by Al Ewing
The Blood-Spider's feet touched down on the floor of the alley by the hospital, and he took a moment to look around and check for any clues. To actually catch the Sword Killer was perhaps too much to hope for, at least immediately, but there was the slim chance that he'd find a hint as to which direction he'd taken. The important thing was that he knew who had murdered Heinrich Donner - clearly an inhuman killer.
Inhumanity would not be tolerated. Could not be tolerated. Such was the mission of the Blood-Spider.
As the Spider looked around, his ears caught a sound from nearby; a soft, wheezing moan, like the air escaping from a tyre. He turned, drawing his silenced pistol in a flash of movement.
It was Anton Venger. He had landed in a dumpster.
Perhaps it was due to the pliable nature of his flesh, but the snapping of his neck had not killed him, although he seemed unable to move, and his head now lolled at a grotesque angle. Most of his bones seemed to be broken, and blood leaked from his nose. The Blood-Spider was disgusted, but not entirely surprised, to note that the blood of Anton Venger was not red, but a light, sickly blue. His eyes flickered towards him, imploring, and he attempted to move his lips to speak. Even in such pain and fear as he was in, his face retained only the emotions he gave it. As such, he looked sanguine and unconcerned about his own death.
"Crane?" he breathed, weakly. "Help... help me."
"Help you?" The Blood-Spider looked at him through the implacable lenses. His voice was a cold hiss, like escaping steam - in its own way, just as emotionless as Venger's. A passer-by would have been mystified by the apparent ennui with which they greeted the situation.
Or terrified, perhaps.
"Help you." the Spider repeated, as though contemplating the question. Venger's body twitched, shuddering like a cockroach pinned to a board. "You sent Crane a telegram."
"Yes. I sent you a telegram." His eyes widened as the Blood-Spider lifted his automatic, pointing the barrel of the gun squarely between his eyes.
"Crane."
"Wh... what...?" Venger was breathing heavily, a constant rasp from his damaged lungs. He was clearly terrified, and in great pain.
That was good.
"You sent Crane a telegram. Crane. If I were you, I wouldn't become confused on that point again."
Venger twitched again, trying to nod. "Fine! Fine! I sent Crane a telegram. I - I have something for you. For Crane. It's in my coat pocket. The vial's very thick, it won't have broken. It's, ah... for our mutual friend." He swallowed, and his lips twitched and bubbled, as if he was attempting a smile. "Our friend Fifty fifty. Heh."
"Fifty fifty. What does that mean?"
Venger blinked. "It's the code. Fifty fifty. You know." He swallowed. His face still did not change, but his eyes grew glassy, the pupils dilating with terror. "You don't know... oh God, he said you knew! He said you were working for him! You must be working for him! You must be! Fifty fifty! Fifty fifty! Fifty fifty! Crane, for the love of God, you have to know-"
The automatic spat a single, silent bullet, and a blue flower bloomed in the centre of Anton Venger's forehead as his brain matter, the colour of delicate Japanese pottery, exploded out into the garbage.
"I told you not to become confused."
He hadn't meant to pull the trigger - there was so much more to learn - but to have Venger screaming his name, his real name, where anyone walking by could have heard him... better he was silenced. The Blood-Spider had no doubt that whoever this mysterious 'Fifty fifty' was, he would be hearing from him soon enough.
And if his hunch was correct, so would Doc Thunder.
Working quickly, the Spider searched through Venger's pockets. Inside one of them there was a thick vial, still stoppered and sealed, undamaged by the fall from the roof.
It was full of blood.
The best part of a pint, unclotted, still cool from the cold room of the hospital. Wound around the neck, there was a slip of paper reading 50/50 - DOC THUNDER.
Doc Thunder's blood.
The Blood-Spider nodded once, grimly, and slid the vial into the inside pocket of his coat. Then he turned and walked deeper into the pooling shadows of the alley.
By the time the police found the body of Anton Venger, he was long gone.
Marlene Lang picked up the phone on the first ring.
