Pipkin’s face was gone. Knocked off by the lightning bolt, it fell down through space to shatter the ground below.
“Pipkin!”
But there below on the cathedral porch stones were only flinty firesparks blowing away, and a fine gargoyle dust. Nose, chin, stone lip, hard cheek, bright eye, carved fine ear, all, all whipped away on the wind in chaff and shrapnel dust. They saw something like a spirit smoke, a bloom of gunpowder blow drifting south and west.
“Mexico—” Moundshroud, one of the few men in all the world who knew how to utter, uttered the word.
“Mexico?” asked Tom.
“The last grand travel of this night,” said Moundshroud, still uttering, savoring the syllables. “Whistle, boys, scream like tigers, cry like panthers, shriek like carnivores!”
“Scream, cry, shriek?”
“Reassemble the Kite, lads, the Kite of Autumn. Paste back the fangs and fiery eyes and bloody talons. Yell the wind to sew it all together and ride us high and long and last. Bray, boys, whimper, trumpet, shout!”
The boys hesitated. Moundshroud ran along the ledge like someone racketing a picket fence. He knocked each boy with his knee and elbow. The boys fell, and falling gave each his particular whimper, shriek, or scream.
Plummeting down through cold space, they felt the tail of a murderous peacock flourish beneath, all blood-filled eye. Ten thousand burning eyes came up.
Hovered suddenly round a windy corner of gargoyles, the Autumn Kite, freshly assembled, broke their fall.
They grabbed, they held to rim, to edge, to cross-struts, to trapdrum rattling papers, to bits and tatters and shreds of old meat-breath lion-mouth, and stale-blood tiger’s maw.
Moundshroud leaped up to grab. This time he was the tail.
The Autumn Kite hovered, waiting, eight boys upon its billowing surf of teeth and eyes.
Moundshroud tuned his ear.
Hundreds of miles away, beggars ran down Irish roads, starving, asking for food from door to door. Their cries rose in the night.
Fred Fryer, in his beggar’s costume, heard.
“That way! Let’s fly there!”
“No. No time. Listen!”
Thousands of miles away, there was a faint tap-hammering of deathwatch beetles ticking the night.
“The coffin makers of Mexico.” Moundshroud smiled. “In the streets with their long boxes and nails and little hammers, tapping, tapping.”
“Pipkin?” whispered the boys.
“We hear,” said Moundshroud. “And, to Mexico, we go.”
The Autumn Kite boomed them away on a one-thousand-foot tidal wave of wind.
The gargoyles, fluting in their stone nostrils, gaping their marble lips, used that same wind to wail them farewell.
Chapter XVIII
They hung above Mexico.
They hung above an island in that lake in Mexico.
They heard dogs barking in the night far below. They saw a few boats on the moonlit lake moving like water insects. They heard a guitar playing and a man singing in a high sad voice.
A long way off across the dark borders of land, in the United States, packs of children, mobs of dogs ran laughing, barking, knocking, from door to door, their hands full of sweet bags of treasure, wild with joy on Halloween night.
“But, here—” whispered Tom.
“Here what?” asked Moundshroud, hovering at his elbow.
“Oh, why here—”
“And down through all of South America—”
“Yes, South. Here and South. All the cemeteries. All the graveyards are—”
—full of candlelight, Tom thought. A thousand candles in this cemetery, a hundred candles in that graveyard, ten thousand small flickering lights farther on a hundred miles, five thousand miles down to the very tip of Argentina.
“Is that the way they celebrate—”
“El Dia de los Muertos. How’s your grade school Spanish, Tom?”
“The Day of the Dead Ones?”
“Caramba, si! Kite, disassemble!”
Swooping down, the Kite flew apart for a final time.
The boys tumbled on the stony shore of the quiet lake.
Mists hung over the waters.
Far across the lake they could see an unlit tombyard. There were, as yet, no candles burning in it.
Out of the mists, a dugout canoe moved silently without oars, as if the tide touched it across the waters.
A tall figure in a gray winding sheet stood motionless in one end of the boat.
The boat nudged the grassy shore softly.
The boys gasped. For, as far as they could tell, only darkness was cupped inside the hood of the shrouded figure.
“Mr.—Mr. Moundshroud?”
They knew it had to be him.
But he said nothing. Only the faintest firefly of a grin flickered within the cowl. A bony hand gestured.
The boys tumbled into the boat.
“Sh!” whispered a voice from the empty hood.
The figure gestured again and, touched by wind, they blew across the dark waters under a night sky filled with the billion never-before-seen fires of the stars.
Far off on that dark island, there was a prickle of guitar sound.
A single candle was lit in the graveyard.
