The Face in the Frost (18 page)

The snow fell quietly, settling on his shoulders in wet sticky patches. And as it got darker, he began to get the feeling that he dreaded. Someone was coming up the road on his left. He could not see anything there. Outside the cold, slowly swaying circle of lamplight, the road ran off into a tangle of skeletal trees. But someone was coming, Melichus was coming for him. Now, far down the road, he could see a tiny yellow point of light, bobbing. Wrapping his woolen cloak around him and turning up his collar—the snowflakes were icy on his neck—he started to run in the other direction. The snow had packed down into a slick smooth track under the loose sparkling flakes—he fell down, got up, skidded, and fell down again, his hands sinking into the stinging cold. He crawled on his hands and knees to the sunken shoulder of the road and found that he could walk in the drifts. Frozen grass crunched under him, and the wind began to blow in his face. Dots of snow rushed at him out of the darkness, and he had to keep wiping his eyes as he staggered along.

He kept walking as fast as he could, for what must have been several miles. Sometimes he fell into a hole filled with rotten leaves or scraped his leg on a snow-covered post, but he kept going. Every now and then he looked behind him, and the moving light was still there. Once a car came around a bend, a boxy black shape crawling slowly behind two frosted moons of light, but he hid in the ditch until it was gone. He doubted that they could or would help anyone who looked the way he did, and for some reason, he did not want to meet any of the people in this world, not just yet. If there was a way out of all this, he felt that he would have to find it himself. But the light was getting nearer.

At the top of a low hill, under a huge chestnut tree that dropped shovelfuls of snow on him as he stood looking around uncertainly, Prospero stopped to rest. He saw that he was standing under a stone wall, and that there was a little flight of stairs nearby; it was merely a soft bumpy incline in all this snow, but maybe he could climb it. As he made his way toward it, he noticed a large flat wooden sign propped against one of the ball-topped gateposts. He brushed away the snow with a stinging reddened hand, struck a match, and read:

M. MILLHORN

LAWNMOWERS & AXES SHARPENED

HAMMER HANDLES MADE

USED NAILS AND BACK DOORS FOR SALE

Prospero rubbed more snow away from the bottom of the sign and looked again. That was what it said, all right. He tried to laugh, but it came out as a phlegmy cough.

“Well, M. Millhorn, you sound interesting. Here we come.”

Prospero kicked some footholds in the snow that covered the steps, and he slowly climbed up, plunging his hands into the snow in front of him to steady himself. At the top, he stood up in the knee-high snow and stared into the swirling dark. There, behind a couple of skinny pines, was a big square farmhouse with deep-set corniced windows and a scalloped rooftree. A light was on downstairs, but the yellow shades, patched with colored pieces of newspaper, were drawn. He kicked his way through the snow, making long scars in the wet drifts. From this height, he had a good view of the road, and when he looked, he saw, far down the row of fence posts, the light. It stopped, dropped to a lower position, then rose and went slowly swinging along, as if the bearer had stopped to look for footprints. They wouldn’t be hard to find, Prospero thought, and he kicked harder at the packed snow in front of him.

Moving at this spread-legged awkward gait, he took a long time, or what seemed a long time, to reach the front steps. Up on the narrow front stoop, he banged with a numb first on the yellow door. Thumping and bumping inside, and a sound like someone upsetting a keg of nails. Finally, the door opened, and there in the harsh glare of a single bulb that hung from a long knotted cord was a small man in a square-cut beard. He wore oval rimless spectacles and a black skullcap, and over his shoulders was a black silk shawl with elaborate gold tassels. His striped floor-length robe, something between a dressing gown and a cassock, might once have been brown and blue. He looked Prospero up and down and laughed silently.

“Well, come on in. You’ll catch your death out there.”

Prospero thanked him and stepped in the door, brushing snow off his cloak as he went. The room was an incredible mess: cracked chamber pots, upended sewing machines, fat-lipped spittoons, iron-wheeled lawn mowers, ax handles stacked like rifles, fussy-fringed floor lamps with green marble insets, an isinglass-windowed stove with a brass vase on top, and several kegs of bent nails, one of them tipped over. On the wall was a crazy collection of picture frames, some with dark pictures in them. One of them showed several dogs with pipes in their mouths. They were sitting around a table playing poker.

