Justice League of America - Batman: The Stone King

by Alan Grant

  He bent suddenly, reaching underneath a twisted pile of corrugated steel panels. His fingers encountered hard, cool plastic and sought out the control buttons set into it.

  The air shimmered for a moment as the hologram projector shut off. The high pile of rubble was suddenly revealed for what it really was–the sleek, menacing lines of the Batmobile, the Batman's high-tech car.

  Wayne held the palm of one hand against the infrared reader pad recessed in the car door. Soundlessly, the door slid open. If he'd been an intruder, several hundred volts would have sent him on his way.

  Seconds later the Batmobile shot out of the building, its massive engine barely ticking over, all of its lights running on infrared mode. It wheeled in a tight semicircle and sped toward the junction with the highway into downtown.

  The man seated behind the wheel, hidden by smoked glass and steel plate, was no longer Bruce Wayne. A lightweight cowl covered his head; short, stubby, batlike ears jutted up from it. His eyes were hidden behind a mask, the bat-symbol emblazoned on his chest.

  He was already doing well over a hundred miles an hour as the car hit the near-deserted highway.

  Three miles, and fewer minutes, later, Batman parked in the Stygian shadows of a narrow city center alley.

  The Batmobile's roof slid noiselessly open. A grapnel snaked upward, and Batman swung himself up into the nighttime rooftops. Swinging, running, and diving, never setting a foot wrong, he made his way swiftly toward Police Headquarters.

  A huge electronic billboard blazed on a building roof. ONLY 2 DAYS 2 GO! its flickering neon letters declared. Beneath them was an array of grotesque masks, their features lighting up and darkening again in an eye-catching display that had been the talk of the city when it was first erected a week earlier.

  MEGA-MASKS was emblazoned along the bottom of the board. WE PUT THE 'HELL' IN HELLOWEEN!

  Batman grimaced as the inertia reel of his line swung him past the face of the massive billboard, his trailing cape briefly covering the winking neon lights. Halloween was far from his favorite time of year. It always seemed to draw out the worst of Gotham, as if the old legends about it being witches' night were firmly grounded in reality–as if, under their masks, people's inhibitions disappeared. And, of course, it provided the perfect cover for criminal activity.

  Villains like Scarecrow always seemed to be revitalized as the autumn nights heralded the coming winter. Last year it had been the turn of Cornelius Stirk, the cannibal, who'd escaped from Arkham Asylum and brought terror to the city for days before Batman managed to return him to his padded cell.

  But this year promises to be the worst of all. The unwelcome thought ran through Batman's mind. The Justice League's mightiest members gone–captured or abducted by who knows what? And me armed with only a handful of suspicions and even fewer leads.

  He shrugged the nagging thought aside. Jenny Ayles had given him much to consider, and once he dealt with whatever emergency Jim Gordon was calling him to, he'd devote himself full-time to trying to piece Jenny's data into what little he already knew.

  There was a sense of some grand scheme behind all the seemingly disparate events of the past month or so. It would take time and hard thought before he could begin to pin it down.

  Batman flexed his ankles and knees as he dropped fifteen feet through the air, landing atop the roof of the insurance company building that stood next to Police HQ. Slightly below him, at the far end of the roof, he could see two figures waiting by the huge lamp that projected the Bat-Signal. Jim Gordon was unmistakable, his overcoat collar turned up as he hunched himself against the cutting wind that blew at this height above the city's concrete canyons. There was a dull red glow as he puffed furiously at the pipe clamped in his teeth.

  Obviously fallen off the wagon, Batman thought, knowing that Gordon was having difficulty implementing his decision to quit smoking. The stress of the job made it doubly hard for the lifelong nicotine addict to break his habit.

  Batman's eyes narrowed as he saw that Jim Gordon's companion was a woman. She was bundled up

  in a dark cape, a scarf knotted over her hair. And it was her hair, struggling out of its covering in platinum locks, that gave her identity away.

  Batman had met Madame Cassandra once before. At his wits' end while striving to bring to a close one of the Joker's insane murder sprees, he'd turned to Cassandra for help. She'd been of little assistance, but he remembered her as a sincere and serious young woman.

