by Al Ewing
New York had the most interesting men of any city in the world, and she was building up rather a varied set.
And of course, there was the other one.
The most interesting of them all.
As if in answer to her thoughts, the phone rang. She smiled as she picked up the earpiece, a thrilling premonition dancing its way down her spine.
She was not disappointed.
"Ms. Lang... you're needed." A click, and the line went dead. To-night, it seemed, the Blood-Spider was in no mood to mince words.
Enjoying the secret shiver of anticipation building inside her, Marlene stood, unhooked the nightgown and let it puddle around her feet, and then went to the wardrobe where the sleek black uniform waited for her.
Less than forty minutes later, her body caressed and hugged by the tight leather of her chauffeur's costume, her long legs flexing as she pressed her foot down on the accelerator, she guided the Silver Ghost through the twisting traffic of New York City.
The Blood-Spider was quiet in the passenger seat - more so than usual. His expressionless lenses stared straight ahead, and aside from a curt mention of their destination there had not even been the slightest word to her as she powered through the streets in the purring machine, startling horses and rickshaw drivers and astonishing passers-by.
"What's the matter?" she heard herself say.
A pause. So long that she assumed he was simply ignoring her. Finally, he spoke.
"We have... urgent business. Business that cannot be ignored."
"What kind of business?" she asked, before she could stop herself. She was on dangerous ground here, she knew. He was obviously in no mood to talk. And yet, something in her could not help but poke and pick at his looming, oppressive silence.
Again, a long pause. Then he turned his head, staring at her with those unreadable, blank lenses.
"Perhaps... the end of the Blood-Spider."
The roof of the hospital was flat and barren, in large part taken up by a large metallic structure, a lattice of steel and copper that looked like an Eiffel Tower in miniature. It was designed to absorb lightning strikes and bring them harmlessly to earth, so neighbouring structures were not damaged. Occasionally, the staff of the hospital would come up here to smoke. The hospital was a good ten stories high, and the view, while not spectacular, was certainly worth the trip from the lower floors. On a night like tonight, however - with the setting sun shrouded in dark cloud and a fierce rain already descending - there was nobody who would bother making the long trek up the maintenance stairs.
Almost nobody.
The maintenance exit leading onto the roof opened with a creak, and the man who for the past two-and-a-bit years had answered to the name Doctor Miles Hamilton shuffled out. He leant on his cane, turning his head and checking the roof was quite empty. Then he stood straight, taking the weight fully on his legs, the years seeming to fall from him in an instant. The rain was falling heavily now, but he didn't seem to notice.
Events were moving towards the endgame. Parker Crane would be on his way, and everything he'd worked for the past three years would be set into motion. Had he been capable of it, he would have smiled. Instead, his face shifted and bubbled as the rain fell from above, lashing at his skin, washing away the expertly-applied makeup that so perfectly duplicated the skin tone of Doctor Hamilton and leaving in its place a sickening bluish whiteness, like the flesh of some corpse-fish from the ocean's deepest trench. The dye washed from his hair in a grey river, leaving it pure white, and his emotionless mask began to slacken, the features sliding and slackening, until the face staring out over the city resembled nothing more than a wax sculpture that had been left close to a furnace. A sickening parody of a face, made all the more horrible by the utter absence of any recognisable expression.
As the man without a face gazed over the city, he emitted a series of short, wheezing exhalations, akin to a man doing violent exercises - stomach crunches, perhaps. "Hhh! Hnnhh! Hhh!" Short little gasps, barely audible against the drumming of the rain on the roof.
Anton Venger was attempting to laugh.
He heard the creak of the maintenance door, and turned, speaking in the rasping monotone that was his natural voice once all pretence had been stripped away. "Mister Crane. I'm sorry to have contacted you at such short notice-"
He froze.
The man who'd just entered through the maintenance door laughed, his eyes dancing behind his blood-red mask, and Venger felt an icy chill in the marrow of his bones.
"No problem, amigo. Only too happy to be here." El Sombra said.
He smiled.
Venger gripped the handle of his cane tightly, pressing a concealed button with his thumb. A three-inch blade popped from the very tip of it, glistening slickly with some foul unguent. "A deadly poison, extracted from the Amazonian tree frog. One cut and you'll die slowly and in the most hideous agony the mind could possibly conceive."
El Sombra drew his sword from his belt. "I don't know any tree frogs, amigo, but one cut from this and you'll die fast, I guarantee. Mostly because I'm going to cut off that ugly head of yours and sculpt it into a gargoyle. Or maybe a vase for flowers."
Venger's top lip twitched, and a pulsation ran across his quivering, pallid flesh. On another man, it would have been a smirk. "You can try..."
There was a low rumble of thunder.
"We're here."
Marlene frowned, applying the brakes and bringing the Silver Ghost to a halt. The Blood-Spider opened the door and stepped out, walking purposefully into an alleyway near the hospital.
"You can't just leave it at that! The end of the Blood-Spider?" She could not keep the anxiety out of her voice. She realised that she had childishly assumed that this would be forever, or at least until she got bored of it and moved on to something else. To have the end of all of it dangled so casually in her face like this was more than she could stand.
