Borsalino had just been working out how to continue the conversation with Gwen Stacy when the bar emptied itself toward the entrance.
Not walked — moved with the urgency of people who have identified something they want to be closer to and have stopped caring about the people between them and it. The Liberty Bar's doors were open wide. A line of luxury cars occupied the street outside. A concentrated mass of entertainment reporters surrounded someone who had arrived in the middle of it all, and the fanatical edge of a large crowd was building rapidly as people who had been inside were pulled toward the gravity of whatever was happening out there.
Borsalino felt the crowd before he saw the cause of it. Three meters of height gave him an advantage that no amount of fan enthusiasm could entirely neutralize — he could look over the tops of most of the heads around him without effort. Gwen, significantly less tall than him and caught between the movement of dozens of bodies, grabbed his arm with both hands and held on.
He didn't object. He was busy looking.
He removed his pink sunglasses. Put them back on. Removed them again and held them at his side.
"Gwen." He kept his voice measured. "You young people are enthusiastic. The person you're worshipping is not actually a human being."
The creature that had entered the Liberty Bar and was now moving toward the main stage moved the way liquid moved when it had decided on a direction. Its skin was black and caught the bar's colored lights in a way that standard skin did not — the surface shifted slightly, like something alive underneath was responding to stimulation. The face had been arranged around a mouth full of teeth that were not human teeth, and a tongue that extended well past what was structurally necessary and moved with the independent flexibility of something that had its own opinion about where to go.
The crowd around it — and it was very much "around," pressing close, reaching out, generating a sound that was somewhere between cheering and something more primal — did not demonstrate fear. Every face Borsalino could see was bright with the intensity of genuine enthusiasm. The kind that comes from someone meaning something to you.
The creature opened its mouth and produced a voice that had the quality of a resonant instrument played at low frequency.
"Family." Its tongue moved. "Shout my name. Let everybody know who's here."
The response was immediate and substantial.
"Venom!" From dozens of voices simultaneously, then more, then the whole bar coalescing around that single word. "Venom, we love you!" "Venom, eat me!" — that one from a young woman in the third row who appeared entirely serious about the request.
The creature — Venom, apparently, and apparently known by that name to everyone present — smiled with its full complement of teeth and waved. It moved through the crowd not by pushing but by allowing the crowd to rearrange itself around it. The security team attempted to maintain formation; Venom pushed them gently aside with an arm that stretched further than an arm should and let the fans get close.
"Nobody sleeps tonight," it said to the bar. "Dance with me."
It did not walk to the stage. It extended one arm, let the black surface adhere to the stage infrastructure, and hauled itself smoothly over the top of the crowd — passing above the reaching hands, landing on the stage in a single motion, accepting a set of LED light rings from the staff waiting there. One by one it fitted them around its body — neck, arms, legs — where they pulsed in the colors the lighting rig was already using, turning the creature into something that looked less like a monster and more like an entity that had simply decided that conventional aesthetics were not worth the effort.
"Ready?" it said to the room.
The DJ equipment was in front of it. It appeared to know how to use the DJ equipment. The music that emerged from the speakers when it started had the particular quality of heavy metal performed by someone who understood it structurally — the rhythm was correct in a way that went beyond pattern-matching, built on something that sounded like years of genuine experience with what the form was supposed to do to a person.
The dance floor responded. Every body on it moved to the same frequency, not by instruction but by the music itself demanding it.
Borsalino watched from a position that was far enough back to observe rather than participate.
He was aware that music had always done something to people — he had lived through enough eras to know that this was not new. But watching it happen in a room of several hundred people, all of them moving to the output of a creature that had been eating human brains at some point in its personal history, had a quality that he found interesting rather than unsettling.
Gwen had released his arm. She was moving slightly, not quite dancing, tracking the rhythm with the kind of minimal acknowledgment that someone gives to music they are not entirely willing to admit they like.
"You looked surprised," she said, projecting over the noise. "I know it looks strange the first time."
"It is strange," Borsalino agreed.
"All the fans know what Venom is. That's part of it. The songs it writes are heavy metal. Not mainstream." She watched the stage for a moment. "Some of the fans found their way through rough periods because of the music. That tends to create loyalty."
She added, with the casual authority of someone who has researched what they like: "It's been around for at least a few hundred years. When it first appeared, it ate humans. Brains ally." She said this in the tone of someone discussing interesting historical trivia. "Now it eats chocolate beans. Someone figured out that certain compounds in chocolate are nutritionally equivalent, from Venom's perspective. So it doesn't need to commit crimes anymore."
Borsalino ran the dates.
A few hundred years. This was Year 1940 of the Holy Roman Empire calendar. A few hundred years back from here was — approximately his era. The era where a Marine Science Base in Rome had been experiencing a significant problem involving a black liquid that ate scientists and took hosts.
He looked at the stage. The creature up there was moving with the music, its extended tongue catching the stage lighting, the audience below it generating enough sound to be physically felt at this distance.
That thing survived from our time to this one, he thought. And it became a DJ.
He put his sunglasses back on.
"Chocolate beans," he said, to no one in particular.
Gwen glanced at him.
"I think," Borsalino said, more to himself than to her, "I would like to have a conversation with that star. If it was around several hundred years ago, it might have some information about that period."
He said it pleasantly, in the tone he used for most things, which was the tone of someone who has stopped finding the world surprising and now simply finds it interesting.
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