by Diane Duane
Once fired, Brock had decided that Spider-Man was the cause of all his troubles and needed to be killed. And one night, in that same church, something dark oozed out of the shadows and found Eddie Brock. He was joined. He welcomed the hating unity that the symbiote offered him—he became one with it, part of it; and it, part of him.
Hatred can be even more potent than love as a joining force. So it proved for Brock. The costume, though not saying as much in words, gave him to understand its hatred for Spider-Man, for whom it had been made, and who, in its view, had heartlessly rejected it. And in Eddie Brock’s opinion, anything that hated Spider-Man was only showing the best possible taste.
They were one. Eddie Brock became one of those people who could say “we” and did not need to be royal to make it stick. Since then, he, or they, as Venom, had successfully hunted Spidey down in apartment after apartment in New York—not beneath frightening MJ in their attempts to get at Spider-Man. That dark shadow—black costume, white spider, and the formidably fanged mouth and horrific prehensile tongue that the symbiote liked to grow—that shadow came and went in Peter’s life, never bringing less than dread, often terror, sometimes pain and injury nearly to the point of death. They had slugged it out, how many times now? Up and down the city, and each time only skill and wits and sometimes luck had saved Spider-Man’s life.
After many encounters, though, something strange had happened. In one final battle on a lonely Caribbean island, Spider-Man (already nearly beaten to a pulp) arranged for Venom to believe he had died in a gas explosion—leaving charred human bones and the remnants of his costume as evidence. He himself swam like mad into the nearby shipping lanes, looking for a ship to take him home, and found one.
And Venom, Eddie, convinced that his old enemy was dead at last, found a sudden odd peace descending on him. For a while he stayed on that island—maybe, Peter wondered, recovering some of his sanity there? At any rate, some time later Eddie turned up in San Francisco. He stayed there only long enough to discover that Spider-Man was still alive, and began hitching his way eastward to come to grips with him one last time.
But on the way, a gang of thugs attacked the kind family which had offered him a ride cross-country. It was here that Eddie began to find a sense of purpose, as Venom stood up and utterly destroyed the thugs attacking this family and the other people in the truckstop. He decided there might be something else for him to do in this life. He would protect the innocent, as (he thought) Spider-Man had betrayed him.
Or, at least, those he thought were innocent. One had to remember that Venom was not remotely sane. Still, he was no longer a figure of pure malice, either. There was an ambivalent quality to his danger now. He would probably always be a threat to Spider-Man, on some level or another. But the poor and helpless had nothing to fear from him—at least as far as Peter understood. That was why this news about some homeless person’s murder rang so false.
“How you doing in there?” came the call from down the hallway.
Peter bubbled.
MJ put her head around the corner of the door. “Need anything? Should I scrub your back?”
“Maybe later,” Peter said. “Has the news come around yet?”
“No. You just make sure you dry off before you come out, and don’t drip all over the floor like last time.” She turned away. “Things are wet enough in here as it is.”
“From what?”
“Your costume. Keeps trying to climb out of the sink.”
“Don’t even joke about it,” Peter said, and submerged to his nose again.
It was bad news all around. He sighed, bubbling. His spider-sense was gone for at least a day, or so he thought. Even if it had been in working order, his spider-sense didn’t react to the symbiote Venom now wore. It had, after all, been designed by that alien machine not to interfere with his own powers.
Bad, he thought. If I were Hobgoblin, I would be gunning as hard as I could for Spider-Man over the next day. I’m just going to have to be super careful tomorrow. I’ve got no choice about going out, either. He looked out at dawn’s early light beginning through the bathroom window. As soon as I get myself out of the tub and dried, I’ve got to start getting those pictures developed… so I can do something about that credit card bill. Assuming they want the pictures.
