Robert Silverberg - The Way to Spook City

“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 that had been 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.”