The Black Spider - 5. Chapter 5: Nothing Important Happened Today - Part 1

Originally, Peter wasn’t going to spend the day home alone.

The only reason May allowed it at the medical facility was because there was Doctor Wu, nurses, or other staff present at all times. None of that would be there at the house with Peter if she left him alone. It would just be him.

“Anna is right next door, Aunt May. If somethin’ goes down, she can get to me,” Peter reminded his aunt when the two discussed the topic the night before.

“I know, but she’s already done more than enough for us. I don’t want to burden her with somethin’ I can do myself,” May responded.

“I promise I’ll be fine. You know I’d be beggin’ you to stay if I thought otherwise.”

“I’ll tell you what. I’m gonna pray on it tonight and we’ll see how I feel about it in the morning.”

Peter had accepted that answer and let the subject rest.

When morning arrived, prayer and observation helped May make her final decision. Peter made it through the night without any problems. She knew that because she’d kept an eye on him during various parts of it. If he was able to wake up without any problems when she came in to tell him her decision, it would be yes. And she was happy to give that answer when Peter woke up without issue.

After May delivered her decision, Peter set his clock alarm to go off at nine and went back to sleep. He knew he could sleep all day if he wanted to, but figured it was best to ease himself back into the rhythm of getting up early. The clock was more than happy to resume its service. When nine o’clock rolled around, it happily filled the room with its electronic buzz.

Peter reached over to the clock and shut it off. As he pulled his hand back, it felt as if something else was coming along with it. Opening his eyes and looking, he saw it was the clock that was trying to come along. It appeared to be stuck to his hand.

“What the…?” Peter questioned the sight.

He shook his hand in an attempt to disconnect the clock from it. It stayed firmly where it was. Sitting up, Peter brought his hand – with clock attached – into inspection range. Taking a look at where his hand was fastened, he didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary on the clock, such as glue or tape.

“What else could it be, though?” He wondered, shaking his hand again with more force than he had the first time.

The clock continued to hold fast.

Grabbing hold of the bottom of the clock with his other hand, Peter cautiously attempted to pull the clock off his hand. When it didn’t give, he applied more force. When it still didn’t give, he applied full force. The clock continued its stubborn refusal to disconnect.

“Okay. Seriously what the hell?” Peter shook his head.

He was about to set his mind searching for an answer when a new dilemma entered the equation. When he tried to take his other hand off the clock, it too was stuck.

For a moment all Peter could do was stare at his stuck hands.

“This is startin’ to get a little insane,” he said.

Deciding to jump straight to full force, Peter attempted to pull his hands free from the clock. The plastic body of the clock groaned in protest until suddenly it snapped and came apart in his hands. He now had the top part of the clock attached to his left hand, and the bottom part attached to his right.

“This has to be a dream.” He reasoned, as he moved his legs over and off the side of the bed and got out.

When Peter tried to take a step forward with his left foot, another dilemma was discovered. It too was stuck. By instinct, he was already attempting to take a step with his right foot when he realized this. It threw him off his balance and sent him falling back onto his bed.

“Yeah, this is definitely a dream. And so far, I am not a fan,” Peter remarked, as he sat up and tried to get his feet to move.

Normally he would’ve been gentle. It was not in his best interest to tear up his Aunt May’s carpet. This, however, wasn’t normal. So Peter stood and put full strength into trying to pull his feet free. They still would not budge.

“Let me go! And get this damn clock of my hands!” he yelled at whatever unseen forces that had to be responsible for what was going on.

Three things happened almost simultaneously.

First, the two halves of the clock suddenly came free and fell off Peter’s hands and onto the ground.

Second, Peter’s feet came free unexpectedly when he tried to take a step. He’d put full force into the step, so it caused him to stumble forward.

Third happened as he stumbled forward and his now free hands reached out in front of him to stop his fall. They succeeded, leaving him in a position that looked like he was doing a pushup.

Peter held the position for a moment absolutely stunned. The fall happened so fast, he hadn’t had the chance to tell his body to react. It’d done that on its own with a speed and accuracy he didn’t even know his body was capable of.