The little man stood looking at Prospero for a couple of seconds, and then he turned sharply and went to the window. Raising the dirty shade a couple of inches, he looked out.

“From what I can see,” he said, “you don’t have much time. You’d better do what I tell you.”

Prospero gaped. He felt an urge to run around the room touching things.

“Are you real? Is this house real?”

The man laughed quietly with his tongue between his teeth.

“Well, these days you can’t tell. Yes, I’m real. A damn sight more real than you are, if you catch my meaning. Well, let’s get going. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time.”

He went to a high glazed bookcase full of vellum-backed volumes; from where he stood, Prospero could read titles like
Aristotelis Opera
and
Mysterium Cosmographicum
. Standing on a cane-bottomed chair, the man lifted down from the top of the case a huge untitled tome with the Seal of Solomon stamped on the side. He lugged it over to a large wooden lectern and opened it. It was full of black, shaded Hebrew characters.

Prospero knew what it was and he looked with awe at the man, who was unconcernedly thumbing through the book.

“The Kabbala?” Prospero asked.

“The Kabbala. Now, hurry downstairs and find the door you want. When I say ‘Back doors for sale,’ that’s what I mean.”

“But can I pay you? What can I do? You don’t know how grateful I am...”

“Yes, I do. For payment, though, I’ll take this little glass doodad. It can’t be worth much, but it’ll look nice on the mantel.”

Prospero looked at him and the little man looked back, smiling quietly. But at that moment, the front door banged open and a rush of cold wind blew a thin line of snow skittering across the floor. Outside, at the bottom of the snowy steps, they could see the light of a single square lantern.

The man talked fast and nervously now. “Give me that thing, for God’s sake! You can’t help me now, and you can’t take it back with you. One way or another, I’ll keep him from getting it, so get on with you! Go!”

Prospero looked at the yellow light that hung in a fog of snowflakes, at the man in the black skullcap who held out his hand, and he gave him the paperweight. He turned to go, but with his hand on the knob of the cellar door, he turned and looked. The man was dragging the lectern over in front of the door.

Now Prospero was clumping down the thin slats of the cellar stairs. Leaning against the wall opposite him was a row of doors: big paneled doors with peeling black paint, ivory-colored doors with broken star-frosted panes; a door covered with speckled brown leather and pyramid-headed nails. The line stretched away into the coal-smelling dark basement, and Prospero walked along it, pulling doors toward him and looking behind them: nothing but rough mortared stones. Overhead, a mournful winding high-pitched chant started, but it was cut off by an incredibly angry word. A long flash of blue light shot down the cellar stairs—Prospero, several yards away, could feel the heat of it. Doors, doors, doors. For a minute, he had the horrible fear that he would see the two of them coming down the stairs after him. Then he stopped short. In front of him was a little pointed door that looked like a tombstone. A dirty yellow card was stuck to it with a red thumbtack. The card said “Root Cellar.”

There was no doorknob, of course, so Prospero tried the opening spell. Nothing happened. Overhead, the war between the wandering chant and the loud bursting voice went on. The cobwebbed ceiling shook, bits of dirt sifted down from the shaking and grinding rafters, and a chamber pot flew down the stairs. It smashed on the wall with a loud pop, like a huge light bulb. Prospero stood looking at the door, his arms at his sides. Then, suddenly, he smiled and laughed, shaking his head. He grabbed the door with both hands and lifted it toward him. It was not fastened to anything and came away from the wall easily. Behind it was a long tunnel and a slippery-looking rock incline. Carrying the door in front of him like a shield, he backed into the tunnel, setting down the heavy wooden slab when it was—he hoped—back in place. He could not hear the noises overhead any more.

