Superpowerless Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Also by Chris Priestley

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: If Only Any of Them Knew

  Chapter 2: To Be or Not to Be

  Chapter 3: You Will Remember Nothing

  Chapter 4: His Radioactive Spider

  Chapter 5: Winkers Are Wankers

  Chapter 6: X-Ray Vision

  Chapter 7: More Himself?

  Chapter 8: Positively Cold

  Chapter 9: Permission to Be Happy

  Chapter 10: Super-Sensitive

  Chapter 11: A Different Kind of Super-Wrong

  Chapter 12: It’s a Free Country

  Chapter 13: A Kind of Thrashed Electric-Guitar Chord

  Chapter 14: Kindness Doesn’t Get You Laid

  Chapter 15: A Fresh Wound

  Chapter 16: A Superhero Has to Have a Name

  Chapter 17: Seeing Other People

  Chapter 18: Like a Frog in a Box

  Chapter 19: Superpowerless

  Chapter 20: Sociable and Yet Not

  Chapter 21: Full of Surprises

  Chapter 22: Nobody’s Perfect

  Chapter 23: Black People Aren’t Allowed to Fly

  Chapter 24: There’s Always Room for More

  Chapter 25: The Stillness of a Quiet City

  Chapter 26: Sex and Death and Comics

  Chapter 27: Superhero Porn

  Chapter 28: Low Expectations

  Chapter 29: Keep Your Hair On

  Chapter 30: Like a Jelly Tower Block

  Chapter 31: The Sea, Of Course

  Chapter 32: Perfectly Up

  Chapter 33: The Truth Game

  Chapter 34: A Big Deal About Everything

  Chapter 35: Man to Man

  Chapter 36: End-of-a-Film Finality

  Chapter 37: Like It’s Unravelling

  Chapter 38: Everyone Wants to Believe They’re Special

  Chapter 39: Like an Animal

  Chapter 40: What If Everything Is Significant?

  Chapter 41: Drifting Among the Rubble

  Chapter 42: Too Many Secrets

  Chapter 43: Standing on the Sidelines Moaning

  Chapter 44: The Opposite of a Magnet

  Chapter 45: No One Is Watching

  Chapter 46: To Be

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  ALSO BY CHRIS PRIESTLEY

  (SELECTED)

  Anything That Isn’t This

  The Wickford Doom

  The Last of the Spirits

  The Dead Men Stood Together

  Through Dead Eyes

  Mister Creecher

  Blood Oath

  The Dead of Winter

  Tales of Terror from the Tunnel’s Mouth

  Tales of Terror from the Black Ship

  Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror

  New World

  Redwulf’s Curse

  The White Rider

  Death and the Arrow

  For Adam

  Chapter 1

  If Only Any of Them Knew

  David is halfway to the shop when he spies a group of girls he knows from school. He doesn’t usually employ his superpowers for such trivial things, but as they draw near he engages his power of invisibility and they walk on past as though he doesn’t even exist.

  He smiles to himself. They move away, chatting and laughing, oblivious. But as that sound dies away, he hears another. He comes to a stop and tilts his head like a bird, straining to hear, pushing the trailing locks of his long hair away from his ears.

  A voice. He can hear a voice. Only just. Only him. Only with his super-hearing. He is picking up cries for help – distressed cries coming from about four miles away or so, he guesses.

  David looks around to see if anyone is watching. Just Mrs Harper walking her dog, and Mrs Harper wouldn’t see a T. rex if it wandered by.

  He runs along the pavement, picking up speed all the time, his feet drum-rolling, and then, with a final bound, launches himself into the air, pushing his hands flat out in front of him like he’s diving into a pool.

  Mrs Harper barely registers him as anything but a gust of wind, a blurred smudge at the edge of her vision – just another loose, half-formed thought among many that drift, unmoored, around her mind of late.

