The Halloween Tree Read online

  Even as a final rain, a shower, a downpour of hysterical souls-turned-beetle, turned flea, turned stinkbug, turned daddy longlegs, 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.

  Samhain, 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 Broomworks, 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.

  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 earth's 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 bindle 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 bramblecat 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 there 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-brushes 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?"