Prospero took one step in the darkness and fell down. He slid and kept on sliding on wet chunky stones that bit into his back as he fell. It was not a steep incline, but there was no way of stopping, and by the time he got to the bottom, he was shaken, nauseated, and bruised. He looked around and saw that he was in a forest that looked familiar, if ordinary elms, oaks, and maples can look familiar. It was the forest behind his house.

Now he was running down a path he had walked along many times on quiet afternoons in the late slanting light. The owls of his nightmare appeared overhead and swooped down on him, great hissing moon-eyed bags of dusty feathers. He swung at one and it ripped open, emptying on him a cloud of green buzzing insects. They clung to his face and bit, brushing his eyelids with rustling wings. He ran on with his eyes closed, waving his arms, and suddenly the bugs dropped off him, dead. He was in his back yard.

Everything looked the way it had in the magic glass: the lines of snow, the frost on the windows. He saw that the fountain was not running. A long muddy streak ran down the satyr’s sides and the marble basin was full of caked smelly earth. Two dead birds lay in it. The apple tree was covered with dead rattling leaves and small wrinkled mushy brown stones. Everything lay under a dull gray light; the bulging clouds overhead looked as though they were going to burst. But every object in the yard threw a shadow, a small dark trembling patch. One of them, cast by nothing that Prospero could see, lay on the grass near him. It started to crawl toward him slowly.

He shoved his way through the bare forsythia branches and reached the back door, his key already in his hand. The lock turned, the door opened, he was inside. And when he slammed the door behind him, he could feel something rushing back into place. The house was under siege.

Prospero went about lighting candles in the musty dark; they burned with a pale gassy glare and sometimes guttered out in a wind that was not blowing. Outside, behind the staring faces, the heavy dark waited. Now and then, as he went about the house examining the rooms, he put his hand on an outside wall and imagined that he felt it straining inward. The plaster was covered with wandering thready cracks.

He went to the living room and pulled down magic books, one after the other, trying spells. Nothing worked. When he had tried about ten books, he threw the pile on the floor in the middle of the room, grabbed a Florence flask that had something brown crusted inside it, and smashed it in the fireplace. He went upstairs.

In the glass-walled observatory, he picked up instruments and stared at them. The metal barometers were stuck on “Storm” and the liquid was high up in the Torricellian tube. Prospero stood there idly wondering how there could be low pressure when the whole house seemed about to cave inward. And then he started to think about what he could do. Nothing. He took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, put the glasses on again, and sat on the edge of a desk, looking out over the dead landscape.

He had been staring for some minutes when the clouds began to move very strangely. They came apart in places, in stringy rips and seams, like torn cloth. The sky that showed behind was dark red, and the garish light spattered on treetops. Now the clouds were rushing about and heaving, shooting jabs of that bloody light in all directions. The shadows below contracted to pinpoints and shot suddenly out into acre-wide blots. Across the road that ran toward Brakespeare, the ground opened, a huge saliva-strung mouth, and out of it crawled shapes with arms and legs. And now thunder, or something like thunder—heavy, flat, ear-pressing booms without reverberations, each one louder than the next. In the crazy jumping red light, Prospero fell to the floor, his hands on his ears. Almost hysterically, he was thinking the same thing over and over: “What can I do? What can I do? What—”

The key. Gwydion of Caer Leon’s key. It was still in his inner pocket. Now, what to use it on? He had a key for every bureau drawer and cupboard in the house, except...of course! Prospero got up and started down the steps, as the booming and flashing went on. The floor and walls seemed uncertain, as though they might not be there the next minute. He had the horrible feeling that needles and nails were about to shoot into his feet when he stepped forward, and he had to force himself to put one foot after another on the winding stairs, which were now bending and giving like the melting steps of the inn at Five Dials.

Halfway down from the observatory, in the paneled wall of the corkscrew staircase, was a little locked cubbyhole. Prospero had never known what it was for, and he had tried many times to pry it open. Now, he had the key, and in it went, turning around twice. The little door popped open, and inside, in the rushing and retreating red light that was beating at the observatory windows, he saw a small carved squirrel with a note in its two buck teeth. The note said: