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Why were they waiting, afraid for one small boy?
Because…
Joe Pipkin was the greatest boy who ever lived. The grandest boy who ever fell out of a tree and laughed at the joke. The finest boy who ever raced around the track, winning, and then, seeing his friends a mile back somewhere, stumbled and fell, waited for them to catch up, and joined, breast and breast, breaking the winner’s tape. The jolliest boy who ever hunted out all the haunted houses in town, which are hard to find, and came back to report on them and take all the kids to ramble through the basements and scramble up the ivy outside-bricks and shout down the chimneys and make water off the roofs, hooting and chimpanzee-dancing and ape-bellowing. The day Joe Pipkin was born all the Orange Crush and Nehi soda bottles in the world fizzed over; and joyful bees swarmed countrysides to sting maiden ladies. On his birthdays, the lake pulled out from the shore in midsummer and ran back with a tidal wave of boys, a big leap of bodies and a downcrash of laughs.
Dawns, lying in bed, you heard a birdpeck at the window. Pipkin.
You stuck your head out into the snow-water-clear-summer-morning air.
There in the dew on the lawn rabbit prints showed where, just a moment ago, not a dozen rabbits but one rabbit had circled and crisscrossed in a glory of life and exultation, bounding hedges, clipping ferns, tromping clover. It resembled the switchyards down at the rail depot. A million tracks in the grass but no …
Pipkin.
And here he rose up like a wild sunflower in the garden. His great round face burned with fresh sun. His eyes flashed Morse code signals:
“Hurry up! It’s almost over!”
“What?”
“Today! Now! Six A.M.! Dive down! Wade in it!”
Or: “This summer! Before you know, bang!—it’s gone! Quick!”
And he sank away in sunflowers to come up all onions.
Pipkin, oh, dear Pipkin, finest and loveliest of boys.
How he ran so fast no one knew. His tennis shoes were ancient. They were colored green of forests jogged through, brown from old harvest trudges through September a year back, tar-stained from sprints along the docks and beaches where the coal barges came in, yellow from careless dogs, splinter-filled from climbing wood fences. His clothes were scarecrow clothes, worn by Pipkin’s dogs all night, loaned to them for strolls through town, with chew marks along the cuffs and fall marks on the seat.
His hair? His hair was a great hedgehog bristle of bright brown-blond daggers sticking in all directions. His ears, pure peachfuzz. His hands, mittened with dust and the good smell of airedales and peppermint and stolen peaches from the far country orchards.
Pipkin. An assemblage of speeds, smells, textures; a cross section of all the boys who ever ran, fell, got up, and ran again.
No one, in all the years, had ever seen him sitting still. He was hard to remember in school, in one seat, for one hour. He was the last into the schoolhouse and the first exploded out when the bell ended the day.
Pipkin, sweet Pipkin.
Who yodeled and played the kazoo and hated girls more than all the other boys in the gang combined.
Pipkin, whose arm around your shoulder, and secret whisper of great doings this day, protected you from the world.
Pipkin.
God got up early just to see Pipkin come out of his house, like one of those people on a weatherclock. And the weather was always fine where Pipkin was.
Pipkin.
They stood in front of his house.
Any moment now that door would open wide.
Pipkin would jump out in a blast of fire and smoke.
And Halloween would REALLY begin!
Come on, Joe, oh, Pipkin, they whispered, come on!
Chapter 3 (#ulink_f2b690d0-f603-5bd4-bf67-adf9e3ec03af)
The front door opened.
Pipkin stepped out.
Not flew. Not banged. Not exploded.
Stepped out.
And came down the walk to meet his friends.
Not running. And not wearing a mask! No mask!
But moving along like an old man, almost.
“Pipkin!” they shouted, to scare away their uneasiness.
“Hi, gang,” said Pipkin.
His face was pale. He tried to smile, but his eyes looked funny. He was holding his right side with one hand as if he had a boil there.
They all looked at his hand. He took his hand away from his side.
“Well,” he said with faint enthusiasm. “We ready to go?”
“Yeah, but you don’t look ready,” said Tom. “You sick?”
“On Halloween?” said Pipkin. “You kidding?”
“Where’s your costume—?”
“You go on ahead, I’ll catch up.”
“No, Pipkin, we’ll wait for you to—”
“Go on,” said Pipkin, saying it slowly, his face deathly pale now. His hand was back on his side.
“You got a stomachache?” asked Tom. “You told your folks?”
“No, no, I can’t! They’d—” Tears burst from Pipkin’s eyes. “It’s nothing, I tell you. Look. Go straight on toward the ravine. Head for the House, okay? The place of the Haunts, yeah? Meet you there.”
“You swear?”
“Swear. Wait’ll you see my costume!”
The boys began to back off. On the way, they touched his elbow, or knocked him gently in the chest, or ran their knuckles along his chin in a fake fight. “Okay, Pipkin. As long as you’re sure—”
“I’m sure.” He took his hand away from his side. His face colored for a moment as if the pain were gone. “On your marks. Get set. Go!”
When Joe Pipkin said “Go,” they Went.
They ran.
They ran backward halfway down the block, so they could see Pipkin standing there, waving at them.
“Hurry up, Pipkin!”
“I’ll catch you!” he shouted, a long way off.
The night swallowed him.
They ran. When they looked back again, he was gone.
They banged doors, they shouted Trick or Treat and their brown paper bags began to fill with incredible sweets. They galloped with their teeth glued shut with pink gum. They ran with red wax lips bedazzling their faces.
