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Walt held his body differently.

Hollis liked to stoop a bit, but Walt stood tall, with his feet planted firmly on the ground. He tilted Hollis’s chin up and looked down with his eyes instead of crouching to talk to smaller people. He walked like he was used to people darting out of his way. Eyes followed them, scraping over places they usually didn’t. Shoulders, jaw, hands.

Walt’s original body must be shorter than Hollis’s. Taller than Annie, but probably not as tall as Yulia.

Walt seemed to think about looks the way someone average did, so he probably hadn’t been crazy hot or anything either. Hot people didn’t think of ways to make up for lacking anything, they didn’t think about colors or sharp haircuts or talking to women in a softer, slower voice.

Walt had been a guy who worked to be liked.

Hollis was getting closer to guessing his age, too. Gros Michel bananas were from the 1950s, but Hollis was already sure he was from earlier than that. The 1930s was a good bet, but The Jungle was set in the early 1900s and he clearly recognized that, so Walt could be from as early as 1905.

Hollis had heard music from the early 1900s, and Walt’s accent wasn’t that old. Unless it was somehow older and he’d been referring to agrarian life, not postindustrial hardiness.

So, he was either some 1920s–1930s hotshot, only as spooky as a haunted house, or two-hundred-plus years old, which was vampire territory.

Neither was good. But the latter was definitely worse, so Hollis gritted his teeth and hoped.