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THE WAY TO SPOOK CITY

Here’s a case where the author experienced more thrills and chills than his own protagonist in the course of writing one simple 18,000-word story. It is altogether possible that aliens were at work trying to prevent this one from ever seeing print.

The saga began during the hot, dry summer of 1991, when I proposed to the editors of Playboy that I write a story of double the usual length of the stories I had done for them in the past. I was having increasing difficulty confining my Playboy stories to their top limit of 7,500 words or so. Long ago, I pointed out, the magazine had regularly run novellas, such stories as George Langelaan’s “The Fly,” Arthur C. Clarke’s “A Meeting with Medusa,” and Ray Bradbury’s “The Lost City of Mars.” What about reviving that custom and letting me write a long one now?

The powers that be mulled over the idea and gave me a qualified go-ahead. I submitted an outline, and on September 10, 1991, we came to an agreement on the deal. Two days later the printer of my loyal computer, which I had been using for nearly a decade, declined to print a document. Somehow I jollied it into going back to work, and blithely got started on the story that was to become “The Way to Spook City” a day or two later, imagining I’d have the piece behind me before settling down to work on the upcoming winter novel. I promised to deliver it by mid-October so that it could be used in the August 1992 issue. But the printer trouble returned, and worsened, and on September 27—when I was forty pages into the story—the printer died completely. I was trying to print out my forty pages at the time, but what came out was this:

“Everyone had been astonished when Nick announced he was going LIa kciN disiruprus oo, that he should be setting himself up for such a crazy LKthguoht eh nruter ot brawny young man Tom had become but of the soft-eyed LJs’kciN fo lla nehgt dna ,n” and then blank space, not another garbled word.

No problem, you say. Get a new printer, hook it up, do the printout. But there was a problem. I had been something of a pioneer, as writers go, in the use of a computer for word-processing, and the computer I had been using all those years was now obsolete—incompatible, in fact, with any existing brand. The company that had made it was out of business, and no one then alive knew how to connect a modern printer to it. I did, of course, have a backup of my forty pages on a floppy disk; but my computer was a pre-MS-DOS model and its operating system could not communicate with then-modern machines. The texts on my computer were trapped in it forever, all my business records and the first half of “Spook City” among them. They could be brought up onscreen but they were inaccessible for purposes of printing.

I needed to buy one of the newfangled MS-DOS computers and learn how to use it. And I contemplated the gloomy prospect of having to type “Spook City” and hundreds of other documents onto the new computer, one word at a time. It would take forever. What about my mid-October deadline?

It was possible, at least, to rescue the unfinished story. The technician who had been servicing my old computer discovered that he still had one machine of that model in working order (more or less) in his San Francisco office. I gave him my backup disk; he printed out the forty pages of “Spook City” and faxed them to me. Later in the day I began keying the story into the only working computer in the house, which belonged to my wife Karen and was a perfectly standard DOS-based job. I also went out and bought a new computer myself, also, of course, a DOS machine compatible with hers.

For the next ten days or so, while waiting for the new computer to arrive, I continued writing “Spook City” using my prehistoric manual typewriter, and entering each day’s typewritten work on Karen’s computer after her work-day was over. By October 4th I had 59 pages on disk. I decided to print them out and halt further work until my own new machine arrived.

Karen’s computer wouldn’t print it.

I didn’t know why.

The text looked fine on screen, but when I gave the familiar print command I was told that the document was “corrupted” and couldn’t be sent on to the printer.

Again? Was there a curse on this story?

The backup disk was corrupted too. It began to look as though I had lost the nineteen pages I had written since the first computer glitch plus all the rewriting I had done on the original forty pages that the computer pro had rescued.

“I’m pretty much in shellshock now,” I wrote Alice Turner of Playboy, “but what I suppose I’ll do is wait for the new computer to arrive, maybe by Wednesday, and then start putting the whole damn thing in once more, trying to reconstruct (though you never really can) the stuff I had been doing all this past week. I can see that I’m going to wind up earning about five cents an hour on this project even if everything goes perfectly the third time, which is by no means assured.”

Enter a second savior that grim evening: our friend and neighbor Carol Carr, who showed up equipped with some program that allowed us to bring up on screen, page by page, the whole corrupted document, and print it. What came out, alas, was mostly babble: a Martian mix, miscellaneous random consonants (not vowels!) and numbers and keyboard symbols with an occasional intelligible phrase glaring out of the welter of nonsense. But that was better than nothing. The next day I told Alice Turner what Carol had achieved: “She spent hours waving magic wands in front of Karen’s computer and was able to coax out pages and pages of gibberish printout, which I am now reassembling, jigsaw-puzzle fashion, by locating recognizable passages, putting them into the proper order, and transcribing them by hand onto the old first draft that the last bunch of computer wizards coaxed out of my old computer last week. So far I’ve reached page 28 of the original 40-page draft and have pretty much reconstructed all the revisions. Unfortunately, a lot of the really good stuff in the climactic scenes didn’t emerge yesterday, but at least I have typed rough drafts of that and I ought to be able to put them back together in something approximating the level of yesterday’s destroyed version.”

The new computer finally arrived. I learned how to use it by entering poor garbled “Spook City” in something like proper form. I rewrote as I went, and cautiously produced a new printout every afternoon. On Friday, October 18th, I finally finished what looked like a complete draft of the story, though it still needed some trimming and polishing. But the evil extraterrestrials who were determined to keep this story from coming into being weren’t finished with me. Two days later—a furiously hot summer day—my part of California caught fire and three thousand houses nearby were destroyed. It looked as though our house might go up in flame as well. Karen and I were forced to flee, taking with us our cats, a handful of household treasures, and a backup disk of the accursed “Spook City.” Whatever else happened, I didn’t want to have to write that thing a third time.

We were able to return home after eighteen hours. The fire had stopped a mile north of us. After a couple of shaky days I got back to work and on October 25th, only two weeks beyond deadline, I sent the story to Playboy, telling Alice: “Here, thank God, is the goddamn story, and what a weird experience it has been. Written on four different machines—my old computer, Karen’s computer, my ancient manual typewriter, and my jazzy new computer—and lost twice by computers and both times recovered with the aid of technical wizardry, and typed over and over from one machine to the other, and interrupted by a natural disaster that makes our earthquake of a few years ago seem trivial—I feel as though I’ve been writing it forever. I wake up mumbling it to myself. I never dreamed I was embarking on such an epic struggle when I proposed the story; I thought it would simply be a few weeks of the usual tough work, a nice payday, and on to the next job . . . Anyway, here’s the story. I hope you like it.” She did, and published it in the August 1992 issue of Playboy, just as planned.

Thus, with some trepidation, I will herewith instruct my computer to copy its text from my 1991 story file into this present collection. If you don’t find it here, you’ll know why.

THE AIR WAS SHINING UP ahead, a cold white pulsing glow bursting imperiously out of the hard blue desert sky. That sudden chilly dazzle told Demeris that he was at the border, that he was finally getting his first glimpse of the place where human territory ended and the alienheld lands began.

He halted and stood staring for a moment, half expecting to see monsters flying around overhead on the far side of the line; and right on cue something weird went flapping by, a blotch of darkness against the brilliant icy sheen that was lighting everything up over there in the Occupied Zone. It was a heavy thing the size of a hawk and a half, with a lumpy greenish body and narrow wings like saw-blades and a long snaky back that had a little globular purple head at the end of it. The creature was so awkward that Demeris had to laugh. He couldn’t see how it stayed airborne. The bird, if that was what it was, flew on past, heading north, dropping a line of bright turquoise turds behind it. A little burst of flame sprang up in the dry grass where each one fell.

“Thank you kindly for that pretty welcome,” Demeris called out after it, sounding jauntier than he felt.

He went a little closer to the barrier. It sprang straight up out of the ground like an actual wall, but one that was intangible and more or less transparent: he could make out vague outlines of what lay beyond that dizzying shield of light, a blurry landscape that should have been basically the same on the Spook side of the line as it was over here, low sandy hills, gray splotches of sagebrush, sprawling clumps of prickly pear, but which was in fact mysteriously touched by strangeness—unfamiliar serrated buttes, angular chasms with metallic blue-green walls, black-trunked leafless trees with rigid branches jutting out like horizontal crossbars. Everything was veiled, though, by the glow of the barrier that separated the Occupied Zone from the fragment of the former United States that lay to the west of it, and he couldn’t be sure how much he was actually seeing and how much was simply the product of his expectant imagination.

A shiver of distaste ran through him. Demeris’s father, dead now, had always regarded the Spooks as his personal enemy, and that had carried over to him. “They’re just biding their time, Nick,” his father would say. “One of these days they’ll come across the line and grab our land the way they grabbed what they’ve got already. And there won’t be a goddamned thing we can do about it.” Demeris had dedicated himself ever since to maintaining the order and prosperity of the little ranch near the eastern border of Free Country that was his family heritage, and he loathed the Spooks, not just for what they had done but simply because they were hateful—unknown, strange, unimaginable, alien. Not us. Others were able to take the aliens and the regime they had imposed on the old U.S.A. for granted: all that had happened long ago, ancient history. In any case there had never been a hint that the elder Demeris’s fears were likely to be realized. The Spooks kept to themselves inside the Occupied Zone. In a hundred fifty years they had shown no sign of interest in expanding beyond the territory they had seized right at the beginning.

He took another step forward, and another, and waited for things to come into better focus. But they didn’t.

***

DEMERIS HAD MADE THE FIRST part of the journey from Albuquerque to Spook Land on muleback, with his brother Bud accompanying him as far as the west bank of the Pecos. But when they reached the river Demeris had sent Bud back with the mules. Bud was five years younger than Demeris, but he had three kids already. Men who had kids had no business going into Spook territory. You were supposed to go across when you were a kid yourself, for a lark, for a stunt.

Demeris had had no time for larks and stunts when he was younger. His parents had died when he was a boy, leaving him to raise his two small sisters and three younger brothers. By the time they were grown he was too old to be very interested in adventures in the Occupied Zone. But then this last June his youngest brother Tom, who had just turned eighteen, an unpredictable kid whose head seemed stuffed with all sorts of incomprehensible fantasies and incoherent yearnings, had gone off to make his Entrada. That was what New Mexicans called someone’s first crossing of the border—a sort of rite of passage, the thing you did to show that you had become an adult. Demeris had never seen what was particularly adult about going to Spook Land, but he saw such things differently from most people. So Tom had gone in.

He hadn’t come out, though.

The traditional length of time for an Entrada was thirty days. Tom had been gone three months. Worry nagged at Demeris like an aching tooth. Tom was his reckless baby. Always had been, always would be. And so Demeris had decided to go in after him. Someone had to fetch Tom out of that place, and Demeris, the head of the family, the one who had always seemed to seek out responsibilities the way other people looked for shade on a sunny day, had appointed himself the one to do it. His father would have expected that of him. And Demeris was the only member of the family, besides Tom, who had never married, who had no kids, who could afford to take a risk.

What you do, Bud had said, is walk right up to the barrier and keep on going no matter what you may see or feel or think you want to do. “They’ll throw all sorts of stuff at you,” Bud had told him. “Don’t pay it any mind. Just keep on going.”

And now he was there, at the barrier zone itself.

You walk right up to it and keep on going, that was what you had to do. No matter what it did, what it threw at you.

Okay. Demeris walked right up to it. He kept on going.

