Secret Lives by Jeff VanderMeer

looking at?” one of his friends asked.
    “Just a second,” Rajan said, still staring.
    Rajan realized then that sometimes he existed in two worlds at once. He stood there and stared down the alley into that expanse of impossible blue sky and knew that if he chose to, he could walk through the building, that there would be no brick to stop him.
    But on that particular day, at the age of sixteen, Rajan chose not to follow the path, in part because he was with his friends. It wasn’t that he wasn’t curious. He was. But on that day, too, Rajan began to realize that he didn’t yet understand this “gift,” and that while it might seem wondrous, it could also be dangerous.
    For, he could hear, above the sounds of the people moving around him, a low growling whimper. It came from somewhere far, far down the alleyway. It didn’t sound human. It didn’t sound friendly. For some reason, until he heard that sound, and a wave of the lime smell washed over him again, Rajan had not realized that the paths he saw might be populated  . . .
    No, although he began to sense more and more of them—felt, at times, as if the world were riddled with them like wormholes—it wasn’t until college that Rajan first placed his feet upon a “ghost path” as he began to call them (because no one else could see them because there was something mournful about even the brightest of them because it was better to think of them as ghosts of paths than as portals ).
    In his second year at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsyvania, on a cold winter’s night at the end of a drunken party to celebrate a friend’s birthday, Rajan was sitting on a couch, wide awake, with other students sleeping or dazed all around him, when a path appeared to him in the white wall directly in front of him. It was a canopy road: oak trees with deep green leaves hanging over red clay. It was like a cocoon in greens, reds, and the solid brown-gray of the oak tree trunks. A wind came roiling up across the road, bringing a haze of red dust up into the room; Rajan could taste it. He could smell the red clay, thick and oddly comforting. He could hear the rhythmic retort of a woodpecker. He could feel the thick, wrinkled roughness of the oak bark . . . and then he realized he was on the path, that he had gotten up off the couch and was standing on the path, and when he looked back he could kind of see the apartment and the couch and his sleeping friends, but they were the mirage now, and the path was the reality, and somehow he wasn’t frightened, not frightened at all, and drunk but alert, he started to walk down the path.
    For a long time, he walked alone on that path, content to let the mottled sunlight through the tree branches massage his shoulders with warmth and the cooling wind push gently against his clothes. Off to the sides lay deep, sprawling forests of oak and fir trees. Sometimes, he could hear the distant complaint of a blue jay, or the very personal bustling sound of a squirrel in the underbrush, searching for acorns. Sometimes, out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of the apartment he’d left behind—an exit, a slice of his world, reassuring him that, when he wanted to, he could return home.
    After minutes or hours or seconds of walking—his watch had stopped as soon as he had set foot on the path—Rajan noticed a two-humped dark shape crouched to the side of the road about a hundred feet ahead. At first, he could not tell if it was human or animal, and then, when he had come within fifty feet, he realized it was both an animal and a human: an old woman holding a leash attached to the collar of some sort of boar or wild pig. They sat by the side of the road in silence.
    For a moment a prickle of unease slowed Rajan. He stood there, looked back the way he had come, and wondered if he should try to return to the apartment. Again, the thought of populated paths filled him with a numbing dread.
    But when he turned back, the woman and