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 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 thirty 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 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, 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 at each other, 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, and he got his hands to the other man’s throat and started to squeeze. Dimly he was aware of sounds all around him, doors slamming, rapid footsteps, people shouting, a thick incoherent babble of sound. 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, some kind of moving contrivance. His hands and feet were tied. A flushed sweaty face looked down at him, grinning.
“Where are you taking me?” Demeris asked.
“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. Certainly a lot of time had gone by, perhaps a whole night. 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,” Gorton said.
He had to be Gorton. He was around six feet 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 builds up and 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 a little 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, anyway?”
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, raising his eyebrows.
“Yes. Then I met your daughter, Jill, at some little 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. “What daughter? I don’t have no fucking daughter.”
“No daughter,” said 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 serious, or are you playing games with me too?”
Something in Demeris’s agonized tone seemed to register sympathetically on 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 his name is?”
“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
