Justice League of America - Batman: The Stone King (16 page)

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. . . ."

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 blade 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?

Peter reawakened from his reverie with a start. After a long period of inactivity, as if his possessor had been asleep, his body was moving again.

The interior of the chamber seemed to have grown, somehow. Incongruously, Peter was reminded of an old British television series he'd seen, about a space traveler whose craft was a phone booth on the outside, yet as big as a football stadium within. A tesseract, Peter recalled from his freshman science class. At least his memory was still his own.

Unless the intruder had access to his memories, too.

Twigs dipped in animal fat and set ablaze threw out a smoky light that flickered across the room interior, but failed to penetrate the deepest shadows. Peter saw shapes on the wall–spirals and sticklike human figures, lozenges and palm prints–all outlined in blood that had darkened as it dried. The remains of the bull's head lay heaped on the altar stone, giving off an indescribable stench.

Peter watched in fascinated horror as his hand, with no input from him, closed around the base of a burning, fat-soaked torch. Words that he didn't recognize, whose meaning was a mystery to him, spilled from his mouth in a guttural dirge.

His feet were bare, and the rough soil rasped against his soles. Seemingly of their own volition, they carried him deeper into the stone-lined chamber.

With a sense of shock, he saw the figures there. Totally motionless, jutting from a massive block of stone that must have weighed fifty tons, he mistook them at first for carefully carved, life-size sculptures.

He heard his own voice rise and fall, a new tone in it now, as if he were praying. His hand moved the flaming torch in slow, spiraling circles. Its guttering light fell on the figures, and Peter felt his stomach churn as he realized what they were.

The Justice League of America.

He'd seen their pictures in a dozen newspapers, watched footage of their exploits on the television news. They were even present the day the pyramid was uncovered by the dam burst.

Superman was unmistakeable in his blue costume and red cape. The dark-haired female with the tiara, a red star emblazoned in its center, was Wonder Woman. The black-and-green symbol identified Green Lantern. Peter had never seen the Flash before–any photograph of the Scarlet Speedster tended to show only a red blur–but deduced it was him from the golden lightning streak that crossed his chest.

Four of the mightiest heroes in the world . . . and Peter Glaston held them captive!

No,
not me,
Peter corrected himself.
Whoever has invaded my mind and stolen my body. Why did I think it was me?

Somehow, the heroes' bodies had been imprisoned in the living rock, as if the stone had grown organically around them, the way that, over years, a tree will grow to envelop a nail hammered into its trunk. Their hands were free but, here and there where they touched the rock, they too seemed to be absorbed.

Only their heads and upper torsos were showing; the rest of them was buried in the solid granite. Their eyes were closed, and Peter would have thought them dead had it not been for the tiny fluttering movements of their eyelids.

Like they're in REM sleep,
he thought. Rapid eye movement was one of the physical manifestations of the dreaming mind.
But what does this all mean?

The pain seemed to have been burning in him for all eternity.

Huge jagged teeth pierced his midriff. He could feel them, chafing against his innards every time a muscle so much as flexed. Staying still was agony, yet even the slightest movement sent him into a paroxysm of suffering.

Time and again Green Lantern tried to focus his will, to send a single coherent thought to the ring that was supposed to have protected him, but had failed.

What in the world could be strong enough to overcome
–