The Halloween Tree

“You swear?”

“Swear. Wait’ll you see my costume!”

The boys began to back off. On the way, they touched his elbow, or knocked him gently in the chest, or ran their knuckles along his chin in a fake fight. “Okay, Pipkin. As long as you’re sure—”

“I’m sure.” He took his hand away from his side. His face colored for a moment as if the pain were gone. “On your marks. Get set. Go!”

When Joe Pipkin said “Go,” they Went.

They ran.

They ran backward halfway down the block, so they could see Pipkin standing there, waving at them.

“Hurry up, Pipkin!”

“I’ll catch you!” he shouted, a long way off.

The night swallowed him.

They ran. When they looked back again, he was gone.

They banged doors, they shouted Trick or Treat and their brown paper bags began to fill with incredible sweets. They galloped with their teeth glued shut with pink gum. They ran with red wax lips bedazzling their faces.

But all the people who met them at doors looked like candy factory duplicates of their own mothers and fathers. It was like never leaving home. Too much kindness flashed from every window and every portal. What they wanted was to hear dragons belch in basements and banged castle doors.

And so, still looking back for Pipkin, they reached the edge of town and the place where civilization fell away in darkness.

The Ravine.

The ravine, filled with varieties of night sounds, lurkings of black-ink stream and creek, lingerings of autumns that rolled over in fire and bronze and died a thousand years ago. From this deep place sprang mushroom and toadstool and cold stone frog and crawdad and spider. There was a long tunnel down there under the earth in which poisoned waters dripped and the echoes never ceased calling Come Come Come and if you do you’ll stay forever, forever, drip, forever, rustle, run, rush, whisper, and never go, never go go go …

The boys lined up on the rim of darkness, looking down.

And then Tom Skelton, cold in his bones, whistled his breath in his teeth like the wind blowing over the bedroom screen at night. He pointed.

“Oh, hey—that’s where Pipkin told us to go!”

He vanished.

All looked. They saw his small shape race down the dirt path into one hundred million tons of night all crammed in that huge dark pit, that dank cellar, that deliciously frightening ravine.

Yelling, they plunged after.

Where they had been was empty.

The town was left behind to suffer itself with sweetness.

Chapter 4 (#ulink_cce42f2c-15e5-57cd-862e-699c083ed026)

They ran down through the ravine at a swift rush, all laughing, jostling, all elbows and ankles, all steamy snort and roustabout, to stop in collision when Tom Skelton stopped and pointed up the path.

“There,” he whispered. “There’s the only house in town worth visiting on Halloween! There!”

“Yeah!” said everyone.

For it was true. The house was special and fine and tall and dark. There must have been a thousand windows in its sides, all shimmering with cold stars. It looked as if it had been cut out of black marble instead of built out of timbers, and inside? who could guess how many rooms, halls, breezeways, attics. Superior and inferior attics, some higher than others, some more filled with dust and webs and ancient leaves or gold buried above ground in the sky but lost away so high no ladder in town could take you there.

The house beckoned with its towers, invited with its gummed-shut doors. Pirate ships are a tonic. Ancient forts are a boon. But a house, a haunted house, on All Hallows’ Eve? Eight small hearts beat up an absolute storm of glory and approbation.

“Come on.”

But they were already crowding up the path. Until they stood at last by a crumbling wall, looking up and up and still farther up at the great tombyard top of the old house. For that’s what it seemed. The high mountain peak of the mansion was littered with what looked like black bones or iron rods, and enough chimneys to choke out smoke signals from three dozen fires on sooty hearths hidden far below in the dim bowels of this monster place. With so many chimneys, the roof seemed a vast cemetery, each chimney signifying the burial place of some old god of fire or enchantress of steam, smoke, and firefly spark. Even as they watched, a kind of bleak exhalation of soot breathed up out of some four dozen flues, darkening the sky still more, and putting out some few stars.

“Boy,” said Tom Skelton, “Pipkin sure knows what he’s talking about!”

“Boy,” said all, agreeing.

They crept along a weed-infested path toward the crumpled front porch.

Tom Skelton, alone, itched his bony foot up on the first porch-step. The others gasped at his bravery. So, now, finally in a mob, a compact mass of sweating boys moved up on the porch amid fierce cries of the planks underfoot, and shudderings of their bodies. Each wished to pull back, swivel about, run, but found himself trapped against the boy behind or in front or to the side. So, with a pseudopod thrust out here or there, the amoebic form, the large perspiration of boys leaned and made a run and a stop to the front door of the house which was as tall as a coffin and twice as thin.

They stood there for a long moment, various hands reaching out like the legs of an immense spider as if to twist that cold knob or reach up for the knocker on that front door. Meanwhile, the wooden floorings of the porch sank and wallowed beneath their weight, threatening at every shift of proportion to give way and fling them into some cockroach abyss beneath. The planks, each tuned to an A or an F or a C, sang out their uncanny music as heavy shoes scraped on them. And if there had been time and it were noon, they might have danced out a cadaver’s tune or a skeleton’s rigadoon, for who can resist an ancient porch which, like a gigantic xylophone, only wants to be jumped on to make music?

But they were not thinking this.

Henry-Hank Smith (for that’s who it was), hidden inside his black Witch’s costume, cried: “Look!”

And all looked at the knocker on the door. Tom’s hand trembled out to touch it.

“A Marley knocker!”

“What?”

“You know, Scrooge and Marley, a Christmas Carol!” whispered Tom.

And indeed the face that made up the knocker on the door was the face of a man with a dread toothache, his jaw bandaged, his hair askew, his teeth prolapsed, his eyes wild. Dead-as-a-doornail Marley, friend to Scrooge, inhabitor of lands beyond the grave, doomed to wander this earth forever until …

“Knock,” said Henry-Hank.

Tom Skelton took hold of old Marley’s cold and grisly jaw, lifted it, and let it fall.

All jumped at the concussion!

The entire house shook. Its bones ground together. Shades snap-furled up so that windows blinked wide their ghastly eyes.

Tom Skelton cat-leaped to the porch rail, staring up.

On the rooftop, weird weathercocks spun. Two-headed roosters whirled in the sneezed wind. A gargoyle on the western rim of the house erupted twin snorts of rain-funnel dust. And down the long snaking serpentine rainspouts of the house, after the sneeze had died and the weathercocks ceased spinning, vagrant wisps of autumn leaf and cobweb fell gusting out onto the dark grass.