But all the people who met them at doors looked like candy factory duplicates of their own mothers and fathers. It was like never leaving home. Too much kindness flashed from every window and every portal. What they wanted was to hear dragons belch in basements and banged castle doors.
And so, still looking back for Pipkin, they reached the edge of town and the place where civilization fell away in darkness.
The Ravine.
The ravine, filled with varieties of night sounds, lurkings of black-ink stream and creek, lingerings of autumns that rolled over in fire and bronze and died a thousand years ago. From this deep place sprang mushroom and toadstool and cold stone frog and crawdad and spider. There was a long tunnel down there under the earth in which poisoned waters dripped and the echoes never ceased calling Come Come Come and if you do you’ll stay forever, forever, drip, forever, rustle, run, rush, whisper, and never go, never go go go …
The boys lined up on the rim of darkness, looking down.
And then Tom Skelton, cold in his bones, whistled his breath in his teeth like the wind blowing over the bedroom screen at night. He pointed.
“Oh, hey—that’s where Pipkin told us to go!”
He vanished.
All looked. They saw his small shape race down the dirt path into one hundred million tons of night all crammed in that huge dark pit, that dank cellar, that deliciously frightening ravine.
Yelling, they plunged after.
Where they had been was empty.
The town was left behind to suffer itself with sweetness.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_cce42f2c-15e5-57cd-862e-699c083ed026)
They ran down through the ravine at a swift rush, all laughing, jostling, all elbows and ankles, all steamy snort and roustabout, to stop in collision when Tom Skelton stopped and pointed up the path.
“There,” he whispered. “There’s the only house in town worth visiting on Halloween! There!”
“Yeah!” said everyone.
For it was true. The house was special and fine and tall and dark. There must have been a thousand windows in its sides, all shimmering with cold stars. It looked as if it had been cut out of black marble instead of built out of timbers, and inside? who could guess how many rooms, halls, breezeways, attics. Superior and inferior attics, some higher than others, some more filled with dust and webs and ancient leaves or gold buried above ground in the sky but lost away so high no ladder in town could take you there.
The house beckoned with its towers, invited with its gummed-shut doors. Pirate ships are a tonic. Ancient forts are a boon. But a house, a haunted house, on All Hallows’ Eve? Eight small hearts beat up an absolute storm of glory and approbation.
“Come on.”
But they were already crowding up the path. Until they stood at last by a crumbling wall, looking up and up and still farther up at the great tombyard top of the old house. For that’s what it seemed. The high mountain peak of the mansion was littered with what looked like black bones or iron rods, and enough chimneys to choke out smoke signals from three dozen fires on sooty hearths hidden far below in the dim bowels of this monster place. With so many chimneys, the roof seemed a vast cemetery, each chimney signifying the burial place of some old god of fire or enchantress of steam, smoke, and firefly spark. Even as they watched, a kind of bleak exhalation of soot breathed up out of some four dozen flues, darkening the sky still more, and putting out some few stars.
“Boy,” said Tom Skelton, “Pipkin sure knows what he’s talking about!”
“Boy,” said all, agreeing.
They crept along a weed-infested path toward the crumpled front porch.
Tom Skelton, alone, itched his bony foot up on the first porch-step. The others gasped at his bravery. So, now, finally in a mob, a compact mass of sweating boys moved up on the porch amid fierce cries of the planks underfoot, and shudderings of their bodies. Each wished to pull back, swivel about, run, but found himself trapped against the boy behind or in front or to the side. So, with a pseudopod thrust out here or there, the amoebic form, the large perspiration of boys leaned and made a run and a stop to the front door of the house which was as tall as a coffin and twice as thin.
They stood there for a long moment, various hands reaching out like the legs of an immense spider as if to twist that cold knob or reach up for the knocker on that front door. Meanwhile, the wooden floorings of the porch sank and wallowed beneath their weight, threatening at every shift of proportion to give way and fling them into some cockroach abyss beneath. The planks, each tuned to an A or an F or a C, sang out their uncanny music as heavy shoes scraped on them. And if there had been time and it were noon, they might have danced out a cadaver’s tune or a skeleton’s rigadoon, for who can resist an ancient porch which, like a gigantic xylophone, only wants to be jumped on to make music?
But they were not thinking this.
Henry-Hank Smith (for that’s who it was), hidden inside his black Witch’s costume, cried: “Look!”
And all looked at the knocker on the door. Tom’s hand trembled out to touch it.
“A Marley knocker!”
“What?”
“You know, Scrooge and Marley, a Christmas Carol!” whispered Tom.
And indeed the face that made up the knocker on the door was the face of a man with a dread toothache, his jaw bandaged, his hair askew, his teeth prolapsed, his eyes wild. Dead-as-a-doornail Marley, friend to Scrooge, inhabitor of lands beyond the grave, doomed to wander this earth forever until …
“Knock,” said Henry-Hank.
Tom Skelton took hold of old Marley’s cold and grisly jaw, lifted it, and let it fall.
All jumped at the concussion!
The entire house shook. Its bones ground together. Shades snap-furled up so that windows blinked wide their ghastly eyes.
Tom Skelton cat-leaped to the porch rail, staring up.
On the rooftop, weird weathercocks spun. Two-headed roosters whirled in the sneezed wind. A gargoyle on the western rim of the house erupted twin snorts of rain-funnel dust. And down the long snaking serpentine rainspouts of the house, after the sneeze had died and the weathercocks ceased spinning, vagrant wisps of autumn leaf and cobweb fell gusting out onto the dark grass.
