As the evening wore on-and "wore" was the proper word-Prospero found himself more and more dissatisfied with his surroundings. The place was dull, no doubt about it. For instance, the conversation he had tried to take part in was curiously vague and listless. The people welcomed him and seemed to be cordial, but everyone was-how should he put it?-saying the same thing in different ways. He would have blessed a monologist and was tempted to become one himself, but he felt helpless in the face of this balanced, trivial buzzing. There were no rip-roaring tale tellers, and no one was bold enough to introduce a song, bawdy or otherwise.
Prospero took to looking around the room. Again, his immediate instinct was to find fault. The large brown tapestry near the door was supposed to show a hunt, but the animal being gored by the spears of the two riders was crudely done,– it looked more like a man in a lion suit. The opposite wall was large, smooth, and blank. No ornaments of any kind. The candlestick, on one end of the nearer mantelpiece, was not matched by a mate at the other end. And, in the stone front of the fireplace was an escutcheon with a dagger carved on it in low relief. Prosaic. The blank card, when you thought about it, pretty well suited this dreary place. Maybe it was under new management and things were not yet organized. That would explain the sign. The card had held some device of the previous owner's that was now painted over, and apparently, the new proprietor hadn't decided what to call the place. Well, at least the food was not bad. Roast beef and Cheddar cheese and more ale. But, it is blasted boring in here!
Prospero's thoughts ran this way the rest of the evening. The other guests left, in twos and threes, some of them going upstairs to bed. He sat practically alone now, blowing smoke rings. A little magic, perhaps some indoor lightning or stone smoke rings dropped in people's soup. That might have salvaged the evening. On the other hand, the dour people of this tavern might have responded with pained looks and silence. "Oh, another magician, how tedious! There was one in here last week, etc." Prospero laughed aloud at this train of thought, startling a man at the other end of the room, who turned, glared at him, and walked out without a word.
Soon, Prospero was alone in the long room-alone except for the hostess, who was passing among the tables collecting plates and mugs. He called out to her through the stale drifting smoke.
"Madam! Are there any rooms left for the night?"
She turned and smiled vaguely. "Of course. I'll take your bag upstairs and open the bed. Stay up as long as you like."
"Thank you, but I think I'll go to my room now. It must be nearly twelve, and I am very tired."
"Very well."
Prospero pushed through the empty chairs and found his carpetbag, which he had left near the door. He waited until the hostess had put out all the downstairs lights, and then, he followed her as she led the way, candle in hand, up the dully gleaming oak steps. There was a mirror in a black oval frame halfway up the stairs, and as he passed it, hardly looking at it, something about it struck him as strange. He was about to turn on the stairs, but he shrugged and went on up.
The hostess gave him the candle as they reached his room.
"Here you are, sir. Sleep well." And with that, she turned and walked on down the long hall, a glimmering white figure that was soon lost in the musty shadows. Prospero stood watching her go, and then he opened his door. The room looked pleasant enough, if sparsely furnished: a small double feather bed with high sideboards; a table and chair, the latter rush-bottomed; and a long low chest with a little carved strongbox on the top. Prospero put on his nightshirt and stood at the window, smoking a last pipe. The overcast that had hidden the moon and stars was gone now, and the full moon was so bright that for a minute he could not see the features of the appalled face it always wore. Melancholy, something more than the usual sadness of silent rooms, was creeping over him as he stood there looking down at the gray-shining street.
He didn't know why he felt so sad, though he suspected that the lugubrious evening he had spent downstairs was at fault. Well, to bed. He knocked out his pipe into a small lead jar. Just before he got into bed, Prospero happened to glance at the long pitchfork shadow cast on the moonlit floor by a three-branched candelabrum that was on the window sill. The shadow appeared to be wavering slightly. Prospero leaned over the bedside and stared. The shadow was still. He looked at the candlestick, then rolled over to sleep.
