Ace of Spiders

by Stefan Mohamed

  I desperately try to think of something, grasping at straws, picking at the logic, even though I know that it’s pointless, that he has me. ‘But the empowered,’ I say. ‘They’re all damaged beyond repair, vegetables or insane or worse! So much for your army of superpowered people!’

  ‘Not beyond repair,’ says Freeman. ‘I can help them. People can almost always be fixed.’

  ‘It’ll take time, though! Can your new world order afford to wait that long? And I took apart half the Angel Group’s soldiers, even before the monsters started coming!’

  He shrugs. ‘They’ll live. And broken bones can be fixed with a thought.’

  ‘But if I could take them all down by myself—’

  ‘Why do you think they keep spectacularly failing to kill you?’ asks Freeman, as though I’m an irretrievable dunce. ‘Pandora and I started recruiting a long time ago.’

  I keep struggling, but whatever monster Freeman’s controlling keeps my body maddeningly in place, and the grand puppet master keeps my powers at bay. He shakes his head. ‘Honestly, Stanly. Resistance is quite literally futile. You want to save the world, this is the price you pay. It’s a shame but . . . that’s the way this particular story goes.’ There might be sympathy behind the self-satisfaction, it’s hard to tell. ‘You don’t belong in that world anyway,’ he says. ‘Not in the real world. A young man with the powers of a god? How could you ever . . .’ In a flash, his smug expression is blown apart, and the fragments re-shape to form anger and disbelief. ‘You!’ he cries.

  I can feel things happening behind me, fighting, snapping. My unseen captor lets go of me and I’m flung forwards, knocking right into Freeman. The two of us sprawl on the sand and I roll over onto my back and look up, and up, and up, and up. My skin frosts over. ‘Holy spider,’ I whisper.

  Chapter Thirty

  I THOUGHT THAT I’D got pretty used to big and horrible in the last few hours, but the monster standing in front of me now, looming over the doorway through which I entered the cave . . . well, it’s not the biggest, but in terms of horrible, it makes the green tentacled blob look downright huggable. Its eight huge legs are jet black, its bloated red body dripping with slime, and it has twenty glassy hubcap-sized eyes and shining metallic pincers in front of a horrendous dribbling mouth. It’s roughly the size of the blue dog, and it makes me want to shit my soul out of my body. The black creeper things that were holding me are like thin tentacles snaking out from the sides of its fat, awful head, and they’re writhing around trying to fend off someone who I’ve never been more glad to see. ‘Daryl!’ I cry. ‘You fucking legend!’

  The great spider is fully occupied trying to attack Daryl as he rushes in and out of its many legs, biting at its soft spots every chance he gets. ‘Freeman!’ he yells, between bites. ‘How long have you been empowered, you lying shit heel? And how come I didn’t pick up on it?’

  ‘I’ve been planning this for years,’ sneers Freeman. ‘It’s my masterwork. I wasn’t about to let myself get rumbled by a beagle. There are ways of hiding—’

