The Halloween Tree

"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.