Emperor of Gondwanaland

by Paul Di Filippo

  Nonetheless, he remained observant enough to take note of Hazel’s attitude and behavior, since so much rested on this stranger’s character. In contrast with Frost’s disheveled state, Hazel appeared as neat, if dowdy, as she had last night. She had enjoyed a hearty breakfast with ladylike gusto, while chatting amiably with the children. Flora seemed particularly taken with her, laughing at her nonsensical chatter. The medium—the witch—seemed an uncomplicated person. But Frost suspected that, like any square yard of simple forest soil, she concealed an entire sophisticated and alien civilization beneath her surface.

  At nine-thirty the Eddys began to make ready to attend church. Soon the family and their guests stood at the front gate, ready to go their separate ways.

  Hazel patted the heads of the children. A1 and Mel’s normally unruly hair had been brilliantined flat. “Enjoy the services, Muriel. Robert and I are heading for our own sort of natural chapel.”

  Clifford tilted back his fedora and clapped Frost on his shoulder. “You’re in good hands, Bob. I expect that when we next see you, you’ll be feeling considerably more chipper.”

  In the sober light of day, Frost experienced some doubts about the wisdom of committing himself to the hands of this unknown witch. “Such an outcome of this haring about after spooks would be a welcome surprise. But I’m not counting on it.”

  Muriel said, “Robert Frost, such a defeatist attitude is hardly likely to merit success.” She stood on tiptoes and kissed Frost’s stubbly cheek.

  Then the Eddys departed.

  Frost turned to Hazel. “Exactly where are we heading, to meet this ‘Nevernaught’?”

  “Why, Robert, only to someplace you’ve already exhibited an affinity for. The Dark Swamp.”

  Frost jolted backward. Hazel’s comment struck deep into his memories, hitting one of the most tumultuous periods in his life.

  Shortly after the twenty-year-old Frost had poured out his heart to Elinor, gifting her with that copy of Twilight, he received intelligence that caused him to believe that she had spurned his gift, rejected his soul-offering, and that she had pledged her hand to a rival. Plunged into black despair, Frost conceived of only one possible retreat that would match the anguish of his being: North Carolina’s Great Dismal Swamp. A legendary haunt of melancholy, affirmed as the recourse of heartstricken lovers by many of Frost’s heroes, such as Longfellow and Thomas Moore, the Great Dismal Swamp seemed the only fitting abode wherein to nurse his wounds—or extinguish his very consciousness.

  By train and steamer he made his way to the boggy wasteland. Hurling himself on foot into its darkling interior, still clad in his unsuitable street clothes, Frost battled briars and vines and sinkholes for ten miles, until darkness fell. Just on the point of casting himself into the marsh’s peaty waters, he stumbled upon a party of duck hunters. Suddenly, human company appeared precious to him, and his mood began to lift. Over the next few days, he experienced various misadventures back in the South’s small towns, which culminated in his humbly wiring his mother for the train fare home.

  But how could Hazel know any of this? Perhaps her remark merely referred symbolically to some aspect of his personality she divined. Frost chose for the moment not to interrogate her on this point.

  “Yes, I suppose my stories have exhibited an affinity for the nighted places of the earth. But are you speaking literally?”

  “Yes, I am. We need to ride a trolley to the village of Chepachet, to visit its Dark Swamp.”

  Vague memories of conversations with Lovecraft on various Rhode Island locales rumored to possess supernatural qualities now returned to Frost. “I believe I’ve heard of this locus of mystery. All right, then, let’s catch a ride downtown, to Exchange Place.”

  As they strolled toward the East Providence trolley stop, Frost sought to learn more about his companion. Hazel needed little prompting to talk about herself.

  “I’m thirty-eight. No special male friends, but plenty of chums of both sexes in the amateur-press world. I enjoy writing, but have commenced to suspect that I have little talent for it. I live in the same town I was born in, with my widowed mother. It was she who helped me become a witch, for it’s an old family calling among the Heald women. But I’m only a pauper witch, not inclined to feather my own nest with my skills. Not do I indulge in any kind of repellent or malicious work, such as milking bats or riding bony old men naked through the night. I prefer to use my abilities to help people. People who deserve it. Such as you, Robert.”

