Behind The Mask: Devil In Plain Sight

O villain, villain, smiling damned villain!

My tables-meet it is I set it down

That one may smile and smile, and be a villain;

At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark.

-Hamlet, I. v. 111-114

If rape and poison, dagger and burning,

Have still not embroidered their pleasant designs

On the banal canvas of our pitiable destinies,

It's because our souls, alas, are not bold enough!

-Beaudelaire, Les Fleurs Du Mal

Just a few seconds ago, Gwen Stacy, alias the spectacular Spider-Woman, was fighting with fire in her eyes and rage in her heart. Spider-Woman's old enemy Jack O'Lantern had taken her Aunt Nancy and dozens of other people hostage at the Stark Enterprises office building where they worked, and the arachnid heroine had come to their rescue. In fighting the pumpkin-headed psychopath, she had shattered the ghoulish flaming pumpkin mask Jack wore.

Now, as she stared at the face that had been hiding under Jack O'Lantern's pumpkin, all she could feel was shock and horror.

She stared back at the handsome, chiseled features of Steven Mark Levins, uncle to her close friends Kitty Pryde and Ben Reilly. Thick dark hair framed his face, and his dark eyes glowed alternately with perverted amusement at her distress and smoldering anger that reflected the poisonous hatred he felt for her. Spider-Woman had seen Steve Levins's face before, but now she felt as if she was seeing its true form for the first time.

"W...why...?" Spider-Woman managed to gasp, her mind still reeling from what she was seeing. "All the suffering...all the death...you...I...can't..."

"Isn't it obvious?" Levins hissed. "Because it fills me with joy, because it gives my life meaning, because I feel a sense of accomplishment, because I'm doing something worthwhile! Finally, I can let everything out, be the monster I've always wanted to be, live my deepest, darkest fantasies..."

"I've done this to make you suffer!" the man who called himself Jack O'Lantern shouted, his voice rising several octaves as he tossed another explosive shrapnel pumpkin bomb at Spider-Woman. "You, and everyone like you, who've been ruining my fun and holding me back!"

Reflexively, Spider-Woman leaped back and caught the grenade with a webline before hurling it off to the side where it exploded harmlessly. All the shock and horror she felt was gone. It was replaced by her rage, the anger she felt at the monster that had endangered her family, murdered dozens of innocents, and left a path of destruction across New York City.

Jack O'Lantern stared back at Spider-Woman with a look of pure, poisonous hate, his gaze fixed on the young woman who in his mind had come to represent everything he hated about the world.

He unleashed a flock of razor-edge boomerang bats from his hands, sending them hurtling at Spider-Woman. The arachnid heroine sprayed her webbing in a wide arc, entangling the bats and grounding them before blasting Jack O'Lantern head-on with a double blast from her sting bolts. Jack O'Lantern recoiled from the blast, grunting in pain, but then he fired back with his own wrist lasers, knocking Spider-Woman off her feet. As she leapt to her feet, Jack O'Lantern came flying in, his razor-sharp talons bared.

The storm continued to rage outside as they battled, the lightning flashing as the thunder roared more loudly than ever.

SPIDER-WOMAN #32

BEHIND THE MASK, PART FOUR

"DEVIL IN PLAIN SIGHT"

Perhaps you're wondering how all this began.

I was born October 31, 1964-fitting, wasn't it? Halloween, the night when people dress up as monsters and indulge their dark sides, letting their inner monsters out to play, just for a moment. That always appealed to me, and from my most tender years I was fascinated by it.

Growing up, I saw the hypocrisy of so many of the people around me, hiding their true feelings behind the masks and facades they wore to gain the approval of the people around them. My father made nice with his superiors and coworkers, when he would mock and insult them behind their backs in the privacy of his own home. My mother put up the pretense of loving my father, but then she went out behind his back to have an affair with the man she truly enjoyed sharing her bed with.

Spouses who make sacred wedding vows and then violate them by committing adultery, sports stars who make big speeches about wanting to be good role models and then get busted for drug possession and infidelity, businesspeople and politicians who make a show of being honest and are then caught looting their institutions, respectable family men being exposed as pedophiles or murderers...

...I saw them all.

