Ace of Spiders Read online

  Ace of Spiders

  Stanly is frustrated. Having set himself up as London’s protector, he’s finding that the everyday practicalities of superheroism are challenging at best, and downright tedious at worst. So it’s almost a relief when an attempt is made on his life and Stanly finds himself rushing headlong into a twisted adventure, with enemies new and old coming out of the woodwork. However, even with his friends and his ever-increasing power behind him, he may have bitten off more than he can chew this time. The monsters are coming … and nothing will ever be the same!

  Praise for Ace of Spiders

  ‘Doing what so many sequels fail to do, Ace of Spiders soars, with a thrilling plot, brilliant character development, and fantastically funny cultural references.’ LUKE MARLOWE, The Bookbag

  Praise for Bitter Sixteen

  ‘It’s part superhero fantasy, part comedy, with an underlying love story and a creepy twist in the tail, all served up with panache, pace and punch.’ SALLY MORRIS, The Daily Mail

  Children’s Book of the Week: ‘Never mind writing about superpowers, debut author Stefan Mohamed clearly has them himself – he’s produced a highly original novel for young adults that is clever and funny, with character you want to ask home afterwards.’ ALEX O’CONNELL, The Times

  ‘This sparky debut puts the classic comic book origin story through the pop-cultural blender by gifting superpowers to a kid who just happens to be a massive sci-fi geek. For Smallville, substitute Tref-y-Celwyn, the mid-Welsh town where vowel-deficient teenage loner Stanly suddenly discovers a talent for flight and telekinesis. Accompanied by a potty-mouthed beagle (just go with it), Stanly up, ups and aways to London, where he throws his lot in with a bunch of Generation X-Men investigating a series of sinister child abductions. Zippy prose keeps the story barrelling along, the genre references come thick and fast (even the dog a Yoda impression does) and, in Stanly, Mohamed has created a hero you’ll really root for. A flying start.’ PAUL KIRKLEY, SFX Magazine

  Ace of Spiders

  STEFAN MOHAMED is an author, poet, occasional journalist and full-time geek. He graduated from Kingston University in 2010 with a first class degree in creative writing and film studies, and later that year won the inaugural Sony Reader Award, a category of the Dylan Thomas Prize, for his first novel Bitter Sixteen. He lives in Bristol, where he works as a general purpose editorial node, writing stories and performing poetry in his spare time.

  Also by Stefan Mohamed

  Stuff (2014)

  Bitter Sixteen (2015)

  Operation Three Wise Men (2015)

  Published by Salt Publishing Ltd

  12 Norwich Road, Cromer, Norfolk NR27 0AX

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © Stefan Mohamed, 2016

  The right of Stefan Mohamed to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Salt Publishing.

  Salt Publishing 2016

  Created by Salt Publishing Ltd

  This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN 978-1-78463-068-3 electronic

  For anyone who read the first book and thought “ooh I wonder what happens next”

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  SO IF I’D had my way, this would be the ‘previously’ montage:

  A frenetic and stylishly edited sequence set to some propulsive piece of rock or techno or drum and bass, showing me flying between buildings, swooping into dark alleys, kicking down doors, psychically grabbing would-be muggers, murderers, loan sharks, internet spammers and multifarious other potential evildoers and hurling them into walls, saving distressed damsels (and whatever the bloke versions of damsels are), engaging in spectacular fights on rain-lashed rooftops, chucking a few cars about (maybe at a giant monster) and generally being utterly superheroic, black coat flapping behind me in the wind, always leaving the scene of the awesomeness without giving my name. Maybe interspersed with a few headlines, done in that old-school spinning front page style.

  Who is London’s new dark avenger?

  Police baffled by plummeting crime rate!

  ‘He’s an absolute dream,’ says smitten young damsel, ‘what a shame he already has a brilliant girlfriend whom he loves, and even if he didn’t, he would never take advantage of someone he’d just rescued, what an absolute bona fide legendary hero type!’

  ‘I totes agree,’ says smitten young boy damsel.

  And so on. Also, at some point, a shot of me walking away from a massive explosion. In slow motion.

  In actual fact (record scratch), it was more like this:

  Me foiling a bag-snatcher by psychically tripping them up from across the road, because crime generally doesn’t tend to happen in obvious places and it’s hard to patrol a city the size of London when you’re: a) just one person, and b) unable to fly around with impunity because of all the CCTV cameras. This latter fun fact was duly impressed upon me as soon as I arrived back at Connor and Sharon’s house, fresh from my very first dawn flight.

  Eddie (because of course he was there first thing in the morning): ‘What if someone saw you? Took pictures? We agreed to keep a low profile! Blah blah Angel Group! Blah blah responsibility! Blah blah blah! Blah! And also blah!’

  Me (trying not to sound petulant): ‘But blah blah powers! Blah blah actual responsibility! Blah blah saving people! Blah blah helping the helpless! Blah blah my city! And stuff!

