Ben Reilly

Ben Reilly is an aging private investigator scraping by in the grimy underbelly of 1932 Depression Era New York, a man who once stood as the city's lone hero under the name The Spider. Five years before, his beloved Ruby drowned, handcuffed to the steering wheel of a sinking car while he fought and failed to reach her in time. The loss broke something in him. He hid the mask away and has refused to re-don it since. Now, he chases unfaithful spouses and missing men for rent money.. his great power buried beneath grief and guilt.. along with his responsibility. Deaf to the cries of a city that has fallen under a crime lord's heel and begs in its newspapers for its hero to return.

A simple job tailing a nightclub singer named Cat Hardy drags him back toward the world he abandoned. He fights the pull of his abilities at every turn, scaling a fire escape rather than a wall, refusing to be what he was, until the sight of the man rearing back to strike Miss Hardy snaps his restraint and a strand of webbing flies from his hand before he can think better of it. The streets he tries to ignore continue to press in regardless, a man of fire dead at an oil refinery, a man of sand struggling to keep his humanity, and the long shadow of the crime lord who owns the city.. all of it pulling the reluctant Spider back toward a fight he swore to be done with.

Ben Reilly takes the case he has been resisting, hired by the nightclub singer Cat Hardy to find her missing bodyguard Flint Marko. Searching Marko's apartment, he uncovers that Marko and the dead arsonist Jimmy Addison both fought together in the Great War.

When Silvermane's men threaten his secretary Janet at the office, the threat to someone he cares about is what finally breaks his five-year vow. He pulls the woolen mask back over his face and becomes the Spider once more, confronting Silvermane on his way to the docks to frighten the crime lord into leaving Ben Reilly and Janet be. Only later, from Robbie, does he learn the bitter cost of that choice: the police had planned to arrest Silvermane at the docks that night, and the Spider's return unintentionally saved the very man strangling the city.

Ben Reilly keeps his enemies close, taking a job from the crime lord Silvermane himself, hired to root out the rat who tipped the police to the dock shipment. He plays the part of the loyal investigator while working his own angles, posing as an injured officer to question the patrolmen wounded in the raid and tracing the leak back to Mayor Morris. When Silvermane's man Winston pays him with marked bills, Ben recognizes the same mark found on the money Cat Hardy once gave him, and the pieces begin to point toward the singer as the one who put out the hit.

Determined to throw Silvermane off Cat's scent, Ben pulls the mask back on and breaks into the crime lord's home, listening his way through the tumblers of a personal safe to lift a stack of marked cash for a double cross of his own. He goes to Vera Addison to confirm his fears, her reaction telling him Cat did hire her husband, only for Vera to demand a thousand dollars to keep the secret. The night tightens around him as hit plan unfolds.

Ben Reilly keeps up his uneasy dance with Silvermane, drinking late into the night with the crime lord at The Alcove and turning up hungover at the office the next morning. When he meets Cat Hardy, the two grow closer, and he opens up about the woman he loved and lost, telling her how a man he once put behind bars came out after five years and killed Ruby in revenge while Ben sat drinking across town, too late to save her. He leaves out the part about the mask, keeping only that secret as he bares the rest.

A news alert about a monster tearing through the Diamond District pulls he and Cat from a romantic evening. Him back into the suit. Believing it to be Flint, he allows Cat to go off alone to help. Lets her brand him a coward. He then calls Robbie to bring his camera and races to the scene as The Spider. The man he finds is not Flint but a stranger crackling with electricity, who knocks him around in front of a gathered crowd. Clearly outmatched in a straight fight, Ben turns to his wits, cutting the power grid the man has tapped into and baiting him to burn through his charge until he has nothing left, then easily taking him down. The victory is immediately hijacked by Mayor Morris, who arrives to proclaim a public pact between the city and The Spider, binding the masked hero to his campaign.

Ben Reilly opens up to Cat Hardy at last, recounting how his abilities first came to him. The story carries back to the Great War, when his unit stormed a German prison camp and the captives, Flint Marko among them, helped save his life. Pushing deeper into the compound with a fellow soldier, Ben found men strapped to beds and fused with creatures, and one prisoner transformed into a spider hybrid bit his arm before being gunned down. The same day that the now-infamous photograph of the freed prisoners was taken, Ben lay off to the side, convulsing as the bite rewrote what he was.

