Even the selection of books in the mahogany cases that lined the reading room was solid and functional. There were lots of volumes of James, Hawthorne, Melville, and the like. Not much Twain, no Hemingway. The bottom shelves were inconveniently low and filled with current bestsellers by people like Kathryn Atwood, Felicia Andrews, Lionel Fenn, Les Simon, and Geoffrey Marsh. Mike wondered if the manage-ment had put them there on purpose, making the patron un-comfortable who read anything but the classics. At eye level, on the shelf an average sized person would normally see first, were the collected works of John Updike.

On first reflection Mike felt like a Geoffrey Marsh thriller. Marsh had entertained him on many a lonely night on the road. Then he thought he ought to take the opportunity to read one of those tomes he'd been promising himself to look into for many years. Everybody's list of unread masterpieces is about the same-War and Peace, Ulysses, Remembrance of Things Past, The Brothers Karamazov, Moby-Dick-and Mike Condon was no different. He chose Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. The book must have meant a great deal to someone in management as there were several copies of it scattered throughout the shelves.

He was halfway through the first chapter, traveling to the sanitorium with Hans Castorp, when he fell asleep.

Sleeping in the afternoon was something Mike rarely did, but the de-scription of the snow-covered journey up the Swiss Alps to the place where tuberculars went to die before the invention of tine tests and wonder drugs depressed him and made him tired.

"Getting to be an old man," he mumbled as he got up and headed for the bathroom. He did not feel rested. His back ached and his knees creaked as he moved across the room. It took three glasses of cold water to wash the velvet out of his mouth and he promised himself to quit smoking. He was patting his pockets for cigarettes before he got out of the bathroom.

When he finished freshening up he decided it was time to get something to eat. He wasn't hungry really. He just knew he hadn't eaten in a long time.

He decided to forgo the dining room and eat in the bar instead. It was dark in there. He sat at the brass-railed bar with his elbows resting on the leather trim and his head resting on his hands, which were cathedraled beneath his chin.

He ordered a Bloody Mary and a corned beef sand-wich (with mustard, on rye) and waited silently to be served. There were two other customers in the room, sitting in a darkened booth in the corner. They were quiet when he first came in but soon laughter smoked its way across the room and distracted him from his sandwich. He listened intently and chewed slowly. The sandwich was tasteless. It was the kind of sandwich that normally would taste either good or bad.

But never tasteless. Never bland. As he chewed he marvelled at the lack of sensation. The food in his mouth tasted gray. It was a mass of fiber about as appetizing as polyester. The laughter grew louder, more frequent, and finally almost raucous. One of the revelers was throaty and loud. Her laughter conquered the bar's darkness and he could have sworn he had heard it before. He tried to place it and failed. If she reminded him of anyone, it was someone he hadn't thought about in a long time. He had half made up his mind to approach them and ask if he could buy them a drink, but by the time he turned around to make his move they had gone.

At first he thought they had just moved further into the booth, sliding across the brown leather to make room for him. But no, the booth was empty. On the table were two old-fashioned glasses thick with melting ice and a half empty bottle of Southern Comfort. One of them had left behind a scarf. He thought maybe it was like dropping a handkerchief, someone's way of inviting him to the pursuit. He decided to take it with him in the hopes of returning it to her when their paths crossed again. When he got into the corridor, which was better lit, he noticed that it was purple paisley.

When was the last time he had seen paisley. It had to have been over twenty years ago.Mike walked around the bottom floor aimlessly, searching for he knew not what. Finally he came to a set of French doors that led to the back porch and the spacious lawn spread out before it. There were benches where couples sat and he could see four middle-aged men playing croquet. He sat to watch the competition and was surprised to discover that there was none.

At first it seemed like any other game of croquet that he had ever seen, though truth to tell he hadn't seen that many. They played by the rules, smoothly stroking the wooden balls through wicket after wicket, but there seemed to be no competitive fire. The players were all men, middle-aged, well-dressed, slightly paunchy. They possessed the aura of successful businessmen yet there was none of the spirit that successful people bring to all of life's activities.

They played too politely. They never tried to smash another player's ball away from a wicket. They never raised a fist in triumph after a good shot or slapped a back in admiration or derision. Though he was at a distance he could have sworn they never even smiled. It was spooky.

Not spooky enough to investigate any further, however. Instead he felt like reading for a bit so he got up and headed back to his room. His sandwich and his drink hadn't been that appetizing yet he felt full, like the aftermath of Thanks-giving dinner. He thought he might order an Alka Seltzer from room service.

