of room on those humps. Take you at least a week if you walk there, if you’re a good walker. Maybe longer. Riding, it’ll be just a couple of days.”
What the hell, he thought.
It would be dumb to turn her down. That Spook-mauled landscape was an evil place when you were on your own.
“Sure,” he said, after a bit. “Sure, I’d be glad to. If you really mean it.”
“Why would I say it if I didn’t mean it?”
Abruptly the notion came to him that this woman and Tom might have had something going for a while in Spook City. Of course. Of course. Why else would she remember in such detail some unknown kid who had wandered into her town months before? There had to be something else there. She must have met Tom in some Spook City bar, a couple of drinks, some chatter, a night or two of lively bed games, maybe even a romance lasting a couple of weeks. Tom wouldn’t hesitate, even with a woman ten, fifteen years older than he was. And so she was offering him this ride now as a courtesy to a member of the family, so to speak. It wasn’t his tremendous masculine appeal that had done it, it was mere politeness. Or curiosity about what Tom’s older brother might be like.
Into his long confused silence she said, “The critter here needs a little more time to feed itself up. Then we can take off. Around two o’clock, okay?”
***
AFTER BREAKFAST THE BOY WENT over to him in the dining hall and said, “You meet the woman who come in during the night?”
Demeris nodded. “She’s offering me a ride to Spook City.”
Something that might have been scorn flickered across the boy’s face. “That nice. You take it?”
“Better than walking there, isn’t it?”
A quick knowing glance. “You crazy if you go with her, man.”
Frowning, Demeris said, “Why is that?”
The boy put his hand over his mouth and muffled a laugh. “That woman, she a Spook, man. You mean you don’t see that? Only a damn fool go traveling around with a Spook.”
Demeris was stunned for a moment, and then angry. “Don’t play around with me,” he said, irritated.
“Yeah, man. I’m playing. It’s a joke. Just a joke.” The boy’s voice was flat, chilly, bearing its own built-in contradiction. The contempt in his dark hard eyes was unmistakable now. “Look, you go ride with her if you like. Let her do whatever she wants with you once she got you out there in the desert. Isn’t none of my goddamn business. Fucking Free Country guys, you all got shit for brains.”
Demeris squinted at him, shaken now, not sure what to believe. The kid’s cold-eyed certainty carried tremendous force. But it made no sense to him that this Jill could be an alien. Her voice, her bearing, everything about her, were too convincingly real. The Spooks couldn’t imitate humans that well, could they?
Had they?
“You know this thing for a fact?” Demeris asked.
“For a fact I don’t know shit,” the boy said. “I never see her before, not that I can say. She come around and she wants us to put her up for the night, that’s okay. We put her up. We don’t care what she is if she can pay the price. But anybody with any sense, he can smell Spook on her. That’s all I tell you. You do whatever you fucking like, man.”
The boy strolled away. Demeris stared after him, shaking his head. He felt a tremor of bewilderment and shock, as though he had abruptly found himself at the edge of an abyss.
Then came another jolt of anger. Jill a Spook? It couldn’t be. Everything about her seemed human.
But why would the boy make up something like that? He had no reason for it. And maybe the kid could tell. Over on the other side, really paranoid people carried witch-charms around with them to detect Spooks who might be roaming Free Country in disguise, little gadgets that were supposed to sound an alarm when aliens came near you, but Demeris had never taken such things seriously. It stood to reason, though, that people living out here in Spook Land would be sensitive to the presence of a Spook among them, however well disguised it might be. They wouldn’t need any witch-charms to tell them. They had had a hundred fifty years to get used to being around Spooks. They’d know the smell of them by now.
The more Demeris thought about it, the more uneasy he got.
He needed to talk to her again.
***
HE FOUND HER A LITTLE way upstream from his shack, rubbing down the shaggy yellow flanks of her elephantine pack-animal with a rough sponge. Demeris halted a short distance away and studied her, trying to see her as an alien being in disguise, searching for some clue to otherworldly origin, some gleam of Spookness showing through her human appearance.
He couldn’t see it. He couldn’t see it at all. But that didn’t necessarily mean she was real.
After a moment she noticed him. “You ready to go?” she asked, over her shoulder.
“I’m not sure.”
“What?”
He was still staring.
If she is a Spook, he thought, why would she want to pretend she was human? What would a Spook have to gain by inveigling a human off into the desert with her?
On the other hand, what motive did the kid have for lying to him?
Suddenly it seemed to him that the simplest and safest thing was to opt out of the entire arrangement and get to Spook City on his own, as he had originally planned. The kid might just be telling the truth. The possibility of traveling with a Spook, of being close to one, of sharing a campsite and a tent with one, sickened and repelled him. And there might be danger in it as well. He had heard wild tales of Spooks who were soul-eaters, who were energy vampires, even worse things. Why take chances?
He drew a deep breath. “Listen, I’ve changed my mind, okay? I think I’d just as soon travel by myself.”
She turned and gave him a startled look. “You serious?”
“Yep.”
“You really want to walk all the way to Spook City by yourself rather than ride with me?”
“Yep. That’s what I prefer to do.”
“Jesus Christ. What the hell for?”
Demeris could detect nothing unhuman in her exasperated tone or in the annoyed expression on her face. He began to think he was making a big, big mistake. But it was too late to back off. Uncomfortably he said, “Just the way I am, I guess. I sort of like to go my own way, I guess, and—”
“Bullshit. I know what’s really going on in your head.”
Demeris shifted about uneasily and remained silent. He wished he had never become entangled with her in the first place.
Angrily she said, “Somebody’s been talking to you, right? Telling you a lot of garbage?”
“Well—”
“All right,” she said. “You dumb bastard. You want to test me, is that it?”
“Test?”
“With a witch-charm.”
“No,” he said. “I’m not carrying any charms. I don’t have faith in them. Those things aren’t worth a damn.”
“They’ll tell you if I’m a Spook or not.”
“They don’t work, is what I hear.”
“Some do, some don’t.” She reached into a saddlepack lying near her on the ground and pulled out a small device, wires and black cords intricately wound around and around each other. “Here,” she said harshly. “This is one. You point it and push the button and it emits a red glow