  Not a sound betrayed him as Batman dropped down onto the lower roof. He moved through shadows thrown by the forest of air-conditioning boxes toward the waiting couple. Only when he was half-a-dozen feet away did he cough slightly to alert them to his presence.

  He saw Cassandra start visibly, but Jim Gordon was long used to Batman's surreptitious comings and goings and had learned to take them in stride.

  "Sorry about this." Gordon turned toward the shadows, and Batman saw that the older man looked uncomfortable, even embarrassed as he briefly nodded in Cassandra's direction. "She refuses to talk to anyone else. If I've brought you here on a wild-goose chase, call me an old fool and–"

  "Never that, Commissioner," Batman said quietly, keeping it formal for the benefit of the girl.

  Batman's friendship with Jim Gordon went back a long way, to the very first nights when Batman took to the rooftops as the city's guardian. A dozen years earlier, eight-year-old Bruce Wayne had stood by, young and terrified and helpless, as his parents were gunned down before his eyes in a street robbery gone wrong. The boy's life seemed to end then.

  Later, when terror had turned to grief and then to guilt, the child had knelt on his parents' grave and made a solemn vow in their memory.

  "Mother, Father, I promise you this," Bruce Wayne said, the tears that rolled down his cheeks lost in the driving midnight rain. "Someday, somehow, I will prevent other innocent people from dying. What happened to you will never happen to anyone else, if I have the power to stop it!"

  For more than a decade, young Bruce Wayne worked obsessively to attain the goals he'd set for himself. Regular punishing exercise turned him into a perfect physical specimen. He developed reading and memory skills until he could recall almost anything he'd ever seen at will. He expanded his general knowledge until his head swam with facts and figures, and took in-depth courses on subjects as varied as forensic science and the psychology of criminality.

  He traveled extensively, training under a variety of masters: detectives, martial artists, and gymnasts. The Wayne fortune meant that he could afford to employ only the very best teachers.

  Finally, when he was twenty-one, he decided that his training had come to an end. After all these years, he was ready. It was time to fulfill the promise he'd made to his parents. Time for justice.

  He chose the image of the bat as his disguise because it inspired fear, particularly in criminals. It never ceased to amaze Batman how the much-maligned bat was reviled as a demon, a symbol of evil and a harbinger of death, throughout the world.

  But Bruce Wayne would be the bat-demon from heaven. He would help ordinary people. He would bring justice to those who mocked it. He would bring law to the lives of those who hated it.

  And it would all have ended within weeks, had it not been for James Gordon.

  Gordon had broken a long-running corruption racket in his own force in Chicago. Memories were long, and a lot of cops didn't like one of their own who blabbed. So Gordon was transferred to Gotham City, as harsh a way as any for a policeman to be punished.

  Jim Gordon was appalled both by the lawlessness of Gotham, and the ineptitude and corruption of its police. He immediately saw an ally in this new vigilante–the "Batman," as the media called him. Both men thought the same way, both would confront any danger in the cause of what they knew was right, and both loved justice with a passion.

  Sometimes, lying awake late into the night, Gordon had wished that he too could become a costumed crimefighter. No paperwork to bury him, no boss to orde
r him around, no more petty squabbling and jealousies from his subordinates. But Gordon had a wife and child, and he owed it to them to build a reliable and stable career.

  Not long after Batman's presence in Gotham had first become obvious, a police team had laid an ambush for the vigilante. Committed to never using firearms, Batman found himself trapped in an empty house surrounded by more than a dozen sharpshooters. He'd already taken one bullet, a high-velocity rifle shot that seared through the flesh of his thigh and made it difficult to stand, let alone run.

  Without Jim Gordon's help, Batman would have died that night.

  The righteous cop followed the dictates of his conscience. He turned a blind eye when it was needed most, and allowed Batman to escape to fight again another night. To become one of the few men in the world that Gordon would trust with his life in the war against crime.