He frowned for a moment. The job market had been tightening of late; there were a lot more freelancers competing for the same number of photo slots in any given day’s paper. The competition is fierce now, but it’s hard to pay attention to composition, he thought ruefully, when someone’s lobbing pumpkin bombs at your head. Peter had a lively respect for the acuity and quality of results that war correspondents got in their photographs. He knew how they felt, and how it felt to be on the firing line… and often he would have given a great deal to be shot at just with bullets, instead of energy blasts or weird gases.
“Yo, tiger! I think it comes on after this bit. C’mon.”
Peter got out of the tub, ouching again as the water scalded him, toweled himself passably dry, wrapped the towel around his waist and padded down the hall to the living room. The TV was showing another of those horrifically frequent commercials for something called Flex-O-Thigh, in which people who plainly had no need of physical exercise whatsoever smilingly worked various springy pieces of machinery in an attempt to convince you that the exercise was effortless, and the machinery results beyond your dreams. Toll-free numbers flashed, and a friendly voice urged all and sundry to Call Now!
Then the news came back on again. “Super villain Venom has been implicated in a burglary and murder tonight in New York,” said the voice. “Venom, whose last known appearance was in San Francisco, according to California law enforcement officials, allegedly murdered one man in an incident in a warehouse, then stole several containers of what City authorities have confirmed is nuclear waste—”
The camera showed the warehouse: a big jagged hole, but odd in its jaggedness, almost as if the edges had been pulverized—or melted? Peter looked at the picture curiously, but it changed to a view of a sheeted form, surprisingly small, being carried out of the warehouse on an ambulance’s gurney and loaded into a paramedic wagon. The announcer said, “An eyewitness was treated for shock at St. Luke’s Hospital and later released.”
Peter and MJ found themselves looking at a stubbled, shaggy-haired man who was saying, “Yeah, he just came in through the wall—knocked some of the canisters over—and then—” He stammered. “He killed Mike there. He just ripped him up like a paper bag. Little bits came off the Venom guy—you know, like the pictures in the paper from the last time—little bits, they just shredded—” He turned away from the camera, making short chopping motions with one hand. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I just wanna go—” He stumbled away.
Peter and MJ looked at each other. “‘Shredded’?” she said softly.
“He could if he wanted to,” Peter muttered. “But it’s just—it’s just not like him.”
“Maybe he had a bad day,” MJ said doubtfully.
“New York City authorities have begun a search for Venom, but reliable sources within the NYPD have told WNN that they doubt the police will have much luck in finding him. Venom’s modus operandi, they say, has been to lie quiet until some set of circumstances aggravates his old hatred against Spider-Man—at which time Venom makes his presence known abundantly. The people of New York can only hope that Spider-Man maintains a low profile for the immediate future. Lloyd Penney, for WNN News, New York.”
“And to think that meanwhile,” MJ said, “you’ve been out aggravating someone else entirely.”
“Hush, woman.” He chuckled, though it wasn’t really all that funny; and briefly he told MJ about the evening’s confrontation with Hobgoblin, while WNN went on briefly about the new Madonna movie and details of a press conference the Avengers had recently called. “And there was nothing in there,” he said at last, “but some big canisters.…” His voice trailed off.
“Like those you j
ust saw on the news?” MJ said, raising her eyebrows.
“Like those…. I can’t go to sleep,” he said, getting up with a groan. “I’ve got to get those pictures developed and get them in to the Bugle, and I’ve got to get a look in the morgue—”
“The morgue,” MJ said dryly, “is exactly where you’re going to wind up if you go out in this condition.”
There was no point in arguing with her in this mood, Peter knew. He sat there quietly, thinking about which stock to use for developing the pictures, and drank what MJ gave him. But the decaf coffee was mostly milk, and Peter sat back, just for a few moments….
MJ stood up, smiled, looked at him and shook her head. “It’s the hot milk,” she said with satisfaction. “That tryptophan does it every time.” She went away to get a quilt to cover Peter, turned off the TV, and then slipped into the kitchen to see about her own pot of coffee.
THREE
PETER blinked at the sunshine suddenly filling the living room. He blinked harder. Oh, God, I overslept. “MJ, why didn’t you get me up?!” he said.
