NO PAIN, NO GAIN.

by Thomas F. Monteleone

"Excuse me, sir, but aren't you forgetting something?" asked Roger Easton, chief bell-boy at the SeaHarp.

"What's that?" said the thin, dishevelled guest who was walking toward the door with two arm-loads of baggage.

"That other box," said Roger, pointing to a fairly large container in the corner of the room. It looked like one of those thin-slatted crates they shipped bottled water in.

The guest stopped at the door, eased his bags to the car-pet, and looked back over a bony shoulder at Roger. "Oh, that . . .""Yeah," said Roger. "Want me to get it for you? I can carry it out on the dolly."

The guest looked at Roger for a moment, then tried to enact a small smile. "Actually, no, I don't."

Roger was taken aback. What the heck was going on here? From the minute he first saw this guy, he figured he was a weirdo-what with the trimmed goatee and the thick horn-rimmed glasses and the baggy suit. The guest looked like one of those jazz musicians or French painters you always saw in cartoons. Of course, Roger made it his business to know as much as possible about all of the SeaHarp's guests, and he already knew this guy was a professor from Miska-tonic University, and he'd been in Greystone Bay to give one of those weekend self-help seminars to all the yuppies. - "Is everything all right?" asked the guest. Roger had ap-parently been staring at him mutely. He did that sometimes without even realizing it. He'd start having some interesting thought, and bang, there he'd be-staring off with his mouth hanging open like he was trying to catch flies with it. He closed his mouth and gathered in his thoughts like a pile of crumpled-up laundry.

"Oh, it's just that we don't usually allow people to leave stuff behind," said Roger. "If you lose somethin' or forget somethin', that's one thing. But people don't usually leave stuff on purpose."

"I am," said the professor.

The abruptness of the man's answer surprised him, but Roger could only say: "And why's that?"

The tall man paused and looked at Roger. "What's your name, son?"

Roger told him.

"Do you make good tips here?"

"It's okay, I guess . . . why?"

The professor reached into his pocket, pulled out a roll of bills. "I make out pretty good with my seminars," he mut-tered. "Here, take this and do me a favor, all right?"

Roger accepted the bill, not wanting to steal a glance at the number in the corner, but when you were getting a big tip, bell-hops had this sort of sixth sense about it. Roger just knew it was a good one and he had to check it out. Once a guy from Texas had given him ten bucks, then there was that woman from New York who promised him a twenty if he'd- he looked down into his hand-My God! A hundred bucks!

"Something wrong?" asked the professor, still looming over him.

"Jeez, no, but I ... I never got a tip like this before!"

"Nor will you probably ever again. No matter, you have one now. I want you to do me a favor, all right?"

"Yeah! Just name it!" Roger stuffed the bill into his pants pocket. It seemed to glow with its own heat, radiating wealth up and down his leg. A hundred bucks!

"As I said before, I intend to leave that small crate behind. It isn't necessary for it to remain in this room, however."

The professor cleared his throat, stared at Roger intently.

"Yeah, okay. So?"

"So I want you to do this for me: put the crate somewhere safe and secure within this hotel. Hide it, if you think it necessary, but remember, it must remain within the walls of this building. Is that clear?"

Boy, this guy was sounding pretty weird, thought Roger. 'Course, there was nothing weird about the hundred-dollar bill warming up his pants pocket.

"Is that clear, Roger?"

"Huh? Oh yeah, sure. I can find a place to keep it. No problem."

The professor nodded. "Very good. Now, here, take my card. There's my phone number on it. I want you to call me at the University if you have any problems. I will be stopping back once a week to check on the bottle. Understood?"

Roger accepted the card. "Yeah, but why?""Well, it's quite simple really-I want to know what things look like in a month or so.''

Jeez, that reminded him. "Hey, I meant to ask you. Just what is it you got in that crate, anyway?"

"It is none of your concern." The professor's voice was flat and stern, reminding Roger of his dead father's.