  ‘Shut up,’ I say, flying to my feet. Freeman jumps up too, his thin face stretched and grim, and we face each other and attack simultaneously. Neither of us moves but our minds erupt, spitting fury. I visualise lightning and fire and bullets and arrows, bright flashes of psychic violence, deadly fireworks, and Freeman counters, teeth gritted, filling my head with pain. I don’t let it stop me, though, I turn it around, throw it back at him, his own imaginary sword clashing against his shield and causing blue and red sparks to fly. I can sense what’s happening behind me, Daryl running rings around the spider, and out of the corner of my eye I see him rip into one of its legs. It staggers, not making any noise apart from the constant frenzied clickclickclickclick of its pincers, and I think of a nuclear mushroom cloud and launch it in Freeman’s direction, fire hotter than the very centre of the angriest sun. I think of asteroids, an express train, an anvil plunging from the sky towards some hapless cartoon, and draw it all together into a hurricane of colour and light, hundreds of flaming multicoloured spirals, the jaws of an immense, god-like wolf, the bite and venom of the world serpent, and I send it hurtling, bellowing at Freeman, everything I’ve endured over the last few days, the pain and the rage and the violence, Eddie, Eddie, I see him, a spectral warrior manifestation of my cousin, like a Patronus, and my attack hits home and Freeman staggers, his nose and ears letting loose little sprays of blood. I grip him and think lift, taking him up into the air, and I think PAIN and he screams, clutching at himself, at the thousands of imaginary tortures I’m visiting on him, plunging down every artery, lighting up every nerve ending. He screams from the very depths of his soul, or whatever he has in place of one, and as I watch him writhe around in agony I conjure more, thinking of all the deaths he’s caused, everything I’ve done because of him, thinking of Tara and Kloe alone in the dark of the woods, of his threat to kill them, of Lauren plugged into that goddamn machine, of Eddie lying dead in the rubble, the city falling to pieces. I gather every last shard of pain that has been visited upon me and the ones I love and I give it right back to Mr Freeman in kind. I know I can’t kill him, I can’t risk it, but by God I owe him this before I let him go, this is the least that I owe him. He’s turning scarlet, screeching at a blood-chilling pitch, only my blood isn’t cold, it’s hot, hot with delight, basking in revenge. I can hear Daryl yelling for me to stop but I don’t care, he’s busy with the spider anyway, and suddenly I realise that I’m not actually scared of it, I don’t care about the spider, I’ll kill it with my bare hands if Daryl can’t finish the job, I’ll kill it and then I’ll kill a hundred more, I don’t care about any monsters in fact, there’s nothing to be scared of, not death, not beasts, and especially not this puppet-mastering motherf—

  ‘STANLY!’ yells Daryl. It makes me shake and I stop and look at him. He’s killed the spider, it’s slumped in a great stinking heap of broken legs, and Daryl is standing in front of it, shaking his head. ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Do you know what they did to me?’ I ask. ‘They tortured me. Got inside my head. I thought I’d been shot. I thought I’d had my hand cut off. I hung there powerless while Smith did what he wanted. All because of Freeman. Look at what he’s done! Everyone he’s killed! He deserves to hurt.’

  ‘He does,’ says Daryl. ‘But you’re not a murderer. Let him go. He’ll answer for what he’s done.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to kill him. Trust me. Just some fun torture.’

  ‘Stanly. Please. It’s not you. It’s not who you are.’

  ‘You don’t know that,’ I say. ‘I don’t even know that. Not any more.’ And I mean it. I don’t have the faintest clue who I am at this point. I’m shaking, my breaths big and painful. I let Freeman drop to his knees on the sand and he moans in pain . . . then he mutters something.

  ‘Tick tock, Stanly. The world is still ending.’ He looks up at me, his eyes weakened but still defiant. ‘The shimmers demand a sacrifice.’

  ‘Then they’ll have one.’ To hell with letting him go. I’ll feed him to the shimmers, and then I will fly to the forest and rescue Tara and Kloe and kill anyone who tries to come near them. I will fill their brains with insanity and snap their necks before they can get within a hundred feet of my family. I’m not playing his games. His ultimatums, his traps, his Rube Goldberg schemes, he can shove them up his arse because I am not playing. I pick him up again, twirl him, hold his face about an inch from the blue lake and close my eyes, letting the fury subside, letting my mind drift. Almost instantly I can feel them, thousands of strange minds clustered together, barely aware of what’s been happening, the meaning of the power that’s been unleashed. They feel the power, yes. But they haven’t the faintest inkling of what it signifies.

  Take him, I think. He has power. Take him. Take him and leave my world. Please.

  Ripples of thought, of . . . is it discussion? I can’t tell. Then a response. No. Not
the word, more like the idea of the word . . . and not just that . . . the reason is there too.

  He was telling the truth.

  He’s not powerful enough.

