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 loo

ked 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.

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.