A World Elsewhere Read Online Free PDF Page B

said that she was halfway gone herself, as good as lost, so she was writing to him while she was still able to. She said Landish would bring upon himself God’s eternal shame if he didn’t take Deacon from the orphanage and raise him as his own. She said her husband had made a lot of money for Landish’s father that should be spent on her baby, not just on Landish, whose father was to blame for her husband’s death two years before. Landish wrote back to her that it was only to satisfy his father’s wishes that he was still the skipper of his own clothes.
    She replied that she would soon be “in the place from which no one knows the way back home.” He was astonished by the eloquence of her letters.
I am only sorry that I let him live, have let him think for so long that he would go unpunished for his crimes. I should have gone to his house with my husband’s gun the day the Gilbert came back without him .
I am guilty, but only of every breath I could have prevented him from drawing, every moment I let him live after I heard on the street that, far from bringing my husband safely home, he had not even brought his body back to me. He never spoke a word of consolation or regret to me .
For some time now, I have been silent in a silent world, often spoken to but never speaking. I “hear” but nothing touches me. Things that once made sound have for some time made none, though I have never stopped expecting this to change, never stopped anticipating sounds that never came, sounds of collisions, voices, vehicles, the striking of hammers and the blowing of whistles, the sounds of footsteps and the galloping of horses, the shrill pitch of the wind .
It has for long seemed that the world was buried deep in snow or lay submerged beneath the fathoms of a sea that muffled every sound. Perhaps because I have been for so long not quite fully alive I have no fear of death, no feelings at all about it in fact. I will do nothing to hurry near the day of my death but will merely await it with my customary patience .
    An inscrutable universe had, by foisting the riddle upon him, offered him the chance to change two lives. The boy knew nothing about it and likely never would if Landish declined him. So Landish decided it was no one’s choice but his.
Birth is a bundle of joy.
Death is a dwindle of joy.
    He heard the answer. No impetus, no volition inclined his will towards the boy except the word which, though it woke him, was beyond recall.
    He went there early in the morning and brought the boy back to the attic. The boy went to sleep in a place he would never see again and woke up in one he had never seen before.
    “Welcome to the attic,” Landish said to the face that peered out at him from a bundle of blankets. “It is ever a hovel and no place like home.”
    There were two rooms, a kitchen to which the stairs led and a bedroom you could only reach by way of the kitchen; no windows except for a kind of wooden-shuttered porthole in the bedroom. It always seemed like nighttime in the attic, especially in the kitchen, where the lamps were lit at noon the same as they were long after sunset. There was a black iron stove with a single damper so Landish could heat only one pot at a time; a wooden table that wobbled no matter what you put beneath its legs; two wooden chairs whose legs were enwrapped with reams of twine; a sink with a long faucet that at one end looped like a cane. Ice-cold water dripped unceasingly from it and barely reached a trickle when you turned the tap.
    The attic in the summer was so hot you couldn’t breathe, and the wind in the winter blew right through the walls. The candles flickered when it gusted and guttered when it roared and you could catch your death unless you slept with your head beneath the blankets.
    The boy’s name was Deacon. They had told him so at the orphanage and said they couldn’t account for the coincidence, the boy having the same name as their institution. Deacon’s father was