Hot Times in Magma City, 1990-95

  In the morning, after the grudging breakfast of stale bread and some coffee-like beverage with an undertaste of barley that the hotel bar provided, he went out into Spook City to look for Tom. But where was he supposed to begin?

  It was a chaotic town. The unpaved streets went squiggling off in all directions, no two of them parallel. Wagons and flatbeds of the kind he had seen at the perimeter checkpoint, some of them ornate and bizarre, swept by constantly, stirring up whirlwinds of gray dust. Ethereal shimmering Spooks drifted in and among them, ignoring the perils of the busy traffic as though they were operating on some other plane of existence, which very likely they were. There was a great bleating of horns and everyone moved to the side of the street to allow a parade of menacing-looking beasts to pass through, a dozen green-scaled things like dinosaurs with high-stepping big-taloned feet or a procession of elephant-camels linked trunk to tail or a string of long slithery serpentine creatures moving on scores of powerful stubby legs.

  Demeris felt a curious numbness coming over him as one enormity after another presented itself to his eyes. These few days across the border were changing him, creating a dreamy tolerance in him. He had absorbed all the new alien sights and experiences he could and he was overloaded now, no room left for reactions of surprise or fear or even of loathing. The crazy superabundance of strangeness in Spook City was quickly starting to appear normal. Albuquerque in all its somnolent ordinariness now seemed to him like a static vision, a mere photograph of a city.

  There was still the problem of Tom, though. Demeris walked for hours and found no clue, no starting place: no building marked Police Station or City Hall or Questions Answered Here. What he really hoped to come upon was someone who was recognizably a native of Free Country, someone who could give him an inkling of how to go about tracing his brother through the network of kids making entradas that must exist on this side. But he saw no one like that, either. Where the hell was Jill? She was his only ally and she had left him to cope with this lunacy all by himself, abandoning him as abruptly as she had picked him up in the first place.

  But she, at least, could be located. She was the mayor’s daughter, after all.

  He entered a dark, squalid building that seemed to be some sort of shop. A small hunched-looking woman who could have been made of old leather gave him a surly look from behind a warped counter. He met it with the best smile he could manage and said to her, “I’m new in town and I’m trying to find Jill Gorton, Ben Gorton’s daughter. She’s a friend of mine.”

  “Who?”

  “Jill Gorton? Ben Gorton’s—”

  She shook her head curtly. “Don’t know anybody by that name.”

  “Ben Gorton, then. Where can he be found?”

  “Wherever he might happen to be,” she said. “How would I know?” And then she slammed shut on him like a trapdoor. He peered at her in astonishment. She had turned away from him and was moving things behind her counter as though no one were there.

  “Doesn’t he have an office?” Demeris asked. “Some kind of headquarters?”

  No response. She got up, standing in the shadows, ignoring him.

  “I’m talking to you,” Demeris said.

  She might just as well have been deaf. He quivered with frustration. It was midday and he had had practically nothing to eat since yesterday afternoon, and he hadn’t accomplished anything all this day and it had started to dawn on him that he had no idea how he was going to find his way back to his hotel through the maze of the city—he didn’t even know its name or address, and the streets bore no signs anyway—and now this old bitch was pretending he was invisible. Furiously he said, “Jesus Christ, what’s the matter with you people? Haven’t you ever heard of common courtesy here? Have the fucking Spooks drained everything that’s human out of you all? All I want to know is how to find the goddamned mayor. Can’t you tell me that one little thing? Can’t you?”

  Instead of answering him, she looked back over her shoulder and made a sound in Spook language, a wheezing whistling noise, the kind of sound that Jill might have directed to her elephant-camel. Almost instantly a tall flat-faced man of about 30 with the same sort of dark leathery skin as hers came out of a back room and gave Demeris a black, threatening stare.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing yelling at my mother?”