Hoping that he wasn’t now stuck in his current position, Peter attempted to pull his left leg forward. It complied without resistance.

“Oh thank you, god,” he sighed, as he got himself quickly back onto his feet.

And waited for whatever was going to happen next to happen.

When the carpet didn’t turn into quicksand and attempt to swallow him whole, a monster of some type didn’t emerge from his closet or from under his bed, or any other bizarre occurrence didn’t take place, Peter pinched himself. The result was pain, which he knew wasn’t supposed to be felt in a dream.

“But this has to be a dream it can’t be…”

His thought trailed off as he looked down at the remains of the clock on the floor. Cautiously, he picked both the pieces. They did not stick to either of his hands. Slowly and with extra care, he looked over the exterior of the pieces, searching for anything that might even remotely resemble an adhesive. Nothing did. The pieces were completely normal.

Peter walked over to his bed and sat the two pieces down on it. He looked down at his own hands and searched them over for anything out of the ordinary. Just as it was with the two halves of the clock, his hands looked completely normal. They weren’t even the least bit red from the earlier situation.

“Okay…I know I’m not trippin’…” He began, before a terrible thought came to mind.

What if he had, in fact, just tripped?

What if it was a side effect from the coma?

Had he only thought his hands were stuck to the clock and his feet to the carpet?

“No.” Peter cut off the thought’s process.

To his knowledge, trips were short term, not long term. And when the trip ended, the truth was revealed. The truth should’ve revealed clock pieces all over the place. Because unless he’d become the Hulk, Peter knew there was no way he could’ve pried the clock apart without tools.

So the question remained. What happened?

And was it capable of happening again?

It was a theory Peter was ready to test.

But first, he unplugged the clock from the wall socket before going over to the wall his bed sat up against. Taking his right hand, he and pressed it up against the wall. He waited. Then pulled. His hand came off the wall without any resistance.

“Stick damn it!” Peter slapped his hand against the wall.

He waited.

Pulled.

There was resistance.

He pulled again. Still resistance that was just as strong as it’d been during the clock incident.

“Let go.” Peter tried, whispering it to his stuck hand.

The second he did that, a sensation went through his hand. Something that felt like a cross between an itch and a tickle. It was quick, not even lasting a full second. When it was gone, Peter pulled his hand. It came off the wall without resistance.

Giving his hand another once over, Peter saw nothing out of the ordinary.

“Stick,” he whispered to his hand again.

The sensation traveled through his hand once again. As it did, Peter noticed something happening to the surface of his palm. What looked like very small black barbs, which immediately reminded Peter of the shavings one could use a magnet to manipulate, rose out of the skin.

“Whoa. What is that?” He was half wonder, half grossed out.

Cautiously, he touched his palm with the index finger of his opposite hand. The barbs didn’t hurt to touch and felt strangely like very fine hairs. It became clear that they were the source of the 'stick'. When Peter tried to remove his finger, his hand wouldn’t let it go.

“Let go,” Peter commanded his hand.

The sensation again. Peter watched as the barbs retreated back into his skin. His finger came free.

“Sticky pads,” he thought aloud. “It’s like I’ve got sticky pads on my hands…”

He looked down at his feet.

“And my feet.”

He looked back at the wall.

“If that’s true, then…”

Placing his palm back up against the wall, Peter commanded,

“Stick.”

His palm complied.

Putting his other palm against the wall, Peter commanded again,

“Stick.”

Like his right one, the left palm complied.

“Okay. Let’s try the feet.” Peter attempted to put his right foot up against the wall and found it was very awkward and slightly uncomfortable to put the entire foot flat against it.

Wondering if the top half of his foot would be strong enough to support him; Peter placed it against the wall.

“Stick,” He told it.

As it had with his hands, the sensation went through his right foot and it complied with his request. Carefully, Peter lifted his left foot off the ground, ready to put it back down the second his right foot showed any sign of give. It didn’t. It held just as strongly as his hands. Continuing to lift his left foot until it was in position with its top half up against the wall; Peter gave his last appendage the command to stick. It did, with the same holding power shown off by his left foot, leaving him effectively sticking to the wall on all fours.

