Hello, friends, and welcome to Chapter Sixteen! Once again, there was quite a bit more I wanted to have in this chapter, but it was getting far too long for my liking, so I cut it down. This scene follows directly out of Chapter Fourteen, if you want to read back a bit for some context. As always, please read and review, as I greatly appreciate the feedback; how do I know whether or not I'm writing well if you guys don't tell me? Anyway, thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy!
Disclaimer: All characters owned by Marvel.
Chapter Sixteen
The stairs leading down were so narrow and the ceiling so low that the god of thunder had to both turn sideways and slouch in order to sidle his way along the path. There were no lights in the stairway, but the regular electricity over Thor's hammer, as well as Carol's unconscious glowing (burning off the energy she'd absorbed from the door handle) gave the group enough light to traverse the steep stairs without stumbling.
"May?" Tony asked. "I doubt any of this is looking familiar."
"Not in the slightest," she replied.
Thor looked over his shoulder. His cape, combined with his natural size, prevented the rest of them from seeing anything before them. "Friends," he said, "We come to an exit. Prepare yourselves."
Carol floated up, pressing her head sideways against the ceiling to get a look over Thor's shoulder. The metallic door rested at the bottom, gleaming in the scant white light coming from an arched doorway.
They proceeded a few more steps before Doctor Strange nearly fainted. He fell backwards into Jessica, who gripped his shoulders and stood him back upright. "Doc? You okay?"
"By the Hoary Hosts…" he said, his voice scratching through the air like metal on concrete. "Something is… something is definitely down there. I can't… I've never felt…"
They kept going. Carol held May back, letting the others pass by before continuing on. With a glance, she asked Cage and Jess to stay with Peter's aunt. Whatever was down there, though she herself wanted to be—needed to be—one of the first to see it, Carol wanted May as close to the exit as possible.
Thor stepped over the crunched door and into the basement, followed closely by Carol, Tony and Strange. "Odin's Eye," he whispered, taking in a horror he'd never witnessed before, not in the fires of Muspelheim nor Hela's realm itself.
Laid out before them were glass cylinders, dozens of them, each filled with some kind of translucent liquid and a man's body. At least, parts of a man's body. Some were whole, in their own way, the symmetry of regular human anatomy present. Two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears. Some.
The rest were grotesque. Abominations of nature.
Nearer the door, the bodies had few deformities. An arm that was shriveled and short, or withered skin peeling away from a head and neck. Some were missing hands or feet, or had three claw-like fingers rather than five normal ones.
As the tubes disappeared into the darkness, however, their contents became more and more monstrous. Elements of the spider became prominent: one lacked the lower half of a jaw, graced instead with pincers; another had four thin, hairy black legs jutting from his right shoulder and hip, contrasting the human arm and leg on its left; further down still, on the edge of the shadows, the entire lower half of a body was a giant spider—four legs and a rounded black abdomen, complete with spinnerets, attached to a human torso.
Carol couldn't take her eyes off the sight, though they stung with tears of both shock and rage. She approached the nearest tube and wiped her gloved hand over the glass; part of the face beneath was misshapen, the skin almost appearing to be attached in the wrong places—stretching down from the jawline to the collarbone, or from brow to cheekbone, hanging over the eye socket—but the eyes were open, and Carol could see them clearly through the fluid.
Hazel. And if the body had had life, she knew they would be bright and inquisitive.
The sharpness of the jaw, the half-fullness of the lips. Though the cheeks were sunken in, she could see the high set of his cheekbones, and the shock of messy brown hair on his head, floating in the translucent fluid.
Peter. These were Octavius's clones of Peter.
"Luke, keep May out of here!" she called toward the stairs.
Cage had just stepped over the trashed door, and was holding May's hand to help her over it. He held up a hand to her, and she paused, her ear turned toward the room. "Something wrong?" Cage asked, deciding staying still would be better than trying to peek in.
Carol looked to the others. Thor's face was contorted with fury; lightning arced over Mjolnir and up the armor on his arm like a stampede. Tony and Strange were not as angry but were no less horrified. Strange turned away from the sight, almost as though it caused him physical pain. Tony had his faceplate up, his eyebrows shooting into his hairline and his mouth agape; turning in a slow circle, he tried to take in what he was seeing, and was clearly having difficulty. He locked eyes with Carol and shrugged, the gesture one of a man finally at a loss—both for words and action.
