by Diane Duane
“Yeah, this whole thing is just a bundle of laughs, isn’t it? Let’s see if it stays this funny,” Spidey shouted, and made straight for him, energy blasts and pumpkin bombs or not. Even Hobgoblin had cause to be a little twitchy about being caught in a rapidly approaching cloud of his own flying razors. Sure enough, Hobby backed off slightly, tossing spare pumpkin bombs and firing off energy blasts as best he could. Spidey smiled grimly under the mask, noticing that his enemy was swooping toward the space between the two buildings where he had stretched his trap of weblines—
Then, without any warning, Hobgoblin turned, his great cloak flaring out behind him, and threw a pumpkin bomb right at Spidey. Caught up in Hobby’s barrage, he was unable to dodge it, and it went off, seemingly right in his face.
He fell. Only an uprush of spiderly self-preservation saved him, the jet of webbing streaking out to catch the edge of the nearest building and break his fall to the roof of the old warehouse. It was not enough to cushion that fall, though. He came down hard and lay there with the world black and spinning around him.
Dead, he thought, I’m dead. Or about to be.
He could just hear the whine of the jetglider pausing in midair above and beside him, could just feel the sting of the roof gravel its jets kicked up. He knew Hobgoblin was bending over him.
“It doesn’t matter,” Hobby said, and laughed, not quite as hysterically. There was purpose in the laughter, nasty purpose, and the sound of genuine enjoyment. “Right now you wish you’d never heard of me, for all your smart talk. And shortly the whole city will wish it had never heard of me.” More laughter. “Wait and see.”
The laughter trailed away, as did the sound of the jetglider. Spider-Man could just barely hear Hobgoblin scolding his henchmen down in the warehouse, yelling at them to hurry, get themselves cleaned up, get the truck loaded, and get it out of here! He must have passed out briefly: the next sound he heard was the truck being driven away, fading into the greater roar of the city.
It was some while before he could get up. Click, whirr, click, whirr, he heard something say. The camera, its lens following his motion, the motion of a very dazed and aching Spider-Man staggering toward it, holding his head and moaning. Click, whirrrrr, said the camera. Then it said nothing further. It had run out of film.
He sat down next to it, hard, picked up the camera after a moment, and pushed the little button to rewind the film. This worked, at least, he thought. But whatever else was going on down there, there’s no way to tell now. I didn’t even have time to put a tracer on that truck. Oh well—I bet we’ll find out shortly. Whatever it is, it’s big—Hobby wouldn’t be involved otherwise.
Meantime, I’d better get home.
TWO
“AND the WGN news time is one forty-five. It’s eighty-four degrees and breezy in New York. Looks like we’re in for worse tomorrow—our accuweather forecast is for hazy, hot, and humid weather, highs tomorrow in the mid-nineties with expected humidity at ninety-two percent.”
“I wish to God,” said a weary voice off to one side, “that you’d turn that bloody thing off.”
Harry sighed and reached out to turn it down, at least. “Can’t get to sleep without my news,” he said, turning over in the thin, much-flattened sleeping bag.
From his companion, half inside a cardboard box, wrapped in discarded Salvation Army blankets and numerous alternating layers of newspapers and clothes, there came a snort. “I can’t sleep with it. Why don’t you at least use the earphones, since you’ve got them? Jeez.” There was a slight rustle of the other turning over restlessly in his box.
Harry grumbled acquiescence and started going through his things in the dark, looking for the small bag that contained the earplugs for the transistor radio. The sound echoed through the empty old warehouse: nothing else was to be heard. That didn’t stop Harry from wrapping himself in several layers, despite the heat. You never knew what would be crawling around—or who. Best to keep protected, and keep what few possessions you had as close as possible.
He and Mike had been here for about six days now, having wormed their way in through a back-alley service entrance—the door to one of those ground-level elevators which, when they were working, came clanging up through the sidewalk to deliver crates and cartons to the storage area below a building. In the case of this particular freight elevator, it had been many years since it had worked. Some careful prying with the crowbar that Mike carried for self-defense got them in. They squirmed and wriggled their way through and found their way into a subcellar, then up a couple of flights of crumbling steps to the warehouse floor.
It wasn’t as old as some of the buildings around here; it looked to have been built in the late forties and fifties, when there was still something of an industrial boom going on in this part of town. To judge from the general look of the place, Harry thought, it had been let go to seed for the past ten years or so. Now it looked like no one had been in to clean or maintain it for at least that long. There were chips and fragments of old paint and downfallen plaster all over the floor, and much of the light-blocking stuff they used on the glass windows had also peeled off. In other places, sun on the other side of the building had burnt the glass to translucent iridescence. There were some big old dusty canisters stacked up against one wall, forgotten, no doubt, by the previous owner, or the present one, whoever they were.
There were no signs of other habitation, which was unusual in this neighborhood. Squatters and dossers were all over this part of town, looking for a place to spend a night, or five, or ten. This building’s quiet was a treasure, a secret that Harry and Mike kept very close to themselves and never spoke of when they were out on the street during the day, going through the trash and cadging the cash they needed for food.
