"I was away at school most of those years," Montgomery said.

"Yes, yes, of course."

"There are no more orphanages, are there? In the United States, I mean?" Montgomery said.

"No, I don't believe there are."

"Foster homes and such, I believe. The poor orphans get real families now," Montgomery said. Michael simply nod-ded. The infant Montgomery was suddenly struggling to his feet, lost in his clothes, his baby's head lost in the voluminous collar. The interview was over. "I will make sure the staff prepares a suitable Thanksgiving repast for you tomorrow. After that you will have the hotel essentially to yourself. The staff will be home with their families. We Montgomerys will remain in our quarters for the following two days, at the end of which time I expect to be able to review your full report."

"Certainly." Montgomery was moving slowly around his huge desk. He seemed to be extending one sleeve. For a panicked second Michael thought he was extending his hand to him, but the infant's arms were so short Michael would never be able to find the hand, lost in the huge folds of the coat sleeve.

"One more thing." The infant yawned and its eyes rolled. Up past his bedtime, Michael mused. "Any remaining furniture should fit the hotel. It is very important that things fit, find their proper place. I hired you because you supposedly know about such things."

"I do, sir."

The infant lolled its head in the huge collar, then waddled off to bed.Michael took a long, rambling, post-midnight tour of the SeaHarp's floors to get a preliminary feel for the place. He didn't at all mind working at night. Most nights he was un-able to get to sleep until three or four in the morning anyway. There never seemed to be any particular reason for his insom-nia-his mind simply was not yet ready for sleep. And he had no wife or children to be bothered by his sleeplessness. The walls of the SeaHarp's public areas were well-supplied with art. There was a number of pieces by British painters in the German Romantic style. Michael had a working familiar-ity with art but knew he'd have to call in someone else for a proper appraisal: Reynolds from Boston or perhaps J.P. Ja-cobs in Providence, although Jacobs was often a bit too op-timistic in his appraisals for Michael's taste. And Montgomery would want a conservative appraisal, the more conservative the better. So maybe it would have to be Rey-olds. Reynolds would have a field day: there were several excellent examples of the outline style, after Retzsch. Also some nice small sculptures he was sure Reynolds could iden-tify-if the sculptors were worth identifying-the pieces looked nice enough but Michael was out of his area here, The themes seemed to be typically classical: Venus and Cu-pid, Venus and Mercury. The Death of Leander. And several small pieces of children. Cupid, no doubt. But the faces were so worn. Expressionless, as if left too long underwater.

Along one stretch of wall there were so many of these small, near-featureless sculptures, raised on pedestals or re-cessed in alcoves, that Michael was compelled to stop and ponder. But there seemed to be no reason for it. He could not understand the emphasis of these damaged, ill-colored pieces. Literally ill-colored, he thought, for the stone was a yellowish-white, like diseased flesh, like flesh kept half-wet and half-dry for a long time. Even when he left this area he could feel the sculptures clamoring for his attention, floating into his peripheral vision like distorted embryos.

The door to room 312 creaked open. He pawed through a fur of dust for the lightswitch, and when he finally got the light on he discovered more dust hanging in strings from the ceiling, and from antique furniture stacked almost to the ceil-ing, obscuring the glass fixture which itself appeared to have been dipped into brown oil. Obviously, Montgomery had had the furniture moved here some time ago. He wondered why it had taken the man so long to finally decide on getting an appraiser. Or maybe it was a matter of finding the right ap-praiser. That thought made him get out of the chill of the hall and completely into the room, however dim and dusty. The sound of the door shutting was muted by the thick skin of dust over the jamb. Michael slipped the small tape recorder out of his coat pocket.

A good deal of the furniture in the room predated the ho-tel, late eighteenth century to early nineteenth. Bought as collectors' pieces, no doubt, by some past manager. Most of them were chairs: Chippendale mahogany wing chairs and armchairs of the Martha Washington type, late Sheraton side chairs and a few Queen Anne wing and slippers. But they varied widely in quality. Most of the Sheratons were too heavy, with rather awkward carving on the center splat, but there was one boasting a beautifully carved spread eagle and fine leg lines, worth a good ten times more than the others. The Chippendales were all too boxy and vertical in the back. Most of the Martha Washingtons suffered from shapeless arms or legs that were too short, seats often too heavy in relation to the top part of the chair, but there were two genuine masterpieces among those: finely scooped arms, serpentine crests, beautifully proportioned all around.