No answer, nor would there be one, he realized. The apartment had that particular empty sound. As Peter sat up on the couch, the quilt fell to the floor along with a note. Moaning a little—the bruises from last night had now had time to stiffen up—Peter bent over to pick it up. “Gone out for Daily Variety and H’wd Reporter,” it said. “Had hot tip this morning, might mean work. See you later. Love love love love,” followed by a little tangle of X’s and O’s.
Peter dropped the note onto the coffee table, yawned, stretched, moaned again, stretched some more regardless. The smell of coffee was drifting through the apartment. Just like MJ to have made a pot and left it for me.… He staggered to his feet, wandered into the kitchen, poured himself a cup, added a couple of sugars, stirred and drank. When the caffeine buzz started to hit, he headed down the hall to the bathroom, this time to hunt down the extra-strength aspirin.
Peter took a couple of aspirin and a long drink of cold water, then turned the shower on and climbed in, letting the hot water pummel him into some kind of flexibility again. When he could move without whimpering, he turned the water to cold and let the change in temperature blast him awake. Another fifteen minutes saw him dressed, combed, downing another cup of coffee, and heading for his darkroom.
He turned on the red light and closed the door behind him. He glanced at his workbench, where someone had placed his camera and a plastic-wrapped sandwich on a plate, with a note on top. The note said, “NOW YOU EAT THIS, DUMMY! XOXOXO,” and had a lipstick kiss imprint on the bottom of the page. Smiling, Peter unwrapped the plastic and sniffed. Tuna salad: good enough for breakfast.
He spent a few moments hauling down the jugs of developing chemicals and mixing them, getting them ready in the various pans. Then he pulled the string for the exhaust fan to get rid of the stink, and began to break the camera down, pulling out the rewound film. He stripped it carefully out of the canister, dropped the long coil into the first developer pan, and started the timer.
He chomped down the first half of the sandwich while squinting to see how the negatives were doing. In this light, as usual, it was impossible to tell. For him, this was always the worst part of photography: waiting in hope. A picture that seemed useful at first might have inequities of grain, or color, or contrast, which would turn it into so much mud on the printed page. There was no way to tell until you did the contact prints, and in some cases not even then—sometimes you had to do trial blowups of a print in which you were interested to see whether it would really work—and there was that much paper and chemical gone as a result, money down the drain if the picture was no good. One of the risks of the art….
The timer went off. He reached into the bath with a pair of tongs, swished the film around a little, then hoisted it out and dropped it into the fixer. The first glimpse looked good. A lot of the pictures had strong diagonals, he could see that much even now. Whether the fine detail would be good enough, though, remained to be seen. He started the timer again, and waited.
While watching the timer tick its dial around backwards, Peter started on the second half of the sandwich. Venom, he thought. Now there would have been someone to have pictures of. The only problem, for him at least, was that when Venom was in the neighborhood, he was usually too busy trying to keep his skin in one piece to worry about photo opportunities of any kind. If Venom really is in town, though, I’m going to have to deal with him quickly.
Probably soon, too. When Venom suddenly reappeared, it didn’t usually take long for him to hunt Spider-Man down—or worse, to do the same to Peter Parker. That had been one of the worst problems of all. Venom knew his secret identity, knew where to find him, and knew where to find MJ. Venom’s big, broad-shouldered silhouette was not one he ever wanted to see on his living-room wall again.
The timer went off. He pulled the film out of the fixer, held it up to the red light, and took his first good look at the negatives. “Awright,” he breathed. There were some good jumping shots of him, good shots of the Hobgoblin, and nice ones of the two of them. The motion sensor was doing its work. He wondered if he could slightly improve its effectiveness by adding to the motion-control system some routines from the software which managed his spider-tracers. Plant one on the super villain, he thought, so that the computer keeps him in frame all the time. He was not so egotistical as to care whether he was in those shots, particularly. The city knew pretty well what Spider-Man looked like; it was the super villains who fascinated them, and in any shot containing both a hero and a villain, it was best to have the villain better centered.
