(1972) The Halloween Tree Read Free

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, inhabiter 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.
    Tom whirled to
look at the faintly shuddering windows. Moonlit reflections trembled in
the glass like schools of disturbed silver minnows. Then the front door
gave a shake, a twist of its knob, a grimace of its Marley knocker, and
flung itself wide.
    The wind made by the suddenly opening door almost knocked the boys off the porch. They seized one another’s elbows, yelling.

    Then the darkness within the house inhaled. A wind sucked
through the gaping door. It pulled at the boys, dragging them across
the porch. They had to lean back so as not to be snatched into the deep
dark hall. They struggled, shouted, clutched the porch rails. But then
the wind ceased.
    Darkness moved within darkness.
    Inside the house, a long way off, someone was walking toward the door.
Whoever it was must have been dressed all in black for they could see
nothing but a pale white face drifting on the air.
    An evil smile came and hung in the doorway before them.
    Behind the smile, the tall man hid in shadow. They could see his eyes
now, small pinpoints of green fire in little charred pits of sockets,
looking out at them.
    “Well,” said Tom. “Er—trick or treat?”
    “Trick?” said the smile in the dark. “Treat?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    The wind played a flute in a chimney somewhere; an old song about time
and dark and far places. The tall man shut up his smile like a bright
pocketknife.
    “No treats,” he said. “Only— trick!”
    The door slammed!
    The house thundered with showers of dust.
    Dust puffed out the rainspout again, in fluffs, like an emergence of downy cats.
    Dust gasped from open windows. Dust snorted from the porchboards under their feet.
    The boys stared at the locked shut-fast front door. The Marley knocker was not scowling now, but smiling an evil smile.
    “What’s he mean?” asked Tom. “No treats, only trick?”
    Backing off around the side of the house they were astonished at the
sounds it made. A whole rigamarole of whispers, squeaks, creaks, wails,
and murmurs, and the night wind was careful to let the boys hear them
all. With every step they took, the great house leaned after them with
soft groans.
    They rounded the far side of the house and stopped.
    For there was the Tree.
    And it was such a tree as they had never seen in all their lives.
    It stood in the middle of a vast yard behind the terribly strange
house. And this tree rose up some one hundred feet in the air, taller
than the high roofs and full and round and well branched, and covered
all over with rich assortments of red and brown and yellow autumn
leaves.
    “But,” whispered Tom, “oh, look. What’s up in that tree!”
    For the Tree was hung with a variety of pumpkins of every shape and
size and a number of tints and hues of smoky yellow or bright orange.
    “A pumpkin tree,”