The Face in the Frost (7 page)

As Prospero stepped in, his cheek was touched by the rough cold muzzle of a stuffed alligator that hung from the ceiling. He stepped back and turned to Roger.

“You’d better stay outside and watch for the curator—or anyone else who might visit us. This shouldn’t take too long, though God knows I’ve never been inside this place before.”

“All right. You’ve got the copy of the bookplate, and you know the book you want. Good luck.” Roger turned and walked down the path to a broad gray stump. He sat down and lit his red clay pipe.

Inside the one-room building irregular piles of books were scattered about in the ashy darkness. Tiny matchbox-sized books stood in tottering spires on broad elephant folios, and three big square ledgers lay chained to a slanted reading desk against the far wall. Prospero was interested in these ledgers. He lit a candle stub and stuck it on the dirty windowsill over the desk. When he had brushed a thin coat of dust off the pebbled leather cover of one volume, he saw the words:
Register of All Wizards and Warlocks of the South Kingdom and of the North from the Beginning of the World to the Present Time
. He turned the thick damp-smelling pages of the book, looking for the crest that was on the crumpled sheet in front of him—and there it was. The evil device was carefully drawn in black ink, and below it was an unusually long entry in a thick-lined runic script. But Prospero was looking at the name. He was staring at it because it was a name he knew: MELICHUS.

“He has a new crest,” whispered Prospero in the dusty darkness.

He took out his gold-rimmed glasses, put them on, and hunched over the ledger. The greater part of the entry was not very helpful; in fact, Prospero knew more about Melichus’s past than the author did. But at the bottom of the page there was a note in a scribbly secretarial hand, probably that of Gorm’s curator. The ink was fairly fresh and had blotted on the opposite page.

“I have discovered by divers means that the above M. was in England some LXX yrs. ago, living among fishermen to learn sea-spells. After his return to the S.K., he took up his abode in the village of Briar Hill where he lived a secluded life. About that time, the townsfolk began to be visited by the apparitions of their dead relatives and friends. Faces were seen at windows, and shapes were seen in the streets during storms. All suspected M., and he admitted as much to their faces, but their threats were of no avail, till the wife of one D.L. was frightened at noontime by some horrid form, so that she jumped before a cart and horses & was killed. L. gathered a group of men who went one night to the house of M., armed with clubs and scythes. As they were battering on the door, M. escaped by a cellars window, but was seen & a chase ensued. The townsmen followed M. to a small forest some III mi. from the town, where L. wounded him with a bowshot. The wizard entered the forest & was lost in the darkness, but L., who was still angered beyond reason, persuaded his fellows to ring the forest about and guard all the ways of egress. Maddened by him, they set a blaze which well nigh consumed the whole wood, so that the next morning they found within the burnt body of M., which they buried in the forest clearing where he fell. The forest has grown back, but not as before, and I myself would not go within it night or day. The townsmen call it the Empty Forest, since animals & birds do not live there. Obiit Melichus Magister A° 697 A.U.C.”

Prospero stood over the glimmering yellow page gripping the book with both hands. A bit of plaster dropped from the ceiling onto the paper, startling him, and he jumped back, looking around wildly. The room was quiet, but overhead he heard hollow tumbling sounds. The thunder head must be moving in fast now, he thought. A leafy branch swished across a window and an acorn rolled all the way down the roof. Now he could hear the wind hissing in the pines.

Usually Prospero enjoyed storms, but this one, like the storm of the day before, oppressed him in a strange way. He found it was all he could do to go across the room to the doorway, where he stood looking out into the windy tossing night. Big splatting drops were starting to fall, and from where he stood by the sagging orange door, he could see Roger hurrying up the path, pulling up his hood to keep off the rain, which now began to sweep by in long gray sheets.

