by Neil Kleid
Christina hated running in heels, and this was the first time she’d headed home so late or alone. The party had run long, and she had an early call. She’d made her excuses and headed out, hoping to catch a train without damaging either purse or outfit. She didn’t have an umbrella, having left it at home that morning without checking the weather, and she refused to part with five dollars to buy one from the guys hawking them along the street. So she’d pulled the paper from her bag, draped it over her head, and run like hell.
“Stupid, stinking weather,” she cursed out loud. Her heels splashed into pools of water as she stepped from the curb to cross Eighth Avenue, feeling like a drowned rat. The rain intensified, chattering against the ground like machine-gun fire. She slipped in the street while racing to beat the light; the newspaper fluttered above her head, sending a shower of water down her back, into her hair and collar.
“Stupid, stinking rain! I hate it, I just—”
Something darted across her path, splashing in the pools around her feet—something small with long ears, wet whiskers, and a sleek, furry coat attached to a thin, whip-like tail. Christina pulled away in revulsion and twisted to avoid stepping on the Manhattan sewer rat. She tripped, and the newspaper flew out of her hand as she fell to the ground, striking her head on the street next to a closed manhole.
Groggy, head throbbing from the force of the blow, Christina scrambled to regain her footing in case a car came tearing around the corner. She grabbed for her purse, her paper. She lifted herself to one elbow, mentally cursing the errant rat, his rat parents and kids, and all his rat neighbors and drinking buddies. She hoped one day that the Bugle declared rats to be a menace to society, like they did to Spider-Man on a regular basis. She tried to stand, face and side stinging from the fall and the coursing, driving, pounding rain—but suddenly, Christina felt something that really made her shiver.
Fingers, thin and powerful, gripped her right ankle.
Heart fluttering, headache magnifying, she turned and saw that the manhole at her feet had opened wide. A wet, muscular, arm reached out to grab her leg. Too frightened to scream for help, Christina dug her nails into the street and desperately struggled to escape the clutching, clawing fingers digging into her skin. But someone, something, slowly began to drag her toward the waiting sewer, pulling her, inch by inch, down below Manhattan’s streets. After a moment, she found her voice and wailed into the night, but the time for rescue had passed. Christina slid, kicking and fighting, through the manhole and down a short, metal ladder to the sewers below.
She blacked out for a while; when she opened her eyes again, she couldn’t be sure how long she’d been out. She looked around, taking in mildewed walls, rusted pipes, and a thick, viscous river of toxic sludge. Directly across the way, a curious nest of rats skittered to and fro along a series of low steps, surveying Christina in silence with beady, scarlet eyes. She shrank back against the wall, shivering, and turned to grab the ladder to climb out. But the ladder was nowhere to be found.
Someone had moved her; no doubt the man—or thing—that had dragged her down into the sewers. Heart jackhammering against her chest, Christina got to her feet, using the wall to support herself, and wildly looked for an exit of some kind. Her broken heel scraped along the cement, and something large moved in the darkness, splashing toward her in the filth and slime. A soft hiss echoed in the dimly lit tunnel, caroming around the walls as the stranger edged toward her. Christina squinted as best she could, trying to get a clear view of her attacker.
“He…hello?” she asked. “Who’s there?”
Hunched and hissing, the shadowy creature slunk closer, thick legs moving through the waste, making colorful ripples in the deadly stream. Softly, faintly, the hissing turned into words, only some of which she understood.
“…look at this one,” the thing said in a sibilant whisper. “With her funny clothes and sssweet smell…”
Christina tried to get the creature’s attention again. “Who are you? Who’s there?” But if it heard her, it decided not to respond, continuing instead with its strange, childlike monologue.
“Perfume, I think that’s what they call it. A mask in a bottle.” The creature giggled and splashed forward. Dim light revealed only its eerie red eyes and tiny, sharp teeth—teeth like those of the rats across the way, the multiple attendants to Christina’s dawning nightmare. “Not a very good mask, just like all of them up there. Aaaaall of them.”