But, he did not sleep. Prospero stared at the empty whitewashed ceiling and felt himself grow more nervous hour by hour. The five– (or four-) dialed clock struck one and two and three. And then, four-the fourth stroke fell with almost a thudding sound. Wretched clock! Wretched people in this dull dead town! Prospero got up and paced about the room. Something was stirring in his mind and he could not put it together. Idly, he picked up the small walnut strongbox and tried to open it. It didn't even rattle. The heart-shaped brass lock plate on the front was smooth to his touch. It had no keyhole. He turned the box over, looking for hidden locks and spring releases, but there was nothing. Prospero set the box down with a loud crack that startled him in the silent room. Strange thoughts began to come to him now: locked boxes and empty rooms. Four dials and a black hole. Four cards and a blank. And, a dead sound on the stroke of four. Why did that mirror bother him?
Quietly, Prospero got dressed, took his staff from the corner, and opened the door of his room. The hall was dark and silent. No night lamp burned at the head of the gaping stairway. He fished his metal matchbox out of an inside pocket and struck a light. On a hall table was a squat candle in a dish. He lit it and tiptoed down the stairs to the place where the mirror hung. Prospero stared and felt a chill pass through his body. The mirror showed nothing-not his face, not his candle, not the wall behind him. All he saw was a black glassy surface.
Fighting down rising fear, Prospero went back upstairs and began to knock on doors, at first softly, then sharply. He tried the doors. Locked. Locked. And locked. Like the box, the doors didn't even rattle. On an impulse, he opened his pocket knife and tried to slide the blade into the space between a door and its jamb. The point struck solid wood, for what looked like a crack was merely a black line. One door opened, revealing a completely empty room, without even a bed on its smooth floor. The window was open and a cold autumn wind blew in. Prospero shut the door quietly. At the other end of the long straight corridor was a room he had intentionally passed by. The gold letters on the door said "Innkeeper. Please knock."
"Very well," he said through his teeth. "I'll knock."
He struck the floor with his staff, and a loud report crashed through the hall. There was no echo, and the silence returned. Prospero walked slowly to the other end of the corridor until he stood before the lettered door. Placing his hand on the curved handle, he pressed down and the latch clicked. The door opened about a foot and struck something soft. Prospero raised his candle and saw that the door was blocked by the form of the hostess, who was standing in the dark room, her back to him and her arms at her sides. He squeezed through the door and held the light close to the inert form. Her head was bowed slightly and her eyes were open. His gaze wandered to her right arm. Her clenched hand was pressed to her thigh, and she clutched something hidden in the folds of her floor-length checkered skirt. Slowly cautiously Prospero backed away and when he had reached the middle of the room, he glanced quickly around. The weak candlelight did not reach the dark corners, but the room looked as empty as the one he had just been in. He muttered something and struck the butt of his staff on the floor. The room lit up for an instant in a flash of blue lightning, and Prospero could see that the chamber was indeed empty-there was not even a window.
And still, the woman stood silent, staring with dead eyes at the floor. Prospero bent to set the candle down, and then, straightening up suddenly, he walked to where the slumping figure stood. Grasping her shoulders, he shook her violently. There was a clatter on the floor at his feet, and when he looked down, he saw a long, slightly curved butcher knife. He looked up at the woman again and stepped back with a gasp
. His hand went to his face and his staff fell to the floor. The woman's eyes were gone. In her slowly rising head were two black holes. Prospero saw in his mind a doll that had terrified him when he was a child. The eyes had rattled in the china skull. Now, the woman's voice, mechanical and heavy: "Why don't you sleep? Co to sleep." Her mouth opened wide, impossibly wide, and then, the whole face stretched and writhed and yawned in the faint light.
With a cry, Prospero shoved the melting thing aside and got to the door, opened it, and ran down the hall. The walls were caving, bulging, stretching wildly-one door fell before him and tried to wrap itself around his legs. Prospero kicked at the door hysterically and finally got to the stairs, which were covered with a brown fog. As he felt his way down the quivering steps, the whole staircase gave way with a rushing hiss and he landed on his knees in the cold liquid that had been the floor. The walls of the large downstairs room, though blurry, were still there, and he felt for the door, not daring to look back to see if anything had followed him from that terrible blind chamber. Lifting the twisting, bucking bar from the black door, he plunged outside and ran through the street, where the cobblestones oozed like mud and slate roofs turned to dripping black slime. Stone walls ran in viscous rivulets, and the head of the little old man appeared gabbling fiercely. When Prospero got to the church, the bell tower rang five scraping, cracking, howling notes and toppled slowly at him. He raised his arms to shield himself, but the tower, still ringing, turned to mist as it fell and blew away in long sinuous swirls. The wizard dropped to the ground, covering his face with his hands.
