"That's right, I don't. But, we can't just sit here fiddling with this ball while he scares the world to death or destroys it. He may not know were here, but he will soon. Anything after that is up to him."
Roger sat down and folded his arms. "Very well. You make about as much sense as anything does right now. But, if you need my help, just grab my hand."
"All right. But, relax. This may take quite some time. Melichus isn't something I own or someplace I've been. He can resist if he wants to. And, he will want to. In fact, this globe may be the only way to reach him."
Prospero put both hands on the glass and stared at it. Slowly, it began to fill with a flat blue ink, till the whole ball was blanked out. This was all that happened. For a full half hour, Prospero squeezed the ball, hammered it on the table, spoke to it, made signs over it. Nothing happened. At last, he stood up with the thing clenched in his hand. The sweat on his face shone in the firelight.
"Melichus! I call on you by the secret name you were given by Michael Scott. That is..."
He spoke the name and the room grew darker One candlestick fell over and the others burned blue. The flames in the fireplace leaped up the flue with a shriek, leaving the half-burned logs suddenly gray and cold. In the dark chilly room, the two men bent over the glass ball. It seemed to be coming apart. The glass remained intact, but the blackness inside split along a jagged line, like an egg opening to a burning white center.
The light hurt Prospero's eyes and he turned away, but when he looked again, the light was gray and sullen, like a winter afternoon. He saw an old man whose duty red eyes were sunk in wrinkled hollow caves. The thin white lips were parted and the yellow teeth were set on edge. His hand held the trembling page of a book, and Prospero could see that it was the last page. The stare that met his was not one of knowing hatred, scorn, or bitter triumph. It was much more frightening than that. What Prospero saw was the blank angry glare of an animal that has been interrupted at its meal. He could not even tell if Melichus recognized him. The two rheumy eyes focused on his for a second, and then they seemed to be looking past him. Prospero relaxed for a second, and the two halves of the egg slammed together with a boom that made him drop the glass on the floor. It did not break, but a crooked line of white was etched into the outer surface of the globe.
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
USED NAILS AND BACK DOORS FOR SALE
Prospero rubbed more snow away from the bottom of the sign and looked again. That was what it said, all right. He tried to laugh, but it came out as a phlegmy cough.
"Well, M. Millhorn, you sound interesting. Here we come."
Prospero kicked some footholds in the snow that covered the steps, and he slowly climbed up, plunging his hands into the snow in front of him to steady himself. At the top, he stood up in the knee-high snow and stared into the swirling dark. There behind a couple of skinny pines was a big square farmhouse with deep-set corniced windows and a scalloped rooftree. A light was on downstairs, but the yellow shades, patched with colored pieces of newspaper, were drawn. He kicked his way through the snow, making long scars in the wet drifts. From this height, he had a good view of the road, and when he looked, he saw, far down the row of fence posts, the light. It stopped, dropped to a lower position, then rose and went slowly swinging along, as if the bearer had stopped to look for footprints. They wouldn't be hard to find, Prospero thought, and he kicked harder at the packed snow in front of him.
Moving at this spread-legged awkward gait, he took a long time, or what seemed a long time, to reach the front steps. Up on the narrow front stoop, he banged with a numb first on the yellow door. Thumping and bumping inside, and a sound like someone upsetting a keg of nails. Finally, the door opened, and there in the harsh glare of a single bulb that hung from a long knotted cord was a small man in a square-cut beard. He wore oval rimless spectacles and a black skullcap, and over his shoulders was a black silk shawl with elaborate gold tassels. His striped floor-length robe, something between a dressing gown and a cassock, might once have been brown and blue. He looked Prospero up and down and laughed silently.
"Well, come on in. You'll catch your death out there."
Prospero thanked him and stepped in the door, brushing snow off his cloak as he went. The room was an incredible mess: cracked chamber pots, upended sewing machines, fat lipped spittoons, iron-wheeled lawn mowers, ax handles stacked like rifles, fussy-fringed floor lamps with green marble insets, an isinglass-windowed stove with a brass vase on top, and several kegs of bent nails, one of them tipped over. On the wall was a crazy collection of picture frames, some with dark pictures in them. One of them showed several dogs with Pipes in their mouths. They were sitting around a table playing poker.
The little man stood looking at Prospero for a couple of seconds, and then he turned sharply and went to the window. Raising the dirty shade a couple of inches, he looked out.
"From what I can see," he said, "you don't have much time. You'd better do what I tell you."
Prospero gaped. He felt an urge to run around the room touching things.
"Are you real? Is this house real?"
The man laughed quietly with his tongue between his teeth.