***

THE MOMENT HE STEPPED THROUGH the fringes of the field he felt it starting to attack him. It came on in undulating waves, the way he imagined an earthquake would, shaking him unrelentingly and making him slip and slide and struggle to stay upright. The air around him turned thick and yellow and he couldn’t see more than a couple of yards in any direction. Just in front of him was a shimmering blood-hued blur that abruptly dissolved into an army of scarlet caterpillars looping swiftly toward him over the ground, millions of them, a blazing carpet. They spread out all around him. Little teeth gnashed in their pop-eyed heads and they made angry, muttering sounds as they approached. There was no avoiding them. He walked in among them and it was like walking on a sea of slime. A kind of growling thunder rose from them as he crushed them under foot. “Bad dreams,” Bud was saying, in his ear, in his brain. “All they are is a bunch of bad dreams.” Sure. Demeris forged onward. How deep was the boundary strip, anyway? Twenty yards? Fifty? He ached in a dozen places, his eyes were stinging, his teeth seemed to be coming loose. Beyond the caterpillars he found himself at the edge of an abyss of pale quivering jelly, but there was no turning back. He compelled himself into it and its substance rose up around him like a soft blanket, and a wave of pain swept upward through him from the scrotum to the back of his neck: to avoid it he pivoted and twisted, and he felt his backbone bending as if it was going to pop out of his flesh the way the fishbone comes away from the filleted meat. Stinking rain swept horizontally over him, and then hot sleet that raked his forehead and drew howls of rage from him. No wonder you couldn’t get a mule to cross this barrier, he thought. Head down, gasping for breath, he pushed himself forward another few steps. Something like a crab with wings came fluttering up out of a steaming mudhole and seized his arm, biting it just below the elbow on the inside. A stream of black blood spurted out. He yelled and flapped his arm until he shook the thing off. The pain lit a track of fire all along his arm, up to the shoulder and doubling back to his twitching fingers. He stared at his hand and saw just a knob of raw meat with blackened sticks jutting from it. Then it flickered and looked whole again.

Demeris felt tears on his cheeks, and that amazed him: the last time he had wept was when his father died, years ago. Suddenly the urge arose in him to give up and turn back while he still could. That surprised him too. It had always been his way to go plunging ahead, doing what needed to be done, even when others were telling him, Demeris, don’t be an asshole, Demeris, don’t push yourself so hard, Demeris, let someone else do it for once. He had only shrugged. Let others slack off if they liked: he just didn’t have the knack for it. Now, here, in this place, when he absolutely could not slack off, he felt the temptation to yield and go back. But he knew it was only the barrier playing devil-tricks with him. So he encapsulated the desire to turn back into a hard little shell and hurled it from him and watched it burn up in a puff of flame. And went onward.

Three suns were blazing overhead, a red one, a green one, a blue. The air seemed to be melting. He heard incomprehensible chattering voices coming out of it like demonic static, and then disembodied faces appeared all around him, jittering and shimmering in the soupy murk, the faces of people he knew, his sisters Ellie and Netta, his nieces and nephews, his friends. He cried out to them. But everyone was horridly distorted, blobby—cheeked and bug-eyed, grotesque fun-house images. They were pointing at him and laughing. Then he saw his father and mother pointing and laughing too, which had to be impossible, and he understood. Bud was right: these were nothing but illusions or maybe delusions. The images he saw were things that he carried within him. Part of him. Harmless.

He began to run, plunging on through a tangle of slippery threads, a kind of soft, spongy curtain. It yielded as he ripped at it and he fell face down onto a bank of dry sandy soil that was unremarkable in every way: mere desert dirt, real-world stuff, no fancy colors, no crazy textures. More trickery? No. No, this was real. The extra suns were gone and the one that remained was the yellow one he had always known. A fresh wind blew against his face. He was across. He had made it.

He lay still for a minute or two, catching his breath.

Hot pain came stabbing from his arm, and when he looked down at it he saw a jagged bloody cut high up near the inside of the elbxow, where he had imagined the crab-thing had bitten him. But the crab-thing had been only a dream, only an illusion. Can an illusion bite? he wondered. The pain, at any rate, was no illusion. Demeris felt it all the way up through the back of his throat, his nostrils, his forehead. A nasty pulsation ran through the whole arm, making his hand quiver rhythmically in time with it. The cut was maybe two inches long, and deep enough to see into. Fresh blood came dribbling from it every time his heart pumped. Fine, he thought, I’ll bleed to death from an imaginary cut before I’m ten feet inside the Occupied Zone. But after a moment the wound began to clot over and the bleeding stopped, though the pain remained.

Shakily he stood up and glanced about.

Behind him was the vertical column of the barrier field, looking no more menacing than a searchlight beam from this side. Dimly he saw the desert flatlands of Free Country beyond it, the scrubby ordinary place from which he had just come.

On this side, though, everything was a realm of magic and mysteries. He was able more or less to make out the basic raw material of the landscape, the underlying barren dry New Mexico/Texas nowheresville that he had spent his entire life in. But here on the far side of the barrier the invaders had done some serious screwing around with the look of the land. The jagged buttes and blue-green arroyos that Demeris had glimpsed through the barrier field from the other side were no illusions; somebody had taken the trouble to come out here and redesign the empty terrain, sticking in all sorts of bizarre structures and features. He saw strange zones of oddly colored soil, occasional ramshackle metal towers, entire deformed geological formations—twisted cones and spiky spires and uplifted layers—that made his eyes hurt. He saw groves of unknown wire-leaved trees and arroyos crisscrossed by sinister glossy black threads like stitches across a wound. Everything was solid and real, none of it wiggling and shifting about the way things did inside the barrier field. Wherever he looked there was evidence of how the conquerors had put their mark on the land. Some of it was actually almost beautiful, he thought; and then he recoiled, astonished at his own reaction. But there was a strange sort of beauty in the alien landscape. It disgusted him and moved him all at once, a response so complex that he scarcely knew how to handle it.

They must have been trying to make the landscape look like the place they had originally come from, he told himself. The idea of a whole world looking that way practically nauseated him. What they had done was a downright affront. Land was something to live on and to use productively, not to turn into a toy. They didn’t have any right to take part of ours and make it look like theirs, he thought, and anger rose in him again.

He thought of his ranch, the horses, the turkeys, the barns, the ten acres of good russet soil, the rows of crops ripening in the autumn sun, the fencing that he had made with his own hands running on beyond the line of virtually identical fencing his father had made. All that was a real kind of reality, ordinary, familiar, solid—something he could not only understand but love. It was home, family, good clean hard work, sanity itself. This, though, this—this lunacy, this horror—!

He tore a strip of cloth from one of the shirts in his backpack and tied it around the cut on his arm. And started walking east, toward the place where he hoped his brother Tom would be, toward the big settlement midway between the former site of Amarillo and the former site of Lubbock that was known as Spook City.

He kept alert for alien wildlife, constantly scanning the landscape, sniffing, watching for tracks. The Spooks had brought a bunch of their jungle beasts from their home world and turned them loose in the desert. “It’s like Africa out there,” Bud had said. “You never know what’s going to come up and try to gobble you.”

Once a year, Demeris knew, the aliens held a tremendous hunt on the outskirts of Spook City, a huge apocalyptic round-up where they surrounded and killed the strange beasts by the thousands and the streets ran blue and green with rivers of their blood. The rest of the time the animals roamed free in the hinterlands. Some of them occasionally strayed across the border barrier and went wandering around on the Free Country side: while he was preparing himself for his journey Demeris had visited a ranch near Bernalillo where a dozen or so of them were kept on display as a sort of zoo of nightmares, grisly things with red scaly necks and bird-beaks and ears like rubber batwings and tentacles on their heads, huge ferocious animals that seemed to have been put together randomly out of a stock of miscellaneous parts. But so far out here he had encountered nothing more threatening-looking than jackrabbits and lizards. Now and again a bird-that-was-not-a-bird passed overhead—one of the big snake-necked things he had seen earlier, and another the size of an eagle with four transparent veined wings like a dragonfly’s but a thick mothlike furry body between them, and a third one that had half a dozen writhing prehensile rat-tails dangling behind it for eight or ten feet, trolling for food. He watched it snatch a shrieking bluejay out of the air as though it were a bug.

When he was about three hours into the Occupied Zone he came to a cluster of bedraggled little adobe houses at the bottom of a bowl-shaped depression that had the look of a dry lake. A thin fringe of scrubby plant growth surrounded the place, ordinary things, creosote bush and mesquite and yucca. Demeris saw some horses standing at a trough, a couple of scrawny black and white cows munching on prickly pears, a few half-naked children running circles in the dust. There was nothing alien about them, or about the buildings or the wagons and storage bins that were scattered all around. Everyone knew that Spooks were shapeshifters, that they could take on human form when the whim suited them, that when the advance guard of infiltrators had first entered the United States to prepare the way for the invasion they were all wearing human guise. But more likely this was a village of genuine humans. Bud had said there were a few little towns between the border and Spook City, inhabited by the descendants of those who had chosen to remain in the Occupied Zone after the conquest. Most people with any sense had moved out when the invaders came, even though the aliens hadn’t formally asked anyone to leave. But some had stayed.

The afternoon was well along and the first chill of evening was beginning to creep into the clear dry air. The cut on his arm was still throbbing and he didn’t feel much like camping in the open if he didn’t have to. Perhaps these people would let him crash for the night.

When he was halfway to the bottom of the dirt road a gnomish little leathery-skinned man who looked to be about ninety years old stepped slowly out from behind a gnarled mesquite bush and took up a watchful position in the middle of the path. A moment later a boy of about sixteen, short and stocky in torn denim pants and a frayed undershirt, emerged from the same place. The boy was carrying what might have been a gun, which at a gesture from the older man he raised and aimed. It was a shiny tube a foot and a half long with a nozzle at one end and a squeeze-bulb at the other. The nozzle pointed squarely at the middle of Demeris’s chest. Demeris stopped short and put his hands in the air.

The old man said something in a language that was full of grunts and clicks, and some whistling snorts. The denim boy nodded and replied in the same language.

To Demeris the boy said, “You traveling by yourself?” He was dark-haired, dark-eyed, mostly Indian or Mexican, probably. A ragged red scar ran up along his cheek to his forehead.

Demeris kept his hands up. “By myself, yes. I’m from the other side.”

“Well, sure you are. Fool could see that.” The boy’s tone was thick, his accent unfamiliar, the end of each word clipped off in an odd way. Demeris had to work to understand him. “You making your Entrada? You a little old for that sort of thing, maybe.” Laughter sparkled in the boy’s eyes, but not anywhere else on his face.

“This is my first time across,” Demeris said. “But it isn’t exactly an Entrada.”

“Your first time, that’s an Entrada.” The boy spoke again to the old man and got a long reply. Demeris waited patiently. Finally, the boy turned back to him and said, “Okay. Remigio here says we should make it easy for you. You want to stay here your thirty days, we let you do it. You work as a field hand, that’s all. We even sell you some Spook things you can take back and show off like all you people do. Okay?”

Demeris’s face grew hot. “I told you, this isn’t any Entrada. Entradas are fun and games for kids. I’m not a kid.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“Trying to find my brother.”

The boy frowned and spat into the dusty ground, not quite in Demeris’s direction. “You think we got your brother here?”

“He’s in Spook City, I think.”

“Spook City. Yeah. I bet that’s where he is. They all go there. For the hunt, they go.” He put his finger to his head and moved it in a circle. “You do that, you got to be a little crazy, you know? Going there for the hunt. Sheesh! What dumb crazy fuckers.” He laughed and said, “Well, come on, I’ll show you where you can stay.”

***

THEY PUT HIM UP IN a tottering weather-beaten shack made of wooden slats with big stripes of sky showing through, off at the edge of town, a hundred yards or so from the nearest building. There was nothing in it but a mildewed bundle of rags tied together for sleeping on. Some of the rags bore faded inscriptions in the curvilinear Spook script, impenetrable to Demeris. A ditch out back served as a latrine. A little stream, hardly more than a rivulet, ran nearby. Demeris crouched over it and washed out his wound, which was still pulsing unpleasantly but didn’t look as bad as it had at first. The water seemed reasonably safe. He took a long drink and filled his canteens. Then he sat quietly in the open doorway of the shack for a time, not thinking of anything at all, simply unwinding from his long day’s march and the border crossing.

As darkness fell the boy reappeared and led him to the communal eating hall. Fifty or sixty people were sitting at long benches in family groups. A few had an Anglo look, most seemed mixed Mexican and Indian. There was little conversation, and what there was was in the local language, all clicks and snorts and whistles. Almost nobody paid any attention to him. It was as if he was invisible; but a few did stare at him now and then and he could feel the force of their hostility, an almost intangible thing.

