Strangers

ghosts were actually bad memories rather than spirits, and they haunted not the room but the shadowy corners of his own mind.
        "Remember anything?" Ernie asked. "Is it coming back to you?"
        "I want to have a look at the john," Dom said.
        It was small and strictly functional, with a shower stall but no bathtub, a speckled tile floor, and durable Formica counter tops.
        Dom was interested in the sink, for it was surely the one in his recurring nightmare. But when he looked into the bowl, he was surprised to see a mechanical stopper. And an inch below the rim of the bowl, the overflow drain consisted of three round holes, a more modern design than the six slanted lozenge-shaped outlets in the sink of his dreams.
        "This isn't the same," he said. "The sink was old, with a rubber stopper attached to a bead-chain and hung from the cold-water faucet."
        "We're always upgrading the place," Ernie said from the doorway.
        "We took that sink out eight or nine months ago," Faye said. "We replaced the Formica then, too, although it's the same color as before."
        Dom was disappointed because he had been convinced that at least some memories from those lost days would begin to return to him when he touched the sink. After all, judging from the stark terror of the nightmare, something particularly frightening had happened to him at that very spot; therefore, it seemed likely that the sink might act as a lightning rod upon the supercharged memories that drifted in the darkness of his subconscious, drawing them back in a sudden crackling blaze of recollection. He put his hands on the new sink, but he felt only cold porcelain.
        'Anything?" Ernie asked again.
        "No," Dom said. "No memories… but bad vibrations. If I give it time, I think the room might break down the barriers. I'll sleep here tonight, give it a chance to work on me… if that's all right."
        "No problem Faye said.
        The room's yours."
        Dom said, "I have a hunch the nightmare will be worse here than it's ever been before."
        
        Laguna Beach, California.
        Although Parker Faine was one of the most respected of living American artists, although his canvases were assiduously collected by major museums, although he had been commissioned to create works for the President of the United States and other luminaries, he was not too old and certainly not too dignified to get a thrill from the intrigue upon which he was engaged in Dominick Corvaisis' behalf. To be a successful artist, one needed maturity, an adult's perception and sensitivity and dedication to craftsmanship, but one also had to hold on to a child's curiosity, wonder, innocence, and sense of fun. Parker held tighter to those things than most artists did; therefore, he fulfilled his role in Dom's plans with a spirit of adventure.
        Each day, when he picked up Dom's mail, Parker pretended to go about his business without the slightest suspicion that he might be under surveillance, but in fact he searched surreptitiously, diligently for the watchers - spies, cops, or whatever they might be. He never saw anyone observing him, and he never detected a tail.
        And each night, when he left his house and went to a different pay phone to await Dom's prearranged call, he drove miles out of his way, turned back on his own route, made sudden turns calculated to throw off a tail, until he was sure that he was not being followed.
        A few minutes before nine o'clock, Saturday night, he arrived by his usual devious means at a telephone booth beside a Union 76 station. A hard rain fell, sluicing down the Plexiglas walls, distorting the world beyond and screening Parker from prying eyes.
        He was wearing a trenchcoat and a rainproof khaki hat with the rim turned down all the way around to let the rain run off. He felt as if he belonged in a John le Cared tale. He loved it.
        Promptly at nine o'clock, the phone rang. It was Dom. "I'm on schedule, at the Tranquility Motel. This is the place, Parker."
        Dom had a lot to tell: a disturbing experience in the Tranquility Grille, Ernie Block's nyctophobia… And by indirection, he managed to convey that the Blocks had received strange Polaroid snapshots, too.
        Discretion was essential; if the Tranquility Motel was, indeed, the center of the unremembered events of the summer before last, the Blocks' phones might be tapped. If the