A World Elsewhere

by Wayne Johnston

  He heard Landish cursing. Deacon hoped he was bumping headfirst into everything, getting scratches on his face. Soon he couldn’t hear him. He must have stopped so he could listen for him. Deacon stopped. He counted to a hundred twice until he was sure Landish had gone back to the bridle path.

  Deacon wasn’t sure which way to go. He ran until he couldn’t see the trees in the deepening darkness. Then he walked with his hands in front of his face. He came out on the slope that led down to the stream that ran into Lake Loom. Olmsted’s stream. It was easy to find. The water was silver because of the moon.

  He could walk around Lake Loom and then keep going straight until he reached the wall. Goddie said the road was just outside the wall. He wasn’t sure how far it was. Maybe farther than the Crosses. It was so cold and the moon was so bright he could see his breath. Palmer said that if you knew the sky well enough it became a kind of map that you could use to get where you were going, especially at sea but even in the woods if you went high enough above the trees to see the stars.

  The lake was frozen and covered in snow except where it was broken by the stream that went beneath the ice about six feet from shore. He might make it to the wall if he could walk across the lake, but he didn’t think he would if he had to walk around it. There wasn’t a path. There’d be no moonlight in the woods. There might be other, deeper streams that he couldn’t cross or that he might drown in like Landish almost did when they lived on Dark Marsh Road.

  Landish said he weighed so little that if he walked on water it would only come up to his ankles.

  Deacon stamped on the ice with one foot. It cracked and water bubbled up. The ice was not much thicker than glass. He bet that in the daytime you could see right through it. He wished he could skate across. Goddie had skates but Landish had never bought him skates. It wouldn’t take long to skate across if you knew how.

  He looked up at the moon. It wasn’t in the same place as before. It would get orange and bigger as it sank below the Ridge. Then there would be nothing but the stars. He looked behind him at Vanderland, high up on the hill. More than half the lights were on. He wondered what the Blokes were doing and where Landish was. He wished he was in the Smoker listening to Landish making fun of Sedgewick. But then he thought about what Landish told him on the bridle path and he knew he was lying and was going away for ever. He looked up at the sky and shouted “Landish!” It felt as if he was shouting at the stars.

  Having alerted a blacksmith that Deacon was missing, Landish ran towards the lake. He blew on his hands to keep them warm and wondered why he hadn’t thought to wear his gloves. He imagined that the last of those who had ventured out to take the air were heading back to Vanderland and thinking of the fires they would soon be seated by. He trailed Deacon’s footprints down the slope to Olmsted’s stream, then followed the stream to Lake Loom, to the very edge of which the footprints led.

  On the lakeshore, there were prints pointing every which way and trampled on by other prints, as if Deacon had turned round repeatedly, hoping for a clue from his surroundings as to what he should do next.

  There was a small, dark patch of ice about a foot from shore, a faint concavity from which the new snow had been melted by water that had seeped up through the cracks. He thought Deacon had likely tested the ice with his boot to see if it would hold him. There were no other dark patches, just the open channel where the current of Olmsted’s stream carried out into the lake.

  A line of footprints led away from the trampled patch of snow to where the shoreline was broken by the stream. There were no footprints on the other side. Deacon’s prints led to the water’s edge. They ended there.

  He wondered if the boy had slipped and fallen while trying to cross the stream, slipped and struck his head on one of the large rocks that rose up from the surface. The current looked strong, but he doubted that the water was much past Deacon’s knees. But there was no telling how abruptly the water deepened where the current met the lake.

  Given what the boy weighed, he would only need to fall forward a few feet, perhaps while trying to get his balance, to have wound up in water deep and fast enough to carry him out into the lake. He might have gone in just minutes, or even seconds.

  Landish couldn’t make out the end of the channel. It was possible that the boy had stayed afloat long enough to bring up against the ice, possible that he was still there, soon to go under and out into Lake Loom, but still alive, his face and hands pressed to the underside of the ice.

