by Diane Duane
And then it stood up and looked around thoughtfully, like a man, with those great pale glaring eyes.
Its eyes rested on Harry.
He lay there frozen, on his side, watching, a trickle of drool running unnoticed out of his shocked-open mouth.
The creature turned away, whipped a few more of the nastily dextrous tendrils around several of the canisters, and effortlessly leapt out the hole in the wall with them, silent in the silence.
Gone.
It was a long, long time before Harry could move. When he did, it took him a while to stand up, and he stood still in the one spot, shaking like an old palsied bum, for many minutes.
Then, carefully, avoiding the still-wet spots, and the gobbets and tatters of Mike that lay around on the floor, he made his way out through the hole the creature had left… feeling in his pocket for a quarter to call the radio station, and collect his fifty dollars.
* * *
IT took Spider-Man a long time to get up after the fight. First he saw to the camera, unloading the film and tucking it away in his costume, and then he found that he didn’t feel very well. He sat down, breathed deeply, and tried hard not to throw up. It was as usual: the reaction hit him later, sometimes worse than other times.
Finally he decided he really had to get himself moving. He started web-swinging his way home, taking his time and not overexerting himself. His whole body felt like one big bruise, and several times he had to stop and blink when his vision wobbled or swam. He found himself wondering whether the pumpkin bomb had possibly left him with a borderline concussion along with everything else. Hope not, he thought. At least I wasn’t unconscious at all. It was a relief. Going to the emergency room as a walk-in patient held certain complications for super heroes with secret identities—especially as regarded sorting out the medical insurance….
The digital clock on the bank near home said 4:02, with two bulbs missing, and 81 degrees. Lord, the heat…. There was this blessing, at least: the city seemed mercifully quiet as he made his way back.
Very wearily he climbed up the wall toward their apartment, avoiding the windows belonging to the two nurses on four who were working night shift this spring and summer, and the third-floor windows of the garbage guy who was always up and out around four-thirty.
He found the bedroom window open just that crack, pushed it open, and found the lights all out inside as he stepped carefully over the sill and closed the window behind him. He looked at the bed. There was a curled-up shape there, hunched under the covers. He looked at it lovingly and was about to head for the bathroom when the shape said, “Out late tonight….”
“Later than planned,” he said, pulling his mask off wearily, “that’s for sure.”
MJ sat up in bed and turned the light on. She didn’t look like she’d slept at all. “Sorry,” he said, knowing she hadn’t.
She yawned and leaned forward, smiling a small smile. “At least you came back,” she said.
The issue of his “night job,” and his need to risk himself webslinging for the public good, had been a source of concern. Peter had felt for a long time before they got serious that a costumed crimefighter had no business having a permanent relationship with someone who, by that relationship, would be put permanently at risk. It hadn’t stopped him from dating, with various levels of seriousness, both super heroes and mere mortals—something that MJ was always quick to point out when the subject came up. She also pointed out that there were other costumed crimefighters and super heroes who were happily married and carried on more or less normal family lives, even without their alternate identities being known. That much he himself had shared with her. There was no reason they couldn’t make it work as well. “All you have to do,” she kept saying at such times, “is give up the angst.”
Anyway, now she said nothing about those other discussions, though the memory of them clearly lurked behind her eyes. “You made the news,” MJ said.
“I did?” He blinked as he pulled the costume top over his head. “That was quick. Didn’t see any news people turn up before I left—”
“Yup. You made WNN.”
“What??” That confused him. “Must have been a pretty slow news night,” Peter muttered. “I still don’t see how they managed to find out about that—”
MJ laughed at him softly, but there was a worried edge to the sound. She swung out of the bed. “Boy, you must be getting blasé. After what’s been going on around this town the past few years, it is not going to be considered a slow news night when Venom turns up again—”
“What?!”
The laugh definitely had more of the nervous edge to it. She turned and felt around in the semidarkness for the nightgown left over the bedside chair. “Venom,” she said, and then looked at him. Her mouth fell open. “I assumed—” She shut the mouth again. “You weren’t out fighting Venom?”