I saw them all being caught without their masks, and then punished and condemned by society. They were held back by the sniveling, whining sheep who harbored the same twisted dark sides they did, but lacked the courage to live out their true natures. The sheep were hypocrites, holding back people who dared to indulge their perverted fantasies, all so they could keep up their own respectable images and have the people around them like them.

I thought of all this, and then I thought of my own dark fantasies, all the people I wanted to make suffer, all the crimes I wanted to commit, because I knew it was wrong.

I knew that the other people around me would try to stop me.

And that thought enraged me.

Spider-Woman dodged off to the side as Jack O'Lantern charged in, swinging her foot out and catching him in the face with a vicious kick. Cursing in pain, Jack lost control of his hover disc and crashed into a nearby pillar, bouncing off it before regaining his balance. Spider-Woman was coming at him on a webline, aiming directly at him with a vicious swing kick, but Jack O'Lantern was faster, catching her square in the chest with another pumpkin bomb. The pumpkin exploded in a burst of flaming shrapnel, tearing long, bloody wounds in her skin as she crashed and landed painfully on the floor. Shaking her head in agony as she tried to get up, Spider-Woman was blasted back to the ground by Jack's wrist lasers.

Spider-Woman rolled on the floor to dodged the next series of blasts before she sprang back to her feet. Deflecting the blasts with her own stings, Spider-Woman quickly tagged Jack O'Lantern with a webline. Before Jack could cut himself free, Spider-Woman began swinging him around like an athlete preparing to throw a hammer, slamming Jack into one wall and then another. Dizzied from the blows, Jack couldn't cut himself free before Spider-Woman let him go and he flew crashing through the window she had already broken to get into the building.

The sudden burst of pain and the long, ugly cuts on his face and neck actually brought Jack back to his senses, and he reacted more quickly than Spider-Woman expected. Before she could react, Jack O'Lantern had retrieved a ghost grabber from his belt and caught her in the arm with it, pulling her out into the storm.

Now it was Spider-Woman's turn to smash through the window once again, the glass tearing her all over before she crashed headlong on the pavement below. Breaking free of Jack's ghost grabber, she and Jack O'Lantern both lay in the street for a few seconds, the rain mixing with the blood on their bodies, before they rose and attacked each other again.

It would have been so easy for me to kill myself, given how angry I was at not being able to realize my fantasies.

The feeling of tearing a defenseless victim's throat out, the look of terror in someone's eyes when they saw me coming for them, the grief and sorrow parents would feel when they found their kidnapped children murdered, the begging and pleading for mercy, the destroying of someone else's livelihood, everything that would bring me joy and give my life meaning...

...and I was unable to do any of it.

As I grew up, I was forced to weave my own mask and behave the way those stupid fucking sheep demanded I do, holding myself back the way I was supposed to even as I nurtured a deep, boiling rage at my situation. During that time, I studied and prepared, pursuing my education as an engineer and a biochemist. I worked hard and gained my fortune, even as I sought to determine how and when I could finally begin to be who and what I truly was, so that I could finally unleash the monster within.

I could have been a murderer, a kidnapper or a terrorist, but somehow that wasn't quite enough. If I were ever seen, I could easily and quickly be identified, and then the full force of their laws would come after me, nipping my dreams in the bud. Besides that, I wanted to inspire true fear in my victims, letting them see me as the monster I truly was.

For a long time, I reflected on how to do this.

The rise of costumed supervillains, criminals and murderers who committed their crimes as much for the fun of causing misery and horror as for the profits they could enjoy, gave me my answer.

They fought viciously at close quarters, Spider-Woman sending Jack O'Lantern flying with a vicious uppercut in response to Jack slashing her with the talons at the end of his skeletal gauntlets. Finally, in response Jack blew Spider-Woman away with a wrist blast before taking to the air with his hover disc. Continuing to fire his blasters as a means of keeping Spider-Woman dodging, Jack O'Lantern immediately switched to still more of his pumpkin bombs, lighting the darkness of the storm with brightness as they exploded.

