What was going on here? thought Roger. The damned thing was disgusting. A fuckin' monster-that's what they were growing in there.

Jeez, it looked worse than ever. The image of the unde-veloped egg-embryo needed to be revised; it had changed, warped into something really alien, something bad. And it had been doing some serious growing-the bulk of it barely fit within the confines of the bottle. The thing had grown not only larger, but darker. Its dissected-organ appearance glis-tened with pulsating life. There was a sac-life thing which almost glowed with orange movement. There was something that could have been an eye. A tendril-like arm. Was that a claw? Seaweed-like stuff flowed and wavered in self-contained currents. The amorphous body constantly in ebbing motion, Roger was unable to recognize what was really growing in there. But whatever it was, he knew two things for sure: it was a nasty motherfucker and it couldn't get a whole hell of a lot bigger without busting the glass bottle.

"You didn't tell me it was gonna get so big," he said.

"I didn't know what it was going to do. This was an ex-periment, remember?" The professor's voice was calm, even.

In control.

"Yeah, I guess you're right," said Roger. "But, man, it looks bad, doesn't it? It's getting crowded in there."

"No, I still think there's plenty of room."

"What is it? You never told me?"

The professor rubbed his chin pensively. "I'm not sure."

"Well, listen, is it dangerous?" Roger figured it was-no matter what the professor said.

"Probably. I don't know yet."

Roger swallowed hard. Now there was an honest answer if he ever heard one.

"Where'd you get it anyway? Are you a biology-guy?"

The man smiled thinly. "No, I'm an archeologist-I found the, ah, spores of this thing in a stoppered vial thousands of years old."

"Really? Where?"

The professor shrugged. "The ruins of a building dating back to early Mycenaean times. I brought it back from my last dig."

"Yeah, I got you." Roger didn't know from mice an' eons, but he figured the professor was onto something pretty weird, so he figured he oughta just play along.

"There were writings, too," said the professor. "They spoke of this as a deimophage. Fascinating, don't you think?

I tried controlled experiments at the university with labora-tory animals, but I didn't have much heart for the torturing necessary, you see."Roger frankly didn't see at all, but he nodded his head solemnly as the professor rambled on.

"Besides, it wasn't working. None of the spores did any-thing. I decided they required spontaneously generated hu-man emotion, so I thought of the most suitable test environment-hence the SeaHarp!"

"Yeah . . . right," said Roger, having lost the thread way back there somewhere. "Hey, is it okay to cover it up now?" The professor nodded. "Till next week." "You sure it's gonna be okay. If it grows as much this week as it did last-" The professor waved off his protest. "Everything will be just fine, Roger. Let's be off." "Yeah?" said Bobby Kaminski, grabbing the receiver from its cradle. He'd been pacing about the hotel room, waiting for the call for what seemed like an eternity.

"Okay, man, we're in the lobby. What room you in?" "Two-O-Five," said Bobby. "You got the money?" "Hey, man .

. . sure we do. You got the shit?" Bobby nodded, rubbed his nose. "Yeah, I got it." He was getting bad feelings about all this, but there was no turning back now.

"Okay, keep it stiff, man. We'll be right up." Bobby hung up the phone and began pacing the hotel room again. How did he ever get involved in this crazy bullshit? If he wasn't such a goddamned cokehead . . .

He didn't much like himself, but he didn't like dealing with this guy, Andy, a lot worse. Sherry'd hooked him up, but Bobby didn't like the looks of Andy, didn't like his scent. The Good Fathers of Greystone Bay didn't have much com-passion for dealers and Bobby was feeling pretty paranoid. Either this guy Andy was a narc, or he was just bad news. Either way, Bobby didn't dig the set up-that's why he kept his jacket on; that's why he kept his snub-nose .38 in his shoulder holster.

Hard knocks at the door broke up his thoughts. He opened the door after checking the peep-hole.

"Hey, dude, how's it hangin'?"

Andy was standing there in his leather gear, punctuated now and then by chrome studding and chains. He smelled of grease and road-grime. Behind him were two other bikers who looked like they could have been tag-team members from a World Federation Wrestling bout. One of them carried a small nylon Nike sportsbag.

"I thought I told you to come alone," said Bobby.

"Hey, I don't go nowhere without my stick-men," said Andy, who remained standing in the hallway. "So, are we comin' in, or what?"

Bobby stood aside and the trio entered-the two goons im-mediately casing things out like good goons should. He didn't like this situation at all. His nose was itching and burning. He'd love to take a toot right about now, but he needed to be clear, to be ready for anything.