  He took off his coat and boots and waded into the channel. He was soon waist-deep in water so cold that when he tried to shout the boy’s name he couldn’t make a sound. He’d be over his head before he reached the ice. He looked around. A side current might have carried Deacon under the ice closer to shore, under the ice on either side of Landish. It would be too dark under the ice to do anything but blindly try to find him with his hands. He could smash the ice to pieces with his fists for all the good it would do the boy. He tried to shout again but barely managed to croak out Deacon’s name.

  The boy might not be in the lake. But he could not otherwise account for the disappearance of his footprints from the snow. He looked across the ice at the far, moonlit shore.

  It would be wholly his fault if the boy was gone. He would hear the accusations of many in his dreams, but the loudest of them all would be the boy’s. There could be no pardon for losing Deacon to his father’s fate, for losing the son entrusted to him by the widow of Carson of the Gilbert. He would not be able to go on if the boy was gone. He would not have been able to if he were wholly blameless, but most of what the boy had said on the bridle path was true. He thought of Deacon running downhill to the lake in the darkness. As alone in his last moments as his father must have been. Running because, having been betrayed, he could think of nothing else to do. Everyone must go alone to the place from which no one knows the way back home. No exceptions, not even for children. Not even for a boy who was half the size of other boys his age. He wished that he had never said such things.

  “LANDISH.”

  At first he thought his name came from far out on the lake, perhaps even from the other side of it. He heard it twice more and realized that it was a diminishing echo.

  He turned slowly, chest deep in water, trying to keep his footing on the slick rocks of Lake Loom.

  Deacon thought he could run back into the woods and get lost on purpose for a while. Landish had told him what to do if he got lost in the winter at night. He’d made him memorize the rules. Number one was don’t get lost. Number two was don’t pretend you’re not lost when you know you are. Number three was stay put but don’t stay still. Mark off a room-sized space and never leave or lie down in that room. Start a fire if you can, sing songs and picture what your room will look like when the sun came up.

  He was at the water’s edge. If he went in, he would feel it soaking through his clothes. They might never find him, never know for certain that he died. Forever lost like his father, Carson of the Gilbert. Another cross without a grave. Just a marker like his father’s in the cemetery on the windy hill below Mount Carmel. He would see what Landish saw when he went through the ice. Like a pie crust from inside the pie, Landish said. But he’d rammed his way up through the ice head first, emerging like someone who had climbed up from the bottom of the river on a flight of stairs. But Deacon knew he wasn’t strong enough for that. He wasn’t strong enough for anything.

  Deacon saw himself in the lake. All but for his head and arms. Hanging on, clinging to the wet and slippery ice, head tilted back as he tried to shout while he was gasping from the cold. Landish would blame himself.

  It was cold, but he didn’t feel cold. His heart beat like a bird’s. He was so warm he was sweating. His clothes were wet and sticking to him like they did when it was hot. He pulled his pants away from his skinny, good-for-nothing legs and his shirt away from his belly and chest. He bet that he was red all over. Moonlit mist rose from the open channel in the lake made by Olmst
ed’s stream. Even in Carolina, nothing looked colder and darker than open water in winter.

  Landish had picked him but didn’t want him anymore. Landish had picked Esse. Landish and Esse, without the nuisance of a puny runt like him. Landish asked Mr. Vanderluyden to take him off his hands. He’d said in the attic that Captain Druken’s hat was something called his inspiration, and it didn’t matter where it was, or whose it was or even if it was, as long as he remembered it. Landish and Esse would take Gen of Eve away into Just Mist and Deacon would never see the three of them again.

  He would walk up the stream, in the stream so Landish would see his footprints in the snow, leading to the stream. There’d be no hole where he went through, so they would think he had walked down the stream into the channel like Goddie walked down the steps into the swimming pool in the basement of Vanderland. Landish would think he had done it, walked into the lake and disappeared beneath the ice. He stepped into the stream. The water was shallow, but it was so cold it made his shins and ankles ache. He kept going until trees closed in above the stream from both banks. He couldn’t see a thing when he looked upstream or at the sky.