“Hobgoblin, actually.” But now his head was spinning.
She stared at him again. “It was on the news, like I said. Something about him having been seen at a warehouse downtown. There was a murder—and then he made off with some—radioactive waste, I think they said.”
“Who was murdered?”
MJ shook her head. “Some homeless guy.”
Peter was perplexed. “Doesn’t sound like Venom,” he said. “Radioactive waste? What would Venom want that for? As for murdering a homeless person—” He shook his head too. “That sounds even less like him.”
He handed MJ his costume top. “I thought,” she said, “when you were out late….” Then she looked down at her hands and wrinkled her nose. “This can wait,” MJ said. “I think I’d better wash this thing.” She held the top away from her, with a most dubious expression. “And I think you’d better change your deodorant. Phooey!”
“You didn’t have the night that I had,” Peter said, “for which you should be grateful.”
“Every minute of the day,” MJ said, with her mouth going wry. “Have you given any thought to making a summerweight one? This can’t be comfortable in this weather.”
“In all my vast amounts of spare time,” Peter said, “yes, the thought has crossed my mind, but picking the right tailor is a problem.” MJ winced, then grinned and turned away.
“I’ll just wash it,” she said. “Did you buy more Woolite yesterday?”
“Oh, cripes, I forgot.”
“Oh well. Dishwashing liquid’ll have to do. Don’t forget the Woolite this time.”
“Yes, master.”
“Have you got everything off of the belt? All your little Spidey-gadgets?”
“Uh huh.”
She looked at his abstracted expression and, smiling, handed him back the costume. “You’d better go through it yourself—I can never find all those compartments. The thing’s worse than your photojournalist’s vest.”
Peter took it, obediently enough, and removed from the top a couple of spider-tracers and some spare change. Then he shucked out of the bottom and gave it to her.
“You go get in the tub, tiger,” MJ said, turning away again. “You can use a soak to relax.”
“And to make me fit for human company?” he shouted down the hall after her.
A slightly strangled laugh came back. “After you’re done,” she said, “we can look at WNN. It’ll be back on again.”
Peter sighed, went to the hall closet for a towel, then ambled to the bathroom.
It was just like life to pull something like this on him now. Venom. But he’s supposed to be in San Francisco—
Then again, this sudden appearance was not necessarily a surprise. Every time in the past he had thought Eddie Brock, the man who had become Venom, was out of his life, back he would come.
And thinking this, not watching particularly where he was going, Peter tripped on the bathroom threshold and fell flat on the tile floor. Only a quick twist sideways kept him from bashing his forehead on the sink.
“You okay?” came the worried call from down the hall, in the kitchen, where
MJ was filling the big sink to wash the costume.
“If ‘okay’ means lying under the toilet with the brushes and the Lysol, then, yeah….”
He heard MJ’s footsteps in the hallway as he started to lever himself up. “You fell down?” she said, sounding confused. “That’s not your style, either.”
“No,” Peter said, getting up and rubbing one of his elbows where he had cracked it against the sink on the way down. “No, it isn’t. Ever since—”
And then he stopped. The spider’s bite had conferred a spider’s proportional strength on him, along with its inhuman agility, and the spider-sense always helped that agility along, warning him of accidents about to happen, non-routine dangers, and even routine ones like trips and falls and people blundering into him. Now it was just gone. Then he remembered that he had also gotten no warning whatsoever when Hobby tossed that last pumpkin bomb at him. He should have received some sort of warning. He rubbed his ribs absently, feeling the ache. He said to MJ, “Some time ago when Hobby and I first tangled—Ned, not the current version—he had managed to come up with a chemical agent that killed my spider-sense for a day or so at a time. He used to deliver the agent as a gas out of the pumpkin bombs. However—” He bent over to finger the shallow cut on his leg.
“You’re going to need stitches for that,” MJ said, concerned.