She'd only just managed to get in the door of her apartment, after securing the Silver Ghost in its usual hiding place in her private garage, behind a false wall in the side of the apartment building. The Blood-Spider owned the building under an alias - he was the only other person who knew it was there. Even Parker didn't know about it.
She reacted instinctively, but froze once she'd lifted the receiver out of the cradle. What if this wasn't him? What if it was whoever he'd gone to meet - whoever his 'business' had been with? What if he (she didn't consider that it might be a she) had killed the Spider and was now coming to do the same to her?
"H-hello?" Her voice trembled, uncertain.
"Ms. Lang."
She let out the breath she'd been holding. She hadn't expected a call the moment she'd come in. If he'd needed her that urgently, he would have asked her to keep the engine running, surely? For a quick getaway. But then, he'd wanted to protect her. She was surprised at how that thought made her feel.
"Do I still need to pack the suitcase?" Her voice shook, no matter how much she willed it to stop. His tone seemed almost amused, but still compassionate, inasmuch as it ever seemed to be anything at all. How much was there, and how much was she reading into it?
"You may still need it. But right now... you're needed. Meet me at pickup point C."
She nodded. That one was near the corner of first and thirty-fifth, not far from the hospital. He must have called from the kiosk there. "I'll come right away, Sir." she said, blushing at how the sir slipped out. He hung up, leaving her with the dial tone and her whirling thoughts.
As Marlene turned to leave, she caught a glimpse of herself in the full-length mirror that hung by the door. Usually, she thought of the outfit the Blood-Spider had chosen, for reasons of his own, to dress her in as being risqué - daring, even. But now she realised it actually looked rather smart. Professional.
All of a sudden, she mused, she had a new understanding of what she was doing. She had come face to face with just how serious this could all get, and rather than shrink from it, or ask to be relieved of her duty, her first instinct was to throw herself in even deeper. And suddenly, she realised, it was a duty. Not a lark for a bored rich girl with expensive and naughty tastes, but a solemn appointment.
She was the Blood-Spider's driver, and that meant something.
She smiled at herself, then stepped confidently out of the door. Time was of the essence, after all.
And the war on crime was not about to wait.
The Blood-Spider said nothing as the two of them sped through the streets, heading for the location in the East Village he'd specified. She hadn't been there yet - he'd never mentioned the place. But she knew better than to ask questions now. Indeed, she was rather enjoying this new feeling of quiet, sober professionalism, even subservience - of being a cog in a well-oiled machine. What was it she'd said to Parker?
"The most fabulous thing to do now is to believe in something utterly and completely, without restraint."
How true. How very true.
She opened up the throttle, a smile crossing her lips as she weaved expertly between two horse-drawn carriages, the horses rearing as she left them in the rear view mirror, rounding the next corner in a screech of tyres. Eventually, the Blood-Spider nodded, and she braked smoothly to a halt and triggered the passenger door release, with all the quiet deference of a British automaton.
"Very good, Ms. Lang. Pick me up on this spot in twenty minutes."
He turned and vanished into an alley, and she gunned the engine and eased the Silver Ghost onto the night streets.
A compliment! Perhaps her first from him. It felt rather like coaxing a climax from another man.
Perhaps if she was awfully good, the Blood-Spider would let her have a gun.
The door was nondescript - a flat rectangle of metal halfway down an alley between a chapbook store and a long-forgotten dance club. The wall nearby was marked by freshly-chalked graffiti: DON'T PUSH ME 'CAUSE I'M CLOSE TO THE EDGE. A breaker slogan. Indeed, The Blood-Spider could see one of the squares of cardboard they littered their chosen alleys with scattered on the ground. He was glad none of them were here now. Littering was a crime, after all. And it would be so terrible to have any unpleasantness.
His trigger fingers were itching again.
At the end of the alley, he could see a homeless man, covered up by a thick, filth-covered blanket, his head buried in his lap, a mass of greasy black hair hiding his features. The Spider wondered for a moment whether or not he should simply put a bullet in the man's head... but no. Best not to invite trouble.
