The Face in the Frost

by John Bellairs

  Roger looked pained. " I think," he said, "that I'll go get a glass of hard cider."

  Upstairs, later, Roger was in Prospero's room helping him pack into a green plush carpetbag such essentials as tarot cards, extra tobacco, and pocket magic books. The magic mirror, after plaguing the two men with questions, was finally beginning to understand what was going on.

  "You mean," it said with a scarcely suppressed giggle, "that you're going to make yourselves ... smaller?"

  "Yes," said Prospero, blushing. "What of it?"

  The mirror broke into hysterical cackles and began to chant in a falsetto voice:

  "Magic words of poof, poof, poof, piffles,

  Make me just as small as Sniffles!

  Woo, hoo, hoo, hee, hee, hee!"

  "I'll wager," said Prospero, "that I have the only mirror that wallows in the trash of future centuries."

  Roger was nervously opening and shutting the casement window. "I'm worried." he said. "What do you suppose hell do when he finds we've gone? Will he destroy your house or go down the road and attack the village?"

  "I think he will try to find us. He hasn't reached his full strength yet by any means-that is, if the book is as evil as I think it is-and I don't think he'll waste his powers destroying a village or a house out of anger. It has occurred to me that he may not be able to injure my house anyway The hearthstone was laid by Michael Scott, my teacher, and it has many powerful spells on it. He built a good deal of the house, too, and there are still things about it I don't under­stand. Why, there's a cupboard that-oh, the devil! Some other time. I guess I've got everything. Good-by, mirror. I trust you can entertain yourself while we're gone."

  "I should hope so. I think I'll scare the wits out of the cleaning lady when she comes. I have a very nice scream."

  A little later, downstairs, Prospero wrote a note in black crayon and left it on the kitchen table under a bust of the Emperor Pupienus.

  Dear Mrs. Durfey,

  Will be gone for an indefinite period. Pay no attention to the mirror if it acts up, and in any case, you know where the harp case is. You can slip it over him when he's not looking. Don't forget to water the trailing arbutus and the creeping Charlie. Change the water in the large onyx water clock; the other one takes care of itself. Help yourself to the cheese and anything else. The Cheshire gets dry and crusty if you don't eat it. With luck, I should be back for the big Christmas party. Say hello to His Lordship the Mayor for me,

  Prospero

  P.S. Unexplained noises are best left unexplained.

  He looked around the house sadly. "I do hate to leave. Oh, well. Are the windows closed,, Roger? Grab your bag and let's get going."

  Soon, the secret door had closed behind the two wizards and they had placed the boat in the black water, where it rocked gently, moored by a pair of wispy cords. The ship was close to the low bank, and a rope ladder hung down from the muddy edge to the port side rail. Roger Bacon and Prospero stood looking doubtfully at the tiny craft.

  "Well," said Roger, " I don't suppose we can put it off."

  "No," said Prospero, "I don't suppose we can."

  He thumbed a small book, which looked like a pocket dictionary, until he found the page he wanted.

  "All together now:

  Shrivel, shrink, squinch, and squibble

  Dwindle, dwilp, melt, and dribble,

  ZALAMEA ALCAZAR!"

  Roger and Prospero shrank and shrank, until they looked like two odd chess pieces standing by the brown sloping sides of the boat. They made faces at each other, laughed a little, and then climbed aboard.

  Inside the low, echoing wet-dirt tunnel, the noise of the rushing water was weirdly magnified and distorted into a hollow tinny roar. A shout or a hand­clap came whanging back at you immediately from a low curving roof. Prospero and Roger, sliding farther and farther into this claustrophobic gloom, stood on the high ornamented poop of their absurd ship and watched the shrinking half moon of light cast by the lantern they had left on the floor of the cave. Two tiny alcohol-burning stern lamps cast a flickering moth-light on the wizards, who now turned to the task of keeping up their spirits until the Actaeon sailed out into the sunny lake.