“This is…this is crazy!” He marveled.

It would get even crazier during the next fifteen minutes as Peter experimented with his newfound ability. The first thing he discovered was the 'stick' command could be used to activate his hands and feet individually. The 'let go' command, however, could not. That’d made everything let go all at once and resulted in him landing on the floor backside first.

This led to Peter using specific commands. If he wanted his right hand to stick, he’d say: 'Right hand stick'. If he wanted his right hand to let go, he’d say: 'Right hand let go'. With this method, Peter was able to scale the wall and climb onto the ceiling.

The second thing was discovered while on the ceiling. Peter knew it should’ve felt like he was upside down, but it didn’t. It felt like he was right side up. Even when he looked down from the ceiling, there was no sense of vertigo.

Discovery of the third thing happened shortly after that. Peter found that he didn’t have to say the command to stick or unstick. He could think it and his hands and feet would respond as if he’d spoken. That was the method he used to complete the rest of the 180 of his room.

When Peter was back on the ground, he still wasn’t quite ready to believe that what was happening was real. He thought of other tests he could perform, aside from the pinch test again, to see if he was dreaming.

“I’ll call Glen.” He decided.

In all the instances where he’d tried to use his phone in his dreams, it’d always done something strange.

Going to where it sat on his bed side table, Peter picked it up, unlocked it, pulled up Glen’s number and dialed.

The phone rang. It rang again. Then, Glen’s voice mail picked up.

“The caller you have reached, Glen Stacy, is unavailable. Please leave a message after the tone. For advanced options, please press 4 now.” The automated voice spoke.

Peter almost decided to leave a message, before ending the call instead.

This was not what’d happened in his dream the last time he’d tried to call Glen. That instance had led to a fight between him and Siri, his phone’s interactive assistant application. Siri wouldn’t dial Glen’s number. It’d just kept telling jokes, before deciding it did not like being cursed at by a homosexual, and locked the phone down in armor plating.

Still, Peter was not entirely convinced he wasn’t dreaming. He knew very well how smart his dreams could be. He decided to test another number. It was one that hadn’t been used in over a year and didn’t even exist in his phone’s directory anymore. But he knew the number by heart. He dialed it, knowing if the person he was calling answered, he was definitely dreaming.

The phone rang twice before,

“The number you have dialed is not a working number. Please check the number and dial again.” An automated female voice spoke.

The automated voice went on to say the same message in Spanish as Peter hung up.

The number he’d dialed was the one that’d belonged to his Uncle Ben. He’d dialed it in a dream shortly after Ben’s passing and Ben had answered.

“Okay. Just one more.” Peter was almost entirely convinced as he pulled up the next number and dialed it.

This number belonged to his Aunt May. She’d asked him to call once he was up and about.

The phone rang three times before,

“Good morning. You must’ve known I was just thinkin’ about you. I’m glad you remembered to call,” May greeted.

“Of course. I couldn’t forget and have you all stressed out,” Peter replied.

“Yes. My day will go a lot better without that. Is everything still good? You still feelin’ okay?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“All right. Remember there’s food in the refrigerator to make you some lunch. You still got oatmeal in the cabinet, waffles in the freezer. Make sure you eat, okay?”

“I will. I promise.”

“Okay. You need anything? You need me to come home at lunch?”

“Nope. I’ll be good.”

“Okay. Then I’ll see you once I get off work.”

“All right, Aunt May. See you then.”

“Bye, baby.”

With that, May hung up the phone. Peter did the same and sat his phone back down on the table.

“This is real.” He found the theory tested and sound. “This is really happening.”

But how was it happening? Why was it happening?

Peter found his mind going back to the conflicting report about what’d bitten/stung him. Confirmed was the fact that it hadn’t been a bee sting. Now, something else was approaching confirmation. To his knowledge, Peter never heard of a person developing the ability to walk on walls and ceilings from a black widow’s bite. But what would the effects of a bite from a genetically altered spider have on the human body? Would it be something like what was happening now?

