Only Happy When It Rains

’m only happy when it rains
I’m only happy when it’s complicated
And though I know you can’t appreciate it
I’m only happy when it rains

I snapped off my walkman as I emerged from the alleyway, out onto Bourke St. The earpieces I left in; no point in letting everyone know that I could hear them just fine. Took a quick look in either direction, scanning the late night crowd for a target. No luck. Ah well, the night was young, and it would be a fine night for a hunt. A storm threatened.

I slid my shades out of my jacket pocket, slipped them onto my face and studied my reflection in the comic-book shop window. They were jet black, very much like the ones Bono wore in the video for ‘The Fly’. They actually did give me a sort of insectile look, which was a scream, all things considered.

I turned from the shopfront and headed into the heart of town. Nothing incongruous about wearing my shades this late at night; this was Melbourne after all, and it was pretty bright besides. It’s a well lit town, my town. That’s not always a good thing, but I have a knack for searching out the dark corners.

I knew I stood out as I strode down towards the mall, but then again, there’s a certain art to camouflage by confrontation. If I was dressed down, I’d really stand out. So, with my leather greatcoat and bugoid shades, my black silk shirt and grey check chinos, and especially my studded shit-kicking Docs, I blended into the sea of individuality perfectly. I felt the corner of my mouth curl up at the thought, the delicious irony. How different does one have to be before they are truly different?

Just ask me.

I sniffed as I walked, smelled the beast that was this town, the people that flowed in its veins. I was still searching, though I never looked right or left. Under the citylights, even with my shades on, my nose was still far and away a better seeker than my eyes. In fact...

I closed my eyes, and snapped my walkman back on. With the multi-hued scent now my only link to the world around me, the odours swelled and magnified within my skull, guiding me, drawing me on. I trod as boldly as before. Other pedestrians moved away as I neared; I could smell it, could almost taste their passing as a trace of copper at the back of my throat. Licking my lips, I let the music fill my head.

You know I love it when the news is bad
Why I feel good but feel so sad
I’m only happy when it rains

Oh yes.

Within minutes I reached the mall, the foot-bound hub of Melbourne. I opened my eyes and took a look around. Every where I looked, a sea of humanity ebbed and flowed. They poured in and out of the department stores, through the specialty stores that covered one entire side of the block, and gathered in pools around the benches and metal seats that were scattered along either side of the tram tracks. On one corner, a crazed old man with a violent explosion of grey about his head was haranguing an amused crowd from the steps of the GPO. I could smell him from where I stood, could smell the bile that ran through his body, and knew that his anger would kill him within a year. No good for me.

The song pounding into my ears finished, fading out to the hiss of the tape. Pulling my greatcoat aside, I caressed the unit that lay clipped to my belt. Instantly the music began again, the same song, the anthem I had chosen for my own. Who needs a CD player, I thought happily. The fat buzzing guitar slammed back into my brain, Shirley Manson’s glorious vocals firing my blood. A pulse so vivid it was almost electrical coursed through me, lifted me, charged me full.

That’s when the first drops of rain fell.

And that’s when I saw them. A young couple, wrapped about each other. They were young, barely out of their teens; I rolled their years around in my mouth like wine. Or blood. The joy they were taking in each other shone to me like a beacon, blazed like the fire of God, assaulted all my senses at once. Oh, this was going to be a fine night! They were walking up the centre of the mall, between the tram tracks, and hadn’t noticed the rain starting to fall. Nor had most of the crowd. Only a few of the more perceptive seemed to notice the occasional bloated drop smacking against the pavement, and even they hadn’t started to move to shelter yet. Taking my shades off again, I leapt from the bench I had used as my observation post and headed towards the soon-to-be tragic lovers.

