CHAPTER 6

That evening Corin picked up the November 1963 issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, brought it over to his couch, and escaped into its pages. Spidey versus The Lizard. Their first battle. Why did he still read these things? The counselor he saw for the first year after his divorce would say the explanation was easy. Corin still felt like Peter Parker inside, the skinny scared kid who finally became something more. Who overcame his fears and became a hero. Became more than he ever expected himself to be. And Corin longed to be those things.

Longed to have special powers that would free him from the mundane place the world had become. A power that would crush his fear of tight spaces and the lake.

A power that would give him the ability to slay The Dream and keep it from torturing his nights ever again.

The power to heal a kid like Brittan and let him run with abandon every day of summer.

The power to heal his brother and make things go back to the way they’d been before.

Or maybe he still read comics because he simply liked being a kid again, pretending there were such things as superheroes. Maybe it was because it made him feel like doing things only superheroes could do. That wasn’t a maybe. It was a definite. One reason his marriage fell apart.

She never could understand his obsession with extreme sports. Every time he went skydiving she shouted, “You’ll never fly like the Human Torch.” She thought he’d “grow out of it.” It didn’t happen. In their final months together, he tried to explain why he did it, but how could he get her to understand the reasons when even he didn’t know what they were?

Of course, her choice of extracurricular activities didn’t exactly solidify the marriage either.

He closed the comic and looked at the cover again. Spidey was in fine form, web shooting out from his wrist, hanging forty stories above Manhattan.

He pushed the self-analysis from his mind and decided on option number two. He loved comics simply because he longed to go back to being ten again.

The way he was before the day he had died.

When it happened there was no white light. No soloing angels with voices of silver. No gates welcoming him to a garden of utter bliss.

There had been only nothing.

He wanted to return to the innocence before he’d sputtered back to life, hacking up brackish lake water and having his world turned inside out.

Corin’s thoughts drifted to the chair sitting in his store. What if Jesus really had made the chair? Would it be full of power? Tori had been joking, but what if she was right? The lady had talked about him sitting in the chair when he was ready. Maybe it could give him visions about the future.

Sure, and maybe there was hidden gamma radiation trapped inside the chair that would turn him into the Incredible Hulk.

At the very least he’d give it a close examination in the morning. Corin rubbed his thumb and fingers together—to see if the tingling feeling returned.