He ate quickly and went back to his shack. But sleep was a tough proposition. He lay awake for hours, listening to the wind blowing in out of Texas and wishing he was home, on his own ten acres, in his familiar adobe house, with the houses of his brothers and sisters around him. For a while there was singing—chanting, really—coming up from the village. It was harsh and guttural and choppy, a barrage of stiff angular sounds that didn’t follow any musical scale he knew. Listening to it, he felt a powerful sense of the strangeness of these people who had lived under Spook rule for so long, tainted by Spook ways, governed by Spook ideas. How had they survived? How had they been able to stand it, the changes, the sense of being owned? But somehow they had adapted, by turning themselves into something beyond his understanding.

Later, other sounds drifted to him, the night sounds of the desert, hoots and whines and screeches that might have been coming from owls and coyotes, but probably weren’t. He thought he heard noise just outside his shack, people moving around doing something, but he was too groggy to get up and see what was going on. At last he fell into a sort of stupor and lay floating in it until dawn. Just before morning he dreamed he was a boy again, with his mother and father still alive and Dave and Bud and the girls just babies and Tom not yet even born. He and his dad were out on the plains hunting Spooks, vast swarms of gleaming vaporous Spooks that were drifting overhead as thick as mosquitoes, two brave men walking side by side, the big one and the smaller one, killing the thronging aliens with dart guns that popped them like balloons. When they died they gave off a screeching sound like metal on metal and released a smell like rotting eggs and plummeted to the ground, covering it with a glassy scum that quickly melted away and left a scorched and flaking surface behind. It was a very satisfying dream. Then a flood of morning light broke through the slats and woke him.

Emerging from the shack, he discovered a small tent pitched about twenty yards away that hadn’t been there the night before. A huge mottled yellow animal was tethered nearby, grazing on weeds; something that might have been a camel except there weren’t any camels the size of elephants, camels with three shallow humps and great goggling green eyes the size of saucers, or knees on the backs of their legs as well as in front. As he gaped at it a woman wearing tight khaki slacks and a shirt buttoned up to the collar came out of the tent and said, “Never seen one of those before?”

“You bet I haven’t. This is my first time across.”

“Is it, now?” she said. She had an accent too. It wasn’t as strange to Demeris as the village boy’s but there was some other kind of spin to it, a sound like that of a tolling bell beneath the patterns of the words themselves.

She was youngish, slender, not bad-looking: long straight brown hair, high cheekbones, tanned Anglo face. It was hard to guess her age. Somewhere between 25 and 35 was the best he could figure. She had very dark eyes, bright, almost glossy, oddly defiant. It seemed to him that there was a kind of aura around her, a puzzling crackle of simultaneous attraction and repulsion.

She told him what the camel-thing was called. The word was an intricate slurred sound midway between a whistle and a drone, rising sharply at the end. “You do it now,” she said. Demeris looked at her blankly. The sound was impossible to imitate. “Go on. Do it.”

“I don’t speak Spook.”

“It’s not all that hard.” She made the sound again. Her eyes flashed with amusement.

“Never mind. I can’t do it.”

“You just need some practice.”

Her gaze was focused right on his, strong, direct, almost aggressive. At home he didn’t know many women who looked at you like that. He was accustomed to having women depend on him, to draw strength or whatever else they needed from him until they were ready to go on their way and let him go on his.

“My name’s Jill,” she said. “I live in Spook City. I’ve been in Texas a few weeks and now I’m on my way back.”

“Nick Demeris. From Albuquerque. Traveling up that way too.”

“What a coincidence.”

“I suppose,” he said.

A sudden hot fantasy sprang up just then out of nowhere within him: that instant sexual chemistry had stricken her like a thunderbolt and she was going to invite him to travel with her, that they’d ride right off into the desert together, that when they made camp that evening she would turn to him with parted lips and shining eyes and open her arms and beckon him toward her—

The urgency and intensity of the idea surprised him as much as its adolescent foolishness. Had he really let himself get as horny as that? She didn’t even seem that interesting to him.

In any case he knew it wasn’t going to happen. She looked cool, self-sufficient, self-contained. She wouldn’t have any need for his companionship on her trip home and probably not for anything else he might have to offer.

“What brings you over here?” she asked him.

He told her about his missing brother. Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully as he spoke. She was taking a good long look, studying his face with great care, staring at him as though peering right through his skull into his brain. Turning her head this way and that, checking him out.

“I think I may know him, your brother,” she said calmly, after a time.

He blinked. “You do? Seriously?”

“Not as tall as you and stockier, right? But otherwise he looks pretty much like you, only younger. Face a lot like yours, broader, but the same cheekbones, the same high forehead, the same color eyes, the same blond hair, but his is longer. The same very serious expression all the time, tight as a drum.”

“Yes,” Demeris said, with growing wonder. “That’s him. It has to be.”

“Don, that was his name. No, Tom. Don, Tom, one of those short little names.”

“Tom.”

“Tom, right.”

He was amazed. “How do you know him?” he asked.

“Turned up in Spook City a couple of months back. June, July, somewhere back then. It isn’t such a big place that you don’t notice new people when they come in. Had that Free Country look about him, you know. Kind of big-eyed, raw-boned, can’t stop gawking at things. But he seemed a little different from most the other Entrada kids, like there was something coiled up inside him that was likely to pop out any minute, that this trip wasn’t just a thing he was doing for the hell of it but that it had some other meaning for him, something deeper that only he could understand. Peculiar sort of guy, actually.”

“That was Tom, yes.” The side of Demeris’s face was starting to twitch. “You think he might still be there?”

“Could be. More likely than not. He was talking about staying quite a while, at least until fall, until hunt time.”

“And when is that?”

“It starts late next week.”

“Maybe I can still find him, then. If I can get there in time.”

“I’m leaving here this afternoon. You can ride with me to Spook City if you want.”

“With you?” Demeris said. He was astonished. The good old instant chemistry after all? His whole little adolescent fantasy coming to life? It seemed too neat, too slick. The world didn’t work like this. And yet—yet—

“Sure. Plenty of room on those humps. Take you at least a week if you walk there, if you’re a good walker. Maybe longer. Riding, it’ll be just a couple of days.”

What the hell, he thought.

It would be dumb to turn her down. That Spook-mauled landscape was an evil place when you were on your own.

“Sure,” he said, after a bit. “Sure, I’d be glad to. If you really mean it.”

“Why would I say it if I didn’t mean it?”

Abruptly the notion came to him that this woman and Tom might have had something going for a while in Spook City. Of course. Of course. Why else would she remember in such detail some unknown kid who had wandered into her town months before? There had to be something else there. She must have met Tom in some Spook City bar, a couple of drinks, some chatter, a night or two of lively bed games, maybe even a romance lasting a couple of weeks. Tom wouldn’t hesitate, even with a woman ten, fifteen years older than he was. And so she was offering him this ride now as a courtesy to a member of the family, so to speak. It wasn’t his tremendous masculine appeal that had done it, it was mere politeness. Or curiosity about what Tom’s older brother might be like.

Into his long confused silence she said, “The critter here needs a little more time to feed itself up. Then we can take off. Around two o’clock, okay?”

***

AFTER BREAKFAST THE BOY WENT over to him in the dining hall and said, “You meet the woman who come in during the night?”

Demeris nodded. “She’s offering me a ride to Spook City.”

Something that might have been scorn flickered across the boy’s face. “That nice. You take it?”

“Better than walking there, isn’t it?”

A quick knowing glance. “You crazy if you go with her, man.”

Frowning, Demeris said, “Why is that?”

The boy put his hand over his mouth and muffled a laugh. “That woman, she a Spook, man. You mean you don’t see that? Only a damn fool go traveling around with a Spook.”

Demeris was stunned for a moment, and then angry. “Don’t play around with me,” he said, irritated.

“Yeah, man. I’m playing. It’s a joke. Just a joke.” The boy’s voice was flat, chilly, bearing its own built-in contradiction. The contempt in his dark hard eyes was unmistakable now. “Look, you go ride with her if you like. Let her do whatever she wants with you once she got you out there in the desert. Isn’t none of my goddamn business. Fucking Free Country guys, you all got shit for brains.”

Demeris squinted at him, shaken now, not sure what to believe. The kid’s cold-eyed certainty carried tremendous force. But it made no sense to him that this Jill could be an alien. Her voice, her bearing, everything about her, were too convincingly real. The Spooks couldn’t imitate humans that well, could they?

Had they?

“You know this thing for a fact?” Demeris asked.

“For a fact I don’t know shit,” the boy said. “I never see her before, not that I can say. She come around and she wants us to put her up for the night, that’s okay. We put her up. We don’t care what she is if she can pay the price. But anybody with any sense, he can smell Spook on her. That’s all I tell you. You do whatever you fucking like, man.”

The boy strolled away. Demeris stared after him, shaking his head. He felt a tremor of bewilderment and shock, as though he had abruptly found himself at the edge of an abyss.

Then came another jolt of anger. Jill a Spook? It couldn’t be. Everything about her seemed human.

But why would the boy make up something like that? He had no reason for it. And maybe the kid could tell. Over on the other side, really paranoid people carried witch-charms around with them to detect Spooks who might be roaming Free Country in disguise, little gadgets that were supposed to sound an alarm when aliens came near you, but Demeris had never taken such things seriously. It stood to reason, though, that people living out here in Spook Land would be sensitive to the presence of a Spook among them, however well disguised it might be. They wouldn’t need any witch-charms to tell them. They had had a hundred fifty years to get used to being around Spooks. They’d know the smell of them by now.

The more Demeris thought about it, the more uneasy he got.

He needed to talk to her again.

***

HE FOUND HER A LITTLE way upstream from his shack, rubbing down the shaggy yellow flanks of her elephantine pack-animal with a rough sponge. Demeris halted a short distance away and studied her, trying to see her as an alien being in disguise, searching for some clue to otherworldly origin, some gleam of Spookness showing through her human appearance.

He couldn’t see it. He couldn’t see it at all. But that didn’t necessarily mean she was real.

After a moment she noticed him. “You ready to go?” she asked, over her shoulder.

“I’m not sure.”

“What?”

He was still staring.

If she is a Spook, he thought, why would she want to pretend she was human? What would a Spook have to gain by inveigling a human off into the desert with her?

On the other hand, what motive did the kid have for lying to him?

Suddenly it seemed to him that the simplest and safest thing was to opt out of the entire arrangement and get to Spook City on his own, as he had originally planned. The kid might just be telling the truth. The possibility of traveling with a Spook, of being close to one, of sharing a campsite and a tent with one, sickened and repelled him. And there might be danger in it as well. He had heard wild tales of Spooks who were soul-eaters, who were energy vampires, even worse things. Why take chances?

He drew a deep breath. “Listen, I’ve changed my mind, okay? I think I’d just as soon travel by myself.”

She turned and gave him a startled look. “You serious?”

“Yep.”

“You really want to walk all the way to Spook City by yourself rather than ride with me?”

“Yep. That’s what I prefer to do.”

“Jesus Christ. What the hell for?”

Demeris could detect nothing unhuman in her exasperated tone or in the annoyed expression on her face. He began to think he was making a big, big mistake. But it was too late to back off. Uncomfortably he said, “Just the way I am, I guess. I sort of like to go my own way, I guess, and—”

“Bullshit. I know what’s really going on in your head.”

Demeris shifted about uneasily and remained silent. He wished he had never become entangled with her in the first place.

Angrily she said, “Somebody’s been talking to you, right? Telling you a lot of garbage?”

“Well—”

“All right,” she said. “You dumb bastard. You want to test me, is that it?”

“Test?”

“With a witch-charm.”

“No,” he said. “I’m not carrying any charms. I don’t have faith in them. Those things aren’t worth a damn.”

“They’ll tell you if I’m a Spook or not.”

“They don’t work, is what I hear.”

“Some do, some don’t.” She reached into a saddlepack lying near her on the ground and pulled out a small device, wires and black cords intricately wound around and around each other. “Here,” she said harshly. “This is one. You point it and push the button and it emits a red glow if you’re pointing it at a Spook. Take it. A gift from me to you. Use it to check out the next woman you happen to meet.”

She tossed the little gadget toward him. Demeris grabbed it out of the air by reflex and stood watching helplessly as she slapped the elephant-camel’s flank to spur it into motion and started off downstream toward her tent.

