by Diane Duane
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, OK?"
"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 supervillains, 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, aftera 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-Athought, 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 superheroes 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 torn 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 superhero'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 c
ostume 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 than 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.
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-villai
n 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."
