The Face in the Frost

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... 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 bad 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:

USE THE SPELL, FOOL

'Spell?' shouted Prospero, throwing the squirrel down the stairs. 'What spell?'

Then, he knew. Down the stairs, rushing and stumbling, taking them two at a time. In the living room, he plowed through the books on the floor till he found the duplicate of the one he had put in his bag, the one that was God knows where now. In a loud splintery ripping of wood, a rising roaring of wind, in a cloud of plaster dust shooting down from the ceiling, and as the front door flew open and something Prospero refused to look at stepped in, he shouted the square-noted spell that had never been good for anything. The clocks, run down and clogged with dust, started to strike, at first wheezily, then in rapid pings and booms and whangs and wauwauwaus; the brass kettles hanging on hooks over the kitchen stove boomed together. All this noise, amazingly, sounded over the flat thuds, which now grew softer and then traded away like ordinary summer thunder. The front door, in which no figure stood, banged gently in a wet-smelling breeze, and the light that threw its long, slanting dusty rays in at Prospero's wet dripping windows was the light of four o'clock on a bright October afternoon.

11

11

On Christmas Eve, a screeching ice storm swept through the countryside around Brakespeare, and the next afternoon the trees of Prosperous forest jingled and flashed like chandeliers in the light of a small cold sun. In the back yard, the mayor, his chain of office hanging over one arm like a priest's maniple, was trying out his new pearl- and-ivory inlaid crossbow on some red-feathered popinjays that swayed on the tops of tall wooden poles. He was not having much luck, since in the course of the previous three-day party, he had found Prospero's stock of carnation brandy. In the living room, the innkeeper of the Running Hog and Emperors Elbow was mixing a slate- colored drink called Bishops Disgust in a beer bar­rel that had been full the day before. King Gorm, dressed in a white cassock with a powder-blue cummerbund, sat in a corner reading the Krankenhammer. Villagers hefting double-handled beer mugs occasionally stopped in front of him and bowed uncertainly. In a back room, the plant-raising monk looked like a cartoonists Laocoon, because he was trying to break up a fight between his Sensitive Anaconda and Prosperous Creeping Charlie. On the cupola of the observatory, the hippopotamus, painted a tasteful red and green, huffed out an asthmatic 'We Three Kings.'

Prospero and Roger were in the back yard with the mayor, and they were throwing snowballs at the thickly glazed satyr, whose ears sprouted huge ice trumpets. Roger had arrived in mid-November, driving the black box carriage,-he brought with him the plant monk, Prospero's bag and staff, and enough stories about what had happened to him up north to fill all the evenings before Christmas. Prospero's powers had returned. When he grew tired of throwing snowballs, he ran around the yard touching the forsythia bushes, which burst crackling from their ice shells, shot forth pasty yellow flowers, and quacked out the shawm music Josquin des Pres had composed for the coronation of Louis XII.

Finally, toward evening, everyone went home, even the mayor, who had stripped the gears on his crossbows windlass. Prospero stood at the snow-rounded front gate wishing the Lord Mayor a Merry Christmas, while Roger swept bro­ken bottles and things past the sleeping Gorm, who was staying the night whether he knew it or not. Suddenly, from an upstairs window, came a horrible retching sound. Only the mirror could make such noises at such a volume. Prospero looked quickly at the lighted bedroom window, and turned to the mayor.

'You'll have to excuse me, sir, but I think somethings wrong upstairs. It's the mirror.'

The mayor stared at him sluggishly from brandied eyeballs. 'Do mirrors drink?'

'Some do. Here, take this bottle, there's a little left. Good-by again and Merry Christmas.'

Prospero rushed inside and, with an amused glance at the snoring Gorm, ran upstairs. The mirror's cranky voice could be heard all over the house.

'Akkkk! Hcchh-ptui-phoo! Well, how would you like it if people came traips­ing across your tongue all the time? In smelly carpet slippers?'

There in front of the mirror stood Roger, and beside him, stood somebody else. The small bearded man in the skullcap, who was brushing mirror mica off his sleeves. He tipped his cap to everyone, including the mirror, which bent a gold leaf of its frame at him in grouchy acknowledgment. 'Am I too late, gentlemen? You both look pretty worn out.'

'Not all that worn out, Mr. Millhorn,' said Prospero. 'This is Roger Bacon, and I've told him all about you. Let's go down to the kitchen. I want to make some coffee, but theres a cyanide bottle full of Holland gin on my laboratory shelf, unless someone got desperate and drank it.'

'I want to go too,' said the mirror. 'I'll hold my breath if I don't get to go.' 'Oh, all right,' said Prospero. 'Help me carry this thing, Roger. The last time it held its breath we got two hours of 'Overhead the Moon Is Screaming' and bagpipes playing Gregorian chants.'

The mirror, which had been made to feel quite important in the last three days-everyone had gone upstairs to look at it and ask it questions-hummed contentedly as the little procession made its way down to the kitchen. They set it on a chair drawn up to the big white table, and Prospero started to grind up some coffee beans. As he turned the ornate handle of the big walnut grinder, he talked with the other two men.

'Now, Mr. Millhorn. You will hear later what happened to me-the whole thing, before and after I met you-because I insist on your staying several days. Bed and breakfast, you know. But, I'm not sure what or who I defeated.'