Chapter Sixteen
"I'm sorry, but Mrs. Parker is asleep right now. I know that you must be upset-"
"'Upset' is an understatement. She's my mother! At least tell us where her room is!" Benny and I were standing at the front desk of the hospital where Mom was staying. I had swung home as quickly as I could to change and tell Benny what had happened.
The hospital receptionist shook her head, tapping at her keyboard. "I know that this must be a terrible ordeal for you and your little brother, but I can't allow it. Mrs. Parker can have no visitors until she has been questioned by the police."
"The police? Why?" Benny hoisted himself up on his elbows on the counter to glare eye-to-eye with the receptionist.
The receptionist stared at him as if he were a nuisance disorganizing her desk. "You don't know?"
"Not the details," I said quickly.
"She was in the subway attack. Spider-Girl and this other monster blew up the central terminal in midtown."
"Spider-Girl blew it up?" Benny asked, astonished.
"Of course she did. Freaks like her are always behind things like this. Mrs. Parker was injured in the subway." She kept tapping her keys, apparently more interested in hospital records than our questions.
I bit my tongue to keep from saying what was on my mind. Instead, I said, "Look, our mother is hurt. If you don't tell us where she is, I'm going to go up and down this hospital until I find her room. Let's go, Benny." Benny hopped down and I took his hand. "We'll find Mom. She's on this floor."
I led Benny around the counter as he stuck his tongue out at the receptionist. "Visiting hours are over, miss. You can't go to the patients' rooms now," Keyboard Woman said sharply.
"Watch me." I didn't look back.
"Miss, I will call security! Miss!"
"Whoa, do you think she will?" Benny asked as we hurried down the thinly carpeted hall, searching for 'Parker, Mary Jane' on one of the doors.
"Hey, where do you think you're going?" A man with a badge clipped to his jacket was lounging against the wall next to a tightly shut door. As he straightened, I saw another man and a woman sitting in waiting chairs, arms crossed, both with badges.
"Down the hall," I said, trying to get a glimpse of the folder on the door. The man shifted again, and I saw , 'Parker, M'.
"Are you the police?" Benny asked.
"What's it to you, kid?" the first man asked, seemingly amused. I didn't share his levity at all.
"Because you're leaning against my mother's door," I said icily.
"Visiting hours are over...um, May," the woman said, flipping through a manila folder stuffed with papers.
"Then what are you doing here?"
"We have some questions for your mother," said the other man in a bored tone. "Just about the accident and all."
"Oh, all right. Then we'll wait here with you." I steered Benny over to the row of chairs opposite the detectives. They looked none too pleased by our company, and I didn't care at all.
"So Spider-Girl blew up the subway," Benny said tonelessly.
"She did not!" I said, so loudly that the three officers turned and looked at me curiously. I lowered my voice and whispered, "It was that spider monster that was on TV. That's what I heard."
"It doesn't matter. Didn't you hear all of that stuff that the cameras caught her and Hobgoblin saying last time? They're both after her."
Benny scuffed the heels of his shoes against the carpet. "All of this stuff is happening because they're trying to get Spider-Girl. This is all her fault."
I swung over Queensboro Bridge, thinking hard and hoping that Grandma Watson wouldn't wake up before I got back. She had come over to stay with us until Mom came home tomorrow. I always liked visiting her, but hearing her rail against Spider-Girl that evening had almost sent me into tears. My own grandmother.
Manhattan Island loomed up in front of me as I swung over South Street Seaport and paused momentarily on the mast of one of the beached sailboats. Even in the middle of the night, South Street Seaport was bustling with activity and blazing with white, artificial light. People doing early Christmas shopping, no doubt.
"Is that Spider-Girl?"
I sighed. The last thing I needed was a crowd of tourists flashing cameras in my face-
"Aack!" I twirled around the mast by a halyard as the woman below hurled a chunk of loose concrete at me.
"What's your problem?" I shouted angrily.
The gray-haired woman snarled, "Get out of here! The last thing we need is another disaster!"
"Yeah!" A street vendor left his pretzel ice stand. "Wherever you are, something bad happens! Go away!"
I climbed up to the tip of the mast as the crowd beneath me gathered. People were furious, shouting at me, even throwing things.
"This is all your fault!"
"Why don't you go make trouble for someone else?"
"Freak!"
I dodged another well-aimed rock and sprang from the mast. The crowd below yelled and scattered as I swung a meter over their heads and over the highway.
First my brother, then my grandmother, and now the rest of the city hated me. I could have just stopped, found an alley corner, sit down, and never move again.
