(1972) The Halloween Tree Read Online Free PDF

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.

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,