Spider-Woman flipped out of the way of the last pumpkin bomb as she tried to counterattack, but the last pumpkin released a sickly green gas that seemed to cling to her, causing her to breathe it in before she could hold her breath. The gas sapped Spider-Woman's strength, causing her slump to her knees despite her best efforts. Although she tried to force herself to stand and respond to Jack's next attack as he came flying in, she couldn't stop him catching her in the throat with a ghost grabber and then taking to the air, dragging Spider-Woman behind him. Laughing hysterically, Jack swung Spider-Woman around like a flail, smashing her into the building again and again as she struggled to break free.

Try as she might, Spider-Woman couldn't seem to muster the strength to escape the ghost grabber. Her body exploded with pain the first time she slammed into the building, the second time she felt as if she'd broken every bone in her body, and the last time she felt ready to pass out from the impact.

George Stacy's outburst at the Hammer Labs meeting I attended intrigued me from the start. Here I saw a well-respected businessman, an upstanding pillar of the community, revealing the hatred and bigotry he felt for the mutants among us. I was impressed by his willingness to let his mask drop, to show us the monster he hid within himself.

Of course, I realized I'd barely scratched the surface once I'd hacked George's home computer. I learned all about his affairs with women young enough to be his daughters, his involvement in funding anti-mutant hate groups and terrorist organizations, his illegal dealings with Norman Osborn, his involvement with the crime syndicates, which gave me all the information I would eventually need when I first enslaved George and used him to organize the gang war that weakened the New York mobs and led to the rise of the Tomorrow Legion.

I used the time not only to plan, but also to develop my equipment. Not that the lack of resources was a problem-when I appeared to be putting in late nights at work I was in fact working on my hover disc, my boomerang bats, my holographic flaming pumpkin helmet, and so much more. Having simple tastes and a very high-paying job gave me all the resources I needed to build my weapons without having to rely on outside sources.

My training as an engineer was what enabled me to craft most of my masterpieces, ranging from my boomerang bats to the tracing and recording devices I planted on Spider-Woman, her TV set and in her father George's computer and telephone, of course. However, what most people don't know is that I also minored in biochemistry, which is what gave me the ability to craft the special protein formula that gave me my superhuman strength, or the various poisons and explosives I outfitted my pumpkin bombs with, including the muscle paralysis with which I've paralyzed my victims and the mind control gas I used to make George my puppet.

I chose the horror motifs in my costume and my weapons to honor my birthday-Halloween, the night when monsters roam and evil is celebrated.

My night.

In between the roar of the storm, Spider-Woman heard Jack O'Lantern's sadistic, insane laughter. She saw images of her loved ones-her cousin Jill, her mother Helen, Aunt Nancy, Grandpa Lieber, her friends Randy, Liz, Harry, Kitty, Ben, Mark and Kong, seeming to fade away as she struggled to free herself.

Perhaps you're wondering just why I've come to hate Spider-Woman so.

As I have said before, Spider-Woman represents everything I hate about this world. She possesses incredible skills and powers all her own, powers which would have made her a formidable supervillain, and yet she wastes them defending those helpless cattle when I try to have some fun by inflicting a little misery and suffering on them. Again and again, she has interfered with my fun, and every time I think of it I am filled with a poisonous, hellish, all-consuming rage and hatred of her.

My costume reveals everything that I am, my true self, freeing me to unleash my sickest, darkest fantasies. When Spider-Woman puts on her costume, however, she saves lives, she defends the weak, she helps those in need. She simply reinforces that weakness, that refusal to embrace her dark side, that angers me about all the people I have seen in the world.

And indeed, when I first saw her on the news I saw the anger that she so often unleashed, her willingness not only to defeat her enemies but to beat on them, making them suffer. When I realized that she was Gwen Stacy, it all made sense to me...but then she wasted her budding potential. Even when she first started out as Spider-Woman, she was still protecting people and saving lives-although I'd hoped she would give in to her fury, she lost it all to that same pathetic, sniveling compassion that made me despair for Kitty after she refused to join the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.

Spider-Woman is everything that I'm not, and I'm everything that she's not.

That's why I hate her, and why I want to destroy not only her, but everything and everyone she holds dear.

Her entire body throbbing with pain, it was all Spider-Woman could do to stay conscious. Inwardly, she felt sick with the knowledge that she had failed. Once Jack O'Lantern had finished with her, Aunt Nancy and the rest of the hostages were doomed-and what did Jack have planned for Kitty and Ben? Jack had already killed her father-who was he going to go after next?

