Ace of Spiders

by Stefan Mohamed

  Focus.

  Stop thinking.

  I squeeze my eyes shut and keep running through this new cold place. I don’t feel like I’m going anywhere, it’s like being on a treadmill. I clench both fists and remember the ribbon, remember the sight of it, the feel, even if the actuality of it isn’t there, was never there, and my feet touch the ground, no, not ground, air, nothing but air, and I fly forwards and feel myself transferred from cool back to warmth. I open my eyes in semi-darkness, which is a relief. Everything seems the right way up in here, also a relief, and I walk through an oily-smelling corridor of metallic rock, wiping sweat from my face with my sleeve. Beyond this corridor I can see golden sand and I start to run, I start to run, I start to run, I start to – yes I’m running OK that’s what’s happening – so desperately grateful for something normal, like running. Out and onto the sand . . .

  I take everything in very fast. I’m standing on a beach in a cave of crimson rock, a cave vast enough to fit ten cathedrals. Where the sand ends there is pure, glittering blue water that stretches out to the edges of the cave, and standing at the water’s edge with his back to me is a man in a grey suit. I can’t see his face but I know exactly who it is, of course.

  Freeman.

  I would have words with thee.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  FREEMAN TURNS. CLOCKS me. Smiles broadly, like he’s pleased to see me. Like this is some kind of reunion. ‘Stanly! Glad you made it, I—’

  Choke. His words are cut off, squeezed into a splutter of saliva as his throat constricts. Up. He levitates, a foot off the ground, two feet, clutching at his throat. I walk towards him, maintaining my mental grip on his windpipe, my hands shaking because they’d really rather it was them doing the gripping. It’s taking a lot of willpower not to just tear him in half now, see what would happen if I thought eviscerate, or just die. ‘You’re going to show me how to fix what’s happening,’ I say, ‘or I’m going to end you. Right here. And I’ll make sure you don’t come back this time.’

  Freeman’s eyes bulge, his face shifting from red to purple, his body twitching. I know for a fact that he can’t breathe. But he keeps smiling, and says something I can just about make out. ‘That’s not how this is going to work.’

  Something grabs me from behind, wrapping around my waist. I try to struggle but it holds my head and limbs in place. I manage to look down and recoil at what look like thin, sinuous black creepers restraining me. They’re alive. I try to look behind me to see what’s doing this but I can’t, which I think might actually be a good thing. Whatever it is, it lifts me off the ground and holds me in mid air. Freeman drops down on to the sand and rubs his throat, coughing. He takes out a handkerchief, wipes his eyes, replaces it, shakes his head. ‘Stanly,’ he says. ‘Stanly, Stanly. Did you think that that was going to be it? You really can be disastrously dense sometimes.’

  I think punch and his head jolts back. Blood trickles from one nostril and finally that smile vanishes. He scowls at me, taking out his handkerchief again and wiping the red from his face. ‘Now, now,’ he says. ‘Less of that, if you please.’ He doesn’t make any kind of movement but I feel something change between us, and when I think punch again my attack comes up against a crackling wall of opposing thought.

  ‘You’re empowered,’ I say.

  He nods. ‘Somewhat.’

  I shouldn’t be surprised.

  He shouldn’t surprise me any more.

  ‘I would have thought you’d have worked that out,’ says Freeman. ‘I mean, I have spoken to you telepathically twice in the last hour.’

  I didn’t even make the connection.

  Too much in my head . . .

  Missing important things . . .

  I try thinking sleep at him like I did at the soldier earlier, but it does nothing, and he shakes his head again, a disappointed teacher admonishing a favourite pupil. ‘See above, re: dense.’ He turns away from me, walks to the water and kneels down. ‘Shimmers,’ he says. ‘Fascinating beings. Truly. Like nothing we’ve ever seen in our world. Little living dream factories feeding on pure, concentrated power.’ He turns back to me, grinning like we’re on safari and he’s just spotted something particularly cool. ‘This whole lake is made of them you know. This is their home. Where they originate. They sit together, pumping out energy, dreams, nightmares. Monsters.’

  ‘They . . . make them?’ I’ve given up struggling physically, but I can’t even do it psychically now. I can feel him blocking me, like Leon did before. This feeling, this impotence, is unbearable. It fills me with rage – and I’m glad, because I can feel fear in there as well, the threat of absolute terror at whatever fresh abomination has me in its grip. I’d rather rage than fear.

