The Face in the Frost

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 corpse like 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.

10

10

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?

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 come 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, no 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