"Okay, where is it?" asked Andy.

Bobby opened the top dresser drawer and pulled out the kilo, nicely wrapped and sanitized for their protection.

"You got the money?" he asked. His voice sound weak, reedy. Scared.

Andy smiled and nodded to the goon with the Nike bag, who threw it on the bed. Unzipping it, Bobby wasn't really surprised to see it was filled with cut-up newspapers. So it was going down like this . . .

Swinging around, he reached for his gun. Better to take out Andy, then maybe reason with the other two.

But before he could complete the turn, something stunned him, creating a stinging halo around the back of his head. His knees jellied up on him and huge arms caught him as he started to go down. Bobby was dazed as they frisked him.

"You were right, Andy-he was hot," said the goon, strip-ping out his piece.

"So you were going to shoot me?" asked Andy.

Bobby was too numb to respond. He knew it wouldn't do any good anyway. One of them ripped open his shirt.

Then somebody was fumbling with his belt and zipper. "Just for that," said Andy, "I'm gonna let my boys have a little fun before they ex you out, man." The pain in the back of his head bloomed like a miniature nova, but it proved to be only a sweet prelude . . . Roger was getting very freaked out when the professor didn't show up for his weekly visit. It had been a bad week at the SeaHarp anyway-Mr. Montgomery had been highly upset by the murdered drug dealer they found in 205's bath-tub. Roger was just glad he hadn't been the one to find the poor bastard.

He waited all day on Saturday, and still no professor. Roger called at the University on Sunday, but nobody was answer-ing any of the phones. On Monday, he spoke to a woman who gave him the bad news: the professor had slipped in the shower and fractured his skull. He was now at the Miskatonic University Hospital, comatose. Great. Just great.

That night Roger decided he'd better check on the thing in the bottle, but he didn't know what the hell he'd do if he got himself up to the fourth floor and it had already broken loose. When he pulled back the heavy draperies and saw the bot-tle still intact, Roger exhaled-only then realizing he'd been holding his breath. His luck was holding, but just barely, it seemed.

The thing had grown horribly. It didn't look like there was any water left in the bottle at all. Just this bloated, sickly-green tumorous thing. Its amorphous shape pulsed with life like a giant, beating heart. Jeez, it looked like it was growing larger as he watched it, like it would break the glass any second.

He had to get it out of there. Like right away. No way it was going to make it through another night. Just get it out.

Dump it somewhere.

Roger told himself he'd worry about the details later as he hefted the bottle into his arms and slipped into the deserted hallway. It had to be at least three times as heavy as it had been before and he wondered how that could even be possi-ble. Roger kept wondering what he would say if he saw any of the Montgomerys coming down from their apartments on the fifth floor. All he needed was to get caught by them be-fore he reached the service elevator.

The old service elevator creaked and groaned its way to the musty basement, where Roger eased the bottle past the doors and across the cluttered floor. Lawn furniture, croquet sets, umbrellas, and other seasonal equipment littered the path to the exit doors. The bottle seemed to getting heavier with each step and Roger prayed that he didn't stumble on something or lose his grip.

It wasn't until he'd carried it out to his four-year old Ca-maro that he'd thought of what to do with it. Placing it care-fully in the back seat, Roger tried to avoid looking into the dark center of its mass. There was something very much like an eye looking back at him. Its whole body, now pressed against the glass, heaved like a beating heart. He couldn't wait to get rid of the ugly son-of-a-bitch.

Turning off Harbor Road onto Port Boulevard, Roger drove carefully through the center of Greystone Bay. It was getting late in the evening and things were quiet. Lightning flashed in the northern skies and he wondered if a storm might be descending on the coast.

With the bottle wedged into the floor-well behind the shot-gun seat, he headed straight out of town on Western Road, past the industrial parks and the other new development in some of the farmlands. There was a place up in the hills off Western Road where the government had operated a toxic waste dump. Public outcry had it closed down about fifteen years ago and since then it had become a favorite spot for adventurous kids who wanted to do some make-believe ex-ploring and teen-agers who wanted to do some real exploring in the back-seats of their cars.

As Roger drove up the abandoned road with his headlights off, past the battered chain-link fence and gate, memories of evenings spent up here with Diana wafted back to him like a subtle perfume. He wished they'd been able to work things out. He still missed her sometimes, he thought wistfully as *he pulled up and killed the engine.