And then he saw something else he had hoped for—one of the first shots in the roll, and as a result one of the last ones he came to—a shot of the robbery actually in progress. “Not bad,” he said softly. “This’ll get their attention, if nothing else does.”
He looked thoughtfully at the big canisters in the photo. One thing the camera was not good at, unfortunately, was zooming. He couldn’t really make out much beyond the big “warning—radiation” trefoil on the side. No use trying for an enlargement, really.
Now then—prints. He pulled a pad close and began scribbling notes. Two, six, seven, eight, nine… fourteen, sixteen… eighteen.… He marked which of them he would print, checked the ones he wanted as eight-by-tens rather than three-by-fives, then shrugged a bit. A contact sheet, six eight-by-tens, then this one, this one… that one…. Done.
After that, things moved quickly. Picking the exposures was always the worst part of the work for him. You had to anticipate your editor. Sometimes it was hard to tell what they would prefer: did they want the more carefully composed picture, or the one with more fine detail? The best you could do was pick the best of each, bring a sampling of the others, and a contact sheet. That sheet—which showed a thumbnail of every picture on the roll—had saved his bacon more than once when his editors had chosen a picture that Peter hadn’t bothered to make into a print for one reason or another.
He got to work, pulling out his printing stock, setting up the enlarger, cutting the negatives down to more manageable strips of five. The developing took him about another three-quarters of an hour.
The clock was running, now. Two o’clock was the cutoff for the five-o’clock evening edition, and no one would thank a photographer who came in on the stroke of two, just as the big web presses were being prepped. One o’clock would be good, noon better still—but noon was pretty much impossible now. He twitched slightly at the thought of which photographers might have beaten him down to the office with other pictures. Some of the editors at the Bugle in particular felt that a picture in the hand was worth any two in the bush, regardless of quality, but there was no telling which editor was going to make the call on your photos, either. If Kate Cushing was in today, Peter knew she liked to have pictures in early, rather than good—though she wanted them good as well.
Shortly the pictures were hanging up on the little “clothesline” of string. Pet
er snapped the white light on and looked at them, while fanning them dry with his hand. They were a fairly good-looking bunch. It had been a good first test of the camera’s motion control. The camera had gotten one particularly good chance shot, a full-face view of Hobby running straight at the camera without his having been aware it was there. Peter looked at the grinning face, slightly strained out of shape by the speed of the turn Hobgoblin had just made, and thought, That’s the one. If she doesn’t want that one, I can’t imagine what her problem is. Assuming the editor in question was Kate. She could sometimes be a dreadful stickler for quality—not necessarily a bad thing, when you were in competition with all the other newspapers in town, but annoying to the photographer with credit card bills to pay.
Peter smiled as he took down that head-on shot, and two others: one of Spider-Man leaping directly at Hobby, the webline reaching up and out of frame at a most dramatic angle, another of the warehouse floor, Hobgoblin streaking up and out past the camera’s point of view, a very lucky shot both in that Hobby could as easily have come up out of any other of the skylights, and that he might also easily have tipped the camera over as he zipped past. Gotta find a way to lower the center of gravity on that tripod, he thought as he took down the last of the prints and flicked its edge with one finger to see if it was still tacky. It wasn’t. Peter slipped it and its companions into a compartmented paper portfolio, put that in turn into his leather photo envelope, packed in the negatives as well, and finished the last of the tuna fish sandwich. Payday today, he thought, in as hopeful a mood as he could manage, and headed out to the Bugle.
* * *
HALF an hour later he was standing in the air-conditioning just inside Kate’s office door, while one by one she peeled the photos out of the paper portfolio and dropped them on the desk. “Not too bad,” she said, dropping the one with the canisters, and “That’s OK, a little dark.” Then, with an intake of breath and a smile, “What an ugly sonofabitch he is.”