  Eddie (trying not to totally lose his rag): ‘Blah blah understandable! But blah blah dangerous! Blah blah irresponsible! Blah blah that’s what the police and the justice system are there for anyway!’

  Me (sounding really petulant now): ‘Blah blah everything I just said again! Also who cares?

  Oddly, this wasn’t as effective a resting of my case as it seemed in my head, so I had to content myself with wandering around the city, vainly looking for crime to fight or any disasters that might be occurring. Spoiler alert – it didn’t really work. In fact, the main thing I got out of it – apart from the exercise, I suppose – was a general depressed feeling, because poking your nose, however stealthily, into strangers’ business mainly serves to illustrate how crap humans can be.

  But did I give up? ‘No!’ he declared, with his hands heroically on his hips.

  Well . . . not really. I might have buggered off early from a few potential scuffles, purely because the individuals involved seemed like such terrible people that working out which of them needed helping felt like a waste of time.

  Not very superheroic, I hear you say.

  Well . . . try it yourself sometime. See how far you get. Also, bear in mind that on the couple of occasions when I did try to intervene directly in a conflict and break it up, I was told in no uncertain terms to mind my own effing business and sling my hook sharpish, and ended up having to creatively negotiate my way out of a beating. It was a good test, I suppose, knowing I could have decorated the walls with these fools without lifting a finger and then literally flown away, and instead opting not to do those things, but it rarely left me feeling satisfied.

  Again, I hear you say, not very
superheroic. Surely it’s not about satisfaction, or a job well done? It’s about helping people. Doing the right thing. Upstanding moral whatevers.

  Well . . . yeah. And . . . shut up.

  So there you go. I’d fully expected to spend my time living in some sort of badass superhero story, hurtling between adventures, a blur of power and selflessness zipping from burning building to bank heist to hostage situation. What I ended up with was more along the lines of a cynical, this-is-modern-London cinéma vérité documentary with footage from an aggressively good-natured indie romance spliced in.

  This romantic aspect made for a much more enjoyable focus, so now the desaturated theoretical superheroics fade into brightly lit scenes of niceness. I’d spent a lot of my first London summer – when I wasn’t recovering from my encounters with child-eating monsters and mysterious corporations – missing Kloe, as her parents had conveniently decided that a very long impromptu family holiday would be a capital idea. We both knew that this was their passive-aggressive, highly roundabout way of ensuring that she didn’t spend any time with me, but they ended up regretting it when she spent the whole holiday sulking and chatting with me on the internet. Kloe is a luminous ray of sunshine in human form, a genuine supernova of joy and love and enthusiasm, but boy, when she decides to sulk, winter comes early. Like, now is the nuclear winter of our discontent.

  As a fairly prolific sulker from way back, I respect that.

  My second London summer, which was fading to autumn as the opening credits roll on this new tale, was a different matter. Kloe had spent a lot of time working on her parents, wearing them down, and after a couple of hideously awkward dinners that had tested my acting-like-a-regular-human-being skills to their absolute limit, they had finally relented, and we’d been able to spend pretty much the whole summer together. We’d gone to a music festival in Wales, explored London, gone to gigs, watched films, got drunk (which it turns out I’m not very good at), started having sex (which it turns out is bloody brilliant and also none of your damn business), all the good stuff that one does. The rest of the time I’d worked at 110th Street, read a lot of comics, systematically listened my way through Skank’s extensive music collection, recorded a series of relatively popular ‘stop-motion’ YouTube videos in which I psychically re-enacted scenes from films and TV series with action figures, and generally, if I’m honest, had a pretty sweet time of it.

  The itch hadn’t gone away, though. The feeling that there was more to be done, a bigger, stranger, scarier, more exciting world to explore. People to save, and also fight. So despite my misgivings about the general attitude of London’s populace, and the futility of wandering around looking for trouble, I did it anyway. ‘Cos that’s what the hero does.

  At least, I told myself that’s why I was doing it.

  Roll opening credits.

  ‘Big Issue, pal?’

  I jumped, having left my ninja cat reflexes at home, and took off my headphones. I was pretty sure I’d heard him right, even over the screech of Tom Morello’s guitar, and the red and white Big Issue uniform was another clue, but I said ‘Sorry?’ anyway because that’s what my mouth had decided was happening. The guy wore thick glasses that looked to have been Sellotaped together more than once, and had a masticated bush of ginger hair, and his grin exposed a load of gaps with a few teeth here and there to break up the monotony. The teeth themselves looked like old, chewed-up Werther’s Originals. ‘Big Issue? Top of the range reading material for the discerning pedestrian. And it’s my last one, which means I can bugger off home.’

  I smiled. ‘Yeah, sure.’ I bought it and the dude thanked me and went off whistling. I rolled the magazine up, tucked it away in my coat and resumed walking. It was late September, a week after I’d turned eighteen, and I was in Peckham on what I optimistically called my evening patrol, trying to lose myself in the labyrinth of fried chicken outlets, betting shops and bus stops, to be a shadow, an invisible element rippling through the urban sprawl. Either the Big Issue guy had super-developed senses, or I wasn’t doing a very good job. I tried to do a patrol most nights, and luckily this month had been markedly cooler after the heat of the summer, which meant that I could wear a coat and keep my hood up. Much better uniform. Plus it’s tricky to hide your identity when you’re just wearing shorts and a T-shirt.