  The ship itself was entertaining, because it was so incredibly detailed: There were gleaming rows of brass cannon, nickel-plated swinging lanterns that worked, and, in the captain's cabin, rows of books, real books, mostly on nautical subjects. Even the purple liquid in the little flattened decanter turned out to be wine. Though they were, if anything, too small for the ship, the wizards still thought of it as tiny, and were endlessly fascinated by the discovery of new details-a cupboard that opened on scrolled brass hinges, a box within the cupboard that held delicate jade-and-ivory chessmen. The wheel of course, worked, and Prospero had roped it down, so that the ship would follow the straight flow of the current. Though all the lamps, lanterns, and candles on board were lit, the sides of the cave could not be seen, and periodic flashes of magic lightning were needed to assure them that the little bobbing toy was still in the middle of the stream.

  As the Actaeon sailed on into the noisy darkness, Prospero and Roger heard faintly disquieting sounds: the plip! that might be a clot of earth falling from the ceiling into the water, the splop! that probably was a small water animal sliding off some unseen shore into the stream. And, there was another sound, one which was harder to single out from the others and define: It was only a little different from the normal rushing-water sound, yet it was there-a hissing and foaming that was getting more and more distinct. At first, Prospero thought "Rapids!" and shivered. But, it was the sound of water flowing through something, not over it. He got up from the powder keg on which he had been sitting and motioned to Roger, who was up on the quarterdeck, trying to compute the speed of the ship. Together, they went to the forecastle and stood peering into the blackness ahead. The little swinging lamps that hung near them were not much help, so Prospero and Roger struck their staffs together-a bright red light, dripping like a fireworks flare, hung around them for a few minutes, and by that garish light, they saw a mesh of some kind strung across their path. It was held by a rigid black square frame that was awkwardly jammed into the tunnels rough walls at a point where the opening was lower and narrower than usual.

  Prospero and Roger struggled with the capstan, but the anchor was either decorative or stuck. The ship drifted on, yawing a little in the current, until it bumped-more gently than Prospero had hoped-against the strange wall. Prospero set off another flare and suddenly realized what the obstruction was: It was a window screen. His window screen. He saw the place where he had scratched with a nail "Bedroom SE Corner," and he remembered the theft, the broken cellar window of three years before. Roger stared at him with understanding and fear.

  The ship bumped against the screen, and the water shed through a thousand tiny openings. As Prosperos eyes got used to the dark, he saw that there was a little ledge nearby on one side of the tunnel. And behind it was the deep blackness of a cave. Now, from the cave came a scrabbling, grunting clumping sound, and out of the ragged opening crawled a hairy, angular shape. Two red eyes glowed in the darkness. Prospero could have lit the tunnel for a better look, but the magic was not endless, and anyway, he knew what the thing was. So did Roger, who gripped his own staff tightly.

  And now, a sneering gritty voice:

  "Well, well. I hear this noise, so I says to myself-fresh fish! But, it ain't, it's a couple of little men in a toy boat!"

  Prospero leaned over the side and shouted: "We are wizards, troll! And, if you don't let us through, this thing we'll turn you into a rock at the bottom of this stinking, filthy, sloppy stream!"

  The troll snickered, a nasal snortling sound. "If you're wizards, you can blast your own hole in my screen, can't you? But, you ain't done it because you can't. So, I think I'll have some nice stewed wizard, or wizard dumplings, or"-here he held up the tiny white bones of some animal and rattled them-"wizard gizzard!"

  "Troll," said Prospero
quietly, with both hands on the rail, "I am going to turn you into lead. A few centuries from now someone will find you and use you for a lawn ornament!"

  "Oh, shut up, you mouthy little bug!" said the troll. "I'm going to watch you a few minutes, and then-" He twisted his hands as if he was wringing out a cloth.

  Prospero closed his eyes and tried to think. He had been reading about trolls the night Roger came, but now he could think of nothing that would help him. He couldn't even grapple physically with the troll, since the spell that made the two men smaller lasted till sunset, which was at 8 P.M. that day. His watch said five. Picking up his staff and throwing it down in anger, he turned to Roger, but Roger was gone.

  "All right," said the troll, lowering his webby feet into the water, "you two ain't no fun no more. You'll probably taste like water rats, but ..."

