(1972) The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury Read Free Book Online

moment by simply clapping on a white scare-mask and grabbing
his grandpa’s harvest scythe off the garage wall.
    All the boys being safely landed on English earth, their billion autumn leaves fell off and blew away.
    They stood in the midst of a vast field of wheat.
    “Here, Master Nibley, I brought your scythe. Take it. Grab! Now lie
low!” warned Moundshroud. “The Druid God of the Dead! Samhain! Fall!”
    They fell.
    For a huge scythe came skimming down out of the sky. With its great
razor edge it cut the wind. With its whistling side it sliced clouds.
It beheaded trees. It razored along the cheek of the hill. It made a
clean shave of wheat. In the air a whole blizzard of wheat fell.
    And with every whisk, every cut, every scythe, the sky was aswarm with cries and shrieks and screams.
    The scythe hissed up.
    The boys cowered.
    “Hunh!” grunted a large voice.
    “Mr. Moundshroud, is that you!” cried Tom.
    For towering forty feet above them in the sky, an immense scythe in his
hands, was this cowled figure, its face in midnight fogs.
    The blade swung down: hisssssss!
    “Mr. Moundshroud, let us be!”
    “Shut up.” Someone knocked Toms elbow. Mr. Moundshroud lay on the earth beside him. “That’s not me. That’s—”
    “Samhain!” cried the voice in the fog. “God of the Dead! I harvest thus, and so!”
    Sssss-whoooshhhh!
    “All those who died this year are here! And for their sins, this night, are turned to beasts!”
    Sssssswooommmmmmm!
    “Please,” whimpered Ralph-the-Mummy
    “Sssssssttttt! The scythe zippered Hackles Nibley’s spine, ripping his
costume in a long tear, knocking his own small scythe free of his hands.
    “Beasts!”
    And the harvest wheat, flailed up, spun round on the wind, shrieking
its souls, all those who had died in the past twelve months, rained to
earth. And falling, touching, the heads of wheat were turned to asses,
chickens, snakes which scurried, cackled, brayed; were turned to dogs
and cats and cows that barked, cried, bawled. But all were miniature.
All were tiny, small, no bigger than worms, no bigger than toes, no
bigger than the sliced-off tip of a nose. By the hundreds and thousands
the wheat heads snowed up in scatters and fell down as spiders which
could not shout or beg or weep for mercy, but which, soundless, raced
over the grass, poured over the boys. A hundred centipedes tiptoed on
Ralph’s spine. Two hundred leeches clung to Hackles Nibley’s scythe
until with a nightmare gasp he raved and shook them off. Everywhere
fell black widows and tiny boa constrictors.
    “For your sins! Your sins! Take that! And this!” bellowed the voice in the whistling sky.
    The scythe flashed. The wind, cut, fell in bright thunders. The wheat
churned and gave up a million heads. Heads fell. Sinners hit like
rocks. And, hitting, were turned to frogs and toads and multitudes of scaly warts with legs and jellyfish which stank in the light.
    “I’ll be good!” prayed Tom Skelton.
    “Lemme live!” added Henry-Hank.
    All of this said very loudly, for the scythe was making a dreadful
roar. It was like an ocean wave falling down out of the sky, cleaning a
beach, and running away up to cut more clouds. Even the clouds seemed
to be whispering out swift and more fervent prayers for their own
fates. Not me! not me!
    “For all the evil you ever did!” said Samhain.
    And the scythe cut and the souls were harvested and fell in blind newts
and awful bedbugs and dreadful cockroaches to scuttle, limp, creep,
scrabble.
    “My gosh, he’s a bug maker.”
    “Flea squasher!”
    “Snake grinder-outer!”
    “Roach transformer!”
    “Fly keeper!”
    “No! Samhain! October God. God of the Dead!”
    Samhain stomped a great foot which tread a thousand bugs in the grass, trompled ten thousand tiny soul-beasts in the dust.
    “I think,” said Tom, “it’s time we-”
    “Ran?” suggested Ralph, not offhand.
    “Shall we take a vote?”
    The scythe hissed. Samhain boomed.
    “Vote, heck!”