Some of the chairs had been virtually ruined by amateurish restoration efforts: the arms crudely embellished, mis-matched replacement of a crest rail or stretcher, the legs shortened to give the chair an awkward stance. And some-thing odd about one of the altered pieces. Michael clicked on his recorder: "A metal rod has been added to the top of the chair, with leather straps attached." He brushed off the leather and leaned in for a closer look. "It appears to be some sort of chin strap. Another, wider leather strap has been attached to the seat. Like a seat belt, I'd say, but poorly designed. It would be much too tight, even for a child."

He gradually worked his way around the room, not trying to catalog everything, but simply trying to get a feel for the range of the pieces, highlighting anything that looked inter-esting. "An English Tall Clock, with a black japanned case embellished with colored portraits of both George III and George Washington. An excellent matching highboy and low-boy with cabriole legs. An early eighteenth-century high chest of drawers. Ruined because one of the cup turned legs has been lost and replaced at some point with a leg trumpet turned. A very nice India side chair with Flemish scrolls and feet . . ."

He stopped once he discovered he was standing by the window. A heavy fog had come in from the bay, had crept like steaming gray mud over the trees, and was now filling the yard to surround and isolate the SeaHarp. It seemed only fitting for such obsessive, lonely work. On the evening before his solitary Thanksgiving meal. It had been only recently that Michael realized he had no practical use for the antiques he valued so much. These were heirlooms, family icons and embodiments. Made for a family to use, for fathers and mothers to pass down to children and grandchildren. And he was someone who had no place to go for Thanksgiving. A wet fish trapped inside the aquarium. He was haunted by mothers and fathers, grandparents, generations of ancestors who-as far as he could tell-had never existed.

He had no fixed place. He was, forever, the rootless boy who cannot get along.

He got down on his hands and knees and rooted like a pig through the dust of ages. He pretended to be aprofessional. He examined the pieces of patina, wear, and tool marks. His fingers delicately traced the grain for the track of the jack plane. He crawled around and under the pieces, seeking out construction details. He made constant measurements, gaug-ing proportion and dimension. "A sofa in the Louis XV style with a scroll-arched rail and a center crest of carved fruits and flowers with foliage,'' he chanted into the recorder held to his lips, like a singer making love to his microphone.

But in fact he was a dirty little boy, four or five, hiding in a forest of legs and upholstery. Now and then he would try out a chair or sofa, sitting the way he was supposed to sit, sitting like a grownup in uncomfortable furniture that broke the back and warped the legs and changed the body until it fit the furniture, and nothing was more important than fitting in however painful the process. "A Philadelphia walnut arm-chair, mid-eighteenth century, with a pierced back and early cresting." Yellow-pale, distorted children with featureless heads were strapping themselves into the chairs around him, trying to sit pretty with agreeable smiles so that visiting adults would choose them. "Three Victorian side chairs after the French style of Louis XV, both flower and fruit motifs, black walnut." Wet children with eyes bigger than their mouths pressed tighter and tighter against the glass. "Belter chair with a scroll-outlined concave back and central upholstered panel crowned by a crest of carved foliage, flowers and fruit."

He examined the wall nearer the floor. Letters were scratched into the baseboard, by something sharp. Perhaps a pocket knife. Perhaps a fingernail grown too long. V. I. He imagined a child on his knees, scratching away at the base-board with his torn and bleeding fingernail. V. I. C. T. O. R, the baseboard cried.

The next morning he woke up from a series of strange dreams he could not remember, in the rough chair with the straps, the cracked leather chinstrap caressing his cheek like a lover's dry hand.

The morning's disorientation continued throughout the day.

Thanksgiving dinner in the Dining Room was a solitary affair; he quickly discovered that the last of the hotel's guests had left that morning and, other than two or three staff mem-bers and the. Montgomerys hidden away in their quarters at the top of the hotel, he had been left to himself. An elderly waiter poured the wine. "Compliments of Mr. Montgomery, Suh," the old man creaked out.

"Well, please tell Mr. Montgomery how much I appreciate it."