Shit, he thought.

He felt like six kinds of idiot. The sound of her voice, tingling with contempt for him and his petty little suspicions, still echoed in his ears.

Baffled and annoyed—with her, with himself, with the boy for starting all this up—he flipped the witch-charm into the stream. There was a hissing and a bubbling around it for a moment and then the thing sank out of sight. Then he turned and walked back to his shack to pack up.

She had already begun to take down her tent. She didn’t so much as glance at him. But the elephant-camel thing peered somberly around, extended its long purple lower lip, and gave him a sardonic toothy smirk. Demeris glared at the great beast and made a devil-sign with his upraised fingers. From you, at least, I don’t have to take any crap, he thought.

He hoisted his pack to his shoulders and started up the steep trail out of town.

***

HE WAS SOMEWHERE ALONG THE old boundary between New Mexico and Texas, he figured, probably just barely on the New Mexico side of the line. The aliens hadn’t respected state boundaries when they had carved out their domain in the middle of the United States halfway through the 21st century, and some of New Mexico had landed in alien territory and some hadn’t. Spook Land was roughly triangular, running from Montana to the Great Lakes along the Canadian border and tapering southward through what had been Wyoming, Nebraska, and Iowa down to Texas and Louisiana, but they had taken a little piece of eastern New Mexico too. Demeris had learned all that in school long ago. They made you study the map of the United States that once had been: so you wouldn’t forget the past, they said, because someday the old United States was going to rise again.

Fat chance. The Spooks had cut the heart right out of the country, both literally and figuratively. They had taken over with scarcely a struggle and every attempt at a counterattack had been brushed aside with astonishing ease: America’s weapons had been neutralized, its communications networks were silenced, its army of liberation had disappeared into the Occupied Zone like raindrops into a lake. Now there was not one United States of America but two: the western one, which ran from Washington State and Idaho down to the Mexican border and liked to call itself Free Country, and the other one in the east, along the coast and inland as far as the Mississippi, which still insisted on using the old formal name. Between the two lay the Occupied Zone, and nobody in either United States had much knowledge of what went on in there. Nor did anyone Demeris knew take the notion of a reunited United States very seriously. If America hadn’t been able to cope with the aliens at the time of the invasion, it was if anything less capable of defeating them now, with much of its technical capacity eroded away and great chunks of the country having reverted to a pastoral, pre-industrial condition.

What he had to do, he calculated, was keep heading more or less east until he saw indications of Spook presence. Right now, though, the country was pretty empty, just barren sandy wastes with a covering of mesquite and sage. He saw more places where the aliens had indulged in their weird remodeling of the landscape, and now and again he was able to make out the traces of some little ancient abandoned human town, a couple of rusty signs or a few crumbling walls. But mainly there was nothing at all.

He was about an hour and a half beyond the village when what looked like a squadron of airborne snakes came by, a dozen of them flying in close formation. Then the sky turned heavy and purplish-yellow, like bruised fruit getting ready to rot, and three immense things with shining red scales and sail-like three-cornered fleshy wings passed overhead, emitting bursts of green gas that had the rank smell of old wet straw. They were almost like dragons. A dozen more of the snake-things followed them. Demeris scowled and waved a clenched fist at them. The air had a tangible pressure. Something bad was about to happen. He waited to see what was coming next. But then, magically, all the ominous effects cleared away and he was in the familiar old Southwest again, untouched by strangers from the far stars, the good old land of dry ravines and big sky that he had lived in all his life. He relaxed a little, but only a little.

Almost at once he heard a familiar snorting sound behind him. He turned and saw the ponderous yellow form of the elephant-camel looming up, with Jill sitting astride it just back of the front hump.

She leaned down and said, “You change your mind yet about wanting that ride?”

“I thought you were sore at me.”

“I am. Was. But it still seems crazy for you to be doing this on foot when I’ve got room up here for you.”

He stared up at her. You don’t often get second chances in this life, he told himself. But he wasn’t sure what to do.

“Oh, Christ,” she said, as he hesitated. “Do you want a ride or don’t you?”

Still he remained silent.

She shot him a quick wicked grin. “Still worried that I’m a Spook? You can check me out if you like.”

“I threw your gadget in the stream. I don’t like to have witch-things around me.”

“Well, that’s all right.” She laughed. “It wasn’t a charm at all, just an old power core, and a worn out one at that. It wouldn’t have told you anything.”

“What’s a power core?”

“Spook stuff. You could have taken it back with you to prove you were over here. Look, do you want a ride or not?”

It seemed ridiculous to turn her down again.

“What the hell,” Demeris said. “Sure.”

Jill spoke to the animal in what he took to be Spook language, a hiccupping wheeze and a long indrawn whistling sound, and it knelt for him. Demeris took her hand and she drew him on top of the beast with surprising ease. An openwork construction made of loosely woven cord, half poncho and half saddle, lay across the creature’s broad back, with the three humps jutting through. Her tent and other possessions were fastened to it at the rear. “Tie your pack to one of those dangling strings,” she said. “You can ride right behind me.”

He fitted himself into the valley between the second and third humps and got a secure hold on the weaving, fingers digging down deep into it. She whistled another command and the animal began to move forward.

Its motion was a rolling, thumping, sliding kind of thing, very hard to take. The sway was both lateral and vertical and with every step the ground seemed to rise and plunge around him in lunatic lunges. Demeris had never seen the ocean or any other large body of water, but he had heard about seasickness, and this was what it was like. He gulped, clamped his mouth shut, gripped the saddle even more tightly.

Jill called back to him, “How are you doing?”

“Fine. Fine.”

“Takes some getting used to, huh?”

“Some,” he said.

His buttocks didn’t have much padding on them. He could feel the vast bones of the elephant-camel grinding beneath him like the pistons of some giant machine. He held on tight and dug his heels in as hard as he could.

“You see those delta-winged things go by a little while ago?” she asked, after a while.

“The big dragons that were giving off the green smoke?”

“Right. Herders. On their way to Spook City for the hunt. They’ll be used to drive the game toward the killing grounds. Every year this time they get brought in to help in the round-up.”

“And the flying snakes?”

“They herd the herders. Herders aren’t very smart. About like dogs, maybe. The snake guys are a lot brighter. The snakes tell the herders where to go and the herders make the game animals go there too.”

Demeris thought about that. Level upon level of intelligence among these creatures that the Spooks had transported to the planet they had partly conquered. If the herders were as smart as dogs, he wondered how smart the snakes were. Dogs were pretty smart. He wondered how smart the Spooks were, for that matter.

“What’s the hunt all about? Why do they do it?”

“For fun,” Jill said. “Spook fun.”

“Herding thousands of exotic wild animals together and butchering them all at once, so the blood runs deep enough to swim through? That’s their idea of fun?”

“Wait and see,” she said.

***

THEY SAW MORE AND MORE transformation of the landscape: whorls and loops of dazzling fire, great opaque spheres floating just above ground level, silvery blades revolving in the air. Demeris glared and glowered. All that strangeness made him feel vulnerable and out of place, and he spat and murmured bitterly at each intrusive wonder.

“Why are you so angry?” she asked.

“I hate this weird shit that they’ve strewn all over the place. I hate what they did to our country.”

“It was a long time ago. And it wasn’t your country they did it to, it was your great-great-grandfather’s.”

“Even so.”

“Your country is over there. It wasn’t touched at all.”

“Even so,” he said again, and spat.

When it was still well before dark they came to a place where bright yellow outcroppings of sulphur, like foamy stone pillows, marked the site of a spring. Jill gave the command to make her beast kneel and hopped deftly to the ground. Demeris got off more warily, feeling the pain in his thighs and butt from his ride.

“Give me a hand with the tent,” she said.

It wasn’t like any tent he had ever seen. The center-post was nothing more than a little rod that seemed to be made of white wax, but at the touch of a hand it tripled in height and an elaborate strutwork sprang out from it in five directions to provide support for the tent fabric. A Spook tent, he supposed. The tent pegs were made of the same waxy material, and all you had to do was position them where you wanted them around the perimeter of the tent and they burrowed into the ground on their own. Faint pinging sounds came from them as they dug themselves in.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Security check. The pegs are setting up a defensive zone for a hundred yards around us. Don’t try to go through it in the night.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Demeris said.

The tent was just about big enough for two. He wondered whether she was going to invite him to sleep inside it.

Together they gathered mesquite brush and built a fire, and she produced some packets of powdered vegetables and a slab of dried meat for their dinner. While they waited for things to cook Jill went to the spring, which despite the sulfurous outcroppings gave fresh, pure water, and crouched by it, stripping to the waist to wash herself. Seeing her like that was unsettling. His gaze flicked a quick glance at her as she bathed, but she didn’t seem to care, or even to notice. That was unsettling too. Was she being deliberately provocative? Or did she just not give a damn?

He washed himself also, splashing handfuls of the cold water into his face and over his sweaty shoulders. “Dinner’s ready,” she said a few minutes later.

Darkness descended swiftly. The sky went from deep blue to utter black in minutes. In the clear desert air the stars began quickly to emerge, sharp and bright and unflickering. He looked up at them, trying to guess which of them might be the home star of the Spooks. They had never troubled to reveal that. They had never revealed very much of anything about themselves.

As they ate he asked her whether she made this trip often.

“Often enough,” she said. “I do a lot of courier work for my father, out to Texas, Louisiana, sometimes Oklahoma.” She paused a moment. “I’m Ben Gorton’s daughter,” she said, as though she expected him to recognize the name.

“Sorry. Who?”

“Ben Gorton. The mayor of Spook City, actually.”

“Spook City’s got a human mayor?”

“The human part of it does. The Spooks have their administration and we have ours.”

“Ah,” Demeris said. “I’m honored, then. The boss’s daughter. You should have told me before.”

“It didn’t seem important,” she said.

They were done with their meal. She moved efficiently around the campsite, gathering utensils, burying trash. Demeris was sure now that the village boy had simply been playing with his head. He told himself that if Jill was really a Spook he’d have sensed it somehow by this time.

When the cleanup work was done she lifted the tent flap and stepped halfway inside. He held back, unsure of the right move.

“Well?” she asked. “It’s okay to come in. Or would you rather sleep out there?”

Demeris went in. Though the temperature outside was plunging steeply with the onset of night, it was pleasantly warm inside. There was a single bedroll, just barely big enough for two if they didn’t mind sleeping very close together. He heard the sounds she made as she undressed, and tried in the absolute darkness to guess how much she was taking off. It wasn’t easy to tell. He removed his own shirt and hesitated with his jeans; but then she opened the flap again to call something out to the elephant-camel, which she had tethered just outside, and by starlight he caught a flashing glimpse of bare thigh, bare buttock. He pulled off his trousers and slipped into the bedroll. She joined him a moment later. He lay awkwardly, trying to avoid rubbing up against her. For a time there was a tense expectant silence. Then her hand reached out in the darkness and grazed his shoulder, lightly but clearly not accidentally. Demeris didn’t need a second hint. He had never taken any vows of chastity. He reached for her, found the hollow of her clavicle, trailed his hand downward until he was cupping a small, cool breast, resilient and firm. When he ran his thumb lightly across the nipples she made a little purring sound, and he felt the flesh quickly hardening. As was his. She turned to him. Demeris had some difficulty locating her mouth in the darkness, and she had to guide him, chuckling a little, but when his lips met hers he felt the immediate flicker of her tongue coming forth to greet him.

And then almost as though he was willing his own downfall he found himself perversely wondering if he might be embracing a Spook after all; and a wave of nausea swept through him, making him wobble and soften. But she was pressing tight against him, rubbing her breasts from side to side on him, uttering small eager murmuring sounds, and he got himself quickly back on track, losing himself in her fragrance and warmth and banishing completely from his thoughts anything but the sensations of the moment. After that one attack of doubt everything was easy. He located her long smooth thighs with no problem whatever, and when he glided into her he needed no guidance there either, and though their movements together had the usual first-time clumsiness her hot gusts of breath against his shoulder and her soft sharp outcries told him that all was going well.