"Jeez, I don't know ... I don't want to do anything that's gonna get me in trouble."

A large, bony hand suddenly vised down on his shoulder. "If you don't want to help me out, I'm sure I can find some-one else who can . . . especially for a hundred-dollar tip."

The thought of losing his tip sent a bolt of electric juice through Roger like he'd stuck his finger in a light socket.

Jeez, this guy was serious.

"Oh, no sir! You don't have to worry about that. Listen, I was just tryin' to make conversation. I don't really care what's in the crate, honest. And I'll hide it for you, no problem."

The man stared at him, as though evaluating the proposi-tion, then nodded slowly. "Very well. Keep my card. You shall call me if anything untoward occurs between my visits. Now, let's go. I have a long drive ahead of me."

"Yes sir!" said Roger, grabbing the handle of the dolly. As he walked down the hall toward the elevator bay, he could almost hear the crackle of that crisp bill against his right thigh, and he began thinking of ways he could spend so much extra cash.

"I can't believe you wanted to stay in this goddamned place," said Angela in her whining, yet still acidic tone of voice. It was a voice Daniel Rosenthal had grown to despise in a surprisingly short amount of time.

"Jesus Christ, we just got here," he said softly, trying to keep from sounding shitty. He really wanted to make a sin-cere effort. "What's wrong with it? Let's give it a chance, okay?"

Angela preened in the mirror, fingering this curl and that. Daniel wondered why she just didn't get her hair exactly right, get it encased in lucite, and forget about it.

"The SeaHarp Hotel!" she muttered. "Didn't this town ever hear of a Holiday Inn?"

"They're all the same. This place has character." Daniel opened his parachute luggage, started hanging up his shirts and pants.

"But there's nothing to do here, Danny-Boy. No sauna, no pool. They don't even have a night-club."

He walked over to her, put his arms around her while she continued looking at herself in the mirror. She was not the most beautiful woman he'd ever been with, and her body was just average, but there had always been something about her that attracted him.

"If you recall, honey, we're supposed to be 'doing' each other. Isn't that was this little vacation is all about?"

He'd felt her tense up as soon as he touched her. Six years of marriage and there was about as much warmth between them as ice cubes in a tray. He'd truly loved her, but she did not love him. It was that simple, and he was having a hell of a time accepting it. They'd read counties books, been to counselors and therapists, and nothing had essentially changed. Angela resented him. She was intimidated by him, threatened intellectually by him. His list of accomplishments (Daniel Rosenthal was a nationally renowned orthodontic specialist, the author of several definitive textbooks, a wildly successful public speaker, and the holder of sixteen patents) made her feel inadequate, stupid, and hopelessly inferior. Since marrying him, Angela had learned to loathe Trivial Pursuit. She felt powerless and inept in his presence in all things but one-and it was from this single thing that she fashioned a most terrible weapon.

Daniel had always been a naturally affectionate man. He gave his love freely and he craved it in return. And when Angela finally learned this, she lunged for her newfound power with a vengeance. Her rejection ate him up like the crudest of cancers. When he would tell her he loved her, and only a cold, black silence welled up out of her in reply, the bottomless pain and naked fear in his heart ranged outward like a beacon of loneliness.

Only Angela had the power to hurt him so exquisitely and she wielded her special weapon with the skill of a neurosur-geon. If he made no overtures, she could let them live like brother and sister for months at a time, and then almost whimsically deign to open her legs for him when she felt like it. Like a dumb mutt, he would sit up and get ready for her, waiting for her to toss him a doggie-treat.She turned and slipped out of his embrace, walked to the window, stared out at the manicured hedges and lawns of the grand old hotel. Keeping her back to him, she spoke to the leaded glass panes. "Oh yes, I keep forgetting. This is our 'second honeymoon,' isn't it?"

Daniel couldn't ignore the sarcasm in her voice. "Well, we didn't have much of a first one now, did we?"

