The Face in the Frost (5 page)

“I knew it,” he said. “Gothic arches and little carved monster heads. You would.”

“Of course,” said Prospero, picking up a small tin lantern that hung near the stairs. “Notice the fan vaulting and follow me.”

They walked through a tunnel that sloped gently down and took one sharp right-angle turn. Suddenly, the tunnel opened into a natural cave, a domed, stalactite-dripping room with a dark cold stream flowing through it.

“Here,” said Prospero, “is our problem. I ran into this and had to stop. There’s no stone beyond this point, and the earth behind that wall is very mushy. But the tunnel that the stream flows through rises four feet above the level of the water.”

Roger was getting nervous again. “Are we going to crawl through the water? Do you know where the stream goes?”

Prospero smiled. “I have it on the authority of a talking fish that this stream runs underground for ten miles and then empties into a small lake in the realm of our old friend, King Gorm. You remember him. Well, I think he has a library like the one in Roundcourt, though not so complete. I’ve never seen it, but it ought to have a copy of the Register, and I want to look up the crest on that bookplate. It’s a start, anyway, and there’s a possibility that the owner of such an ugly device might have gotten the book back. And I want to know more about that kindly old fisherman who suddenly volunteers to drown the book for the monk. If the lake isn’t stocked with gray ghastlies, we may find something interesting.” He looked at Roger, who was still scowling at him. “Oh, yes—no, we’re not going to crawl. Come upstairs.”

Back in the living room, Prospero went to the mantelpiece and took down a small, very accurate-looking ship model. “This,” he said, “is what we are going in: the British man-of-war
Actaeon
, which ran—will run—aground on a sand bar during the siege of Charleston in 1776. Do you know, by the way, that Lord Nelson was hit in the head with a cannon ball at the Battle of the Nile? You pick up the damnedest things from that mirror.”

Roger looked pained. “I think,” he said, “that I’ll go get a glass of hard cider.”

Upstairs, later, Roger was in Prospero’s room helping him pack into a green plush carpetbag such essentials as tarot cards, extra tobacco, and pocket magic books. The magic mirror, after plaguing the two men with questions, was finally beginning to understand what was going on.

“You mean,” it said with a scarcely suppressed giggle, “that you’re going to make yourselves...
smaller?
”

“Yes,” said Prospero, blushing. “What of it?”

The mirror broke into hysterical cackles and began to chant in a falsetto voice:

“Magic words of poof, poof, piffles,

Make me just as small as Sniffles!

Woo, hoo, hoo, hee, hee, hee!”

“I’ll wager,” said Prospero, “that I have the only mirror that wallows in the trash of future centuries.”

Roger was nervously opening and shutting the casement window. “I’m worried,” he said. “What do you suppose he’ll do when he finds we’ve gone? Will he destroy your house or go down the road and attack the village?”

“I think he will try to find us. He hasn’t reached his full strength yet by any means—that is, if the book is as evil as I think it is—and I don’t think he’ll waste his powers destroying a village or a house out of anger. It has occurred to me that he may not be able to injure my house anyway. The hearthstone was laid by Michael Scott, my teacher, and it has many powerful spells on it. He built a good deal of the house, too, and there are still things about it I don’t understand. Why, there’s a cupboard that—oh, the devil! Some other time. I guess I’ve got everything. Good-by, mirror. I trust you can entertain yourself while we’re gone.”

“I should hope so. I think I’ll scare the wits out of the cleaning lady when she comes. I have a very nice scream.”

A little later, downstairs, Prospero wrote a note in black crayon and left it on the kitchen table under a bust of the Emperor Pupienus.

Dear Mrs. Durfey,

Will be gone for an indefinite period. Pay no attention to the mirror if it acts up, and in any case, you know where the harp case is. You can slip it over him when he’s not looking. Don’t forget to water the trailing arbutus and the creeping Charlie. Change the water in the large onyx water clock; the other one takes care of itself. Help yourself to the cheese and anything else. The Cheshire gets dry and crusty if you don’t eat it. With luck, I should be back for the big Christmas party. Say hello to His Lordship the Mayor for me.