When he looked up several minutes later, he was in a field of heavily trampled moonlit grass, through which a rutty gouged cow path wandered. Some distance away the road he had been following wound up a pine-covered ridge. Near him, Prospero found his bag and staff, unharmed, and he picked them up from the withered weeds as if he expected them to crumble in his grasp. Something was glittering in the gray tangle at his feet-the knife, which was quite real, and very ordinary-looking. No inscriptions on it, no deaths heads. Prospero broke it, buried it, and started walking toward the road.
7
7
On his way again, Prospero crossed ridge after ridge of uninteresting country: a cattle pond here, a clump of Scotch pines there-just enough variation for boredom. He was beginning to feel that this was a pointless, hopeless journey. The situation, the problem that faced him, was getting clearer in his mind, and the clearer it got, the more hopeless he felt. Without Roger, he was lost.
After half a day of walking, something happened that made him strangely hopeful He found a sign, a fairly new sign, that said FIVE DIALS: THIRTY MILES. So, there was a town with that name, after all. He walked the rest of the day, stopped to build a fire in a little circle of pines, and slept a full nine hours. The next morning, after coffee, bread, and cheese, he went on, feeling much better.
Five Dials, it turned out, was not a town at all, but a lonely inn wedged under a yellow limestone bank, a last friendly stop before you reached the Brown River and the treeless empty moors of the North Kingdom, A man by the name of Clockwarden had been here first, in the barn-shaped house that was still the center of the collection of different-sized, plugged-together buildings that made up the Five Dials Inn. Clockwarden may not have been his real name, since that was his job. On the cliff over the inn stood a crenelated clock tower, built some two hundred years before the time of this story; it was the hobby work of some local prince, and it had had, when new, four brightly painted wooden dials with keyhole-shaped windows cut in them. Through these, you could see moons and suns rising and setting-not that they ever told you anything about moonrise, sunrise, or the tides. The fifth dial was a sundial on the flat top of the tower; it was used to set the clock, which had only hour hands. After the prince who built the clock died, his successors let the thing run down and dismissed the warden. They tore off the bronze hands and made them into spearheads,– the lead weights were thrown off a castle wall in some forgotten siege.
Two days after his escape from Five Dials, Prospero stood on Clocktower Hill, looking up at warped, bleached, saucer-shaped faces that still had a few flaking Roman numerals. Inside, the works were full of birds' nests-empty at this time of year-and in some places, small skeletons were caught in cogs, because playing children or a strong wind had started the rope-and-stone pendulum and the big square-toothed wooden wheels. From the Clocktower Hill, you could see, to the north, a valley of little jigsaw-puzzle fields cut up by bunchy and badly trimmed hedgerows. Beyond the fields was a curving fence of tall feather-shaped trees that marked the course of the Brown Rivet; the border between the North and South kingdoms. The road that ran past the inn must meet a bridge at that point, It was near sunset, and Prospero watched for a while as a stone-blue point of cloud, rising out of a thick curded mass, cut the red sun in two. Suppertime at the inn. Two maple trees grew at the western edge of the low cliff and marked the place where the stone steps led down to the side yard of the inn, As Prospero passed between the trees, a little breeze started and a leaf scraped his cheek. He felt a sharp pain and blood wet his face. Reaching up carefully and staring hard at the dark moving leaves, he broke one off at the stem and held it up in the light, it was not hard-it was unpleasantly soft and furry feeling, like a caterpillar. Its edges and veins were gray, and it had turned a dark red. With a nervous look over his shoulder, Prospero hurried down the steps.