Jess's voice came from the stairway corridor. "Carol? Everything okay in there?"
"We're fine, Jess," Carol responded. "We just need a few minutes. We want to, uh…" She turned to Tony again, who gave her that same look before she saw the light bulb go off in his head. He pointed two armored fingers at his eyes, then made a circular motion with his arm, a finger aimed toward the ceiling.
Carol nodded. "We want to check the room out, make sure there aren't any traps or anything before you guys come in."
"Okay, Carol," Cage called. "Just give us the all clear when you're done."
She turned back to the tube behind her. He was so close. Having not seen Peter's face, his real face, for so long—she didn't realize how badly it had been affecting her. The clone brought it all back into perspective.
This wasn't just a fight to save Peter, to try to get him back from some villains who'd kidnapped him. It was justice against a fiend, who had violated every tenant of both man and God Himself in an effort to denigrate Peter's name—to defile the very essence of who Spider-Man was and what he stood for.
And Peter would have seen this. If he hadn't been captured, he would have found this place. Carol thought of how Peter felt about Kaine, the first in what was now a series of many, many clones. The torment of Kaine's own cellular degeneration—due to the imperfections of the process that created him—had driven him insane, and he had, on more than one occasion, tried to both kill Peter and hurt those his progenitor cared for. In general, Kaine sought to make Peter's life a living Hell.
But Peter never gave up one Kaine. He cured his clone of the cellular degeneration, and—now restored to both a sound mind and body—Kaine lived in Houston, righting wrongs in his own way as the Scarlet Spider.
They called each other brother now.
How would Peter have reacted to this? So many "brothers;" misshapen, broken, damaged forms floating free in glass tanks, the horrors from a circus freak show.
"We have to do something," Carol said. "May can't see this."
Tony turned to her, if only for the chance to stop looking. "Can't we just tell her she can't come in?"
Carol arched an eyebrow at him.
"Yeah, you're right, that won't work."
Carol glanced to her right, where Strange was standing next to a full size bed, medical equipment placed on the shelves and counters behind it. One of the glass tubes sat empty to the left of the bed, its door still ajar. Strange had been quiet ever since his episode on the staircase. She didn't like it.
"Doc?" she asked, taking a step forward.
Strange's head snapped up from where he'd been staring at the floor, and his hand jutted out toward her. "Stop!" he shouted. "Don't move."
Carol looked down at the stone, and noticed for the first time what appeared to be thick red-brown arches painted over the masonry. Oh, God…
"Tony," Strange said, pointing to what Carol now saw was some kind of circular sigil surrounding the Sorcerer Supreme, "I need you to analyze this substance."
Taking the few steps over, Tony bent down, a finger hovering over the edge of the circle. "I'm gonna have to take a sample," he said.
"As little as possible, please," Strange said.
Tony scraped his armored fingertip along the ground, then placed the substance in a panel that opened in the side of his forearm. After a few moments, he sighed.
"Well?" Strange asked.
"Yeah."
"You checked it against the database?"
Tony nodded. "Blood type matches. DNA matches. Down to the arachnid nucleotides."
Strange breathed heavily through his nose, once, and then his temper exploded. He gripped the bed beside him and upturned it, crashing it into the empty glass case and cracking the open door. From his mouth flew a stream of words and phrases that none of them understood, but even the god of thunder took a step back from the raging sorcerer.
After a few moments Strange calmed, and spoke intelligible words again. "Foul, wretched beasts, the both of them!" He slumped down to the floor, his back against the underside of the bed. He rubbed at his eyes with his left hand before resting it just below his hairline, his right forearm settled on his knee.
Jess ran into the room, most likely in response to the noise, and Carol heard her gasp. She looked to her friend: Jess's steepled hands covered her nose and chin, her eyes wide; she turned away from the sight after a moment and saw Strange sitting on the floor. She took the few steps to stand next to Carol, casting her friend a sideways glance of sympathy before looking back to Strange. "Doc, you okay?" she asked.
