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