Emperor of Gondwanaland (47 page)

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.

But at the height of his joy, a transformation began. Half of Earth began to ice over. The other hemisphere began to burn. Ice and flame raced to meet at the terminator. Frost seemed to hear the dying screams of all creation, as billions of entities crisped or shattered.

When the opposing forces met, Earth instantly vanished, as did the attendant stars.

Now Frost was left in some featureless desert place, a zone with no expression and nothing to express. He could hardly grasp the death of Earth he had just witnessed, so blank was this new environment. It was as if all the beauty he had been savoring had been just a painting on the stretched skin of a balloon that, once pricked, became less than nothing.

Time trickled by. Or did not. But there came a moment when Frost reached a new understanding.

This desert place was inside him. He was viewing the emptiness within himself, the emptiness that had been incipient in him, but only fully born the night he lost everything he loved in flames.

Frost began to weep. What a cruel fate, to carry around such a vacuum. Why could he not be populated with sustaining hopes and dreams and beacons of affection as other men were? Were such helpful bastions of mortal existence any more false or inaccurate than this ghastly nothingness?

Even before the thought was completed, the voice of the Nevernaught returned.

Men dance round in a ring and suppose, but the Secret sits in the middle and knows!

Now Frost’s inner desert began to change.

Flowers thrust out of the featureless medium. Tulips and daffodils …

Frost lay upon his back on the abnormally warm ground of the island, flowers nodding around his body. Hazel bent over him, soothing his brow.

Frost found her hand and clutched it. Even as he spoke, his vision of the Nevernaught and what it had showed him was fading. But what remained behind was a certainty of purpose and a calmness of heart he had not felt in a dozen years.

“Hazel, I had a glimpse, a glimpse of something wonderful—”

Hazel’s smile held both sadness and delight. “Yes, Robert, that’s the most any of us ever have.”

Frost was on the point of leaving his room to meet Hazel. The month was June, the year 1925, and they were heading to New York by train. Frost gathered up his luggage, which included a string-wrapped manuscript bearing the tide
A Boy’s Will
.

On the doorstep, Frost encountered the mailman.

“Mr. Frost, just one for you today.”

Frost accepted the envelope. It bore the return address for
Weird Tales
.

Dear Grampa Jack,

Weh-hell, I swan! Such a startling career turnaround Uncle Theobald has never seen in all his advanced years! From spinner of supernatural shiver-makers to a certified poetaster! The imminent publication of your debut volume of verses is an occasion much to be celebrated, save by all those devotees of the occult yarn, who are losing one of the finest talents ever to grace our small field. I suppose I’ll just have to fill my empty pages with more stories from old Cliffy. Providencians forever! But don’t let all the attention from those Eastern literary nabobs get your head in a whirl! It’s as easy to go down as to rise up, and such fawning litterateurs can be damn fickle. But Grampa Jack has a firm head on his shoulders, and certainly knows that he has a home to return to in the pages of
Weird Tales
, should fortune ever turn his feet our way again.

But even this news pales in the light of your upcoming wedding to the inestimable Miss Heald! Please give all my regards to your talented fiancée. If half the hints about her character which you’ve dropped are true, then she’s some catch! A veritable daughter of Endor. I know that married life will shore you up in any future moments of trial, just as it has yours truly. Why, my ol’ battle wagon even has her Uncle Theobald making regular visits to a general practitioner now! I’ll attain Methuselah’s years with such healthy ways!