  “Look,” Demeris said, “I just asked her for a little help, that’s all.” He was still churning with rage. “I need to find the mayor. I’m a friend of his daughter Jill’s, and she’s supposed to help me track down my brother Tom, who came across from Free Country a few months ago, and I don’t know one goddamned building from the next in this town, so I stopped in here hoping she could give me some directions and instead—”

  “You yelled at her. You cursed at her.”

  “Yeah. Maybe so. But if you people don’t have any decency, why the hell should I? All I want to know—”

  “You cursed at my mother.”

  “Yeah,” Demeris said. “Yeah, I did.” It was all too much. He was tired and hungry and far from home and the streets were full of monsters and nobody would give him the time of day here and he was sick of it. He had no idea who moved first, but suddenly they were both on the same side of the counter and swinging, butting heads and pummeling each other’s chests and trying to slam each other against the wall. The other man was bigger and heavier, but Demeris was angrier. He got his hands to the man’s throat and started to squeeze. Dimly he was aware of sounds all around him, doors closing, rapid footsteps, people shouting, a thick incoherent babble. Then someone’s arm was bent around his chin and throat, and hands were clamped on his wrists and he was being pulled to the floor, kicking as he went and struggling to reach the knife at his waist. The confusion grew worse after that: He had no idea how many of them there were, but they were sitting on him, they were holding his arms, they were dragging him out into the daylight. He thought he saw a Spook hovering in the air above him, but perhaps he was wrong about that. There was too much light everywhere around. Nothing was clear.

  “Listen,” he said, “The only thing I want is—” And they hit him in the mouth and kicked him in the side, and there was some raucous laughter and he heard them speaking in the Spook language; and then he came to understand that he was in a wagon, a cart, a moving contrivance. His hands and feet were tied. A flushed sweaty face looked down at him, grinning.

  “Where are you taking me?” Demeris asked.

  “To Ben Gorton. That’s who you wanted to see, isn’t it? Ben Gorton, right?”

  He was in a basement room somewhere, windowless, lit by three of the little Spook lamps. It was the next day, he supposed. They had given him a little to eat, some sort of bean mush. He was still bound, but two men were holding him anyway.

  “Untie him,” someone said.

  It had to be Gorton. He was around six foot seven, wide as a slab, with a big bald head and a great beaky nose, and everything about him spoke of power and authority. Demeris rubbed his wrists where the cord had chafed them and said, “I wasn’t interested in a fight. That’s not the sort of person I am. But sometimes when it builds up, and you can’t stand it anymore—”

  “Right. You damn near killed Bobby Bridger, you know that? His eyes were bugging right out of his head. This is hunt season here, mister. The Spooks will be turning the critters loose any minute now and things are going to get real lively. It’s important for everybody to stay civil so things don’t get any more complicated than they usually are when the hunt’s going on.”

  “If Bridger’s mother had been more civil to me, it would all have been a lot different,” Demeris said.

  Gorton gave him a weary look. “Who are you and what are you doing here?”

  Taking a deep breath, Demeris said, “My name’s Nick Demeris and I live in Free Country, and I came over here to find my kid brother Tom, who seems to have gotten sidetracked coming back from his entrada.”

  “Tom Demeris,” Gorton said, lifting his eyebrows. r />
  “Yes. Then I met your daughter Jill at a town near the border, and she invited me to travel with her. But when we got to Spook City, she dropped me at some hotel and disappeared, so—”

  “Wait a second,” said Gorton. His eyebrows went even higher. “My daughter Jill?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Shit,” the big man said. “I don’t have no fucking daughter.”

  “No daughter?” asked Demeris.

  “No daughter. None. Must have been some Spook playing games with you.”

  The words fell on Demeris like stones. “Some Spook,” he repeated numbly. “Pretending to be your daughter. You mean that? For Christ’s sake, are you playing games with me, too?”

  Something in Demeris’ tone seemed to register sympathetically with Gorton. He squinted, he blinked, he tugged at the tip of his great nose. He said in a much softer voice, “I’m not playing any games with you. I can’t say for sure that she was a Spook, but she sure as hell wasn’t my daughter because I don’t have any daughter. Spooks doing masks will tell you anything they damn please, though. Chances are, she was a Spook.”

