The Face in the Frost

5

5

When Prospero awoke the next morning, he stared for a long time at the blinding white clouds that lay along the broken line of gabled rooftops. After a few minutes, his eyes began to hurt, so he rolled over and stared at the white blotches that danced in the black mouth of the stupidly ferocious gargoyle fireplace. He feared the day's work, and he wanted (half-consciously) to keep his mind unfocused. But, as soon as he was aware of what he was doing, he shook his head, shuddered, jumped out of bed, and began mechanically gathering up his belongings, as if he were collecting firewood.

After he had stuffed books, snuffbox, and tobacco box into his green bag, Prospero looked quickly around the homely little room and took his staff away from the door. As he grasped the heavy stick, the knuckles of his right hand rested momentarily against the thick wooden door, and he had an odd sensation in that instant. It seemed that the wood suddenly gave under his hand, as if some pressure from outside had suddenly been removed. Prospero stood there for a few seconds, and then he pulled the door inward, so violently that it slammed against the whitewashed stone wall. No one was in the hall, which was still dark, though it was morning outside. A couple of burned-out candle ends dripped wax beards from their sconces.

He went back into the room and lit the bedside candle, which he held up close to the outer face of the door. The wood was crisscrossed over and over with long scratches: some of them were needle scrapes, others were wide and deep, and one ended in a ragged gouge that must have gone halfway through the door. Prospero dropped his candle. When he could think clearly again, he began to wonder why the thing hadn't climbed in through the window. The shutters had been open most of the night.

He turned and went back into the room. The window sill was the answer to his question: Some superstitious (or prudent) traveler, days or weeks ago, had drawn a powerful hex sign on the stone sill in rain-blurred yellow chalk. Prospero thanked him, whoever he was, and sat down on the bed.

"I wonder if the landlord was disturbed by the thing?" he said to himself out loud.

This question, in its turn, was answered by the look on the landlord's face when Prospero went downstairs to pay the bill.

"Keep your witch's money," said the old man, staring hatefully at him. "And, take your magic out of this inn and out of this town. Do I look tired? Well, I've been up all night praying. I don't know what you brought in here last night, but I hope the other guests didn't hear it or smell it, the way I did. I'd call the watch and have you put in prison till we could try you and burn you, but they say you can come back after you're dead. The other one did."

Prospero would have explained, but he knew that the response would be another tirade. So, he took three gold coins out of his pocket and flipped them casually over his shoulder. They shot the length of the room and were imbedded deep in the limestone mantel of the fireplace, where they are to this day. On his way out, for good measure, he crossed the eyes of the stone gorgon.

As he walked across the square, Prospero thought of his planned investigation of the ruined cottage. That would have to be left to Roger if he came this way, assuming he was alive, and Prospero was assuming that his best friend was still alive.

It did not take Prospero long to get to the west gate of the town. But, once he was outside the thick spiny hedge, he realized that he didn't have the faintest idea of which way to go. He hardly expected signs, but on the other hand, what was he going to do? Two farmers stood by the city gate, arguing about seed prices. He walked up to them, took off his hat, and bowed.

"Excuse me, but I am traveling north on foot, and I want to avoid going through the forest you people talk about here. The inn was full of terrible stories about it."

One farmer turned and gave him an odd look. "I'm surprised they'd talk about it at all. But, if you want to know where it is, so that you can avoid it, I'll tell you. Straight along that dirt road about five miles. If you want to be sure just step off the road and stand inside the forest a bit. Then get out of it and go on. You're safe during the day, as long as you don't go too far in. You'll know when you're in it." He gave Prospero another suspicious look and turned away.

The black mucky road ran straight down the western face of Briar Hill and into a green shadowy cleft. It cut between two banks of shelving mossy sandstone for about three of the five miles Prospero followed it, and then it became a weedy ditch about three feet wide that wound through scratchy bushes and large sprouting ferns with scrolled green fronds. After that, the road stopped-no longer a road, just a wide clearing, flat as a lake and covered with hairy, tangled, yellow grass that lay close to the ground. And on the other side, the forest.