"Mr. Montgomery feels badly that you should dine alone.

and on Thanksgiving." "Well, I do appreciate his concern." Michael tried not to look at the old man.

"Mr. Montgomery says a family is a very important thing to a man. 'Families make us human,' he says."

"How interesting." Michael bolted his wine and held up his glass for more. The elderly waiter obliged. "He is close to his family, is he? And was he close to his father as well, when he was alive?"

"Mr. Simon Montgomery had a strong interest in child-rearing. He was always looking for ways to improve his children, and read extensively on the subject. You can find some of his reading material still in the library, in fact."

"Is that why he brought the children from the orphanage here over the years?" Again, Michael bolted his wine, and again the old waiter replenished his glass.

"I suppose. Did you enjoy yourselves?"

Michael stared up at the waiter. The old man's tired red eyes were watching him carefully. Michael wanted to reach up and break through the glass wall that had suddenly sur-rounded him, and throttle this ancient Peeping Tom. But he couldn't move. "I don't remember," he finally said.

After dinner Michael spent several hours in the library try-ing to sober up so that he could continue his cataloguing. He was particularly interested in the older books, of course, and in the course of his examinations discovered the German title Kallipadie, 1858, by a Dr. Daniel Schreber. Michael's Ger-man was rather rusty, but the book's illustrations were clear enough. A figure-eight shoulder band that tied the child's shoulders back so they wouldn't slump forward. A "Gerad-halter"-a metal cross attached to the edge of a table-that prevented the child from leaning forward during meals or study. Chairs and beds with straps and halters to prevent "squirming" or "tossing and turning," guaranteed to keep the young body "straight."Off in the distance, in some other room, Michael could hear the pounding of tiny knees on the carpet, the thunder of the old men trying to catch them.

Michael made his way down to the cellars via a door in the wall on the north side of the back porch. That door lead him to a descending staircase, and the cellars. The main part of these cellars consisted of the kitchen, laundry, furnace and supply rooms, and various rooms used by the gardeners and janitors. But hidden on one end, seldom-used, were the stor-age cellars.

In the cellars had been stored a treasure of miscellaneous household appurtenances: some of the most ornate andirons Michael had ever seen, with dogs and lions and elephants worked into their designs; shuttlecocks and beakers; finely painted bellows and ancient bottles and all manner of brass ware (ladles, skimmers, colanders, kettles, candlesticks and the like); twenty-two elaborately stenciled tin canisters and a chafing dish in the shape of a deer (necessary to keep the colonials' freshly slain venison suitably warm); dozens of rolls of carpet which had been ill-preserved and fell into rot-ted clumps when he tried to examine them; a half-dozen crocks, several filled with such odd hardware as teardrop handles, bat's-wing and willow mounts, rosette knobs and wrought-iron hinges, and the largest with an assortment of wall and furniture stencils; another half-dozen pieces of Delft ware from Holland (also called "counterfeit china"); a drip-ping pan and a dredging box; a variety of flesh hooks and graters and latten ware and patty pans, all artifacts from ear-lier versions of the SeaHarp's grand kitchen; a jack for re-moving some long-dead gentleman's boots; a finely-made milk keeler and several old jack mangles for smoothing the hotel's linen; a rotting bag full of crumbling pillow cases (sorting through these Michael liked to imagine all the young maids' hands which had smoothed them and fluffed their pil-lows-they would have been calling them "pillow bears" back then); skewers and skillets; trays and trenchers; and a great wealth of wooden ware, no doubt used by some past manager in an attempt to hold down costs.

He could spend a full week cataloguing it all, which wasn't really what he wanted to do during his time at the hotel.

After seeing just these more common, day-to-day, bits and pieces, he was more anxious than ever to go through the other rooms. But he could tell from his finds in the cellars that there was quite a bit of antique wealth here. If the sales were handled properly they could bring the Montgomerys a fair amount of money. And the beauty of it, of course, was that these relics were now of little use in the actual running of the hotel.

