(1972) The Halloween Tree (5 page)

“Quick, now, come find me!”

Moundshrouds voice, laughing, called them on.

“This way! No, this!
This!”

They ran along the slender ribbon of mummy wrapping, deep into the earth.

“Yes. Here I am.”

They turned a corner and stopped, for the long linen ribbon wound
across the tomb floor and up a wall to wrap around the feet of an
ancient brown mummy which was propped atilt in a candlelit niche.

“Is,” stuttered Ralph Bengstrum, dressed in his own Mummy costume, “is—is that a
real
mummy?”

“Yes.” Dust sifted from under the golden mask on the mummy’s face. “Real.”

“Mr. Moundshroud!
You!

The gold mask fell to clang like a bright bell on the floor.

Where the mask had been was a mummy’s face, a pool of brown mud crinkled by blasts of sun. One eye was glued shut with
spiderweb. The other eye cracked forth tears of dust and a glint of
bright blue glass.

“Isssss there some boy there dressed like a mummy?” asked the voice muffled beneath the shroud.

“Why, me, sir!” squeaked Ralph, showing his arms, legs, chest, the
medical bandages it had taken him all afternoon to wrap himself up in,
mummified.

“Good,” sighed Moundshroud. “Grab the linen strip. Pull!”

Ralph bent, took hold of the ancient mummy bandages and—yanked!

The ribbon unraveled up around, up around to reveal the great ancient
reptile nose-beak and flaky chin and dry smiling dust-powdery mouth of
Moundshroud. His crossed arms fell loose.

“Thanks, lad! Free! No fun being wrapped like some old funeral gift for
the Land of the Dead. But—hist! Quick, boys, hop in the niches, stand
stiff. Someone’s coming. Play mummies, boys, play
dead!”

The boys leaped to stand, arms folded, eyes shut, breaths held, like a frieze of small mummies cut in the ancient rock.

“Easy” whispered Moundshroud. “Here comes—”

A funeral procession.

An army of mourners in gold and fine silks bearing small sailing-ship toys and copper bowls of food in their hands.

And in their midst, a mummy case carried light as sunshine on the shoulders of six men. And behind that, a fresh-wrapped mummy with new paintings on its linen vestments and a small gold mask fitted over the hidden face.

“See the food, boys, the toys,” whispered Moundshroud. “They put toys
in the tombs, lads. So the gods will come play, romp, roustabout, and
run children happy to the Land of the Dead. See the boats, kites,
jump-ropes, toy knives—”

“But look at
the size of that mummy,” said Ralph, inside his hot linen bandages.
“It’s a twelve-year-old boy in there! Like me! And that gold mask on
the boy mummy’s face—doesn’t it look familiar?”

“Pipkin!” cried everyone, hoarsely.

“Sh!” hissed Moundshroud.

For the funeral had stopped, the high priests were glancing around through the flickering torch shadows.

The boys, high in their niches, squeezed their eyes tight, sucked in their breaths.

“Not a whisper,” said Moundshroud, a mosquito in Tom’s ear. “Not a murmur.”

The harp music began again.

The funeral shuffled on.

And in the midst of all the gold and toys, the kites of the dead, there
was the small twelve-year-old fresh-new mummy with a gold mask that
looked just exactly like—

Pipkin.

No, no, no, no! thought Tom.

“Yes!” cried a mouse voice, tiny, lost, wrapped away kept, trapped, wild.
“Its me! I’m here. Under the mask. Under the wrappings. Can’t move! Can’t yell Can’t fight free!”

Pipkin! thought Tom. Wait!

“Can’t help it! Trapped!”
shouted the small wee voice wrapped in picture linens.
“Follow! Meet me! Find me at—”

The voice faded, for the funeral procession had turned a corner in the dark labyrinth and was gone.

“Follow you where, Pipkin?” Tom Skelton jumped down from his niche and yelled into the dark. “Meet you
where?”

But at that exact moment, Moundshroud, like a chopped tree, fell out of his niche. Bang! he struck the floor.

“Wait!” he cautioned Tom, looking up at him with one eye that looked
like a spider caught in its own web. “We’ll save old Pipkin yet. Sly
does it. Slide and creep, boys. Ssst.”

They helped him up and unwound some of his mummy wrappings and tiptoed down the long corridor and turned the corner.

“Holy Cow,” whispered Tom. “Look. They’re putting Pipkin’s mummy in the coffin and the coffin inside the—the—”

“Sarcophagus,” Moundshroud supplied the jawcracker. “A coffin in a
coffin in a coffin, lad. Each larger than the last, all done up in
hieroglyphs to tell his life story—”

“Pipkin’s
life?” said all.

“Or whoever Pipkin was this time around, this year, four thousand years ago.”