Prospero

P.S. Unexplained noises are best left unexplained.

He looked around the house sadly. “I do hate to leave. Oh, well. Are the windows closed, Roger? Grab your bag and let’s get going.”

Soon, the secret door had closed behind the two wizards and they had placed the boat in the black water, where it rocked gently, moored by a pair of wispy cords. The ship was close to the low bank, and a rope ladder hung down from the muddy edge to the port side rail. Roger Bacon and Prospero stood looking doubtfully at the tiny craft.

“Well,” said Roger, “I don’t suppose we can put it off.”

“No,” said Prospero, “I don’t suppose we can.”

He thumbed a small book, which looked like a pocket dictionary, until he found the page he wanted.

“All together now:

Shrivel, shrink, squinch, and squibble

Dwindle, dwilp, melt, and dribble

ZALAMEA ALCAZAR!”

Roger and Prospero shrank and shrank, until they looked like two odd chess pieces standing by the brown sloping sides of the boat. They made faces at each other, laughed a little, and then climbed aboard.

Inside the low, echoing wet-dirt tunnel, the noise of the rushing water was weirdly magnified and distorted into a hollow tinny roar. A shout or a handclap came whanging back at you immediately from a low curving roof. Prospero and Roger, sliding farther and farther into this claustrophobic gloom, stood on the high ornamented poop of their absurd ship and watched the shrinking half moon of light cast by the lantern they had left on the floor of the cave. Two tiny alcohol-burning stern lamps cast a flickering moth-light on the wizards, who now turned to the task of keeping up their spirits until the
Actaeon
sailed out into the sunny lake.

The ship itself was entertaining, because it was so incredibly detailed. There were gleaming rows of brass cannon, nickel-plated swinging lanterns that worked, and, in the captain’s cabin, rows of books, real books, mostly on nautical subjects. Even the purple liquid in the little flattened decanter turned out to be wine. Though they were, if anything, too small for the ship, the wizards still thought of it as tiny, and were endlessly fascinated by the discovery of new details—a cupboard that opened on scrolled brass hinges, a box within the cupboard that held delicate jade-and-ivory chessmen. The wheel, of course, worked, and Prospero had roped it down, so that the ship would follow the straight flow of the current. Though all the lamps, lanterns, and candles on board were lit, the sides of the cave could not be seen, and periodic flashes of magic lightning were needed to assure them that the little bobbing toy was still in the middle of the stream.

As the
Actaeon
sailed on into the noisy darkness, Prospero and Roger heard faintly disquieting sounds: the
plip!
that might be a clot of earth falling from the ceiling into the water, the
splop!
that probably was a small water animal sliding off some unseen shore into the stream. And there was another sound, one which was harder to single out from the others and define. It was only a little different from the normal rushing-water sound, yet it
was
there—a hissing and foaming that was getting more and more distinct. At first, Prospero thought “Rapids!” and shivered. But it was the sound of water flowing
through
something, not over it. He got up from the powder keg on which he had been sitting and motioned to Roger, who was up on the quarterdeck, trying to compute the speed of the ship. Together, they went to the forecastle and stood peering into the blackness ahead. The little swinging lamps that hung near them were not much help, so Prospero and Roger struck their staffs together—a bright red light, dripping like a fireworks flare, hung around them for a few minutes, and by that garish light, they saw a mesh of some kind strung across their path. It was held by a rigid black square frame that was awkwardly jammed into the tunnel’s rough walls at a point where the opening was lower and narrower than usual.

Prospero and Roger struggled with the capstan, but the anchor was either decorative or stuck. The ship drifted on, yawing a little in the current, until it bumped—more gently than Prospero had hoped—against the strange wall. Prospero set off another flare and suddenly realized what the obstruction was: it was a window screen.
His
window screen. He saw the place where he had scratched with a nail “Bedroom SE Corner,” and he remembered the theft, the broken cellar window of three years before. Roger stared at him with understanding and fear.