  A lot had changed in the past dozen years. Jim's good work saw him promoted again and again, until he'd eventually become Commissioner. But in the interim, his wife left him, taking their son with her. His niece Barbara was shot and crippled by the Joker; now, unknown to her uncle, she had become the mysterious Oracle, whose computer expertise was invaluable to the Justice League.

  Finally, Jim's hopes of finding new love were smashed when his second wife, Sara Essen, was murdered.

  Only one tiling hadn't changed: through everything, his friendship with Batman had endured, unwavering.

  "I'll wait out of earshot," the commissioner said now, snapping off the heavy switch on the Bat-Signal projector. The stylized black bat disappeared from the clouds.

  "No," Cassandra said emphatically. "What I have to say might sound crazy, but the police should hear it, too."

  Gordon nodded his agreement, and Cassandra's brow creased as she tried to penetrate the roof shadows. She knew Batman was there, she'd heard his voice, but there was nothing in the darkness she could pin down as a human shape. She could feel his presence, though, steady and calming.

  "Please, go on," Batman said, as if he sensed her dilemma.

  "As you know, I'm an empath," Cassandra began, her voice quiet and steady. "In scientific terms, my unconscious mind picks up tiny signals from other people and amplifies them. Sometimes, I can extrapolate these feelings into the future, so I can tell what's going to happen before it does."

  She broke off abruptly, afraid that Jim Gordon would laugh at her. Batman already knew of her abilities, but the pragmatic commissioner didn't. However, Jim had studied psychology, and knew that 90 percent or more of all communication took place at a level below the threshold of conscious perception. In fact, Gordon's own department increasingly used slow-motion videos of criminal interrogations to reveal far more than their words ever could. The telling of a lie could be pinpointed exactly by the film.

  "The night of the attack at Gotham Cathedral," Cassandra continued, "I had a consultation with a client. I had a full-blown vision. My first ever." Her voice became husky with emotion, and she stopped for a second to compose herself. "I saw that my client was going to die at the hands of a bull-headed monster."

  A shiver ran down Batman's spine, a feeling most people might have put down to fear. But Batman knew it for what it was–a signal that another piece of this unfathomable jigsaw was starting to fall into place.

  "I advised my client to go home. He ignored me, and paid the price. He . . . he was crushed to death later that night at the service."

  Jim Gordon frowned. It was his job to catch whoever had killed those people in the cathedral, but despite throwing every police officer he could at the case, so far he didn't have a single lead.

  "That's it?" the commissioner asked Cassandra, unable to keep the disappointment from his voice.

  "It was enough for me, Commissioner!" Cassandra shot back at him.

  Jim accepted the rebuke with a muttered apology. Easy for him to forget how deeply and personally death always touched those affected by it. He saw a dozen or more corpses every week of his life; it was sometimes hard to remember that each one had its own tragic tale.

  He turned away to fire up his pipe again, and Cassandra went on in a low voice. "Next day I went to the cathedral to pay my respects. I had another vision, much more powerful than the first." She halted to moisten her suddenly dry lips–a gesture, both men knew, that what she had experienced truly frightened her. "I saw the bull-headed man again, but this time he was gigantic. He towered over Gotham City like a god."

  "Or a devil," Batman added, so softly she didn't even hear.

  "Lightning came from his eyes and his hands. Buildings burst into flame. The whole city was on fire. People were dying–men and women. I could hear children screaming–"

  Cassandra broke off, her shoulders heaving as sobs racked her body. Tears welled up in her eyes and poured down her cheeks. Unnoticed, Batman had taken a couple of steps closer to her. His arm extended around her shoulder, drawing her against him, letting her feel the calm strength of his body. A man who had mastered his fear.

  Her sobs subsided, and she tilted her head back so she was looking up directly into the vigilante's masked eyes.

  "It's going to happen," she said, as evenly as she could. "I know it's going to happen. The whole city was on fire!" She reached up to knuckle away fresh tears. When she spoke again, there was a vehement edge to her words. "You have to stop it, Batman. Somebody has to stop it!"

  Jim Gordon heaved a sigh. He could have been in his snug office for the past half hour, wading through some of the paperwork that deluged him every day. "Guess I am that old fool after all," he began, but stopped as Batman spoke.

