(1972) The Halloween Tree (10 page)

“Yeah,” said Ralph, nodding behind his mask. “Heck.”

“Look, oh, look, look there,” said J.J.

The boys looked.

On top of a mound of white sugar skulls was one with the name
PIPKIN
on it.

Pipkin’s sweet skull, but—nowhere in all the explosions and dancing
bones and flying skulls was there so much as one dust-speck or whimper
or shadow of Pip.

They had grown so
accustomed to Pip’s leaping up in fantastic surprises, on the sides of
Notre Dame, or weighted down in gold sarcophagi, that they had expected
him, like a jack-in-the-box, to pop from a mound of sugar skulls, flap
sheets in their faces, cry dirges.

But no. Suddenly, no Pip. No Pip at all.

And maybe no Pip ever again.

The boys shivered. A cold wind blew fog up from the lake.

Along the dark night street,
around a corner, came a woman bearing over her shoulders twin scoops of
mounded charcoals, burning. From these heaps of pink burning coals
firefly sparks scattered and blew in the wind. Where she passed on bare
feet she left a trail of little sparks which died. Without a word,
shuffling, she went around another corner into an alley, gone.

After her came a man carrying, on his head, lightly, lightly, a small coffin.

It was a box made of plain white wood nailed shut. On the sides and top
of the box were pinned cheap silver rosettes, handmade silk and paper
flowers.

Inside the box was—

The boys stared as the funeral parade of two went by. Two, thought Tom. The man and the box, yes, and the thing inside the box.

The man, his face solemn, balancing the coffin on the top of his head, walked tall into the nearby church.

“Was—” stuttered Tom. “Was that Pip again, inside that box?”

“What do you think, lad?” asked Moundshroud.

“I don’t know,” cried Tom. “I only know I had enough. The night’s been
too long. I seen too much. I know everything, gosh, everything!”

“Yeah!” said everyone, clustering close, shivering.

“And we’ve got to get home, don’t we? What about Pipkin, where is he?
Is he alive or dead? Can we save him? Is he lost? Are we too late? What
do we do?”

“What!” cried everyone, and
the same questions flew and burst from their mouths and welled in their
eyes. They all took hold of Moundshroud as if to press the answer from
him, yank it out his elbows.

“What do we do?”

“To save Pipkin? One last thing. Look up in this tree!”

Dangling from the tree were a dozen Halloween piñatas: devils, ghosts, skulls, witches that swayed in the wind.

“Break your piñata, boys!”

Sticks were thrust in their hands.

“Strike!”

Yelling, they struck. The piñatas exploded.

And from the Skeleton piñata a thousand small skeleton leaves fell in a
shower. They swarmed on Tom. The wind blew skeletons, leaves, and Tom
away.

And from the Mummy piñata fell hundreds of frail Egyptian mummies which rushed away into the sky, Ralph with them.

And so each boy struck, and cracked and let down small vinegar-gnat dancing images of himself so that devils, witches, ghosts
shrieked and seized and all the boys and leaves went tumbling through
the sky, with Moundshroud laughing after.

They ricocheted in the final alleys of the town. They banged and skipped like stones across the lake waters—

—to land rolling in a jumble of knees and elbows on a yet farther hill. They sat up.

They found themselves in the middle of an abandoned graveyard with no
people, no lights. Only stones like immense wedding cakes, frosted with
old moonlight.

And as they watched,
Moundshroud, landing light on his feet in a swift quiet motion, bent.
He reached for an iron rung in the earth. He pulled. With a shriek of
hinges, a trapdoor in the earth gaped wide.

The boys came to stand at the edge of the big hole.

“Cat—” stuttered Tom. “Catacombs?”

“Catacombs.” Moundshroud pointed.

Stairs led down into a dry dust earth.

The boys swallowed hard.

“Is Pip down there?”

“Go bring him up, boys.”

“Is he
alone
down there?”

“No. Things are with him.
Things.”

“Who goes first?”

“Not me!”

Silence.

“Me”
said Tom, at last.