It did not look haunted, especially at noon, this crowded, textured, interwoven wood. Prospero saw every shade of green, from light, bleached, papery, yellow-green to a dark, wet, inky green that was almost black. Willows, poplars, maples, oaks, and stubby kinked mulberry trees. As he crossed the little clearing, he noticed that the wood-at least the part of it that he saw-was surrounded by a loose fence of closely planted wooden poles tipped with spear blades and linked by three tiers of reddish iron chains. Nothing that a man might not break down in a few minutes, but it could keep something in. The gate was more impressive: two heavy round stone pillars, and between them, a single spike-topped door of thick pine boards banded with iron. Again, like the fence, this barrier was merely symbolic, since it was fastened by an unlocked metal latch that could be lifted easily. Atop the wide pillars were two rain-eaten stone statues. The one on the left was a cowled monk who stood facing into the forest with upraised arms; the other statue, a naked, scrawny, kneeling shape, looked out toward the glade, but his hands covered his face. Prospero looked once around him, shifted the heavy bag to his left hand, and lifted the curved latch. The door swung inward very easily, and without noise. When he turned to push it shut behind him, he looked up at the protesting stone monk. The lower half of the face was broken away, leaving in the hollow of the cowl a look of blank gap-mouthed fear.

Once he was actually inside the forest and the oiled gate was shut behind him, Prospero knew what was wrong. There are times when you feel that you hear doors slamming in the distance, voices calling your name; you see blurred things, far away or very close up, that look like people until you focus on them. That was the trouble. The whole place seemed slightly out of focus, very slightly off.

If was as if you were half asleep. There was a buzzing in Prospero's ears, and he had to stare at a tree for several seconds before it looked like a tree and not a leaning furry shadow. He felt very nervous, drowsily nervous, with prickling dark borders on his sight. A glass bell was ringing somewhere deep, deep in the forest. An icy green glass bell ridged with frost, trembling on a green willow branch.

Prospero shook his head to clear it of this image. The light on the forest floor, even at noon, was dim, with little wavering circles in clusters here and there. The circles moved back and forth in a way that Prospero did not like,-the branches shifted and did strange things just out of his line of vision. After a few minutes, some of the strangeness went away, but the queasy feeling of distortion was still there. He picked a narrow strip of crushed grass and fol­lowed it into the close-crowding trees.

As he walked along, Prospero noticed more things that he did not like: Clumps or mangy and worm holed ivy covered what looked like stumps from the fire. But, when he tried to scrap the vines away with his staff, the whole tangled mass fell into the ground with a faint plop. There was never any stump, only a damp hole smelling sickly of rotted plants. And, what the Register of Wizards revealed was true. This was the Empty Forest. Once or twice Prospero stopped at a tree to look at some small speckled bug stuck in a crevice of bark. When it didn't move, he touched it lightly with his finger. The dead shell flicked away to the ground. And once, he thought he saw the amber eyes of a small animal staring at him out of a hollow in the side of an old broken tree. When he went up close to look in at the unwavering stare, he closed his eyes and turned away. The small animal, whatever it was, stood on its hind legs, hunched, mummified, long dead. Eyes that should have rotted had by some awful magic grown hard, like cloudy yellow marbles, and the matted hair was shrunken on the bones.

Prospero walked on into the musty leaf-green light that grew deeper and darker as he went farther in. The trees were very large for a second growth, even a fifty-year-old second growth, and some looked much older than they possibly could have been. Had the whole forest really burned down? It would have taken many years for those thick pebbled humps to grow on the wide, splitting trunks. A very strange place. Then, as he was trudging along through wet clotted leaves, staring at the shelf growths that sometimes laddered the whole north side of a tree, he looked up and found that he was at the edge of another clearing.

It was a wide sunny circle of grass, and in the middle, something white and hard caught the afternoon light. Prospero walked out to where the white shape was, and found that he was standing over a long flat stone, a grave marker covered with square chiseled letters in ragged rows. Some of the letters were filled with dirt, though the slab itself was amazingly clean-no bird droppings, no leaf stains, or weather streaks. What the inscription said was this:

"That is a terrible curse," said Prospero, looking at the quiet branches all around him. "I hope it did not come true, for his sake."

Now, he had to wait for dark. All the long afternoon Prospero sat there by the stone, listening in vain for some bird, some squirrel, some fat hovering bumblebee. He did not hear anything, but the uneasy leaf rustling that started suddenly and built to a nervous thrashing, as though someone took a bough in his hand and shook it. Then, quiet again. And, he knew that, when darkness finally came, he would not hear crickets. Out in this central circle the queer vagueness of the forest was not so strong, but when Prospero looked for very long into the confusing crisscross of branches, he found that he had to look away, at the blank blue sky or at the bleached grass, or at the familiar green bag that lay beside him.