“Too bad I can’t ask.” Peter figured.

He knew that if he walked into the Oscorp Los Angeles Tower to do so, he would more than likely not be able to walk back out. If, in fact, his new ability was the result of a bite from one of the super spiders, Oscorp was bound to treat him like one of their projects. He’d become their human guinea pig.

“So it’s probably a good idea to keep this to myself for now.” Peter decided. “It would also be a good idea to see if anything else has changed.”

He started work on that immediately as he went to grab a notebook and a pen to write down all of the things he could think of to check for.

'It’s a good thing superheroes exist, or else I’d goin’ outside my mind right now,' he thought, as he sat down at his desk and prepared to write.

It was a long living rumor that some superheroes were the results of experiments.

The Hulk topped the list.

His biggest rumor was that he was actually a regular man who was capable of transforming into a nine foot tall, one thousand plus pound titan. This ability supposedly came from some type of experiment that’d gone wrong, but there was no definitive proof to support the claim.

Even one of the most just superheroes, Captain America, was supposedly the result of a government experiment with the aim of creating a super soldier. But once again, there was no definitive proof to back the claim. Only rumor.

Peter looked at what was happening to him in the same light. Because although an experiment had not been performed directly on him, one was definitely in progress as a result of one (or many) that’d been performed on the spider that’d bitten him.

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Once the list was compiled, Peter took it and went out to the garage where the weight set and bench he’d gotten for his fifteenth birthday was housed to test the first thing on the list. Super strength.

Starting with two hundred pounds on the barbell, which was seventy pounds over his usual limit, Peter settled into position, wrapped his hands securely around the bar and cautiously lifted it up.

The barbell felt as if it weighed nothing at all as he pulled it down, back up, then down again.

“Okay.” Peter smiled as he did a couple more effortless reps. “Let’s put some more on.”

He doubled the weight to four hundred pounds, which was the maximum for his set.

Getting back into position, Peter gripped the barbell and tried to lift it. Once again it lifted without any effort.

“Whoa!” He marveled, doing another set of effortless reps, before he replaced the barbell. “I think we got a winner!”

He wanted to test that winner more, but aside from his Aunt May’s car, there was nothing else at the house that weighed more than his weights. So Peter figured until he had a chance to pull that off, further testing for how much he could lift was on hold.

So it was on to the second item for testing. Super speed.

Stepping into his room to put on a shirt, a pair of sweat pants, and shoes, Peter grabbed his phone and went out to the backyard to conduct the test.

The shape and size of the back yard made for a good place to run laps. Peter had done it plenty of times. Usually he would do fifty laps, which was always enough to get him winded. So he set that as his target, as he took his mark, and started the test.

He ran the first five laps at regular speed. On all of them he noticed no change in his run speed. As he started the sixth, he put a little sprint into his run. Again there was no change. For the seventh, he broke into a full sprint. The burst of speed he picked up surprised him so much that he almost plowed straight into the fence.

Almost.

His body reacted just as it had before, seemingly on instinct, and made him turn with such sharpness that he hadn’t realized he’d done it until it was time to do it again, and again. Realization was set by then and Peter skidded to a halt and took a moment to collect himself.

“Super reflexes. Check. But I’m gonna need a better place to test for super speed.” He decided, noticing that just the one lap he’d taken around the yard with the burst of speed had disturbed the grass. It’d left a noticeable path that was going to require a rake to erase.

Once the erasure was complete, Peter remained outside to begin the first half in further testing his super reflexes. Staying on the concrete and using exercises he remembered from basketball training back when he was in junior high school, he quickly found that he’d become obscenely nimble. He could stop, turn, and switch in any direction on a dime. The entire time his feet never felt like they were confused. They were always sure. Always sharp.

The second half of testing took Peter back inside the house. Taking off his shoes, he put them in his room and went into the living room to begin. It was time to test if the super reflexes extended toward balance.

In order to do that, Peter decided to use the living room sofa as his platform. It had a nice, solid edge that ran across its back and down the arms. But the edge was narrow, not even as thick as the average balance beam. The objective was to see if he could jump up onto, land on the edge without falling, then walk it.