Inside the inn was a pleasant reeky disorder, with a gong like whanging of kettles, loud talk, and some shouting. This place seemed real enough. The tables had pipe-ash burns and interlaced bottle marks; the mantel was crowded with smudged mustard jars, dirty boot-shaped leather pitchers, and speckled china jam pots. Bent and tarnished spoons stood upright in some thick green stuff that dripped over the edges of dirty white porcelain bowls. Lifting his bag over the heads of ducking customers, Prospero squeezed through the tables and found the innkeeper. He wanted a glass of wine before supper, and he had heard-all the way back in Brakespeare-that the cellars of the border inns were very good, especially for port and sherry. "Go on down and help yourself," said the fat blue-aproned man. "Here's a glass. You won't need a candle; the place is all lit up. Don't drink too much, ha ha."
"I won't, ha ha," said Prospero to himself, and he started down the stairs.
In the cellar, rows of splintery tarred barrels ran off into the vaulted alleys,-here and there, lumpy starfish-shaped grease lamps gave off a smudge pot stink and precious little light. Prospero looked around and saw a man in a brown robe bent over a little low barrel. He was turning the spigot and drawing off a thick brown fluid that was probably sherry. Prospero stood watching him from a distance, and the man started to talk in a creaky old-geezer voice. It was not clear if he was talking to himself, but he gave no sign that he knew the other man was there.
"Ye-es, this is proper Snake Year sherry, it is. I've got the right barrel. Snake Year, ye say? Thaat's right, thaat's right. Seems they was a plague of adders several years ago. Well, they come down off of that Clock Hill lookin' for a cold dark place, and they filled this cellar up to the gunnels. Right up to the roof beams. Wrigglin' and squirmin' like anything. Well, old whatsisname come down here in a suit of armor he borrowed up the road, and he laid around with a broadsword till they was all dead. Well, then they aired out the cellar 'n' carted out the segments, or figments if ye please"-here he broke down into shaking silent laughter and hit his head several times against the barrel rim-"but it took 'em a long time to get this funny smell out. They finally did, most of it, but this here barrel, if ye pop out the bung, still smells bracky That's because a lady adder set down some eggs in here. She squirmed in the spigot and she squirmed out again. Now, they ain't many that likes this barrel, but I claim the taste is special."
All the while that this strange old man was talking. Prospero was walking toward him through the rows of kegs. Now, he stood directly behind the stooping hooded figure.
"Are you serious?" said
Prospero. "About that?"
"I am," said the old man. "Here-try some!" He screeched these last words, straightened up suddenly, and shoved the slopping mug in Prospero's face. The wizards reaction was automatic, as if he had had a dead rat thrown in his lap. He jerked back, swung his arm, and batted the mug across the room. It bounced on kegs with a dull tunk-tunk, spewing brown wine everywhere, Prospero stood staring at the old man, who was Roger Bacon.
"Oh, good grief! Roger, if you ever do that again, I'll make you drink real snake wine, it's a very simple formula, you just..." Now, he was crying, with his arms around the red-bearded man.
"Roger, how did you know I'd be here? How did you know I'd come down here?"
"I was watching you from the top of that ridiculous tower. Did you think I was the gnomon, in the shape of Father Time?"
"I didn't see you."
"Well, I saw you miles off. I went to Briar Hill and saw your mark in the guest book, f didn't know where you'd go after that, but I went north for reasons of my own, and figured you'd come for the same reasons."
"Don't be mysterious," said Prospero. "What reasons? And, how did you happen to go to Briar Hill? And, what happened..."
"Better not to talk down here," said Roger, staring around at the barrels. "Let's get a back parlor with a nice thick door on it. We can take turns talking."
The two of them sat, later in the evening, at a scallop-edged wooden table on which four gray squares of bright moonlight lay. In the corner, a little fire of pine chunks burned behind a thick iron grate pierced with quatrefoils. On the table were two greasy tin plates, a couple of half-full mugs of cider, and a squashed-down tallow candle in a green copper dish. A brass cylinder marked "Salt" held thick peeling cigars-the innkeeper rolled them himself-and Prospero lit one from the candle. Roger was trying to fight a bulbous black pipe that looked like an avocado on a stick. Smoke, swirling in graceful slow strands, drifted toward the fieldstone chimney.
The Face in the Frost Page 8