A World Elsewhere Read Online Free PDF

some professors about devising a scheme to get you expelled. I don’t know why.”
    At first Landish took it to be nothing but a spiteful lie. But he walked about the streets of the town, trying to convince himself that the fellow was foolhardy enough to tell such a lie about a Vanderluyden.
    He ran back to Lotus Land. Van was in the front room, standing, arms folded, in front of the fire.
    “Why did you do this?” Landish said, advancing on Van, who backed away and began to cry.
    “How else could I keep you in my life?”
    “You ruined me so that I would have no choice but to go with you?”
    “I had to try something or else I would never have set eyes on you again.”
    “Nor will you,” Landish said. “Nor hear from me again.”
    “You’re no better. You’ve known for years that you’d betray your father.”
    “Yes. For which I deserve to be disowned. As I will be.”
    Mr. Trull walked into the room as casually as if he always had the freedom of the whole house. Dressed for the outdoors in an overcoat and hat, he slowly withdrew a pistol from the pocket of his coat and pointed it at Landish.
    “We’ll be leaving now, you and me,” Mr. Trull said. “I’ll take you to the station and you won’t say a word or give me any trouble while we’re waiting for the train.”
    Van began to make his way from the room. He stopped in the doorway and rubbed his nose with his sleeve. “It would have worked, Landish,” he said. “If only you’d said yes.”
    Landish might never have known he’d been betrayed if he’d said yes after “they” were caught. Would their friendship have been a sham even if Landish didn’t know what Van had done and Van believed that he had done no wrong?
    He thought so.
    But he would not be living in an attic now, counting what remained of his “compensation,” with no clue what he would do when it ran out.

The Attic
    LANDISH WOKE AND SAT on the edge of the bed in the darkness, trying to decide, his feet on the floor, his hands on the mattress. He could make his way to Cluding Deacon through the snow, demand to be let in no matter the time, go from room to room, bed to bed if need be, looking for her baby boy, reading her letters aloud if he had to, though he doubted it would come to that, it being unlikely that they would say no to the first person of any name who had gone there with what he had in mind.
    He sat on the edge of the bed for hours, then lay down again. He tried to reason it out. With whom would the boy be better off, him or them? He couldn’t name a child who had prospered because of or in spite of the place called Cluding Deacon. But what chance of prospering would a charge of his have? They knew better than he did how to care for a child’s most basic needs. With them, the boy would at least have comradeship, even if it was no more than company in misery.
    He would be alone with Landish, and Landish himself had every reason to expect to be alone. But there was Cluding Deacon’s reputation. Better the boy suffer who knew what number of lesser torments than the ones that were rampant at that place.
    He mulled it over night after night in this manner and found that he could make as good an argument for taking the boy from the orphanage as for ignoring the letters the boy’s mother had written to him demanding that Landish take responsibility for him. And then there was the matter of what Landish wanted. He thought first of his book. He didn’t even know yet what it would be about, but the “feeling” of fall, which he could summon up in any season, convinced him that the book would follow on the writing of an acceptable first page, the subject of which would only announce itself as he was in the act of putting pen to paper. The boy would surely be an impediment to the book’s completion, given that without the boy he had yet to write even a sentence that he could stand. So he obsessively argued both sides of the question but came no closer to an answer.
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