As I approached, the rain began to fall harder, its rhythm increasing with its strength. People began to head for the edges of the mall, but there was no urgency just yet. My prey had stopped and were staring upwards, as if surprised that the clouds that had hovered for most of the evening had decided to vent their spleen. Oh come on, I thought, this is Melbourne after all! As I stepped up to them, I decided to leave the music playing in my head. Moments like these need their poignancy, and that’s what I intended to give this one. Instead, I drew on the power of the storm that was still building above, boosted my hearing far beyond even my higher-than-normal range, and tuned in to the world around me.

‘Excuse me,’ I said politely, water starting to run off my greatcoat, ‘would either of you have a light?’ I smiled, a dazzling, warmly sincere smile that I knew neither of them could resist. I radiated style, I radiated class; most of all, I positively overflowed with harmlessness. It’s a nice trick, once you can get the hang of it, and I’d had a long, long time to practice.

Besides, asking for a light was a safe bet. I’d smelt the cigarettes on them from fifty paces.

‘Ah... yeah, sure,’ said the boy, obviously torn between helping out this strangely appealing stranger and making a dash for cover from the storm. He fumbled in his pocket, pulled out a Zippo and flicked it once. The flame was instantaneous, and he held it up to me.

The music thundered on in my head and I smiled, my teeth glowing like milk.

I only smile in the dark

‘Don’t you love it when the lights go out?’ I asked happily, ignoring the proffered flame.

My only comfort is the night gone black

The boy looked to his lover and she returned the look, puzzlement quickly giving way to unease. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she said, turning back to me.

I didn’t accidentally tell you that

‘You’re about to find out,’ I replied, and reached out one arm, away from the three of us.

I’m only happy when it rains

Lightning split the sky.

I snapped my fingers, bringing on the thunder.

And everything went black.

Things moved fast for a moment then. I leaped, straight up, and landed on the side of the Myer building, the claws that were already sprouting from my fingers digging easily into the brickwork. Looking down, I could see the pair still standing there, bathed in a shallow pool of light from the boy’s Zippo. They were looking around frantically, looking for me, not even aware that something momentous had just happened. The darkness flowed down with the rain; they were an isolated island of light in the flood.

That won’t do, I thought. While the change continued to wrack and ripple across my frame, I made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a cough. Instantly the flame was snuffed. After a moment’s shocked silence, a scream cut through the ensuing blackness before being abruptly cut short by what sounded to me like a hand being clapped across a mouth. Much better, I thought.

After another brief pause, the boy found his voice.

‘It’s just a blackout, Carly,’ he said, but I could feel the quicksilver tightness in his voice that gave the lie to what he was saying. ‘Only a blackout. There’s nothing to worry about.’

‘But all the shops gave gone out too!’ Carly replied, a touch of hysteria jagging about the edges of her voice. ‘Wouldn’t they have backup generators? And where did that bloke go? What did he mean? What’s going on, Josh?’

Both of my forearms snapped, the breaks moulding themselves into secondary elbows as I lay against the wall and listened to Josh trying to be brave. ‘I don’t know what the hell he meant, but if you want to know where he went, I’d say he got smart and got out of the rain. We’re getting soaked here! Look, just keep hold of my hand so we don’t lose each other, and we’ll head for shelter.’ Shuffling sounds began to drift up from below, easily picked up by the ragged peaks of tissue that my ears had become. I was just about done; my teeth had almost finished re-knitting themselves, and they were always the last to go. My clothing hung off me in shreds and tatters, which was a shame really; that greatcoat had been mighty fine. No matter, I could find something else to wear later.

After I’d eaten.

Speaking of which... it was time to prepare the feast. I rolled sideways along the wall, a half-turn that left me facing outwards, hands and feet planted against the surface behind me. The claws were no longer needed to hold me to the wall, so I retracted them for later. Then, raising one of my arms, I made a twisting motion towards the sky. A break appeared in the clouds, a split that quickly grew into a hole bounded by roiling shapes and forms that hurt even my eyes to look at. Red light splashed through the opening, falling earthwards with the rain as a crimson moon came into view and filled the gap. The mall was illuminated like a darkroom, and the rain continued to fall like blood. Another scream, two screams this time, drew my attention back to earth where I quickly spotted the pair. They’d been heading in the wrong direction and were now standing between the tram tracks, almost in the centre of the thoroughfare.