  "Cassandra, what you've just told us fits very closely with another case I'm investigating. Think carefully now–" His voice was still soft, but contained the authoritative tone of a man used to getting his own way. "Was there any indication of a time scale in your vision? I mean, anything that would allow you to judge exactly when this was going to happen?"

  "Why, yes." Cassandra hadn't paid much attention to the detail of what she'd seen, she'd been too traumatized by the death and destruction. But the date had been obvious. "Everyone was wearing masquerade costumes. And face masks. Halloween . . . it'll happen on Halloween."

  "All Hallow's Eve." Batman's voice was grim. "We have only two days from now. . . ."

  CHAPTER 9

  The Stone King

  Peter Glaston was alive, but dead. He still existed, his body still moved and acted, his mind still thought.

  Only, it was someone else's existence that filled him, crowding Peter out until he was no more than a spectator in the theater of his own life. His body moved at the volition of an intruder. The thoughts of his conqueror blasted his own into wisps of gibbering trivia.

  Glaston was still inside the hidden chamber of the Gotham pyramid. He didn't know whether or not he'd been here since he found it, because his memory seemed to be playing tricks on him. He remembered bright light, like a fountain of shining blood, erupting in Gotham Cathedral. Yet he'd never been to the cathedral. He remembered a subway train screaming down its tracks at breakneck speed, a rocketship blasting off into orbit, a man with a green ring.

  He remembered dead men walking.

  Something had possessed him. A spirit . . . a ghost . . . a consciousness. It had gained access the moment he fell through the ceiling of that sealed chamber, bursting into his brain like an exploding star. As if it had been lurking across the countless centuries, waiting for him.

  It had made him dig like a dog in the hard-packed soil. Clutching the ancient ax in Peter's hand, it had used his lips to emit a guttural shriek of triumph. And when the blade rose and fell, burying itself deep in Robert Mills's skull, it wasn't Peter Glaston's thoughts that guided it.

  He remembered Mills's blood and brains splashing over him, horrifying him to the point of violent nausea. He'd tried to vomit, but with no control over his physical self, even that was denied him.

  He watched helplessly as his own hand was guided to Mills's chest. The stone b
lade began to slice through the professor's rib cage, and Peter's nausea reached fever pitch. He had a brief, sickening memory of holding aloft Mills's heart, still pumping weakly, slippery blood dribbling down his wrist and arm. Then Peter had lost consciousness.

  When he came to, it was with that mixture of fear and relief that invariably accompanies waking from a nightmare.

  Thank God it's over! his mind cried with blessed relief.

  But when he tried to move his hand, nothing happened. It was as if the nerve endings that interfaced between his body and his brain had been severed. He realized for the first time that he no longer owned himself, that he'd been taken over, turned into a puppet–a tool to be used at the whim of its new owner.

  The terror he'd felt then abated somewhat. The blind panic that had filled him at no longer being in control of his own actions, his own mind, had gradually eased. Though he felt its malice, its malign pleasure in hurting others, whatever had taken him over seemed to bear him no evil intent. In fact, it ignored him completely, as if he was completely irrelevant to whatever it planned. Sometimes he found himself wondering if it even knew that he was still there.

  Cowering in a corner of his own mind, Peter Glaston tried to fathom what had happened to him. Some kind of possession, obviously. But by what? And for what purpose?

  His senses still carried information: he could feel a hairy animal pelt against his skin, hanging in loose folds over his shoulders and back. Did he really remember a field suffused with moonlight, the stone blade in his hand slicing through the jugular vein of an Aberdeen Angus bull? Was it possible he had danced in a meadow at night, a slow, shuffling counterclockwise movement, chanting obscenely as he smeared himself with the dead beast's innards?

  His body reeked of stale blood, so maybe his memories were authentic. There was a weight pressing down on his head, and every now and then something warm and slick slipped from it to slither down his neck. Had he really hacked off the bull's head, crouched for an hour as he carefully skinned its flesh before setting it on over his own head? Was it blood and animal brains that dripped and slid down his body?