For all his mania moments ago, Strange may as well have been stone. They couldn't even see him breathing. Carol knelt down before him, placing a hand on his shoulder. "He didn't have to do it this way," Strange said.
"What do you mean?" Carol asked.
Strange dropped his hand from his forehead and opened his eyes, interlocking his fingers and letting his left arm dangle free. "Doom." He gestured about them, to the symbol that surrounded the upturned bed. "He didn't have to use the blood. He could've used chalk or… or paint. Anything that could've drawn the circle."
Carol turned her eyes to the stones, to the brown, faded color around them. "Does it… make a difference?" she asked.
"Not in the result, no," Strange said. "A soul is as it will be. But using blood would have an effect on the process."
He stood, using his knee for leverage, and Carol joined him. They turned to the tanks, where Thor and Tony had begun pushing them closer together, trying to get them into the shadows. "Ritual magic is… different," Strange said. "It takes longer to perform, and requires more energy from the practitioner, because they're trying to accomplish more." Strange extended his hand toward the floor. "This isn't just conjuring a fireball or willing a protective shield into place. You're trying to reshape reality."
Tony and Thor finished their work, but a full fourteen tanks still stood in the light. "Blood holds power," Strange continued. "Doom could've used another medium to make the circle and still performed the ritual, but it would've been difficult for him—maybe impossible."
"Stephen," Tony called, a holographic interface pulled up over his forearm as he examined one of the tanks. He looked away from it, his expression asking Strange not to continue but knowing the sorcerer would.
"I know," Strange replied. He turned to Carol then, gripping her shoulders, and she shifted her gaze to him. His gray eyes burned with both fury and a warning. "Using blood for the sigil allowed Doom the opportunity to harness the power it held, making the ritual's draw upon his own energies less potent."
Carol understood then, what had happened. Why Strange had been so angry. But she needed to hear the words. She backed out of his grasp. "What power?" she asked, the hardness in her voice cutting the air, the burning of her eyes casting the sorcerer's face in firelight.
Strange sighed. "Life," he said. "Life itself has power, just by being. Blood is the conduit. When it's spilled, that power remains, for a time."
Carol turned back to the tanks, looked at the barely damaged face of a Peter Parker within. "Meaning they were…"
"They were alive," Strange said. "The blood wouldn't have worked if they hadn't been."
A roar echoed through the basement laboratory, Carol exploding away from Strange toward the rows of corpses. Her hands crackled with power, and she fired a photon blast at the nearest tank. Thor stepped in front of it, deflecting it away with his hammer. Carol crashed into his chest, trying to move him by sheer momentum, just enough to slip around and get another shot. But Thor wrapped his massive arms around her—pinning hers to her sides—and gripped Mjolnir with both hands. She struggled, and though he had difficulty holding on, the god had both size and leverage over Carol, and eventually her fury quelled.
Strange approached her as Thor let her go. "I understand Carol, believe me," he said. "What's been done here is a… perversion of everything I believe the mystic arts to stand for. Though the magical energies would still exist, it takes life to harness them, and intellect to understand their complexities. Using the power of life, through so many deaths, to cheat Death of one she is rightful in taking is… abhorrent to me."
Trying to see things from Strange's point of view, Carol calmed herself. She could appreciate his perspective—his offense at how Doom had used the gift of magic, his general revulsion at the loss of life. But it wasn't the same. Not nearly.
Octavius and Doom had killed these clones. Murdered them. And though they wouldn't have been the same as Peter, contained his memories or earned his scars, they were still a piece of him. Living, breathing pieces of him that they had drained to husks just so Otto Octavius could drag Spider-Man's name through filth.
"I have a small addendum to that," Tony said, waving them over. They approached the tank where he was standing, and Carol looked at the interface hovering over his arm. "They weren't… alive. Not all of them, anyway."
"What?" Carol asked.