  But when he turned around, he saw the lake, moonlit, bright. It made him wish he hadn’t tried to make it look like he went in. He decided to go back and climb up the hill to Vanderland and The Blokes. Landish might be there. He waded towards the lake, trying to go fast but having to drag his feet through the water because he couldn’t lift his legs high enough to clear the surface. He heard from far up on the slope what Mr. Vanderluyden called his wolf pack. But they were just dogs. He wasn’t afraid of them. Even if you walked right through a pack of them all they did was sniff the ground. No one went out hunting after dark, not even when the sky was clear and the moon was full, but the dogs sounded like they did when they had the scent of something. He heard a gunshot and the voice of someone he thought must be shouting at the dogs that were getting closer to him. Through the bare branches that blocked his view of Vanderland, he saw torches coming down the hill. “Dea … con,” someone shouted, dragging out his name as if they thought he was a thousand miles away. It echoed round the lake. He tried to call out, but he couldn’t. He tried to wade faster but the water was deeper.

  Emerging from behind the branches, he saw Landish coming at him from the lake. Landish walking out of Lake Loom the way he walked out of the river.

  Deacon began to run towards him, stubbed his foot on a rock and all but dove into the channel where the running water met the lake. His head went under. He breathed water through his nose and mouth. He got to his hands and knees, coughing and snorting. The back of his nose and throat burned like they did when he woke up in the nighttime with a cold. Dick and the happy couple hurt so much he grabbed them with both hands.

  He slipped and went under again. This time he couldn’t find the bottom with his hands or feet.

  Landish saw nothing but the snow-covered lakeshore and an upstream grove of cedars. He didn’t know who had shouted to him, but it had sounded like someone older than the boy, though perhaps that was owing to the sound of the rushing stream.

  “DEACON.”

  It came from high up on the hill behind the house. He saw the lights of torches and heard the excited barking of Van’s harriers. He chested shoreward, against the current, barely making headway. He lost his footing, fell backwards and went under. He was soon standing again, spitting, wiping his face, pushing his dripping hair aside, lips quivering.

  Through a film of water, he saw Deacon emerge from the darkness where the branches of the cedars closed above the stream, staggering as though on his last legs, arms pumping though he was barely moving, wading almost silently with hardly a ripple in front of him or a wake behind.

  “Jesus, Deacon,” Landish cried just as Deacon toppled face first into the stream and went under.

  Landish plucked him from the water by his hair with one hand. He took him in his arms and thrashed his way to shore.

  A horse with Van astride it stopped just short of them.

  “Give him to me,” Van said, but Landish shook his head. Van dismounted and tried to take Deacon from him, but Landish pushed him away so hard that Van fell onto his back, skidding in the snow. The horseman just behind Van pointed a pistol at Landish. It was Mr. Trull.

  “For Christ’s sake, Trull, don’t,” Van said. “You’ll hit the boy. Landish—take the horse.”

  Landish put Deacon on Van’s horse and climbed on behind him. They rode along the shore, taking shortcuts along the lake, the horse galloping through the ice and water and snow spraying up around them. Mr. Vanderluyden’s best horse. The best one at Vanderland. He held Deacon’s small body hard against him with one arm. The speed of the horse uphill made it feel as if the wind were blowing through them and he tried to shield the boy from the cold. His clothes were glazed with ice, and so were Landish’s, though not frozen solid yet, like they were after he fell through. The harriers followed them barking in mad pursuit. They went past men holding torches aloft, and Deacon opening his eyes for a moment thought he was looking at the Golden Queen in New York.

  The horse went instinctively where horses weren’t allowed. She followed a trail through the orchard that Landish hadn’t known was there, tore through the Ramble, raced across the rear court where Goddie had played croquet in summer with her Cronies from New York. Landish thought she would gallop straight across the Esplanade, but she turned sharply at the corner of the house and stopped in front of the steps that led up to the tree-high doors of Vanderland.

