Smoke curled from the dim lamps.
And the shadows stepped up on the porches and, very gently, touched the gifts of food.
And in one house they could see an old grandfather mummy being taken out of a closet and put in the place of honor at the head of the table, with food set before him. And the members of the family sat down to their evening meal and lifted their glasses and drank to the dead one seated there, all dust and dry silence…
Chapter X
“Quick, now, come find me!”
Moundshrouds voice, laughing, called them on.
“This way! No, this! This!”
They ran along the slender ribbon of mummy wrapping, deep into the earth.
“Yes. Here I am.”
They turned a corner and stopped, for the long linen ribbon wound across the tomb floor and up a wall to wrap around the feet of an ancient brown mummy which was propped atilt in a candlelit niche.
“Is,” stuttered Ralph Bengstrum, dressed in his own Mummy costume, “is—is that a real mummy?”
“Yes.” Dust sifted from under the golden mask on the mummy’s face. “Real.”
“Mr. Moundshroud! You!
The gold mask fell to clang like a bright bell on the floor.
Where the mask had been was a mummy’s face, a pool of brown mud crinkled by blasts of sun. One eye was glued shut with spiderweb. The other eye cracked forth tears of dust and a glint of bright blue glass.
“Isssss there some boy there dressed like a mummy?” asked the voice muffled beneath the shroud.
“Why, me, sir!” squeaked Ralph, showing his arms, legs, chest, the medical bandages it had taken him all afternoon to wrap himself up in, mummified.
“Good,” sighed Moundshroud. “Grab the linen strip. Pull!”
Ralph bent, took hold of the ancient mummy bandages and—yanked!
The ribbon unraveled up around, up around to reveal the great ancient reptile nose-beak and flaky chin and dry smiling dust-powdery mouth of Moundshroud. His crossed arms fell loose.
“Thanks, lad! Free! No fun being wrapped like some old funeral gift for the Land of the Dead. But—hist! Quick, boys, hop in the niches, stand stiff. Someone’s coming. Play mummies, boys, play dead!”
The boys leaped to stand, arms folded, eyes shut, breaths held, like a frieze of small mummies cut in the ancient rock.
“Easy” whispered Moundshroud. “Here comes—”
A funeral procession.
An army of mourners in gold and fine silks bearing small sailing-ship toys and copper bowls of food in their hands.
And in their midst, a mummy case carried light as sunshine on the shoulders of six men. And behind that, a fresh-wrapped mummy with new paintings on its linen vestments and a small gold mask fitted over the hidden face.
“See the food, boys, the toys,” whispered Moundshroud. “They put toys in the tombs, lads. So the gods will come play, romp, roustabout, and run children happy to the Land of the Dead. See the boats, kites, jump-ropes, toy knives—”
“But look at the size of that mummy,” said Ralph, inside his hot linen bandages. “It’s a twelve-year-old boy in there! Like me! And that gold mask on the boy mummy’s face—doesn’t it look familiar?”
“Pipkin!” cried everyone, hoarsely.
“Sh!” hissed Moundshroud.
For the funeral had stopped, the high priests were glancing around through the flickering torch shadows.
The boys, high in their niches, squeezed their eyes tight, sucked in their breaths.
“Not a whisper,” said Moundshroud, a mosquito in Tom’s ear. “Not a murmur.”
The harp music began again.
The funeral shuffled on.
And in the midst of all the gold and toys, the kites of the dead, there was the small twelve-year-old fresh-new mummy with a gold mask that looked just exactly like—
Pipkin.
No, no, no, no! thought Tom.
“Yes!” cried a mouse voice, tiny, lost, wrapped away kept, trapped, wild. “Its me! I’m here. Under the mask. Under the wrappings. Can’t move! Can’t yell Can’t fight free!”
Pipkin! thought Tom. Wait!
“Can’t help it! Trapped!” shouted the small wee voice wrapped in picture linens. “Follow! Meet me! Find me at—”
The voice faded, for the funeral procession had turned a corner in the dark labyrinth and was gone.
“Follow you where, Pipkin?” Tom Skelton jumped down from his niche and yelled into the dark. “Meet you where?”
But at that exact moment, Moundshroud, like a chopped tree, fell out of his niche. Bang! he struck the floor.
“Wait!” he cautioned Tom, looking up at him with one eye that looked like a spider caught in its own web. “We’ll save old Pipkin yet. Sly does it. Slide and creep, boys. Ssst.”
They helped him up and unwound some of his mummy wrappings and tiptoed down the long corridor and turned the corner.
“Holy Cow,” whispered Tom. “Look. They’re putting Pipkin’s mummy in the coffin and the coffin inside the—the—”
“Sarcophagus,” Moundshroud supplied the jawcracker. “A coffin in a coffin in a coffin, lad. Each larger than the last, all done up in hieroglyphs to tell his life story—”
“Pipkin’s life?” said all.
