by Diane Duane
Spider-Man joined the commuters crowding in through the door and headed down the stairs. Again, some looked at him curiously while others barely spared him a glance. But all of them were moving with a speed which suggested they thought a bomb might go off under their feet right now instead of later.
He left them getting into the big silver LIRR train and continued down the platform, following the buzz of his spider-sense. It was getting stronger. Somewhere off this track and farther down. He walked to the end of the platform, found the steps that let onto the tracks, and began to stroll down them, keeping an eye out behind him to make sure Venom wasn’t sneaking up behind him.
He came to a railed stairway leading downwards between two of the tracks. Downwards, his spider-sense said to him, so down he went. At the bottom, he discovered another long, barren access tunnel. He followed it to another set of steps. Down he went again.
Following his spider-sense, he came to a place where half a dozen tunnels met. The spider-sense indicated that the source of the tracer was quite close. Just off to the right—downward again.
He followed the rightward tunnel. This one almost immediately dead-ended into a stairwell, which he took very slowly and softly in the increasing dark, for he heard voices. At the bottom he paused, looking ahead. Light poured through air vents set into the walls of the tunnel in which he now stood. The voices were louder here. He listened but couldn’t quite make out the words. Then came a very familiar laugh.
Hobgoblin.
NINE
EDDIE Brock’s was not what one would normally consider a meticulous personality. He had been told by friends that this lack might get him into trouble one day. Sure enough, one time during his days as a journalist, he ran with a story as it seemed to be going, confident it would turn out as he’d expected. And, as his friends predicted, he got into trouble.
That, however, had been Spider-Man’s fault. His career, his relationships, everything lay in ruins now because of Spider-Man. His life since then, it seemed, had been one long stroll through dark places—the sewers of San Francisco, and the basements of his soul.
At least today he had some slight hope for a modicum of satisfaction. He would catch the Hobgoblin. He would extract the last possible measure of terror and repentance from him. And, when that was done, he would disassemble him into his component parts. Nothing about Hobgoblin’s life would suit him so much as ending it.
Eddie was not going about his plan in a slipshod manner. He had taken some care, while researching CCRC’s connections, also to look into the Map Room at the New York Public Library’s 42nd Street research library. There he had pulled the Con Edison maps for the access tunnels in the Midtown and West Side areas.
It was fortunate that his memory had always been sharp, for the whole place was a tangled warren of crawlways, passages, flights of stairs, and access holes of such complexity that anyone trying to navigate it without aid would be hopelessly lost. There were too many traps and pitfalls for the unwary—dead ends; pathways that seemed to go nowhere but led for miles, twisting, turning on themselves; old accesses added to new ones; old ones blocked up without being noted in the maps except as footnotes. It was all very complicated.
Eddie knew well enough, though, the kinds of places he was interested in. He had started, logically enough, at the CCRC headquarters.
He came after closing hours, having just had his little contretemps with Hobgoblin and Spider-Man. Spider-Man… All over Eddie’s skin, the symbiote ruffled, a quick movement like the skin of a horse trembling when a fly bites it, a gesture of mingled disgust and desire. The symbiote’s moods were clear enough to him from inside. But that gesture was diagnostic of one of the most common of its emotions. The symbiote’s hatred for Spider-Man was a refreshing thing next to his: simple, straightforward, but at the same time, always tinged with longing.
His pain was always a trouble to it, and its pain to him, especially when he pitied it for what it couldn’t be, for the one thing that was lacking. It had sentience—it existed, and it knew it did. But personality, it had none. A sort of a yearning toward his personality, and a sort of sad longing for something of the same kind, like the Tin Man wishing for a heart. But that was all. And when you came right down to it, sentience without personality was not enough to be company.
Even so, from Eddie’s point of view, their relationship was better than being alone. Now, as he stood in the silence of the deserted downstairs of the CCRC building, next to the old warehouse, he got from the symbiote a sense of excitement—of interest and desire—and, very restrained at the back of that interest, the hope of something to tear, devour, consume.
