The Face in the Frost (17 page)

“Do you suppose that key the farmer gave you fits this lock?”

“No,” said Prospero, who was rummaging in the inside pocket of his winter cloak. “I have carried the key to this door with me for years. When I’m looking for the key to the root cellar or the linen closet, I always come across the thing and wonder why I keep it.”

He pulled out a small iron ring full of different-size keys. Selecting a big one with a quatrefoiled handle, he placed it in the cherub-mouth of the lock plate. The door rattled open. Roger shut it after them and lit another match, and they saw the shadowy outline of a few small wooden chairs. An empty copper candlestick stood nearby on a dusty table, and Prospero stuck a lighted candle—his last one—in it.

“Well, here we are,” he said. “Now, if I can only remember where I put that globe.”

“If it’s still here,” said Roger. “Look at the floor.”

The dusty gray boards in front of them were covered with long narrow footprints. Prospero stood looking at them. He bit his lip several times until it hurt, and he started nervously clenching and unclenching his fists.

“It was to be expected. But he
can’t
take it away.” His voice dropped. “At least, I think he can’t. Come on. I remember where I put it, and I was the last one out.”

He grabbed the candlestick and led Roger to a corner cupboard at the back of the cottage’s one large room. The round-topped door stood on a little waist-high sill, and its knob, a piece of blue-streaked porcelain, was startlingly cold to the touch. While Roger held the candle, Prospero opened the cupboard. Inside, he could see stacks of bowls and plates, last used—as far as he knew—by Melichus himself. On a separate shelf, over the others, was the green-glass paperweight. He was almost afraid to touch it, and he reached for it twice, pulling his hand away each time. Finally, he closed his fingers on it—it was colder than the knob had been—and he lowered it carefully. Roger saw that he was covering it with his hand.

“Let’s light more candles,” said Prospero. “I don’t want to look at this strange little thing in the dark.”

He set the green object on a table and, with Roger, searched about until they found a bundle of candles on the mantelpiece, tied up with some rotted string. They spent several minutes sticking them in wall sconces and dishes all around the room, then lit them all. Prospero was still not satisfied, and besides, he wanted an excuse to keep him from looking at the magic globes. So, he decided to build a fire. The logs that he and Melichus had left there so long before lay near the fireplace, soft honeycombs of mushy sawdust. He kicked one and a swarm of beetles crawled out, scurrying away to find cracks in the floor. But another log pile lay nearby, further evidence that someone had been there recently. Roger knelt in front of the black sooty-smelling hearth, laid a small fire, and struck several matches before he could get the pile of twigs to light. Prospero was pacing up and down, looking at the door.

“The globes aren’t dusty either,” he said. “And there were marks of hands scrabbling in the dust on the shelf. What do you think? I’m afraid.”

“So am I,” said Roger, who was pumping the fire with a cracked old leather bellows. “So am I.”

He straightened up. The fire was crackling and throwing long jumping shadows on the opposite wall.

“Well, that’s that. Now, let’s look at that thing on the table. Prospero! For heaven’s sake, stop pacing!”

“Oh, very well. I’d feel better if he’d just burst in on us. But he’s not going to. Let’s see what the globes are doing.”

They pulled two chairs up to the round oak table where the glass pyramid sat sparkling between two candles, like some strange shrine. At first, the globes were empty and transparent. A few bubbles frozen inside them made specks in the green water-shadow that floated on the table. Then, slowly, the three lower spheres began to form a picture. There was the crossroads, there were the high banks, the bare trees, the leaning stone marker, and the softly falling snow. Prospero pulled the paperweight closer and stared hard at the uppermost globe. From the pinpoint bubbles, rounded images expanded till their bowed and distorted shapes filled the whole ball, and then they burst to let new images form. All these pictures were familiar to Prospero: his bookcase, a hatrack, a bust of some Roman dignitary. Finally, after much swirling, the ball focused on a single scene: Prospero’s house, seen from the front lawn. The porch was piled with leaves, the shades were drawn as Prospero had left them, and long bands of that uncanny snow lay in curving ridges around the house. With an effort, Prospero brought the house closer, till he could see the square window in the front door. It was covered with the frost-mask, two running empty eyes, and a long howling mouth. He tried to get close enough to look in the window, but the empty face filled the glass and burst. The ball was clear and green again.