Carefully, Roger slipped from behind the wheel, went around and pulled the bottle out from behind the passenger seat. When he reached down to pick it up* the thing inside lurched and churned, like it had tried to get at him through the glass. God, he hated it! He couldn't wait to dump it into the well and be done with the whole mess.

He'd found the well years ago when he'd been kicking around the site. The wooden well-cover had half-rotted away and somebody had tried to batten it down with a piece of corrugated steel. It was a half-assed job, and Roger had pulled back the metal and peered down into the shaft in the earth. He couldn't see any bottom and a stone dropped unto the darkness fell for what seemed like a very long time before splooshing into the water.

The perfect place to dump this thing, thought Roger as he carried the bottle the remaining few feet to the lip of thewell. The circumference of the opening looked narrow, but it wasn't-certainly wide enough to swallow up the water-fountain bottle. Sucking in his breath, he wrapped his arms around it and prepared to lift it over the opening.

The timing was flawless.

The thing must have sensed its fate because as soon as he embraced the glass, the creature inside heaved upward.

With a smart little snick! the neck of the bottle just snapped off, pushed out and up by a thick tendril-like arm. It happened so fast, Roger didn't have time to react. All of a sudden this piece of fleshy tuber shot up past his face.

Instantly he was stunned by the overpowering stench of it. The inside of his nose stung, actually burned from the acid-stink of decay, of swamps. It was a batrachian smell, a hid-eous smell of something impossibly old. He staggered backwards, then spun around, still holding the bottle. And then the glass was cracking, fracturing in all directions. The thing, once free, seemed to be expanding like a balloon being filled with air. Roger was awash in the foul bath of its prison, smelling like the grave. More tendrils shot out embracing him like clinging seaweed. He screamed and a long tuberous finger leaped into his mouth, forcing its way down his throat. He gagged, heaving and puking, but still the appendage wormed its way into the depths of his stomach. He could feel it wriggling about and he puked again.

Reeling from the shock, locked in a death-dance with the thing, he staggered forward and tripped over the lip of the well. Head-first, he pitched downward into the shaft. The opening was just large enough to accept the width of his shoulders, pinning his arms to his sides. He plummeted into the darkness, picking up speed. His mind threatened to blank out from the sheer panic, and then suddenly he was jerked to a jolting stop. Reaching a more narrow spot in the wall, his body was wedged vise-like in the shaft.

And still the creature clung to him, wriggling and sliding about, appearing to assume a more comfortable position.

His thoughts were short-circuiting as he realized there was no getting out, that he was going to die suspended upside down and being slowly eaten from the inside out by the mon-ster from the bottle. He wanted to scream, to cry out, but the tendril stuffed into his mouth wouldn't allow it.

Slowly the creature kept adjusting its position, rearranging itself, moving and exploring his body with its many arms, leaving a vicious trail of slime everywhere it touched his flesh. He was almost numb from shock and exposure as it moved against him, sending lancets and pincers and thorns into him.

Under his fingernails, in his ears and up his nose, through his armpits and groin, the thing shot him through with a raging inferno of pain. All his nerve endings sang with tor-ment. His brain threatened to buzz away into the idiot hum of white noise, of absolute pain.

And the thing surged with pleasure and satiety.

Time lost all meaning in the dank confines of the well. The constant symphony of pain precluded any serious thinking, and all he wanted to do was die.

But Roger Easton didn't die.

He had no idea how long he lay wedged in the well before he realized the thing was keeping him alive in the white-pain darkness. The thing was feeding him parts of itself, as Roger in turn fed it.

It was the perfect relationship, and he knew it would last for a very long time.

OLD FRIENDS NEVER DIE.

by Bob Booth

Mike Condon knew he was going to die on the night of No-vember seventh. He had seen it in a dream, not once,but many times. Mike wasn't the kind of guy who believed in psychic foretelling any more than he believed in the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, or nine-inch aliens who kidnapped people. He was like the old English lady he had read about who'd said: "I don't believe in ghosts, but I AM afraid of them."

Mike Condon was a successful musician. His band, the Snappers, had been big in the sixties; producing hit singles with regularity and garnering two glorious platinum albums. In the early seventies they split. Mike and Keith Packer, who between them had written all the songs and sung all the leads, went to work for various groups as back-up singers and opened for others as a two-man band called Barney and Clyde. They never made a lot of money during those years, but they developed a cult following and they worked steadily. Marriage, kids, houses in the suburbs, private schools-all the trappings of moderately successful businessmen in their thirties. They supplied the singing voices for animated char-acters big with the pre-school set and once in a while played a local club to stay sharp. Then the eighties came. An entire generation of rock & roll fans had come and gone and sud-denly they were getting air play. An army of adolescents cu-rious about the sixties, about Vietnam, about the drug culture, the civil rights movement and all that history that Mike and his friends had lived through were searching used record stores for Hendrix, the Doors, Big Brother and, amazingly enough, the Snappers.