  David twists in the air and changes direction, shivering the upper leaves of the big chestnut tree on the end of Mill Lane, squinting into the onrushing air, listening all the time – homing in on the source of the sound.

  He flies to the top of the church tower, gripping the flint with his fingers, standing with one foot on one of the carved faces sprouting from the ancient walls; getting a better bearing on the direction of the cries. They sound more panicky now.

  He climbs in through the little arched window near the bells, strips and stashes his clothes in the usual place, emerging after a moment in his costume – a dark metallic grey of an almost indestructible material, the surface bristling all over with spikes. He dives into the air once again, rushing down over the roof tiles then out across the deserted graveyard, heading for the fields beyond.

  A flock of rooks scattered across the moist, cake-brown earth rise up at his passing, cawing and flapping languorously in the strengthening wind. It begins to rain. How can it be so cold on a summer’s day?

  David slows down, lets his feet drop until he is ‘standing’ in the air and then hovers there, motionless. He can see the road ahead, over and through the tangle of tree branches, bending, snaking; the dampening tarmac beginning to shimmer darkly, almost as dark now as the river that runs alongside it.

  Ember-red rear lights shine in the gloom below, heading away from him. A white van on the road. David hears the voices again. Screams. Muffled screams. He sees the brake lights of the van flare up. The source of the cries is close. But it’s not the van.

  He flies on, focusing on the voices until the wind, the rain, his own heartbeat are shoved behind a wall of silence as he blocks everything else out and concentrates his whole mind onto that fine point.

  There. Below. A car has lost control and skids up the grass verge, leaving a dark curving wake of muddy tyre tracks as it crests the bank and slides sideways into the rippling black water.

  David hangs in the air for just a moment before hurling himself downwards past the low electrical hum of a pylon as the car begins to rock and sink beneath the bubbling surface. The white van drives on, unaware.

  David can never understand it. It surely ought to be easier to fly downwards. It had to be. With gravity and everything? But it always feels as though he’s towing a whole bunch of helium-filled balloons. He wants to fall, to plummet, but he has to claw his way through the air. It’s more like swimming to the bottom of the ocean, like diving underwater.

  Underwater. The car is almost submerged now as David lands, feet first – thud – on the bonnet, crouching down on his haunches, one palm slapping down on the wet metal, to stare through the windscreen at the screaming man whose terrified face is blurred by the rain and river water streaming over the glass.

  The look of terror on that face turns instantly to confusion and amazement and then excitement and hope as the wiper clears the windscreen and he sees David, who now rams his hands into the metal of the car, forcing his fingers through until they grip the frame of the chassis and then he heaves, leaning back into the air, straining, his face upraised and contorted by the effort.

  It takes most of his super-strength to pull the car free from the water’s murderous grip, but free it comes, with a great vomiting whoosh and David carries it through the air towards the road and then, bang, in comes a blinding flash of light in human form.

  The blow seems to hit his entire body like a massi
ve electric shock and he is hurled sideways, unable to maintain his grip on the car, which bounces once against the grass of the embankment and then splashes back into the water.

  David himself drops to the ground, dazed, and it’s a few seconds before he come to his senses to see the car sinking once again. He gets up and launches himself through the air.

  ‘Ow! Watch where you’re going!’

  David just manages to stop himself falling over and taking Mrs Harper with him. Her tiny dog starts barking and jumping around on the end of the lead, like a white woolly fish on a hook.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘David?’ she says, peering at him, her eyes narrowing. ‘Is that David?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Harper,’ he says.

  ‘Well, what are you doing? You walked straight into me.’

  David rubs his eyes. He apologises again and says he was miles away.

  Mrs Harper shakes her head.

  ‘You always were a dreamer,’ she says. ‘Just like your father.’

  Her face twitches as she realises what she has said.

  ‘Sorry, my love. I didn’t mean to –’

  ‘No. It’s fine,’ says David mechanically.

  How many times has he heard those words – or words like them? So many that they have become sounds and nothing more. But it was what people wanted to hear. They wanted to be reassured.