Night came at last, chilly and damp, but no dew beaded on the flat face of the stone. When the rough-edged half moon began to climb to the center of the little circle of sky, Prospero got up and opened his bag. The copper hinges squeaked, and he jumped back as if he had been shocked. He tried to laugh at his nervousness, but his own dry chuckle only made him feel more strange. He walked back and forth a few times and wiped his hands on his dusty robe, and then he went back to the bag. He took out a pair of brown beeswax candles and lit them, placing them a few feet apart on the carved stone. Between these, he opened his large book to the place he had marked the night before. Then, he went to the bag again and took out a square glass jar full of saffron-colored chalk powder, Going back to the book occasionally to check the words, he sprinkled the chalk in two concentric circles around himself and the stone, all the while whispering verses. Sometimes he would speak a word aloud, and then stop to listen before going on. In the space between the two circles, with the same yellow powder, he made signs: Hebrew letters, zodiac symbols, old complicated figures that every magician knew. One wide empty space was left, and in it he slowly wrote "Melichus." First, he traced the letters in the dirt with his finger, then, he poured in chalk. He got up, took a compass from his pocket, and sprinkled water from a metal jar to the north, the south, the east, the west.

Now, he was kneeling over the book again, and he read the same passage aloud three times, each time in a louder voice. Finally, he stood up and took his staff in his hand. He tapped the name "Melichus" three times and spoke in a firm voice.

Silence in the moonlit circle, and the two candle flames burned straight up. Prospero waited, but all he heard was a creaking branch. He spoke the same formula again, and again there was nothing. The moon passed slowly out of the circle overhead, and the candles spread into brown maps on the cold stone. Prospero pulled his bag toward him and put the book and bottles in it. The clink of jostling bottles made him laugh a little. Here he was in the night with his absurd fat satchel, stealthily conjuring over an empty tomb. He laughed till the nervousness was gone, and then, he stirred around the things in his bag till some of the softer items were on the outside. It wasn't a very good pillow, but he slept. His body was just inside the circle.

When he awoke, it was still night, and as he lay there half asleep, he began to notice the swaying of the branches. They ought not to move that way, was all he could think. The forms they were tracing bothered him so much that he sat up on his elbows. He turned his head slightly and saw that something in tattered moon-gray was crawling out of the dark grass at the edge of the wood, A man on all fours, making no sound as he scrambled over the dry grass. Prospero closed his eyes and said over and over to himself, "It cannot come into the circle. It cannot..."

The man stopped at the edge of the chalk line, beside Prospero's head. And, when he spoke, he had the voice of a boy, panting and wincing in pain.

"I am under that stone. I was his servant. They killed me. Let me go."

Prospero, frightened, lying there staring at a sky containing only one or two weak stars, spoke.

"I did not call you. But, if I can set you free, I will."

The boy spoke again. His wet lips were almost touching Prospero's ear. "Go north and kill him, Go north." His voice had an awful rising wailing sound.

Prospero clenched his hands and sat up, looking away from the thing that crouched or floated near him. Now, he put his hands to his face and tried to think, and finally, he spoke the words he had to speak, one at a time in a shaking voice. He turned his head slowly and looked at the shape, which now began to melt into the hard ground like a spreading lump of gray dirty snow.

But, nothing evil left the forest. Prospero stared at the ring of trees and realized that he could feel their limbs growing tense. He shook his head to get rid of the pulsing fuzziness in his eyes. Had he said the right words? He sat up straighter, and then bent down over the stone, trying to read the letters by the starlight. For some reason, he began to trace the letters with his finger tip, trying to imagine how they looked, and how the wavering lines of square deep-cut symbols ran.

"I thought so!" he said out loud, and he pounded on the stone until his hand was sore. Now, he knew the reason for those ragged rows. The rise and fall of the letters, the extra spurs and flourishes the carver had put in, had knit together a curse too strong to be undone by a few mumbled words. Prospero, lying full length on the stone, painfully bent his head backward and looked at the dark sky.

"I wonder what I have done," he said. "I wonder what I have done."