  What about me then, I think, without pausing, because to pause would be to comprehend what’s going to happen, and I’m not sure I want to do that. Will I do? Take me, everything in me, all my power. Keep me here forever. But leave my world alone. Seal yourselves off.

  More of those abstract waves of cognition, cool and blue inside my head . . . and then they say yes and my heart drops to the very pit of my stomach. Thank you, I think, and I bring myself back to my body. I turn to Daryl. Somehow, he knows. ‘It has to be me,’ I say.

  ‘What?’ The disbelief in his voice makes my guts lurch. ‘No. That can’t be—’

  ‘Daryl,’ I say. ‘It’s the only way.’ I drag Freeman back from the water and throw him across the beach. He lands on his back by the cave exit, next to the corpse of the massive spider, and sits there, rubbing his eyes. ‘Looks like you were right,’ I say. ‘I’m the only one who can do it.’

  Freeman stands up, straightens his tie and nods. ‘I’m sorry, Stanly.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say.

  ‘I want you to know that it was never personal,’ says Freeman. ‘I never hated you. You truly are a fine young man, possibly the only individual I’ve ever met worthy of the word hero. I salute your bravery. And I swear that Kloe and Tara—’

  Daryl moves so fast that I don’t even have time to think about stopping him. Neither does Freeman. The dog is just a blur of white flying straight at him, and with one snarling movement he rips the man’s throat out, spraying both their faces with blood. Freeman’s eyes bulge, his face clouds over in disbelief, then he gurgles up a flood of dark red and collapses to the ground, twitching. Daryl stands over him, panting, and spits out bloody flesh. ‘Daryl!’ I yell. ‘No! No!’

  ‘What? What’s—’

  ‘Kloe and Tara!’ I drop to my knees next to Freeman and roll him over. ‘He said someone’s going to kill them! If he doesn’t get out of here . . .’

  ‘Oh God . . . Stanly, I . . .’

  ‘Shh. Be quiet, please.’ I stare at Freeman. The life is leaving him, I can see it, I can feel it, and I can’t let it. I can’t let him die. I can’t lose Kloe and Tara too, I’m weak and not a hero and I need them to be alive even if I can never see them again, no matter the cost. I concentrate on the blood, the torn flesh, the ruptured veins. I let my brain find its way in, see the mechanisms, how everything should work, how it’s been damaged, how it can work again . . . got to do it, do it fast, do it now, no time, NO TIME . . .

  And, hating myself, I bring him back to life. Again. He sits up, gasping, clutching his repaired throat, looking wildly from me to Daryl. ‘He . . . I . . .’

  ‘Shut up,’ I say. ‘Shut your mouth. And listen. I’m going to stay here. I’m going to give myself to the shimmers. And you’re going back to London.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘I said shut up,’ I say. ‘This is the deal. Tara and Kloe will not be harmed. My friends will not be harmed. If they are, I will know. I knew to find Kloe in the park that time, and I knew to go to that alleyway to meet Smiley Joe, to save Tara. I knew, without knowing. And if you hurt the people I love, I’ll know that too. Even in here, asleep, I will know. And I will tear my way back through, and I will rain a fresh apocalypse down on you. Whatever new world you think you’re going to build, I will burn it down. It will burn. And so will you. Do you understand?’

  He nods.

  ‘Now get out,’ I say. ‘Get the hell out and don’t say one word to me.’

  Freeman nods again, scrambles to his feet and leaves the cave. Daryl watches him go, looking away from me, staring. ‘Daryl,’ I say. He doesn’t answer. ‘Daryl, look at me.’

  He turns slowly. ‘It’s OK,’ I say.

  The dog shakes his head. ‘No it’s not,’ he says, his voice catching in his throat. ‘No it’s not! I should have . . . I came to save you.’

  ‘You did,’ I say. ‘You saved me from . . . having to do this alone. You’re with me. That’s the best thing.’

  ‘It’s not fair, though.’ He’s crying. ‘It’s not fair!’

  I shrug. ‘Did you expect it to be?’