They were completely alone.

The crush of people that had hurried through this mall only moments before were nowhere to be seen. Which wasn’t surprising, because this wasn’t really that mall. This was my mall, my world, and it was time to re-enter the fray.

But first : music! My Walkman hung limply from the belt that dangled from what used to be my waist, the headphones gone. That didn’t matter any more, I had far more effective ways to add a soundtrack to this little soiree. Placing all of my hands back against the wall, I concentrated briefly on my heartbeat, and was soon rewarded by a tremor in the bricks. It was followed by another, then another, as the cadence established itself and gained volume as it gained tempo. Soon it was audible, even to the ears of the poor fools below, who were now clinging to each other like limpets to a rock.

vadoom...

vadoom...

vadaboom...

vadaboom vadaboom...

vadaboomvadaboomvadaboomvadaBOOMVAdaBOOMVADABOOM...

In seconds the buildings themselves were shaking. When the pace of the beat had reached fever pitch I held it there, and with a thought sent a low cacophony swirling through the air. It rustled and whispered around their ankles and began to climb, getting louder and louder, fragments of voices and music fading in and out of the din. I caught a whiff of urine and grinned; one of those kids had pissed themselves! A second sniff and I knew it was Josh. That made things easier for me; now I knew beyond all doubt where I had to focus to get the best out of this pair.

When the noise had reached the lower thresholds of pain, it was almost recognisable. I let it run for ten seconds more, then blinked. There was a moment of pure silence, just long enough to let the pair below register it, and then I brought my original two hands together with a crash.

At that exact moment, my soundtrack kicked in again, a touch of theatre that I thought corny but appropriate. Hell, this world was my stage, and I’d do whatever the hell I liked! My private anthem erupted into the mall, the counter-chorus screaming from every surface, the words the very essence of my existence.

POUR YOUR MISERY DOWN...
POUR YOUR MISERY DOWN ON ME

And also at that exact same moment, every window, every shopfront on both sides of the mall exploded.

I love a good show.

I landed lightly on my feet, bracing myself with my hands before pushing back to stand upright. The air was full of glass, shards spinning through the air to land tinkling on the concrete. The rain continued to pelt down, and the length of the mall was still bathed in the deep, murky red luminescence of my moon. It was time for the finale.

Carly and Josh stood, huddled together, some twenty feet away. They hadn’t noticed me yet, but I knew that wouldn’t last. I waited.

Finally the torrent of glass subsided, the ground now carpeted in what seemed to be fragments of rubies. The pair in front of me remained oblivious to my presence, their faces buried in each other’s shoulders. So I cleared my throat, quite loudly. It wouldn’t do to be impolite, after all.

Carly’s head snapped up, and her eyes widened. And widened again. There was no scream this time, she was way too far gone for that, but a low moan dribbled from her lips and I caught another whiff of urine. Different this time. Snap, I thought, but it’s too late for you, honey. Josh finally looked up and into my eyes; he seemed almost resigned, as if he knew what was going to happen. You ever seen a snake staring down a rabbit? Well, call me a snake.

Or a spider.

I darted forward on my back four legs (the ones that ended in feet) and held out one of my hands, a Marlboro appearing between my fingers. ‘You still got that light mate?’ I asked pleasantly. ‘We sort of lost track of each other for a moment there.’

Carly remained almost catatonic, moaning constantly and swaying slightly as if in a breeze, or in time to the music that continued to reverberate throughout the mall. Josh, however, was not so happy to stay where he was. His feet started scrabbling backwards, then he turned and, grabbing Carly’s arm, he bolted the other way. Carly was almost jolted off her feet, but the shock seemed to snap her out of her trance and she soon picked up speed behind him.