  As I walked, I did my best Sherlock Holmes impression, sizing up the people I passed, projecting (i.e. inventing) backstories for them, trying to work out where they’d come from, where they might be going and, most importantly, whether they might be about to start some trouble that might require a spot of righteous smacking down. Was that bearded man in the duffel coat on his way to purchase a shit-ton of heroin from some dodgy Russians? Might the deal turn sour? Might someone need to swoop in and whip away their AK-47s, flip their car over and tie them all up, leaving them in a neatly-wrapped package for the police with a note gaffer-taped to one of their foreheads simply signed ‘A Friend’? Maybe, but it was academic because the bearded man in the duffel coat was going in the other direction and I didn’t fancy turning around and following him.

  If it seems as though my heart wasn’t quite in this, that’s because it wasn’t.

  Part of that was undoubtedly because I’d been given a tantalising taste of a genuinely deeper, darker, weirder world, which had then stubbornly refused to reveal any more of itself. No more monsters, and nothing to indicate that the Angel Group had any interest in me whatsoever.

  Not that that diminished my interest in them. I’d bought myself a pretty flash laptop, and one of my new favourite hobbies was researching weird stuff on the internet. Turns out there’s a lot of it about, although frustratingly little of it pertained to my new ultimate foe, or uneasy potential ally, or whatever the hell they were. The company kept a very smart, very vague, very corporate website, with no lists of key personnel or anything that might be construed as useful – even their ‘about us’ section was written in such densely coded business wonk speak that you’d need a PhD in advanced hypereconomics to work out if they even provided a service that you needed. The most helpful words were ‘brokering’, ‘investment’ and ‘compliance’.

  What were you expecting, to be fair? Menu tabs for ‘monster research’, ‘superhero research’, ‘evil plots’ and ‘ultimate shadowy purpose’?

  Maybe not. But the name was definitely out there, in the real world (i.e. not the internet). I’d been surprised to hear it coming from somebody who hadn’t been involved in the craziness at the Kulich Gallery, although having talked to the guy for a bit he did seem like the type to know this stuff.

  •

  Flashback sound effect.

  His name was Damien. He was an older guy, approaching thirty or possibly beyond, heavily dreadlocked, clad from head to ankle (he was barefoot, obviously) in hemp and beads and existing in a permanent fug of weed smoke. I’d met him at Bubble Hill, the festival Kloe and I had been to during the summer. He was a friend of a friend of a friend’s dealer, or something, and he and I had ended up talking extensively, sitting around a fire with various colourful casualties while Kloe was off dancing with Lynsey. Damien was a veritable repository of conspiracy theories, everything from ‘the moon landing’ (his implied inverted commas) to chemical sky-engineering, and most of it had been pretty entertaining, until he’d casually mentioned the Angel Group. My ears had immediately pricked up, and he’d noticed. Stoned but still sharp. ‘You’ve heard of them?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Vaguely. Just another corporation, I thought.’

  Damien laughed. His laugh was like someone chewing a cork mat. ‘No such thing, bro. Goddamn corporations will be the ruin of this little world of ours . . . and the Angel Group’s one of the worst.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘They got ties,’ said Damien. ‘I mean, it’s all connected once you get to the top – businessmen, politicians, religious leaders, doesn’t matter what country they�
��re from. At the top of the tower, where the money’s free-flowing and endless, even if they’re supposed to be at war, even if officially they are, even if the papers are reporting battleships trading bullets, even if their disciples are blowing themselves up in crowded market places, the guys at the top are all just chatting away, seeing who they can screw over to make each other richer.’

  It made some kind of paranoid sense. Plus, I’d once split open the head of a child-eating creature shaped like a mutated man and a pair of multi-mouthed spidery black hell-beasts had popped out to greet me. Something like that tends to redefine your perception of what’s ridiculous and what isn’t.

  ‘But the Angel Group’s got fingers in all those pies,’ Damien continued. I had a feeling he’d practised this routine. ‘Every one. Cyber espionage, big oil contracts, elections, geo-engineering, they’ve always got a representative sitting at the back, taking notes.’

  ‘You’re saying they’re pulling the strings? Secretly? Everywhere?’

  ‘Something like that,’ said Damien. ‘Plus, you’ve heard about all the weird shit that goes on, right? X-Files-y stuff? Extrasensory perception, kids with powers. Monsters?’

  ‘Heard a bit,’ I said, uncomfortable but also kind of enjoying knowing far more than I was letting on.

  ‘That’s where they live,’ said Damien. ‘The way we figure it, they keep someone at every big meeting in the world, to keep up with what’s going on, and they’ve got people implanted in every government, every military organisation. Means they can come and go as they please. Do worse things. Stranger things. More evil and messed-up things.’