  Van’s version of what happened was the talk of Vanderland. They talked of Deacon Carson Druken who had bolted while walking on the bridle path with Landish, run off into the underbrush because of something Landish did or said. Landish, who gave chase but couldn’t catch him, ran back to the stables where he found the blacksmith still at work to announce that with a cold night for which he was ill dressed coming on the boy was missing and would freeze to death if not soon found. A search party comprising every man at Vanderland, including Mr. Vanderluyden, spread out in all directions from the house, on foot, on horseback, wielding torches, shouting Deacon’s name. Mr. Vanderluyden found him, it was said, fished him by the hair from the waters of Lake Loom just as he was going under. A blacksmith saw the boy dive into the lake at the mouth of Olmsted’s stream. Another second and he would have disappeared beneath the ice, dead by his own hand though he was but a child. Landish hit Mr. Vanderluyden and would have hit him again if not for Mr. Trull. Mr. Vanderluyden rushed Deacon back on horseback to the house where the boy was administered to by the Vanderland doctor, who put him in a metal tub of near-boiling, mentholated water by which the boy was revived from the torpor induced by his immersion in the frigid lake.

  “I’m sorry,” Deacon told Landish. “I ran up the stream so you’d think I’d drowned. But then I changed my mind.”

  Landish understood that the boy hadn’t really known how much he would frighten him. He didn’t know, and hopefully would never know, how it felt to bear the blame for someone’s death. Captain Druken was to blame for the death of the boy’s parents, and Landish almost to blame for the death of their son. And maybe Van was to blame for Vivvie. Deacon couldn’t know that he would recall the sorrow and dread of this night no differently than if Deacon really had been lost and his remains recovered in the morning from the waters of Lake Loom. And it seemed to Landish that the boy’s belief in him was likewise lost, not since a few hours ago but since some moment whose passing neither one of them had noticed, perhaps as long ago as Newfoundland.

  Deacon said he hadn’t even meant to get wet above the knees. He said it was mean of him to make it look as if he had drowned himself. He said his teeth were going like a typewriter when they put him in the tub.

  “Mine, too,” Landish said.

  “But it wasn’t as bad as falling in the river, was it?”

  Landish shook his head.

  They didn’t talk about the argument they had on the bridle path.
/>
  “Did you think I was a goner?” Deacon said.

  “I wasn’t sure.”

  “What would I do if I had a fever?” Deacon said.

  “You’d look right through me,” Landish said, “as if I wasn’t there. You’d make accusations against the furniture and try to start a fight between the bedposts. You might remember something from the Murk.”

  “What?”

  “Your mother maybe. But you’d forget her when the fever went away.”

  “Why did my father stay with the men of the Gilbert if they were goners anyway?”

  “I think it would have been hard just to leave them there, knowing they were watching as you walked away.”

  They tried to make jokes but they didn’t laugh. Deacon said they don’t have winter here. Landish said that winter here was like October in St. John’s. Three months of October. Nothing here would grow as high as Deacon if you planted it in Newfoundland. The sound of the wind would keep the Vanderluydens awake for weeks. Landish said the ice on Lake Loom was covered with tiny footprints that led to tiny holes where foolhardy mice had fallen through. Deacon said Goddie laughed and held her belly when he told her that after one storm, there was nothing left above the snow on Dark Marsh Road but chimneys.

  Deacon and Landish were quiet. Deacon knew they were stuck for words. He lay down on his bed, his hand in Landish’s, and said, “Tell me a story.”

  “All right,” Landish said.

  Deacon sailed from Atlastica on the S.S. Carson with a wizard named Landish. They crossed the Antic Ocean to the coast of Wonderland where, in a storm, the Carson sank. Deacon was borne ashore on the back of Landish. They went to Wonderland, to the Fortress of the Forest, and stayed with Good King Padgett, who was once Landish’s best friend but was a very sad man now. His queen offered a reward of a million Vanderbills to anyone who could break the spell cast on the king by Landish. Landish was in love with the Mistress of the Fortress of the Forest. He told her and Deacon that one day all three of them would return to Atlastica and they would never leave again. But no one, not even Landish, knew the way back to Atlastica, for its location was ever changing. Deacon and Landish didn’t even know how much they liked Atlastica until they left and saw the way things were in Wonderland—