The Face in the Frost (11 page)

Fighting down rising fear, Prospero went back upstairs and began to knock on doors, at first softly, then sharply. He tried the doors. Locked. Locked. And locked. Like the box, the doors didn’t even rattle. On an impulse, he opened his pocket knife and tried to slide the blade into the space between a door and its jamb. The point struck solid wood, for what looked like a crack was merely a black line. One door opened, revealing a completely empty room, without even a bed on its smooth floor. The window was open and a cold autumn wind blew in. Prospero shut the door quietly. At the other end of the long straight corridor was a room he had intentionally passed by. The gold letters on the door said “Innkeeper. Please knock.”

“Very well,” he said through his teeth. “I’ll knock.”

He struck the floor with his staff, and a loud report crashed through the hall. There was no echo, and the silence returned. Prospero walked slowly to the other end of the corridor until he stood before the lettered door. Placing his hand on the curved handle, he pressed down and the latch clicked. The door opened about a foot and struck something soft. Prospero raised his candle and saw that the door was blocked by the form of the hostess, who was standing in the dark room, her back to him and her arms at her sides. He squeezed through the door and held the light close to the inert form. Her head was bowed slightly and her eyes were open. His gaze wandered to her right arm. Her clenched hand was pressed to her thigh, and she clutched something hidden in the folds of her floor-length checkered skirt. Slowly, cautiously, Prospero backed away, and when he had reached the middle of the room, he glanced quickly around. The weak candlelight did not reach the dark corners, but the room looked as empty as the one he had just been in. He muttered something and struck the butt of his staff on the floor. The room lit up for an instant in a flash of blue lightning, and Prospero could see that the chamber was indeed empty—there was not even a window.

And still, the woman stood silent, staring with dead eyes at the floor. Prospero bent to set the candle down, and then, straightening up suddenly, he walked to where the slumping figure stood. Grasping her shoulders, he shook her violently. There was a clatter on the floor at his feet, and when he looked down, he saw a long, slightly curved butcher knife. He looked up at the woman again and stepped back with a gasp. His hand went to his face and his staff fell to the floor. The woman’s eyes were gone. In her slowly rising head were two black holes. Prospero saw in his mind a doll that had terrified him when he was a child. The eyes had rattled in the china skull. Now the woman’s voice, mechanical and heavy: “Why don’t you sleep? Go to sleep.” Her mouth opened wide, impossibly wide, and then the whole face stretched and writhed and yawned in the faint light.

With a cry, Prospero shoved the melting thing aside and got to the door, opened it, and ran down the hall. The walls were caving, bulging, stretching wildly—one door fell before him and tried to wrap itself around his legs. Prospero kicked at the door hysterically and finally got to the stairs, which were covered with a brown fog. As he felt his way down the quivering steps, the whole staircase gave way with a rushing hiss and he landed on his knees in the cold liquid that had been the floor. The walls of the large downstairs room, though blurry, were still there, and he felt for the door, not daring to look back to see if anything had followed him from that terrible blind chamber. Lifting the twisting, bucking bar from the black door, he plunged outside and ran through the street, where the cobblestones oozed like mud and slate roofs turned to dripping black slime. Stone walls ran in viscous rivulets, and the head of the little old man appeared gabbling fiercely. When Prospero got to the church, the bell tower rang five scraping, cracking, howling notes and toppled slowly at him. He raised his arms to shield himself, but the tower, still ringing, turned to mist as it fell and blew away in long sinuous swirls. The wizard dropped to the ground, covering his face with his hands.

When he looked up several minutes later, he was in a field of heavily trampled moonlit grass, through which a rutty gouged cow path wandered. Some distance away the road he had been following wound up a pine-covered ridge. Near him, Prospero found his bag and staff, unharmed, and he picked them up from the withered weeds as if he expected them to crumble in his grasp. Something was glittering in the gray tangle at his feet—the knife, which was quite real and very ordinary-looking. No inscriptions on it, no death’s heads. Prospero broke it, buried it, and started walking toward the road.

CHAPTER SEVEN

On his way again, Prospero crossed ridge after ridge of uninteresting country: a cattle pond here, a clump of Scotch pines there—just enough variation for boredom. He was beginning to feel that this was a pointless, hopeless journey. The situation, the problem that faced him, was getting clearer in his mind, and the clearer it got, the more hopeless he felt. Without Roger, he was lost.

