Ultimate Spider-Woman: Change With the Light

Chapter 54: Breakdown

Jack O' Lantern had to admit, the Trapster did excellent work. The Trapster was known for his ability to construct lairs and hideouts on very short notice, often riddling them with highly effective booby traps that earned him his official nickname. After he'd escaped from the Raft, that wing of Riker's Island Prison that was used to contain supervillains, Jack had contracted the Trapster to design a hideout for him in this abandoned subway station beneath New York City. It might have been a risk to let the Trapster know where he was, and invite him to construct this lair, but the Trapster was like fellow criminal technologists the Fixer and the Tinkerer in that none of them ever revealed confidential information about their clients, even to other clients.

The Trapster's work had been worth every penny that Jack O' Lantern had paid him, money looted from the many innocent and not-so-innocent people Jack had murdered over the course of his brief but extremely intense supervillain career. He was a terrifying sight, wearing a costume whose gauntlets and boots resembled skeletal limbs, whose chest guard was crafted to look like it was covered in tiny human skulls and whose head was a hideously carved pumpkin head glowing with holographic fire. Jack O' Lantern had only been on the scene for about a year, but he'd already become known as one of New York's most terrifying costumed criminals, even for a city already infested with costumed psychopaths, sadists and monsters.

On one of his earliest outings, Jack O' Lantern had been opposed by the spectacular Spider-Woman, a costumed superheroine who'd begun her career only a few months before Jack had started his. That initial battle had sparked a frenzied hatred in Jack O' Lantern, a hatred of the person who'd dared to interfere with his depraved, perverted 'fun', a hatred of the person who Jack believed personified everything he hated about humanity. Jack O' Lantern and Spider-Woman became caught in an increasingly intense blood feud, clashing several more times over the next year until Spider-Woman had finally defeated the pumpkin-headed madman.

That was far from the end of it, though. Jack O' Lantern had discovered Spider-Woman's true identity as Gwen Stacy, and once he'd escaped from prison he'd begun a carefully orchestrated plan to destroy her. Like no other of Spider-Woman's enemies, Jack O' Lantern could get inside her head. By playing on her anger and guilt, threatening her loved ones and reminding her that he knew who she really was and could strike at any time, Jack O' Lantern had made Spider-Woman increasingly uncertain and angry until she was finally in the right state of mind for the final phase of his plan.

Jack O' Lantern had kidnapped Kitty Pryde, his mutant niece and one of Gwen's closest friends, to use as bait to lure Spider-Woman here. In her heightened emotional state, Spider-Woman had let her guard down, and she'd fallen into the trap Jack had set for her. Now, he was exposing her to the fumes of Radix pedis diaboli, or "devil's foot root", a highly potent poison that caused horrible hallucinations, mental breakdowns and even death in anyone unlucky enough to breathe in the fumes it gave off when it was burned.

Now, everything was in place.

It was time.

SPIDER-WOMAN #54

"BREAKDOWN"

Spider-Woman seemed to have passed, out, but she slowly rose, fear and panic filling her mind as she struggled to get to her feet. Holding her head in her hands, she shuddered as she felt a horrible presence in the room, a certain indescribable something that she knew was coming, and that she knew she could not fight back against. The fumes of the devil's foot root seemed to take on strange yet maddeningly familiar shapes, even as Jack O' Lantern's mad laughter continued to echo in her ears.

Then the nightmare began. Spider-Woman was surrounded by babbling, laughing skeletons that danced in a circle around her, even as laughing jack o' lanterns formed themselves out of the ground and flew into the air before exploding in a chorus of further laughter. Crying ghosts flew in the air around her, as grotesquely malformed bat creatures flew through the air in strange, unnatural patterns, horribly croaking toads dangling from their claws.