  A hatch clattered behind Prospero and Roger reappeared, carrying a length of rope from which a four-pronged grappling hook hung. Standing a little back from the rail, Roger whirled the grapnel whistling around his head, and then he let it go. The hook raked the screen but fell into the water, and Roger quickly started to reel it in.

  The troll was still sitting on the muddy bank, his feet in the sloshing water.

  "This is more like it," he said. He clapped his hands, and when he pulled them apart they went thock like suction cups. "Climb to the top and fall over, and then I can rescue you!"

  Roger threw the grapnel again, and this time the pronged iron went chunk! into the screen-two spurs were wedged tight. Now, Roger whipped the rope around the mainmast and started to pull. Prospero suddenly saw what was going on, and in a second, he was pulling too. A large ragged piece of the screen ripped out, crumbling as it fell and spattering the deck with red flakes of rust. The troll stood up and started to stoop forward, but Prospero gathered all his strength and blacked out the tunnel. For several minutes, the place was absolutely dark-it was filled with thick, palpable, gross darkness, and while the murk lasted, the little boat slipped through the hole. One scuttering wire scraped the bottom of the hull from one end to the other, and for a sickening instant, the boat slowed. But then, it bobbed through, wallowed sideways in the current for a bit, and straightened out to steer its course down the middle of the fast-flowing stream. The troll still held his eyes and screeched, for he thought he had been struck blind. Roger and Prospero were far downstream when the lights went on again.

  3

  3

  After more than two hours of uneventful drifting, the Actaeon rounded a sweeping curve, and Prospero, who was sitting on one of the bow chasers, saw a blue twilight glimmer ahead. He pointed this out to Roger, who was poking a straw into the touch hole of the other brass cannon to see if it really was bored all the way through.

  "Oh yes. The lake," said Roger without looking up. He was determined to be nonchalant until Prospero asked him one question. "All right," said Prospero, drawing a deep breath. "How did you know the screen was rusted through?"

  "A very simple matter, my dear Prospero. You made that screen twenty years ago. It has been in the tunnel for three years. So, I looked in Captain Monkhouse's Table of Rust Rates, one of the books in the ship's library, and I calculated the rest with the aid of my little pocket hygrometer."

  "Little pocket hygrometer! I don't believe you."

  Roger held up a turnip-shaped gold watch on a long twisted chain. The large ticking bulb was covered with glassy warts, crystal-domed dials that told lunar eclipse dates, the rate of rainfall on the third planet out from Alpha Centauri A, and, incidentally, the time."

  "I'm sorry I asked," said Prospero, grinning. "Tell me, how far off is sundown?"

  Roger squinted at the watch. "Oh, about twenty minutes."

  "Hum," said Prospero. "I do hope no one is out fishing on the lake. I'm not sure what I'd do if I saw a wee little ship scooting past my rowboat, but I think I might be tempted to smack it with an oar."

  A few minutes later the Actaeon floated out onto the windy blue-shadowed water of a little round lake. On the shore were high tossing willow trees and thick clumps of those strange telescoping green reeds that can be pulled apart into sections. In the western sky, a tall light-seamed thunder head was slowly rising to meet two sculptured pink-gray clouds. The Actaeon, spinning and at times heeling over dangerously, was swept by the harsh gusts into a squeaking forest of reeds near the shore, where it soon was lodged tight.

  Prospero peered through the yellow-banded green columns and listened. Prom the dark bushes on the shore came voices.

  "Of course, it's a duck. What else would it be?"

  And then, the other voice, nimbly and sarcastic:

  "Really? How many ducks do you know that spin around and around while they swim?"

  "Shut up. You'll scare it away."

  Now, Prospero and Roger could see two hunched men in the olive light; one of them was quite fat. Probably off-duty soldiers, since they both wore wide-brimmed pot helmets and carried crossbows. "I've always hated duck hunters," whispered Prospero. "I wonder if there's something I can do ...let's see ...Oh, good grief! If I had thought of it back there we wouldn't have had any trouble with that troll!" He hit himself on the head with the flat of his hand. "I wonder if I would have thought of it things had really come to a crisis. Oh well ..."

  "What are you talking about?" said Roger.

