The Face in the Frost (2 page)

“I learned that spell fifty years ago,” he mumbled as he lit his pipe. “And I still don’t know what it’s for.”

Around six o’clock, a dark greenish storm-twilight descended, though the sun was not due to set for two hours. Prospero got up and walked out the back door into this unnatural dusk; in the yard behind the house no birds could be seen or heard; the leaves of the trees hung like carved ornaments; and even the splashing of the fountain was strangely muted. The slates of the roof were a flat gray, and the thick-piled clouds seemed to press down on the turreted house. Prospero went back inside and decided to prepare dinner for himself. He pottered about in the kitchen in an attempt at a cheerful manner, whistling bits of tunes like “Lilliburlero” and “The Piper of Dundee.” But his whistling died away as he suddenly thought with inexplicable dread that he would have to go down into the cellar for a pitcher of ale. Now, a grown man—especially one who is a wizard—is not supposed to be afraid of going to the cellar at night. But though he loved the strong brown ale that aged in oozing vats in his dark cool basement, Prospero would (this time) have just as soon done without.

“This is silly,” he said to himself. “You are a coward and a lumphead.” He lit a tall, twisty beeswax candle and grabbed a fat pewter pitcher from the nail where it hung.

The cellarway was dark and musty-smelling, and a damp breeze blew from a window that must have been left open. Prospero, moving along cautiously in the wavering yellow light, passed shelves of cobwebbed jelly jars and dusty overturned steins with inscriptions in strange blue letters. Overhead were the floor beams of the house, split logs with the furrowed black bark still on them. When he reached the great rounded shapes of the beer kegs, Prospero stuck the candle into a wooden wall socket and turned toward a heavy brassbound tun labeled “XXX Strong Ale.” Setting the pitcher on a shelf just under the blocky wooden spigot, he turned the handle, and the ale gushed into the container with a tinny rising sound.

He looked absently around the cellar as he waited for the pitcher to fill, and suddenly his eye was caught by the fluttering of an old cloak hanging on a wooden peg. And in that instant Prospero got the odd notion that the cloak was not his, and might not be a cloak at all. He stared intently at it as the fluttering of the garment became more agitated. And then it turned to meet him. With empty flapping arms, it floated across the cellar floor, swaying in a sickening nightmare rhythm. Prospero clenched his fist and felt his pulse beating in his palms; he fought the rising fear as the cloak flapped nearer, for with all his heart, he did not want it close to him. As it closed the gap between them, all the spells against apparitions ran through his mind, but he had the queasy feeling that none of them would work. The thing was about six feet from him, its cold musty-cellar breath faintly brushing his face, when it simply stopped. The flapping arm dropped, and the gray cloak, or whatever it was, slumped into a ragged heap on the stone floor. Prospero stepped back nervously and stiffened as he felt a cold sensation. But when he looked down, he laughed abruptly, since he had stepped into the spreading brown pool of ale that was now sloshing and frothing over the sides of the pitcher. He shut off the spigot and leaned, trembling, against the barrel, his forehead pressing the fragrant wet wood. When he looked again at the place on the floor where the cloak had fallen, he was not surprised to see that there was nothing lying on the rough candlelit stone. The peg where the cloak had first hung was not there either.

As soon as he felt able to walk, Prospero grabbed up the brimming pitcher, snatched the candle from its sconce, and dashed up the creaking wooden stairs. When he got back to the kitchen, he felt better, and since ghostly cloaks should be common experience for a sorcerer, he felt a little ashamed. But when he closed his eyes, the scene in the cellar came back with all its inexplicable terror.

“Well,” said Prospero to himself, “the thing to do is to keep my eyes open and eat my dinner.”