He lay awake for a time when it was over, listening to the reassuring pinging of the tent pegs and the occasional far-off cry of some desert creature. He imagined he could hear the heavy snuffling breathing of the elephant-camel too, like a huge recirculating device just outside the tent. Jill had curled up against him as if they were old friends and was lost in sleep.

***

SHE SAID OUT OF THE blue, after they had been riding a long while in silence the following morning, “You ever been married, Nick?”

The incongruity of the question startled him. Until a moment ago she had seemed to be a million miles away. His attempt to make love to her a second time at dawn had been met with indifference and she had been pure business, remote and cool, all during the job of breaking camp and getting on the road.

“No,” he said. “You?”

“Hasn’t been on my program,” she said. “But I thought everybody in Free Country got married. Nice normal people who settle down early and raise big families.” The elephant-camel swayed and bumped beneath them. They were following a wide dirt track festooned on both sides with glittering strands of what looked like clear jelly, hundreds of feet long, mounted on spiny black poles that seemed to be sprouting like saplings from the ground.

“I raised a big family,” he said. “My brothers and sisters. Dad got killed in a hunting accident when I was ten. Possibly got mixed up with a Spook animal that was on the wrong side of the line: nobody could quite figure it out. Then my mother came down with Blue Fever. I was fifteen then and five brothers and sisters to look after. Didn’t leave me a lot of time to think about finding a wife.”

“Blue Fever?”

“Don’t you know what that is? Infectious disease. Kills you in three days, no hope at all. Supposed to be something the Spooks brought.”

“We don’t have it over here,” she said. “Not that I ever heard.”

“Spooks brought it, I guess they must know how to cure it. We aren’t that lucky. Anyway, there were all these little kids to look after. Of course, they’re grown by now.”

“But you still look after them. Coming over here to try to track down your brother.”

“Somebody has to.”

“What if he doesn’t want to be tracked down, though?”

Demeris felt a tremor of alarm. He knew Tom was restless and troubled, but he didn’t think he was actually disturbed. “Have you any reason to think Tom would want to stay over here for good?”

“I didn’t say I did. But he might just prefer not to be found. A lot of boys come across and stay across, you know.”

“I didn’t know. Nobody I ever heard of did that. Why would someone from Free Country want to live on the Spook side?”

“For the excitement?” she suggested. “To run with the Spooks? To play their games? To hunt their animals? There’s all sorts of minglings going on these days.”

“Is that so,” he said uneasily. He stared at the back of her head. She was so damned odd, he thought, such a fucking mystery.

She said, sounding very far away, “I wonder about marrying.” Back to that again. “What it’s like, waking up next to the same person every day, day after day. Sharing your life, year after year. It sounds very beautiful. But also kind of strange. It isn’t easy for me to imagine what it might be like.”

“Don’t they have marriage in Spook City?”

“Not really. Not the way you people do.”

“Well, why don’t you try it and see? You don’t like it, there are ways to get out of it. Nobody I know thinks that being married is strange. Christ, I bet whatever the Spooks do is five hundred times as strange, and you probably think that it’s the most normal thing in the world.”

“Spooks don’t marry. They don’t even have sex, really. What I hear, it’s more like the way fishes do it, no direct contact at all.”

“That sounds terrifically appealing. I’d really love to try something like that. All I need is a cute Spook to try it with.”

He attempted to keep it light. But she glanced around at him.

“Still suspicious, Nick”

He let that go by. “Listen, you could always take a fling at getting married for a while, couldn’t you?” he said. “If you’re all that curious about finding out what it’s like.”

“Is that an offer, Nick?”

“No,” he said. “Hardly. Just a suggestion.”

***

AN HOUR AFTER THEY SET out that morning they passed a site where there was a peculiar purple depression about a hundred yards across at its thickest point. It was vaguely turtle-shaped, a long oval with four stubby projections at the corners and one at each end.

“What the devil is that?” Demeris asked. “A Spook graveyard?”

“It’s new,” she said. “I’ve never seen it before.”

Some vagrant curiosity impelled him. “Can we look?”

Jill halted the elephant-camel and they jumped down. The site might almost have been a lake, deep-hued and dense against the sandy earth, but there was nothing liquid about it: it was like a stain that ran several yards deep into the ground. Together they walked to the edge. Demeris saw something moving beneath the surface out near the middle, a kind of corkscrew effect, and was about to call it to her attention when abruptly the margin of the site started to quiver and a narrow rubbery arm rose up out of the purpleness and wrapped itself around her left leg. It started to pull her forward. She shrieked and made an odd hissing sound.

Demeris yanked his knife from the scabbard at his belt and sliced through the thing that had seized her. There was a momentary twanging sound and he felt a hot zing go up his arm to the shoulder. The energy of it ricocheted around inside his shirt collar; then it ceased and he staggered back. The part of the ropy arm that had been wrapped around Jill fell away; the rest writhed convulsively before them. He caught her by one wrist and pulled her back.

“It’s got to be some kind of trap for game,” he said. “Or for passing travelers stupid enough to go close. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

She was pale and shaky. “Thanks,” she said simply, as they ran toward the elephant-camel.

Not much of a show of gratitude, he thought.

But at least the incident told him something about her that he needed to know. A Spook trap wouldn’t have gone after one of their own, would it?

Would it?

***

AT MIDDAY THEY STOPPED FOR lunch in a cottonwood grove that the Spooks had redecorated with huge crystalline mushroom-shaped things. The elephant-camel munched on one and seemed to enjoy it, but Demeris and Jill left them alone. There was a brackish little stream running through the trees, and once again she stripped and cleaned herself. Bathing seemed very important to her and she had no self-consciousness about her nudity. He watched her with cool pleasure from the bank.

Once in a while, during the long hours of the ride, she would break the silence with a quirky sort of question: “What do people like to do at night in Free Country?” or “Are men closer friends with men than women are with women?” or “Have you ever wished you were someone else?” He gave the best answers he could. She was a strange, unpredictable kind of woman, but he was fascinated by the quick darting movements of her mind, so different from that of anyone he knew in Albuquerque. Of course he dealt mainly with ranchers and farmers, and she was a mayor’s daughter. And a native of the Occupied Zone besides: no reason why she should be remotely like the kind of people he knew.

They came to places that had been almost incomprehensibly transformed by the aliens. There was an abandoned one-street town that looked as though it had been turned to glass, everything eerily translucent—buildings, furniture, plumbing fixtures. If there had been any people still living there you most likely could see right through them too, Demeris supposed. Then came a sandy tract where a row of decayed rusting automobiles had been arranged in an overlapping series, the front of each humped up on the rear end of the one in front of it, like a string of mating horses. Demeris stared at the automobiles as though they were ghosts ready to return to life. He had never actually seen one in use. The whole technology of internal combustion devices had dropped away before he was born, at least in his part of Free Country, though he had heard they still had cars of some sort in certain privileged enclaves of California.

After the row of cars there was a site where old human appliances, sinks and toilets and chairs and fragments of things Demeris wasn’t able even to identify, had been fused together to form a dozen perfect pyramids fifty or sixty feet in height. It was like a museum of antiquity. By now Demeris was growing numb to the effects of seeing all this Spook meddling. It was impossible to sustain anger indefinitely when evidence of the alien presence was such a constant.

There were more frequent traces now of the aliens’ living presence, too: glows on the horizon, mysterious whizzing sounds far overhead that Jill said were airborne traffic, shining roadways through the desert parallel to the unpaved track they were following. Demeris expected to see Spooks go riding by next, but there was no sign of that. He wondered what they were like. “Like ghosts,” Bud had said. “Long shining ghosts, but solid.” That didn’t help much.

When they camped that night, Demeris entered the tent with her without hesitation, and waited only a moment or two after lying down to reach for her. Her reaction was noncommittal for the first instant. But then he heard a sort of purring sound and she turned to him, open and ready. There had been nothing remotely like affection between them all afternoon, but now she generated sudden passion out of nothing at all, pulling it up like water from an artesian well; and he rode with her swiftly and expertly toward sweaty, noisy climaxes. He rested a while and went back to her a second time, but she said simply, “No. Let’s sleep now,” and turned her back to him. A very strange woman, he thought. He lay awake for a time, listening to the rhythm of her breathing just to see if she was asleep, thinking he might nuzzle up to her anyway if she was still conscious and seemed at all receptive. He couldn’t tell. She was motionless, limp: for all he knew, dead. Her breathing-sounds were virtually imperceptible. After a time Demeris rolled away. He dreamed of a bright sky streaked with crimson fire, and dragons flying in formations out of the south.

***

NOW THEY WERE NEARING SPOOK City. Instead of following along a dusty unpaved trail they had moved onto an actual road, perhaps some old United States of America highway that the aliens had jazzed up by giving it an internal glow, a cool throbbing green luminance rising in eddying waves from a point deep underground. Other travelers joined them here, some riding wagons drawn by alien beasts of burden, a few floating along on silent flatbed vehicles that had no apparent means of propulsion. The travelers all seemed to be human.

“How do Spooks get around?” Demeris asked.

“Any way they like,” said Jill.

A corroded highway sign that looked five thousand years old announced that they had reached a town called Dimmitt. There wasn’t any town there, only a sort of checkpoint of light like a benign version of the border barrier: a cheerful shimmering sheen, a dazzling moire pattern dancing in the air. One by one the wagons and flatbeds and carts passed through it and disappeared. “It’s the hunt perimeter,” Jill explained, while they were waiting their turn to go through. “Like a big pen around Spook City, miles in diameter, to keep the animals in. They won’t cross the line. It scares them.”

He felt no effect at all as they crossed it. On the other side she told him that she had some formalities to take care of, and walked off toward a battered shed a hundred feet from the road. Demeris waited for her beside the elephant-camel.

A grizzled-looking weather-beaten man of about fifty came limping up and grinned at him.

“Jack Lawson,” he announced. He put out his hand. “On my way back from my daughter’s wedding, Oklahoma City.”

“Nick Demeris.”

“Interesting traveling companion you got, Nick. What’s it like, traveling with one of those? I’ve always wondered about that.”

“One of what?” Demeris said.

Lawson winked. “Come on, friend. You know what I mean.”

“I don’t think I do.”

“Your pal’s a Spook, friend. Surely you aren’t going to try to make me believe she’s anything else.”

“Friend, my ass. And she’s as human as you or me.”

“Right.”

“Believe me,” Demeris said flatly. “I know. I’ve checked her out at very close range.”

Lawson’s eyebrows rose a little. “That’s what I figured. I’ve heard there are men who go in for that. Some women, too.”

“Shit,” Demeris said, feeling himself beginning to heat up. He didn’t have the time or the inclination for a fight, and Lawson looked about twice his age anyway. As calmly as he could he said, “You’re fucking wrong, just the way that Mex kid down south who said she was a Spook was wrong. Neither of you knows shit about her.”

“I know one when I see one.”

“And I know an asshole when I see one,” said Demeris.

“Easy, friend. Easy. I see I’m mistaken, that you simply don’t understand what’s going on. Okay. A thousand pardons, friend. Ten thousand.” Lawson gave him an oily, smarmy smile, a courtly bow, and started to move away.

“Wait,” Demeris said. “You really think she’s a Spook?”

“Bet your ass I do.”

“Prove it, then.”

“Don’t have any proof. Just intuition.”

“Intuition’s not worth much where I come from.”

“Sometimes you can just tell. There’s something about her. I don’t know. I couldn’t put it into words.”

“My father used to say that if you can’t put something into words, that’s on account of you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Lawson laughed. It was that same patronizing I-know-better-than-you laugh that the kid in the village had given him. Anger welled up again in Demeris and it was all he could do to keep from swinging on the older man.

But just then Jill returned. She looked human as hell as she came walking up, swinging her hips. Lawson tipped his hat to her with exaggerated courtesy and went sauntering back to his wagon.

“Ready?” Demeris asked her.

“All set.” She glanced at him. “You okay, Nick?”

“Sure.”

“What was that fellow saying to you?”

“Telling me about his daughter’s wedding in Oklahoma.”

He clambered up on the elephant-camel, taking up his position on the middle hump.

His anger over what Lawson had said gradually subsided. They all knew so much, these Occupied Zone people. Or thought they did. Always trying to get one up on the greenhorn from Free Country, giving you their knowledgeable looks, hitting you with their sly insinuations.

