Robert Silverberg - The Way to Spook City

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 briefly; then it ceased and he staggered back a little way. 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 impingement.

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 distinctly 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 for 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 weatherbeaten 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.”