Free (1972) The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury

below.
    “Pipkin!”
    But there below on the cathedral porch stones were only flinty
firesparks blowing away, and a fine gargoyle dust. Nose, chin, stone
lip, hard cheek, bright eye, carved fine ear, all, all whipped away on
the wind in chaff and shrapnel dust. They saw something like a spirit
smoke, a bloom of gunpowder blow drifting south and west.
    “Mexico—” Moundshroud, one of the few men in all the world who knew how to utter, uttered the word.
    “Mexico?” asked Tom.
    “The last grand travel of this night,” said Moundshroud, still
uttering, savoring the syllables. “Whistle, boys, scream like tigers,
cry like panthers, shriek like carnivores!”
    “Scream, cry, shriek?”
    “Reassemble the Kite, lads, the Kite of Autumn. Paste back the fangs
and fiery eyes and bloody talons. Yell the wind to sew it all together
and ride us high and long and last. Bray, boys, whimper, trumpet,
shout!”
    The boys hesitated. Moundshroud
ran along the ledge like someone racketing a picket fence. He knocked
each boy with his knee and elbow. The boys fell, and falling gave each
his particular whimper, shriek, or scream.
    Plummeting down through cold space, they felt the tail of a murderous
peacock flourish beneath, all blood-filled eye. Ten thousand burning
eyes came up.
    Hovered suddenly round a windy corner of gargoyles, the Autumn Kite, freshly assembled, broke their fall.
    They grabbed, they held to rim, to edge, to cross-struts, to trapdrum
rattling papers, to bits and tatters and shreds of old meat-breath
lion-mouth, and stale-blood tiger’s maw.
    Moundshroud leaped up to grab. This time he was the tail.
    The Autumn Kite hovered, waiting, eight boys upon its billowing surf of teeth and eyes.
    Moundshroud tuned his ear.
    Hundreds of miles away, beggars ran down Irish roads, starving, asking
for food from door to door. Their cries rose in the night.
    Fred Fryer, in his beggar’s costume, heard.
    “That way! Let’s fly there!”
    “No. No time. Listen!”
    Thousands of miles away, there was a faint tap-hammering of deathwatch beetles ticking the night.
    “The coffin makers of Mexico.” Moundshroud smiled. “In the streets with
their long boxes and nails and little hammers, tapping, tapping.”
    “Pipkin?” whispered the boys.
    “We hear,” said Moundshroud. “And, to Mexico, we go.”
    The Autumn Kite boomed them away on a one-thousand-foot tidal wave of wind.
    The gargoyles, fluting in their stone nostrils, gaping their marble lips, used that same wind to wail them farewell.

They hung above Mexico.
    They hung above an island in that lake in Mexico.
    They heard dogs barking in the night far below. They saw a few boats on
the moonlit lake moving like water insects. They heard a guitar playing
and a man singing in a high sad voice.
    A
long way off across the dark borders of land, in the United States,
packs of children, mobs of dogs ran laughing, barking, knocking, from
door to door, their hands full of sweet bags of treasure, wild with joy
on Halloween night.
    “But, here—” whispered Tom.
    “Here what?” asked Moundshroud, hovering at his elbow.
    “Oh, why here—”
    “And down through all of South America—”
    “Yes, South. Here and South. All the cemeteries. All the graveyards are—”
    —full of candlelight, Tom thought. A thousand candles in this cemetery,
a hundred candles in that graveyard, ten thousand small flickering
lights farther on a hundred miles, five thousand miles down to the very
tip of Argentina.
    “Is that the way they celebrate—”
    “El Dia de los Muertos. How’s your grade school Spanish, Tom?”
    “The Day of the Dead Ones?”
    “Caramba, si! Kite, disassemble!”
    Swooping down, the Kite flew apart for a final time.
    The boys tumbled on the stony shore of the quiet lake.
    Mists hung over the waters.
    Far across the lake they could see an unlit tombyard. There were, as yet, no candles burning in it.
    Out of the mists, a dugout canoe moved silently without oars, as if