The ship bumped against the screen, and the water shed through a thousand tiny openings. As Prospero’s eyes got used to the dark, he saw that there was a little ledge nearby on one side of the tunnel. And behind it was the deep blackness of a cave. Now from the cave came a scrabbling, grunting clumping sound, and out of the ragged opening crawled a hairy, angular shape. Two red eyes glowed in the darkness. Prospero could have lit the tunnel for a better look, but the magic was not endless, and anyway, he knew what the thing was. So did Roger, who gripped his own staff tightly.

And now, a sneering gritty voice:

“Well, well. I hear this noise, so I says to myself—fresh fish! But it ain’t, it’s a couple of little men in a toy boat!”

Prospero leaned over the side and shouted: “We are wizards, troll! And if you don’t let us through this thing, we’ll turn you into a rock at the bottom of this stinking, filthy, sloppy stream!”

The troll snickered, a nasal snortling sound. “If you’re wizards, you can blast your own hole in my screen, can’t you? But you ain’t done it because you
can’t
. So I think I’ll have some nice stewed wizard, or wizard dumplings, or”—here he held up the tiny white bones of some animal and rattled them—“wizard gizzard!”

“Troll,” said Prospero quietly, with both hands on the rail, “I am going to turn you into lead. A few centuries from now someone will find you and use you for a lawn ornament!”

“Oh, shut up, you mouthy little bug!” said the troll. “I’m going to watch you a few minutes, and then—” He twisted his hands as if he was wringing out a cloth.

Prospero closed his eyes and tried to think. He had been reading about trolls the night Roger came, but now he could think of nothing that would help him. He couldn’t even grapple physically with the troll, since the spell that made the two men smaller lasted till sunset, which was at 8 p.m. that day. His watch said five. Picking up his staff and throwing it down in anger, he turned to Roger, but Roger was gone.

“All right,” said the troll, lowering his webby feet into the water, “you two ain’t no fun no more. You’ll probably taste like water rats, but...”

A hatch clattered behind Prospero and Roger reappeared, carrying a length of rope from which a four-pronged grappling hook hung. Standing a little back from the rail, Roger whirled the grapnel whistling around his head, and then he let it go. The hook raked the screen but fell into the water, and Roger quickly started to reel it in.

The troll was still sitting on the muddy bank, his feet in the sloshing water.

“This is more like it,” he said. He clapped his hands, and when he pulled them apart they went
thock
like suction cups. “Climb to the top and fall over, and then I can rescue you!”

Roger threw the grapnel again, and this time the pronged iron went
chunk!
into the screen—two spurs were wedged tight. Now Roger whipped the rope around the mainmast and started to pull. Prospero suddenly saw what was going on, and in a second, he was pulling too. A large ragged piece of the screen ripped out, crumbling as it fell and spattering the deck with red flakes of rust. The troll stood up and started to stoop forward, but Prospero gathered all his strength and blacked out the tunnel. For several minutes, the place was absolutely dark—it was filled with thick, palpable, gross darkness, and while the murk lasted, the little boat slipped through the hole. One scuttering wire scraped the bottom of the hull from one end to the other and, for a sickening instant, the boat slowed. But then it bobbed through, wallowed sideways in the current for a bit, and straightened out to steer its course down the middle of the fast-flowing stream. The troll still held his eyes and screeched, for he thought he had been struck blind. Roger and Prospero were far downstream when the lights went on again.

CHAPTER THREE

After more than two hours of uneventful drifting, the
Actaeon
rounded a sweeping curve, and Prospero, who was sitting on one of the bow chasers, saw a blue twilight glimmer ahead. He pointed this out to Roger, who was poking a straw into the touch hole of the other brass cannon to see if it really was bored all the way through.