And all the boys were given to wonder, and touched their own costumes and refit their own masks.
“Then wouldn’t it be fun for you to find out?” asked Mr. Moundshroud. “I’ll tell you! No, I’ll show you! If only there was time—”
“It’s only six thirty. Halloween hasn’t even begun!” said Tom-in-his-cold-bones.
“True!” said Mr. Moundshroud. “All right, lads—come along!”
He strode. They ran.
At the edge of the deep dark night ravine he pointed over the rim of the hills and the earth, away from the light of the moon, under the dim light of strange stars. The wind fluttered his black cloak and the hood that half shadowed and now half revealed his almost fleshless face.
“There, do you see it, lads?”
“What?”
“The Undiscovered Country. Out there. Look long, look deep, make a feast. The Past, boys, the Past. Oh, it’s dark, yes, and full of nightmare. Everything that Halloween ever was lies buried there. Will you dig for bones, boys? Do you have the stuff?”
He burned his gaze at them.
“What is Halloween? How did it start? Where? Why? What for? Witches, cats, mummy dusts, haunts. It’s all there in that country from which no one returns. Will you dive into the dark ocean, boys? Will you fly in the dark sky?”
The boys swallowed hard.
Someone peeped: “We’d like to, but—Pipkin. We’ve got to wait for Pipkin.”
“Yeah, Pipkin sent us to your place. We couldn’t go without him.”
As if summoned in this instant they heard a cry from the far side of the ravine.
“Hey! Here I am!” called a frail voice. They saw his small figure standing with a lit pumpkin, on the far ravine ledge.
“This way!” they all yelled. “Pipkin! Quick!”
“Coming!” was the cry. “I don’t feel so good. But—I had to come—wait for me!”
Chapter VI
They saw his small figure run down the middle of the ravine, on the path.
“Oh, wait, please wait—” the voice began to fail. “I don’t feel well. I can’t run. Can’t—can’t—”
“Pipkin!” everyone shouted, waving from the edge of the cliff.
His figure was small, small, small. There were shadows mixed everywhere. Bats flew. Owls shrieked. Night ravens clustered like black leaves in trees.
The small boy, running with his lit pumpkin, fell.
“Oh,” gasped Moundshroud.
The pumpkin light went out.
“Oh,” gasped everyone.
“Light your pumpkin, Pip, light it!” shrieked Tom.
He thought he saw the small figure scrabbling in the dark grass below, trying to strike a light. But in that instant of darkness, the night swept in. A great wing folded over the abyss. Many owls hooted. Many mice scampered and slithered in the shadows. A million tiny murders happened somewhere.
“Light your pumpkin, Pip!”
“Help—” wailed his sad voice.
A thousand wings flew away. A great beast beat the air somewhere like a thumping drum.
The clouds, like gauzy scenes, were pulled away to set a clean sky. The moon was there, a great eye.
It looked down upon—
An empty path.
Pipkin nowhere to be seen.
Way off, toward the horizon, something dark frittered and danced and slithered away in the cold star air.
“Help—help—” wailed a fading voice.
Then it was gone.
“Oh,” mourned Mr. Moundshroud. “This is bad. I fear Something has taken him away.”
“Where, where?” gibbered the boys, cold.
“To the Undiscovered Country. The Place I wanted to show you. But now—”
“You don’t mean that Thing in the ravine, It, or Him, or whatever, that Something, was—Death? Did he grab Pipkin and—run?!”
“Borrowed is more like it, perhaps to hold him for ransom,” said Moundshroud.
“Can Death do that?”
“Sometimes, yes.”
“Oh, gosh.” Tom felt his eyes water. “Pip, tonight, running slow, so pale. Pip, you shouldn’t’ve come out!” he shouted at the sky, but there was only wind there and white clouds floating like old spirit fluff, and a clear river of wind.
They stood, cold, shivering. They looked off to where the Dark Something had stolen their friend.
“So,” said Moundshroud. “All the more reason for you to come along, lads. If we fly fast, maybe we can catch Pipkin. Grab his sweet Halloween corn-candy soul. Bring him back, pop him in bed, toast him warm, save his breath. What say, lads? Would you solve two-mysteries-in-one? Search and seek for lost Pipkin, and solve Halloween, all in one fell dark blow?”
They thought of All Hallows’ Night and the billion ghosts awandering the lonely lanes in cold winds and strange smokes.
They thought of Pipkin, no more than a thimbleful of boy and sheer summer delight, torn out like a tooth and carried off on a black tide of web and horn and black soot.
And, almost as one, they murmured: “Yes.”
