She told him what the camel-thing was called. The word was an intricate slurred sound midway between a whistle and a drone, rising sharply at the end. “You do it now,” she said. Demeris looked at her blankly. The sound was impossible to imitate. “Go on. Do it.”
“I don’t speak Spook.”
“It’s not all that hard.” She made the sound again. Her eyes flashed with amusement.
“Never mind. I can’t do it.”
“You just need some practice.”
Her gaze was focused right on his, strong, direct, almost aggressive. At home he didn’t know many women who looked at you like that. He was accustomed to having women depend on him, to draw strength or whatever else they needed from him until they were ready to go on their way and let him go on his.
“My name’s Jill,” she said. “I live in Spook City. I’ve been in Texas a few weeks and now I’m on my way back.”
“Nick Demeris. From Albuquerque. Traveling up that way too.”
“What a coincidence.”
“I suppose,” he said.
A sudden hot fantasy sprang up just then out of nowhere within him: instant sexual chemistry had stricken her like a thunderbolt and she was going to invite him to travel with her, that they’d ride right off into the desert together, that when they made camp that evening she would turn to him with parted lips and shining eyes and open her arms and beckon him toward her—
The urgency and intensity of the idea surprised him as much as its adolescent foolishness. Had he really let himself get as horny as that? She didn’t even seem that interesting to him.
In any case he knew it wasn’t going to happen. She looked cool, self-sufficient, self-contained. She wouldn’t have any need for his companionship on her trip home and probably not for anything else he might have to offer.
“What brings you over here?” she asked him.
He told her about his missing brother. Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully as he spoke. She was taking a good long look, studying his face with great care, staring at him as though peering right through his skull into his brain. Turning her head this way and that, checking him out.
“I think I may know him, your brother,” she said calmly, after a time.
He bled. “You do? Seriously?”
“Not as tall as you and stockier, right? But otherwise he looks pretty much like you, only younger. Face a lot like yours, broader, but the same cheekbones, the same high forehead, the same color eyes, the same blond hair, but his is longer. The same very serious expression all the time, tight as a drum.”
“Yes,” Demeris said, with growing wonder. “That’s him. It has to be.”
“Don, that was his name. No, Tom. Don, Tom, one of those short little names.”
“Tom.”
“Tom, right.”
He was amazed. “How do you know him?” he asked.
“Turned up in Spook City a couple of months back. June, July, somewhere back then. It isn’t such a big place that you don’t notice new people when they come in. Had that Free Country look about him, you know. Kind of big-eyed, raw-boned, can’t stop gawking at things. But he seemed a little different from most of the other Entrada kids, like there was something coiled up inside him that was likely to pop out any minute, that this trip wasn’t just a thing he was doing for the hell of it but that it had some other meaning for him, something deeper that only he could understand. Peculiar sort of guy, actually.”
“That was Tom, yes.” The side of Demeris’s face was starting to twitch. “You think he might still be there?”
“Could be. More likely than not. He was talking about staying quite a while, at least until fall, until hunt time.”
“And when is that?”
“It starts late next week.”
“Maybe I can still find him, then. If I can get there in time.”
“I’m leaving here this afternoon. You can ride with me to Spook City if you want.”
“With you?” Demeris said. He was astonished. The good old instant chemistry after all? His whole little adolescent fantasy coming to life? It seemed too neat, too slick. The world didn’t work like this. And yet—yet—
“Sure. Plenty 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.”
Demeris said, frowning, “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 looking over the edge of an abyss.