Harry?

Jill?

Randy?

Her mother?

In that moment, Spider-Woman felt her anger rising again. Anger at all the lives Jack O'Lantern had ruined, all the people he'd made suffer, all the horror and chaos he'd sown. He had taken more than sixty people, including her Aunt Nancy, hostage just to indulge his sick hatred of her.

Spider-Woman's feet seemed to almost move on their own, anchoring her to the wall as she spun a wrapping of webbing around the ghost grabber Jack was strangling her with. With her free hand, she tore herself free of the grabber, using her webbing to keep a grip on it as Jack suddenly tried to reel it in. Springing off the side of the building, Spider-Woman whipped the ghost grabber, and the screaming Jack O'Lantern still attached to it, down towards the ground with one hand while she used the other to spin a webline that anchored back to the side of the building.

With a sickening crunch, Jack O'Lantern was hammered into the brutal pavement as Spider-Woman released the ghost grabber and swung to safety with her webline. Jack O'Lantern had been too startled to let go of the grabber, thinking he had Spider-Woman dead to rights, and it took him several seconds to get up as Spider-Woman came down to street level.

Jack looked hideous even without his mask, his face and body covered in bleeding cuts, abrasions, burns and bruises. His armor was cracked and broken in several places, and his breathing came ragged and shallow. Spider-Woman was hardly any better off, just as injured and bloodied as her nemesis, struggling for breath as she stared at him with undisguised contempt.

"You had everything," Spider-Woman said calmly, clenching and unclenching her fists. "The talent to go as far as you wanted. The knowledge to make incredible discoveries. Family and friends that loved you and were ready to support you in anything you did. And you throw it all away? Why?"

"For the love of God, why?" she demanded.

"How many times do I have to tell you?" Jack O'Lantern sneered, before he spat out some blood. "This is who I am. I'm evil. I do all this because it's wrong. I do it because I'm not supposed to. I can let out all my deepest, darkest fantasies, do everything I ever wanted. I do it all because I'm a sick, depraved monster."

"And what about you?" he demanded. "Do you realize what you could have gained with your power? You could have taken anything you wanted, done anything you wanted, destroyed anyone who stood in your way. And all you do is protect those sad, pathetic weaklings, people who you could crush without even thinking about it. You make me sick! Sick!" Jack roared.

"Are we going to finish this, or are you just going to try to talk me to death?" Spider-Woman demanded.

"Oh, we're going to finish this, you bi-" Jack O'Lantern scowled as he raised his wrist blasters, but he was rudely interrupted as Spider-Woman sprang forward.

Spider-Woman began pounding Jack O'Lantern from every conceivable angle, kicking him in the stomach one moment and elbowing him in the face the next. With almost mesmerizing speed, she flipped, twirled and spun with kicks, fists, sting blasts, elbows and knees that left Jack O'Lantern a half-conscious, bloodied heap on the ground. Reaching down, Spider-Woman picked the battered Jack O'Lantern up by the neck, her face staring into his.

"That's what you really think, isn't it?" Spider-Woman wondered. "You really think everyone can be just as evil and twisted as you? Here's something you should remember-I'm not alone in this world. You are. You had everything you could have ever needed, and you wasted it all."

"Oh, I'm not alone," Jack O'Lantern wheezed, smiling weakly as the lights of the police cars finally appeared down the street. "I have a special little secret, something only you and I know...Gwen."

Spider-Woman paled at this.

"And I'm sure I won't be alone in prison, either," Jack continued, his smile growing wider. "For instance, what would Firebrand say if he knew who you were? Maybe Will O' the Wisp would be interested? How about the Brothers Grimm or Supercharger? Think any of them would like to know?" he whispered, before settling into a perverted giggling as the police pulled up.

Another burst of rage welled up inside Spider-Woman, as she felt the urge to start pounding on Jack O'Lantern again, but she knew it wouldn't solve anything. Scowling with contempt, she threw Steven Mark Levins to two of the police officers and led the others back into the Stark Enterprises building where the hostages were being kept.