The phone started to ring again. Various promoters were packaging groups from the sixties to tour again. The Snap-pers were in demand again. Except there weren't any Snap-pers. The drummer had bought into an Audi dealership, the bass player had become a commercial artist, and the key-board man worked in a factory in Bakersfield.

They were all out of shape, out of practice, and not the least bit interested in touring. No matter. Mike and Keith were the heart of the band. They recruited two kids and an old session man who were familiar with their style and in a matter of months the Snappers were as tight as they had ever been. Keith was a little chunkier and a lot grayer, but that was all right. He could still write, and play, and sing. Most of all, he wanted it. He hadn't given up the dream. The dreams.

The dreams started when the tour started. At first he thought it was life on the road. He wasn't, after all, as young as he used to be. Six nights a week in six different towns hundreds of miles apart were bound to take their toll. The schedule was always the same. Rehearse in the after-noon after the roadies had set up the equipment. . . munch on the lousy buffet the promoter sent over . . . nap or meet with local acquaintances until show time . . . smile, laugh, jump around, flirt with the girls in the front row, joke with the stage hands, sing and play as hard as you could for forty-five minutes . . . go back to a converted house trailer that was home on the road for the five of them . . . live in cramped quarters . . , drink lousy local beer . . . sign a few auto-graphs and listen for the thousandth time as some middle-aged guy with a paunch tells you he's got all your records and is, in fact, your biggest fan . . . a few hours of fitful sleep, listening to the eighteen-wheelers roll down the high-way that inevitably ran past the parking lot of the arena you had played that night. . . up at dawn for the trek to the next town, the sound checks, the rehearsals . . .

appearing on the radio stations that were partially sponsoring the tour . . . lunch with the councilman's sister-she had all your records, was in fact your biggest fan, and her brother did pull some strings so the promoter could get his permit, after all.

The dreams always featured dead friends. They weren't dead in the dreams, but he was, or was about to be. He was lying on a beach or a lawn staring up at a brightly lit building. His dead friends, Janis with her bottle of Southern Comfort, Jim with his little volume of Rimbaud, or Jimi with some wildly colored scarf slung haphazardly around his neck would cluck and shake their heads, turn away from his hardening body and walk off towards some stately old place he had never seen before, not even in dreams. It looked like it might be an unusually long hotel, or a big casino on the boardwalk. It was several stories high and over the stone wall that sur-rounded the place he could see white clapboard with ginger-bread trim and a roofline that was truly unusual. It had many more than seven gables and Mike always thought when he awoke that the architect must have been a big Hawthorne fan.

Some nights he favored the casino-there was no pool, no tables or chairs on the large expanse of lawn, nothing that would give the impression of a hotel. Other nights he thought about the lack of neon signs every casino would have, or the unpaved nature of the surrounding area-casinos need lots of parking. In desperation he thought it might be some exclusive country club, but there were too many buildings and trees around it. Behind his body he could hear the ocean so he knew it was on the coast. Probably, judging from the archi-tecture, the East Coast or maybe somewhere in England. He wasn't sure. What he was sure of was that it was a better place. When his friends left the grisly scene of his death they always headed for it to soothe their injured emotions.

He could not move his head as they walked away, but out of his glassy eyes he could see smaller figures in the distance; sit-ting quietly on the porch that surrounded the building, read-ing books or papers, or simply strolling the vast lawn that spread out in front of the building like a lush green carpet. Then the scene would dissolve like one of those shots in old movies that indicated the passage of time. Sometimes the pages of a calendar riffled quickly only to come to a screech-ing halt on his forty-fifth birthday-November seventh, nine-teenth eighty-eight. Sometimes it would be a twirling newspaper that would land with a thud on the floor of his vision revealing the date, November 7, 1988; and his obitu-ary, complete with picture.Mike Condon didn't believe in psychic foretelling. Not un-til about two weeks before his forty-fifth birthday when he saw the flyer for the SeaHarp Hotel in an information booth at the Old Slater Mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

It was the hotel of his dreams. Everything matched-the gingerbread trim, the long porch, the pounding waves of the ocean in front and the seeming lack of civilization around the place. The Snappers had come to Rhode Island to play The Tent in Warwick, and Mike had gone in the afternoon to a few of the state's historical landmarks. He had been curious to see the first factory in the United States, and no doubt the first sweat shop. It wasn't much of a place but in his mind's eye he could picture the women weaving against the sound of the waterwheel outside, perhaps reciting some puritan prayer to themselves as they worked their sixteen-hour shifts amongst the flax and under the watchful eye of Samuel Slater, the world's first industrial spy.