He put his foot on the first step down. He sank into the earth. He took another step. Then, suddenly, he was gone.

The others followed.

They went down the steps in single file and with each step down the
dark got darker and with each step down the silence grew more silent
and with each step down the night became deep as a well and very black
indeed and with each step down the shadows waited and seemed to lean
from walls and with each step down strange things seemed to smile at
them from the long cave which waited below. Bats seemed to be hanging
clustered just over their heads, squeaking so high you could not hear
them. Only dogs might hear, have hysterics, jump out of their skins,
and run off. With each step down the town got farther away and the
earth and all the nice people of the earth. Even the graveyard above
seemed far away. They felt lonely. They felt so alone they wanted to
cry.

For each step down was a billion
miles lost from life and warm beds and good candlelight and mothers’
voices and fathers’ pipe-smoke and clearing his voice in the night
which made you feel good knowing he was there somewhere in the dark,
alive and turning in his sleep and able to hit anything with his fists
if it had to be hit.

Each step down, and at last, at the bottom of the stairs, they peered into the long cave, the long hall.

And all the
people
were there and very quiet.

They had been quiet for a long time.

Some of them had been quiet for thirty years.

Some had been silent for forty years.

Some had been completely mum for seventy years.

“There they are,” said Tom.

“The mummies?” someone whispered.

“The mummies.”

A long line of them, standing against the walls. Fifty mummies standing
against the right wall. Fifty mummies standing against the left wall.
And four mummies waiting at the far end in the dark. One hundred and
four dry-as-dust mummies more alone than they, more lonely than they
might ever feel in life, abandoned here, left below, far from dog barks
and fireflies and the sweet singing of men and guitars in the night.

“Oh, boy,” said Tom. “All those poor people. I
heard
of them.”

“What?”

“Their folks couldn’t pay the rent on their graves, so the gravedigger
dug up these people and put them down here. The earth is so dry it
makes mummies out of them. And look, see how they’re dressed.”

The boys looked and saw that some of the ancient people were dressed
like farmers and some like peasant maids and some like businessmen in
old dark suits, and one even like a bullfighter in his dusty suit of
lights. But inside their suits they were all thin bones and skin and
spiderweb and dust that shook down through their ribs if you sneezed
and trembled them.

“What’s that?”

“What, what?”

“Ssssst!”

Everyone listened.

They peered into the long vault.

All the mummies looked back with empty eyes. All the mummies waited with empty hands.

Someone was weeping at the far end of the long dark hall.

“Ahhh—” came the sound.

“Oh—” came the crying.

“eeee—” and the small voice wept.

“That’s—why, that’s Pip. Only heard him cry once, but that’s him. Pipkin. And he’s trapped there in the catacomb.”

The boys stared.

And they saw, a hundred feet away, crouched down in a corner, trapped
at the most distant part of the catacomb, a small figure that—moved.
The shoulders twitched. The head was bent and covered with trembling
hands. And behind the hands, the mouth wailed and was afraid.

“Pipkin—?”

The crying stopped.

“Is that
you?”
whispered Tom.

A long pause, a trembled insuck of breath and then:

“…yes.”

“Pip, for cry-yi, what you doing there?”

“I don’t know!”

“Come out?”

“I—I can’t. I’m afraid!”

“But, Pip, if you stay there—”

Tom paused.

Pip, he thought, if you stay, you stay forever. You stay with all the
silence and the lonely ones. You stand in the long line and tourists
come and look at you and buy tickets to look at you some more. You—

“Pip!” said Ralph behind his mask. “You got to come out.”

“I can’t.” Pip sobbed.
“They
won’t let me.”

“They?”

But they knew he meant the long line of mummies. In order to get out he
would have to run the gauntlet between the nightmares, the mysteries,
the dreadful ones, the dires and the haunts.

“They
can’t stop you, Pip.”

Pip said: “Oh, yes, they can.”

“… can …” said echoes deep in the catacomb.

“I’m afraid to come out.”

“And we’re—” said Ralph.

Afraid to go in, thought everyone.

“Maybe if we chose
one
brave one—” said Tom, and stopped.

