by Diane Duane
It hnh, hnhed in his hands for a few more seconds before he managed to pull the motion control system's jack.Well, it works, Peter thought, turning back toward the table. Even if it is a little light on the trigger. I'll take it out tonight and see how it does.
A key turned in the apartment door, which then obligingly opened. The camera in Peter's hands flashed. MJ stood in the doorway, caught open-mouthed with a couple of heavy bags of groceries, and looked at Peter curiously.
"It's not my birthday," she said. "And I don't remember calling the media. What's the occasion?"
"Your glorious homecoming," Peter said, putting the camera down. "C'mere. I want a hug."
MJ offloaded the bags onto a table near the door, and Peter collected the hug, and a couple of serious kisses, while behind them the camera flashed and flashed and flashed. After a few seconds, MJ detached herself by a few inches, took his face between her hands, and said, "Gonna run the batteries down that way."
"What, mine?"
She laughed. "Not yours, lover. Eveready, that's you. Just keeps going, and going, and . . ." Peter poked her genially in the kidneys, and MJ squealed slightly and squirmed in his arms. "What, what, why are you complaining? It's a compliment. Lemme go, the frozen stuff's going to defrost. It's like an oven in here. Didn't you turn the air-conditioning on?"
"I didn't notice," Peter said, letting her go. He picked up one of the bags while MJ got the other, and they headed into the kitchen.
"It may be just as well," MJ said as she started unpacking one of the bags: salad things, a couple of bottles of wine, ice cream, sherbert. "I turned the air conditioner on this morning and it didn't go. Made a sort of gurgly noise for a while, but no cold air. I shut it off—thought it might recover if I left it alone."
Peter sighed. "That's what it did the last time it broke. The compressor, wasn't it?"
"Yeah. The guy said it might not last much longer. . . ."
She reached down into the bag for a couple of cheeses, then picked the bag up and started to fold it. Peter opened his mouth to say something about how they really couldn't afford to have the air conditioner break just now, there were too many other bills . . . and then he stopped. MJ looked so tired and woeful. Perspiration and the heat of the day had caked the makeup on her, her hair was all over the place, and she had a run in her stocking. He knew she hated looking like that, and she was so worn down and miserable that she didn't even care.
He went to her and hugged her. Somewhat surprised, MJ hugged back, and then she put her head down on his shoulder and just moaned softly, a little sound that hurt him as badly as any supervillain tapdancing on his spleen.
"Nothing today, huh?" he said.
"Nothing," MJ replied, and was silent for a little while. "I can't stand this much longer. I hate this. I'm a good actress. At least, they all used to say so. Were they just saying that because they wanted to stay on ray good side? And if they weren't just saying it, why can't I find another job?"
Peter didn't have any answers for her. He just held her.
"I've been all over this town," MJ muttered. "I'm either too tall, or too short, or too fat, or too thin, or my hair's the wrong color, or my voice is wrong somehow. I wouldn't mind if I thought the producers knew what they wanted. But they don't know. They don't know anything except that I'm not what they want. Whatever that is." She breathed out, hard. "And my feet hurt, and my clothes stick to me, and I want to kick every one of their sagging, misshapen butts."
"Oh, come on," Peter said, holding her away a little now, since her voice told him it was all right to. "Their butts can't all have been misshapen."
"Oh yes they can," MJ said, straightening up again and reaching for the second paper bag, while Peter still held her. "You should have seen this one guy. He had this—"
"Who's all this food for?" Peter said suddenly, looking at the counter, which was becoming increasingly covered with stuff. Chicken breasts, more wine—dessert wine this time—fresh spinach, cream, fresh strawberries. "Is someone coming over for dinner, and I forgot about it? Ohmigosh, you said we were inviting Aunt May—"
"It's for us," MJ said. "Why do we only have to have nice dinners when people are coming over? Besides, May is next week. You have a brain like a sieve." She folded up the other bag, picked up its partner, and shoved them into the bag drawer.