The answer came. As he watched, something like a cloud, but too low for a cloud, moved over the circle of sky. Now, even the light of those distant stars was going. It felt as though someone were sliding the lid onto a vault, and Prospero could almost hear stone grinding and sliding overhead. Now, it was really dark, a shut-in, musty-closet dark. He felt that if he reached out he would touch hanging cloth, old clothes that he did not want near him. Choking, blinding, afraid even to take a deep breath for fear of what he might draw into his lungs, Prospero started to stumble out of the circle, moving his hands in front of him. He felt nothing there, but he sensed something slip­ping past his arm and trailing down his finger tips. Now, he started to run, and his head hit against a tree trunk with a sickening jolt. He turned, and his left cheek was scratched all the way across by what might have been a branch.

Prospero came to a shuffling stop in the leaves that smelled more strongly than ever of black-green rot. Hanging at his belt was a small quartz globe with a brass rod running through it. He unhooked it and held it up, rubbing it. For years, he had used this globe; he had used it on the darkest caves under mountains, and it had always sent out a bright orange light that made fire shadows on the rough stone walls. Now, it glowed a foggy green, giving Prospero a thin misty halo to walk in. He saw that he was in the middle of several tall dark trunks, and that the clearing was out of sight, although it might be only a few yards away. What he wanted was the path that led back to the gate. Of course, the path was not there, so he started to walk through the trees, holding the weak lamp in front of him. A vine swished down from a tree, and Prospero reached up to fend it off. His hand closed on sticky, slippery rope, and he pushed the thing away.

Suddenly, he saw the path. It might not have been the same one, but anyway it was there, and Prospero took it. The hooked branches pulled back as he walked along in the black silence. No noise now, but his soft footsteps on the flattened grass. It seemed to be the same path; at least, he thought he recognized a little black bush that grew almost across it. As he approached the bush, it slumped across his way with a rustle and what sounded like a little cry. He stopped and prodded it with his toe-it squealed and ran away. And then, there was a hand on his arm.

A voice breathed in Prospero's ear with a wet-leaf smell, and what that voice said, Prospero has never told anyone. He turned, and he grasped an arm, but his hand sank into mud-mud with a center like bone. Frantically, Prospero jerked his hand away, and with his other hand, he shoved the ball of quartz at this breathing, man-sized form. The globe burst with a flash of chilly lightning, Prospero closed his eyes tight and began shoving mechanically at what he could no longer feel. The smell was gone, and Prospero opened his eyes to find that the forest around him was full of fireflies, the last pale magic of the vanished globe. He could see to get out, but he would have to run to make it, because the little dots of light were already going out.

He ran along the path, trying not to look at the things that were going on around him, and as the last fireflies went out, he reached the gate. Outside the fence, the clearing lay in calm starlight. His hand was on the latch when he heard another voice-not the whispering leaf voice, but a little girl's weak cry.

"Help me! I can't get out!"

He turned and ran to where he saw a small white blur under a willow tree. But, when he clasped the child to him, her head crunched under his hand and the whole body turned to crackling fluttery paper. In the air, someone was laughing, and the laughter was more horrible because it was a child's-wet, gulping, and somehow harsh. It did not take long for Prospero to reach the gate again, and this time he slammed the gate open with both hands so hard that it rebounded from the stone post. He caught it from the outside, pulled the iron ring, and the latch hooked.

All the rest of the night Prospero walked up and down in the clearing, watching the forest. It was like something seen through glass, engraved and still, like frost-plants on a windowpane. As soon as it was light, he got up and walked back to town. He did not care about the townspeople's hatred now. Outside the city wall was a blacksmith's shop, and Prospero walked up to it calmly, like an old customer. The blacksmith looked up in fear.

"Give me a hammer and a chisel," said Prospero, "or I'll tie all your horse­shoes in bowknots."

The man gave him the tools. Prospero went back to the forest and kicked open the gate. He marched straight to the clearing, where he found his hat, bag, and staff untouched in the scuffed yellow circle. With the chisel, he hacked away enough of the lettering to undo the awful curse that some local magician had made with rising and falling rows of letters. But, even though he had–he hoped–wiped out the curse, he did not want to stay in this place, and in a little while, he was on a north-running road–after he had returned his tools to the startled blacksmith.