The Spider turned, his mask betraying not the slightest hint of emotion. Again, the lenses gazed into her, seemingly reading her slightest thought. "Go home, Ms. Lang."
Marlene pouted. "Damn you! You can't just dismiss me like-"
"For your own protection. Take the car, go home, and pack a suitcase with essentials."
She fell silent. Suddenly, she realised how seriously she should have been taking this. "What happened?" Her voice sounded small and frightened.
"Up on that roof, there is a man who knows my secrets. Perhaps all of them. Perhaps all of yours. If I do not contact you by midnight... leave this city. Find somewhere to hide, and pray you can hide well. I will contact you in good time." The hiss of his voice sounded almost compassionate.
Marlene swallowed, her heart beating in her ears. "What... what if you don't?"
"Then the Blood-Spider is dead."
He turned and walked into the darkness of the alley, and was gone.
On the roof, El Sombra's sword clashed against Venger's cane as lightning arced across the sky.
Anton Venger had been an accomplished swordsman before his disfigurement, and the poison cane had been a favourite trick of his during his days as N.I.G.H.T.M.A.R.E.'s top undercover agent. He'd lost none of his skills in the intervening years. If anything, the madness that had infected his brain after the loss of his good looks had only added an extra dimension to his prowess. The tiny blade at the end of the cane flashed and darted, each time coming less than an inch from piercing the flesh of his half-naked opponent with a deadly sting.
But if any man knew about the subtle art of madness used as a weapon, it was El Sombra.
Once upon a time, he had been Djego the poet, a shiftless layabout hiding behind a tissue-thin veneer of pretension. Then the bastards - the Nazis - had come to his little town, razing it to the ground and rebuilding it as a clockwork nightmare, a grotesque experiment designed to create a strain of human robots. Djego's mind had fractured under the stress of losing everyone he had ever loved, as well as the influence of a strain of unknown psychedelic h
e had encountered in the desert after fleeing the scene of the massacre. Out of that madness had emerged his second personality - the Saint Of Ghosts, El Sombra, the shadow-self that existed to perform a single task: to take revenge on all who had wronged him.
Mostly, that revenge consisted of a quest to murder as many Nazis as humanly possible on a bloody trail that would lead to the king of them all - the insane brain of Adolf Hitler, now housed inside a gigantic steam-powered robot deep within a secret chamber at the very heart of Berlin.
He'd heard, on his travels, about North America's infestation by Untergang; the destabilisation agency put in place by Hitler himself, experimenting in 'asymmetrical warfare', after his doomed Russian campaign. Nobody could prove that the terrorist organisation was run via orders from the Fatherland, and Germany denied everything, of course. El Sombra had decided it was worth looking into.
He'd found out a number of things already. Interrogating - some would say torturing - his way up the ladder of command had led him to Heinrich Donner, the organisation's disgraced ex-chief. But the real find had been the secret journal in Donner's bedroom.
The one that explained everything.
Well, not quite everything - who explains everything to themselves in their diary? - but enough. More than enough.
It had led him to the Jameson Club, and while investigating to see just how that fitted into the puzzle, he'd overheard Parker Crane and his telegram. And that had brought him here, to clash a razor-sharp sword against a deadly poison cane, battling for his life against a man with a molten face and crazed, wild eyes, dangerously close to a huge lightning rod in the midst of a raging storm.
Sometimes, life was good.
"So what brings you here, amigo?" Again, the sword and the cane clashed together, the sword-hilt locking with the cane's head as El Sombra leaned close for a moment before pirouetting back and slashing in a wide arc, only to have the blow parried expertly by the other man. Neither of them seemed to blink.
"The reason why?" Venger laughed again - that peculiar expulsion of air in short, guttural bursts - and then lunged, the point of his blade barely missing El Sombra's abdominals. Then his eyes, the only part of him capable of expression, grew hard and cold, like two small stones in a sea of shapeless clay. "My ugly. My disease. My love... and all my lover's revenge."
"You and me could write a bad romance, my friend." El Sombra murmured, blade flashing, clashing, deflecting the poison point as it sought out the weakness in his defence, the eye of the needle that would send the Saint Of Ghosts prematurely to the kingdom of heaven. As the dance of sword and cane went on, the two men circled, feet shifting warily. El Sombra did not realise his back was to the huge lightning conductor until it was too late.
"I don't want to be friends!" Venger lunged forward suddenly, the deadly point of the blade aimed right for El Sombra's heart, putting him on the defensive and forcing him to take a step back. But he had nowhere to go. His only option was to clamber backwards up onto the metal structure.
Now, he mused, he had the advantage of height. The advantage of height, and also the advantage of being fried like a strip of bacon at any moment.
The thunder roared in his ears.
Doc Thunder and Maya burst through the front doors of the hospital, looking at the bustling activity. It was the second night in a row he'd entered like this, and the staff instinctively looked to see if he was holding any dying people in his arms. When they saw his hands were empty, they breathed sighs of relief.
"Can I help you, Sir?" the receptionist said, doing her best to smile.