  Freeman nods. ‘Dreams made flesh by the raw energy that fills this world.’

  ‘None of them attacked me, though. Why . . .’

  ‘Here they are benign entities.’ Freeman stands and looks around, appraising the cave like he’s considering buying it. ‘It is only when they emerge in our world that they become bloodthirsty. I use the terms dreams and nightmares for your benefit, you must understand that here they are meaningless. There is no human concept of evil, no idea of terror. A nightmare to you, here is just . . . an object, an entity, a neutral presence. They are harmless apparitions, projections from the minds of the shimmers. They simply exist.’ He walks back towards me and smiles, and there is a curl at the edge of his lip, a sneer. Such contempt. ‘It’s our world that turns them into monsters.’

  ‘What’s holding me, then? Doesn’t feel very benign.’

  ‘It is under my control,’ says Freeman. He laughs. ‘Did you think that little oik Alexander was the only person to work out how to control animals? He can’t even stay conscious while doing it. Honestly, Stanly.’

  ‘Well, Jesus,’ I say. ‘Sorry. But I’ve had rather a lot on my mind of late. Things like being tortured and beaten up, my cousin dying—’

  At that, Freeman has the gall to stop smiling and affect an expression of sympathy, which makes me want to rip out his lungs. ‘Edward? Oh, I’m terribly s—’

  ‘I don’t know if you have any respect for me,’ I say, ‘but if you do, if you have a single shred of it, don’t say you’re sorry. Don’t you dare. You have no right.’

  He nods. ‘Fair enough. You were saying, about having things on your mind?’

  ‘Oh yeah. Well, the biggest one was probably the world ending.’

  ‘It hasn’t ended yet,’ says Freeman. ‘That’s the point. Did you really think I wanted to destroy the whole world?’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t party to the intimate details of your psychotic megalomaniacal breakdown,’ I say. ‘So . . .’ He opens his mouth, but I interrupt him again. ‘But that was not your cue to explain the whole thing to me in excruciating detail. Every second that you chat bollocks, more people in London are dying. So why don’t you just skip to the end and tell me how I stop it? What’s plan B?’

  Freeman laughs. ‘To be honest, a little bit more devastation up there will suit my purposes nicely. There are some fairly high-ranking Angel Group personnel still in London and it’ll be very handy if they’re all crushed into a paste by monsters before I return. It’ll make the clean-up that much easier. Although I wouldn’t mind killing Morter Smith myself, to be honest.’ He’s actually beaming. ‘And surely you want to know how you’ve ended up in this position? I’m sure the curiosity is gnawing away at you.’

  ‘There’s no time.’

  ‘But this is the big climax!’ he grins. ‘The hero and the villain, facing off! The plot revealed! Surely you won’t deny me my big monologue, I thought you loved this sort of thing? You certainly seemed to enjoy it last time, at the Kulich.’

  ‘There’s no time!’ I yell. ‘Just stop it!’ The last two words explode from inside me, manifesting as concentric rings of thought that break through Freeman’s barri
ers and cause him to stumble. The thoughts carry on past him, into the living lake, and for one vertigo-inducing second I can see infinity, a cavern deeper than the universe and filled with memory, and then we’re not underground any more, we’re standing in white space, and Freeman is smiling again and speaking, although it sounds like it’s taking more effort than it should.

  ‘Interesting trick,’ he says, breathing heavily. ‘Trying to get inside my head, are you? That’s a new one . . . you’d make a pretty good shimmer yourself.’

  I didn’t even mean to, I say. Except I don’t say it. It’s just a thought. I try to say I don’t want to be in your head, but again I don’t say it. I don’t understand what’s happening. I can still feel the grip of the black creepers around me, still sense the presence of something monstrous, but right now I don’t seem to be an actual mass. I’m just essence, floating . . . although Freeman seems to be able to see me. What’s going on, I think.

  ‘What’s going on,’ says Freeman, ‘is that I really, really want to tell you the whole story. And not just the once upon a time there was a boy named Stanly bit. I want you to see the whole picture. And maybe doing it this way will make it a bit more exciting, a bit more interactive. Give it a bit of pizzazz. Plus it will also make it more difficult for you to use those pesky powers against me.’

