The Halloween Tree

Pipkin's sweet skull, but--nowhere in all the explosions and dancing bones and flying skulls was there so much as one dust-speck or whimper or shadow of Pip.

They had grown so accustomed to Pip's leaping up in fantastic surprises, on the sides of Notre-Dame, or weighted down in gold sarcophagi, that they had expected him, like a jack-in-the-box, to pop from a mound of sugar skulls, flap sheets in their faces, cry dirges.

But no. Suddenly, no Pip. No Pip at all.

And maybe no Pip ever again.

The boys shivered. A cold wind blew fog up from the lake.

Along the dark night street, around a corner, came a woman bearing over her shoulders twin scoops of mounded charcoals, burning. From these heaps of pink burning coals firefly sparks scattered and blew in the wind. Where she passed on bare feet she left a trail of little sparks which died. Without a word, shuffling, she went around another corner into an alley, gone.

After her came a man carrying, on his head, lightly, lightly, a small coffin.

It was a box made of plain white wood nailed shut. On the sides and top of the box were pinned cheap silver rosettes, handmade silk and paper flowers.

Inside the box was--

The boys stared as the funeral parade of two went by. Two, thought Tom. The man and the box, yes, and the thing inside the box.

The man, his face solemn, balancing the coffin on the top of his head, walked tall into the nearby church.

"Was--" stuttered Tom. "Was that Pip again, inside that box?"

"What do you think, lad?" asked Moundshroud.

"I don't know," cried Tom. "I only know I had enough. The night's been too long. I seen too much. I know everything, gosh, everything!"

"Yeah!" said everyone, clustering close, shivering.

"And we've got to get home, don't we? What about Pipkin, where is he? Is he alive or dead? Can we save him? Is he lost? Are we too late? What do we do?"

"What!" cried everyone, and the same questions flew and burst from their mouths and welled in their eyes. They all took hold of Moundshroud as if to press the answer from him, yank it out his elbows.

"What do we do?"

"To save Pipkin? One last thing. Look up in this tree!"

Dangling from the tree were a dozen Halloween pinatas: devils, ghosts, skulls, witches that swayed in the wind.

"Break your pinata, boys!"

Sticks were thrust in their hands.

"Strike!"

Yelling, they struck. The pinatas exploded.

And from the Skeleton pinata a thousand small skeleton leaves fell in a shower. They swarmed on Tom. The wind blew skeletons, leaves, and Tom away.

And from the Mummy pinata fell hundreds of frail Egyptian mummies which rushed away into the sky, Ralph with them.

And so each boy struck, and cracked and let down small vinegar-gnat dancing images of himself so that devils, witches, ghosts shrieked and seized and all the boys and leaves went tumbling through the sky, with Moundshroud laughing after.

They ricocheted in the final alleys of the town. They banged and skipped like stones across the lake waters--

--to land rolling in a jumble of knees and elbows on a yet farther hill. They sat up.

They found themselves in the middle of an abandoned graveyard with no people, no lights. Only stones like immense wedding cakes, frosted with old moonlight.