Peter knew he could only perform the test a few times. If he messed up the sofa, he knew his Aunt May would kill him.

“Please don’t let me break the couch,” Peter said, before he started a light jog toward it and jumped at a distance of half away.

He rose up into the air at a normal height and speed. As he came down, he got ready to hold out his hands for extra balance. A second later, he found out that was completely unnecessary. With the same sharpness he was able to stop and go at, he was also able to land. He perched perfectly onto the edge of the couch without losing his balance.

“Okay! Part one complete!” He nodded his approval, before proceeding to the second part.

Turning himself so that he could walk along the edge, Peter made the attempt. He passed.

“This is so cool, it’s gettin' scary.” Peter marveled at the ability in action.

It was as if his feet memorized the surface, making it feel like he was walking on flat ground instead of a thin edge. He never felt off his balance.

With the two part assessment complete, Peter got down off the couch and checked to make sure no damage had been done. When all appeared to be well, he continued with further testing. He tried performing a backflip. It was something he’d always wished he could do after attempting it in the eighth grade and almost breaking his wrist in the process. He’d gotten scared mid flip when he’d lost sense of which way was up and which way was down.

That turned out to be no problem during the attempt. Throughout the entire duration, Peter could tell which way was up and which way was down. He knew when to place his hands on the ground and complete the flip.

The success led to three more backflips, with the last two being done one after the other.

“Wow! I’m like super gymnastics man!” The cheer wasn’t even finished for a second, before Peter was off to the next challenge that’d jumped into his head.

It led him to the kitchen. In the center was an island cabinet. Peter went to it, cleared it off and placed his hands on its edge.

“All right, let’s see how this goes,” he said, as he braced himself and then lifted his body up to perform a handstand on the counter’s edge.

He expected to lift up, lose his balance, and topple either forward or backward. What happened instead was that Peter held his balance with a precision that felt completely effortless and natural.

“God, it feels like I don’t weight a thing.” Peter noticed as he held his position.

A risky idea came to mind.

“Please don’t let me splatter my face,” he remarked, before slowly letting go of the counter with his left hand to leave his right hand as the only anchor.

It worked just as fine as if both hands were still anchoring.

Switching hands, Peter found the result the same.

“Super gymnastics man, indeed.” Peter approved.

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Peter spent the rest of the morning and afternoon testing out the rest of the items on his list. He failed all of the psychokinetic tests. He couldn’t make things move with just his mind. He couldn’t talk to machines. He couldn’t produce or manipulate fire, water, or any other element.

He almost thought he could speak to people with just his mind. Glen happened to call right when Peter was sending the message to him to call. He’d known Glen would be at lunch and able to use his phone. Instead, Glen had simply been calling Peter back after noticing he’d called earlier.

Also on the failed list was flight, although Peter did find he could jump much higher than he could before. That gave super jump a question mark on the list until a full test could be conducted in a location where people couldn’t see.

Invulnerability was also a no. The trial of holding a flame to his finger had resulted in immediate pain that continued to voice itself – albeit much quieter – once ointment and a bandage was applied, for the rest of the day.

No was also checked for teleportation, bilocation, portals, and night vision.

During the night vision test, however, Peter realized that he had not put his contact lenses in. Yet somehow he’d been seeing just fine. This led to a test for super sight, but it was also failed, leaving Peter with the question of how his sight had improved.

That was the last thing on the list that led to a yes, or a discovery. No was applied to everything else that remained.

With the list as complete as it could be for the time being, Peter went into research mode. He focused on all the tests that were passed. By the time he was done, which was thirty minutes before his Aunt May came home with Tre and Zeyna, he was sure the abilities he’d acquired resembled those of a spider. It left him with a closing thought. Were these new abilities permanent or just a temporary thing that could be gone when he woke up the next morning?

“Guess time’ll tell,” Peter remarked to the thought, before ending research mode and going to make sure that everything was as normal as possible at his various test sites before residents arrived.

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