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.