That evening Michael began his inventories of the guest rooms themselves. Most could be handled very quickly as there was little of value or interest. The only thing that slowed him was a continuation of the vague sense of disorientation he'd felt since awakening that morning. Things-most rec-ognizably the faceless cupid statues he'd encountered his first night-hovered at the periphery of his vision, and then dis-appeared, much like the after-effects of some drug-induced alertness. He began to wonder if there had been something wrong with his Thanksgiving dinner-perhaps it had been the wine the old waiter had delivered so freely-and he became very careful of the things he ate, examining each glass of beverage or piece of bread or meat minutely-for consis-tency, pattern, tool-marks, style-before consumption.

"A tea-table with cabriole legs and slipper feet tapering finely to the toe. Like some stylish grandmother dancing.

Perhaps my own, undiscovered, grandmother dancing. Sec-ond quarter of the eighteenth century, probably from Phila-delphia."

The orphans squealed with delight, their tiny knees raw and bleeding from carpet burns.

"This kettledrum base desk is obviously pregnant. A por-trait of my mother bearing me? Its sides swell out greatly at the bottom. A block front."

In two rooms he found painted Pennsylvania Dutch rocking chairs. The pale yellow children rocked them so vigorously he thought they might take off, fueled by their infant dreams.

When it finally came time to retire, Michael of course had his choice of many beds. But many of the beds were of the modern type and therefore of little interest to him. Where there were antique beds they were usually Jenny Linds with simple spool-turned posts or the occasional Belter bed with its huge headboard carved with leaves and tendrils.

Michael finally settled for a bed with straps, so many straps it was like sleeping in a cage. But he felt secure, accepted. He began a dream about a forest full of children, tying one another to the trees. The crackling noises in the walls of his bedroom jarred his nerves, but eventually he was able to fall asleep. That night, as always, he had a boy's dreams. No business or marital worries informed them. It was only upon waiting that Michael discovered this room had a stenciled wall. This was of course a surprise in a structure from the 1850s, with the number of manufactured wallpapersavailable, but he supposed it might have been done-no doubt using old stencils-for uniqueness, to pre-serve some individual effect. Michael was surprised to find that it had survived the many small repaintings and remod-ellings that had occurred over the years. Usually a later owner could find the slight imperfections normal to a stencilled wall irritating, and the patterns crude, as certainly they often But Michael liked them; there was a lot to be said for the note of individuality they added to a room. He suspected the only reason this particular wall had been saved, however, was because the guests hadn't the opportunity to see it. Looking around the walls-at their shabbiness, and the crude nature of the furniture-he felt sure this room was not normally rented. So an owner would not be embarrassed.

The pattern was an unusual one. The border was standard enough: leaves and vines and pineapples, quite similar to the work of Moses Eaton, Jr. Some of the wall stencils Michael had found in the cellar matched these shapes.

Within these borders, however, was a grove of trees. Most of them were large stencils of weeping willows, but still fairly standard, again derived from Raton's work. But here and there among the willows was another sort of tree: an oak, perhaps, but he wasn't sure, tied or bound by a large rope, or maybe it was a snake wrapping around the trunk and through the branches. Bound was the proper description, because the branches seemed pulled down or otherwise diverted from their natural direction by the rope or snake, and the trunk twisted from the upright-a dramatic violation of the classical symmetry one usually found in wall designs.

The design of this particular tree was obviously too intri-cate to have been done with a single stencil. There had to have been several, overlapping. But the color was too faded and worn to make out much of the detail, as if some past cleaning woman had tried to remove the bound trees, though not the willows, with an abrasive.

He got down on his hands and knees. The baseboard was covered with scratches, the signatures of dozens of different children. He could hear a distant thundering in the hall out-side, hundreds of orphan limbs, pounding out a protest that grew slowly in its articulateness. Choose me. Me me me. He began to doubt that Victor Montgomery had ever been away to school, that he had ever left this hotel, and his father's watchful eye, at all. The voices in the hall seemed strangely distorted. Distorted embryos. As if under water. The scratches in the baseboard tore at his fingertips.

Michael crawled out the door and down several flights of stairs. The faceless children all crowded him, jostled him, and yet he still kept his knees moving. He maneuvered through a mass of legs, odd items of furniture stacked and jammed wall-to-wall, all eager to grab him with their straps and wooden arms and bend him to their shape. He cried when their sharp legs kicked him, and covered his face when hur-ricanes swept through the woods and shouted like old men.