Some rational part of him told him that if two people over here had said the same thing about Jill, it might just be true. A fair chance of it, in fact. Well, fuck it. She looked human, she smelled human, she felt human when he ran his hands over her body. That was good enough for him. Let these Spook Land people say what they liked. He intended to go on accepting her as human no matter what anyone might try to tell him. It was too late for him to believe anything else. He had had his mouth to hers; he had been inside her body; he had given himself to her in the most intimate way there was. There was no way he could let himself believe that he had been embracing something from another planet, not now. He absolutely could not permit himself to believe that now.

And then he felt a sudden stab of wild, almost intoxicating temptation: the paradoxical hope that she was a Spook after all, that by embracing her he had done something extraordinary and outrageous. A true crossing of borders: his youth restored. He was amazed. It was a stunning moment, a glimpse of what it might be like to step outside the prisons of his soul. But it passed quickly and he was his old sober self again. She is human, he told himself stolidly. Human. Human.

***

A LITTLE CLOSER IN, HE saw one of the pens where the hunt animals were being kept. It was like a sheet of lightning rising from the ground, but lightning that stayed and stayed and stayed. Behind it Demeris thought he could make out huge dark moving shapes. Nothing was clear, and after a few moments of staring at that fluid rippling wall of light he started to feel the way he had felt when he was first pushing through the border barrier.

“What kind of things do they have in there?” he asked her.

“Everything,” she said. “Wait and see, when they turn them loose.”

“When is that?”

“Couple of days from now.” She swung around and pointed. “Look there, Nick. There’s Spook City.”

They were at the crest of a little hill. In the valley below lay a fair-sized sprawling town, not as big as he had expected, a mongrel place made up in part of little boxy houses and in part of tall, tapering, flickering constructions that didn’t seem to be of material substance at all, ghost-towers, fairy castles, houses fit for Spooks. The sight of them gave him a jolt, the way everything was mixed together, human and non. A low line of the same immaterial stuff ran around the edge of the city like a miniature border barrier, but softer in hue and dancing like little swamp-fires.

“I don’t see any Spooks,” he said to her.

“You want to see a Spook? There’s a Spook for you.”

An alien fluttered up into view right then and there, as though she had conjured it out of empty air. Demeris, caught unprepared, muttered a whispered curse and his fingers moved with desperate urgency through the patterns of protection signs that his mother had taught him more than twenty years before and that he had never had occasion to use. The Spook was incorporeal, elegant, almost blindingly beautiful: a sleek cone of translucence, a node of darkness limned by a dancing core of internal light. He had expected them to be frightening, not beautiful: but this one, at least, was frightening in its beauty. Then a second one appeared, and it was nothing like the first, except that it too had no solidity. It was flat below and almost formless higher up, and drifted a little way above the ground atop a pool of its own luminescence. The first one vanished; the second one revolved and seemed to spawn three more, and then it too was gone; the newest three, which had s-shaped curves and shining blue eye-like features at their upper tips, twined themselves together almost coquettishly and coalesced into a single fleshy spheroid crisscrossed by radiant purple lines. The spheroid folded itself across its own equator, taking on a half-moon configuration, and slipped downward into the earth.

Demeris shivered.

Spooks, yes. Well named. Dream-beings. No wonder there had been no way of defeating them. How could you touch them? How could you injure them in any way, when they mutated and melted and vanished while you were looking at them? It wasn’t fair, creatures like that coming to the world and taking a big chunk of it the way they had, simply grabbing, not even bothering to explain why, just moving in, knowing that they were too powerful to be opposed. All his ancient hatred of them sprang into new life. And yet they were beautiful, almost godlike. He feared and loathed them but at the same time he found himself fighting back an impulse to drop to his knees.

He and Jill rode into town without speaking. There was a sweet little tingle when they went through the wall of dancing light, and then they were inside.

“Here we are,” Jill said. “Spook City. I’ll show you a place where you can stay.”

***

THE CITY’S STREETS WERE UNPAVED—THE Spooks wouldn’t need sidewalks—and most of the human-style buildings had windows of some kind of semi-clear oiled cloth instead of glass. The buildings themselves were of slovenly construction and were set down higgledy-piggledy without much regard for order and logic. Sometimes there was a gap between them out of which a tall Spook structure sprouted like nightmare fungus, but mainly the Spook sectors of the city and the human sectors were separate, however it had seemed when he had been looking down from the hill. All manner of flying creatures gathered for the hunt were in busy circulation overhead: the delta-winged herders, the flying snakes, a whole host of weirdities traversing the air above the city with such demonic intensity that it seemed to sizzle as they passed through it.

Jill conveyed him to a hotel of sorts made out of crudely squared logs held together clumsily by pegs, a gigantic ramshackle three-story cabin that looked as if it had been designed by people who were inventing architecture from scratch, and left him at the door. “I’ll see you later,” she told him, when he had jumped down. “I’ve got some business to tend to.”

“Wait,” he said. “How am I going to find you when—”

Too late. The elephant-camel had already made a massive about-face and was ambling away.

Demeris stood looking after her, feeling puzzled and a little hurt. But he had begun to grow accustomed to her brusqueness and her arbitrary shifts by now. Very likely she’d turn up again in a day or two. Meanwhile, though, he was on his own, just when he had started to count on her help in this place.

He shrugged and went inside.

The place had the same jerry-built look within: a long dark entry hall, exposed rafters, crazily leaning walls. To the left, from behind a tattered curtain of red gauze, came the sounds of barroom chatter and clinking glasses. On the right was a cubicle with a pale, owlish-looking heavyset woman peering out of a lopsided opening.

“I need a room,” Demeris told her.

“We just got one left. Busy time, on account of the hunt. It’s five labor units a night room and board and a drink or two.”

“Labor units?”

“We don’t take Free Country money here, chumbo. An hour cleaning out the shithouse, that’s one labor unit. Two hours swabbing grease in the kitchen, that’s one. Don’t worry, we’ll find things for you to do. You staying the usual thirty days?”

“I’m not on an Entrada,” Demeris said. “I’m here to find my brother.” Then, with a sudden rush of hope: “Maybe you’ve seen him. Looks a lot like me, shorter, around eighteen years old. Tom Demeris.”

“Nobody here by that name,” she said, and shoved a square metal key toward him. “Second floor on the left, 103. Welcome to Spook City, chumbo.”

The room was small, squalid, dim. Hardly any light came through the oilcloth window. A strangely shaped lamp sat on the crooked table next to the bare cot that would be his bed. It turned on when he touched it and an eerie tapering glow rose from it, like a tiny Spook. He saw now that there were hangings on the wall, coarse cloth bearing cryptic inscriptions in Spook script.

Downstairs, he found four men and a parched-looking woman in the bar. They were having some sort of good-natured argument and gave him only the quickest of glances. Sized him up, wrote him off: he could see that. Free Country written all over his face. His nostrils flared and he clamped his lips.

“Whiskey,” Demeris told the bartender.

“We got Shagback, Billyhow, Donovan, and Thread.”

“Donovan,” he said at random. The bartender poured him a shot from a lumpy-looking blue bottle with a garish yellow label. The stuff was inky-dark, vaguely sour-smelling, strong. Demeris felt it hit bottom like a fishhook. The others were looking at him with more interest now. He took that for an opening and turned to them with a forced smile to tell them what they plainly already knew, which was that he was a stranger here, and to ask them the one thing he wanted to know, which was could they help him discover the whereabouts of a kid named Tom Demeris.

“How do you like the whiskey?” the woman asked him, in response.

“It’s different from what I’m accustomed to. But not bad.” He fought back his anger. “He’s my kid brother, that’s the thing, and I’ve come all this way looking for him, because—”

“Tom what?” one of the men said.

“Demeris. We’re from Albuquerque.”

They began to laugh. “Abblecricky,” the woman said.

“Dabblecricky,” said one of the other men, sallow-skinned with a livid scar across his cheek.

Demeris looked coldly from one face to another. “Albuquerque,” he said with great precision. “It used to be a big city in New Mexico. That’s in Free Country. We still got eight, ten thousand people living there, maybe more. My brother was on his Entrada, only he didn’t come back. Been gone since June. I think he’s got some idea of settling here, and I want to talk to him about that. Tom Demeris is his name. Not quite as tall as I am, a little heavier set, longer hair than mine.”

But he could see that he had lost their attention. The woman rolled her eyes and shrugged, and one of the men gestured to the bartender for another round of drinks.

“You want one too?” the bartender asked Demeris.

“A different kind this time.”

It wasn’t any better. He sipped it morosely. A few moments later the others began to file out of the room. “Abblekirky,” the woman said, as she went past Demeris, and laughed again.

He spent a troubled night. The room was musty and dank and made him feel claustrophobic. The little bed offered no comfort. Sounds came from outside, grinding noises, screeches, strange honkings. When he turned the lamp off the darkness was absolute and ominous, and when he turned it on the light bothered him. He lay stiffly, waiting for sleep to take him, and when it failed to arrive he rose and pulled the oilcloth window-cover aside to stare into the night. Attenuated streaks of brightness were floating through the air, ghostly will-o’-the-wisp glowings, and by that faint illumination he saw huge winged things pumping stolidly across the sky, great dragons no more graceful than flying oxen, while in the road below the building three flickering columns of light that surely were Spooks went past, driving a herd of lean little square-headed monsters as though they were sheep.

In the morning, after the grudging breakfast of stale bread and some sort of coffee-like beverage with an undertaste of barley that the hotel bar provided, he went out into Spook City to look for Tom. But where was he supposed to begin? He had no idea.

It was a chaotic, incomprehensible town. The unpaved streets went squiggling off in all directions, no two of them parallel. Wagons and flatbeds of the kind he had seen at the perimeter checkpoint, some of them very ornate and bizarre, swept by constantly, stirring up whirlwinds of gray dust. Ethereal shimmering Spooks drifted in and among them, ignoring the perils of the busy traffic as though they were operating on some other plane of existence entirely, which very likely they were. Now and again came a great bleating of horns and everyone moved to the side of the street to allow a parade of menacing-looking beasts to pass through, a dozen green-scaled things like dinosaurs with high-stepping big-taloned feet or a procession of elephant-camels linked trunk to tail or a string of long slithery serpentine creatures moving on scores of powerful stubby legs.

Demeris felt a curious numbness coming over him as one enormity after another presented itself. These few days across the border were changing him, creating a kind of dreamy tolerance in him. He had absorbed all the new alien sights and experiences he could and he was overloaded now, no room left for reactions of surprise or fear or even of loathing. The crazy superabundance of strangeness in Spook City was quickly starting to appear normal to him. Albuquerque in all its somnolent ordinariness seemed to him now like a static vision, a mere photograph of a city rather than an actual thriving place. There was still the problem of Tom, though. Demeris walked for hours and found no clue, no starting place: no building marked Police Station or City Hall or Questions Answered Here. What he really hoped to come upon was someone who was recognizably a native of Free Country, someone who could give him an inkling of how to go about tracing his brother through the network of kids making Entradas that must exist on this side. But he saw no one like that either. Where the hell was Jill? She was his only ally, and she had left him to cope with this lunacy all by himself, abandoning him as abruptly as she had picked him up in the first place.

But she, at least, could be located. She was the mayor’s daughter, after all.

He entered a dark, squalid little building that seemed to be some sort of shop. A small hunched woman who could have been made of old leather gave him a surly look from behind a warped counter. He met it with the best smile he could manage and said to her, “I’m new in town and I’m trying to find Jill Gorton, Ben Gorton’s daughter. She’s a friend of mine.”

“Who?”

“Jill Gorton? Ben Gorton’s—”

She shook her head curtly. “Don’t know anybody by that name.”

“Ben Gorton, then. Where can he be found?”

“Wherever he might happen to be,” she said. “How would I know?” And slammed shut on him like a trapdoor. He peered at her in astonishment. She had turned away from him and was moving things around behind her counter as though no one was there.

“Doesn’t he have an office?” Demeris asked. “Some kind of headquarters?”

No response. She got up, moving around in the shadows, ignoring him.