Tony glanced over his shoulder at her, then shrugged. "Best I can tell, Octavius was attempting to figure out the cloning process. Despite the fact that the Jackal has already cloned Peter perfectly—several times—Ock's ego probably wouldn't allow him to use a 'lesser mind's work.'" He pointed toward the back, into the shadows. "The earliest attempts came out… well. We saw them. They were too genetically unstable to be viable." He spread his arms wide, and the blue glow of the interface spread with them, highlighting the seven tanks in the front row. "Only these seven appear to have had a chance of surviving."
Carol noted how they were the only ones without particularly obvious spider characteristics. The first had several extra limbs, but they looked human. Hell, that had happened to Peter himself once. "Did they come out… adult? Aged?"
"No." Jess's voice came from behind the bed, and the group turned to face her. Her goggles were pushed up into her hairline, and a leather-bound brown journal sat open in her hand. She lifted the book slightly as she stepped toward them. "Found this behind the bed. I think it's his notes."
The others stepped around her as she held up the book. Photographs pinned to the pages showed the clones in fetal form, accompanied by rapid, scratched-in scribbles detailing various alterations and attempts to replicate the Jackal's cloning process. Tony took the book from her, turning the pages quickly. "This is incredible," he said. "Ock's been working on this for over a year. He didn't even know who Spidey was until the last clone reached maturity. Once he saw they weren't… 'perfect,' as he says, he never looked at them again."
"Guys?" Cage called from the hallway, "Is it okay in there?"
Thor turned back to the door. "Another moment, my friend," he said. "Our task is nearly complete."
Tony kept going until he reached the pages with the pictures of the completed clone. "Here it is," he said. "A perfect clone. Genetically stable, aging accelerated to maturity. Peter's powers intact—adhesion, agility, speed, strength, precognition."
He turned the page again, read a few lines, and snapped the journal closed.
"What's wrong?" Strange asked.
Tony turned around. "Doom did… whatever he did while the clone was still fetal. So it seems like he might not know Peter's identity. But," he paused, swallowed once, and licked his lips. "They didn't kill the other clones by draining their blood for the sigil."
Jess took the journal from him, rapidly flipping the pages. "Then what happened?" she asked.
"They only took a few pints of blood from each," Tony said. "Not nearly enough to kill them."
Carol turned back to the closest tank. She rested her left hand against the glass, staring into what she could see of the clone's face.
"They starved to death."
She dipped her head to the ground, closing her eyes. Her palm closed into a fist, and she popped the side of it against the glass, sending a spider web of cracks across the surface. A hand gripped her wrist, and she opened her eyes to see Jess holding her. "I'm going to kill this man," she said, her voice as calm as discussing dinner plans. "Wherever he is, wherever he's holding Peter, he will not step out of that place alive."
Jess looked at her once, a small frown on her face, before they walked back to the group, where Tony was flipping back and forth between two pages. "Alright, I don't understand this," he said.
"What is it?" Strange asked.
Tony held the journal out to him. "Some kind of symbols or something," he said. "I've never seen it before."
Strange poured over the pages for a moment, then shook his head. "Neither have I."
Thor looked it over as well, but had never seen the script either.
"I'm not waiting any more, Luke," came May's voice from the hall.
Carol's head snapped to Strange, her eyes wild. He raised his palms to the tanks and whispered. The shadows behind them stretched forward, engulfing the two remaining rows, wrapping them in darkness.
May entered the room, Cage following right after her. She looked around for a moment, her eyes lingering on the shadows a bit too long for Carol's tastes, before she approached the Avengers.
"I suppose this isn't our final destination," she said. "Have you found anything?" The heroes exchanged sideways glances, and Jess tried in vain to hide the journal before May took it from her. "What's this?" May asked, flipping it open to where Jess had been holding the page with her finger.
She scanned the left page, where the picture of the final clone was pinned. Her fingertips grazed the photo, and Carol saw her eyes moving back and forth over the words. Her lips and chin quavered, and she paused for a moment at the bottom. Then she looked to the right page, and her eyebrows pulled together as her eyes bounced around the strange writing.
Carol stepped next to her. "We're sorry, May," she said. "There isn't much else here. None of us have seen…"
"I know this," May said.
"What?" Strange asked. "How? Where have you seen it before?"
May groaned, and rubbed her forehead with her thumb and fingers. "I need to make a phone call."