"No question about that whatsoever," Peter said, abruptly glad of an excuse not to have to tell her immediately about the bank, or the credit card, or the answering machine. "Sieves R Us. What's for dinner, sexy?"
"I'm not telling you till you set the table. And tell your little droid friend out there that he doesn't get a high chair. He can sit in the living room and I'll give him a can of WD-40 or something." She hmphed, an amused sound, as she pulled a drawer open and started taking out pots and pans. "Flashers. I have enough problems with them in the street without finding them at home."
Peter chuckled, picked up the camera tripod and its associated apparatus and carried it into the living room, where he left the camera with its face turned to the wall. Then, humming, he went to get the tablecloth.
Tonight, he thought. Tonight we'll see.
Much later, well after dinner, the lights in the front of the Parker apartment went out.
The lights in the back were still on. MJ was in bed, propped up in a nest of pillows, reading. If someone heard about this tendency and asked her about it, Peter knew, MJ would tell them one version of the truth: that she was just one of those people who found it constitutionally impossible to get to sleep without first reading something, anything. The other truth, which she only told to Peter, and no more often than necessary, was that she needed to do something to take her mind off his "night job," as opposed to his day job. His night job's hours were far more irregular, the company he kept was generally far less desirable, and sometimes he didn't come back from it until late or, rather, early. Peter knew MJ restrained herself from saying, much more often, how much she feared that one night he would go out to the night job, and never come back from it. He had learned to judge her level of nervousness by how big a book she took to bed with her. Tonight it was The Story of the Stone, a normal-sized paperback. So Peter went out in a good enough humor, as relaxed as he could be these days, when he was no longer quite a free agent.
It was perhaps more strictly accurate to say that Peter Parker opened the window, and turned off the lights. Then, a few minutes later, someone else came to the window and stood for a moment, the webbed red and solid blue of the costume invisible in the darkness to any putative watcher. It was always a slightly magical moment for him, this hesitation on the border between his two worlds: the mundane standing on the threshold of the extraordinary, safe for the moment. . . but not for long.
Tonight he hesitated a shorter time than usual. The camera and its rig were collapsed down as small as they would go, slipped into the back-pouch where they would stay out of his way. If anyone caught sight of him on his rounds tonight, they would probably find themselves wondering if they were seeing some new costumed figure who had decided to emulate the Hunchback of Notre Dame. He chuckled under his breath at the thought. Would one more costumed figure attract any attention in this city anymore? he wondered. Lately the place had been coming down with them. Meanwhile, there would be the usual stir if one of the natives spotted him, one of the more familiar, if not universally loved, of the super heroes in town.
Under the tight-fitting mask, he smiled. Then Spider-Man slipped out the window, clung briefly to the wall, and closed the window behind him, all but a crack.
Carefully, as usual, he wall-crawled around the corner of the building—theirs was a corner apartment—and around to the back wall, where MJ's bedroom window was. The window was open, in the hope of any cool breeze. He put his head just above windowsill level, knocked softly on the sash. Inside, on the bed against the far wall, the reading light shone. MJ looked up, saw him, smiled slightly, made a small finger-waggle wave at him: then went back to her book. S
he was already nearly halfway through it. I still wish she could teach me to read that fast, he thought, and swarmed up the back corner of the building, making for the roof.
He peered cautiously over the edge of the roof balcony. There was no one up there this time of night: it was too hot and humid, and their neighbors with air conditioners seemed to have stayed inside to take advantage of it.
Can't blame them, he thought. It was a heck of a night to be out in a close-fitting costume. All the same, he had work to do.
About a third of a block away stood a tall office building. Spider-Man shot a line of web to a spot just south of the roofline near the building's corner. And we're off, he thought, and swung.
He had five different standard exit routes from the apartment, which he staggered both for security—no use taking the chance someone might see him exiting repeatedly and figure something out—and for interest's sake. Security was more important, though: he didn't want to take the chance that someone would find out where he was living by the simple expedient of following him home.