For Pipkin was crying again, and the mummies waiting and the night so
dark in the long tomb hall that you would sink right through the floor
if you stepped on it, and never move again. The floor would seize your
ankles with bony marble and hold you until the freezing cold froze you
into a dry-dust statue forever.

“Maybe if we went in in a mob, all of us—” said Ralph.

And they tried to move.

Like a big spider with many legs, the boys tried to cram through the door. Two steps forward, one step back. One step forward, two steps back.

“Ahhhhh!” wept Pipkin.

At which sound they all fell upon themselves, gibbering, and scrambled
yelling their dires and frights back to the door. They heard an
avalanche of heartbeats bang pains in their chests.

“Oh, my gosh, what we gonna do, him afraid to come, us afraid to go, what, what?” wailed Tom.

Behind them, leaning against the wall, was Moundshroud, forgotten. A
little candleflame of smile flickered and went out among his teeth.

“Here, boys. Save him with
this.”

Moundshroud reached into his dark cloak and brought forth a familiar
white-sugar-candy skull across the brow of which was written:

PIPKIN!

“Save Pipkin, lads. Strike a bargain.”

“With who?”

“With me and others unnamed. Here. Break this skull in eight delicious bits, boys, hand them ’round.
P
for you, Tom, and
I
for you, Ralph, and half of the other
P
for you, Hank, the other half for you, J.J., and some of the
K
for you, boy, and some for you, and here’s the
I
and the final
N.
Touch the sweet bits, lads. Listen. Here’s the dark deal. Do you truly want Pipkin to live?”

Such a fury of protest burst forth at this, Moundshroud was fair driven back by it. The boys barked like dogs against his so much as questioning their need for Pips survival.

“There, there,” he curried them, “I see you mean it. Well then, will you each give one year from the end of your life, boys?”

“What?” said Tom.

“I mean it, boys, one year, one precious year from the far-burned
candle-end of your life. With one year apiece you can ransom dead
Pipkin.”

“A year!” the whisper, the
murmur, the appalling sum of it ran among them. It was hard to grasp. A
year so far away was no year at all. Boys of eleven or twelve cannot
guess at men of seventy. “A year? a year? why, sure, why not? Yes—”

“Think, boys, think! This is no idle bargain struck with Nothing. I
mean it. It is true and a fact. It is a grave condition you make, and a
grave bargain you strike.

“One year,
each of you must promise to give. You won’t miss the year now, of
course, for you are very young, and I see by touching your minds you
cannot even guess the final situation. Only later, fifty years from
this night, or sixty years from this dawn, when you are running low on
time and dearly wish an extra day or so of fine weather and much joy,
then’s when Mr. D for Doom or Mr. B for Bones will show up with his
bill to be paid. Or perhaps I will come, old Moundshroud himself, a
friend to lads, and say ‘deliver.’ So a year promised must be a year
given over. I’ll say give; and you must give.

“What will that mean to each of you?

“It will mean that those of you who might have lived to be seventy-one
must die at seventy. Some of you who might have lived to be eighty-six
must cough up your ghost at eighty-five. That’s a great age. A year
more or less doesn’t sound like much. When the time comes, boys, you
may regret. But, you will be able to say,
this
year I spent well, I
gave for Pip, I made a loan of life for sweet Pipkin, the fairest apple
that ever almost fell too early off the harvest tree. Some of you at
forty-nine must cross life off at forty-eight. Some at fifty-five must
lay them down to Forever’s Sleep at fifty-four. Do you catch the whole
thing intact now, boys? Do you add the figures? Is the arithmetic
plain? A year! Who will bid three hundred and sixty-five entire days
from out his own soul, to get old Pipkin back? Think, boys. Silence.
Then, speak.”

There was a long brooding silence of arithmetic students doing inward sums.

And the sums were very fast indeed. There was no question, though they
knew that years from now they might doubt this dreadful haste. Yet what
else could they do? Only swim out from shore and save the drowning boy
before he sank a last time into a frightening dust.

“Me,” said Tom. “I’ll give a year.”