The creature smiled, stopping to rest its hand on a mossy wall. Its clawed fingers squeaked against the stones. Christina’s voice caught in her throat as the thing moved out to where she could see it. A filthy coat of matted fur, brown and tangled, covered its shoulders, chest, and arms. Pointed ears stuck out from a rodent’s skull; the thing’s nose wriggled and sniffed the air, searching for something through the foul, stifling scents of the sewer.
“Under the smell, a sssstink worse than mine,” it spit out, flecks of saliva splashing in the waste around its legs. The creature screwed up its face, turning uglier than Christina could have believed as it moved into what passed for light in the sewers. Shrinking back as far as possible, Christina held a hand to her heart and blubbered with fear as a giant, ferocious rat-man loomed over her, casting shadows across her face.
The rat-man smiled, speaking to itself but in her direction, laughing under its wet, hot, terrible breath. “But, oh oh how they like to pretend they’re better than us. Oh, how they like to pretend. It’s because of them that we have to hide down here, hide down in the dark. Them, thesssse soft people and their funny clothes and their ssssssswweet smells. They run like ratsss, every one, but in the end they’re no better than ussss, are they, Edward?”
Christina began to hyperventilate. “E-Edward… is that—is that your name?”
The rat-man hissed, and its army of rats scampered away with frightened, nervous squeaks. It lunged at her, angry at having been interrupted. The creature’s breath washed over Christina’s face in fetid, strangling waves.
“My name,” the rat-man said, “isssss Vermin. Not Edward—Vermin!”
And then, as poor Christina screamed for the last time, Vermin began to feed.
SIX
MARY JANE finished a late dinner—reheated samosas from the Indian place around the corner— while idly paging through photo albums, walking down memory lane one picture at a time. Her conversation with Peter had left her awash in questions and realizations. Events from their shared history haunted her in new and revealing ways. The further she ventured into the past, the more the samosas seemed to unsettle her stomach. Eventually she set them aside, realizing that the uneasy feeling in her gut might have stemmed from more than a rancid helping of spiced potatoes and peas.
On the surface, Mary Jane Watson had led a carefree life. Suffering under the roof of a crooked and abusive father, MJ had developed a skin tough enough to weather any hardship, masking inner turmoil with a fun, bubbly, party-girl façade she dropped on limited occasions and only for a select few—Peter Parker at the top of the list. Her romantic history hadn’t made things easier for her. She’d always jumped from beau to beau, afraid to be tied down and end up in the kind of relationship she’d seen her parents muddle through until her mother passed. And so MJ had rotated the men in her life, ensuring she always had another to jump to whenever a relationship began to grow shaky. Harry Osborn, half the men in Hollywood when she’d lived there, and Peter Parker, of course—who brought a whole new level to shaky relationships.
To be fair, Mary Jane had half-guessed he might be Spider-Man long before Peter had revealed his secret. His constant disappearances during high-pressure situations, the sudden arrival of a certain wall-crawler moments later—all the signs were there, but she’d forced them out of sight and out of mind like the rest of the drama in her life. She didn’t need more pain or hardship in her free-spirited, intentionally superficial lifestyle.
Fat lot of good it did in the end. Here she sat, looking through innocent ph
otos of her friends, captured moments, and she found herself wondering what else might be hiding beneath the surface of each happy snapshot—which of the faces before her were masks, used to hide something terrible or triumphant from the rest of the world. How many times had Mary Jane’s life been in danger simply by hanging out with a specific circle of friends, cluelessly smiling for the camera despite the fact that a hero sat among them? Here, in a photo taken six months earlier, Spider-Man and Mary Jane had been captured arm-in-arm at a Lower East Side tiki bar with Betty Brant Leeds and her husband, the deadly Hobgoblin. Two pages earlier MJ had lingered over a two-shot of Peter laughing and drinking with Harry Osborn—son of Spider-Man’s late arch-nemesis, the Green Goblin. Clueless Harry, never knowing that his best friend was his father’s greatest foe. Never fully realizing that his life had been in constant peril.
