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, 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, that he had wanted her so much that he had stubbornly refused to accept any of the evidence that had been given him that that was unthinkable. 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 hardly felt anything at all. He was like a stone. Perhaps he had already done the anger and pain, on some level below his consciousness. Or else he had somehow transcended it. The Spooks are in charge here. All right. We are their toys. All right. All right. You could go only so far into despair and then you stopped feeling it, he supposed. Or hatred. Hating the Spooks was useless. It was like hating an avalanche, like hating an earthquake.
“Taking human men as your lovers, too: that’s part of doing masks, isn’t it?” he asked. “Was my brother Tom one of them?”
“No. Never. 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, seeming 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 a little. 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, frenzied 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 did the Spooks 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.”
“Listen,” she said, putting an edge on her voice to make it cut through the roaring coming from overhead, “I’ve got a proposition for you, now that you know the truth.” She leaned close to him. “Let’s stay together, you and me. Despite our differences. I like you a lot, Nick.”
He peered at her, utterly astounded.
“I really think we can work something out,” she went on. Another horde of winged things shot by just above them, making raspy tearing sounds as they flailed the air, and a new gush of color stained the sky. “Seriously, Nick. We can stay in Spook City if you want to, but I don’t suppose you do. If you don’t I’ll go back across the border with you and live with you in Free Country. In my mind I’ve already crossed over. I don’t want just to study you people from the outside. I want to be one of you.”
“Are you crazy?” Demeris asked.
“No. Not in the least, I swear. Can you believe me? Can you?”
“I’ve got to go inside,” he said. He was trembling. “It isn’t smart to be standing out here while the hunt is going on.”
“What do you say, Nick? Give me an answer.”
“It isn’t possible for us to be together. You know it isn’t.”
“You want to. Some part of you does.”
“Maybe so,” he said, amazed at what he was saying, but unable to deny it despite himself. “Just maybe. One little fraction of me. But it isn’t possible, all the same. I don’t want to live here among the Spooks, and if I take you back with me, some bastard with a sharp nose will sniff you out sooner or later and expose you for what you are, and stand up before the whole community and denounce me for what I am. I’m not going to take that risk. I’m just not, Jill.”
“That’s your absolute decision.”
“My absolute decision, yes.”
Something was coming down the street now, some vast hopping thing with a head the size of a cow and teeth like spears. A dozen or so humans ran along beside it, practically within reach of the creature’s clashing jaws, and a covey of Spooks hovered over it, bombarding it with flashes of light. Demeris took a step or two toward the door of the hotel. Jill did nothing to hold him back.
He turned when he was in the doorway. She was still standing there. The hunters and their prey sped right past her, but she took no notice. She waved to him.
Sure, he thought. He waved back. Goodbye, Jill.
He went inside. There was a clatter on the stairs, people running down, a woman and some men. He recognized them as the ones who had mocked him in the bar when he had first arrived. Two of the men ran past him and out the door, but the woman halted and caught him by the crook of the arm.
“Hey, Abblecricky!”
Demeris stared at her.
She leaned into his face and grinned. She was flushed and wild-looking, like the ones who had been running through the streets. “Come on, man! It’s the hunt! The hunt, man! You’re heading the wrong way. Don’t you want to be there?”
He had no answer for that.
She was tugging at him. “Come on! Live it up! Kill yourself a dragon or two!”
“Ella!” one of the men called after her.
She gave Demeris a wink and ran out the door.
He swayed uncertainly, torn between curiosity about what was going on out there and a profound wish to go upstairs and shut the door behind him. But the street had the stronger pull. He took a step or two after the woman, and then another, and then he was outside again. Jill wasn’t there. The scene in the street was wilder than ever: people running back and forth yelling incoherently, colliding with each other in their frenzy, and overhead streams of winged creatures still swarming, and Spooks like beams of pure light moving among them, and in the distance the sounds of bellowing animals and thunderous explosions and high keening cries of what he took to be Spook pleasure. Far off to the south he saw a winged something the size of a small hill circling desperately in the sky, surrounded by implacable flaring