“Yeah,” whispered Ralph. “Look at the pictures on the sides of the
coffin. Pipkin one year old. Pipkin five. Pipkin ten and running fast.
Pipkin up an apple tree. Pipkin pretending to drown in the lake. Pipkin
eating his way through a peach orchard. Wait, what’s
that?!”

Moundshroud watched the busy funeral. “They’re putting furniture in the
tomb for him to use in the Land of the Dead. Boats. Kites. Tops to
spin. Fresh fruits should Pipkin wake a hundred years from now, hungry”

“He’ll be hungry all right. Good grief, look, they’re going out!
They’re closing the tomb!” Moundshroud had to grab and hold Tom for he
was jumping up and down in agony “Pipkin’s still in there, buried! When
do we save him?”

“Later. The Long Night is young. We'll see Pipkin again, never fear. Then—”

The tomb door slammed shut.

The boys yammered and yelled. In the dark they could hear the scrape
and slosh of mortar filling the last cracks and seams as the final
stones were shoved in place.

The mourners went away with their silent harps.

Ralph stood in his Mummy costume, stunned, watching the last shadows go.

“Is that why I’m dressed like a mummy?” He fingered the bandages. He
touched his clay-wrinkled ancient face. “Is that what my part of
Halloween is all
about?”

“All, boy, all,”
murmured Moundshroud. “The Egyptians, why, they built to last. Ten
thousand years they planned for. Tombs, boys, tombs. Graves. Mummies.
Bones. Death, death. Death was at the very heart, gizzard, light, soul, and body of
their life! Tombs and more tombs with secret passages, so none might be
found, so grave robbers could not borrow souls and toys and gold. You
are a mummy, boy, because that was how they dressed for Eternity. Spun
up in a cocoon of threads, they hoped to come forth like lovely
butterflies in some far dear loving world. Know your cocoon, boy. Touch
the strange stuffs.”

“Why,” said Ralph the Mummy, blinking at the smoky walls and old hieroglyphics.
“Every
day was Halloween to them!”

“Every day!” gasped all, in admiration.

“Every day was Halloween for
them,
too.” Moundshroud pointed.

The boys turned.

A kind of green electric storm simmered in the tomb dungeon. The ground
shuddered as with an ancient earthquake. Somewhere, a volcano turned
over in its sleep, lighting the walls with one fiery shoulder.

And on the walls beyond were prehistoric drawings of cavemen, long before the Egyptians.

“Now,” said Moundshroud.

Lightning struck.

Saber-toothed tigers caught the cavemen screaming. Tarpits drowned their bones. They sank, wailing.

“Wait. Let’s save a few with fire.”

Moundshroud blinked. Lightning struck to burn forests. One apeman,
running, seized a burning branch and rammed it in a saber-tooth’s jaws.
The tiger shrieked and fell away. The apeman, snorting in triumph, tossed the fiery branch
into a pile of autumn leaves in his cave. Other men came to hold their
hands out to the fire, laughing at the night where the yellow beast
eyes waited, afraid.

“See, boys?”
Moundshroud’s face flickered with the fire. “The days of the Long Cold
are done. Because of this one brave, new-thinking man, summer lives in
the winter cave.”

“But?” said Tom. “What’s that got to do with Halloween?”

“Do? Why, blast my bones, everything. When you and your friends die
every day, there’s no
time
to think of Death, is there? Only time to
run. But when you stop running at long last—”

He touched the walls. The apemen froze in mid-flight.

“—now you have time to think of where you came from, where you’re
going. And fire lights the way, boys. Fire and lightning. Morning stars
to gaze at. Fire in your own cave to protect you. Only by night fires
was the caveman, beastman, able at last to turn his thoughts on a spit
and baste them with wonder. The sun died in the sky. Winter came on
like a great white beast shaking its fur, burying him. Would spring
ever come back to the world? Would the sun be reborn next year or stay
murdered? Egyptians asked it. Cavemen asked it a million years before.
Will
the sun rise tomorrow morning?”

“And
that’s
how Halloween began?”

“With such long thoughts at night, boys. And always at the center of it, fire. The sun. The sun dying down the cold sky forever. How that must have scared early man, eh? That was the Big Death. If the sun went away forever,
then
what?

“So in the middle of autumn, everything dying, apemen turned in their
sleep, remembered their own dead of the last year. Ghosts called in
their heads. Memories, that’s what ghosts are, but apemen didn’t know
that. Behind their eyelids, late nights, the memory ghosts called,
waved, danced, so apemen woke up, tossed twigs on the fire, shivered,
wept. They could drive away wolves but not memories, not ghosts. So
they held tight to their ribs, prayed for spring, watched the fire,
thanked invisible gods for harvests of fruit and nuts.