He stopped at the front windows and floated up to the glass. A crowd of people watched him, pointed, tapped the glass. Sweat drenched him and fogged the glass wall. His eyes grew bigger than his mouth. And yet no matter how hard he peered at the ones outside, he could find no face that resembled his own.

THREE DOORS IN A.

DOUBLE ROOM.

by Craig Shaw Gardner

There was something wrong with his hands. There was no dirt lodged in the lines of the knuckles. It had been scrubbed away a long time ago. The skin was far smoother than it should have been, his fingers showing nothing but the traces of a few old scars. And they were wounds he could barely remember, self-inflicted for the most part, the legacy of too many late nights at the work bench. Those sort of nights were over now. Sally had seen to that.

"Ooh," his wife breathed. "Look at that, Sammy!" Sam Copper looked up from his too-clean knuckles, looked out of the window of the taxi at the immense structure the cab approached. It was a huge, wooden place, four stories tall andtwice as wide. But what made the place look even larger was the weird decoration everywhere. Strips and spi-rals of wood surrounded every door and window and ran between each floor, like a mountain of icing dripping from an enormous, melting cake. Sam had done a little building in his time, but this was like nothing he'd ever seen.

"I knew Greystone Bay would be a special place!" Sally giggled, forgetting for the moment the small crystal she held between her palms. "Look at all that gingerbread!"

Sam smiled at his wife and nodded, glad she was paying attention to him for a change rather than her damn crystal -gewgaws. Even inside the cab, her blonde hair shone in the late afternoon sun, framing dark eyes, full lips, and those pale freckles across her nose; freckles that she always wished she didn't have. She was awfully pretty when she got excited. It made Sam even sadder than before. Sally might be even prettier than the day he married her. He turned away from her, surprised that his too-clean hands had rolled themselves into fists.

He let his eyes focus on the hotel; no use punishing him-self. Gingerbread. So that's what you called it. The whole front of the place was covered with the stuff; far too much of it, as if whoever put it up there was trying to hide something underneath. But it was like a fat man wearing stripes; the riot of diamonds and curlicues covering everything made the place look even larger and more garish, the slopes and angles of the nailed-on wood conflicting crazily with the windows and doors beneath. It hurt his eyes to look at it.

"This is it, folks," the cabbie announced as he pulled the taxi up to the front steps. "The SeaHarp Hotel."

One glance at Sally told Sam the whole story. His wife loved it.

"It's so quaint!"

"Nah." The cabbie laughed. "It's too big to be quaint. You'll see, once you get inside." He got out of the cab to get the luggage.

Sally scrambled out of the car next, moving quickly away. Sam sat there and watched her go. Once, a couple of years ago, she would have squeezed Sam's arm, kissed his cheek. She would have wanted to share the excitement, to make Sam a part of it. And Sam would have touched her back. He would have taken her in his arms and half hugged the life from her.

He looked back down at his hands, far too pale against his charcoal gray slacks. Once, these hands had stroked Sally's hair, caressed her shoulders, touched her everywhere. These once-rough hands had become gentle with Sally, and he had discovered new strengths in the movement of his fingers or the way he turned his wrist.

Sam closed his eyes. A noise came from deep in his throat, half sigh, half groan. Where had that strength gone? He won-dered now if those things in his lap were able to move at all. Once, his hands had been his life. Now it seemed that Sam hardly knew those hands at all. 'Sam? Where are you?"

He started. He had forgotten where he was, had begun to drift off. He looked around. Sally stood between the cab and the steps to the hotel. Now that she had summoned him, she had gone back to talking to the cabbie as he hauled out their luggage.

Sam opened the door on his side and pulled himself from the cab, exhaling with the effort. Marry a younger woman, they told him. It'll keep you young, too. These days, being with Sally only made him feel older. He pulled out his wallet and paid the cab driver. He turned to his wife, but she was halfway up the stairs, keeping pace with a bellman laden down with their bags.

This was so different from the way they had started out. Sam sighed again. Had it only been two years? He wished, somehow, that they could change it all back. But then, that's why he'd agreed to come to this old resort hotel in Greystone Bay. A second honeymoon, his wife had called it. But it didn't feel like a honeymoon; it just felt like the rest of their lives, just going on because there was nothing better to do. Sam started up the stairs after his wife. Maybe things would be different, maybe everything would slow down a little bit, when they made it up to the room.