  “Doing masks?”

  “Spooks going around playing at being human. It’s a big thing with them these days. The latest Spook fad.”

  Demeris nodded. Doing masks, he thought. He considered it and it began to sink in, and sink and sink and sink.

  Then quietly he said, “Maybe you can help me find my brother, at least.”

  “No. I can’t do that and neither can anybody else. Tom Demeris, you said?”

  “That’s right.”

  Gorton glanced toward one of his men. “Mack, how long ago was it that the Demeris kid took the Spooks’ nickel?”

  “Middle of July, I think.”

  “Right.” To Demeris, Gorton said, “What we call ‘taking the Spooks’ nickel’ means selling yourself to them, do you know what I mean? You agree to go with them to their home planet. They’ve got a kind of plush country club for humans there where you live like a grand emperor for the rest of your life: comfort, luxury, women, anything you damn please. But the deal is that in return you belong to them forever, that they get to run psychological experiments on you to see what makes you tick, like a mouse in a cage. At least that’s what the Spooks tell us goes on there, and we might as well believe it. Nobody who’s sold himself to the Spooks has ever come back. I’m sorry, man. I wish it wasn’t so.”

  Demeris looked away for a moment. He felt like smashing things but he held himself perfectly still. My brother, he thought, my baby brother.

  “He was just a kid,” he said.

  “Well, he must have been a damned unhappy kid. Nobody with his head screwed on right would take the nickel. Hardly anybody ever does.” Something flashed momentarily in Gorton’s eyes, and Demeris sensed that to these people, selling yourself to the Spooks was the ultimate surrender, the deepest sort of self-betrayal. Even here in the Occupied Zone there were levels of yielding to the alien conqueror, he realized, and in the eyes of Spook City people, the thing that Tom had done was the lowest level of all. He felt the weight of Gorton’s mingling of contempt for Tom and pity for himself, and tried to throw them back with a furious glare. Gorton watched him quietly, not reacting.

  After a moment Demeris said, “All right. There’s nothing I can do, is there? I guess I’d better go back home.”

  “You’d better go back to your hotel and wait until the hunt is over,” said Gorton. “It isn’t safe wandering around in the open while the critters are loose.”

  “No,” said Demeris. “I suppose it isn’t.”

  “Take him to wherever he’s staying, Mack,” Gorton said. He stared for a time at Demeris. The sorrow in his eyes seemed genuine. “I’m sorry,” Gorton said again. “I really am.”

  Mack had no difficulty recognizing Demeris’ hotel from the description he gave, and took him to it in a floating wagon that made the trip in less than 15 minutes. The streets were practically empty now, no Spooks in sight and few humans, and those were moving quickly.

  “You want to stay indoors while the hunt is going on,” Mack said. “A lot of idiots don’t, but some of them regret it. This is one event that ought to be left strictly to the Spooks.”

  “How will I know when it starts?”

  “You’ll know,” Mack said.

  Demeris got out of the wagon. It turned immediately and headed away. He paused in front of the building, breathing deeply, feeling light-headed, thinking of Tom on the Spook planet, Tom living in a Spook palace, Tom on satin Spook sheets.

  “Nick? Over here, Nick! It’s me!”

  “Oh, Christ,” he said. Jill, coming up the street toward him, smiling as blithely as though this were Christmas Eve. He scanned her, searching for traces of some Spook gleam, some alien shimmer. When she reached him, she held out her arms to him as though expecting a hug. He stepped back just far enough to avoid her grasp.

  In a flat, tight voice he said, “I found out about my brother. He’s gone off to the Spook world. Took their nickel.”

  “Oh, Nick. Nick!”

  “You knew, didn’t you? Everybody in this town must have known about the kid who came from Free Country and sold himself to the Spooks.” His tone turned icy. “It was your father the mayor that told me. He also told me that he doesn’t have any daughters.”