When he got back to the room he didn't order anything. He thought it would be too much trouble. It wasn't just going to the phone and calling in his order. He'd have to get up again to open the door, then walk to the dresser for his bill-fold ... he was just simply too tired. He tried to read The Magic Mountain but Castorp had only been at the Sanatorium for an afternoon when Mike drifted off to sleep to the sounds of a guitar playing.

He could see where the music came from without getting out of his chair. There was a room at the opposite end of the corridor from his and he could tell that the player was using a Stratocaster with a small practice amp. Still, the sound was fantastic. The player had a feel for the music that was nothing short of extraordinary. He bent the notes torturously and pro-duced the feel of some of the great old blues players-a sense of proficiency without the sloppy headlong rush for speed a la Jimmy Page. He placed the style right away. It was Hen-drix. Only Jimi could get that soul-wrenching emotion out of a guitar in a style as distinct as any since Django Reinhardt; but the song was a new tune, written and played not three years ago by Stevie Ray Vaughan. The man played and played and Mike knew he couldn't wake up until the song was over. On the surface it was a pleasant enough fantasy. He was comfortable and he enjoyed the music. Still, he wished for the beach, the blood, the glassy stare. . . .

When he awoke it was dark. He hadn't turned on the lights, as the sun had been bright in the afternoon sky when he fell asleep. He was tired. No, that wasn't it. Listless maybe, or "logy" as his mother used to say when he was in grade school.

He began to wonder if he had been drugged. Whatever drug it was it was not one he had taken before. It felt a little like being on massive doses of Valium or Librium in that he wasn't bothered by all the little aches and pains and annoy-ances that the average aware person is heir to. Yet unlike the downers he was used to, it also robbed him of any sense of being alive. He remembered the gray taste of the corned beef, the listless way the other guests played croquet, and the lack of any noise about the place. Everyone seemed to be living in slow motion, like a ward full of first-time heart attack victims suddenly aware of their own fragility.

He was frightened. He wanted to get out of the hotel as fast as he could, but where would he run to? Back to his family? The Road? His Fans? November 7?

He went down the corridor and into an elevator. The ele-vator paused for a second and began its descent with a slow, smooth, lifeless motion. When he got to the bottom floor, he walked into the lobby (though in his mind he was bursting into the lobby). He wanted to confront somebody. He wanted to grab somebody by the goddamned throat and demand an explanation. He wanted to make his presence felt.

He did nothing. The manager, a Mr. Montgomery, stood in the lobby right in front of the elevator, rocking back and forth on his heels with his hands clasped behind his back. "Is everything all right, Mr. Condon?" He said, grinning.

"Fine," Mike heard himself say, though it wasn't. He nodded in return of Mr. Montgomery's nod and walked past him toward the bar. He couldn't understand why he hadn't asked the man, who was the most likely person to know the truth, what the story was with the SeaHarp Hotel. It just didn't seem like the right thing to do.

The bar was empty. He had hoped to meet the couple that had been there in the afternoon, but it was not to be. The bartender was absentmindedly wiping down the bar and he didn't appear to be the kind of guy who would tell him any-thing, though no doubt he could if he wanted to-bartenders know everything.He went across the hall to the library where there was a middle-aged man sitting in an overstuffed chair reading a slim volume, probably poetry. The man had close-cropped dark brown hair and was going to seed around the waistline, though he was about the same age as Mike. He laid the book face down on the arm of the chair and Mike could see the title-The Drunken Boat by Arthur Rimbaud. Mike knew the book and he had a vague memory of a friend who used to live by it, but the details were fuzzy. Still, the more he looked at the man and the more he thought about the book a certain connection sparked in his consciousness. It was a dim flickering like a flashlight whose batteries have lost their potency.

"Have we met?" he said. "My name is Mike." . "We haven't met that I know of," the man said. "My name is Jim.

Maybe we've run across each other on the grounds."

"Jim?" Mike heard himself say. "No, I don't know any Jim."

Mike turned away from the man and began to look at the shelves. He was looking for something to read. He remem-bered reading something in the morning but he couldn't re-member what it had been. It must not have made much of an impression. He knew he had looked at the bookshelves before but remembered nothing that he specifically wanted to look for.

He saw lots of Kafka, Proust, Sartre, and Dostoyevski. Some of the titles he was familiar with: The Nothing Man, Nausea, The Stranger, The Trial, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Shoot The Piano Player, and The Magic Mountain. The last title attracted him. It seemed light, airy, and fantas-tic compared to the other depressing titles. He took it off the shelf and held it in his hands while he looked further.

"Nothing a little more uplifting than these?" he said to no one in particular. He saw Henry James, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and John Updike ad infinitum. But nothing with a little spirit, a little zing.