“Halloween, indeed! A million years ago, in a cave in autumn, with ghosts inside heads, and the sun lost.”

Moundshroud’s voice faded.

He unraveled another yard or two of mummy wrappings, draped them over his arm grandly and said: “More to see. Come on, boys.”

And they walked out of the catacombs into the twilight of an old Egyptian day.

A great pyramid lay before them, waiting.

“Last one to the top,” said Moundshroud, “is a monkey’s uncle!”

And the monkey’s uncle was Tom.

Gasping, they reached the
pyramid’s top where waited a vast crystal lens, a viewing glass which
spun slowly in the wind on a golden tripod, a gigantic eye with which
to bring far places near.

In the west, the sun, smothered and dying in clouds, sank. Moundshroud hooted his delight:

“There it goes, boys. The heart, soul, and flesh of Halloween. The Sun!
There Osiris is murdered again. There sinks Mithras, the Persian fire.
There falls Phoebus Apollo all Grecian light. Sun and flame, boys. Look
and blink. Turn that crystal spyglass. Swing it down the Mediterranean
Coast a thousand miles. See the Greek Isles?”

“Sure,” said plain George Smith, dressed up as fancy pale ghost.
“Cities, towns, streets, houses. People jumping out on porches to bring
food!”

“Yes.” Moundshroud beamed.
“Their
Festival of the Dead:
the Feast of Pots.
Trick-or-Treat old style. But tricks from the dead if you don’t feed them. So treats are laid out in fine banquets on the sill!”

Far away, in the sweet dusk, smells of cooked meats steamed, dishes
were dealt out for spirits that smoked across the land of the living.
The women and children of the Grecian homes came and went with
multitudinous quantities of spiced and delectable victuals.

Then, all through the Grecian Isles, doors slammed. The vast slamming echoed along the dark wind.

“The temples shutting tight,” said Moundshroud. “Every holy place in Greece will be double-locked this night.”

“And look!” Ralph-who-was-a-Mummy swung the crystal lens. The light
flared over the boys’ masks. “Those people, why are they painting black
molasses on their front door posts?”

“Pitch,” corrected Moundshroud. “Black tar to glue the ghosts, stick them fast, so they
can’t
get inside.”

“Why,” said Tom, “didn’t
we
think of that!?”

Darkness moved down the Mediterranean shores. From the tombs, like
mist, the dead spirits wavered in soot and black plumes along the
streets to be caught in the dark tar that smeared the porch sills. The
wind mourned, as if telling the anguish of the trapped dead.

“Now, Italy. Rome.” Moundshroud turned the lens to see Roman cemeteries where people placed food on graves and hurried off.

The wind whipped Moundshroud’s cape. It hollowed his mouth:

“O autumn winds that bake and burn

And all the world to darkness turn,

Now storm and seize and make of me…

A swarm of leaves from Autumn’s Tree!”

He kick-jumped straight up in the
air. The boys yelled delight, even as his clothes, cape, hair, skin,
body, corn-candy bones tore apart before their eyes.

“… leaves … burn …

… change … turn … !”

The wind ribboned him to confetti; a million autumn leaves, gold,
brown, red as blood, rust, all wild, rustling, simmering, a clutch of
oak and maple leaf, a hickory leaf downfall, a toss of flaking whisper,
murmur, rustle to the dark river-creek sky. Not one kite, but ten
thousand thousand tiny mummy-flake, kites, Moundshroud exploded apart:

“World turn! Leaves burn!

Grass die! Trees …fly!”

And from a billion other trees in autumn lands, leaves rushed to join
with the upflung battalions of dry bits that were Moundshroud dispersed
in whirlwinds from which his voice stormed:

“Boys, see the fires along the Mediterranean coast? Fires burning north through Europe? Fires of fear. Flames of celebration. Would you spy, boys? Up, now, fly!”

And the leaves in avalanche fell upon each boy like terrible flapping
moths and carried them away. Over Egyptian sands they sang and laughed
and giggled. Over the strange sea, rapturous and hysterical, they
soared.

“Happy New Year!” a voice cried, far below.

“Happy
what?”
asked Tom.

“Happy New Year!” Moundshroud, a flock of rusty leaves, rustled his
voice. “In old times, the first of November was New Year’s Day. The
true end of summer, the cold start of winter. Not exactly happy, but,
well, Happy New Year!”

They crossed Europe and saw new water below.

“The British Isles,” whispered Moundshroud. “Would you cock an eye at England’s own druid God of the Dead?”

“We would!”

“Quiet as milkweed, then, soft as snow, fall, blow away down, each and all.”

The boys fell.

Like a bushel of chestnuts, their feet rained to earth.