  Her cheeks blazed with embarrassment. It was so human a reaction that he was cast into fresh confusion: How could a Spook learn to mimic a human even down to a blush? It didn’t seem possible. And it gave him new hope. She had lied to him about being Ben Gorton’s daughter, yes, God only knew why; but there was still the possibility that she was human, that she had chosen to put on a false identity but the body he saw was really her own.

  If only it was so, he thought. His anger with her, his disdain, melted away in a flash. He wanted everything to be all right. He was rocked by a powerful rush of eagerness to be assured that the woman he had embraced those two nights in the desert was indeed a woman; and with it, astonishingly, came a new burst of desire for her.

  “What he told me was that you were a Spook,” Demeris said in a guarded tone. He looked at her hopefully, waiting for her to deny it, praying for her to deny it, ready to accept her denial.

  “Yes,” she said. “I am.”

  It was like a gate slamming in his face.

  Serenely she said, “Humans fascinate me. Their emotions, their reactions, their attitudes toward things. I’ve been studying them at close range for a hundred of your years and I still don’t know as much as I’d like to. And finally I thought, the only way I can make that final leap of understanding is to become one myself.”

  “Doing masks,” Demeris said in a hollow voice. Looking at her he imagined he could see something cold and foreign peering out at him from behind her eyes, and it seemed to him that great chilly winds were sweeping through the empty caverns of his soul. He began to see now that somewhere deep within him he must have been making plans for a future that included this woman. He had wanted her so much that he had stubbornly refused to accept any of the evidence that had been given him. And now he had been given the one bit of evidence that was impossible to reject.

  “Right,” she said. “Doing masks.”

  He knew he should be feeling fury, or anguish, or something, at this final revelation that he had slept with a Spook. But he barely felt anything at all. He was like a stone. The Spooks are in charge here. We are their toys. All right.

  “Taking human men as your lovers, too: that’s part of doing masks, isn’t it?” he asked. “Was my brother one of them?”

  “No. I saw him only once or twice.”

  He believed that. He believed everything she was saying, now.

  She seemed about to say something else. But then suddenly a flare of lightning burst across the sky, a monstrous forking shaft of flame that looked as though it could split the world in two. It was followed not by thunder but by music, an immense alien chord that fell like an avalanche
from the air and swelled up around them with oceanic force. The vault of the sky rippled with colors: red, orange, violet, green.

  “What’s happening?” Demeris asked.

  “The hunt is starting,” she said. “That’s the signal.”

  Yes. In the wake of the lightning and the rippling colors came swarming throngs of airborne creatures, thousands of them, the delta-winged dragon-like herders and their snake-like pilots, turning the midday sky dark with their numbers, like a swarm of bees overhead, colossal ones whose wings made a terrible droning sound as they beat the air; and then Demeris heard gigantic roaring, bellowing sounds from nearby, as if monsters were approaching. There were no animals in the streets, not yet, but they couldn’t be very far away. Above him, Spooks by the dozens flickered in the air. Then he heard footsteps, and a pack of humans came running frantically toward them out of a narrow street, their eyes wild, their faces weirdly rigid. Did the Spooks hunt humans too? Demeris wondered. Or was one of the monsters chasing after them? The runners came sweeping down on him. “Get out of the way, man!” one of them cried. “Out of the way!”

  Demeris stepped back, but not fast enough, and the runner on the inside smacked hard into his shoulder, spinning him around. For one startling moment Demeris found himself looking straight into the man’s eyes and saw something close to madness there, but no fear at all—only eagerness, impatience, excitement—and he realized that they must be running not from but to the hunt, that they were on their way to witness the crazy slaughter at close range or even to take part in it themselves, that they lived just as the Spooks did for this annual moment of apocalyptic frenzy.

  Jill said, “It’ll be berserk here now for two or three days. You ought to be very careful if you go outdoors.”

  “Yes. I will.”