Which he did, though he had hardly gotten halfway through his meal of cold roast beef, ale, and Cheshire cheese, when the heavy-hanging storm broke over the house with a long, splitting, plate-rattling crash. The thunder did not frighten Prospero half so much as his reaction to it, which was to shove his chair back and look quickly over his shoulder. For the next hour, he was plagued by the strong, palpable feeling that someone was behind him. Even in his study, where he had pushed his big wing chair up against the paneled wall, he found that he could not read—the shadows that leaned out over the high-sided chair seemed more than shadows. He got up and went back to the kitchen, where he nervously finished his dinner as the rain swished and rattled at the diamond-paned window; he tried to play solitaire with an old oblong deck of tarot cards; and he finally settled in his wing chair again to read by the light of a squat, ruby-shaded oil lamp.

By nine o’clock, the storm had passed over and crickets were chirping in the wet grass outside. Prospero found himself still edgy, and he was reading the same sentence about wood trolls for the third time when the doorbell rang. The bell was a small, tinkling silver toy with a chain pull, but just then it sounded like a rusty iron bourdon tolling in an empty church on a winter night. Prospero let the heavy volume he was holding slip to the floor with a loud dust-raising whump. He stared for several minutes at the half-open study door that led to the dark front hall. Finally, with a sudden resolute jerk, he stood up, crossed the room, and peered into the narrow vestibule. The linen-curtained square window in the front door threw a wavering yellow patch on the splintered floorboards, and the huddled shapes of picture frames, dressers, and coat trees leaned out from the walls. Staring intently at the blank yellow window, Prospero stepped into the hall and lurched into a massive mahogany coat tree. The tall spindled thing rocked on its warped base, and three or four umbrellas fell in the wizard’s path with a swishing clatter. Shaken, but still relatively calm, he stepped over the scattered junk and got to the door, grasped the cold porcelain knob, and pulled. The swollen black door would not open at his first jerk, or at the second. On the third try, it rattled suddenly inward and the chilly night air, smelling of cut grass and rain-drenched lilacs, blew gently into the hall. From the blistered white porch ceiling hung a square yellow-paned lantern, and around it mosquitoes, moths, and other night insects flittered and ticked. The tiny doorbell was still trembling on its rusty hook. No one was there.

Prospero stood under the lamp, staring out into the moonless night. At first, he saw only vague shapes, some darker than others, but before long, he became aware of a small figure standing halfway down the flagstone walk. As Prospero watched, the figure raised a threatening arm and spoke in a deep voice:

“Kill them all!”

At this, Prospero did a strange thing. He began to smile. His long wrinkled face, which had been set in a tense frown, was now creased by a delighted grin.

“Kill who all?” he asked in an amused voice.

“All those blasted, pesty, nitty insects!” the figure roared. “If yellow light attracts moths the size of horse blankets, why don’t you get a purple lamp or a green lamp? At least let me smash the one you have!”

Still grumping, the person on the walk came forward until he stood in the light. Prospero saw a short, burly, middle-aged man with a close-trimmed dark-red beard; the hair on his head was beginning to get gray, and it was hard to tell whether he was going bald or just wearing a badly overgrown tonsure. The monkish aspect was also suggested by a mud-splashed brown robe, over which a shiny rain slicker was thrown. But instead of sandals, the man wore scuffed brown walking boots. In one hand, he held a dripping sou’wester rain hat, and in the other, he held a long brass-tipped staff. A fat brown valise crouched at his feet, like an absurd and lumpy short-haired dog. It was Roger Bacon, one of Prospero’s best friends and a pretty good sorcerer in his own right. He had been in the North Kingdom for the last three years, and before that, he had been in England for three years. But you would have thought the two men had not seen each other in fifty years, the way they pounded each other on the back, bellowing wisecracks about falling hair and midriff bulge. When the welcoming uproar had subsided, Prospero stepped back and made a deep, comic bow.

“Welcome, noble friar! And when did you return from the land of ice and mist?”

“Just tonight. A fishing boat put me ashore on the coast, and I found my way here as well as I could. I got—”

Suddenly Roger looked up, because some movement near the porch ceiling caught his eye. A huge gray moth, at least two hand-spans across, came flapping down from the shadows. It went straight for Prospero, and before he could raise his hand, it had plastered itself against his face. Roger gave a sharp cry and rushed forward, shooing at the thing until it dropped to the floor with a light plop and an unpleasant rustling sound. But before Roger could step on it, the moth rose, dived once at his head, and then floated off into the night. The two men stared after it for a full minute, and when Roger turned to look at Prospero, he saw that his face was pale, even in the yellow light. And his hands were trembling.