“No, I won’t. It looks worse than it is. But it was deep enough for one of the razor-bats he threw at me to give me a good dose of the anti-spider-sense agent, whatever it is.”
MJ looked at him. “How long is it going to last?”
Peter shrugged. “Well, Jason Macendale isn’t quite the scientific whiz that Ned Leeds was. If Ned were still the Hobgoblin, I’d have reason to expect much worse—an improved brew every year, at least. But I think this’ll just last a day or so.”
“Well, be careful,” MJ said. “Just get yourself into the tub and try not to drown, okay?”
“Yes, Mom,” he said with some irony.
He turned on the tub’s faucets, put in the drain-plug, and sat and watched the water rise. Hobgoblin was enough of a problem, but the addition of Venom to the equation—if the news story was accurate—made the situation even less palatable.
In a city filled with super heroes with complex life-histories and agendas, and villains with a zoo full of traumas, histories, and agendas almost always more involved than the heroes’, and inevitably more twisted, Hobgoblin stood out. Originally “he” had been another villain entirely, one called the Green Goblin, who had taken a particular dislike to Spider-Man early in their careers. He had spent a long time repeatedly hunting Spidey down and making his life a misery. Norman Osborn had been the man’s name: a seriously crazy person, but nonetheless a certifiable genius with a tremendous talent in the material and chemical sciences. Like many other super villains, he picked a theme and stuck to it with fanatical and rather unimaginative singlemindedness, establishing himself as a sort of spirit of Halloween gone maliciously nuts—wearing a troll-like costume with a horrific mask and firing exploding miniature “pumpkin bombs” in all directions around him from the jetglider on which he stood. He took whatever he liked from the city he terrorized, and he frightened and tormented its citizens as he pleased.
Spider-Man, naturally, had been forced to take exception to this behavior: and the Green Goblin had taken exception to him. Their private little war had gone on for a long time, until finally Osborn died, killed by one of his own devices—but not before he had caused the death of Gwen Stacy, an early love of Peter’s.
Peter paused, looking for something aromatic and soothing to put in the bath water. There didn’t seem to be anything but a large box of Victoria’s Secret scented bath foam. I can’t imagine why she buys this stuff, he thought. He started going through the bathroom cupboards and finally came up with a bottle of pine bath essence.
Green, he thought. It would have to be green…. He shrugged and squirted some in, then sat down again, watching the bubbles pile up.
No sooner had the Green Goblin died—and Peter, after a while, had come to some kind of terms with his grief—than history began to repeat itself. Some petty crook stumbled onto one of the Goblin’s many secret hideouts, sold the information of its whereabouts to another, better-heeled criminal, who found the Green Goblin’s costumes, bombs, energy gauntlets and jet gliders intact and in storage. He had done some minor work on the spare costumes—alterations and changes in color—and had emerged as a more or less off-the-rack super villain, the Hobgoblin.
Hobby had been a reporter named Ned Leeds—ironically, both a colleague of Peter Parker’s at the Daily Bugle and the husband to another of Peter’s early loves, Betty Brant. This man too, in his new identity, began bedeviling Spider-Man in an attempt to keep him busy while Leeds tried to mine the secrets of Norman Osborn’s rediscovered diaries—which Spidey feared also might include information on his own secret identity, which Osborn had learned. Leeds also synthesized the odd chemical formula which had given the Green Goblin his terrible speed and strength, but he ignored the warnings in Osborn’s journals that the formula might also cause insanity in the person who used it for maximum physical effect.
It did, of course. It made Leeds as crazy as Osborn had ever been, and he too died, killed by a rival criminal. And then the weaponry, the costume, the persona, and the ruthlessly opportunistic and money-hungry personality surfaced again, this time in another man called Jason Macendale. Macendale had eagerly made himself over as Hobgoblin Number Two, or perhaps Two-A. Hobby Two-A thought, in concert with his predecessors, that it would be an excellent idea to get rid of Spider-Man, one of the most active local crimefighters and the one most likely to cause him trouble on a day-to-day basis.