  ‘Stop barking, Sammy, you silly dog. It’s David.’

  David smiles down at the dog, but that just seems to excite the ridiculous creature even more and it snaps at him, an incongruously fierce expression on its cuddly-toy face. Sammy has never liked David. Mrs Harper chuckles, happy to have this distraction from her faux pas.

  ‘He’s very protective. Aren’t you, Sammy? Yes, you are.’

  David nods.

  ‘Well, sorry again, Mrs Harper,’ he says. ‘I’d better get on.’

  ‘Try to stay awake this time,’ she says, wagging her finger. ‘I was saying to Holly only the other –’

  ‘I will. Bye.’

  David smiles as he walks away. If she only knew. If only any of them knew. But then that was the whole point of having an alter ego – no one was meant to guess you were a superhero. You had to look like you could never be anything more than the nobody you were. The more unlikely the better in fact.

  Maybe – just maybe – a superhero’s girlfriend might guess, but only after a long while or after some crisis of one kind or another – and it was never a good idea because, sooner or later, supervillains seemed to always get their hands on a superhero’s girlfriend.

  Luckily David doesn’t have a girlfriend, so that isn’t a problem.

  Chapter 2

  To Be or Not to Be

  The next day David is lying on his bed, his window open just a little so that a light breeze is, every now and then, tickling the fine hairs on the back of his hand and playing across the pages of the comic he is reading.

  It’s hot. It’s the middle of July. Midday midweek noises drift lazily in – a distant jackhammer, the wheezing air brakes of a delivery truck stopping on the high street, birds chattering in the roof gutter, someone in one of the gardens whistling thinly.

  David’s bedroom is at the very top of his house. It had been his dad’s office when they first converted the attic – it still had his old desk, his chair – but David had moved his bed up there after his dad died.

  There was no real need for it – this room is actually smaller than the room he vacated – and it annoys his mother on some level, David can tell; although she’s never said anything about it. He tells himself he doesn’t care what she thinks. He tells himself that a lot. Often it’s true.

  David has made the room his own – and not just by the mess that his fastidious father would never have allowed. No – he has decorated the walls with posters he himself has made: drawings of his favourite superheroes in their typical poses, coloured up on Photoshop with their names above, in just the way they’re written on the covers of the comics.

  All apart from two, that is, who are nameless.

  David turns his head as his mother walks in, but immediately returns to the comic he’s reading. He hopes, by doing this, he’s making it crystal clear that he finds this imaginary world more deserving of his attention. She doesn’t seem to get the hint.

  ‘Why don’t you at least just open the blinds?’ she says, her voice muffled and muted by the fog wall of David’s aggressive disinterest.

  ‘It just seems a shame to spend such a lovely day inside,’ she says, looking towards the window.

  David follows her gaze, squinting into the light. A honeyed glow is seeping in horizontal bands through the slats of the Venetian blinds and then striping its way diagonally across the wall. A birdwatching scope stands silhouetted on a tripod pointing out through one of the gaps.

  They used to go to wildlife reserves, David and his dad. They were always jealous of the guys in camouflage who had scopes, when they only had binoculars. David’s father always promised him they would get one, but they never did. Then, one birthday, he bought David this. That was the last birthday before …

  That was the last birthday that mattered.

  ‘Seen anything interesting?’ says his mother, approaching the scope.

  David tells her there was a blackcap in the Johnsons’ pear tree.

  ‘Really?’ says his mother, leaning towards the eyepiece.

  ‘Please don’t move it!’

  His mother flinches and tells him she was only going to have a quick look.

  ‘Well, it’s hardly going to still be there,’ mutters David.

  She frowns at him and grinds her teeth.

  ‘It’s so gloomy in here. Why lie around in semi-darkness? I’m surprised you can see to read.’

  He mumbles that he likes it like that and does so with a pained expression, eyes still determinedly fixed to the page. Leave me alone. Leave. Me. Alone.