MJ closed the album, placed it aside, and tossed her takeout containers in the trash. She walked to the window and stared out at the rain, watching cars pass by far below and lights flicker off in buildings across the way.
Now that I know all their secrets, MJ thought, what will I do with this knowledge? And what will the answer mean for Peter and me? Mary Jane wanted to believe that none of this made a difference—she loved Peter Parker, even more now that she knew about his double life, and that he wanted her to be a part of it. But did she share his strength? Could she live in a world where pain might be lurking at every turn, where their closest friends might be their deadliest enemies? Could Mary Jane Watson— party girl, always jumping from beau to beau, never committing to anything serious—live with the fact that responsibility would always place the man she loved in harm’s way? And the fact that, more often than not, she could be in danger, as well?
And most important: Was the love she felt for Peter strong enough to make her stick around and find out?
Mary Jane returned to her bed and reached for the albums once more. There would be no sleep tonight. She paged through the photos for the fifth time, searching the frozen eyes of friends and confidantes, wondering about hidden secrets and contemplating all the ones she knew.
SEVEN
HANDS reached from the darkness, cold and wet, covered in dirt, calling to Peter with ragged fingernails and querulous accusations. Eight hands stretched toward him—four on each side, black and monstrous, grasping and clicking—and Peter shrank into the corner, praying they wouldn’t snatch and drag him down into their cold, dark web. Perspiration sprang out on his forehead as he attempted to shut out the sounds of their questions, the anger behind the hands, and a faint pounding beneath their voices like the deep, rolling echo of a jungle drum.
A single spider, black and horrible, rushed from the void and opened wide its salivating maw, screaming a single word with unholy abandon.
Peter yelled and opened his eyes, heart pounding as he quickly sat up against the pillows, slick with sweat. He switched on his bedroom light. The soft glow of the lamp lengthened the shadows in the room, and he reacted to each in turn, fitfully jumping at unseen monsters.
Slowly, Peter caught his breath and calmed down. It had been a nightmare, nothing more—only a dream, cold and dark and wet.
There had been…things…crawling atop his body. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move.
He had to move.
Moments later, Spider-Man swung through the growing storm with no true destination in mind. He needed to get out and away, to clear his head. He turned uptown toward Times Square, hoping the lights and hubbub might draw out a target. The rain did not let up, pattering against his second skin like tiny, wet bullets. The distant thunder sent shivers down Peter’s spine; it sounded far too much like the terrible clarion call of his nightmare: jungle drums, pounding inside his skull.
Peter fired a strand of webbing with his left hand, shifting to grab it with his right, and turned up Sixth. He swooped up and over the buildings to where the sky opened up and he could swing free, alone with his muddled thoughts and fevered nightmares. He couldn’t stop shivering, and his stomach was wound in knots. He had to keep moving—if he simply kept moving, if he forgot the dream, everything would be all right.
Spider-Man swung north, eyes front and focused on his destination—completely oblivious to the fact that he was being hunted. Kraven watched and waited from a rooftop two blocks away.
EIGHT
DRESSED in ceremonial garb, the lion’s mane around his shoulders proclaiming him king of all wilds—verdant, concrete, or otherwise—the hunter crouched in the rain and stalked his prey. Hefting a sharp wooden spear, he carried the rest of his tools secured across his back with a leather strap. Searching for the Beast’s scent, as familiar to him as his dead mother’s perfume, Kraven sat atop a broken cornice and surveyed the hunting ground.
For years, the Spider has thwarted me, he mused. Mocked and humiliated me, here in my adopted land.
In the beginning, Kraven had been naïve. Through all his training overseas, his travels home to man’s modern jungle with the sole purpose of hunting the Spider, Kraven had thought his prey to be a mere man clad in ridiculous skins, prancing around and joking like a fool. And so Kraven had hunted Spider-Man as he would a fool—quickly, definitively, eager to finish the hunt and move on to greater, deadlier challenges. But the fool had bested the Hunter, and had done so many times. So the Hunter had allied himself with other, equally foolish men that Spider-Man had humiliated through the years, hoping their combined numbers might be enough to put an end to the self-proclaimed hero, the trickster in human skin who so vexed them all.