“Or whoever Pipkin was this time around, this year, four thousand years ago.”
“Yeah,” whispered Ralph. “Look at the pictures on the sides of the coffin. Pipkin one year old. Pipkin five. Pipkin ten and running fast. Pipkin up an apple tree. Pipkin pretending to drown in the lake. Pipkin eating his way through a peach orchard. Wait, what’s that?!”
Moundshroud watched the busy funeral. “They’re putting furniture in the tomb for him to use in the Land of the Dead. Boats. Kites. Tops to spin. Fresh fruits should Pipkin wake a hundred years from now, hungry”
“He’ll be hungry all right. Good grief, look, they’re going out! They’re closing the tomb!” Moundshroud had to grab and hold Tom for he was jumping up and down in agony “Pipkin’s still in there, buried! When do we save him?”
“Later. The Long Night is young. We’ll see Pipkin again, never fear. Then—”
The tomb door slammed shut.
The boys yammered and yelled. In the dark they could hear the scrape and slosh of mortar filling the last cracks and seams as the final stones were shoved in place.
The mourners went away with their silent harps.
Ralph stood in his Mummy costume, stunned, watching the last shadows go.
“Is that why I’m dressed like a mummy?” He fingered the bandages. He touched his clay-wrinkled ancient face. “Is that what my part of Halloween is all about?”
“All, boy, all,” murmured Moundshroud. “The Egyptians, why, they built to last. Ten thousand years they planned for. Tombs, boys, tombs. Graves. Mummies. Bones. Death, death. Death was at the very heart, gizzard, light, soul, and body of their life! Tombs and more tombs with secret passages, so none might be found, so grave robbers could not borrow souls and toys and gold. You are a mummy, boy, because that was how they dressed for Eternity. Spun up in a cocoon of threads, they hoped to come forth like lovely butterflies in some far dear loving world. Know your cocoon, boy. Touch the strange stuffs.”
“Why,” said Ralph the Mummy, blinking at the smoky walls and old hieroglyphics. “Every day was Halloween to them!”
“Every day!” gasped all, in admiration.
“Every day was Halloween for them, too.” Moundshroud pointed.
The boys turned.
A kind of green electric storm simmered in the tomb dungeon. The ground shuddered as with an ancient earthquake. Somewhere, a volcano turned over in its sleep, lighting the walls with one fiery shoulder.
And on the walls beyond were prehistoric drawings of cavemen, long before the Egyptians.
“Now,” said Moundshroud.
Lightning struck.
Saber-toothed tigers caught the cavemen screaming. Tarpits drowned their bones. They sank, wailing.
“Wait. Let’s save a few with fire.”
Moundshroud blinked. Lightning struck to burn forests. One apeman, running, seized a burning branch and rammed it in a saber-tooth’s jaws. The tiger shrieked and fell away. The apeman, snorting in triumph, tossed the fiery branch into a pile of autumn leaves in his cave. Other men came to hold their hands out to the fire, laughing at the night where the yellow beast eyes waited, afraid.
“See, boys?” Moundshroud’s face flickered with the fire. “The days of the Long Cold are done. Because of this one brave, new-thinking man, summer lives in the winter cave.”
“But?” said Tom. “What’s that got to do with Halloween?”
“Do? Why, blast my bones, everything. When you and your friends die every day, there’s no time to think of Death, is there? Only time to run. But when you stop running at long last—”
He touched the walls. The apemen froze in mid-flight.
“—now you have time to think of where you came from, where you’re going. And fire lights the way, boys. Fire and lightning. Morning stars to gaze at. Fire in your own cave to protect you. Only by night fires was the caveman, beastman, able at last to turn his thoughts on a spit and baste them with wonder. The sun died in the sky. Winter came on like a great white beast shaking its fur, burying him. Would spring ever come back to the world? Would the sun be reborn next year or stay murdered? Egyptians asked it. Cavemen asked it a million years before.
Will the sun rise tomorrow morning?”
“And that’s how Halloween began?”
“With such long thoughts at night, boys. And always at the center of it, fire. The sun. The sun dying down the cold sky forever. How that must have scared early man, eh? That was the Big Death. If the sun went away forever, then what?
“So in the middle of autumn, everything dying, apemen turned in their sleep, remembered their own dead of the last year. Ghosts called in their heads. Memories, that’s what ghosts are, but apemen didn’t know that. Behind their eyelids, late nights, the memory ghosts called, waved, danced, so apemen woke up, tossed twigs on the fire, shivered, wept. They could drive away wolves but not memories, not