Peter turned the faucets off, tested the water. It was at that perfect heat where, if you stepped in carefully and lay perfectly still, it would boil the aches out of you, but once in, if you moved, you’d be scalded. He climbed in, sank down to bubble level, and submerged himself nearly to his nose. Hobgoblin, he thought and sighed. Him I could deal with. But Venom, too…
He closed his eyes and let the hot water do its work on his body, but his mind refused to stay still.
Venom was entirely another class of problem.
The trouble had begun innocently enough, when he was off-planet—Peter chuckled at how matter-of-fact it all sounded, put that way. He had been swept up into a war of super heroes against unearthly forces at the edge of the known universe and conveyed by a being known as the Beyonder to a world out there somewhere. While there, his trusty costume had been tom to shreds and, not being the kind of crimefighter who felt he was at his best working naked, he looked around for another one. A machine on that planet, obligingly enough, provided him with one. It was quite a handsome piece of work, really—that was his thought when he first put it on, and when he wore it during the Secret War, and afterwards, on his return to Earth. It was every super hero’s dream of a costume. Dead-black, with a stylized white spider on the chest—graphically, he thought, a more striking design than his present red-and-blue one. Possibly the machine had read the design from some corner of his mind which thought it knew what he really wanted to look like.
The costume was more than just sleek-looking. It responded instantly to its owner’s desires. You didn’t have to take it off: you could think it off. It would slide itself away from your mouth so you could eat or talk; it would camouflage itself, with no more than a thought, to look like your street clothes; at the end of a hard day, it would slide off and lie in a little puddle at your feet, and you could pick it up and hang it on a chair, where the next morning it would be perfectly fresh and clean and ready to go.
It was so accommodating, in fact, that Peter began to find it a little unnerving. He began to have odd dreams about that costume and his old one, engaged in a struggle for possession of him, threatening to tear him apart. Finally he took the costume to Reed Richards, the most scientifically inclined of the Fantastic Four, and asked to
have it analyzed.
He was more than slightly surprised to discover that what he had been wearing was not a costume, not a made thing—or made it possibly was: but it was not just cloth. It was alive. It was an alien creature, a symbiote, made to match his physiology, even his mind. And its intention was to bond with him, irrevocably. They would be one.
Peter shivered in the hot water and then winced slightly as it scalded him. He slowed his breathing down slightly, trying to deal with the heat and the discomfort of the memory.
It had taken a fair amount of work to get the costume off him. He had not been prepared for a relationship of that permanence, intensity, or intimacy—not for anything like it at all. It took all Reed Richards’ ingenuity to get the symbiote-costume off Peter’s body and confine it for further study. Sonics were one of its weak points; against loud noises, and specifically, focused sound, it had no defense. But even when it was finally off him, that did not solve Peter’s problem.
The costume desired him, and a great rage was growing in its simple personality. If it ever escaped its durance, it would find him. It would bond with him. It would punish him for his rejection. And in the act, it would probably squeeze the life out of him. The irony, of course, would be that in so doing, in killing the host for which it had been created, it would probably then die itself. But from Peter’s point of view, the irony ran out with the prospect of his own death.
The symbiote had eventually escaped, of course—these things have a way of not ending tidily—and it did indeed hunt Peter down. The only way he had been able to get rid of it was to flee into the bell tower of a nearby church, and let the brain-shattering ringing of the bells drive it off him. Most of the symbiote, he had thought, perished. But a drop or two, it seemed, remained. With unearthly persistence it replicated itself—and found another host.
That new host was named Eddie Brock: once a journalist who worked for the Daily Globe, the Bugle’s primary competitor, but who had been fired over a misunderstanding, a misjudgment of a news story he had been reporting. Spider-Man had been involved in a less visible aspect of the same story, which involved a masked killer called the Sin-Eater. Spidey had revealed the genuine identity of the killer to the media, when Brock had thought it was another person entirely, and had written and published his story based on insufficient data.