Now Kraven understood the Truth: Spider-Man could not possibly be a man, for no man could do to the Hunter what the Spider had. No mere man, but a Beast parading as mortal—inhuman, the colors on its back that of blood and sky. So beautiful. Kraven watched it pass by, boldly defying the laws of nature by swinging on the thinnest of threads above its domain as it pretended to protect the mortals below—though Kraven knew protection was far from the Spider’s true purpose.
You exist to test me, don’t you? To taunt and challenge me, and mock the Hunter until he has regained his honor.
Following the Spider, shadowing its every move, Kraven paced his foe through the concrete canyons. He would not stop until he had proved himself against the Beast—until he had destroyed the Spider and erased the failures and humiliations of old.
I cannot rest, Kraven told himself.
NINE
OKAY, Parker, Spider-Man lectured himself as he clung to the side of a four-story building in Manhattan’s low thirties. Let’s get real.
Peter had stopped to catch his breath, and he was regretting the choice to skip food and drink—anything that might settle his stomach. He decided to take a moment, clear his head, and face a number of facts.
Ever since Ned’s death, Peter had been upset. That was to be expected; that was the normal part, being upset. Hell, he’d just found out that Ned had spent the last year parading around in Norman Osborn’s discarded underwear, tossing pumpkin bombs in Peter’s general direction. Ned, the guy who had picked up the check for brunch just the other day.
(So why)
And what Peter was feeling now—as he crawled down a fire escape to locate a newsstand or bodega, someplace he might score a Ginger Ale or Alka-Seltzer—was far from surprising. He hadn’t been sleeping well, had been on the move since putting Ned in the ground. Nerves shot, dog-tired, swinging aimlessly through the rain—heck, Peter thought, he might even have the flu, and wouldn’t that be on par with the old Parker luck?
(So why am I sure that)
Joe Face’s funeral hadn’t helped matters. Why had he gone, anyway? Why load an already burdened psyche with added guilt, especially for a criminal Peter barely even knew? Between the twin funerals, the depressing weather, and the fallout of revealing his secret to MJ, Peter wasn’t exactly a paragon of mental stability right now. Maybe that’s why he found himself jumping from building to building through what had to be the Next Great Flood, seriously jone
sing for a soda or a sandwich, steering by autopilot through the city—but no closer to answers than when he’d first stepped from his skylight.
Peter leapt across a chasm, swinging between two low buildings, and landed on the ledge of a billboard that advertised insect spray, of all things. “Kills bug dead!” He hunkered down beneath the lights that hung from the top of the sign; they bathed the ad’s message and cartoon roaches in a soft, suffused glow. Turning his back to the ad, fingers gripping the edge of the roof—white-knuckled, tense, clenched— Peter searched the skies for something he couldn’t quite place. An invisible threat, some impending doom that had yet to reveal itself.
Then he realized: If a threat were truly in the offing, his spider-sense would be blaring like rock music and train whistles. Silently, he chastised himself for allowing private turmoil to manifest as full-blown paranoia. Everything was fine; he was simply depressed, anxious because of Ned and because of how exposed he felt with MJ now. Everything was fine.
(So why am I so sure that something is out there? Something is waiting for me in the)
Mid-thought, a familiar feeling sizzled up Spider-Man’s spine—crawling step by step to the base of his skull, sending both his stomach and mood into sudden swan dives. The burst of spider-sense radiated quickly through his brain, rising to a shrill whistle as it echoed inside his skull. Peter turned right, eyes wide, just as something small and sharp whistled through the air, embedding itself into the looming, goofy cartoon roach on the wall. A scarlet dart vibrated where Peter had stood not a moment before.
Peter leapt away, trying to avoid another volley, but the unseen assailant tracked his motion. A second dart whizzed from the darkness and struck Spider-Man above his right shoulder, burying itself in his neck. The impact and shock knocked his feet out from under him. He fell, twisting toward the sign, careful not to roll out over the ledge as he grabbed the dart and pulled it out.