By now the business of swinging through the city had become second nature, a matter of ease. Tarzan could not have done it more easily, but then, Tarzan had his vines hanging ready for him. Spider-Man made his swinging equipment to order as he went. He shot out another long line, swung wide across Lexington and around the corner of the Chrysler Building, shot another line way up to one of the big aluminum eagle's heads, and swarmed up the line to stand atop the head and have a look around.
This was a favorite perch: good for its view of midtown, and it had other attractions. This was the particular eagle-head on which Margaret Bourke-White had knelt while doing her famous plate photos of the New York skyline in the late forties. Spidey stood there a moment, enjoying the breeze—it was better, this high up—and scanned his city.
It moved, as always it moved: restless, alive, its breath that old soft roar of which he never tired, the pulse visible rather than audible. Red tail-light blood moving below him in golden-lined sodium-lit arteries, white light contesting the pathways with the red; the faint sound of honking, the occasional shout, but very faint and far-off-seeming, as heard from up here; the roar of late jets winding up, getting ready to leap skyward from LaGuardia; lights in a million windows, people working late, home from work, resting, eating meals with friends, getting ready to turn in. Those people, the ones who lived here, worked here, loved the place, couldn't leave—those were the ones he did this for.
Or had come to do it for. It hadn't started that way, but his mission had grown to include them, as he had grown.
Spider-Man breathed out. While Spidey had never established a formal communication with the various low-lifes, informants, and stoolies that populated the city, he still heard things. Over the last couple of days, he'd heard some rumblings about "weird stuff" going on on the west side. Nothing more specific than that, just "weird."
Spidey slung a long line of web at the Grand Hyatt, caught it at one corner and swung on past and around, halfway over Grand Central, then shot another line at the old Pan Am building, swung around that, and headed westward first, using the taller buildings in the upper Forties to get him over to Seventh Avenue, where he started working his way downtown. That was something he had learned fairly early on: when traveling by web, a straight line was often not the best way to go. It wasn't even always possible. Buildings tall enough to be useful are not necessarily strung for a webslinger's convenience in a straight line between him and his destination. Over time Spidey had learned where the tall buildings clustered and where they petered out. He learned to exploit those clusters for efficiency, discovering that an experienced slinger of webs could gain as much speed slingshotting around corners as he lost from not being able to go straight as the crow flew.
Shortly he was down in the mid-Twenties, and he slowed down to take in the landscape. This time of night, things were more than just quiet, they were desolate. There were few restaurants in this area, not even many bars, and almost no one lived here, except the occasional tiny colony of homeless squatting in some unused or derelict structure. Not even much traffic passed by. Here the street lighting was iffy at best, the lamp bulbs missing or sometimes blown out by people who liked the dark to work in. The presence of that kind of person was one of the reasons he patrolled here on a more or less regular basis. Left to themselves, the children of the night might get the idea that they owned this neighborhood, and it was good for them to know that someone else had other ideas.
He paused on the roof of one building, looked up and down its cross-street, and listened carefully.
Nothing. He shot out another line of web, swung across another street, and waited. It was not only sound for which he listened.
Nothing.
So it went for some good while. Not that he minded. Every now and then, he lucked into a quiet night, one which left him more time to appreciate the city and required less of his time worrying about it. The problem was that the worry came a lot more easily than it used to. The city was not as nice as he remembered it being when he was a child—and he chuckled softly to himself, remembering what a dirty, crime-ridden place it had seemed to him when his aunt and uncle first brought him from Queens into Manhattan. By comparison, that New York of years ago—and not that many years, really—was a halcyon memory, a pleasant and happy place, where it seemed the sun had always been shining.
Not anymore.
He paused on another rooftop on West 10th, looking around. Nothing but the muted city roar. Locally, no traffic—but he could hear the grind and whine of a diesel truck, one with a serious transmission problem to judge by the sound of it, heading north on 10th Avenue. We've got a dull one, he thought. No "weird stuff" in sight. Normally I'd be grateful.
Then it hit him.