Moundshroud sprang. He ran. He pummeled, he pushed, he raved. “Quick now, along this path, up this rise, along this road! The abandoned farm! Over the fence! Allez-oop!”
They leaped the fence running and stood by a barn that was frosted over with old circus posters, with banners tattered by wind pasted here thirty, forty, fifty years back. Circuses, passing through, had left patches and swatches of themselves ten inches thick.
“A kite, boys. Build a kite. Quick!”
Chapter VII
No sooner had he cried this than Mr. Moundshroud ripped a great tissue from the side of the barn! It fluttered in his hands: the eye of a tiger! Another rip from another ancient poster and—the mouth of a lion!
The boys heard roars of Africa down the wind.
They blinked. They ran. They scratched with fingernails. They plucked with hands. They seized off strips and patches and huge rolls of animal flesh, of fang, and piercing eye, of wounded flank, of blood-red claw of tail, of bound and leap and cry. The whole side of the barn was an ancient parade stopped dead. They tore it asunder. And with each tear they pulled off talon, tongue, or ravening feline eye. Beneath waited layer upon layer of jungle nightmare, delicious encounters with polar bears, panicked zebra, milling prides of lions, charging rhinos, clambering gorillas which pawed up the side of midnight and swung toward dawn. A thousand animals in congregation rumbled to be set free. Now free in fists and hands and fingers, whistling on the autumn wind, the boys raced off across the grass.
Now Moundshroud knocked down old fence-railing beams and made a rough kite-cross and bound them with wire, then stood back to receive the gifts of kite paper as the boys flung them in fistfuls.
And these he tossed in place upon the frame, and, spark-flinting, fused with burnings of his horny hands.
“Hey!” The boys cried their delight. “Oh, look!”
They had never seen such things, or known that men such as Moundshroud with a pinch, a clutch, a pressure of fingers might blend an eye with tooth, a tooth with mouth, a mouth with feline bobcat tail. All, all mingled beautifully into a single thing, a wild jigsaw puzzle jungle zoo billowed and trapped, pasted and tied, growing, growing, taking color and sound and pattern in the light of the ascending moon.
Now another cannibal eye. Now another hungry maw. A mad chimpanzee. A most insane mandrill-ape. A screaming butcher bird! The boys ran up with the last frights handed over and the kite finished, the ancient flesh laid out, fused by the still blue-smoke-burning horny hands. Mr. Moundshroud lit a cigar with the last bit of fire that sparked out of his thumb and smiled. And the light from his smile showed the Kite for what it was, a kite of destructions, of animals so dire and fierce their outcry drowned the wind and murdered the heart.
He was pleased, the boys were pleased.
For the Kite somehow seemed to resemble …
“Why,” said Tom, astounded, “a pterodactyl!”
“A what?!”
“Pterodactyl, those ancient flying reptiles, gone some billion years back, and never seen again,” replied Mr. Moundshroud. “Well said, boy. Pterodactyl it seems and is, and ‘twill fly us downwind to Perdition or Lands End or some other fine-sounding place. But, now, rope, twine, string, quick! Filch and carry!”
They ran the rope off an old abandoned clothes line strung between barn and abandoned farmhouse. A good ninety feet or more of rope they brought Moundshroud who snaked it through his fist until it smoked a most unholy smoke. He tied it to the middle of the vast Kite which flapped like a somehow lost and out-of-water manta ray upon this high strange beach. It struggled with wind to live. It flapped and floundered on the heaves of tidal air, laid down on grass.
Moundshroud stood back, gave a jerk, and lo! the Kite—flew!
It hung low upon the air at the end of its clothes line, in a dumb-brute groveling of wind, veering this way, dashing that, leaping up suddenly to confront them with a wall of eyes, a solid flesh of teeth, a storm of cries.
“It won’t rise, won’t go straight! A tail, we need a tail!”
And as by instinct Tom dived first, and seized the Kite by its bottom. He hung there. The Kite steadied. It began to rise.
“Yes,” cried the dark man. “Oh lad, you are the one. Bright boy! You be the tail! And more, and more!”
And as the Kite slowly ascended the cold river of swift flowing air, each boy in turn, seized with the whim, spurred by his wits, became more and yet more of the tail. Which is to say that Henry-Hank, disguised as a Witch, grabbed Toms ankles, and now the Kite had two boys for its magnificent tail!
And Ralph Bengstrum, wound up in his Mummy clothes, stumbling over his winding tapes, smothered in his burial rags, shambled forward, jumped, and grabbed Henry-Hank’s ankles.
So three boys hung now in a Tail!
“Wait! Here I come!” cried Beggar, who under his dirt and rags was really Fred Fryer.
He jumped, he caught.
The Kite ascended. The four boys making
