They got it when the boy dressed as an Apeman scrambled and grabbed ankles followed by the boy dressed as Death with a Scythe who did dangerously likewise.
“Watch out with the scythe!”
The scythe fell and lay in the grass like a lost smile.
But the two boys hung down now from all the half-washed ankles, and the Kite rose more, higher, higher adding a boy and a boy, and a boy until with a yell and shout, eight boys were down-hung in a magnificent thrashing tail, the last two being Ghost who was truly George Smith and Wally Babb who had, inspired, made himself up to look like a Gargoyle fallen off the top of a cathedral.
The boys yelled with elation. The Kite swooped and—took off!
“Hey!”
Whoosh! The Kite purred with a thousand animal whispers.
Whannng! The Kite rope strummed the wind.
Hush! said the entire thing.
And the wind flew them high across the stars.
Leaving Moundshroud to look up with awe at his contraption, his kite, his boys.
“Wait!” he shouted.
“Don’t wait, come on!” the boys yelled.
Moundshroud ran along the grass to seize the scythe. His cape fluttered taking air, making wings until he, also, very simply, took off, and soared.
Chapter VIII
The Kite flew.
The boys hung down from the Kite in a fine lizard’s tail, now weaving, now looping, now snapping, now gliding.
They yelled with delight. They shrieked with ingasped, outgasped terror. They rode across the moon in an exclamation point. They soared over hills and meadows and farms. They saw themselves reflected in dusky moon-bright streams, creeks, rivers. They brushed down over ancient trees. The wind stirred by their passing shook down whole government mints of coins, leaves, bright showering to the black-grassed earth. They flew over the town and thought—
O look up! see! here we are! your sons!
And thought: O look down, there somewhere are our mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, teachers! Hey, here we are! O, someone, see us! or you’ll never believe!
And in a last swoop the Kite whistled, hummed, drummed along the winds to float over the old house and the Halloween Tree where first they had met Moundshroud!
Swoomp, flutter, glide, rush, hiss!
The suction of their swung bodies caused a thousand candles to flutter, flicker, stutter their light, hiss with desire to reflame themselves, so all the hung pumpkin scowls and leers and wild smiles were half-snuffed to unhappy shadows. The whole Tree went dead for a heartbeat. Then as the Kite sang high—the Tree blazed up with a thousand new cut-pumpkin frowns, glares, grimaces, and grins!
The windows of the house, black mirrors, saw the Kite go away and away, until the boys and the Kite and Mr. Moundshroud were very small on the horizon.
And then down they sailed off away deep into the Undiscovered Country of Old Death and Strange Years in the Frightful Past… .
“Where are we going?” cried Tom, hanging to the Kite’s tail.
“Yes, where, where?” cried all the boys, one after another, below, below.
“Not where, but when!” said Moundshroud, pacing them, his great veiled cloak full of moonwind and time. “Two thousand, count them, years before Christ! Pipkin’s there, waiting! I smell it! Fly!”
Then the moon began to blink. It closed up its eye and there was darkness. Then faster and faster it began to wink, to wax, to wane, to wax again. Until a thousand times over it flickered and in flickering changed the landscape below, and then fifty thousand times, so fast they could not see it, the moon extinguished and relit itself.
And the moon stopped winking and held very still.
And the land was changed.
“Look,” said Moundshroud, hung upon the very air above them.
And the million tiger-lion-leopard-panther eyes of the autumn Kite looked down, as did the eyes of the boys.
And the sun rose showing them …
Egypt. The River Nile. The Sphinx. The Pyramids.
“But,” said Moundshroud. “Notice anything—different?”
“Why,” gasped Tom, “it’s all new. It’s just been built. That means we really have gone back in Time four thousand years!”
And, sure enough, the Egypt that lay below was ancient sand but new-cut stone. The Sphinx, with its great lion paws treaded out on the golden stuffs of desert, was sharp-cut and freshly born out of the womb of stone mountains. It was a vast pup in the bright and empty glare of noon. If the sun had fallen and lay between its paws, it would have cuffed it like a fireball toy.
The Pyramids? Why they lay like strange-shaped blocks, yet other games to be puzzled over, played with by the woman-lion Sphinx.
The Kite zoomed down and skirted the sand dunes, flirted over one pyramid and was drawn, as by suction, by an open tomb-mouth set in a small cliff.
“Hey, Presto!” cried Moundshroud.
With a flap he gave the Kite such a kick as made the boys toll like clamorous bells.
“Hey, no!” they cried.
The Kite shuddered, fell down, hovered ten feet above the dunes, and shook itself like a wild dog ridding itself of fleas.