“Money you spend on batteries for that thing,” Mike muttered, “you could get food for.”
Harry sniffed. His friend was single-minded in pursuit of something to eat: whatever else you could say about Mike, he wasn’t starving. But his conversation wasn’t the best. Harry, for his own part, might be homeless—but he liked to keep up with what was happening around him. He would not be this poor forever—at least, he tried to keep telling himself so.
At the same time, it was hard to predict how he was ever going to climb out of this hole he had fallen into two years ago. Job cuts at Bering Aerospace out on the Island left him an aircraft mechanic out on the street, unable to get a job even at McDonald’s, because they said he was too old, and overqualified.
At least he had no family to support, never having married. So, when Harry’s savings ran out, and he lost his apartment, there was no one else to feel grief or shame for. He had enough of that for himself. He kept what pride he could. He availed himself of a bath at least once a week at the Salvation Army; he only resorted to the various charities which fed homeless people when he absolutely had no choice. Most of all, he did his best not to despair. He kept himself as well fed as he could, and not on junk food, either. When he had the money, he bought fresh fruit and vegetables to eat. Whereas others might paw through garbage cans strictly for half-finished Big Macs, Harry as often as not would be distracted from his growling stomach by something in print that looked interesting, a foreign newspaper or a magazine. And there were, as Mike complained, nights when Harry went without anything to eat so that he could afford batteries for the transistor. That little radio had been with him a long, long time, a gift from his father many years ago, one of the first truly transistorized radios. It was on its last legs, but Harry refused to throw it away before it gave up the ghost on its own. It was, in a way, his last tie with his old life, and it kept him in touch with the rest of the world as well.
He pushed the earplug jack into the transistor and listened.
“A Hong Kong investment group is close to a deal with Stark Industries to finance a $3 billion housing development on the Hudson River site where real estate developers had once planned to build Television City. The plan for a vast media center on t
he Riverside between 59th and 72nd Streets foundered nearly a decade ago when attacked by city planners and neighborhood activists as a leviathan that would tax the area’s infrastructure and environmental resources. It is believed that Stark’s plan to introduce low-income housing for the area will meet with far greater approval—”
“I can still hear that thing,” Mike said loudly. “Can’t you turn it down?”
Harry was strongly tempted to tell his companion to wrap a pillow around his head and shut up. Since they started dossing here some six nights ago, Mike’s constant complaining had been getting on Harry’s nerves. There wasn’t much he could do about it, though. He was aware that his companion was a bit of a sneak and a bully, and if Harry did anything to push him out of this warehouse, Mike would tell others about it. Shortly thereafter, the place would be full of other people, who would crowd in and steal from each other and get falling-down drunk on cheap booze, or blitzed on drugs, and would generally make the experience even more unpleasant than it already was. So Harry turned the transistor down just as far as he could, and lay there listening.
“District Attorney Tower has announced that he will be running for another term this year, citing his excellent conviction record and his toughness on paranormal criminals. He is expected to run unopposed—”
Harry waited to see what Mike would say. For the moment, at least, he lay quiet. At the end of that story, the radio said, “… and if you have a news story, call 212-555-1212. The best news story of the week wins fifty dollars.”
Harry yawned. He knew the number by heart, but the odds of him seeing anything newsworthy enough to win such a fabulous amount were less than nil.
“I can’t stand it,” Mike said. “I can still hear it!”
Harry opened his mouth to say, “You’re nuts!” and then shut it again. He knew that he had just recently been discharged from the Payne Whitney Clinic across town. Or more accurately, he had signed himself out, after having been brought in half-crazed from drinking what seemed to have been bad booze—or maybe it had been Sterno. In any case, Mike had taken advantage of seventy-two hours’ worth of good food and a cleanup before signing himself out. “Had to get out,” Mike had said to him when they met again on the street. “They talk to you all the time—they never stop. I woulda gone nuts for sure. And there were rats in the walls.”
Privately, Harry believed otherwise. He was no expert, but he thought that Mike sometimes heard and saw a lot of things that weren’t there. The complaining about the radio was probably more of the same.
“I can’t turn it down any further,” he said.
“Well, you’re a bastard, that’s all,” Mike said mildly, “just a bastard.” He crawled out of his box and shed the first two or three layers of his wrappings.
Harry watched warily, wondering whether Mike was going to try to start a fight with him again, as he had a couple of nights ago, when he claimed Harry had been whispering all night. It had been more of an abortive struggle than a fight, but it had wound up with Mike ostentatiously hauling his bedding over to the other side of the warehouse—his mien indicating that this was meant as a penalty for Harry’s bad behavior.
“I can’t stand the noise,” Mike said. “I’m going to sleep over here.” And once more he proceeded to drag his box and his various bags full of belongings, one at a time, with a great show of effort and trouble, over by the canisters stacked up against the wall. This left at least fifty feet between Harry and Mike, and Harry was just as glad: it was that much further for the lice to walk.
Mike started the arduous business of rewrapping and reinserting himself into the bedding. Harry, with only a touch of irony, waited until Mike was finished with all this, then shouted, “Can you hear anything now?”