  ‘You like it gloomy? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘It just doesn’t bother me.’

  ‘But it’s like an oven in here.’

  ‘Look, I’m trying to read!’ he says with a sigh.

  ‘Read?’ she says witheringly. ‘They’re comics, David. Don’t make it sound like I’m interfering with your enjoyment of Dostoyevsky.’

  ‘Who?’

  His mother closes her eyes for a moment.

  ‘Well, Shakespeare then,’ she says.

  ‘You expect me to read Shakespeare?’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ she says. ‘And anyway, don’t say it like that. You loved doing Hamlet. Don’t pretend you didn’t.’

  He had enjoyed Hamlet, it’s true. To be or not to be? That is the question.

  ‘Why are you so snooty about comics anyway?’ says David. ‘You’re an illustrator. Comics are full of pictures.’

  ‘I’m not snooty. I admire a lot of that stuff. I loved how you used to copy from them and make your own versions. But you don’t draw any more.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  But not much, she was right. Not often.

  ‘You just read them mostly, you know you do. And nothing much else.’

  David didn’t respond. What would be the point?

  ‘I thought you were going to get a job,’ continues his mother, determined to at least try to have a conversation of some kind.

  ‘I know you did,’ he replies, looking back at his comic.

  ‘Would it be so terrible?’ she says, cocking her head. ‘To get out of the house? To meet some new people? To earn some money?’

  ‘Money!’ says David. ‘That’s all you ever think about.’

  ‘That’s just not true,’ she says, frowning. ‘Why would you say that?’

  He mutters to himself.

  ‘Do you have to be so rude to me all of the time? I know things –’

  ‘I know – I’m sorry, OK,’ says David without looking at her. ‘I’m sorry.’

  He knows she is staring at him
. He knows the hurt look she’ll be wearing. He feels a faint twinge of remorse but it is quickly smothered. His mother turns and, grabbing the handle, says over her shoulder, ‘I’ll be making a cup of tea in a while. Do you want one?’

  ‘No,’ says David. ‘Thanks.’

  His mother leaves, her footfalls dying away as she descends to the ground floor of the house and to the kitchen. Upstairs, David shakes his head, puffs out his cheeks and blows the door shut with a slam before returning to his comic.

  It is a Silver Surfer comic – Silver Surfer #18 to be precise, entitled ‘The Surfer Fights Alone Against … The Unbeatable Inhumans’. The cover art is by the great Jack Kirby and shows the Surfer getting zapped by Black Bolt.

  It’s one of David’s favourite comics. The artwork is amazing – especially the last spread, which has the Silver Surfer escaping Black Bolt and zooming away at cosmic speed to land on some barren planet, dejected and alone, rising up at the end to say that he’s done with love and mercy. The last page shows him yelling in rage – ‘Let mankind beware! From this time forth … The Surfer will be the deadliest one of all!’

  Sometimes David will lose interest in the story halfway through, but never the artwork – or never if it was by one of the greats – Kirby, John Buscema, Gene Colan, Jim Steranko, Steve Ditko, Neil Adams. He can just fall headlong into that stuff and never come up for air.

  No one David knows has any time for this old-school stuff. There are some kids he knows who read comics – even comics featuring the same characters. There is a superhero movie coming out every other week after all – but they are all the new versions and re-boots and David just doesn’t get the same buzz out of any of that.

  These were his dad’s comics and David knows how much he loved them. It was a special connection they had. A bond. So his mum can moan as much as she likes, but when he reads these comics he’s closer to his dad and he’s not going to stop. Not for anything.

  He drops the comic on the bedspread and stares up at the pitched ceiling above him and then over at the window, cut through by the blinds. He gets up and stands peering out through the slats the way he’s seen detectives do in old movies, prising them apart with his fingers.

  His house stands at the end of the block and his elevated position up there in the attic gives him a god-like view over almost all the back gardens in the street.