"Well, these days you can't tell. Yes, I'm real. A damn sight more real than you are, if you catch my meaning. Well, lets get going. I've been waiting for this for a long time."
He went to a high glazed bookcase full of vellum-backed volumes; from where he stood, Prospero could read titles like Aristotelis Opera and Mysterium Cosmographicum. Standing on a cane-bottomed chair, the man lifted down from the top of the case a huge untitled tome with the Seal of Solomon stamped on the side. He lugged it over to a large wooden lectern and opened it. It was full of black, shaded Hebrew characters.
Prospero knew what it was and he looked with awe at the man, who was unconcernedly thumbing through the book.
"The Kabbala?" Prospero asked.
"The Kabbala. Now, hurry downstairs and find the door you want. When I say 'Back doors for sale' that's what I mean."
"But, can I pay you? What can I do? You don't know how grateful I am..."
"Yes, I do. For payment, though, I'll take this little glass doodad. It can't be worth much, but it'll look nice on the mantel."
Prospero looked at him and the little man looked back, smiling quietly. But, at that moment, the front door banged open and a rush of cold wind blew a thin line of snow skittering across the floor. Outside, at the bottom of the snowy steps, they, could see the light of a single square lantern.
The man talked fast and nervously now. "Give me that thing, for God's sake! You can't help me now, and you can't take it back with you. One way or another, I'll keep him from getting it, so get on with you! Go!"
Prospero looked at the yellow light that hung in a fog of snowflakes, at the man in the black skullcap who held out his hand, and he gave him the paperweight. He turned to go, but with his hand on the knob of the cellar door, he turned and looked. The man was dragging the lectern over in front of the door.
Now, Prospero was clumping down the thin slats of the cellar stairs. Leaning against the wall opposite him was a row of doors: big paneled doors with peeling black paint, ivory colored doors with broken star-frosted panes,-a door covered with speckled brown leather and pyramid-headed nails. The line stretched away into the coal-smelling dark basement, and Prospero walked along it, pulling doors toward him and looking behind them: nothing, but rough mortared stones. Overhead, a mournful winding high-pitched chant started, but it was cut off by an incredibly angry word. A long flash of blue light shot down the cellar stairs-Prospero, several yards away, could feel the heat of it. Doors, doors, doors. For a minute, he had the horrible fear that he would see the two of them coming down the stairs after him. Then, he stopped short. In front of him was a little pointed door that looked like a tombstone. A dirty yellow card was stuck to it with a red thumbtack. The card said "Root Cellar."
There was no doorknob, of course, so Pr
ospero tried the opening spell. Nothing happened. Overhead, the war between the wandering chant and the loud bursting voice went on. The cobwebbed ceiling shook, bits of dirt sifted down from the shaking and grinding rafters, and a chamber pot flew down the stairs. It smashed on the wall with a loud pop like a huge light bulb. Prospero stood looking at the door, his arms at his sides. Then, suddenly, he smiled and laughed, shaking his head. He grabbed the door with both hands and lifted it toward him. It was not fastened to anything and came away from the wall easily. Behind it was a long tunnel and a slippery-looking rock incline. Carrying the door in front of him like a shield, he backed into the tunnel, setting down the heavy wooden slab when it was-he hoped-back in place. He could not hear the noises overhead any more.
Prospero took one step in the darkness and fell down. He slid and kept on sliding, on wet chunky stones that bit into his back as he fell. It was not a steep incline, but there was no way of stopping, and by the time he got to the bottom, he was shaken, nauseated, and bruised. He looked around and saw that he was in a forest that looked familiar, if ordinary elms, oaks, and maples can look familiar. It was the forest behind his house.
Now, he was running down a path he had walked along many times on quiet afternoons in the late slanting light. The owls of his nightmare appeared overhead and swooped down on him, great hissing moon-eyed bags of dusty feathers. He swung at one and it ripped open, emptying on him a cloud of green buzzing insects. They clung to his face and bit, brushing his eyelids with rustling wings. He ran on with his eyes closed, waving his arms, and suddenly the bugs dropped off him, dead. He was in his back yard.
Everything looked the way it had in the magic glass: the lines of snow, the frost on the windows. He saw that the fountain was not running. A long muddy streak ran down the satyr's sides and the marble basin was full of caked smelly earth. Two dead birds lay in it. The apple tree was covered with dead rattling leaves and small wrinkled mushy brown stones. Everything lay under a dull gray light; the bulging clouds overhead looked as though they were going to burst. But, every object in the yard threw a shadow, a small dark trembling patch. One of them, cast by nothing that Prospero could see, lay on the grass near him. It started to crawl toward him slowly.
The Face in the Frost Page 13