A Hidden Place by Robert Charles Wilson

had been watching from behind. There was a terrible, sullen calm in her voice. “You’ve hurt him enough. Get the girl and get out.”
    Travis looked down at his own bruised and bloodied fists.
    “Aunt Liza—”
    “Do it. Do it quickly.”
    Dazed, he moved up the stairs.
    “I hope you rot,” Aunt Liza said placidly. “I hope she eats you alive.”
    They broke the rusted lock on the door of the switchman’s shack and helped Anna inside. She seemed already weak, unsteady on her feet. She is ill, Travis thought.
    The shack was barely erect, weathered sideboards flecked with old red-barn-paint, a sagging tarpaper roof. Inside there was a crude wooden shelf and mouldering mattress, a porcelain bowl and mug, in one corner a pyramid of rust-rimmed tin cans. The unaccustomed sunlight through the open door raised up ancient slumbers of dust. Anna slid down to the mattress. Her eyes were distant and she was panting.
    Travis went outside with Nancy.
    “We can’t keep the truck,” Nancy said.
    He nodded. “We’ll be lucky if he doesn’t have us arrested.”
    “This is just the beginning. We bought ourselves a lot of trouble just now, you know that, Travis?”
    “I guess I do.”
    She shrugged at the switchman’s shack. “I suppose I don’t look like much—next to her.”
    “You look fine.”
    It was a consolation, and she nodded, accepting it. “Well. We need to get that truck back before somebody sees it here. Travis? I can drive it back to the house. Creath doesn’t have anything against me.”
    “You’re sure?”
    “Yeah.”
    “And then come back?” He added, “We need to talk. Make plans.”
    “Sure.”
    She drove away.
    Travis went back to the hovel.
    It would take some cleaning up. The corners were black with spider webs. Carpenter ants moved in the wallboards. It was for certain not a good place to bring a sick person … but Anna was not sick, exactly, or so she said; and anyway they had no choice. A month, she had said. And then what? What consummation was she waiting for? But he could not force his thoughts that far ahead. The needs of the moment had assumed a dire priority.
    He looked at her on the mattress. Her eyes were closed; she might have been asleep. He thought again how delicate she was. Without conscious volition he moved to the side of her, put his hands, gently, on her shoulders. It was the first time he had touched her. Even this trivial intimacy was shockingly intense. Her skin was cool; it was as if he could feel her fragility under his fingers. She stirred but did not open her eyes.
    It was strong, he thought, this thing that was special about her—stronger the closer he got to hen Touching her, it seemed as if she had come somehow to embody everything connected with the female sex, was not so much a single woman as an aggregation of femininity, mother and lover, womb and vagina, an exploration and a welcoming home—he blushed at his own thoughts. But it was so. Not merely carnal, as his contact with Nancy had been. There was nothing base in this. The possibility of defilement was not in her. He thought of what Creath had said. And maybe Liza knows as much about me as that Wilcox girl knows about you, you think perhaps! Oh, we are that much the same.
    Travis could not deny the truth of it. But here, for now, it had ceased to matter. He stroked her perfect cheek, and she trembled.
    “Anna?”
    Her eyes were still closed. The tremor in her grew stronger.
    She twitched in his arms, then convulsed.
    Abruptly he was frightened. “Anna? Anna!”
    She was shaking now, rivers of mysterious energy pouring through her. Her eyes came open suddenly—
    And Travis gazed into them.
    It was a mistake. In that moment she was not Anna Blaise. She was not even a woman.
    Not human.
    Her skin felt dusty. Moth-wing skin. Her eyes were huge undifferentiated pupils dilated beyond credibility. He squeezed his eyelids together to shut out the vision, but that only made it worse: on some inner movie