It was missing the masked man on the hospital roof that had done it, put him in this mood. He'd been so close - so very close - to putting an end to Donner's murderer once and for all, and now the strange Mexican had slipped through his fingers. That was unacceptable. Not only was he Donner's killer, he had been spending the brief time since he entered the city on a rampage that had ended with the deaths of nearly a dozen men.
While the irony was not lost on the Blood-Spider, the simple truth was that there was no room for two vigilantes in a town as small as New York. Even Doc Thunder, the saviour of Manhattan, America's Greatest Hero - even he made the place feel... crowded.
But then, that was why he'd come to Professor Timothy Larson.
Looking around to make sure nobody was watching, he knocked on the door in the pre-arranged pattern. After a moment, it was answered by a rail-thin man with a mop of shaggy, dirty blonde hair and a ratty beard, who looked at him with red-rimmed eyes. This was Timothy Larson.
"Come in out of the rain, man. I was, uh, writing a lecture."
Larson was a strange one. He'd apparently been part of the original futurehead movement as a young twenty-something man when it had started off in the seventies as a group of merry pranksters, before it rejected itself, becoming obsessed with détournment and anarchy, mutating into its current form as a thing to be feared, a tapestry of taboos that were allegedly made safe but all too often held all their old power and more. 'No future' had once been a challenge to authority rather than an acknowledgement of the status quo.
Larson let the Blood-Spider into the small bedsit he'd installed him in - a gloomy little cave, lit by a single oil lamp, encrusted in dust and filth. There was a door in the back that led to a toilet that hadn't been cleaned in months, but the rest of the room was all one thing; kitchen, bedroom and bathroom in one -a criminally small tin bath leaning in the corner, a mattress on the floor, a small camping stove and a sink against one wall. The rest of the space was taken up with workbenches and tables covered with beakers, test tubes, Bunsen burners and the stains of a thousand spilled chemicals. The whole place stank, and the Spider found himself grateful for the mask he wore. Larson grabbed a sheaf of notes off one of the tables.
"Dig this, man - 'if the truth can be told, so as to be understood, it will be believed,'" Larson said, reading from a sheet of lined paper while the Blood-Spider entered and locked the steel door behind him. "'The emphasis - in breaker music and the street dance culture - on physiologically compatible rhythms is really the rediscovery of the art of natural magic with sound, that, uh, sound, properly understood, especially percussive sound, can actually change neurological states-'"
The Blood-Spider cut him off. "Breaker music is a weakness rotting this city and it needs to be stamped out, Professor Larson. For your sake, don't let me find out that you've been taking part in the criminality going on outside." He reached into his coat. "It would not be... healthy for you."
Larson pouted. "It's just a lecture, man. Actually, I was going to have some breakers perform during it. Kind of a performance piece, you know?"
Of all the members of the Spider's Web, Larson was the most secret, and the most secretive. He had good reason to distrust the police. Apparently, they had never forgiven him for attempting to synthesise an artificial opium as a means of opening what he called the 'doors of perception' within the human mind, or for attempting to pour this opiate into the water supply in order to force the city into delirium. A prank gone too far, some would say. The Blood-Spider, on tracking him down - or had Larson simply stumbled into his path? - had been impressed enough with the man's genius to provide him with new, state-of-the-art equipment and the latest findings on a variety of subjects. It had been a worthwhile expense. Larson was perhaps the most brilliant scientist the Spider had ever met.
He was also the only one who treated the Blood-Spider as he would treat anyone else in the world. He was neither terrified, like Stacey, or fascinated, like Marlene, or deferential, like Jonah - he simply treated the Spider as a perfectly ordinary person, no different from anyone he might meet at the theatre or the bakery. In turn, the Blood-Spider found him to be a fascinating and occasionally quite charismatic, if often irritating individual - he was continually grateful to the fates for making Larson far too useful to execute for his opium-related crimes when they had first met. It would be a shame not to have known the man.
That said, it was always best to let him know where he stood.
