The Halloween Tree
"Pip, you did it!"
"You're safe!"
But Pip kept running. Not only through the gauntlet of dead ones but the gauntlet of warm sweating alive yelling boys.
He plowed them aside and raced upstairs, gone.
"Pip, it's all right, come back!"
They ran up the stairs after.
"Where's he going, Mr. Moundshroud?"
"Well, I should imagine, scared as he is," said Moundshroud, "home."
"Is Pipkin--saved?"
"Let's go see,
boys. Up!"
He spun about like a whirlwind. His arms, flung out, cut the air in slicing grabs and swoops. So fast he spun that he made a vacuum, a self-made storm. This cyclone, this huge upsuck of air, then seized the boys by ear, nose, elbow, toe.
Like so many leaves stripped from a tree they yelled themselves into the sky. Moundshroud, raving, sank up. And they, if that is possible, sank and plummeted after. They hit the clouds like an explosion of gunshot. They followed Moundshroud like a flock of north-rushing birds heading home before their season.
The earth seemed to give a turn from north to south. A thousand small villages and towns spun under, alight with candles in tombyards through all of Mexico, alight with candles flickering in pumpkins north of the border across Texas and then Oklahoma and Kansas and Iowa and at last Illinois and at last: "Home!" cried Tom. "There's the courthouse, there's my house, there's the Halloween Tree!"
They swooped once around the courthouse and twice around the thousand-pumpkin-burning Tree, and a final time around old Moundshroud's tall house with its many gables, many rooms, many gaping windows, high lightning rods, railings, attics, scrollworks, which leaned and groaned in the wind their passage made. Dust sifted out of windows to greet them. Shades flapped in yet other windows like ancient tongues lolling to be diagnosed by wind-borne small doctors of strange medicines. Ghosts withered like white flowers, furling and unfurling in moldered flags which fell to ruin even as they shot by.
And the whole house, circled, was like all of Halloween ever. So cried Moundshroud, flapping his antique arms and webs and black silks as he landed on the roof and beckoned the boys to alight and pointed down through an immense sky window through all the levels of his mansion.
The boys gathered round the skylight window and stared down a stairwell which opened out at various floors to various times and histories of men and skeletons and dreadful musics played on flute bones.
"There it is, boys. Will you look? Do you see? There's our whole ten-thousand-year flight, there's our whole trip in one place, from caveman to Egyptian to Roman front porch to English harvest field to boneyard in Mexico."
Moundshroud lifted the vast pane of glass.
"The stairway banister, boys. Ride it down! Each to his own time, his own age, his own level. Leap off where your costume fits, where you think you and your disguise, your mask, belong! Git!"
The boys leaped. They sprang down the stairwell to the top landing. Then, one by one, they popped onto the banister and slid yelling down through all the floors, all the levels, all the ages of history kept within Moundshroud's incredible mansion.
Round-about-down, round-about-down they whisked, they skidded, they shuffled on the waxed rail.
Rrrwhoom-thud! J.J. in his Apeman costume landed in the basement. He glanced about. He saw cave paintings, dim smokes and fires, and shadows of hulking gorilla-men. Saber-tooths burned their eyes at him from the cindered dark.
Down-around rush went Ralph, the Egyptian Mummified Boy, bandaged for all ages, to land on the first floor where Egyptian hieroglyphs strutted in armies of symbol, with squadrons of ancient birds in skies and flocks of beast-gods and scuttling golden beetles rolling dung-balls down history.
Crash! Hackles Nibley, with his scythe somehow still flashing in his hands, hit and almost rolled himself to mincemeat on the second floor where the shadow of Samhain, druid God of the Dead, raised up his scythe upon a far chamber wall!
Bang! George Smith, a Greek Ghost? a Roman Haunt? landed on the third floor near tar-painted porches which glued old wandering spirits to the sill!
Thud, Henry-Hank, the Witch, plopped down in the fourth landing amid witches leaping bonfires in English, French, German countrysides!
Fred Fryer? The fifth floor took him in a heap, the Beggar landing among sounds of beggars begging the country roads of Ireland, starving.
Wally Babb, the Gargoyle himself, flew and crashed on the sixth floor where walls sprouted elbows and limbs and lumps, grimaces of fine gargoyle humors and glees.
Until finally Skeleton Tom skidded off the banister on the topmost floor to tumble and knock white candy skulls like tenpins in a dire game among the shadows of crouched women by mounds, with miniature skeleton brassbands playing mosquito tunes while Moundshroud, far above, still on the roof, yelled down: "Well, boys, do you see? It's all one, yes?"