"Maya, go and check on Monk." murmured Doc, before turning his attention to the woman sitting in front of him. "Hamilton. Doctor Miles Hamilton. I need to see him urgently." He thought for a moment. He couldn't let Venger suspect, and he needed an excuse that would bring him running... "I want to donate more blood."
The receptionist smiled. "All right, sir. He's on a break at the moment. I think he's gone up to the roof." Doc turned, walking towards the exit. "Sir, I can send an orderly to fetch him."
"It's all right, I'll go see him myself." Doc smiled, tightly.
"But the stairs to the roof are that way."
"Oh, I'm not taking the stairs." Doc smiled again, stepping out into the street. "I'm going to take the quick way."
Then he jumped.
The Blood-Spider climbed slowly up the side of the rain-slicked wall, looking like nothing so much as a human spider slowly closing in on the fly at the centre of the web. Despite the rain, the suction cups held fast, as he knew they would. He'd done this before, many times, and it was the last thing Doctor Hamilton would expect.
His plan could be summed up in one word - fear.
The Doctor would be waiting on the roof, watching the maintenance door. When the Blood-Spider appeared behind him, seemingly from nowhere, he'd be much more inclined to talk about exactly how he'd discovered the Spider's true identity, and what that strange 'other interest' comment in the telegram meant. Blackmail, perhaps? Was the good Doctor intending to sell the Blood-Spider's darkest secrets to the highest bidder?
If so, he would learn to his cost that there was far more to the Spider than he could possibly suspect... before he died screaming for mercy.
The eyes behind the implacable lenses narrowed as the Blood-Spider climbed higher. There could be no mercy offered in this matter. To have his secrets revealed would jeopardise the cause - his holy quest to cleanse New York of the inhumans. The criminals. His trigger fingers burned again, the itch nagging at him under his gloves. It had been a very long time since he'd shot anyone.
He was close to the rooftop now, and suddenly, between the cracks of thunder filling the raging sky, he could hear the clang of steel on steel. The clash of swords.
Carefully, he peered over the edge of the rooftop.
There were two men on the roof, one with a sword, the other with some sort of trick cane. The one with a cane had a face bleached blue-white, sagging like unfired clay, a grotesque monster by any reckoning. And yet it was the other who caught the Spider's eye; the man with the sword. A half-naked Mexican man, dressed only in black tuxedo pants, with a red sash tied around his face, forming a mask over his eyes.
The sword killer. The vigilante who'd been such a thorn in Untergang's side. Was this the murderer of Heinrich Donner?
What was he doing here? How was he involved?
The Blood-Spider watched, fascinated, as the swordsman leapt off the metal structure, somersaulting over his enemy just as a bolt of lightning crashed into the metal attractor, missing him by inches and lighting up the whole rooftop in brilliant white electric light. In the light, the Spider realised that the man with the half-melted face was wearing Doctor Hamilton's uniform. Had he stolen it? No, that was the Doctor, or the Doctor was that, had been that thing, all along. How and why?
There would be time to answer such questions later. For now, all the Blood-Spider saw was the killer he had been hunting and the man who had attempted to blackmail him in a life-and-death struggle, with a crackling lightning conductor on one side and a ten-story drop on the other.
Supporting himself with the suction cups on his toes, he drew one of his automatic pistols, removing a silencer from his belt with the other hand. Then he began screwing it in place.
It was only a question of who to kill first.
El Sombra turned, deflecting the deadly cane as it sailed within a millimetre of his throat. He'd managed to score a couple of hits on his enemy - he'd slashed Venger's long white hospital coat open, and even drawn blood with a light scratch on his arm - but he was nowhere close to ending this fight. Venger was simply too skilful. And, unlike El Sombra's non-poisoned sword, his cane only needed to strike once. The smallest scratch would kill him. He couldn't afford to be distracted for a single second.
So it was unfortunate that Doc Thunder chose that exact moment to land on the hospital's roof.
His immense body landed with a crash that shook the whole roo
f, distracting El Sombra for a single, vital second - enough time for Venger to lunge forward, the point of the cane-dagger slashing across the masked man's cheek. Instantly, El Sombra felt a wave of weakness as the poison rushed into his bloodstream. He staggered.
"You're too late, Thunder," Venger spat in his cold, cruel monotone. "I don't know how you found out about this little meeting, but you're too late to save your friend. My poison is even now working through his bloodstream. Within moments, he'll die. Die in unendurable pain."
El Sombra fell to his knees, the pain already beginning. But there was no sympathy in the Doc's eyes. That piercing blue was as cold as steel.
"He's no friend of mine, Venger. This is the man who left someone very important to me downstairs in that hospital with four bullets in him."
El Sombra opened his mouth, trying to speak, trying to shake his head. Bullets?
Doc Thunder scowled. "I honestly don't care if this piece of trash lives or dies."
Chapter Ten
Doc Thunder and The Saint of Ghosts
"This is the man who left someone very important to me downstairs in that hospital with four bullets in him. I honestly don't care if this piece of trash lives or dies."
Yes, it was him, all right. Red mask, crazy eyes. This was the man who'd done his damnedest to murder his best friend. No doubt about it, this was who Monk had been talking about. And yet...