Free Secret Lives by Jeff VanderMeer Page B

stumbled, moved a little to his right on his knees, arms out for balance, and then looked left because of unexpected light . He saw, in a moment that didn’t seem real, a slice of sun through the otherwise overcast sky, a hint of a breeze where none had existed, and, stretching out before him, a path of dried golden-brown leaves. The path wound its way up the lee of a slice of hill that had not been there before, and out of sight, always touched by the sliver of sunlight that seemed from some other place.
    Rajan inhaled with an audible gasp, mouth open, heart beating faster, and grasped the thick grass of the hill with both hands, as if to anchor himself.
    He blinked once.
    The path was still there. It seemed both tranquil and dangerous. The leaves upon its surface spun and whirled, but never blew away. The light upon the leaves had an unreal, hypnotic quality.
    He wrenched his gaze from the sight. He blinked again.
    The path, the light, the leaves, had disappeared in that instant of blindness. There was a ringing in Rajan’s head. No, not in his head. The teacher calling to him once again, in a shrill voice.
    Reluctantly, Rajan released the grass and ran up the hill through the cut grass smell, back into the safety of the school. The mangled stalks of grass in the fists of his hands felt much more real than what he had just seen.
    Soon, the memory of that glimpse into . . . into what? he did not know . . . receded into the morass of other childhood memories. It became more and more unreal, until it became a daydream, a vision, utter fantasy.
    But Rajan did not entirely forget, either. It was hard to forget an event like that, even if dismissed as mere epiphany. It became a kind of submerged memory. It came back to Rajan in moments of triumph, of ecstasy: the column of remembered sunlight like a manifestation of his personal happiness. And yet, a disturbing memory, so that in photographs of Rajan happy, experiencing happiness, there is a hint of a puzzled expression on his face, a hint of looking through the camera into some dilemma, some mystery.
    And that might have been the extent of the secret life of Rajan Khanna: a curious expression in family photographs, a sense in those who met him that at times he wrestled with some unanswerable question. It might have ended there, and simply lent him that attractive otherworldliness his wife secretly adored in him. But, for whatever reason, Rajan Khanna proved to have a talent for finding paths and roads, streets and bridges, overpasses and tunnels, that either no longer existed or had never been there.
    The second time it happened—or, at least, the next time it happened and he could not ignore it or explain it away—Rajan was sixteen and walking with his friends in Manhattan, down a street clogged with pedestrian traffic. In the middle of a block, a sudden compulsion came over him, accompanied by an odd yet pleasant scent, as of fresh lime, to stop, step out of the bustle of people, and look to his left, at the solid brick wall of a bank . . . only, it wasn’t solid brick. Now, in the middle of a building he had passed dozens of time, a mews, or narrow alley, cut right through the wall and traveled off into the distance, buttressed by the dark suspicion of alcoves at irregular intervals to either side. There was a wavery quality to the edges of the brick where it met the open air of the sudden corridor. A suggestion of mirage, as when heat rises beneath from a manhole cover.
    Rajan frowned, tried to control the sudden acceleration of his breath, his heartbeat. That couldn’t be right. It just . . . couldn’t . The mews went right through the building, cut offices in half, created a sliver of blue sky in the middle of windows, and he could see people walking from one side of an office to another, disappearing as they passed through the area now occupied by the sky above the mews, and reappearing unharmed on the other side.
    “Rajan—c’mon. What’re you