Somewhere someone blew a musical sound on a flute.
Another candle was lit among the tombstones.
Someone sang a single word of a song.
A third candle was touched to life by a flaming match.
And the faster the boat moved, the more guitar notes sounded and the more candles were lit high among the mounds on the stony hills. A dozen, a hundred, a thousand candles flared until it looked as if the great Andromeda star cluster had fallen out of the sky and tilted itself to rest here in the middle of almost-midnight Mexico.
The boat struck the shore. The boys, surprised, fell out. They spun about, but Moundshroud was gone. Only his winding sheet lay empty in the boat.
A guitar called to them. A voice sang to them.
A road like a river of white stones and white rocks led up through the town that was like a graveyard, to the graveyard that was like—a town!
For there were no people in the town.
The boys reached the low wall of the graveyard and then the huge lacework iron gates. They took hold of the iron rungs and stared in.
“Why,” gasped Tom. “I never ever seen the like!”
For now they knew why the town was empty.
Because the graveyard was full.
By every grave was a woman kneeling to place gardenias or azaleas or marigolds in a frame upon the stone.
By every grave knelt a daughter who was lighting a new candle or lighting a candle that had just blown out.
By every grave was a quiet boy with bright brown eyes, and in one hand a small papier-mâché funeral parade glued to a shingle, and in the other hand a papier-mâché skeleton head which rattled with rice or nuts inside.
“Look,” whispered Tom.
There were hundreds of graves. There were hundreds of women. There were hundreds of daughters. There were hundreds of sons. And hundreds upon hundreds upon thousands of candles. The whole graveyard was one swarm of candleshine as if a population of fireflies had heard of a Grand Conglomeration and had flown here to settle in and flame upon the stones and light the brown faces and the dark eyes and the black hair.
“Boy,” said Tom, half to himself, “at home we never go to the graveyard, except maybe Memorial Day, once a year, and then at high noon, full sun, no fun. This now, this is—fun!”
“Sure!” whisper-yelled everyone.
“Mexican Halloweens are better than ours!”
For on every grave were plates of cookies shaped like funeral priests or skeletons or ghosts, waiting to be nibbled by—living people? or by ghosts that might come along toward dawn, hungry and forlorn? No one knew. No one said.
And each boy inside the graveyard, next to his sister and mother, put down the miniature funeral on the grave. And they could see the tiny candy person inside the tiny wooden coffin placed before a tiny altar with tiny candles. And around the tiny coffin stood tiny altar boys with peanuts for heads and eyes painted on the peanut shells. And before the altar stood a priest with a cornnut for a head and a walnut for a stomach. And on the altar was a photograph of the person in the coffin, a real person once; remembered now.
“Better, and still better,” whispered Ralph.
“Cuevos!” sang a far voice up the hill.
Inside the graveyard, voices echoed the song.
Leaning against the graveyard walls, some with guitars in their hands or bottles, were the men of the village.
“Cuevos de los Muertos—” sang the faraway voice.
“Cuevos de los Muertos” sang the men in the shadows inside the gate.
“Skulls,” translated Tom. “The skulls of the dead.”
“Skulls, sweet sugar skulls, sweet candy skulls, the skulls of the dead ones,” sang the voice, coming close now.
And down the hill, treading softly in shadow, came a hunch-backed Vendor of Skulls.
“No, not hunched—” said Tom, half aloud.
“A whole load of skulls on his back,” cried Ralph.
“Sweet skulls, sweet white crystal sugar candy skulls,” sang the Vendor, his face hidden under a vast sombrero. But it was Moundshroud’s voice that sweetly piped.
And carried from a long bamboo over his shoulder hung on black threads were dozens and scores of sugar skulls as big as their own heads. And each skull was inscribed.
“Names! Names!” sang the old Vendor. “Tell me your name, I give you your skull!”
“Tom,” said Tom.
The old man plucked forth a skull. On it, in huge letters was written:
TOM.
Tom took and held his own name, his own sweet edible skull, in his fingers.
“Ralph.”
And a skull with the name RALPH written on it was tossed forth. Ralph caught it, laughing.
In a swift game, the bony hand plucked, tossed white skull after skull, sweetly on the cool air:
HENRY-HANK! FRED! GEORGE! HACKLES! J.J.! WALLY!
The boys, bombarded, squealed and danced about, pelted with their own skulls and their own proud names sugar encrusted upon each white brow of those skulls. They caught and almost dropped this splendid bombardment.
They stood, mouths wide open, staring at the sugary death-sweets in their gummy hands.
And from within the graveyard, way-high male-soprano voices sang:
“Roberto … Maria