After half a day of walking, something happened that made him strangely hopeful. He found a sign, a fairly new sign, that said FIVE DIALS: THIRTY MILES. So there
was
a town with that name, after all. He walked the rest of the day, stopped to build a fire in a little circle of pines, and slept a full nine hours. The next morning, after coffee, bread, and cheese, he went on, feeling much better.

Five Dials, it turned out, was not a town at all, but a lonely inn wedged under a yellow limestone bank, a last friendly stop before you reached the Brown River and the treeless empty moors of the North Kingdom. A man by the name of Clockwarden had been here first, in the barn-shaped house that was still the center of the collection of different-sized, plugged-together buildings that made up the Five Dials Inn. Clockwarden may not have been his real name, since that was his job. On the cliff over the inn stood a crenelated clock tower, built some two hundred years before the time of this story; it was the hobby work of some local prince, and it had had, when new, four brightly painted wooden dials with keyhole-shaped windows cut in them. Through these, you could see moons and suns rising and setting—not that they ever told you anything about moonrise, sunrise, or the tides. The fifth dial was a sundial on the flat top of the tower; it was used to set the clock, which had only hour hands. After the prince who built the clock died, his successors let the thing run down and dismissed the warden. They tore off the bronze hands and made them into spearheads; the lead weights were thrown off a castle wall in some forgotten siege.

Two days after his escape from Five Dials, Prospero stood on Clocktower Hill, looking up at warped, bleached, saucer-shaped faces that still had a few flaking Roman numerals. Inside, the works were full of birds’ nests—empty at this time of year—and in some places, small skeletons were caught in cogs, because playing children or a strong wind had started the rope-and-stone pendulum and the big square-toothed wooden wheels. From the Clocktower Hill, you could see, to the north, a valley of little jigsaw-puzzle fields cut up by bunchy and badly-trimmed hedgerows. Beyond the fields was a curving fence of tall feather-shaped trees that marked the course of the Brown River, the border between the North and South kingdoms. The road that ran past the inn must meet a bridge at that point. It was near sunset, and Prospero watched for a while as a stone-blue point of cloud, rising out of a thick curded mass, cut the red sun in two. Suppertime at the inn. Two maple trees grew at the western edge of the low cliff and marked the place where the stone steps led down to the side yard of the inn. As Prospero passed between the trees, a little breeze started and a leaf scraped his cheek. He felt a sharp pain, and blood wet his face. Reaching up carefully and staring hard at the dark moving leaves, he broke one off at the stem and held it up in the light. It was not hard—it was unpleasantly soft and furry-feeling, like a caterpillar. Its edges and veins were gray, and it had turned a dark red. With a nervous look over his shoulder, Prospero hurried down the steps.

Inside the inn was a pleasant reeky disorder, with a gonglike whanging of kettles, loud talk, and some shouting. This place seemed real enough. The tables had pipe-ash burns and interlaced bottle marks; the mantel was crowded with smudged mustard jars, dirty boot-shaped leather pitchers, and speckled china jampots. Bent and tarnished spoons stood upright in some thick green stuff that dripped over the edges of dirty white porcelain bowls. Lifting his bag over the heads of ducking customers, Prospero squeezed through the tables and found the innkeeper. He wanted a glass of wine before supper, and he had heard—all the way back in Brakespeare—that the cellars of the border inns were very good, especially for port and sherry. “Go on down and help yourself,” said the fat blue-aproned man. “Here’s a glass. You won’t need a candle; the place is all lit up. Don’t drink too much, ha ha.”

“I won’t, ha ha,” said Prospero to himself, and he started down the stairs.

In the cellar, rows of splintery tarred barrels ran off into the vaulted alleys; here and there, lumpy starfish-shaped grease lamps gave off a smudge pot stink and precious little light. Prospero looked around and saw a man in a brown robe bent over a little low barrel. He was turning the spigot and drawing off a thick brown fluid that was probably sherry. Prospero stood watching him from a distance, and the man started to talk in a creaky old-geezer voice. It was not clear if he was talking to himself, but he gave no sign that he knew the other man was there.

