For each step down was a billion miles lost from life and warm beds and good candlelight and mothers’ voices and fathers’ pipe-smoke and clearing his voice in the night which made you feel good knowing he was there somewhere in the dark, alive and turning in his sleep and able to hit anything with his fists if it had to be hit.
Each step down, and at last, at the bottom of the stairs, they peered into the long cave, the long hall.
And all the people were there and very quiet.
They had been quiet for a long time.
Some of them had been quiet for thirty years.
Some had been silent for forty years.
Some had been completely mum for seventy years.
“There they are,” said Tom.
“The mummies?” someone whispered.
“The mummies.”
A long line of them, standing against the walls. Fifty mummies standing against the right wall. Fifty mummies standing against the left wall. And four mummies waiting at the far end in the dark. One hundred and four dry-as-dust mummies more alone than they, more lonely than they might ever feel in life, abandoned here, left below, far from dog barks and fireflies and the sweet singing of men and guitars in the night.
“Oh, boy,” said Tom. “All those poor people. I heard of them.”
“What?”
“Their folks couldn’t pay the rent on their graves, so the gravedigger dug up these people and put them down here. The earth is so dry it makes mummies out of them. And look, see how they’re dressed.”
The boys looked and saw that some of the ancient people were dressed like farmers and some like peasant maids and some like businessmen in old dark suits, and one even like a bullfighter in his dusty suit of lights. But inside their suits they were all thin bones and skin and spiderweb and dust that shook down through their ribs if you sneezed and trembled them.
“What’s that?”
“What, what?”
“Ssssst!”
Everyone listened.
They peered into the long vault.
All the mummies looked back with empty eyes. All the mummies waited with empty hands.
Someone was weeping at the far end of the long dark hall.
“Ahhh—” came the sound.
“Oh—” came the crying.
“eeee—” and the small voice wept.
“That’s—why, that’s Pip. Only heard him cry once, but that’s him. Pipkin. And he’s trapped there in the catacomb.”
The boys stared.
And they saw, a hundred feet away, crouched down in a corner, trapped at the most distant part of the catacomb, a small figure that—moved. The shoulders twitched. The head was bent and covered with trembling hands. And behind the hands, the mouth wailed and was afraid.
“Pipkin—?”
The crying stopped.
“Is that you?” whispered Tom.
A long pause, a trembled insuck of breath and then:
“…yes.”
“Pip, for cry-yi, what you doing there?”
“I don’t know!”
“Come out?”
“I—I can’t. I’m afraid!”
“But, Pip, if you stay there—”
Tom paused.
Pip, he thought, if you stay, you stay forever. You stay with all the silence and the lonely ones. You stand in the long line and tourists come and look at you and buy tickets to look at you some more. You—
“Pip!” said Ralph behind his mask. “You got to come out.”
“I can’t.” Pip sobbed. “They won’t let me.”
“They?”
But they knew he meant the long line of mummies. In order to get out he would have to run the gauntlet between the nightmares, the mysteries, the dreadful ones, the dires and the haunts.
“They can’t stop you, Pip.”
Pip said: “Oh, yes, they can.”
“… can …” said echoes deep in the catacomb.
“I’m afraid to come out.”
“And we’re—” said Ralph.
Afraid to go in, thought everyone.
“Maybe if we chose one brave one—” said Tom, and stopped.
For Pipkin was crying again, and the mummies waiting and the night so dark in the long tomb hall that you would sink right through the floor if you stepped on it, and never move again. The floor would seize your ankles with bony marble and hold you until the freezing cold froze you into a dry-dust statue forever.
“Maybe if we went in in a mob, all of us—” said Ralph.
And they tried to move.
Like a big spider with many legs, the boys tried to cram through the door. Two steps forward, one step back. One step forward, two steps back.
“Ahhhhh!” wept Pipkin.
At which sound they all fell upon themselves, gibbering, and scrambled yelling their dires and frights back to the door. They heard an avalanche of heartbeats bang pains in their chests.
“Oh, my gosh, what we gonna do, him afraid to come, us afraid to go, what, what?” wailed Tom.
Behind them, leaning against the wall, was Moundshroud, forgotten. A little candleflame of smile flickered and went out among his teeth.
“Here, boys. Save him with this.”