The Blood-Spider grabbed hold of the collar of Larson's shirt, lifting him up by it, before slamming him against one wall hard enough to knock the breath out of him.
"Remember who owns you, Professor Larson. You work for the Blood-Spider. The rest of your nonsense can wait."
Larson nodded, eyes wide. "Sure thing! Of course! I - I just wanted to, you know... get your opinion..." He swallowed, readjusting his collar as the Spider let him go. "You, uh, don't like breaker music?"
The Blood-Spider removed his hand from his coat, showing Larson the vial. Larson's eyes almost popped out of his head when he saw the label. "Holy crap! Is this Doc Thunder's real blood? Like, out of his body and everything?" He shook his head slowly, as if not quite able to believe what he held in his hands. "We need to get this cold before it congeals..." He looked up suddenly, puzzled. "What's this mean - fifty-fifty? Is it diluted?"
Blood-Spider shook his head. "Quite pure. Apparently that refers to a specific person somewhere in this city... someone I'd like to meet." Larson frowned, turning the vial over and over in his hands. "Any idea who it might be?"
"Someone who's not one thing or another?" He shrugged, shaking his head. "Or half with you and half against you - like a cop moonlighting as a criminal. Know anybody like that?" He laughed. "Or somebody who's around you a lot when you're, you know..." He gestured at the mask. "Not you... but, like, while you're off, y'know, being you, they're... being them. Fifty-fifty split. Does that make sense?"
"It raises some interesting possibilities. Much like that vial of blood. Perhaps you could tell me more about it, given time. I saw him use it to cure a man of a rare poison..." He scowled under his concealing helmet, irritated by the memory. Venger had deserved to die for his incompetence alone.
Larson chuckled. "So we know it's got some kind of healing mojo - that's cool. I'll bet with a little study we could find out just where Doc gets his whole whammy from. Actually, you know what? That last batch of notes you got me, that seemed to be headed in that direction already..." He chuckled, then stopped, looking sideways at the Blood-Spider. The grin on his face turned sly. "That's why you brought this to me, right? You want some of that for yourself. Aw man, you dog, you must have planned for this."
The Blood-Spider stared b
ack at him, the eight lenses impassive.
"I plan for everything. I'll expect results swiftly, Professor. Do you understand? Within the week."
"Sure thing," Larson grinned. "You're the boss, babe. I'll find you what you need. Reverse-engineer what's in this and get it into you. Sound good?"
The Blood-Spider looked at him for a moment, then turned to the door, unlocking and opening it with a creak.
"Not a word, Larson. If you value your life. The Spider's vengeance is swifter than any venom."
"Sure, sure." Larson smiled as he closed the door, examining the vial of blood in his hands. "See you soon, man..."
Outside, the Blood-Spider turned to take another look at the homeless man, as if reconsidering his earlier impulse to simply kill him and be done with it. But no. To bring the police down on Larson while he was engaged in such important work on the Spider's behalf would not do. Better to leave him be.
Besides, he had to reconvene with Marlene. There would be other times.
As he turned and walked back towards his rendezvous with the Silver Ghost, the homeless man raised his head, lifting a strip of red cloth from under the blanket and tying it securely over his face.
El Sombra liked automobiles. The wonderful thing about them was that people who owned a fast one seemed to be under the impression they couldn't be followed. But a man who ran across the rooftops and through the tight alleys could easily keep pace with the fastest car, so long as it spent a good portion of its time in New York traffic. And Marlene wasn't quite as speedy a driver as either of them thought.
"Later, amigo." He grinned, before lifting a thick brown volume from underneath his blanket, with the word Tagebuch inscribed in gold lettering on the front.
He had a little revision to do.
It was getting on for one in the morning when Parker Crane finally returned to the Jameson Club.
"Welcome back, Master Parker," murmured Jonah as he opened the front door and ushered Crane into the sanctuary of the Lower Library, before any of those members still plodding around the club, in the manner of ruminants plodding around a lush green field, could ask any awkward questions. "And may I say," he said, after the door had been securely locked, "What a pleasure it is to find you still alive."