“I’m talking to you,” Demeris said.

She might just as well have been deaf. He quivered with frustration. It was midday and he had had practically nothing to eat since yesterday afternoon and he hadn’t accomplished anything all this day and it had started to dawn on him that he had no idea how he was going to find his way back to his hotel through the maze of the city—he didn’t even know its name or address, and the streets bore no signs anyway—and now this old bitch was pretending he was invisible. Furiously he said, “Jesus Christ, what’s the matter with you people? Haven’t you ever heard of common courtesy here? Have the fucking Spooks drained everything that’s human out of you? All I want to know is how to find the goddamned mayor. Can’t you tell me that one little thing? Can’t you?”

Instead of answering him, she looked back over her shoulder and made a sound in Spook language, a wheezing whistling noise, the kind of sound that Jill might have directed to her elephant-camel. Almost instantly a tall flat-faced man of about thirty with the same sort of dark leathery skin as hers came out of a back room and gave Demeris a black, threatening stare.

“What the hell you think you’re doing yelling at my mother?”

“Look,” Demeris said, “I just asked her for a little help, that’s all.” He was still churning with rage. “I need to find the mayor. I’m a friend of his daughter Jill, and she’s supposed to help me track down my brother Tom, who came across from Free Country a few months ago, and I don’t know one goddamned building from the next in this town, so I stopped in here hoping she could give me some directions and instead—”

“You yelled at her. You cursed at her.”

“Yeah. Maybe so. But if you people don’t have any decency why the hell should I? All I want to know—”

“You cursed at my mother.”

“Yeah,” Demeris said. “Yeah, I did.” It was all too much. He was tired and hungry and far from home and the streets were full of monsters and nobody would give him the time of day here and he was sick of it. He had no idea who moved first, but suddenly they were both on the same side of the counter and swinging at each other, butting heads and pummeling each other’s chests and trying to slam each other against the wall. The other man was bigger and heavier, but Demeris was angrier, and he got his hands to the other man’s throat and started to squeeze. Dimly he was aware of sounds all around him, doors slamming, rapid footsteps, people shouting, a thick incoherent babble of sound. Then someone’s arm was bent around his chin and throat and hands were clamped on his wrists and he was being pulled to the floor, kicking as he went and struggling to reach the knife at his waist. The confusion grew worse after that: he had no idea how many of them there were, but they were sitting on him, they were holding his arms, they were dragging him out into the daylight. He thought he saw a Spook hovering in the air above him, but perhaps he was wrong about that. There was too much light everywhere around. Nothing was clear. “Listen,” he said, “The only thing I want is—” and they hit him in the mouth and kicked him in the side, and there was some raucous laughter and he heard them speaking in the Spook language; and then he came to understand that he was in a wagon, a cart, some kind of moving contrivance. His hands and feet were tied. A flushed sweaty face looked down at him, grinning.

“Where are you taking me?” Demeris asked.

“Ben Gorton. That’s who you wanted to see, isn’t it? Ben Gorton, right?”

***

HE WAS IN A BASEMENT room somewhere, windowless, lit by three of the little Spook-lamps. It was the next day, he supposed. Certainly a lot of time had gone by, perhaps a whole night. They had given him a little to eat, some sort of bean mush. He was still bound, but two men were holding him anyway.

“Untie him,” Gorton said.

He had to be Gorton. He was around six feet seven, wide as a slab, with a big bald head and a great beaky nose, and everything about him spoke of power and authority. Demeris rubbed his wrists where the cord had chafed them and said, “I wasn’t interested in a fight. That’s not the sort of person I am. But sometimes when it builds up and builds up and builds up, and you can’t stand it anymore—”

“Right. You damn near killed Bobby Bridger, you know that?” His eyes were bugging right out of his head. This is hunt season here, mister. The Spooks will be turning the critters loose any minute now and things are going to get real lively. It’s important for everybody to stay civil so things don’t get any more complicated than they usually are when the hunt’s going on.”

“If Bridger’s mother had been a little more civil to me, it would all have been a lot different,” Demeris said.

Gorton gave him a weary look. “Who are you and what are you doing here, anyway?”

Taking a deep breath, Demeris said, “My name’s Nick Demeris, and I live in Free Country, and I came over here to find my kid brother Tom, who seems to have gotten sidetracked coming back from his Entrada.”

“Tom Demeris,” Gorton said, raising his eyebrows.

“Yes. Then I met your daughter, Jill, at some little town near the border, and she invited me to travel with her. But when we got to Spook City she dropped me at some hotel and disappeared, so—”

“Wait a second,” said Gorton. His eyebrows went even higher. “My daughter Jill?”

“That’s right.”

“Shit,” the big man said. “What daughter? I don’t have no fucking daughter.”

“No daughter,” said Demeris.

“No daughter. None. Must have been some Spook playing games with you.”

The words fell on Demeris like stones. “Some Spook,” he repeated numbly. “Pretending to be your daughter. You mean that? For Christ’s sake, are you serious, or are you playing games with me too?”

Something in Demeris’s agonized tone seemed to register sympathetically on Gorton. He squinted, he blinked, he tugged at the tip of his great nose. He said in a much softer voice, “I’m not playing any games with you. I can’t say for sure that she was a Spook but she sure as hell wasn’t my daughter, because I don’t have any daughter. Spooks doing masks will tell you anything they damn please, though. Chances are, she was a Spook.”

“Doing masks?”

“Spooks going around playing at being human. It’s a big thing with them these days. The latest Spook fad.”

Demeris nodded. Doing masks, he thought. He considered it and it began to sink in, and sink and sink and sink.

Then quietly he said, “Maybe you can help me find my brother, at least.”

“No. I can’t do that and neither can anybody else. Tom Demeris, you said his name is?”

“That’s right.”

Gorton glanced toward one of his men. “Mack, how long ago was it that the Demeris kid took the Spooks’ nickel?”

“Middle of July, I think.”

“Right.” To Demeris, Gorton said, “What we call ‘taking the Spooks’ nickel’ means selling yourself to them, do you know what I mean? You agree to go with them to their home planet. They’ve got a kind of plush country club for humans there where you live like a grand emperor for the rest of your life, comfort, luxury, women, anything you damn please, but the deal is that in return you belong to them forever, that they get to run psychological experiments on you to see what makes you tick, like a mouse in a cage. At least that’s what the Spooks tell us goes on there, and we might as well believe it. Nobody who’s sold himself to the Spooks has ever come back. I’m sorry, man. I wish it wasn’t so.”

Demeris looked away for a moment. He felt like smashing things, but he held himself perfectly still. My brother, he thought, my baby brother.

“He was just a kid,” he said.

“Well, he must have been a damned unhappy kid. Nobody with his head screwed on right would take the nickel. Hardly anybody ever does.” Something flashed momentarily in Gorton’s eyes, and Demeris sensed that to these people selling yourself to the Spooks was the ultimate surrender, the deepest sort of self-betrayal. They had all sold themselves to the Spooks, in a sense, by choosing to live in the Occupied Zone; but even here there were levels of yielding to the alien conqueror, he realized, and in the eyes of Spook City people the thing that Tom had done was the lowest level of all. He felt the weight of Gorton’s contempt for Tom and pity for him, suddenly, and hated it, and tried to throw it back with a furious glare. Gorton watched him quietly, not reacting.

After a little while Demeris said, “All right. There’s nothing I can do, is there? I guess I’d better go back to Albuquerque now.”

“You’d better go back to your hotel and wait until the hunt is over,” said Gorton. “It isn’t safe wandering around in the open while the critters are loose.”

“No,” said Demeris. “I suppose it isn’t.”

“Take him to wherever he’s staying, Mack,” Gorton said to his man. He stared for a time at Demeris. The sorrow in his eyes seemed genuine. “I’m sorry,” Gorton said again. “I really am.”

***

MACK HAD NO DIFFICULTY RECOGNIZING Demeris’s hotel from the description he gave, and took him to it in a floating wagon that made the trip in less than fifteen minutes. The streets were practically empty now: no Spooks in sight and hardly any humans, and those who were still out were moving quickly.

“You want to stay indoors while the hunt is going on,” Mack said. “A lot of dumb idiots don’t, but most of them regret it. This is one event that ought to be left strictly to the Spooks.”

“How will I know when it starts?”

“You’ll know,” Mack said.

Demeris got out of the wagon. It turned immediately and headed away. He paused a moment in front of the building, breathing deeply, feeling a little light-headed, thinking of Tom on the Spook planet, Tom living in a Spook palace, Tom sleeping on satin Spook sheets.

“Nick? Over here, Nick! It’s me!”

“Oh, Christ,” he said. Jill, coming up the street toward him, smiling as blithely as though this were Christmas Eve. He scanned her, searching for traces of some Spook gleam, some alien shimmer. When she reached him she held out her arms to him as though expecting a hug. He stepped back to avoid her grasp.

In a flat tight voice, he said, “I found out about my brother. He’s gone off to the Spook world. Took their nickel.”

“Oh, Nick. Nick!”

“You knew, didn’t you? Everybody in this town must have known about the kid who came from Free Country and sold himself to the Spooks.” His tone turned icy. “It was your father the mayor that told me. He also told me that he doesn’t have any daughters.”

Her cheeks blazed with embarrassment. It was so human a reaction that he was cast into fresh confusion: how could a Spook learn to mimic a human even down to a blush? It didn’t seem possible. And it gave him new hope. She had lied to him about being Ben Gorton’s daughter, yes, God only knew why; but there was still the possibility that she was human, that she had chosen to put on a false identity but the body he saw was really her own. If only it was so, he thought. His anger with her, his disdain, melted away in a flash. He wanted everything to be all right. He was rocked by a powerful rush of eagerness to be assured that the woman he had embraced those two nights on the desert was indeed a woman; and with it, astonishingly, came a new burst of desire for her, of fresh yearning stronger than anything he had felt for her before.

“What he told me about was that you were a Spook,” Demeris said in a guarded tone. He looked at her hopefully, waiting for her to deny it, praying for her to deny it, ready to accept her denial.

“Yes,” she said. “I am.”

It was like a gate slamming shut in his face.

Serenely she said, “Humans fascinate me. Their emotions, their reactions, their attitudes toward things. I’ve been studying them at close range for a hundred of your years and I still don’t know as much as I’d like to. And finally I thought, the only way I can make that final leap of understanding is to become one myself.”

“Doing masks,” Demeris said in a hollow voice. Looking at her, he imagined he could see something cold and foreign peering out at him, and it seemed to him that great chilly winds were sweeping through the empty caverns of his soul. He began to see now that somewhere deep within him he must have been making plans for a future that included this woman, that he had wanted her so much that he had stubbornly refused to accept any of the evidence that had been given him that that was unthinkable. And now he had been given the one bit of evidence that was impossible to reject.

“Right,” she said. “Doing masks.”

He knew he should be feeling fury, or anguish, or something, at this final revelation that he had slept with a Spook. But he hardly felt anything at all. He was like a stone. Perhaps he had already done the anger and pain, on some level below his consciousness. Or else he had somehow transcended it. The Spooks are in charge here. All right. We are their toys. All right. All right. You could go only so far into despair and then you stopped feeling it, he supposed. Or hatred. Hating the Spooks was useless. It was like hating an avalanche, like hating an earthquake.

“Taking human men as your lovers, too: that’s part of doing masks, isn’t it?” he asked. “Was my brother Tom one of them?”

“No. Never. I saw him only once or twice.”

He believed that. He believed everything she was saying, now.

She seemed about to say something else. But then suddenly a flare of lightning burst across the sky, a monstrous forking shaft of flame that looked as though it could split the world in two. It was followed not by thunder but by music, an immense alien chord that fell like an avalanche from the air and swelled up around them with oceanic force. The vault of the sky rippled with colors: red, orange, violet, green.

“What’s happening?” Demeris asked.

“The hunt is starting,” she said. “That’s the signal.”