  Frost was silent. Hazel’s easy candor disarmed him. She seemed utterly open and aboveboard, yet remarkably unshallow. There were depths to this woman not yet apparent.

  They boarded the first trolley to stop for them and rode west, crossing the sparkling Seekonk River. In the center of Providence they transferred to the Chepachet-bound car and settled down for an hour’s trip.

  Their conversation turned to abstract literary matters, and Frost found Hazel to be a well-informed devotee of the arts. The ride into the state’s northwestern rural domains proved congenial and passed swiftly. Before Frost quite expected it, they were disembarking in Chepachet Village.

  The heartening sunlight fell upon a rambling, well-tended cemetery that climbed a hillside. Small stores lined a quarter-mile stretch of the main road, known as the Putnam Pike, which, if followed farther, would lead all the way to Hartford, Connecticut. The several private homes that could be seen appeared wholesome and well maintained.

  “Well, what next?” Frost inquired, as they stood in front of a farrier’s, shuttered and quiet on the Sabbath.

  “Let’s inquire at this tavern.”

  Frost asked Hazel to wait outside, leery of the potentially bawdy atmosphere inside the dining establishment. But to his surprise, he found the Stage Coach Tavern to be a reputable place, and just gearing up for the lunchtime trade. Frost buttonholed a portly elderly woman polishing silverware, and soon had directions. Moreover, he managed to secure a sack lunch for the two of them, spending his last fifty cents. He hoped Hazel could supply carfare back to the city.

  He hoped that after his hegira into the Dark Swamp he would be in any condition to ride home.

  Rejoining Hazel, Frost said, “We need to seek out the property of a farmer named Ernest Law. It’s a mile farther down the road.”

  “Let’s get walking then! There’s no more splendid recreation on such a fine day!”

  Hazel’s sentiments pleased Frost, and he offered the woman his arm, at least for their promenade through town, where the sidewalks allowed them to walk abreast.

  When they reached the outskirts of the village, where only fields and forests and the isolated homestead greeted their gaze, Frost dug out the paper-wrapped roast-beef sandwiches supplied by the tavern and shared them with Hazel. Two large pickles spiced the meal. They ate as they walked down the muddy, gravel-strewn road, conversation temporarily abandoned. Hardly had they finished their apples—a bit mealy, after a long winter in storage—when a rutted, weedy sidetrack appeared.

  “This must be the Law farm,” Frost ventured. “Their road appears little traveled. I take it the Dark Swamp is not a popular destination.”

  Hazel said, “The road less traveled always offers vaster prospects than the high road. Never hesitate to venture down such paths, Robert.”

  Frost bristled. “I wasn’t hesitating, woman! Let’s move on!”

  They turned and followed the track that bent its way through the undergrowth.

  After perhaps half a mile, they caught sight of what was presumably the Law farm: an unpainted, weather-silvered, one-story residence in poor repair, nursed by various outbuildings of equal shabbiness. Moving across the sumac-invaded lawn, Frost and Hazel reached the shoddy steps. Soon Frost was knocking at the door.

  When the door swung open, it revealed a bony woman with a careworn yet friendly face, her checked house dress faded and much mended. “Yes? How may I help you?”

  “Mrs. Law?” Frost inquired. “We’re visitors from Pro
vidence who are keen to see the Dark Swamp. We understand that at least a portion of it extends across your property.”

  The woman regarded Frost and Hazel as if they had recently escaped from some sanitarium. “That worthless blotch of land does indeed intrude on our property. Why anyone in his right mind would want to dally there is beyond me. But if you continue to follow the track until you pass the last cornfield, you’ll come directly to it. You’ll have to excuse me now. I’d offer you some refreshment, but we’ve just today had a death in the family. It’s our hired man, and we are busy trying to arrange a home burial.”

  “Oh, please, pardon us—” began Frost. But before he could finish his apology he was talking to a closed door.

  Leaving the sad-aspected house behind, Frost said glumly to Hazel, “Sorrow is the one constant in every human life.”