“Now,” said Prospero, “I’m going to speak to Melichus.”

Roger jumped up and put a hand on his arm. “No, don’t! You don’t know what will happen if you meet face to face.”

“That’s right, I don’t. But we can’t just sit here fiddling with this ball while he scares the world to death or destroys it. He may not know we’re here, but he will soon. Anything after that is up to him.”

Roger sat down and folded his arms. “Very well. You make about as much sense as anything does right now. But if you need my help, just grab my hand.”

“All right. But relax. This may take quite some time. Melichus isn’t something I own or someplace I’ve been. He can resist if he wants to. And he
will
want to. In fact, this globe may be the only way to reach him.”

Prospero put both hands on the glass and stared at it. Slowly, it began to fill with a flat blue ink, till the whole ball was blanked out. This was all that happened. For a full half hour, Prospero squeezed the ball, hammered it on the table, spoke to it, made signs over it. Nothing happened. At last, he stood up with the thing clenched in his hand. The sweat on his face shone in the firelight.

“Melichus! I call on you by the secret name you were given by Michael Scott. That is...”

He spoke the name and the room grew darker. One candlestick fell over and the others burned blue. The flames in the fireplace leaped up the flue with a shriek, leaving the half-burned logs suddenly gray and cold. In the dark chilly room, the two men bent over the glass ball. It seemed to be coming apart. The glass remained intact, but the blackness inside split along a jagged line, like an egg opening to a burning white center. The light hurt Prospero’s eyes and he turned away, but when he looked again, the light was gray and sullen, like a winter afternoon. He saw an old man whose dirty red eyes were sunk in wrinkled hollow caves. The thin white lips were parted and the yellow teeth were set on edge. His hand held the trembling page of a book, and Prospero could see that it was the last page. The stare that met his was not one of knowing hatred, scorn, or bitter triumph. It was much more frightening than that. What Prospero saw was the blank angry glare of an animal that has been interrupted at its meal. He could not even tell if Melichus recognized him. The two rheumy eyes focused on his for a second, and then they seemed to be looking past him. Prospero relaxed for a second, and the two halves of the egg slammed together with a boom that made him drop the glass on the floor. It did not break, but a crooked line of white was etched into the outer surface of the globe.

Prospero stood there a long time, looking down at the scarred globe. The candles were burning brightly again, and a stiff wind was rattling the front windows of the house. Finally, he bent over, picked the thing up, and put it back on the table. Now, as Roger sat staring at him in amazement, he began to walk around the room, touching things, looking under chairs, running his finger over dusty panes.

“Hah! I thought so! He’s crazier than I thought!”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s put it all back. The way it was. Look, we know Melichus was here—it could hardly have been anyone else. And the marks in the dust show that he moved things around, that he probably took the globe off the shelf and looked at it. Well, before he left, he put everything back the way it was when I left. When we first lit candles and I could see the way the room looked, I thought ‘It’s all the same, every bit of it!’ You see that book over there on the edge of the chairs?”

“Yes.”

“Well, when I left here, Lord knows how many years ago, I stood at the door with a book in my hand. I even remember the title,
Roman Divination.
I was wondering whether or not I wanted it. I decided that I didn’t, so I threw it onto that chair over there. It skidded to the edge and almost fell off. It’s still there, hanging on the edge, though the dust marks show it has been picked up recently. Now, either Melichus has gotten fanatically meticulous in his old age, or this is a circle he doesn’t want disturbed.”