"Hmm," the man called Jim mumbled from behind his Rimbaud.

"No best-sellers? No romance? No adventure?"

"Life's an adventure," the man said quietly, staring over the top of the glasses Mike hadn't seen before. "Haven't you had enough of that on the outside?"

"I could have sworn I saw some paperbacks here earlier." Mike said ignoring the man's question. "Geoffrey Marsh was one of them. There were a few of his titles I haven't read in here this afternoon. Someone must have taken them."

"Geoffrey Marsh?" the man said. "I doubt it."

"Why is that?"

"Does this look like the kind of place that would carry paperbacks?" He had to admit that it didn't. It was almost as if the memory of the books was something he had carried in with him from some previous life, some leftover from a past ex-istence.

"Art is that which lets you escape the existence you're most fearful of," the man said philosophically. It was the kind of general statement someone he used to know was fond of making-sweeping generalities so broad they could not be effectively argued against. In some circles it passed for pro-fundity.

Mike didn't answer. He was staring down at The Magic Mountain, doubting now that it was the fantasy its title prom-ised.

"When you were . . . 'younger'. . . you lived a pretty mundane existence and read exotic books to help you escape; rocket ships, tropical islands, willing women, solvable cases. It was the same with the music, art, cinema."

"And now?" Mike said, afraid of the answer he was going to get.

"Now you need quiet. You need rest. Life has stimulated you enough. You need the literature of the condemned, the damned. You need to know that the castle is unreachable, that monsters lurk outside your door-down your street, that life is a bad joke of which you are the butt; you need the literature of disease."

Mike didn't answer. He had a headache. The man's words made no sense to him on one level, but he had not the energy to argue against him. He felt neither like reading, arguing, playing croquet, or anything that would make him expend energy. He just wanted to go back up to his room and sleep."Let's go and get some food," the man said.

Mike shrugged and waited for him to lead the way. It was funny. He wasn't hungry and he didn't have fond memories of the hotel's food, though it was true he had only eaten once. Even the finest restaurants occasionally served bad meals. It was curious that Jim hadn't said 'let's go get something to eat' or 'let's go for a pizza.' No, he had said, 'let's get some food' the same way you would say 'do you have to go to the bathroom?' Like something to be gotten through but not en-joyed.

The restaurant was well-lit but not bright. A man and a woman sat up front near the French doors that led out to the ubiquitous porch. Jim nodded at them and headed their way. The woman laughed as they approached and Mike recognized it as the laugh he had heard in the bar that afternoon.

She was short and pleasant-looking, with red hair and a face full of freckles. She said hello in a gruff voice that had apparently been abused.

"Name's Janis," she said. "Port Arthur, Texas."

"Mike," he said. "L.A."

"Spent some time in L.A." she said. "Never going back."

Mike nodded and sat down. Her partner was a thin black man with sleepy eyes and extraordinarily long fingers that he ceaselessly drummed on the table top while they waited for service. His name was Jimi.

The food was priced steeply and totally bland. Nothing with tomato sauce or spices of any kind. Lots of beef, some fish but no shellfish. No ethnic food. Strictly British.

Mike ordered the filet along with the others. It was small but he had trouble finishing it. So did the others. They ate enough to satisfy their need for food. A potato, some carrots, a little steak, bread pudding and decaffeinated coffee.

The conversation seemed pointless. When Mike asked what they did for a living they seemed to ignore the question, as if they didn't need to do anything. They didn't ask him what he did. He didn't volunteer it. They talked about neither money, politics, sex, art, or religion; the staples of conver-sation among strangers since the beginning of civilization. They talked about disease, death, the pointlessness of exis-tence, the undiscoverability of the cosmos, and the fickleness of human relationships. Mike did not enjoy himself, but the time passed and eventually it was time to head for his room and get some sleep. The waiter didn't bring a check. Neither did he ask for their room numbers so he could put it on a tab. Instead they all just got up when enough time had passed and went their separate ways.

When he had washed, changed and got into bed he began to read. The Magic Mountain had an interesting if slow-moving beginning but he despaired of ever finishing it.

He decided after a while to go to sleep. As a child he had always had to have a night light. As an adult he had to have a television or radio on in the room. It was what got him through the night.

There was no television, but there was a marvelous old radio on the nightstand next to the bed. It was an old Philco from the thirties, made of wood with a cathedral top. The speakers felt like real cloth instead of plastic and the radio had that mellow sound only a wooden box can give. The on/ off knob was a small brown affair, discreet and functional.