  “Is it, Robert?” was her reply. “Remember that happiness makes up in height what it lacks in breadth.”

  Past the tattered detritus of last year’s harvest the pilgrims moved. Some distance off, a line of crooked trees betokened the border of the Dark Swamp. Frost felt impelled to ask Hazel a question.

  “Hazel, exactly what is this Nevernaught from whom I am supposed to derive some solace?”

  “The Nevernaught itself will reveal as much of its nature to you as you can handle, Robert. For now, let’s just say that you will never meet any being of larger capacities.”

  Frost harumphed. “I suppose I’ll have to be content with such mystical formulations until the moment of truth, if any.”

  Hazel stopped, and Frost perforce did likewise. They were adjacent to a low stone wall—partly tumbled, lichen-crusted boulders scattered like the heads of decapitated warriors.

  “I feel you are beginning to doubt the reality of that which we seek, Robert. Allow me to show you something of the unfathomed nature of existence.”

  Hazel stooped and knocked on the nearest boulder.

  “Stonebear, stonebear, show yourself!”

  The first response to Hazel’s invocation was a rumbling underfoot. Frost distinctly felt the ground quiver. Then, at the foot of the wall, soil began to boil. A blocky furred head pushed up into the air, soon followed by the creature’s body. Its emergence sent another section of the wall cascading down.

  The stonebear was as large as a small child. Its head resembled that of a walrus, with shorter tusks, while its mud-coated tawny body reminded Frost of a woodchuck’s—with feet like curved shovel blades.

  Ignoring the humans, the stonebear began powerfully pawing down the upper courses of the wall until Hazel said, “Enough! Begone!”

  The anomalous creature immediately dived back down its hole like a seal entering the water.

  Hazel regarded the gape-mouthed Frost with a wry smile. “The stonebears are the guardians of the earth’s rocks. They spend their days moving stones about underground, for reasons no one has ever quite understood. But I assume their behavior aids the maternal earth in some fashion. The stonebears resent the human use of their flinty charges for walls, and will knock down any wall that’s not protected by a local witch. Any town whose stone walls are succumbing to something which does not love them, is a town bereft of its witch.”

  Frost finally found his voice. “Farmer Law has his wall mending cut out for him now, thanks to my doubts. Best we move on before my skepticism causes our host any more labor.”

  Before much longer, Frost and Hazel attained the line of arthritic trees, realizing that it indeed marked the marge of the Dark Swamp. The land beyond this border was not immediately sodden and impassable, but seemed to transition gradually from solidity, insofar as their vision could penetrate the marsh. Skunk cabbages flared bright green. A footpath led off across various tussocks and ridges.

  “Follow me,” said Hazel, and Frost did.

  They moved deeper into the Dark Swamp, leaving behind daylight and certainty of footing. Even without foliage, the trees of the Dark Swamp seemed to occlude the sunlight. The ground grew squishy under Frost’s soles.

  After some indeterminate time that seemed eons (yet the sun never moved from its perch in the sky), Frost was on the point of asking how much further they had to traverse this cloistered dankness when Hazel called a halt.

  They had reached a sizable island in the bog. Astonishingly, the island was covered with premature flowers, well in advance of any such colorful carpet in the outer world. But these were not wild blooms, rather a remnant of some lost garden, mostly simple tulips and daffodils. Realizing this, Frost noticed that the middle of the island featured a roughly rectangular gap in the flowers. He advanced cautiously toward the irregularity.

  The gap was a cellar hole. Here at one time had stood a house. Now the only trace of the structure was a slope-side declivity. In one corner of the cellar hole, three or four moss-furred stairs descended to nowhere.

  Frost suddenly experienced the cellar hole as an empty eye socket in the earth, somehow still able to pin him with an inhuman stare.

  Hazel broke Frost’s fascination with the cellar hole by speaking. “Here in a simple cottage for uncounted millennia lived an unchanging member of an ancient race, the last survivor of a dawn people, those who furnished Adam’s sons with wives. He was the guardian of the Dark Swamp and its secrets. But in this new benighted age we inhabit, when God seems perpetually on the verge of saying for the final time, ‘Put out the light,’ the guardian has moved on. Too few seekers come this way anymore to sustain him.”

