out of old earthquakes, vomited up from mad volcanoes which cooled themselves to frights and deliriums?

“Here,” wailed a far, small, familiar voice again.

And way down on a ledge, halfway to the earth, the boys, squinting,
thought they saw one small round beautiful angel-devil face with a
familiar eye, a familiar nose, a friendly and familiar mouth.

“Pipkin!”

Shouting, they ran down stairways along dark corridors until they
reached a ledge. Far out there on the windy air, above a very narrow
walkway indeed, was that small face, lovely among so much ugliness.

Tom went first, not looking down, spreadeagling himself. Ralph followed. The rest inched along in a line.

“Watch out, Tom, don’t fall!”

“I’m not fallin’. Here’s Pip.”

And there he was.

Standing in a line directly under the outthrust stone mask, the bust,
the head of a gargoyle, they looked up at that mighty fine profile,
that great nub nose, that unbearded cheek, that fuzzy cap of marbled
hair.

Pipkin.

“Pip, for cri-yi, what you doin’ here?” called Tom.

Pip said nothing.

His mouth was cut stone.

“Aw it’s just rock,” said Ralph. “Just a gargoyle carved here a long time ago,
looks
like Pipkin.”

“No, I heard him
call!”

“But, how—”

And then the wind gave them the answer.

It blew around the high corners of Notre Dame. It fluted in the ears and piped out the gaping mouths of the gargoyles.

“Ahhh—” whispered Pipkin’s voice.

The hair stood up on the backs of their necks.

“Ooooo,” murmured the stone mouth.

“Listen. There it is!” said Ralph excitedly.

“Shut up!” cried Tom. “Pip? Next time the wind blows, tell us, how do we help? What
got
you here? How do we get you down?”

Silence. The boys clung to the rock-cliff face of the great cathedral.

Then another swoop of wind sucked by, drew their breaths, and whistled in the carved stone boy’s teeth.

“One—” said Pip’s voice.

“—question,” whispered Pip’s voice again after a pause.

Silence. More wind.

“At a—”

The boys waited.

“—time.”

“One question at a time!” translated Tom.

The boys hooted with laughter. That was Pip all right.

“Okay” Tom gathered his spit. “What are you
doing
up here?”

The wind blew sadly and the voice spoke as from deep in an old well:

“Been—so many—places—in just—a few—hours.”

The boys waited, grinding their teeth.

“Speak up, Pipkin!”

The wind came back to mourn in the open stone mouth:

But the wind had died.

It began to rain.

And this was best of all. For the raindrops ran cold in Pipkin’s stone
ears and out along his nose and fountained from his marble mouth so
that he began to utter syllables in liquid tongues, with clear cold
rainwater words:

“Hey—this is better!”

He spouted mist, he sprayed quick rain:

“You should’ve been where I been! Gosh! I was buried for a mummy! I was trapped in a dog!”

“We guessed that was you, Pipkin!”

“And now here,” said the rain in the ear, the rain in the nose, the
rain in the clear-dripping marble mouth. “Gosh, golly, funny, strange,
inside this rock with all these devils and demons for pals! And, ten
minutes from now, who knows where I’ll be? higher up? or buried deep!”

“Where, Pipkin?”

The boys jostled. The rain squalled and beat them so they almost tilted and fell off the ledge.

“Are you dead, Pipkin?”

“No, not yet,” said the cold rain in his mouth. “Part of me in a
hospital a long way off home, part of me in that old Egyptian tomb.
Part of me in the grass in England. Part of me here. Part of me in a
worse place—”

“Where?”

“I don’t know, I don’t, oh gosh, one minute I’m yelling laughs, the next I’m scared. Now, just now, this very minute, I guess, I know, I’m scared. Help me, guys. Help, oh
please!”

Rain poured out his eyes like tears.

The boys reached up to touch Pipkin’s chin, as best they could. But before they could touch …

A lightning bolt struck out of the sky.

It flashed blue and white.

The entire cathedral shook. The boys had to grab demons’ horns and angels’ wings on either side so as not to be knocked off.

Thunder and smoke. And a great scattering of rock and stone.

Pipkin’s face was gone. Knocked off by the lightning bolt, it fell down through space to shatter the ground below.

“Pipkin!”

But there below on the cathedral porch stones were only flinty
firesparks blowing away, and a fine gargoyle dust. Nose, chin, stone
lip, hard cheek, bright eye, carved fine ear, all, all whipped away on
the wind in chaff and shrapnel dust. They saw something like a spirit
smoke, a bloom of gunpowder blow drifting south and west.

“Mexico—” Moundshroud, one of the few men in all the world who knew how to utter, uttered the word.

“Mexico?” asked Tom.

“The last grand travel of this night,” said Moundshroud, still
uttering, savoring the syllables. “Whistle, boys, scream like tigers,
cry like panthers, shriek like carnivores!”

“Scream, cry, shriek?”

“Reassemble the Kite, lads, the Kite of Autumn. Paste back the fangs
and fiery eyes and bloody talons. Yell the wind to sew it all together
and ride us high and long and last. Bray, boys, whimper, trumpet,
shout!”

The boys hesitated. Moundshroud
ran along the ledge like someone racketing a picket fence. He knocked
each boy with his knee and elbow. The boys fell, and falling gave each
his particular whimper, shriek, or scream.

Plummeting down through cold space, they felt the tail of a murderous
peacock flourish beneath, all blood-filled eye. Ten thousand burning
eyes came up.

Hovered suddenly round a windy corner of gargoyles, the Autumn Kite, freshly assembled, broke their fall.

They grabbed, they held to rim, to edge, to cross-struts, to trapdrum
rattling papers, to bits and tatters and shreds of old meat-breath
lion-mouth, and stale-blood tiger’s maw.

Moundshroud leaped up to grab. This time he was the tail.

The Autumn Kite hovered, waiting, eight boys upon its billowing surf of teeth and eyes.

Moundshroud tuned his ear.

Hundreds of miles away, beggars ran down Irish roads, starving, asking
for food from door to door. Their cries rose in the night.

Fred Fryer, in his beggar’s costume, heard.

“That way! Let’s fly there!”

“No. No time. Listen!”

Thousands of miles away, there was a faint tap-hammering of deathwatch beetles ticking the night.

“The coffin makers of Mexico.” Moundshroud smiled. “In the streets with
their long boxes and nails and little hammers, tapping, tapping.”

“Pipkin?” whispered the boys.

“We hear,” said Moundshroud. “And, to Mexico, we
go.”

The Autumn Kite boomed them away on a one-thousand-foot tidal wave of wind.

The gargoyles, fluting in their stone nostrils, gaping their marble lips, used that same wind to wail them farewell.