The boys fell safe in golden sand.
The Kite broke away in a thousand shreds of eyes, fangs, shrieks, roars, elephant trumpetings. The Egyptian tomb-mouth sucked them in, and Moundshroud, laughing, with it.
“Mr. Moundshroud, wait!”
Leaping up, the boys ran to shout into the dark tomb doorway. Then they lifted their gaze and saw where they were.
The Valley of the Kings, where huge stone gods loomed above. Dust sifted in a strange downpour of tears from their eyes; tears made of sand and powdered rock.
The boys leaned into the shadows. Like a dry river bottom, the corridors led down to deep vaults where lay the linen-wrapped dead. Dust fountains echoed and played in strange courtyards a mile below. The boys ached, listening. The tomb breathed out a sick exhalation of paprika, cinnamon, and powdered camel dung. Somewhere, a mummy dreamed, coughed in its sleep, unraveled a bandage, twitched its dusty tongue and turned over for another thousand-year snooze… .
“Mr. Moundshroud?” called Tom Skelton.
Chapter IX
And from deep in the dry earth a lost voice whispered:
“Mound—sssss—shroud.”
Out of the darkness something rolled, rushed, flapped.
A long strip of mummy cloth snapped out into the sunlight.
It was as if the very tomb itself had stuck out its old dry tongue which lay at their feet.
The boys stared. The linen strip was hundreds of yards long and might, if they wished, lead them down, down into the mysterious deeps below the Egyptian earth.
Tom Skelton, trembling, put one toe out to touch the yellow linen strip.
A wind blew from the tombs, saying: Yessss—”
“Here I go,” said Tom.
And, balancing on the tightrope of linen, he wandered down and vanished in the dark under the burial chambers.
“Yesssss—!” whispered the wind coming up from below. “All of you. Come. Next. And next. And another and another. Quick.”
The boys raced down the linen path in darkness.
“Watch for murder, boys! Murder!”
The pillars on both sides of the rushing boys flashed to life. Pictures shivered and moved.
The golden sun was on every pillar.
But it was a sun with arms and legs, bound tight with mummy wrappings.
“Murder!”
A dark creature struck the sun one dreadful blow.
The sun died. Its fires went out.
The boys ran blind in darkness.
Yeah, thought Tom, running, sure, I mean, I think, every night, the sun dies. Going to sleep, I wonder, will it come back? Tomorrow morning, will it still be dead?
The boys ran. On new pillars dead-ahead, the sun appeared again, burning out of eclipse.
Swell! thought Tom. That’s it! Sunrise!
But just as quickly, the sun was murdered again. On each pillar they raced by, the sun died in autumn and was buried in cold winter.
Middle of December, thought Tom, I often think: the sun’ll never come back! Winter will go on forever! This time the sun is really dead!
But as the boys slowed at the end of the long corridor, the sun was reborn. Spring arrived with golden horns. Light filled the corridor with pure fire.
The strange God stood burning on every wall, his face a grand fire of triumph, wrapped in golden ribbons.
“Why, heck, I know who that is!” panted Henry-Hank. “Saw him in a movie once with terrible Egyptian mummies!”
“Osiris!” said Tom.
“Yesssssssss …” hissed Moundshroud’s voice from the deep tombs. “Lesson Number One about Halloween. Osiris, Son of the Earth and Sky, killed each night by his brother Darkness. Osiris slain by Autumn, murdered by his own night blood.
“So it goes in every country. Each has its death festival, having to do with seasons. Skulls and bones, boys, skeletons and ghosts. In Egypt, lads, see the Death of Osiris, King of the Dead. Gaze long.”
The boys gazed.
For they had come to a vast hole in the underground cavern and through this hole they could look out at an Egyptian village where, at dusk, food was being placed out in pottery and copper dishes on porches and sills.
“For the homecoming ghostssssss,” whispered Moundshroud somewhere in the shadows.
Rows of oil lamps were nailed to house fronts and the soft smoke from these rose up on the twilight air like wandering spirits.
You could almost see the haunts shifting along the cobbled streets.
The shadows leaned away from the lost sun in the west and tried to enter the houses.
But the warm food, steaming on the porches, kept the shadows circling and stirring.
A faint smell of incense and mummy dust wafted up to the boys who looked out upon this ancient Halloween and the “treats” being set forth not for wandering boys but homeless ghosts.
“Hey,” whispered all the boys.
“Do not lose your way in the dark,” voices sang in the houses, to harps and lutes. “O dear sweet dead, come home, and welcome here. Lost in the dark but always dear. Do not wander,