That was the one danger of dealing with the symbiote, Eddie thought, as he stood gazing down into that hole. If you were careless, you could easily fall into its mindset—to slash and feed when it desired to, rather than when prudence or necessity dictated. Its frustration that it could not subsume the one being it desperately desired sometimes drove it, hungrily, to try to consume others, like people desperate for protein who stuff themselves full of empty calories because there’s nothing else. Sometimes these gorges left Eddie exhausted; other times they left him simply annoyed and enervated. But they were something he had learned to put up with in good grace. There had to be some give-and-take, after all, and his partner had plenty of positive aspects.
Now he stood looking down into that hole and said, “He’s down there somewhere.” The symbiote stirred and rustled all around him, starting already to send out questing tendrils that waved in the air as if testing it for scent. The symbiote had been attuned to his rage all day, reacting with eagerness and pleasure, knowing it was going to feed if they caught the one its partner was after. The symbiote wasn’t picky. It had grown to like the taste of blood. Eddie’s problem—their joint problem as Venom—was to make sure it got only blood that needed to be shed.
He judged the hole. No more than about fifteen feet down. Tendrils swarmed out, anchoring themselves to the edges of the hole. Eddie jumped and was let down easily.
He glanced up the length of the tunnel in which he found himself. Its bare concrete had been stained by years’ passage of water, rust, and other, less healthy, things. Rats’ squeaking could be heard further down. There was no light here, but far down he saw an inequality in the darkness which meant there was light elsewhere. He headed for it slowly and silently, knowing that what he pursued could go silently, too, when it pleased.
Hobgoblin… he thought. Now there will be a dainty morsel for a leisurely postmortem. Eddie confined himself to criminals, to those who preyed on the innocent. Occasionally you might find a criminal who, given the right time, the right money, and sufficient resources, could eventually have been rehabilitated. Trouble was, there wasn’t enough time, and resources generally could better be used on other things. They were wasted on criminals. So often all the good intentions failed. That was the problem with life in general, from his point of view.
If there was anything Venom knew at this point, it was that justice started and ended in one’s own hands, and at the business end of whatever tools you could bring to bear to enforce your power. He was justice, now. Rough justice it might be, but it worked a lot better than the milk-and-water, etiolated kind of justice that various costumed crimefighters, bumbling police, and the corrupt judiciary were trying to impose.
He paused as the light grew from a hint to a halo before him. It came from a single bare bulb set in a concrete wall where this tunnel met another. To his left, the new tunnel dead-ended. To his right, it stretched away for at least a hundred yards before either ending or turning; he couldn’t see which.
That would be north, he thought. Uptown. “Let’s go,” he said.
He made his way up the tunnel, listening carefully. It was not as quiet down here as might have been expected. Even now, the incessant noise of the city managed to force its way through the layers of concrete and brick and earth: bumps and clanks from far above, as traffic hit some occasional manh
ole cover, the toothaching sound of someone working with a jackhammer blocks away. The low-frequency city roar didn’t carry here as it did above ground, but knockings and bumpings, the hiss of steam in conduit pipes, the occasional hum of an exposed transformer box—
—and the murmur of voices.
He stopped, listened. Nothing. Then a sound, indistinct, but the pattern was that of someone speaking. And then, unquestionably, a cough.
Quietly, now, he thought to the symbiote. They made their way to where the tunnel did not end, but turned right again, east. Eddie was taking care to keep his directions straight; he might need to find this place again.
He headed eastward for perhaps half a long block, and then once again the tunnel turned. Now he saw the muted glow of light coming from the northward leg. This time the voices rose much more clearly.