It was a real place, this hotel of his dreams, pictured on a yellowing brochure he found in the Chamber of Commerce rack. The strange thing was that all the other flyers were bright and printed in the recent past. The rack looked like it was straightened every day. The SeaHarp brochure was out of place not only because it had apparently been gathering dust for some time, but also because it was the only promo-tional flyer not about an attraction in Rhode Island.

There was only one way to look at it. His friends were trying to save him. He wasn't young any more and he was pushing himself like he had when he was eighteen. Touring was rough. Just a few months ago Ray Davies of the Kinks had a heart attack and he had been in better shape than Mike. In his dreams his friends were always walking toward this place as if toward sanctuary. It looked comfortable, safe, peaceful, quiet. November 7th loomed like a giant balloon pressuring his skull from the inside and he knew he had to get there before that day arrived. If he didn't make it, they'd find him on the beach like in the dream-stiff, glassy-eyed, short of his goal.

There was a bus from New York that stopped in Greystone Bay on its way to somewhere else. As soon as he got off it he felt at peace. It was a quiet place and even in late October the weather was warm enough for just a light windbreaker. He left his suitcase in a locker at the bus station and wan-dered around the town. He looked in shop windows as he strolled down a divided boulevard. He stopped for a cup of coffee and talked with the waitress about the SeaHarp.

"Is it quiet?" he asked her, trying to dissolve the Sanka in the not-quite-boiled water.

"Don't know much about it," she said. "It seems quiet to me, but why shouldn't it-Greystone Bay is a quiet town."

"Not many customers?"

"Oh no. There always seem to be a lot of people staying out there. It's just . . . it's not the sort of hotel I'd want to stay at."

"They charge by the hour?"

"No," she said laughing. "Nothing like that."

"What then."

"No tennis courts."

"Tennis courts?" "They've got a huge lawn in the back, but no tennis courts. No swimming pool, no jacuzi, no video games, nothing . . . that would bother anybody.'' "What do they have?" he asked. He was intrigued. It sounded like the kind of spa he had read about in all those interminably long Henry James novels. "They got a goddamn croquet patch, or whatever you call it. Inside they got some pool tables." Mike laughed.

"No disco? No punk band on Friday nights?" "No rockers," she said, retreating towards the kitchen in answer to an angry bark by the short order cook.

"Maybe one," he said to himself. He left a five-dollar bill on the counter and went looking for a cab. As he left he could hear the Snappers hit from 1970 blasting from the radio in the kitchen. "Sad All Alone" had made them a lot of money once. It was getting air play again because it was being used as part of the soundtrack for a movie about yuppies and men-ses.

The desk clerk gave him a room facing the sea and he felt strangely at home right away. There was a tang in the air; a damp saltiness that was not unpleasant for those who had grown up close to the ocean. It was almost a religiousfeeling. He stood at his window and watched the whitecaps rush toward the rocky shore. He felt weak all over. The sea always made him feel that way. It was a very sensual feeling of weakness, much the way he had felt the first time he had known that he was in love. It was a secret that made you strong and vulnerable at the same time. The SeaHarp would be a comfortable place to stay for a few weeks. He would get renewed. He would be rested. He would not dream.

Later he wandered around the first floor of the hotel and found himself gravitating towards the reading room. The function rooms were all well-appointed and he glanced into several of them during his wanderings. There were two game-rooms across from the reading room and like the waitress said-no video games, no pinball, just card tables and bil-liard tables. What struck him most was the number of people he saw. The hotel was quiet and did not "bustle" like most hotels. Yet wherever he looked he saw people quietly going about their business. Their business seemed to be relaxing. There were men relaxing in stuffed chairs with newspapers and magazines. There were women and children strolling quietly through the halls the way you would stroll through a museum or an art gallery, glancing at the exhibits quietly as if art would crumble in a lively environment. There was much of the museum about the SeaHarp. There were Tiffany lamp-shades everywhere and the oils that lined the hallways above the hand-rubbed wainscotting all seemed to be originals. No photographs or art prints in glitzy metal frames here, but solid-looking oils in massive darkwood frames with brass plates for the title and the artist's name.