It was all true. Why had Harry become Hobgoblin? Because I showed up as Spider-Girl. Why was Black Widow wreaking havoc? To help Hobgoblin punish Spider-Girl. Why was my mother in the hospital? Because Spider-Girl hadn't reached the subway in time. Why were the lives of thousands of people at stake? Because Spider-Girl existed.
My fault. All my fault.
The Quest Aerospace building suddenly appeared out of nowhere around a corner. I vaulted up to the roof and paused, waiting for my spider-sense to start tingling. Nothing.
Ten minutes later, I was standing over the grille of the ventilation duct, over the same room that I had eavesdropped on Hobgoblin and Black Widow. From the angle I was standing, I could only see the rows of shelves and the small pool of light from the desk lamp. The cabinet was tightly closed. Where there had been a mess of shattered glass and spreading clear liquid, the floor had been swept clean.
Well, I had come for answers. But now what could I do? I crouched down and pulled the grating out. Setting it to the side, I dropped feet first into the room below.
"Aaah!"
I whirled. Oh, no.
At the file-stacked desk was a tall, African-American man in a lab coat was standing there, his swivel chair still turning. "What are you doing here? What do you want?"
"Do you work here?" I countered, wondering whether I should just hop back up and wait until he left.
"Yes, I do. Why?" the man asked tersely.
"I need your help." I hesitated, then crossed the room and pulled open the cabinet door, not realizing that it had been locked. I mumbled a hasty apology and fitted the twisted lock back into the door clumsily.
Inside the cabinet were the two test tube racks. The top row was filled with eight vials of the clear, dark green liquid. But the bottom row was empty, save for one tube of the clear liquid, marked "O17492".
"It has to do with these," I said, turning around.
The man in the coat glanced from the open cabinet, to my mask. "It's about Harry, isn't it."
I blinked, taken aback. How did he know? "How do you know that?" I asked aloud.
The man shook his head grimly. "Because Harry Osborn is Hobgoblin. You already know that, evidently."
I reached into the cabinet and carefully removed the last tube of the clear liquid. "Yes, I do. And he was the one who broke in here and destroyed the rest of these. Why?"
The man rubbed the back of his hand over his forehead. "That's a very long story, um, Spider-Girl."
I shrugged. "I don't have any later appointments, do you?" I hopped backwards to land crosslegged on one of the metal shelves behind me.
"Fine." The man fumbled nervously for his swivel chair and sat down. "I've known Harry Osborn ever since he was a little kid. I'm a doctor, and I worked with his father, Norman Osborn. He owned OsCorp at the time, and was also heading the biochemical research department. We were working on a product. A performance enhancer.
"Everything was going great for a while. We had funding, the test results were as expected, everything. Until some of the animals started showing side effects."
I bristled at the mention of the animal testing, but I kept quiet to let the doctor continue.
"The animals started exhibiting behavioral changes. They became very violent and agressive. Some of the primates even showed what could have been some kind of chimp split personality, if you can imagine that. It looked like the side effect of the performance enhancer was induced schizophrenia.
"Anyway, I was all for pulling the plug on the whole thing. The formula would take months to rework, and we simply didn't have enough money to start all over. But Osborn only dismissed the side effects, always insisting that they were only an abberation.
"It didn't make any difference. We lost funding. After that..." He shrugged. "I don't know the details. All I know is that in the days that followed, another scientist was dead, some company technology had been stolen, and exactly one cylinder of the enhancer was missing. A few weeks later, the Green Goblin appeared."
"So he used it on himself?" I supplied.
"I think he did. And it drove him to insanity. A while later, the Goblin disappeared, and Norman Osborn was reported to be dead. Afterwards, OsCorp was bought by Quest Aerospace. They tried to cover up the whole thing, firing people left and right and such. That's how I ended up down here, to keep me quiet.
"I do know that about...oh...four years later, the flight suit and glider turned up again. I think they were found by some construction workers in an old warehouse, or something like that. Quest confiscated them immediately, and stored them down here, too." He waved vaguely in the direction of the shelves.
"That should have been the end of it. But then some lawyer or other found Osbrorn's will. He left everything to Harry, you know. So a few months ago Harry and his aunt were taken around the company building on a sort of tour." He chuckled briefly. "I don't think Quest Aerospace was too happy about any of it, but they couldn't do anything else. Part of the company belongs to them, after all."
He stopped, and seemed to age before my very eyes. "It's totally, completely my fault. I admit it.