No digital display on this radio, just a small window with a yellow light-just AM. The local stations played classical or soft rock mostly. Finally he found a station from New York that played the music he liked though he had to listen to it through the screeching and fading of a faraway source. The last song he heard before he fell asleep was called "Sad All Alone" by the Snappers. He liked it. If he ever got up the energy to go into town he would have to look for the album. The group showed promise. Maybe he could get the bellman to get him a copy.

AMI AMET DELI PENCET.

by Nancy Holder

April is not the crudest month in the town of Greystone Bay; in March the slate-grey fog congeals into a siege of rain that pounds the rooftops and hurtles through the streets. Rain-gutters burst with greywater pressure; storm drains clog and regurgitate. Rivers tumble down the hills, north and south, and plummet into Greystone Bay itself.

The bay waters churn; long-lost objects materialize on shore. In ancient yellow sou'westers, the old men come out with metal detectors and prowl like sandpipers through the wreckage. Children whoop among the kelp and decayed gumboots, rotted lobster traps, eyeless dolls, the remains of luckless fish.

Behind the scavengers, the SeaHarp Hotel stretches the length of Harbor Road like an immense white sea Serpent, gables and chimneys the spines along its back. The ornate gingerbread trim flares into magnificent scales and barnacles. It is caged by a high stone wall; and in March, the geraniums in the pots along the top of this wall sag from the ferocity of the rain. They bob and flail like drowning creatures.

From a taxi, the hotel's lighted windows glow murkily, monstrous eyes staring underwater. The dark windows of un-occupied rooms are caves that harbor voracious sharks, eager to dart out, to bite, and grab, and pull one down beneath the surface. . . .

Or so it seemed to Rachel Unger, as the cab floated to a stop and the driver turned to her with a question in his eyes, as if to ask if the hotel was really her final destination.

He was a young man, good-looking in a back-East sort of way, and that had made her feel uneasy ever since he'd picked her up at the bus station. Whenever he looked at her she flinched, as she usually did when strangers looked at her; as she always did when young men looked at her; and wondered if everything were completely concealed. Just in case, she adjusted the fold of her turtleneck sweater and smoothed her hair over the side of her face.

He swung out of the car into the deluge and raced around to open her door. Rachel took a deep breath, climbed out, and moved out of his way while he slammed the door shut. Rain pelted her. Her panty-hose clung to her legs and the wind whipped her black wool coat, purchased for the trip. The salty gale slapped her face and she plastered her hair over her jaw line, wishing she'd worn a scarf.

"I'll get your bags," the man said. "Go on up."

Rachel bobbed her head and dashed to the steps cut into the center of the wall. She was defenseless; hadn't remem-bered to pack an umbrella. No one used them in Southern California. If it rained they just stayed inside their cars.

But in Greystone Bay, people swam down the streets, wrapped in coats and gloves, slickers and rain boots, dots of light grey or dark grey with a bouncing slice of black held over their heads. They slogged through their flat-slate weather, existed in it, went on with things. They were a different kind of people, these grey Eastern fishermen of grey Greystone Bay. She wasn't sure if they were her kind of peo-ple; she'd thought to stay, but perhaps she'd just unload the house and go back.

To what?

On top of the wall, the geraniums sagged, puddles of crim-son blossoms ringing the bases of their pots. The presence of the ragged plants gave the hotel a sense of having been caught unawares by the storm; as she had been caught by the simultaneous arrival of her fifty-fifth birthday, her forced re-tirement, and the notification that she'd inherited a house in some podunk town on the Eastern seaboard. From a man unrelated to her, and apparently unrelated to anyone in town.

Else, how to explain the condition of the property on North Hill, of the pools of foul-smelling water on the parquet floors; of all the windows, not one spared? Who was he, the owner of the mildewed raincoat in the coat closet, which hung plain-tive as a loyal and lonely dog, that no one had looked after his house after his death?

Hartfield Croome Simpson. Rachel knew little more than his name: that he was wealthy; that he had traveled much of his life; that no one had mixed much with him for vague reasons Mr. Mordicott, his lawyer, had been unable, or un-willing, to make clear when he flew to Los Angeles to meet with her.

Mr. Mordicott did explain that her benefactor's middle name, Croome, betrayed his relationship to an old Greystone Bay family who had fled the town shortly after the Civil War.

The Croomes, apparently, were shunned by everyone in Greystone Bay. Local legends concerning them abounded,most of them centering around their graveyard. They ranged from tales that the family vaults were filled with vampires or zombies or some other sort of monster, to the story that noth-ing at all-no bodies, no skeletons-was discovered when the coffins were removed from the Croome graveyard to make way for the railroad.