Moundshroud reached into his dark cloak and brought forth a familiar white-sugar-candy skull across the brow of which was written:
PIPKIN!
“Save Pipkin, lads. Strike a bargain.”
“With who?”
“With me and others unnamed. Here. Break this skull in eight delicious bits, boys, hand them ’round. P for you, Tom, and I for you, Ralph, and half of the other P for you, Hank, the other half for you, J.J., and some of the K for you, boy, and some for you, and here’s the I and the final N. Touch the sweet bits, lads. Listen. Here’s the dark deal. Do you truly want Pipkin to live?”
Such a fury of protest burst forth at this, Moundshroud was fair driven back by it. The boys barked like dogs against his so much as questioning their need for Pips survival.
“There, there,” he curried them, “I see you mean it. Well then, will you each give one year from the end of your life, boys?”
“What?” said Tom.
“I mean it, boys, one year, one precious year from the far-burned candle-end of your life. With one year apiece you can ransom dead Pipkin.”
“A year!” the whisper, the murmur, the appalling sum of it ran among them. It was hard to grasp. A year so far away was no year at all. Boys of eleven or twelve cannot guess at men of seventy. “A year? a year? why, sure, why not? Yes—”
“Think, boys, think! This is no idle bargain struck with Nothing. I mean it. It is true and a fact. It is a grave condition you make, and a grave bargain you strike.
“One year, each of you must promise to give. You won’t miss the year now, of course, for you are very young, and I see by touching your minds you cannot even guess the final situation. Only later, fifty years from this night, or sixty years from this dawn, when you are running low on time and dearly wish an extra day or so of fine weather and much joy, then’s when Mr. D for Doom or Mr. B for Bones will show up with his bill to be paid. Or perhaps I will come, old Moundshroud himself, a friend to lads, and say ‘deliver.’ So a year promised must be a year given over. I’ll say give; and you must give.
“What will that mean to each of you?
“It will mean that those of you who might have lived to be seventy-one must die at seventy. Some of you who might have lived to be eighty-six must cough up your ghost at eighty-five. That’s a great age.
A year more or less doesn’t sound like much. When the time comes, boys, you may regret. But, you will be able to say, this year I spent well, I gave for Pip, I made a loan of life for sweet Pipkin, the fairest apple that ever almost fell too early off the harvest tree.
Some of you at forty-nine must cross life off at forty-eight. Some at fifty-five must lay them down to Forever’s Sleep at fifty-four. Do you catch the whole thing intact now, boys? Do you add the figures? Is the arithmetic plain? A year! Who will bid three hundred and sixty-five entire days from out his own soul, to get old Pipkin back? Think, boys. Silence. Then, speak.”
There was a long brooding silence of arithmetic students doing inward sums.
And the sums were very fast indeed. There was no question, though they knew that years from now they might doubt this dreadful haste. Yet what else could they do? Only swim out from shore and save the drowning boy before he sank a last time into a frightening dust.
“Me,” said Tom. “I’ll give a year.”
“And me,” said Ralph.
“I’m in,” said Henry-Hank.
And, “Me!” “Me!” “Me!” said all the rest.
“Do you know what you pledge, boys? You do love Pipkin, then?”
“Yes, yes!”
“So be it, boys. Chew and eat, lads, eat and chew.”
They popped the sweet bits of candy skull in their mouths.
They chewed. They ate.
“Swallow darkness, boys, give up your year.”
They swallowed hard, so hard that their eyes shone bright and their ears banged and their hearts beat.
They felt something like a cage of birds let out of their chests and bodies and flying off, invisible. They saw but did not see the years they gave as gifts wing off round the world to settle somewhere in good payment for strange debts.
They heard a yell.
“Here!”
And then: “I!”
And then: “Come!”
Bang, bang, bang, the three words, and three sounds of shoes hitting stone.
And along the hall and between the rows of mummies which leaned out to stop but did not stop, between the silent shrieks and screams, hellbent, rushing, racing, flinging his feet, pumping his elbows, puffing his cheeks, shutting his eyes, snorting his nostrils, and bang bang banging the floor with his up and down, up and down feet, came—
Pipkin.
Oh how he ran!!!
“Look at him come. Come on, Pip.”
“Pip, you’re halfway!”
“Look at him race!” said
