The Halloween Tree

They thought of Pipkin, no more than a thimbleful of boy and sheer summer delight, torn out like a tooth and carried off on a black tide of web and horn and black soot.

And, almost as one, they murmured: "Yes."

Moundshroud sprang. He ran. He pummeled, he pushed, he raved. "Quick now, along this path, up this rise, along this road! The abandoned farm! Over the fence! Allez-oop!"

They leaped the fence running and stood by a barn that was frosted over with old circus posters, with banners tattered by wind pasted here thirty, forty, fifty years back. Circuses, passing through, had left patches and swatches of themselves ten inches thick.

"A kite, boys. Build a kite. Quick!"

No sooner had he cried this than Mr. Moundshroud ripped a great tissue from the side of the barn! It fluttered in his hands: the eye of a tiger! Another rip from another ancient poster and--the mouth of a lion!

The boys heard roars of Africa down the wind.

They blinked. They ran. They scratched with fingernails. They plucked with hands. They seized off strips and patches and huge rolls of animal flesh, of fang, and piercing eye, of wounded flank, of blood-red claw, of tail, of bound and leap and cry. The whole side of the barn was an ancient parade stopped dead. They tore it asunder. And with each tear that pulled off talon, tongue, or ravening feline eye. Beneath waited layer upon layer of jungle nightmare, delicious encounters with polar bears, panicked zebra, milling prides of lions, charging rhinos, clambering gorillas which pawed up the side of midnight and swung toward dawn. A thousand animals in congregation rumbled to be set free. Now free in fists and hands and fingers, whistling on the autumn wind, the boys raced off across the grass.

Now Moundshroud knocked down old fence-railing beams and made a rough kite-cross and bound them with wire, then stood back to receive the gifts of kite paper as the boys flung them in fistfuls.

And these he tossed in place upon the frame, and, spark-flinting, fused with burnings of his horny hands.

"Hey!" The boys cried their delight. "Oh, look!"

They had never seen such things, or known that men such as Moundshroud with a pinch, a clutch, a pressure of fingers might blend an eye with tooth, a tooth with mouth, a mouth with feline bobcat tail. All, all mingled beautifully into a single thing, a wild jigsaw puzzle jungle zoo billowed and trapped, pasted and tied, growing, growing, taking color and sound and pattern in the light of the ascending moon. Now another cannibal eye. Now another hungry maw. A mad chimpanzee. A most insane mandrill-ape. A screaming butcher bird! The boys ran up with the last frights handed over and the kite finished, the ancient flesh laid out, fused by the still blue-smoke-burning horny hands. Mr. Moundshroud lit a cigar with the last bit of fire that sparked out of his thumb and smiled. And the light from his smile showed the Kite for what it was, a kite of destructions, of animals so dire and fierce their outcry drowned the wind and murdered the heart.

He was pleased, the boys were pleased.

For the Kite somehow seemed to resemble...

"Why," said Tom, astounded, "a pterodactyl!"

"A what?"

"Pterodactyl, those ancient flying reptiles, gone some billion years back, and never seen again," replied Mr. Moundshroud. "Well said, boy. Pterodactyl it seems and is, and 'twill fly us downwind to Perdition or Lands End or some other fine-sounding place. But, now, rope, twine, string, quick! Filch and carry!"

They ran the rope off an old abandoned clothes line strung between barn and abandoned farmhouse. A good ninety feet or more of rope they brought Moundshroud who snaked it through his fist until it smoked a most unholy smoke. He tied it to the middle of the vast Kite which flapped like a somehow lost and out-of-water manta ray upon this high strange beach. It struggled with wind to live. It flapped and floundered on the heaves of tidal air, laid down on grass.

Moundshroud stood back, gave a jerk, and lo! the Kite--flew!

It hung low upon the air at the end of its clothes line, in a dumb-brute groveling of wind, veering this way, dashing that, leaping up suddenly to confront them with a wall of eyes, a solid flesh of teeth, a storm of cries.

"It won't rise, won't go straight! A tail, we need a tail!"

And as by instinct Tom dived first, and seized the Kite by its bottom. He hung there. The Kite steadied. It began to rise.

"Yes," cried the dark man. "Oh, lad, you are the one. Bright boy! You be the tail! And more, and more!"

And as the Kite slowly ascended the cold river of swift flowing air, each boy in turn, seized with the whim, spurred by his wits, became more and yet more of the tail. Which is to say that Henry-Hank, disguised as a Witch, grabbed Tom's ankles, and now the Kite had two boys for its magnificent tail!

And Ralph Bengstrum, wound up in his Mummy clothes, stumbling over his winding tapes, smothered in his burial rags, shambled forward, jumped, and grabbed Henry-Hank's ankles.

So three boys hung now in a Tail!

"Wait! Here I come!" cried Beggar, who under his dirt and rags was really Fred Fryer.

He jumped, he caught.

The Kite ascended. The four boys making the tail yelled for more length!

They got it when the boy dressed as an Apeman scrambled and grabbed ankles followed by the boy dressed as Death with a Scythe who did dangerously likewise.