All this time, the thunder and lightning of the storm had been raging, but now the chaos had subsided, replaced with a cool, soothing rain.

Completely exhausted, Gwen had swung back to her apartment and changed out of her costume, before showering to clean off the muck and dried blood she was covered in. Applying ointment and first aid to her injuries, Gwen wanted nothing more to lay down and sleep for a week, but she knew her evening was far from over.

First she met her mother and Jill to look after Aunt Nancy, who had been taken to the hospital following her ordeal at Jack O'Lantern's hands. Then she stopped in to see Kitty, who had fallen victim to the chaos Mr. Fear had caused in the New York subway tunnel on her way back from a late-afternoon assignment and was in the hospital too. Finally, she gratefully accepted the offer from Jill and her mother to come back and stay the night at their place. Her own wounds had been easy enough to explain, saying that she had gotten caught in the attack

It was only much later, after Jill and her mother had gone to bed and the rain had stopped altogether, that Gwen found herself sitting on the balcony of her Aunt Nancy's townhouse, looking out over a city which had, temporarily at least, regained some of its sanity after the horrors Jack O'Lantern had subjected it to.

Despite her fatigue, Gwen had found that she just couldn't sleep. Her mind kept returning to Steven Mark Levins, wondering why she and he had both put on their costumes and done what they did. Levins embraced his inner monster, using his Jack O'Lantern identity to act out his darkest, most depraved fantasies...so why did she continue to act as Spider-Woman?

Why was she still putting on her costume, constantly risking her life despite the problems it caused her personal life?

Levins claimed that I represent everything he hates, Gwen realized, still not entirely sure what he meant. I could have stopped being Spider-Woman, she thought, but every time I see a crisis, I just can't help myself...

It used to be that she'd begun putting on a costume purely to spite her father, knowing his hatred of both mutants and superheroes. She'd reacted out of anger, viciously beating the supervillains she fought and very nearly hurting many innocent people with her recklessness.

Now, though...

She'd saved literally dozens of lives tonight, not to mention all the other people she'd been able to help as a superheroine. Whether it had been the people kidnapped by Moonstone, the Brothers Grimm or Tarot, the other people Firebrand or Supercharger had tried to murder, or her family when they'd been threatened by the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants or the Constrictor, what would have happened to them if she hadn't been there to protect them?

The results had already been all too clear tonight. While the city's other superheroes and the police had thwarted many of the villains, the Tomorrow Legion had taken almost two dozen lives, victims who died because no one was there to defend them. And then there were all the people whose livelihoods had been damaged, quite possibly even ruined, by the trauma they'd suffered or the money they'd lost when a bank was robbed or a shop was destroyed.

Gwen recalled how angry and helpless she used to feel when she saw her father abusing her mother, how she wished she could have done something.

Now that she had her powers, she could.

And did.

That's the other problem, though, Gwen thought with a sigh. Namely that I've now got a bunch of very powerful people who hate me and want to kill me because I interfered with their plans. And what's worse, at least one of them knows who I really am, she realized, shivering at the thought. What if...what if he...

But did it even matter? There was nothing Gwen could do to stop Steven Mark Levins from revealing her secret identity, or keeping it for himself. If he let the world know, she'd find out soon enough, and she'd have to deal with the consequences...but if he didn't, then she'd be spending all her time obsessing and looking over her shoulder for nothing.

Levins would win a small victory if he made her think like that.

Taking a deep breath, Gwen stood up and went back inside. No matter what happened, she knew she would be ready for it. Until then, she had other, more important things to worry about-her friends and family.

Her mind made up, Gwen settled down to sleep, feeling more at peace than she had in a very long time.

(Next Issue: September sees Gwen returning for her sophomore year at Empire State University, but she gets more than she bargained for when old problems with money and grades come back to haunt her. Meanwhile, Kitty Pryde, Ben Reilly and their families struggle to come to terms with the revelation that Steven Mark Levins is the Jack O'Lantern, even as Roderick Kingsley reveals his new plans for Gwen. In between dealing with the increasing complications in her civilian life, Spider-Woman is also forced to confront a deadly new enemy in the manic thrill-seeker known as Joystick! All this and more in Spider-Woman #33:Thrill Ride!)