Several times over the course of their relationship, he had tried to explain to MJ how it felt, the bizarre experience he had long ago started to call his "spider-sense." It was, first of all, very simple: there was nothing of thought or analysis about it. It wasn't a feeling of fear, but rather of straightforward alarm, untinged by any other emotion, good or bad. It was the internal equivalent of hearing a siren coming up behind you when you knew you hadn't done anything wrong. It had seemed to him that, if as simple a creature as a spider experienced alarm, it would feel like this.
It also made him feel as if he was tingling all over. He was tingling now.
He stood very still, then slowly turned. The sense could be vaguely directional, if he didn't push it. Nothing specific northward, nothing to the east. Westward—
He shot out some web and swung that way, over several decrepit-looking rooftops. Unlike the buildings closer to midtown, these were in rather poor repair. There were gaping holes in some of the roofs, places where the tar and shingles and gravel had fallen in—or been cut through. Looks like there's precious little to steal in most of these, though.
The spider-sense twinged hard, as abrupt and impossible to ignore as the nerve in a cracked tooth, as he came to one particular building. He had almost passed it, an ancient broad-roofed single-story building with big skylights which looked mostly structurally intact, though most of the glass in them was broken. Well, all right. . .
He shot out another length of web, cut loose the last one from which he had been swinging, and let it lengthen as he dropped toward the old warehouse's roof. After a second or so he impacted, but so lightly he doubted anyone inside would have heard him.
Softly he stepped over to the skylight with the most broken glass, dropped beside it to show the minimum possible silhouette, and peered inside.
A very old place indeed. Down on the main shop floor, if that was what it was, lay toppled or discarded timbers, piles of trash, and puddles of water from other spots in the roof that leaked. His gaze took in old oil-drums lying on their sides, some of them split and leaking, and old newspapers plastered to the floor and faded by the passage of time.
Spider-Man shuddered. It was in a place very
like this one that he had found the man who killed his uncle.
At other times, it all seemed a long time ago. His life had become so busy since. But here, it all seemed very close. The memory was reduced, now, to quick flashes. That afternoon in the science department at college, the experiment with what was mildly referred to as "radioactive rays." He could almost laugh at that, now. It had taken him years of study, nearly to the master's level, to really understand what had been going on in that experiment—and he now knew that the professor conducting it hadn't fully understood what was happening, either. There was more going on than the generation of plain old gamma rays: the radiation source had been contaminated by unusual elements and impurities, producing utterly unexpected results.
A spider had dropped gently downwards between the generating pods and become irradiated. Its DNA so quickly uncoiled and recoiled into a bizarre new configuration that it was actually able to survive for a few moments and bite Peter before the changes in its body chemistry killed it. The memory was frozen in Peter's mind like a slide from a slideshow: the tiny glowing thing falling onto his hand, the sudden rush of pain and heat as their respective body proteins met in what started as an allergic reaction, but turned into something much more involved and potentially deadly. Only the tininess of the spider and the minuscule amount of venom from its bite had saved his life. As it was, the radiation-altered proteins in its body fluids complexed with his own, the change a catalytic one, sweeping through Peter's body faster than mere circulation could have propelled it. Ten seconds later, he almost literally had not been the same person.
Another slide-image: the building he jumped halfway up, frightened by a car horn behind him, his hands, adhering to the brick as if glued to it, but effortlessly. A stand-pipe that he accidentally crushed with what seemed a perfectly normal grip. Soon he had realized what had happened to him and, after the initial shock wore off, decided to market it.
He made a costume, not wanting his quiet home life with his Aunt May and Uncle Ben to be affected, and started making public appearances. The media ate it up. Sudden fame, to a guy who had always been regarded by his peers as a useless bookworm, was heady stuff. So it was, one night after a television appearance, that a man brushed past him and dove into an elevator. The cop in pursuit had shouted at Peter (still in costume at that point) to catch the running man. Peter had let the guy go, not particularly caring about him. He had other business to think about, appearances to plan, money to be made. What was one thief, more or less, to him?