  At least let me talk, then.

  He nods and I try an experimental word. ‘OK.’ OK. ‘So,’ I say. ‘We’re really going to do this.’

  ‘We are.’ Freeman smiles gleefully. ‘Go on. Ask me anything.’

  ‘All right. Why do you want to destroy the Angel Group?

  ‘I don’t,’ he says. ‘I want to unite it. And I want to control it. You see, Stanly, the core of the Angel Group, when you strip away the corporate façade, the sub-committees, the private military arm . . . the part of it that makes the really important decisions, the part that authorised the imprisonment of the empowered and so on, has been dividing and dividing for years, ever since its inception in the late nineteenth century as a private interest group dedicated to the study of supernatural phenomena. And in recent years it has been getting worse. On the one hand we have the traditionalists, the religious fanatics who want it all to come back to God and worship and divine destiny and all that rubbish. They may be less in number than they were even fifty years ago, but trust me, they hold on to their ludicrous and outdated beliefs with a psychotic, iron grip.’ He rolls his eyes, ‘cos we’re two buddies in the pub, putting the world to rights. ‘And on the other hand, we have the likes of Morter Smith. Vicious, pragmatic, devoted to saving the world by whatever means necessary, and well past the point of giving a rat’s posterior about the Biblical side of things. I joined years ago and originally I was on the latter side.’

  Everything flashes and we’re back by the lake. Freeman looks down at it, a pane of gently wobbling living glass, and breathes deeply. ‘Then I started to realise that both sides were wrong. We had the knowledge, the power, the money, the influence and the capability to run this world, to effect real change rather than saving it from behind the scenes, paying lip service to democratic checks and balances. But like most of the bloated, corrupt institutions on this planet, we were drowning in dogma, in bureaucracy, in pathetic self-interest and short-termism. Utterly moronic decisions were being made all the time. It’s amazing the organisation didn’t just collapse in on itself.’ He clears his throat. ‘One thing on which both sides could agree was that the empowered were a liability, an awful risk. So as soon as their numbers started to swell – in tandem with the appearance of monsters and shimmers in various spots around the world, interestingly enough – we started snapping them up, probing them, locking them away. Smith’s final solution was greeted with roars of applause from all sides, a way to stem the flow of monsters and keep the empowered out of the way. His side were worried about them rising up and taking over, the religious side still couldn’t suppress the fear that they were agents of Satan, bless their little ignorant socks.’ He smiles. ‘Whatever your feelings about Morter Smith, you have to admire the ruthless bastard.’

  ‘Get a room.’

  Freeman laughs. ‘Well, anyway.’ He closes his eyes and there is another blue flash, and we’re still in the red underground cave with the golden beach, only I’m absent again, and so is Freeman . . .

  No he’s not . . .

  There is a man there, kneeling at the water’s edge, a man in a suit, and I know it’s Freeman even before my vision whirls around to see his face, but it’s a younger face, a face full of fascination, even wonder. His smile in this time is real. I still want to reach out and strangle him, but unfortunately we seem to be doing that weird non-corporeal brain film thing again.

  Now I hear his older voice again. ‘I discovered this place, you know. I spent years studying the shimmers behind the Group’s back, working out a way to close the gaps between here and our world without enslaving the empowered. I always thought the empowered could be so much more useful than the Group was willing to admit. I never told them that I was empowered, of course.’ A laugh echoes across the years. ‘I thought our kind could be essential. We could use my method of sealing off our world from the shimmer realm, and then use our ludicrous level of influence over the governments of the world, plus our private army, plus another army of superpowered soldiers, to bring order to the place. Actual, genuine order. Not the pathetic, unstable, trembling excuse for structure we have at the moment, always thirty seconds away from collapsing into anarchy.’