He was referring to her wrenching a disc in her back as she picked a heavy suitcase from the airport's luggage carou-sel. He was referring to ten days at Lake Tahoe with her complaining of increasingly intolerable lumbar pain and avoiding even a comforting touch from him the whole time. He was referring to her answer when he suggested they sub-stitute with mutual oral sex until her back healed: I guess I should tell you now, Dan-I've always hated doing that to you, and honestly I don't think I could ever do it again.

He remembered wondering back then what her definition of love might be (since it obviously didn't include giving to your lover because it made him feel good. Or deriving plea-sure from simply knowing that you made him feel good.) Angela whirled angrily from the window, her face twisted with a special loathing. "You prick! You always bring that up when you have nothing else to say!"

"Well I guess it's a measure of my pain, Angela. The memory won't go away."

' 'You bastard! You act like it was my fault! Like I hurt my back on purpose . . . !"

"You mean if you hurt it at all." The words came out of him without aforethought. He knew immediately how much they would hurt her. He didn't really want that, did he?

She rushed him, raising her long fingernails at him like talons, going for his face. "You bastard!" she cried out, again and again.

This was not going well at all, thought Daniel, as he fended her off.

Roger ended up stashing the crate on the fourth floor, at the end of the wainscotted hall, in Room 434. The smaller rooms up there were practically never used, especially in the off-season. And now that November was only a couple of weeks away, nobody would be checking that room very often, if at all.

After he'd carefully hidden it behind the valenced draper-ies, and had turned to leave, Roger had decided that, damn it, he did need to know what was in that crate. Its size and weight indicated something substantial, and if it was some-thing like a safe, then maybe he should know about it. A fantasy of the professor being a secret embezzler or bank-robber made him smile. Roger could confront him with his hidden cache of loot, and make him split the money.

Yeah. . . .

But his get-rich-easy dreams faded quickly when he pried back one of the thin, wood slats of the crate to discover one of those big bottled-water bottles in there. Just like he'd first imagined. Now what the hell was going on here?

Looking closer, Roger noted that the water was not clear like bottled water. Rather, it had a murky, greenish cast.

Peering in through the single open slat, he could see nothing in the water, but his instincts told him the bottle could not be empty. After prying the top of the crate loose, he carefully eased the thick-walled glass container from the crate.

It was bulky and probably more than three feet high. He carried the bottle closer to the window and even then, at first glance, he couldn't see a damn thing. Now why the hell was he hiding a bottle of creek-water for?

It wasn't until he started to roll it back under the draperies that he saw it.

Just for an instant, then it was gone. A flash of color and reflected light, like a polished fish-lure spinning through the water. Roger stopped moving the big bottle, again peered into the aquarium depths.

There it was. The little bastard. Jeez, it was small, but it was there.

The light had to hit it just right or he couldn't even see it, but once he knew what he was looking for, he kept relocating it every time it would disappear. It reminded him of that tropical fish they called a neon-not because of its shape, just its colors, which kept changing like an electric rainbow. Its shape was hard to figure. Definitely not a fish-shape, though. It was more like a blob. No shape at all, really. Roger won-dered if he could see arms or legs or eyes in that tiny shape-less mass, and decided that he couldn't really see much of anything.

But that had been more than a week ago . . .

True to his word, the professor came by to check on things. Roger was very courteous to the man and persuaded him to let him tag along for the inspection."All right," said the professor. "Let's have a look."

Roger nodded and uncovered the bottle, then jumped back away from it instinctively when he saw the shape within its brackish depths.

"Damn!" he said automatically, his breath hitching up in his throat. He hadn't been prepared for what he now saw behind the glass.

The tiny sliver of colored tissue had been replaced by something a little larger than a softball. No, that wasn't right.

It hadn't been replaced . . . whatever it was in there had grown. The little bastard was growing, Jeez . . .

