“Wendell?” Harvey whispered. “Where are you?”
There was still no reply. Just the slithering in the leaves, and the moan of hungry branches.
“I know what you’re doing,” Harvey said, louder this time. “And you won’t scare me that easy. Hear me?”
This time there was a reply of sorts. Not words, but a creaking sound from somewhere in the trees.
He’s climbing up into the tree house, Harvey thought, and determined to catch Wendell and scare him back, he followed the sound.
Despite the nakedness of the branches, their mesh kept all but a glimmer of starlight from falling on the groves. He slipped his mask down around his neck so as to see a little better, but even then he was nearly blind, and had to listen out for the sound of Wendell’s ascent to guide him. He could still hear the creaks plainly enough, and stumbled in their direction, his arms outstretched to grasp the ladder when he reached it.
Now the sound was so loud he was certain he must be standing beneath the tree. He looked up, hoping to catch a glimpse of the trickster, but as he did so something brushed his face. He snatched at it, but it was gone, at least for the moment. Then it came again, brushing his brow from the other side. He snatched at it a second time, then, as it touched him again, caught hold of it.
“Got you!” he cried.
His yell of triumph was followed by a rush of air, and the sound of something crashing to the ground at his side. He jumped, but refused to let go of whatever he was holding.
“Wendell?” he called.
By way of a reply a flame flared in the darkness behind him, and a firework erupted into a shower of green sparks, its light making a gangrenous cavern of the grove.
By its flickering light he saw what he held, and seeing, let out a panicked yammering that had the crows rising from their roosts overhead.
It was not a ladder he’d heard creaking, it was a rope. No, not even a rope: a noose. And in his hand, the leg of the man hanging from the noose. He let go of it and stumbled backward, barely suppressing a second shout as his eyes rose to meet the dead man’s stare. To judge by his expression, he had died horribly. His tongue lolled from his foamy lips, his veins were so swollen with blood his head looked like a pumpkin.
Either that, or it was a pumpkin.
A fresh fountain of sparks now burst from the firework, and Harvey saw the truth of the matter. The limb he’d held was a stuffed trouser leg; the body a coat spilling bundles of clothes; that head a mask on a pumpkin, with cream for spittle and eggs for eyes.
“Wendell!” he yelled, turning his back on this scene of execution.
Wendell was standing on the far side of the firework, his ear-to-ear grin lit by its spitting sparks. He looked like a little demon, fresh from the inferno. At his side was the ladder that had come crashing down to get the drama underway.
“I warned ya!” Wendell said, holding up his mask. “I said I was going to be a hangman tonight!”
“I’ll get you back for his!” Harvey said, his heart still beating too fast for him to see the funny side of this. “I swear…I’ll get you back!”
“You can try!” Wendell crowed. The firework was beginning to fizzle out; the shadows around them beginning to deepen again. “Had enough of Halloween for tonight?” he asked.
Harvey didn’t much like admitting defeat, but he nodded grimly, swearing to himself that when he finally got his revenge, it would be choice.
“Smile,” Wendell said, as the fountain of sparks dwindled. “We’re in the Holiday House.”
The light had almost gone, and even though Harvey was still enraged at Wendell (and at himself, for being such a sucker), he couldn’t let it die away without making peace.
“All right,” he said, allowing himself a tiny smile. “There’ll be other nights.”
“Always,” said Wendell. The reply pleased him. “That’s what this place is, “he said, as the light went out. “It’s the House of Always.”
VII. A Present From the Pass
There was a Thanksgiving feast awaiting them when they got back into the House.
“You look as though you’ve been in the wars,” Mrs. Griffin remarked when she set eyes on Harvey. “Has Wendell been up to his tricks?”
Harvey admitted that he’d fallen for all of them, but there was one that impressed him in particular.
“What was that?” said Wendell with a smug grin. “The falling ladder? That was a clever little touch, wasn’t it?”
“No, not the ladder,” said Harvey.
“What then?”
“The thing in the sky.”
“Oh that…”
“What was it? A kite?”
“That wasn’t my doing,” Wendell replied.
“What was it then?”
“I don’t know,” Wendell said, his smile disappearing. “Better not to ask, eh?”
“But I want to know,” Harvey insisted, turning to Mrs. Griffin. “It had wings, and I think it flew off the roof.”
“Then it was a bat,” Mrs. Griffin said.
“No, this was a hundred times bigger than a bat.” He spread his arms. “Great, dark wings.”
Mrs. Griffin frowned as Harvey spoke. “You imagined it,” she said.
“I did not,” Harvey protested.
“Why don’t you just sit down and eat?” Mrs. Griffin replied. “If it wasn’t a bat then it wasn’t anything at all.”
“But Wendell saw it too. Didn’t you Wendell?”
He looked around at the other boy, who was digging into a steaming plate of turkey and cranberry sauce.
“Who cares?” Wendell said, chewing as he spoke.
“Just tell her you saw it.”
Wendell shrugged. “Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. It’s Halloween night. There’s supposed to be bogeymen out there.”
“But not real ones,” said Harvey. “A trick’s one thing. But if that beast was real…”
As he spoke he realized he was breaking the rule he’d made on the porch: Whether the winged creature was real or not didn’t matter. This was a place of illusions. Wouldn’t he be happier here if he just stopped questioning what was real and what wasn’t?
“Sit down and eat,” Mrs. Griffin said again.
Harvey shook his head. His appetite had disappeared. He was angry, though he wasn’t quite sure at whom. Maybe at Wendell, for his shrugs; or at Mrs. Griffin, for not believing him; or at himself, for being afraid of illusions. Maybe all three.
“I’m going up to my room to change,” he said, and left the kitchen.
He discovered Lulu on the landing, staring out the window. Wind gusted against the glass, reminding Harvey of Rictus’s first visit. It wasn’t rain the gusts were bringing, however, it was powdery snow.
“It’ll be Christmas soon,” she said.
“Will it?”
