The Face in the Frost by John Bellairs

Author:John Bellairs
Language: eng
Format: epub

SEVEN

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 crenellated 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 River, the border between the North and South kingdoms. The road that ran past the inn must meet a bridge at that point.

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