The revelation explains why he took the case in the first place: he was there, and he hoped that whatever gave the powered men their abilities might also strip his away. He chases that thread to Dr. Alethea Faber, breaking into her office at a Queens hospital while Robbie keeps her talking downstairs. Nearly caught lifting her files, he plays the part of a lost mental patient to slip away, having stashed the documents in webbing outside the window, though Faber's secretary Ogden recognizes him as the soldier who freed them in France. With the pieces assembled, Ben learns the grim truth that every use of these powers brings their bearers closer to death, and that Faber's treatments have only hastened the end. He goes to Cat with the news that Flint is dying, and offers her a way out of the city, a life together in Santorini far from Silvermane's war.

Ben Reilly is packing to leave the city with Cat when a knock at the door brings Ogden, the assistant to Dr. Faber, asking him to stop Robbie's article so the doctor's work can continue. Ogden reveals he was one of the prisoners Ben freed in France, aged far beyond his years by his mutation despite being only thirty-six, and that he knows Ben is the Spider. Ben refuses to help and announces he is leaving town and giving up the mask for good. As Ogden walks him out, he jabs Ben with a needle, and the detective collapses.

He wakes handcuffed to a bed in Faber's secret laboratory. Faber tells him she means to run tests, draws his blood, and reveals two truths that land hard: Ogden is her son, and it was Cat who gave up his identity. As the sedatives drag him under, Ben sinks into a fever-dream of spiders and his own masked self before waking to find Faber intends to harvest genetic material from his organs. Rubbing his wrists raw against the cuffs, he spots the keys on a nearby hook and uses a strand of webbing to snag them. His escape coincides with disaster, Silvermane and his powered men arrive to plunder the lab, and in the chaos a gun is electrified, dropping to start a fire that engulfs the place. Ogden frees Ben in repayment for the war, and Ben slips past Silvermane's guards as the lab explodes, escaping with the antidote in hand.

Ben Reilly nurses his wounds and his heartbreak after Cat's betrayal, drowning his sorrows at a bar and pouring his bitterness out to Eamon the bartender. When a group of younger drinkers mock the Spider as washed-up and old, the wounded pride proves too much. He stumbles out, pulls on the mask, and returns to silence the naysayers, beating them down and webbing them up in a drunken brawl that doubles as the cathartic release he has been denying himself.. As heroes do..

Robbie tracks him down mid-celebration and pulls him out, and Ben confesses he means to take the antidote and be done with the Spider for good, admitting the role no longer makes him feel the way it once did. Robbie talks him back from the edge, reminding him that Flint and Lonnie are dying and have as much claim to a cure as he does, that this time he has the choice he never had with Ruby. Won over, Ben sets out to cure the veterans instead. He and Robbie corner Lonnie, but the bar fight has left his webs nearly spent and Lonnie's hardened skin turns the antidote needle, until Robbie drives the syringe into the one soft spot left, Lonnie's eye. The cure takes, and a freed Lonnie helps carry the battered Ben to safety, though only a few vials of the antidote remain.

Ben opens a captured man, hauled out of Robbie's apartment by Flint and Leyden and handed to the very man hunting the Spider, who has no idea he already holds him. Rather than break, Ben plays the down-at-heel investigator to the hilt, haggling a fee out of the old crime boss and arranging for the Spider to make an appearance, steering Silvermane clear of the truth with nothing but nerve and patter. It is the same survival instinct that has carried him through five years of insisting the mask was behind him.

When the disguise collapses and Robbie is exposed beneath the hood, Ben can hide no longer. He reveals himself as the true Spider, reclaims the cure on a line of web, and throws himself into a brawl he is too worn to win cleanly, his mask torn to rags by Flint's hands. He turns the night only when Leyden's own cruelty fractures the coalition, hauling the electric man off his feet and hurling him into the path of a passing train. In the end he presses his last dose of the cure into the dying Flint rather than swallow the ordinary life it offered him, and he walks away to the cheers of strangers, taking the mask back up for good and accepting that this city will never let him be only a man.