  Prospero took off his hat, smoothed down his hair, put the hat back on again, and shook his sleeves back.

  "Just watch," he said. "Oh, by the way, how much time do we have now?"

  "About three minutes, if your almanac is right."

  "Just enough time," said Prospero as he began to make rapid hand passes over the deck. Roger heard him chanting in a low voice, and caught the Celtic word for Greek fire couched between two old Dutch swear words. Suddenly, there was a long, loud, ripping crash, as pinpoints of fire shot from the thirty-two cannon of the Actaeons. A great bluish cloud rose over the ship and the guns went off again. One hunter jumped up and ran, stumbling through the thorn bushes, screaming "Yaaaaaah! Spirits from the vasty deep!" The other fainted, and when he came to, he saw a pair of bearded men standing over him. Both were wet to the waist, and laughing. The shorter had just crammed a toy boat into his Gladstone bag.

  "Could you tell us," said Prospero politely, "which of the absurd, small, foolish countries of the South we are in?" He knew very well where he was, but he wanted to hear the soldier's reply.

  The prostrate man, a potbellied sergeant with a President Cleveland mustache, looked offended.

  "You're in the Grand Union of the Five Counties. Population 7200. Our motto is 'Si quaeris terram amoenam, circumspice.' That's Latin. We don't think our country is small."

  "You can think what you like," said Roger as he helped the man up. " I believe your king is Gorm ill, surnamed the Wonder worker."

  The sergeant was beginning to recover his stuffy composure, and he would have leveled his crossbow at these two intruders if he had been able to find it. Prospero had thrown it into the middle of the lake.

  "Well," hrumphed the sergeant, "you seem to know so much, maybe you can tell me what you're doing here. There's three feet of stinking water in King Gorm's dungeons, and you're going to be sitting in it."

  "Oh stop!" said Prospero impatiently. "King Gorm converted his dungeons into handball courts, and he uses his rack to stretch taffy. Now, take us to him or I'll make your mustache light up."

  The guard looked at Prospero for a minute, and then he shrugged. "Oh well, you live in a poor little country, and nobody cares if people make fun of you. Come on. It's about two miles."

  Prospero and Roger, led by the puffing sergeant, followed a sandy path that wound through scratchy thorns and springy green burdock boughs. Soon, after they had crossed an acre of dung-spotted cow pasture, they were walking on one of the main highways of the South Kingdom, the Great South Road, It was one of the works of Godwin I, and it was paved with hexagonal granite blocks, some of which were stamped with the Ki
ng's arms and the phrase "Good Roads." Every hundred miles or so you would find by the roadside a statue of Godwin, crowned, seated, and with his hands on his knees, in the Egyptian manner, resting after his conquests What conquests were referred to would be hard to say, since Godwin inherited the South Kingdom through a series of dynastic perversions, freaks, and mishaps much too tedious to discuss here.

  At any rate, the road took the three men through a small chestnut forest, over rain-grooved stones covered with green spiny pods, and out onto a broad, stubbily, treeless plain. There, far ahead, but clearly visible, stood the castle of King Gorm the Wonder worker, a not very invulnerable fortress that just stood, naked, there in the middle of the plain, without protecting wall, barbican, or moat. For years, the castle had simply been a tall stone box fringed with battlements, but at the southeast corner. Gorm had added a tall fieldstone tower, capped by a paneled ice-cream cone roof. On three levels were long lancet windows with malachite sills, but they were blacked out from the inside by heavy brown curtains. Prospero and Roger knew very well what the tower was for, and they laughed at the sight of it.

  Before long, the wizards stood outside the mahogany front door of Gorm's castle, and they waited as the sergeant pounded importantly on the varnished dark wood. Very soon there was a screeching of bolts and a clatter of chains, and the door opened. In the light of a torch that he carried himself stood a small, wizened, eagle-beaked man in a black velvet gown. A chain of linked gold medallions hung loosely around his neck.

  "There's a couple of old men here that say they're wizards," said the sergeant. "They want to see the King."

  "The King," said the old man in an artificially cadenced voice, "is drowned deep in drafts of doom. With thrilling thoughts, he is thrust through, pierced with the press of pointed pinions."