He padded forward as quickly as he could, but took more care about being silent. Every now and then a rat bolted out from under his feet, and the symbiote stretched out a hungry tendril for it, but always Eddie would pull those reaching tentacles back. “You’ll spoil your supper,” he muttered. The symbiote’s desires and hungers were something he had learned to exploit, and he wanted its hunger at its sharpest when they met Hobgoblin. Spider-Man had been right about one thing—he wasn’t too sure where a spleen was. But he had done a little research after looking at the utility tunnel maps, and he thought Venom now had a good chance of finding it and seeing whether that particular morsel was all it was cracked up to be.
He came to the second turning of the tunnel, paused, and looked around the corner cautiously. Voices again rang out. The light ahead had a different quality than the dim, dusty-bulbed utility lights strung sparingly through the tunnel itself. It was a cleaner white, and he caught a faint whiff of kerosene.
Around him, the symbiote stirred and shifted excitedly. Eddie said softly, “Not this time. Just wait. And considering who we’re going to be dealing with… street clothes, please.”
Obediently it shifted. The spider logo across his chest faded as the black flushed into a beige shirt, jeans, boots. He looked himself over and said, “A little more used-looking.”
Quickly the symbiote reshaped itself to his thought: frays and holes appeared in the jeans, a convincing patina of dirt, the collar and rolled-up cuffs of the shirt went threadbare. There was no point in frightening these people. He knew their kind: suspicious of strangers, always afraid of being driven out of their hard-won hiding places, or worse, made to live there on a new boss’s sufferance. Venom had seen enough of that in the city under Golden Gate Park where he now served as protector—a portion of San Francisco buried in the 1906 earthquake and subsequently forgotten. The underground city had become a haven for society’s outcasts.
He looked himself over one more time, ruffled his hair a bit, felt his chin. Well, the stubble was there, no need to do anything about that.
Slowly he walked down the tunnel, letting his footsteps echo. Ahead of him, people fell silent, listening. He was listening, too, for the sound of a weapon being gotten ready. Not that it was likely that people in these circumstances could do much to him, especially with the symbiote at hand. But all the same, he liked to be careful. “Hello?” Eddie said, trying to sound nonthreatening.
“Hello? Who’s that?” came a voice from down the tunnel, fairly nearby now.
“Nobody,” Eddie said. “Nobody much. I won’t hurt anybody here.”
“Well, Mister Nobody,” said the voice, and it was female, “you just come down here nice and slow, and you keep your hands where we can see them.”
Eddie did that, having no reason to disobey and hearing no overt threat in the voice, just the kind of toughness one needed to survive in these tunnels. Slowly he walked forward.
There were small “bays” in the sides of the tunnel, faired-in places six or eight feet deep. In one of these, the voices he heard were concentrated. He came abreast of the place and found himself looking at a tidy, neat little campsite, such as you might expect to find in the backwoods somewhere. Except that here they all were, any number of feet underground.
Eddie came up to the group—there were three of them—and stood there, letting them see him, keeping his hands in the open. Two women—an older one, red hair going pink as the white came in; a middle-aged one, blond, still pretty in anybody’s book; and an old man, weary-looking, his face flushed with red, peppered with big broken blood vessels, some of them ulcerated. Looks like alcohol or chemical abuse, Venom thought, Sterno, possibly.… There was no telling. It was something he had seen enough of both in San Fran and here.
“That’s an old trick,” the little old red-haired lady said to him, looking up at him genially.
“Which one, ma’am?”
“‘Nobody.’” She smiled, and there was some humor in the expression. “I remember another time a youngster came calling on people who weren’t expecting him. They asked him his name too, and he said ‘Nobody.’ Then when the youngster’s host started abusing his guests, and the young fella arranged to have a sharp stick poked into his host’s big eye, all the poor monster could yell was, ‘Oh my gosh, Nobody’s hurting me!’ And all his friends yelled back, ‘Better pray for relief, then.’”
Eddie smiled. “A classicist,” he said. “Well, the wily Odysseus we are not, no matter who else we might be.”