I grinned, and dropped the cigarette to the ground, where it winked out of existence. Time for some action at last! I dropped to all eights and took off after the pair, climbing up one wall as I passed them before returning to the ground again. They stopped and tried to run the other way, so I spat a couple of globs of webbing at their feet, stopping them in their tracks. They struggled madly as I approached, but there was no way they were going anywhere now.

I stood over the pair, looking down at them, and believe me I know how terrifying I must have looked. You’ve seen spiders on those nature programs, rearing up on their back four or six legs and waving the rest around in the air? Funnel-webs, or the bird-eating kind? Well, put hands and feet on those legs, give it a human head (sort of) and that’s me. Pretty, huh? Hell, I even scare myself sometimes.

I could see Josh had made the connection, too. ‘What the hell are you?’ he screamed. ‘Some kind of fucking spiderman?’

I threw back my head and laughed; an evil, arachnid sound that I’d been practising for a while. Very nasty. ‘No,’ I said, ‘he’s a cheap imitation. I’m the real thing, friends, and I ain’t no good guy. I guess you could call me a were-spider, except I don’t have the hassle of waiting for a full moon.’ I skittered a couple of paces to my left and sat on the pavement. Josh kept quiet, watching me balefully, pissed as hell but obviously terrified at the same time. Carly was just terrified, her eyes swimming in and out of focus. ‘What? No more questions?’ I asked cheerfully. ‘You know, I’m feeling pretty talkative at the moment. It might just be in your best interest to get conversational with me... otherwise I might start feeling a bit - ‘

- dramatic pause -

‘ - hungry.’

‘Why?’ asked Josh.

I tilted my head to one side, my smile flickering like candle-light. ‘Why?’ I repeated. ‘Why what?’

Josh struggled himself into a seated position, the webbing starting to loosen the hold it had on his feet. ‘Why us?’ he said. ‘And why are we here? What is here? And what are you, really? No way you’re a were-spider!’

I was impressed; the kid had smarts and balls on top of everything else. I could see his curiosity smacking up against his fear, and shouldering it aside for the moment.

‘Firstly,’ I said, ‘you were in the right place at the right time. For me, that is. I don’t believe you’d see it that way. Plus you were exactly what I was looking for.’

‘Second : you’re here because I wanted it that way.’

‘Third : here isn’t really anywhere, but it’s not nowhere either. Call it mywhere. This is my world, just a dimensional shift away from yours, but here I’m Hey Zeus and Billy the Bub all rolled into one. Kinda the way I like it.’

‘And finally : what am I really?’ I struck a thoughtful pose, resting my chin on one hand and staring wistfully upwards. ‘I’m an extra from the X-Files, an escapee from the Twilight Zone. I’m Tolkien’s Shelob and Incy Wincy all rolled into one. I’m a comic book creation and I’m far more real than you. And I’m BORED!’ At the last, I flicked out one arm and wrapped my hand around Carly’s waist, pulling her from the webbing around her ankles with a wet schlopping sound. ‘Time to do what we spiders were born to do, missy,’ I hissed at her, drawing her face close to mine and letting my tongue play over her cheeks and brow like a blind man’s fingers. Her eyes were really vacant now, she was so far inside herself that I doubt she even knew any more what was going on. I allowed myself a mental pat on the back; I’d definitely chosen the right one out of this pair! Then, as her would-be hero cried out and began struggling free from his own confines, I turned and headed for the wall.

I didn’t slow when I reached the juncture of brick and pavement, but skittered straight up, hardly hampered at all by the dead weight in my arms. Once I was about ten metres up, I stopped and turned again, a huge black cancer on this bleeding city wall. I looked back down at Josh, who’d managed to free himself and was now doing his damnedest to climb up after me... which is to say, he was still on the ground, cursing and screaming, tears streaming down his face as he scrambled frantically at the wall. I could smell the blood on his hands, seeping from cuts inflicted by the shards of glass that lay everywhere, even though I couldn’t see it in the blood-soaked light. More, I could taste the turmoil that was seething inside him, tearing apart his heart and his soul. He was ripe, at last, and it was time to feed.