“Ye-es, this is proper Snake Year sherry, it is. I’ve got the right barrel.
Snake
Year, ye say? Thaat’s right, thaat’s right. Seems they was a plague of adders several years ago. Well, they come down off of that Clock Hill lookin’ for a cold dark place, and they filled this cellar up to the gunnels. Right up to the roof beams. Wrigglin’ and squirmin’ like anything. Well, old whatsisname come down here in a suit of armor he borrowed up the road, and he laid around with a broadsword till they was all dead. Well, then they aired out the cellar ’n’ carted out the
segments
, or figments if ye please”—here he broke down into shaking silent laughter and hit his head several times against the barrel rim—“but it took ’em a long time to get this funny
smell
out. They finally did, most of it, but this here barrel, if ye pop out the bung, still smells bracky. That’s because a lady adder set down some eggs in here. She
squirmed
in the spigot and she
squirmed
out again. Now, they ain’t many that
likes
this barrel, but
I
claim the taste is special.”

All the while that this strange old man was talking, Prospero was walking toward him through the rows of kegs. Now he stood directly behind the stooping hooded figure.

“Are you serious?” said Prospero. “About that?”

“I am,” said the old man. “Here—
try some!
” He screeched these last words, straightened up suddenly, and shoved the slopping mug in Prospero’s face. The wizard’s reaction was automatic, as if he had had a dead rat thrown in his lap. He jerked back, swung his arm, and batted the mug across the room. It bounced on kegs with a dull
tunk
-
tunk
, spewing brown wine everywhere. Prospero stood staring at the old man, who was Roger Bacon.

“Oh, good grief! Roger, if you ever do that again, I’ll make you drink real snake wine, it’s a very simple formula, you just...” Now, he was crying, with his arms around the red-bearded man.

“Roger, how did you know I’d be here? How did you know I’d come down here?”

“I was watching you from the top of that ridiculous tower. Did you think I was the gnomon, in the shape of Father Time?”

“I didn’t see you.”

“Well, I saw you miles off. I went to Briar Hill and saw your mark in the guest book. I didn’t know where you’d go after that, but I went north for reasons of my own, and figured you’d come for the same reasons.”

“Don’t be mysterious,” said Prospero. “What reasons? And how did you happen to go to Briar Hill? And what happened...”

“Better not to talk down here,” said Roger, staring around at the barrels. “Let’s get a back parlor with a nice thick door on it. We can take turns talking.”

The two of them sat, later in the evening, at a scallop-edged wooden table on which four gray squares of bright moonlight lay. In the corner, a little fire of pine chunks burned behind a thick iron grate pierced with quatrefoils. On the table were two greasy tin plates, a couple of half-full mugs of cider, and a squashed-down tallow candle in a green copper dish. A brass cylinder marked “Salt” held thick peeling cigars—the innkeeper rolled them himself—and Prospero lit one from the candle. Roger was trying to fight a bulbous black pipe that looked like an avocado on a stick. Smoke, swirling in graceful slow strands, drifted toward the fieldstone chimney.

“All right,” said Prospero. “You go first. What happened?”

“Well,” said Roger, “I was sitting on the stump, smoking, just as I am now, and the first odd thing I noticed was the Hall of Records. It looked strange, as if the moon were shining on it and not on anything else. It should have been in shadow, with those oak trees and pines all around, and besides, it must have been overcast. But I didn’t think of that. I stared at the door, and then it opened, and you—or someone I thought was you—came out. You walked up to me and grabbed my arm, and your hand seemed to be made out of frozen sticks. ‘Come on,’ you said. ‘We’ve got to get away from here.’ So I followed you off into the forest, and when we were deep inside, you shriveled with a sound like several voices holding the same dead note. All that was left was a log made of ashes—as if a piece of wood had burned all the way through while keeping its original shape. I didn’t know what to do. At first, I thought that the wizard with the book had finally got you; I wept, raged, and beat on trees with my fists. When I was exhausted, I realized that I was lost. I had left my compass in my bag, which was back at the stump with my staff. So I sat under a big ugly elm all night, and in the morning, I found my way back to the Hall. My bag and staff had been pulled into some brambles, and you, of course, were gone. I went in and read the passage in the Register. It wasn’t hard to find, because you had propped the book open.”