  We’re somewhere else now, a big grey room with a long grey table behind which sit many distinguished-looking men and women in grey suits. Younger Freeman stands addressing them silently, his lips moving but no sound coming out. The voice I hear is older and comes from everywhere. ‘Obviously my idea was laughed out of the room, because traditionally having a shred of imagination is frowned upon within the Angel Group. Smith’s was unanimously approved. I pretended to forget about it. But it kept preying on my mind, and then one day Pandora approached me about a meeting.’ I see Pandora, who looks barely a week younger than she did the last time I saw her, talking quietly with younger Freeman over a drink. ‘She said she was extremely interested in my idea, and that she was prepared to use her authority to lay the groundwork for its implementation. By now the majority of the empowered that we’d discovered had been plugged into Smith’s machines, but there were a few that I’d discovered during my tenure and . . . “neglected” to inform the Group about . . . and I set about meeting them, one by one, and setting them little tests.’

  ‘Tests?’ Ooh look, I can speak again. I see flashes, a younger Sharon, her hair a dirty-blonde dye job, a younger Eddie, his hair a dark mop much like mine at sixteen, Connor, already chiselled and handsome. I see each of them speaking with Freeman, their eyes all nervous and distrustful, and God the déjà vu . . . there are others too, a few I don’t recognise. ‘You sent them to fight monsters,’ I say. ‘Confused teenagers!’

  ‘The ones who survived deserved to,’ says Freeman. We’re back in what I think is reality, him standing with his hands folded behind his back, staring out at the lake, me hanging in the air, a captive audience. ‘The ones who didn’t . . . didn’t. I approved a very select few, and Pandora managed to hold Smith and his dogs off from capturing them, for various unspecified reasons. Very handy that she outranked him, she could tell him to jump and he’d have no choice but to ask how high.’ He smiles. ‘She really has excelled herself. All to be part of my new order. Quite a partnership.’

  ‘Oh, she’s actually dead now, by the way.’ Pandora’s corpse flickers momentarily on the beach and Freeman glances down at it, although he appears unmoved.

  ‘Oh?’ he says. ‘Shame. She was really quite excited about ruling the world.’

  ‘Where do I come into this?’

  ‘Ah,’ Freeman grins. ‘Now the meat of it!’ He’s loving this. Every second of it, his villain monologue, telli
ng me exactly how much of a Machiavellian shitbag he is, while my world burns. ‘When you came on the scene, I couldn’t believe my luck. The most gifted empowered we’d seen since recruiting that dead-eyed sociopath Leon, and you were right under my nose. The cousin of one of my other projects, no less.’

  ‘Don’t you dare talk about—’

  ‘Edward? I’m sorry to hear about his death, I really am. But he was always too stubborn, too untrusting. He would never have made the team. You, however . . . what a find. Impressionable, scared, in dire need of a mysterious mentor figure.’

  ‘You fu—’

  ‘Shh.’ He draws a finger to his lips. ‘Daryl told me everything I needed to know about you. Entirely innocently, of course, he really did love to talk about you. You’ve made quite an impression on that beagle.’ He smiles, as if to say how sweet. It makes me want to puke, although at the same time, thinking of Daryl does make me feel a little better. It gives me some strength. ‘Stanly Bird,’ says Freeman. ‘Loner, outsider, a media child in love with heroism and stories and pure, basic, simple good versus evil, despite the cynical façade he likes to put up. A superhero in the making.’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ I say. ‘We’re not so different, you and I. We’re two sides of the same coin.’

  ‘Not at all,’ says Freeman. He sounds amused by the idea. ‘We’re very, very different. You’re an idealistic child who’s not as bright as he thinks he is. I’m a ruthlessly pragmatic genius who is probably even brighter than he thinks he is.’

  ‘You’re a maniac. You’re . . .’

  ‘The bad guy?’ he says. ‘If that helps you to make sense of this whole thing, then yes I am. I’m the villain, you’re the hero. And you’d be amazed how easy a hero is to manipulate.’ He looks at me, locking eyes with a sudden, fierce intensity. ‘Or maybe you wouldn’t.’ I can see myself now, in a series of rhythmic flashes. Early flight in the woods, slamming my bedroom door and knocking things over with angry, involuntary thoughts. Things he couldn’t have seen, but it’s like he’s drawing them out of my head, projecting them for us, my very own ‘previously’ montage. Now I see London, our first meeting, and we’re actually standing there, side-by-side, as we were, and he is looking at me and speaking, although the words are not the words he used at the time. ‘I told you enough about the Angel Group to make them the bad guys. Enough that there was no way you’d ever change your mind, even if someone gave you some evidence. That’s why I sent that assassin Masters after you, with Smith’s name in his head of course.’