‘Hey Joshy!’ I called down from my perch, my web of brick and mortar. ‘You want her back?’ And I dangled Carly out in front of me, jiggling her slightly so that her arms and legs jerked spastically.

‘Give her back!’ Josh screamed back at me. Veins were sticking out on his forehead and neck, and I’m pretty sure I could hear his heart beat in my ears. He took a few steps back from the wall. ‘Give her back, you monumental prick! Give her back NOW!’

I closed my eyes, leant back against the wall. ‘Anything you say, Joshy,’ I said, opening my eyes again and leaning forward, looking down at him. Making eye contact. ‘Just remember, you asked for it.’

And I let her go.

Red light splashed off sweet Carly’s skin as she fell, turning, a dead weight.

I took one last look around at my world; the shattered shop fronts yawning in the bloody half-light, the sheets of water crashing down from that impossibly intense sky, the open, empty space. My eyes took it all in hungrily. I don’t get to come back here all that often, and I like to take the memories with me when I leave.

Josh surged forward then stopped, finally giving in to the inevitability of events. He stared, eyes straining from his sockets, his face pale even in this light. His hands clenched and unclenched at his sides.

And still she fell, the distance seeming to stretch, ten metres becoming twenty, then fifty, then a hundred. A long, slow, lazy arc, almost graceful in its abandon...

Until suddenly the ground was there, rushing up to meet her, and she hit the ruddy concrete and burst, as human bodies tend to do. A fine spray of blood misted from her before falling back to the ground with the rain, and more blood began to flow from her and out onto the ground. Josh threw back his head and screamed, a sound that ached with desolation and pain, with hopelessness and guilt, with anguish so sweet that I couldn’t hold back any more. I opened wide the maw in my mind and drank it in, a flood of agony that was all the stronger for the fact that I had prepared it so well. I fed on his sorrow; I gorged myself on the black surge of emotion that poured from him like a geyser.

Then there was a blinding flash as lightning cauterised the clouds above us, followed by a deafening crack and rumble as the thunder made its presence known.

And the sky above us faded from red to black, the bleeding moonlight replaced by the harsh sterility of streetlamps, and under the shop canopies forms solidified out of the air into people, still sheltering from the rain.

The music stopped, melted away.

We were back.

It took five, maybe six seconds for a young woman clutching a dripping umbrella to notice the man who had appeared before her, as the thunder diminished and his scream made its presence felt. Another couple of seconds to register the sodden, broken mass at his feet for what it was... and then her scream joined his, followed by another and another as comprehension surged through the crowd. And still I lapped it up, every new voice adding another layer to the farrago of fear that I craved. For that is what I am, and this is what I do. Someone, an older man, rushed forward and grabbed Josh by the arm; he spun around and flailed wildly, connecting with the man’s jaw and knocking him to the ground. Two more men in business suits joined in, grabbing each at an arm, while others attended to the fallen and tried to attend to the dead. The mood began to get ugly, which was a shame as I had finally sated myself and closed my mind to the shenanigans taking place on the ground.

I was still on the wall but had no worries about being spotted; the moment we had returned, I had reverted, finally, to my natural form and scuttled into a crack running alongside one of the windows to my left. And there I stayed for the next three days, absorbing and assimilating the fruits of my labour as the world went about its business. I heard the sirens, of police cars and ambulances; I heard the cries of the newspaper sellers the next morning as they hawked their wares on the strength of last night’s tragedy. I heard snatches of conversation as the citizens of Melbourne walked past the police tape cordoning off a section of the mall, heard them talking about the lunatic who had beaten his girlfriend to a bloody pulp.

Finally I was ready. My abdomen was swollen with angst, a black viscous liquid that was lethal to most, but meant life to me and my kind. It was time to find myself another host, although I doubted I would find one with the physical presence and dress sense of my last, and head home.

My children would be hungry.