  He can’t answer that. He just shakes his head. ‘It’s not fair.’ I kneel down and he comes to me and I hug his bloodstained white body to mine.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘You’re my best friend.’

  ‘I never had a better one,’ he whispers.

  ‘Please,’ I say. ‘I need to get this done, so listen. I have things . . . things you need to do. Freeman might leave you guys alone. After all, none of us has any proof of what he’s done. So he might not see us as that much of a threat. But you need to keep an eye on him. I don’t know what kind of world he’s planning on creating . . . you need to watch. You need to look after everybody.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘And Kloe,’ I say. ‘You need to find her, and Tara.’ I think the forest into his brain. ‘Tell Kloe that I love her, and that I’m so, so sorry. Sorry for not keeping my promise. Explain why. Help her understand.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Tell them all.’ My parents’ faces appear in my mind, first like a mirage and then clear as day, Mum and Dad leading me around the garden, little chubby child me, barely stable on brand new legs.

  ‘I will,’ Daryl says, again. ‘I promise.’

  The embrace is broken. I stand up, look at the cave wall and think show me the real world, and the rock seems to melt, forming an indistinct impression of the Kulich gallery beyond. ‘Go,’ I say. ‘Before there’s no way back. Go now.’

  Daryl runs to the window I’ve created. He looks back briefly and smiles through tears, human tears from canine eyes. ‘Here’s looking at you, kid.’

  I actually manage a laugh, and then he is gone, and so is the exit. I turn back to the vast lake, silent but deafening with thought, and I walk towards it, into it, letting the water that isn’t water cover me over, trying not to think about how goddamn weird this is. It’s just water. Just pretend it’s water. I can, almost, and it’s so cool, so comfortable, so refreshing. Such relief.

  Please give me good dreams.

  Their reply is like whale song and xylophones. No words, just an alien melody and a meaning behind it that I feel in a place beyond my consciousness, beyond my heart. It fills me to the brim with hope and joy and I close my eyes. Journey’s end. I’ve run the miles, and now I can sleep.

  I think thank you.

  Smile.

  Float away . . .

  ???????????????????????????????????????????

  The sun shines on, bright as new life, bright as love. I smile, marvelling at the pathetic fallacy, the poetry that drips from the sky as I stand on the bank of the lake, my bare feet enveloped in cool damp grass. I watch little colourful birds hop and skip across the surface, pecking at wily, unseen fish. I watch the sunlight create patterns in the water, a benevolent breeze massaging the thick green leaves in the trees. I feel an arm slip around my waist and don’t look at her for a second because I want the moment when my eyes fall on her to be perfect, I want the anticipation to build. It doesn’t last long. I can’t help myself. I look into her eyes and they are sparkling and gorgeous, she stands there in a flowing white and red summer dress, her hair blowing out behind her like music, her lips rosy, smiling. She kisses me and it’s like coming back to life, and I take her in my arms and let her magic warm me up. I love you, I think.

  I love you, she replies.

  And another arm around my waist, my little girl, giggling and delighted, her blonde hair in curls. I scoop her up and hold her even though she’s heavy, and she kisses me on the cheek and beams. ‘Love you, Daddy.’

  ‘Love you too, little ’un,’ I grin.

  ‘Can we fly today
?’

  ‘I expect that can be arranged.’

  ‘You said you’d teach me too,’ says Kloe.

  ‘Seems as good a time as any.’ I put Tara down and grab her and Kloe’s hands tight. ‘Just follow my lead. It’s easy.’

  ‘Show-off,’ says Kloe, a teasing smile playing across her lips.

  ‘He is such a show-off,’ says Tara.

  ‘I honestly don’t know why we put up with it.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘If you guys are quite finished?’ I say.

  They giggle and nod.

  ‘Good,’ I say, unable to resist a laugh of my own. ‘Then let’s go.’

  And we take off together and fly towards infinity, and the sun shines on, and everything is as it should be.

  THE END