Free ODD? by Jeff VanderMeer Page A

as if he were working a dial, he undoes his collar button, and begins to undress, begins to laugh, as the black void of the sky above the village behind him explodes in countless lighted windows soaring up tall towers whose tops are impossibly high. Laughing, stripping off his clothes, with a lurid brilliance that steadily grows more intense about his face and eyes, his image begins to dance before X., and, with a crash, dazzling rays of light burst out from behind X. X. turns to see yet more towers, and on all sides — this is not a village, but a city of colossi, wafers of night pressed between headless dragon spires whose flanks are scaled with terrible, illuminated windows. His vision seems to drop away down the endless, canyon-like streets to the massive buildings beyond, as they burst alight one by one, and still further and further. An intense, silent vibration suffuses the air and the ground at his feet, as his companion, whose mind is these buildings, these lights and this power, continues to strip himself.
    A jolt pulls him at once entirely out of his dream, and the man is there by his side, clapping him on the shoulder and telling him it’s time to get off the train. Blearily, X. rises and follows him, his legs moving in what feel like convulsive jerks, shot through with cold, glassy pains like darts of ice.
    They are in the same station, the same station as ever, but the doors open on the wrong side of the train. Together, they stand on the narrow ledge opposite the platform. The train leaves with a dull roar, and people spill from the stairways, refilling the platform, streaming endlessly into the station, lining up along the tracks, bent wearily over fluttering white books. The man leads X. to the panel, which is only a step or two away. With his finger, he scrapes a thick layer of encrusted dirt from the wall, tracing the outlines of a rectangular panel. With some knocking, he clears the dirt from a recessed handle, and draws the panel open with a sharp tug, revealing what looks like a clockwork mechanism within the wall. With a glance at X., he pulls the irregular ring from his finger. Now X. sees clearly that it’s a gear, which the man fits neatly into the mechanism. The machinery spins, and the panel glides up into the wall without a sound.
    The man crosses to the other side of the panel and gestures to X., bowing a little and inviting him, without a word, to crawl inside. From this angle, facing him again, he can make out something of the man’s features a little better than he has up until now. The singular light shining from the platform throws them into an altered relief, and seems to shadow that vague, interior luster that had leant so much variation to their composition. The man is not himself, nor is he another. The idea crosses X.’s mind even as he crouches to enter the wall through the open panel, and the ambivalent alarm that it brings in tow competes with an intense curiosity.
    The aperture is a bit like a closet, lit only faintly by the glow from the platform. It is an upright tomb in the wall, and it was empty until X. climbed inside it. With sudden fear, X. turns to face the man, as best he can, but of course he can only see the feet, and that with effort. They recross in front of the aperture as he stoops awkwardly in the narrow chamber to look, and he hears a soft tinkle of metal. That is the sound, he knows, of the gear being removed from the machinery, and replaced on the ring finger of the left hand. The panel . . .
    The panel drops steadily into place, to seal him in total darkness, inside the wall.
    As the panel begins to descend, neither slowly nor rapidly, in a flash he inventories all that he has within reach and determines which of these things — his head — is the hardest. Already stooped, he thrusts his head violently forward just in time. The panel settles its weight across his temples. The thickness of the panel extends above his eyes like a canopy, but he is still