"I've known the family for several years, even before Harry's mother took off. They came to talk to me. I was talking to Beth McKay, Harry's aunt, about...I forget what. Harry was wandering around here, looking at stuff. I told him to stay away from the larger boxes, and he said, 'Sure'.
"So I was talking to Beth when I turned around, and there was Harry at that cabinet..." He pointed. "Pulling out one of the green tubes. I yelled, 'Don't touch that!' He jumped, and dropped it."
He closed his eyes. "It smashed on the floor right in front of him. The formula goes into its gaseous phase when it's exposed to air.
"We both ran over and pulled him away, but he was already coughing and choking. I started yelling at the interns to call an ambulance, but they were so slow that I ran to the desk phone and dialed myself."
He leaned forward, his head in his hands, and continued.
"He looked like he was having an epileptic fit. Beth was trying to get him to stand up, but he was shaking to hard. The interns ran over and tried to give him water, but he kept choking and spitting it out.
"It seemed to last for hours, but the paramedics got there and took him to the hospital. Beth called me later to tell me that the doctors said that there was absolutely nothing wrong with Harry. She sounded so relieved, and I wanted to believe her. I wanted to believe that Harry had only inhaled enough to make him sick for a few minutes. But I was fooling myself.
"It all comes down to that chemical in there, Spider-Girl. That's what's destroying Harry now, the same way it destroyed his father. And I caused it to happen. Now there's nothing I can do."
I sat in silence, absorbing what I had just heard. An explanation, the reason behind Hobgoblin. Almost.
"Then what's that?" I pointed at the tube of clear liquid that I had placed back into the rack.
The man straightened, and I could sense the tiniest bit of pride coming from him. "That," he said, "was something I came up with, when the project was still on. I put that together in the early stages, when the formula was being developed. I thought it would be best to have on handy, just in case."
I leaned forward, barely daring to believe it. "Is it an antidote?"
He shook his head. "No, not quite. More like a treatment. I was working on reversing the side effects, not the actual formula. It only-"
I bounded off the shelf to the cabinet. "Are you telling me that this could cure Harry?"
Of course! Hobgoblin had been smashing the cylinders of the clear liquid. He must have known what they were. If Hobgoblin was an alternate personality of Harry's, then he would have figured out that they posed a threat to his survival. So he had tried to destroy them. And he had left one, only because Black Widow had spoken...
He raised his hands warningly. "No, listen to me. It's never been tested. It could be just a dud. I don't know if it has side effects. For all I know, it could worsen his situation."
I was too hooked on the possibility of saving Harry to worry. "This is Harry's only chance. What else is there to try?"
The doctor looked about to protest some more, but he paused and said, "All right, you have me. But how can you get it to him? I don't think Hobgoblin'll take kindly to your smashing it in his face."
"I could care less what Hobgoblin takes well. Will it work?"
He shrugged. "In open air? Who can say?"
I ground my teeth in frustation. "Wait...would the anti-...treatment work in a liquid phase?"
"It could...are you thinking...?"
I nodded. "Yeah. Do you have a syringe I could borrow?"
He gaped at me. "Are you saying that you're just going to tackle him and stab him with a syringe? Just like that?"
"What else can I do? Is there any medical stuff in here?" I pulled open the lid of a plastic container and peered in, seeing only a stack of paper folders.
"Yes, there is. Just a minute," the doctor muttered, striding past me into the maze of shelves. He returned a moment later with a small cardboard box filled with cellophane. He set it on his desk and brushed away the wrapping, revealing a box of sterile unused medical supplies.
"Now, remember, try not to break the needle. I don't know how you're going to jam it through his armor, unless you pull of his helmet or something. This syringe should hold enough formula to do the job. I hope. Here."
He pulled a plastic wrapped medical syringe from the box and handed it to me gingerly. I quickly crossed the room and carefully removed the tube of clear liquid again. It was about the size of your average test tube, and stamped with an identifying number. I turned around.
"Thank you very much, er..."
"Doctor Robert Hiller."
"Doc Hiller," I amended. He blinked.
"You're welcome, Spider-Girl."
"I'll be leaving now, then. Thanks again." I backed away to stand below the open square in the ceiling.
"I hope you succeed, for all of our sakes. Good luck."
I nodded, and leaped straight upwards into the ventilation duct. Sliding the grating back into place, I practically shot out of the duct and was on the roof in five minutes.
I was grinning under my mask. It was all right. Everything was going to be all right. I could do this, I could save Harry. And this whole ordeal would be over. I stepped to the edge of the roof and froze.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could have sworn I saw a huge, eight-limbed shaodw scuttle out of sight below.