As Prospero stood there waiting for Roger, he began to feel more and more strange. The feeling reminded him of a time when he had been sitting by the fire one night on the verge of a very bad cold. Everything around him—outdoor noises, the normal creakings of the house, the ticking of the clocks—had seemed distant and muted. That was how things seemed now. His face prickled, he felt hot, and it was hard for him to move. Though he had important news for Roger, he did not feel like saying anything.

Roger brushed past him and stopped in the middle of the room. “Well, shut the door.” His voice was sharp and almost contemptuous.

Prospero struggled to push and lift the door back into place, and when he had finished, his forehead throbbed and the tipsy orange rectangle seemed blurred. He went to a nearby window and stood looking at the running ice-gray pane. Roger fit a two-socketed candelabrum and set it on a pillar of books in the center of the room The streaming rain and the reflected candlelight made strange disturbing dancing shapes in the window. Gray figures waving their arms. Without turning, Prospero spoke in a throaty feverish voice. “Roger, I have found something here.”

“Have you?” Roger laughed, but it was the wrong kind of laugh and it ended on a barking sound.

Prospero stared harder at the glimmering square that was crawling before his eyes.

“You aren’t Roger, are you?”

“No,” said the figure behind him. “I am not, though I wear his cloak and carry his staff. A staff, which supposedly can only be wielded by the great sorcerer himself. Let us see.”

Prospero heard a sharp rap behind him and saw a sickly yellow light dance for a few moments on the dust-webbed walls, like a flare-up from an almost dead fire. The air around him was heaving now. He felt as if he were at the bottom of the sea.

“Not a very good light, perhaps,” said the figure. “But soon there will be none at all. Right now Bacon is being led into the forest by two of Gorm’s soldiers, who think they are under orders from the King to execute a warlock. I summoned them after I had disarmed your friend. They will probably strike his head off when they find a log they can use for a chopping block.”

Now Prospero could not have turned around if he had wanted to. He had to grit his teeth and stare to keep from losing consciousness.

“How could you disarm him?” he said.

“Very easily. I serve someone who has more power than both of you together. My master will spare you if you go home and wait. He will not harm you if you go home and stay there. After his victory, you may want to serve him. Do you know what happens to a wizard’s staff when the wizard dies?”

Prospero saw the wavering cowled shape reflected in the candlelit pane. It held a long black staff. Suddenly, there was a loud crack and the staff bent, twisted, writhed into an ugly bent branch covered with cancerous scabbed growths. The figure cast the shuddering piece of wood to the floor and said quietly:

“He is dead. Go home.”

Prospero was alone in the dark room. The rain clattered on the loose slates and went
pock! pock!
at the parchment nailed over the broken pane, until a sudden gust blew the sheet loose and threw a spatter of rain on the floor. He stood there all night, his hands on the windowsill. He stared at the lines and scratches in the wood as if he were trying to find a pattern. Someone had scratched the nonsense Latin word
“Necreavit”
into the sash, and he stared at this for some time. A black beetle climbed the speckled pane, and somewhere in the back of the creaking room a fly was buzzing and bumping stupidly against a window. The wet wind, blowing through the broken pane, riffled through a thick book spread open on the floor.

The rain stopped, and the streaked pane grew gradually lighter as an overcast humid day dawned. Prospero straightened and flexed his stiff dirty hands. He picked up his staff and satchel, forcing his eyes away from the stick on the floor, and he wrenched open the door, shut it, locked it, and put the key over the lintel. Prospero looked at the split and crumbling stump where Roger had sat the night before, and he grimaced. Staff in hand, he walked stiffly down the muddy path to the stone-paved highway, where he stood for a minute looking at the still puddles that lay in the cracks and smooth-worn hollows of the road. He set out walking with long strides, and the direction he took was not toward home.

CHAPTER FOUR

Prospero walked quickly along the Great South Road, and as he walked, he argued with himself. Sometimes he would stop and wave his staff at some objection he was trying to dismiss, or he would speak aloud phrases like “Of course not!” or “Spared me out of good will, did he?” But after a while, he walked more slowly and talked less. When he came to a mossy stone bench that was half sunk into a muddy red clay bank, he sat down on it, put his head in his hands, and cried. After a while, he looked up and wiped his eyes with a big linen handkerchief.

