"Fine," said Roger, and he started to take off his heavy raincoat.
Before long, the two of them were comfortably planted in two large, sagging easy chairs drawn up before a warm fire, which sometimes burned bright sea green or deep cobalt blue because of salts that Prospero had thrown onto the logs. Between the chairs was a small octagonal table holding a dusty green wine bottle, a rapidly diminishing half wheel of cheese, and a plate of crackers. Roger Bacon had been telling about some of his more notable successes in England, and now, he began to tell, with equal delight, some stories about his more egregious failures.
"... and so, I went to work on a brazen head that was going to tell me how to encircle England with a wall of brass, to keep out marauding Danes and other riffraff. I think something went wrong when i didn't put enough yellow regulus of phosphorus in-or maybe there was too much astatine permanganate. Anyway, I got a head that was at least as talkative as your mirror ..."
"I heard that!" yelled a voice from upstairs.
"You be quiet," shouted Prospero over his shoulder. "Why don't you go watch late movies or something?"
There was silence upstairs, followed shortly by the muffled sound of bird imitations.
"Anyway," Roger went on, munching a piece of cheese, "the head did talk a lot, but unlike your mirror it was deaf as a ... as a ..."
"Brass post?" put in Prospero helpfully.
"Yes," muttered Roger, giving him a dirty look. "You might say so. Well, I asked it how to make a brass wall to encircle England, and it said 'Hah?' 'Brass wall,' I said, louder. 'В as in Bryophyta ..."
"Bryophyta?" Prospero asked.
"Yes," answered Roger testily, "mosses and liverworts."
"I hate liver," said Prospero.
"As well you might," said Roger in a quiet, despairing voice. "As well you might. But be that as it may, I spelled it out. R as in rotogravure process ..." He waited, but Prospero, who was biting down hard on his pipe to keep from laughing, did not interrupt."... A as in Anaxagoras, S as in Symplegades, and S as in Smead Jolley, the only baseball player in history to make four errors on a single played ball."
"And, what did the head say?"
"It said 'Umpf' or something like that, and then it started to rattle off a long formula, which I may have copied wrong. Or, maybe the head didn't know what it was talking about. At any rate, when I chanted the formula the next day, down by the seashore, I heard a sound like crumhorns and shawms, and behold! All of England was encircled with an eight-foot-high wall of Glass!"
"Class? Plain, ordinary glass?"
"Yes, and not very good glass at that. Paper-thin and full of bubbles and pocks. The first boatload of Vikings that came over after the wall went up turned around and went back, because it was a sunny day and the wall glittered wonderfully. But the next day, when they came back, it was cloudy. One of them gave the wall a little tap with an ax, and it went tinkle, tinkle, and now, there is a lot of broken glass on the beach. Not long after that, I was asked to leave."
Prospero could not think of anything adequate to say, so he suggested that they break out the brandy and cigars.
They talked on into the night, and the large candle in the corner, shaped like the head of a mournful monk, got sadder and sadder looking. But, as the candle got scowlier, the two men became more delighted and talkative, so that Prospero finally felt up to telling Roger about the cloak in the cellar. Roger listened with a concerned and sometimes frightened look on his face, and when the story was over, he put his brandy glass down and waited a bit before he spoke.
"You don't mention the moth, but I suppose that neither of us has to dot such a large i. Has anything else happened?"
Prospero nodded. "Last night I dreamed that I was still in bed, but wide awake, staring at something near the foot of my bed. I stared for a long while at the vague shape, and I gradually made out the form of an old man standing there. When he came forward into the moonlight, I could sec that he was watching me with a scornful smile-it was a cruel, cynical face, the arrogant face of a man who is secure in some superior power or knowledge. Without saying anything, he went to the window, which was bright with the light of a full moon. And then, he began to write on the windowpane with his index finger, and it seemed to me that each stroke of his finger cut into the glass like a diamond. For some reason, although the words glowed, with a silver light, I couldn't get any meaning out of the writing. I strained my eyes and stared, but it all seemed like nonsense. Then, the old man turned to me and said, 'Can you read what I have written?' When I said that I could not, he laughed a low, mocking laugh and his whole face contorted in a contemptuous sneer. That is unfortunate' he said, in a cold voice. 'You will suffer because of your ignorance.'
"At that point, I woke up. The room was bright with moonlight, but of course there were no words on the window and, as far as I could tell, there was no one in the room. So, I went back to sleep again, and I'm not sure how long I slept, but I was awakened by the sound of someone tapping on my window. It was a sharp, metallic sound, not like someone rapping with his knuckles, and I sat up with a start. When I looked at the window, which is not very far from my bed, I saw that there was a large bird outside on the sill. And, a second later I saw that it was not an ordinary bird. It was skeletal. The gray light was shining through its rib cage and its eye holes; it was pecking at the pane and clattering its horrible black wings against my window I was suddenly seized with the fear that it would break through the glass at any minute and get in, and I jumped out on the opposite side of the bed. I got hold of my staff, which was leaning against the wall near the bed, and I muttered some kind of charm, I forget what. It didn't work, but a minute or two later the bird gave an awful scraping cry and fell over backward, off the sill."
Roger opened his mouth to say something, but Prospero raised his hand.
"I know what you're going to say. But, the bird was not in a dream. I sat there on the edge of the bed for some time after the thing vanished, but I finally did get some sleep. The next morning-this morning–I looked to see if the bird had left any mark on the ground where it fell. It had. The grass was crushed down in one spot under my window. It wasn't a dream, and these things-the bird, the moth, and the cloak-are not just apparitions."
"I don't see what you mean."
"Roger, you know as well as I do that apparitions, evil or otherwise, are abroad in the world. You have put them down with incantations and so have I. But, these things were tangible-they were real in a way that a ghost is not. Have you ever gotten close enough to an apparition to try to touch it?"
Roger thought for a minute. "Well," he said, "I once had to put to rest the ghost of an old woman who was haunting a village south of here. She had been a witch, and her power to return came from a little wooden charm she had hidden under the floor of her house. I found it and decided to burn it in the town square-with the proper ceremonies, of course. When I set fire to the amulet, she appeared and rushed at me with her arms raised. She had long hooked nails and looked as though she wanted to scratch my eyes out."