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One

THE DOCTOR WOKE up afraid He had been dreaain He had seen the woman in the rocker He'd seen the man with the brown eyes

And even now in this quiet hotel roo disorientation He'd been talking again with the brown-eyed et out of it

The doctor sat up in bed No sound but the faint roar of the air conditioner Why was he thinking about it tonight in a hotel room in the Parker Meridien? For aof the old house He saw the woain--her bent head, her vacant stare He could alainst the screens of the old porch And the brown-eyedhis lips A waxen dummy infused with life--

No Stop it

He got out of bed and padded silently across the carpeted floor until he stood in front of the sheer white curtains, peering out at black sooty rooftops and di light showed behind the clouds above the dull concrete facade opposite No debilitating heat here No drowsing scent of roses, of gardenias

Gradually his head cleared

He thought of the Englishht it all back--the English to the bartender that he'd just come frolishentleold watch chain fixed to his vest pocket Where did one see that kind of man these days?--a e actor, and brilliant, ageless blue eyes

The doctor had turned to hiht about New Orleans, you certainly are I saw a ghost o--" Then he had stopped, embarrassed He had stared at the ht in the base of the crystal glass

Hum of flies in summer; smell of medicine That much Thorazine? Could there be some mistake?

But the Englishman had been respectfully curious He'd invited the doctor to join him for dinner, said he collected such tale

s For a moment, the doctor had been tempted There was a lull in the convention, and he liked this man, felt an immediate trust in him And the lobby of the Parker Meridien was a nice cheerful place, full of light, loo with secrets in its perpetual Caribbean heat

But the doctor could not tell that story

"If ever you change your lishiven the doctor a card with the naht say we collect ghost stories--true ones, that is"

THE TALAMASCA

We watch

And we are always here

It was a curious motto

Yes, that hat had brought it all back The English card with the European phone nu for the Coast tomorrow to see a California ht back to life The doctor had read of that case in the New York papers--one of those characters who suffers clinical death and returns after having seen "the light"

They had talked about the drowned lishman "He clailishes when he touches things with his bare hands We call it psychometry"

The doctor had been intrigued He had heard of a few such patients hihtly recalled, who had co to have seen the future "Near Death Experience" One saw more and more articles about the phenomenon in the journals

"Yes," Lightner had said, "the best research on the subject has been done by doctors--by cardiologists"

"Wasn't there a film a few years back," the doctor had asked, "about a wo"

"You're open-hted shost? I'd so love to hear it I' out till toive to hear your story!"

No, not that story Not ever

Alone now in the shadowy hotel roo dusty hallway in New Orleans He heard the shuffle of his patient's feet as the nurse "walked" her He sain of a New Orleans house in su to him

The doctor had never been inside an antebellu in New Orleans And the old house really did have white fluted colu away Greek Revival style they called it--a long violet-gray town house on a dark shady corner in the Garden District, its front gate guarded it sees were made in a rose pattern and inia creeper, and bougainvillea of a dark, incandescent pink

He liked to pause on the marble steps and look up at the Doric capitals, wreathed as they were by those drowsy fragrant blosso branches Bees sang in the tangle of brilliant green leaves beneath the peeling cornices Never mind that it was so somber here, so damp

Even the approach through the deserted streets seduced him He walked slowly over cracked and uneven sidewalks of herringbone brick or gray flagstone, under an unbroken archway of oak branches, the light eternally dappled, the sky perpetually veiled in green Always he paused at the largest tree that had lifted the iron fence with its bulbous roots He could not have gotten his arms around the trunk of it It reached all the way fro at the shuttered s beyond the banisters, leaves en vines

But the decay here troubled him nevertheless Spiders wove their tiny intricate webs over the iron lace roses In places the iron had so rusted that it fell away to powder at the touch And here and there near the railings, the wood of the porches was rotted right through

Then there was the old swion bounded by the flagstones, which had become a swamp unto itself with its black water and wild irises The ss you could hear at dusk, singing their grinding, ugly song Sad to see the little fountain jets up one side and down the other still sending their little arching streaed to drain it, clean it, scrub the sides with his own hands if he had to Longed to patch the broken balustrade, and rip the weeds frorown urns

Even the elderly aunts of his patient--Miss Carl, Miss Millie, and Miss Nancy--had an air of staleness and decay It wasn't a lasses It was theirto their clothes

Once he had wandered into the library and taken a book down from the shelf Tiny black beetles scurried out of the crevice Alarmed he had put the book back