“What about the new pile of firewood?”

“That’s
new
, but all the old things were put back. He must have found that it felt very wrong for things to be out of place. Now, as I say, it might have been just fussiness. But let’s see.”

Moving around the room in quick jumps and darts, Prospero started upsetting things. First, he tipped over the table—the paperweight hit the floor and skidded into a corner. Then he pitched the book into the fireplace, smashed a chair against a wall, and finally, grandiosely, he swept his arm along the mantel—dishes, candles, bottles, and cups fell and flew up in a splintering dusty cascade. He stopped, panting, in the middle of the room.

“There! Now, if
that
doesn’t stir him from his bibliophilic torpor, then . . .”

“For God’s sake! Look!”

Roger was pointing at the door. The stained-glass oval, a beautiful flower design in cobalt blue and deep crimson, was shining, as though someone had thrown a light on it from the outside. And on the wall opposite the door a watery light pattern appeared. It was full of skeletal winding shadows, and it formed, like the frost patterns, a distorted blank face. The long mouth moved and a harsh, flat, angry voice spoke.

“Put it back. Put back the globes.”

Prospero stood there in the middle of the room, and in the ghastly light the face threw on everything, his own face looked corpselike and frozen. He swallowed hard, and all the ridged muscles in his face and throat convulsed.

“No. I will not.”

The voice began to speak again, this time in a high, almost hysterical chant. The words were ugly and strange, but Prospero knew their meaning. The dusty air of the dark old room was full of this rising and falling sound. Prospero raised his arm, pointed at the trembling blotch of light, and spoke a single word that shook his whole body. The door slammed open and a cold earth-smelling wind blew in. The face spread into a mottled screen that covered the whole wall, writhed, shot halfway across the ceiling, and then slowly began to draw together again, into a tighter, more recognizable, and more brightly shining mask. Roger leaped up and struck at the wall with his staff—it bounced out of his hand and flew across the room. His arm was numb to the elbow and he found that he could not move. The chant went on, rising. Prospero turned and started to stumble slowly toward the table, moving his arms like someone struggling in water. He got to the far corner of the room, stooped, picked up the glass object that was now totally black in all its globes, and started for the door, moving his free arm in front of him, as if he were clearing something away. He stopped and turned in the black doorway. His face was very pale, but he was smiling.

“Good-by, Roger. I hope we meet again.” And then, to the face, which was shaking like the light of a lantern in someone’s trembling fist: “If you want this,
come and get it.
”

He reeled out onto the porch. The face flew apart into wild jabs and streaks of light that shot all over the room. Roger suddenly found that he could move again, and he rushed to the door and looked down the moonlit path. Prospero was running with his cloak bundled tightly around him, and halfway down the road he simply disappeared.

CHAPTER TEN

At first, Prospero felt that he was inside one of the green-glass globes. Everything looked the way it does when you hold a piece of colored cellophane up in front of your eyes, except that it was all rounded, bowed outward—things in the distance diminished into tiny curved perspectives. Then the walls of the globe spread outward, farther, farther, and the green faded to the cold dark of a winter night. He was standing at the crossroads. There were the high banks, made higher by long white drifts; there were the bare black trees, and overhead, the branches of a huge oak creaked under piles of wet snow. But there was no stone marker. Prospero was standing where it should have been, on a little triangular patch of raised ground. A white light lay all around him, and when he looked up into the thick, wet, slowly falling flakes, he saw a swaying lamp overhead, a bare electric bulb with a fluted porcelain reflector. It hung from a long black wire.

He stood there with the green paperweight in his hand, looking up at the frigid, dazzlingly cold light. He felt empty, drained, and he knew that he had no magic power left. His bag and staff were back at the cottage with Roger, not that they would be any help to him now. He couldn’t charm a single snowflake out of the air. Was this his punishment? And was he exiled to some place that existed only in the world of those globes, while Melichus was free to finish what he had started?