“Well,” he said, “I can’t allow myself to believe that Roger is dead. I think whoever-he-is would have killed me too if he had had the power. He tried before, didn’t he? Roger must be alive. But then, where is he? At any rate, I have to go on. There’s something I’ve got to find out.” He got up and started out again.

The day cleared up as Prospero walked along, and it was a bright hot noon when he came to the place where the Great South Road crosses the Sea Road, which runs from the well springs of the Pipestone River to the sea forts on the western coast. At this major crossroads was a gallows tree, a huge oak held together by brass hoops bolted around the pitted and barkless trunk—it had been dead for the last ten years. People told stories about a time, three centuries before, when bodies hung from every limb. That was during the Seven Princes’ War, which had left the South Kingdom a smoking land of burned cities, leveled fortresses, and trampled wheat fields. It was the last civil war the South Kingdom ever had, but it was bad enough to bring on the Long Plague, which killed so many that, even by the time of this story, the country was still underpopulated.

The tree had not been used much since the Seven Princes’ War, and it had not been used at all after the grandfather of the present Duke Anselm abolished the death penalty in his lands. That is why Prospero was shocked and horrified to see a body dangling from one dead limb. He was relieved a minute later, though still puzzled, when he saw that it was a crude straw dummy in a ragged brown robe. A piece of paper was pinned to its chest and when he got close enough to read it, Prospero was shocked again. The word “Wizard” was written there in the three principal languages of the South, and under it were large ugly runes that not many people knew about. They were used when one magician wanted to destroy another.

Prospero stared at the swinging manikin, and after a little thought decided to leave it where it
was, since he knew that rune spells were sometimes activated when you tried to burn the effigy. Now, before he set out again, he took out a wrinkled mapbook that had main routes marked in red, and spent some time tracing the twistings of the Sea Road with his finger. Briar Hill was still half a day’s walk away, and though he was tired from lack of sleep, he knew that he did not dare to try camping overnight on the road. He had felt a foreboding long before he came to the tree, and as he walked on into a smeary crimson sunset, his fear grew. For some time, he had been nagged by the maddening feeling that someone was moving in the thickets near the road or waiting just out of sight around a bend. As the last dark fringe of light faded over the long grassy ridges, Prospero stopped at the bottom of a low hill and listened. A little way behind him, started by something, a small stone began to roll, and it rolled until it came to rest at his feet. There was nothing against the pear-green sky at the top of the hill. Prospero looked at the stone curiously and turned to go on.

He had not gone a mile when he saw, off in a clearing beyond some beech trees, the light of a campfire. At least there’ll be
someone
to talk to, he thought, and he stepped off the road into the swishing wet grass. But as Prospero got near the fire, he saw that there was no one tending it and that it was burning in a very strange way. The flames moved back and forth as if blown by suddenly shifting breezes. As he watched, the movement became rhythmical. Prospero looked about him with growing fear, and he noticed that there was a little stream running nearby. He was drawn by what he first took to be a reflection of the firelight on the water. But as he knelt by the stream, he saw that the faint glow came from
beneath
the surface of the water. There, on the bottom, in a speckled green trembling light, was a smooth triangular stone, and on it was painted his face. The moving water was slowly flaking away the paint, or whatever it was, and the face appeared to be slowly decomposing. He saw a thin film, like a piece of dead skin, wriggle off the portrait-mask and float away down the stream. And the face underneath... Prospero felt his own hands on his wet cheeks.

Against all his instinct, he plunged his own hands into the greasy-feeling, incredibly cold water and picked up the stone. Without looking at it, and holding it at arm’s length as if it were a rotten dead bird, he took it to the fire, which was dancing faster now—it was moving to the rhythm of his own heartbeat. He knew the words that must have been said. “When the fire dies, let him die too.”