“Nothing but your big mouth,” the answer came back after a moment.
Harry raised his eyebrows in resignation and went back to listening to the radio.
“An amino acid has been found for the first time in large galactic clouds, proving that one of the molecules important to the formation of life can exist in deep space, researchers say. Yanti Miao and Yi-Jehng Knan of the University of Illinois at Urbana reported Tuesday—”
“Hey,” Mike’s voice came from the other side of the warehouse floor, “I hear something!”
Oh, God, Harry thought. I was almost asleep. “What?”
“I dunno. I heard something outside the wall—bangin’.”
Harry rolled his eyes. This, too, was a story he had heard before. Things banging on the wall, rats, things walking on the roof—“For God’s sake, Mike, just wrap a pillow around your head, or something. It’ll go away!”
“No it won’t,” Mike said with almost pleased certainty. “It didn’t in the hospital.”
Harry sighed. “Look, just lie down and go to sleep!”
“It’s still there,” Mike said. “Bangin’.”
Unutterably weary, Harry took the earplugs out of his ears and listened.
Bang.
Very faint, but definitely there. “You got one this time, Mike,” he said softly.
Bang. And definitely harder, so that he felt it through the floor. Bang.
“Now what the hell could that be at this time of night?” he wondered.
The two of them lay there, across the floor from one another, staring into the near-darkness and listening. Only a faint golden light came in through the high windows from outside—the reflected streetlights from the next street over. It gleamed faintly in their eyes as they turned to look at each other.
Then, silence—no more bangings.
“Aah, it’s probably someone unloading something,” Harry said after a while. “Maybe that Seven-Eleven over in the next block getting a late delivery.”
Mike groaned. And groaned again, then, and Harry realized abruptly that it was not Mike at all, but a sound that was coming from the wall itself. A long, slow, straining sound of—metal, perhaps? He stared at the source.
In the darkness, your eyes fool you, so at first he simply didn’t believe what he saw. The wall near the canisters was bowing inward toward them, almost stretching as if it were flexible, and being pushed from behind. Then a sudden sagging, the whole shape of the wall changing as it went to powder, and almost liquidly slumped away from itself, bowed further inward—
And then with a dreadful clanging crash, several of the big canisters were tipped away from the wall by what was coming through it, pushing them—the lowest ones fell over sideways and rolled. One of them stacked higher, slightly over to one side, teetered, leaned away from its stack, then crashed to the floor and burst open.
It fell right on the cardboard box where Mike had been sleeping. At the first dreadful noise the wall made, he had scrambled out and was now standing safe from the canister’s fall, but not safe from its contents, with which it sprayed him liberally as it burst. A sort of metallic chemical smell filled the air.
Mike shook himself all over and started jumping around and waving his arms, cursing a blue streak. “What the hell, what is this sh—”
The last of the canisters fell down, missing and rolling away, drowning the sound of his cursing. And then something jumped through the hole in the wall.
Harry looked at it, and swallowed—and had to swallow again, because in that second his mouth had gone so dry, there was nothing left to swallow with. In the shadows of the warehouse, the thing that stood there was blacker still. Whatever light there was in there fell on it and vanished, as if into a hole. It was man-shaped, big, and powerful-looking, with huge pale eyes—
Mike, still waving his arms around, jumping and swearing, took a long moment to see it. Harry concentrated on staying very still and very quiet, and not moving in his bag. He might not have a television himself at this point in his career, but he certainly looked at them when he passed the TV stores on the Avenue. And he knew that dreadful shape—it had been in the news often enough lately. A terrible creature, half man, half God knew what. And Mike, infuriated, spotted it
, and went at it waving his arms.
For the moment it seemed not to have noticed. It was crouching like some kind of strange animal. From a huge fanged mouth it emitted an awful long tongue, broad and prehensile and slobbering, and it began to lap at the stuff which had burst from the containers. Mike lurched toward it, windmilling his arms inanely as if he were trying to scare off a stray dog.
For a few breaths’ worth of time, it ignored him. Harry lay there, completely still, while the sweat broke out all over him, and the blood pounded in his ears. The black creature seemed to grin with that huge mouthful of fangs as it lapped and lapped with the huge snakelike tongue.
But Mike was far gone in annoyance or paranoia, and he went right up to the creature, yelling, and kicked it.
It noticed him then.
It noticed his leg first, the tongue wrapping around it and sliding up and down it as if it were thirsty for the stuff which had drenched Mike. Mike hopped and roared with loathing and annoyance, and he batted at the dark shape.
Then he roared on a higher note, much higher, as it pounced on Mike.
It was not long about exercising its teeth on him. Harry lay there transfixed by horror, now, not by fear for himself. Eventually the screaming stopped, as the dark shape ferreted out the last few delicacies it was interested in, and finally dropped the hideous form that had been Mike.
Then it went back to its drinking, decorous and unselfconscious as some beast by a pool out on the veldt. It cleaned up every last drop of the spilled stuff on the floor… not despising or declining the blood.