Yes. In the wake of the lightning and the rippling colors came swarming throngs of airborne creatures, seeming thousands of them, the delta-winged dragon-like herders and their snake-like pilots, turning the midday sky dark with their numbers, like a swarm of bees overhead, colossal ones whose wings made a terrible droning sound as they beat the air; and then Demeris heard gigantic roaring, bellowing sounds from nearby, as if monsters were approaching. There were no animals in the streets, not yet, but they couldn’t be very far away. Above him, Spooks by the dozens flickered in the air. Then he heard footsteps, and a pack of humans came running frantically toward them out of a narrow street, their eyes wild, their faces weirdly rigid. Did the Spooks hunt humans too? Demeris wondered. Or was one of the monsters chasing after them? The runners came sweeping down on him. “Get out of the way, man!” one of them cried. “Out of the way!”

Demeris stepped back, but not fast enough, and the runner on the inside smacked hard into his shoulder, spinning him around a little. For one startling moment Demeris found himself looking straight into the man’s eyes, and saw something close to madness there, but no fear at all—only eagerness, impatience, frenzied excitement—and he realized that they must be running not from but to the hunt, that they were on their way to witness the crazy slaughter at close range or even to take part in it themselves, that they lived just as did the Spooks for this annual moment of apocalyptic frenzy.

Jill said, “It’ll be berserk here now for two or three days. You ought to be very careful if you go outdoors.”

“Yes. I will.”

“Listen,” she said, putting an edge on her voice to make it cut through the roaring coming from overhead, “I’ve got a proposition for you, now that you know the truth.” She leaned close to him. “Let’s stay together, you and me. Despite our differences. I like you a lot, Nick.”

He peered at her, utterly astounded.

“I really think we can work something out,” she went on. Another horde of winged things shot by just above them, making raspy tearing sounds as they flailed the air, and a new gush of color stained the sky. “Seriously, Nick. We can stay in Spook City if you want to, but I don’t suppose you do. If you don’t I’ll go back across the border with you and live with you in Free Country. In my mind I’ve already crossed over. I don’t want just to study you people from the outside. I want to be one of you.”

“Are you crazy?” Demeris asked.

“No. Not in the least, I swear. Can you believe me? Can you?”

“I’ve got to go inside,” he said. He was trembling. “It isn’t smart to be standing out here while the hunt is going on.”

“What do you say, Nick? Give me an answer.”

“It isn’t possible for us to be together. You know it isn’t.”

“You want to. Some part of you does.”

“Maybe so,” he said, amazed at what he was saying, but unable to deny it despite himself. “Just maybe. One little fraction of me. But it isn’t possible, all the same. I don’t want to live here among the Spooks, and if I take you back with me, some bastard with a sharp nose will sniff you out sooner or later and expose you for what you are, and stand up before the whole community and denounce me for what I am. I’m not going to take that risk. I’m just not, Jill.”

“That’s your absolute decision.”

“My absolute decision, yes.”

Something was coming down the street now, some vast hopping thing with a head the size of a cow and teeth like spears. A dozen or so humans ran along beside it, practically within reach of the creature’s clashing jaws, and a covey of Spooks hovered over it, bombarding it with flashes of light. Demeris took a step or two toward the door of the hotel. Jill did nothing to hold him back.

He turned when he was in the doorway. She was still standing there. The hunters and their prey sped right past her, but she took no notice. She waved to him.

Sure, he thought. He waved back. Goodbye, Jill.

He went inside. There was a clatter on the stairs, people running down, a woman and some men. He recognized them as the ones who had mocked him in the bar when he had first arrived. Two of the men ran past him and out the door, but the woman halted and caught him by the crook of the arm.

“Hey, Abblecricky!”

Demeris stared at her.

She leaned into his face and grinned. She was flushed and wild-looking, like the ones who had been running through the streets. “Come on, man! It’s the hunt! The hunt, man! You’re heading the wrong way. Don’t you want to be there?”

He had no answer for that.

She was tugging at him. “Come on! Live it up! Kill yourself a dragon or two!”

“Ella!” one of the men called after her.

She gave Demeris a wink and ran out the door.

He swayed uncertainly, torn between curiosity about what was going on out there and a profound wish to go upstairs and shut the door behind him. But the street had the stronger pull. He took a step or two after the woman, and then another, and then he was outside again. Jill wasn’t there. The scene in the street was wilder than ever: people running back and forth yelling incoherently, colliding with each other in their frenzy, and overhead streams of winged creatures still swarming, and Spooks like beams of pure light moving among them, and in the distance the sounds of bellowing animals and thunderous explosions and high keening cries of what he took to be Spook pleasure. Far off to the south he saw a winged something the size of a small hill circling desperately in the sky, surrounded by implacable flaring pinpoints of Spook-light, and suddenly halting and plummeting like a falling moon toward the ground. He could smell the smell of charred flesh in the air, with a salty underflavor of what he suspected was the blood of alien beasts.

At a sleepwalker’s dreamy pace Demeris went to the corner and turned left. Abruptly he found himself confronted with a thing so huge and hideous that it was almost funny—a massive long-snouted frog-shaped thing, sloping upward from a squat base, with a moist-looking greenish-black hide pocked with little red craters and a broad, gaping, yellow-rimmed mouth. It had planted itself in the middle of the street with its shoulders practically touching the buildings at either side and was advancing slowly and clumsily toward the intersection.

Demeris drew his knife. What the hell, he thought. He was here at hunt time, he might as well join the fun. The creature was immense but it didn’t have any visible fangs or talons and he figured he could move in at an angle and slash upward through the great baggy throat, and then step back fast before the thing fell on him.

And if it turned out to be more dangerous than it looked, he didn’t give a damn. Not now.

He moved forward, knife already arcing upward.

“Hey!” someone cried behind him. “You out of your mind, fellow?”

Demeris glanced around. The bartender had come out of the hotel and was staring at him.

“That critter’s just a big sack of acid,” he said. “You cut it open, it’ll pour all over you.”

The frog-thing made a sound like a burp, or perhaps a sardonic chuckle. Demeris backed away.

“You want to cut something with that,” the bartender said, “you better know what you’re cutting.”

“Yeah.” Demeris said. “I suppose so.” He put the knife back in its sheath, and headed back across the street, feeling all the craziness of the moment go from him like air ebbing from a balloon. This hunt was no business of his. Let the people who live here get mixed up in it if they liked. But there was no reason why he should. He’d just be buying trouble, and he had never seen any sense in that.

As he reached the hotel entrance he saw Spook-light shimmering in the air at the corner—hunters, hovering above—and then there was a soft sighing sound and a torrent of bluish fluid came rolling out of the side street. It was foaming and hissing as it edged along the gutter.

Demeris shuddered. He went into the building.

***

QUICKLY HE MOUNTED THE STAIRS and entered his room, and sat for a long while on the edge of the cot, gradually growing calm, letting it all finish sinking in while the din of the hunt went on and on.

Tom was gone, that was the basic thing he had to deal with. Neither dead nor really alive, but certainly gone. Okay. He faced that and grappled with it. It was bitter news, but at least it was a resolution of sorts. He’d mourn for a while and then he’d be all right.

And Jill—

Doing masks. Taking humans as lovers. The whole thing went round and round in his mind, all that he and she had done together, had said, everything that had passed between them. And how he had always felt about Spooks and how—somehow, he had no idea how—his time with Jill had changed that a little.

He remembered what she had said. I don’t just want to study you. I want to be one of you.

What did that mean? A tourist in the human race? A sightseer across species lines?

They are softening, then. They are starting to whore after strange amusements. And if that’s so, he thought, then we are beginning to win. The aliens had infiltrated Earth; but now Earth was infiltrating them. This yearning to do masks, to look and act like humans, to experience human feelings and human practices and human follies: it meant the end for them. There were too many humans on Earth and not enough Spooks, and the Spooks would eventually be swallowed up. One by one, they would succumb to the temptation of giving up their chilly godliness and trying to imitate the messy, contradictory, troublesome creatures that humans are. And, Demeris thought, over the course of time—five hundred years, a thousand, who could say?—Earth would complete the job of absorbing the invaders and something new would emerge from the mixture of the species. That was an interesting thing to consider.

But then something clicked in his mind and he felt himself flooded by a strange interior light, a light as weird and intense as the Spooklight in the skies over the city now or the glow of the border barrier, and he realized there was another way of looking at these things altogether. Jill dropped suddenly into a new perspective and instead of thinking of her as a mere sightseer looking for forbidden thrills, he saw her for what she really was—a pioneer, an explorer, a borderjumper, a defiant enemy of boundaries and limitations and rules. The same for Tom. They were two of a kind, those two; and he had been slow to recognize it because he simply wasn’t of their sort. Demeris recognized now how little he had understood his youngest brother. To him, Tom was a disturbed kid. To Ben Gorton, he was a contemptible sellout. But the real Tom, Tom’s own Tom, might be something entirely different: someone looking not just to make a little thirty-day Entrada but to carry out a real penetration into the alien, to jump deep and far into otherness to find out what it was like. The same with this Jill, this alien, this Spook—she was of that kind too, but coming from the other direction.

And she had wanted his help. She had needed it all along, right from the start. She had missed her chance with Tom, but maybe she thought that Tom’s brother might be the same sort of person, someone who lived on the edge, who pushed against walls.

Well, well, well. How wrong she was. That was too bad.

For an instant Demeris felt another surge of the strange excitement that had come over him back at the checkpoint, when he had considered the possibility that Jill might be a Spook and had, for a moment, felt exhilarated by the thought. Could he take her back with him? Could he sneak her into the human community and live happily ever after with her, hiding the astonishing truth like the man in the old story who had married a mermaid? He saw himself, for a moment, lying beside her at night while she told him Spook stories and whispered weird Spook words and showed him sly little Spook shapeshifting tricks as they embraced. It was an astonishing thought. And he began to quiver and sweat as he thought about it.

Then, as it had before, the moment passed.

He couldn’t do it. It just wasn’t who he was, not really. Tom might have done it, but Tom was gone, and he wasn’t Tom or anything like him. Not one of the leapers, one of the soarers, one of the questers. Not one of the adventurous kind at all: just a careful man, a builder, a planner, a preserver, a protector. Nothing wrong with that. But not of any real use to Jill in her quest.

Too bad, he thought. Too damned bad, Jill.

He walked to the window and peered out, past the oilcloth cover. The hunt was reaching some sort of peak. The street was more crowded than ever with frantic monsters. The sky was full of Spooks. Scattered bands of Spook City humans, looking half crazed or more than half, were running back and forth. There was noise everywhere, sharp, percussive, discordant. Jill was nowhere to be seen out there. He let the oilcloth flap drop back in place and lay down on his cot and closed his eyes.

***

THREE DAYS LATER, WHEN THE hunt was over and it was safe to go out again, Demeris set out for home. For the first ten blocks or so a glow that might have been a Spook hovered above him, keeping pace as he walked. He wondered if it was Jill.

She had given him a second chance once, he remembered. Maybe she was doing it again.

“Jill?” he called up to it. “That you?”

No answer came.

“Listen,” he called to the hovering glow. “Forget it. It isn’t going to work out, you and me. I’m sorry, but it isn’t. You hear me?”

A little change in the intensity of the flicker overhead, perhaps. Or perhaps not.

He looked upward and said, “And listen, Jill—if that’s you, Jill, I want to tell you: thanks for everything, okay?” It was strange, talking to the sky this way. But he didn’t care. “And good luck. You hear? Good luck, Jill! I hope you get what you want.”

The glow bobbed for a moment, up, down. Then it was gone.

Demeris, shading his eyes, looked upward for a time, but there was nothing to see. He felt a sharp little momentary pang, thinking of the possibilities. But what could he have done? She had wanted something from him that he wasn’t able to give. If he had been somebody else, things might have been different. But he was who he was. He could go only so far toward becoming someone else, and then he had to pull back and return to being who he really was, and that was all there was to it.

He moved onward, toward the edge of the city.

No one gave him any trouble at all on his way out, and the return trip through the western fringe of the Occupied Zone was just as smooth. Everything was quiet, all was peaceful, clear on to the border.

The border crossing itself was equally uncomplicated. The fizzing lights and the weird hallucinatory effects of the barrier were visible, but they had no impact from this side. Demeris passed through them as though they were so much smoke, and kept on walking. In hardly any time he was across the border and back in Free Country again.