“Look here,” said Roger in a worried voice. “I wish you’d tell me what’s going on. You’re not normally scared of insects, but then that was no ordinary moth. I’ve never seen one like it.”

Prospero sighed and rubbed at his face with both hands, “I’d tell you what was going on if I knew. I’ve never seen anything like it either. It smelled like a basement full of dusty newspapers. But the smell isn’t the worst thing about it.”

“That’s true,” said Roger, looking up at the porch lamp. “It never came close to me and I was scared of it. Well, it’s just more of what I felt when I got here two hours ago, and—”

Prospero stared at him. “Two hours ago! Why didn’t you come in?”

Roger took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “As soon as I came through the gate, I knew that something else was here, something that had nothing to do with you or your spells. So I poked around out here in the rain in hopes of catching the thing or at least finding out what it was.”

“And did you find anything?”

“No. Out by the fountain, I scared off something that might have been a dog, though it didn’t look like one. It stood near the edge of the forest and stared at me for a moment, but when I threatened it with my staff, it ran away. There were sounds in the tall grass and in the bushes. All this in the wild rain, and your house all lit up. It was a bit like a dream I used to have as a child: I would be chased around and around the outside of my house by a tall, formless dark creature; every window in the house was brightly lit and yet I couldn’t go in. Of course, I could have come into
your
house if I had wanted to. But I felt you were safe; the thing was outside.”

“It had been inside,” said Prospero grimly. And now it was Roger Bacon’s turn to stare.

Prospero decided right then that a little false courage was needed—otherwise the two of them would spend the rest of the night looking in closets and under tables.

“Come on inside,” he said. “The ghastly grimling is gone, at least for the time being, and we have a lot of talking to catch up on. It’s getting chilly, so why don’t you start a fire, and I’ll go downstairs—” He paused and laughed. He was not frightened now and he was genuinely amused at himself. Roger, naturally, still looked puzzled. “Never mind,” Prospero went on, “I’ll explain later. Anyway, as I was saying, I’ll go downstairs and get a bottle of good red wine and some of that hundred-year-old brandy you had the last time you were here. And we’ll see what we can do to that large Cheshire cheese in the kitchen. How does that sound?”

“Fine,” said Roger, and he started to take off his heavy raincoat.

Before long, the two of them were comfortably planted in two large, sagging easy chairs drawn up before a warm fire, which sometimes burned bright sea green or deep cobalt blue because of salts that Prospero had thrown onto the logs. Between the chairs was a small octagonal table holding a dusty green wine bottle, a rapidly diminishing half wheel of cheese, and a plate of crackers. Roger Bacon had been telling about some of his more notable successes in England, and now he began to tell, with equal delight, some stories about his more egregious failures.

“...and so, I went to work on a brazen head that was going to tell me how to encircle England with a wall of brass, to keep out marauding Danes and other riffraff. I think something went wrong when I didn’t put enough yellow regulus of phosphorus in—or maybe there was too much astatine permanganate. Anyway, I got a head that was at least as talkative as your mirror...”

“I heard that!” yelled a voice from upstairs.

“You be quiet,” shouted Prospero over his shoulder. “Why don’t you go watch late movies or something?”

There was silence upstairs, followed shortly by the muffled sound of bird imitations.

“
Anyway,
” Roger went on, munching a piece of cheese, “the head did talk a lot, but unlike your mirror it was deaf as a...as a...”

“Brass post?” put in Prospero helpfully.

“Yes,” muttered Roger, giving him a dirty look. “You might say so. Well, I asked it how to make a brass wall to encircle England, and it said ‘Hah?’
‘Brass wall
,
’
 
I said, louder. ‘
B
 
as in Bryophyta...’ ”

“Bryophyta?” Prospero asked.

“Yes,” answered Roger testily, “mosses and liverworts.”