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.