“Who might you be, actually? Queen Victoria, maybe, with all that ‘we’ nonsense.”
He raised an eyebrow. “To tell a name is to control the thing,” he said. “A classicist would know that. But never mind. Just call us Eddie.”
“Eddie. Well, tell us, Eddie, would you be planning to stay?” said the younger woman.
He looked at her. Really very pretty, she was, with a small round face that looked sweet—until you saw something behind the eyes that belied the sweetness. A hard look. “No, ma’am,” he said, “we’re just passing through.”
“Well, that’s good,” she said, but she didn’t say why. Eddie noticed, though, that her hand was near her pocket, and her pocket bulged in an angular way suggestive of a small pistol.
“Can we sit?”
The older lady made a gracious gesture, like a queen offering a commoner a seat in front of her throne. Eddie slumped down with his back against the wall and looked at the trio. The man was paying no attention to him. Eddie glanced briefly in his direction and said, “Is he all right?”
The younger woman acquired an annoyed expression. The older one raised her eyebrows. “He hasn’t been well lately,” she said. “He’s been sleeping in the wrong parts of town.”
An odd way to put it, Eddie thought then. “What brings you down here?” Eddie said, looking at them.
“Usually the guest says first,” said the older lady. “I’m Alma, by the way. This is Linda, that’s Chuck.”
“Alma,” Eddie said, nodding. “We’re just looking for someone. Someone in particular. A fellow we need to have a talk with.”
Alma nodded. “And you’ll be moving on, you say.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, Eddie,” she said, stretching her legs out, “you’ll understand a person has to be cautious, talking to someone they’ve never seen before. But let’s just say my marriage wasn’t working out quite the way I thought it should. And I had nowhere else to go. The women’s shelters were all full the night my husband tried to beat me to death. There was no way I could wait until there was an opening. So I grabbed my things and got out the best I could. Couldn’t have stayed with any of my friends, because he’d have hunted them down and beat them too. So I took myself out of the way.” The smile got grimmer. “I treated this as if it was a camping trip.” She glanced around her, and Venom saw that they were well equipped: a little camping stove, one of those which give heat and light both, a kerosene lamp, hissing softly to itself, backpack, sleeping bag, foam mattress.
“Money has to be a problem,” Eddie said softly.
“When isn’t it?” she said. “I get by.”<
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Alma looked over at Linda, who now looked at Eddie and said, “Family trouble. Alma had trouble with her husband. I had trouble with my uncle. Uncle Sam.” She sighed. “I’ve been homeless for a few years now.”
“Vietnam?” said Eddie softly.
She nodded. “I was a nurse. What I didn’t realize was that, depending on where you worked, you were just as likely to be exposed to Agent Orange as you were if you were out slogging in the jungle. When I got sick, I knew what the problem was, but I was never able to prove it to the medical tribunal’s satisfaction. So…” She shrugged. “I couldn’t work. I lost my apartment. I went under—literally.” She looked around at the tunnels. “All I can do is keep an eye on Alma and Chuck here.”
Eddie looked at her pocket and nodded, knowing that she knew he knew the gun was there. “Chuck,” he said. “You said he was sleeping in the wrong places. Where would that be?”
Alma jerked her head, indicating someplace up the tunnel and to the right. “Over by the Garden. Something’s going on over there, I don’t know what. But lately it’s been less healthy than usual.”
“I’ve heard,” Eddie said. “Someone—” He was not going to say, pretending to be Venom.
“Something,” Alma said. “This town is getting so full of super heroes, and super villains, and things from other planets that it’s hard to know whether you’re coming or going.” She chuckled. “Remember those T-shirts you used to be able to get that said ‘Native New Yorker’? There’s a store downtown selling shirts that say ‘Native Earthling.’”
Linda smiled as well. “No, there’s something down here that has a taste for people,” she said, “or chunks of them. Some poor guy got his hand bit off last night.”