He was already breathing a little heavily when he made it to the top of the steps. But his wife had crossed the porch a moment before, following the bellman through a huge set of double doors, disappearing into the hotel. Sam hurried to catch up, ignoring the stitch in his side. He walked inside. He expected to step into the lobby, but found some sort of large, empty sitting room instead. There was a huge dining room off to his left. Another set of doors opened to theright. Sam heard muffled voices coming from that direction. He was sure the woman speaking was his wife.

He walked into a room more immense than any of those he had seen before. It was the lobby at last; he could see the reception desk tucked into the far corner. His wife was over there, too, talking to a man in a raincoat.

Sam realized as he approached that he recognized the man she was speaking to. Henry something. Henry Fields, that was it, an electronics salesman. Sam recalled that Henry didn't much like his first name, preferred to be called Hank.

They had seen each other once or twice a month before Sam got promoted. Hank Fields. He didn't remember ever intro-ducing him to Sally. But he must have, at one of those trade shows or office cocktail parties they were always going to. Even from here, he could tell that Sally and Hank knew each other.

Hank took a step away from Sally as Sam approached. The salesman smiled and waved.

"Hey, stranger." Hank's deep voice always sounded slightly amused, as if he was in the middle of telling some never-ending joke. "Long time, no see."

"It has been a while," Sam agreed. He thrust out his hand and the two shook.

Sally stepped up to her husband and took his arm. "Imagine!" she said rapidly. "Running into somebody from the city way out here. And somebody in the same business, too."

"Well," Hank replied. "We all have to take a vacation somewhere. It was nice talking to you." He nodded to both of them, but his eyes remained on Sally. "Remember what I told you."

"How could I forget?" Sally replied with a little laugh. "Perhaps we'll see you around later."

"Maybe you will." Fields waved a final time and turned away, marching quickly toward the front door.

"What did he mean?" Sam said with a frown.

"Pardon?" Sally replied as she looked around the room. "We should get a bellboy to take our things."

But Sam wouldn't let it go that easily. "He told you not to forget something."

"Oh." Sally turned and waved at a porter. "I don't know. It was mostly things to stay away from. You know, any place like this has its tourist traps. Hank knows about that sort of thing."

"Oh?" Sam's eyebrows rose of their own accord. It sounded like Fields and his wife had talked for a while. "Does he do some selling around here?"

"What?" Sally looked back up at her husband, blinking for a moment as if she had forgotten what they were talking about. "Oh, I guess he must. Why else would he be in some-place like Greystone Bay?" She let go of Sam's arm. "I've checked in, dear. Why don't we got up to the room?"

The porter arrived and placed their luggage on a small cart. Sam let his wife take the lead, following both her and the luggage to the distant elevator.

The bellman was gone. Sam had tipped him quickly and generously. Sam wanted to be alone with his wife.

Sally had already begun unpacking. He admired the quiet efficiency with which she worked. He liked to watch her slim fingers from behind, the way her hips moved beneath the thin fabric of her summer skirt. Sally had always been careful about staying trim.

Sam rubbed the spot on his arm where she had held him. That sudden contact had felt good, like old times. He wanted to feel that contact again.

It was their second honeymoon, after all. Just because things had changed didn't mean they couldn't change back.

Sam walked up behind Sally and put his large hands on her delicate shoulders. His thumbs dug gently into the spaces beneath her shoulder blades, massaging her back the way he used to, when they had first been married.

"Sam?" she asked, surprise in her voice.

"Yes, honey?" he replied. "I thought this might help you relax."

"Please, Sam!" She stepped forward, pulling free from his grip. "Not now." She began to turn, as if to look him in theeye, but then thought better of it and returned to her unpacking.

"I'm not in the mood," she murmured after a minute. "I guess I'm just tired from the trip. I need to think a little."

"To think?" Sam replied, feeling the old anger rising up in him again. "That wasn't why we came here."

"Wasn't it?" She turned around at last to look at him. "Oh, Sam! There's too much wrong-" She cut herself off and looked away again. "No, that's too easy. I just have to concentrate. Everything will be fine once I calm down."