"The usual sort of nonsense you hear in a small town," Mr. Mordicott had concluded, as he notarized Rachel's sig-nature on the title transfer of Mr. Simpson's house. "He wasn't even sure how he was related to the Croomes. Poor Harry. He had a streak of melancholy in him that the rest of them mistook for snobbery. Never could make friends.

Lonely. No one went to his funeral. Except me, of course."

Mr. Mordicott could offer no clue as to why his client chose Rachel from all the living souls in the world-and so far from Greystone Bay-to receive his once-magnificent mansion. The lawyer had drawn the will up thirty days before Mr. Simpson's death. The man had gone night sailing; in the morning, the boat washed to shore; four days later, Annie, one of the employees of the SeaHarp, found his body on the beach.

So now the circular stairway, the cupola of stained glass, recently smashed; the kitchen, knee-deep in water, painted red as in the olden times to keep out cockroaches, were Ra-chel's. Pantries, dumbwaiters, bay windows, a basement-all the civilized accoutrements, like umbrellas, that Californians did without. She had, at first, thought to claim them; but after seeing the extent of the damage, she was no longer sure.

And frankly, after giving the town below the mansion a good look, she was even less sure. Mr. Mordicott said this was the worst time of year to visit; that summer was lovely and fall and winter like Currier and Ives. She supposed this was all to the good, catching Greystone Bay at its most can-tankerous; but heavens, a few months of this rain and one could turn positively . . . suicidal.

Rachel was short of breath by the time she reached the top of the steps in front of the hotel. Though it had been a short distance, and not steep, fighting the rain had tired her. She paused for a moment, which probably looked ridiculous to anyone who was watching. But she was already soaked through; what was the point of hurrying any longer?

On either side of her, two huge vases of more downtrodden geraniums splashed with rainwater; twin stone cisterns, with streamers of color floating in them and spreading out in fine tendrils, like the brilliant red hair of someone bobbing be-neath the surface.

Rachel blinked. The streamers undulated and for a flash of an instant, she saw the texture of flesh, a silhouette of a long, narrow nose and sharp chin, a gaping mouth, open as if in a scream, and no teeth, none- Gasping, she jumped away from the vase, and collided with the cabbie, who had come up behind her with her lug-gage.

"My god!" she cried, looking from him to the vase.

"What?" He stepped around her and peered in. "Drop something?"

Rachel swallowed hard and looked, too.

Flowers, stems, leaves. Rainwater.

"I thought I saw something."

He said nothing, shrugged. She moved aside and he bounded up the steps-he was so young-along a path, and up another set of steps before landing on the porch.

Rachel followed. Tasseled draperies hung in the windows; she was so eager to reach the promise of warmth- -perhaps, too, to put some distance between her and the vase-so eager that she slipped and almost fell. The cabbie grabbed her arm and said, "Careful. You go down here, you're likely to drown."

Startled, she glanced at him. There was no smile on his face, no hint of any kind that he'd been joking. He stood in the rain, holding onto her arm, in his thick leather jacket and leather cap and she had the silly thought that he had seen the head in the vase, but pretended not to.

"What an odd thing to say," she blurted, and still he didn't smile, only held the door open for her. She went past him, thinking how grey he looked. How vacant. How could she ever have thought him good-looking? It was a sign of her age; god, fifty-five. Out to pasture, wasn't that the saying? Old maid, spinster. A man was distinguished, even young, at fifty-five. A woman was simply old. Christ, if she'd known how depressing Greystone Bay would be, shewould have waited until- "Oh, my," she said, as she stepped through the doors and into the lobby.

The room was leagues long and leagues high, with vast expanses of oriental carpets in blue-grey and sea-green, and flocked Victorian wallpaper in a faded shade of midnight blue. Chandeliers bobbed in the overcast light and glowed faintly on a gallery of armchairs and small tables; a wide, fluted staircase carpeted like the lobby floor; lamps of brass with green shades; and everywhere, rammed between tables and secretaries and cocktail arrangements, pillars of marble, white and cold as icebergs.

The rhythm of the rain increased, then ebbed; Rachel had a sense of standing in the rooms of a sunken ocean liner.

She touched the neck of her sweater and said, purely in jest, "Since I didn't drown out there, maybe I can drown in here."

The cabbie's features remained expressionless.

"How much do I owe you?" she asked to cover her con-fusion. She knew the SeaHarp was Greystone Bay's show-piece; perhaps she'd insulted him with her remark.

"Ten bucks. With the luggage and all," he added, as if she might think he was trying to cheat her.