The professor calmly went about observing the thing and making notes on a little pad he'd pulled from his coat.

Roger peered down at the pulpy mass and winced. It was uglier than anything he'd ever seen. Essentially shapeless, it re-minded him of a freshly excised organ like maybe a spleen or a brain or something. There were convolutions and folds of tissue; there were tendrils and other streamers of meat hanging off it; there were objects that might have been the beginnings of eyes and tiny clawed appendages. Roger re-membered once as a kid his mother cracked open an egg and it had a half-developed chicken in it, and this thing in the bottle almost reminded him of that. It was the weirdest thing he'd ever seen, no doubt.

But calling it weird didn't cover all the bases. No way.

As Roger stared into the dark green liquid, the creature moved toward him, flattening somewhat against the glass.

He sensed the thing would have liked to have grabbed onto him, and he didn't like that feeling even a little bit.

He also sensed something else about the creature: that maybe it was evil.

The professor continued to write something hastily in his notebook, not standing until he was finished. "All right, son, you can cover it up again."

As Roger followed his instruction, a question occurred to him-if that thing had grown so much, just what the hell was it eating? He decided he'd ask the professor.

"A good question," said the man. "But I'm afraid it's a bit too early to tell. Let's wait another week or so."

Melanie Cantrell checked the lock on the door to her hotel room. She'd already put the Do Not Disturb sign on the knob, but goodness knew she didn't want any maids coming in while she in the middle of ... of what she was here to do.

The last phrase stuck in her mind like a line of lyrics on a scratched record. Here she was ready to do it, and she couldn't even bring herself to mention the word. She turned away from the door, passed a small mirror on the wall-something to afford a guest a last-second check of hair or clothing before leaving the room-and stole a look at her own face.

Bloodshot and red-rimmed from all the tears, her eyes looked like some zombie's from a bad movie. The muscles in her jaw, taut and corded, had contorted her normally pretty features into a mask of tense pain. Oh God, what was she doing here? She turned away from the mirror and began to unpack her suitcase. She carried several changes of clothes, extra towels and dressings, a few books, and her diary. After she emptied her bag, her gaze fell upon the telephone, squat-ting like some kind of dark creature by the side of the bed.

She still had a chance to call Teddy and tell him where she'd gone . . . and why.

But no, she wasn't going to involve him in any of it. She'd already decided that she would go through it alone.

Besides Teddy would've went crazy if he ever found out she'd let herself get pregnant. He was like that when she did some-thing he didn't like, screaming and yelling, and even hitting her once in a while. She looked away from the phone, wish-ing just for a moment that Teddy was the kind of guy who could be gentle sometimes. She'd never known a man who could be gentle, and her mother had always told her there was no such thing. She figured it must be true.

Well, she told herself bravely, it was time.

Melanie opened her little travel-bag and dug through till she found the vial of pills her friend Cathy had given her.

Cathy was the only person in the world who knew she was spending the weekend at the SeaHarp. Melanie didn't want anyone to know, but Cathy had been the one who got her the drugs that would make her miscarriage (it was easy with Cathy's older sister going to pharmacy school!). And besides, if anything happened to her, she wanted somebody to know where to look for her.Melanie walked into the bathroom and shook out three of the pinkish pills, washed them down with water just the way Cathy said she should. It would take a few hours before her body would begin to rebel against the intruder in her womb; it would be best if she went to sleep for a while. Walking from the bathroom, she passed an open closet harboring sev-eral coat-hangers.

Pausing, Melanie looked into the darkness at the triangles of wire, and the memory of old horror stories rose up in her mind. She wondered what she would do if the pills didn't work.

Oh Teddy, she thought, as tears stained her cheeks. I love you.

When Roger and the professor checked the bottle the fol-lowing week, he hesitated in pulling back the draperies.

"Go on, son," said the professor, notepad already in hand.

Roger did it and looked into the water. What he saw made his stomach churn. The professor started writing like crazy.