Robert Silverberg: The Way to Spook City

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 alien-held 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 sawblades 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, who was 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 now. Worry over Tom 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 himself 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 resolved itself 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 were gnashing 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.