  “He—this guardian—he is not the Nevernaught?”

  “No. The Nevernaught is another. Let us inform that being now that you wish an audience.”

  Hazel knelt among the flowers, and Frost mimicked her without knowing why. Hazel placed her lips against the golden bell of a daffodil. “Nevernaught, I bring you one who inquires after answers to the questions and doubts that plague him. May he see you?” Hazel shifted her ear to the mouth of the flower. She listened for a moment, then bade Frost do the same.

  Frost bumped the daffodil with his hairy ear. Perfume enveloped him.

  From the fragile trumpet the single word was whispered repeatedly: “Come, come, come …”

  Frost regained his feet. He hardly knew whether he was standing or still kneeling, whether it was night or day.

  Hazel guided Frost to the edge of the cellar hole. “You must go down.”

  Frost turned an imploring face to Hazel. “You’ll come with me?”

  Hazel smiled, and Frost felt a faint surge of confidence. “Not today.”

  Frost’s shoulders slumped. But then, resigned to the exclusionary nature of his quest, he set his foot upon the first step.

  It took thirteen impossible steps for daylight to vanish entirely. Frost never looked back, but fancied he would have seen a dwindling, green-edged square of light with perhaps Hazel’s head framed therein.

  In his descent, Frost recalled for the first time in many years the shunned fate of his sister Jeanie. Always mentally unstable, she had been committed by relatives in 1920 to the state hospital in Augusta, Maine, without Frost’s intercession one way or the other. Once very close to Jeanie, Frost had never visited her in her confinement. Frost’s guilt had burdened him since. Now he wondered if the hereditary madness of his father that had claimed Jeanie was devouring him as well.

  Without choice, whether mad or not, Frost continued his descent. Each step seemed to abase his spirit further.

  At last Frost reached the final step, realizing it when he stumbled in trying to step upon the one that wasn’t there. In what seemed to be a corridor of woe, he continued onward.

  Ahead of him a pale shimmering began to register on his straining eyes. Was it a tiny will-o’-the-wisp floating in a crypt? Or a galaxy revolving against the backdrop of interstellar space?

  Frost slowed his pace and began to shuffle cautiously. And well he did. For his extended left foot eventually met thin air. Frost stopped at the edge of the abyss. A cosmic breeze, chill yet not unpleasant, seemed
to stroke his face.

  The shimmering still tantalized his light-starved eyes. One moment it seemed a spinning nebula, lazing across the heavens. The next it seemed a pocket-sized ghost. Occasionally it resolved into an androgynous human face blending all races into one, yet with disturbing echoes of the visages of both Elinor and himself.

  As Frost struggled to fix the nature of the being, it spoke—it sang!—pulsing visibly with each silent word that seemed to echo directly in Frost’s brain.

  Nevernaught, nevernaught. There was never naught, there was always thought. Thought and afterthought.

  “What—what manner of thing are you?”

  I am the tree of all that will ever be.

  “Are you God?”

  One and complete, unified yet discrete. Conflict and peace, the Thing of things. From hydrogen all the way to man. Less in the present than in the future, and less in both together than in the past.

  Frost realized that the riddle of this entity’s nature was beside the point, if it could heal him.

  “Nevernaught, the shade of my wife counseled me to seek your help. Can you show me what I need to see, to go on living?”

  Out of coming-in, into having been! said the Nevernaught, then flared nova-bright.

  Frost hurled his arm up to block the searing light. When the stabbing radiance finally died away, Frost opened his eyes.

  Below him spun the planet Earth, a cloud-stroked, continent-marbled orb. Frost clutched his throat, bicycled his feet for purchase, flailed for anything to grip. But when he found that he continued to breathe easily and was not falling, he ceased his gyrations.

  As Frost watched, he realized that his vision was enlarging. While retaining his orbital perspective, holding the planet entire in his mind, he simultaneously began to apprehend surface details of the globe. Wild herds in Africa, swarming cities in Europe, the jungles of South America. The immensity and variety of life overwhelmed him with sensations of appreciation and gratitude and delight. Never before had he truly savored the miracle of his world’s existence.