Justice League of America - Batman: The Stone King (5 page)

"I'm a clairvoyant, Mr Marcus." Cassandra gestured with one hand, taking in the whole room. Marcus had already noted the bookshelves filled with arcane literature, and the idols and artifacts from a dozen cultures that stood everywhere. "I don't count many religious people among my clients."

The pain in Marcus's cheek was mounting. A serious attack was about to come on. "I'm not religious," he snapped. "I'm desperate!"

Cassandra didn't reply. All her life, she'd been inordinately sensitive to other people's feelings. "Empathy," her mother used to tell her. "It's a gift, girl. My own mother had it. You must use your empathy to help people."

For a long time after her mother's death, Cassandra had done anything
but
help people. She didn't want to feel the pain of others, didn't want to empathize with them, didn't want to be burdened with the problems of total strangers. So she'd dropped out of her university art classes and set off to find the world. Or, perhaps, to lose herself in it.

She went to Egypt, and to the Rose City of Petra carved out of the sandstone rocks of Jordan. She spent a year in an Indian ashram, fasting and meditating. Only when the Chinese soldiers turned her back as she tried to enter Tibet over the mountain passes did she realize her long journey was over.

She'd seen a lot in those years, but the most important thing she'd learned was, you can never run or hide from yourself and what you are.

Now, twenty-five years old, Cassandra was back in Gotham City, back in the apartment she grew up in, doing exactly what her mother had told her was her duty–helping other people.

Cassandra took a small black silk bag from a shelf behind her, loosened the drawstring, and slid out the pack of worn tarot cards it held. Slowly, deliberately, she began to shuffle the well-thumbed cards, at the same time striving to relax and let her mind go blank. Foretelling the future–or even reading a person's character–never seemed to work properly when her ego was involved.

Finally, she held out the pack to Marcus, facedown. "Select a card," she told him. "Lay it on the table, picture side up."

Tarot cards had been used for centuries to pierce the veil of the future. Cassandra had read a library of books on the subject, from medieval texts to modern psychologists' treatises on universal archetypes and their interactions. But, as with all divination, it was her own subjective interpretations that would count the most.

"'The tower,'" Marcus read aloud from the card as he laid it face up. The image on the card was of a medieval siege tower, starting to disintegrate as lightning bolts from the clouds struck it. "Is that a good sign . . . or bad?"

"The cards themselves are neutral," Cassandra told him, almost automatically. "They merely reflect the situation. It is the human reaction to the situation that is significant."

"Yeah, yeah," Marcus muttered. A stab of pain raged through the left side of his face, all the way from his mouth to his forehead. "Spare me the details. Is it good or bad?"

Cassandra gazed steadily at the upturned card, striving to understand how it might apply to this man's pain-wracked life. Although it had its positive aspects, the tower card often signified death, or outright destruction. But how did that tie in with Marcus's hope for a miracle cure?

She frowned suddenly. There was something in the image on the card she'd never seen before. How could that be? She'd used this deck for a thousand readings, practiced with it for a thousand more. She knew every card, every detail of every illustration, back to front and inside out.

Narrowing her eyes, Cassandra stared harder. She could swear something in the picture was
moving
–something hidden behind the tower was making its presence known. Fighting down a little knot of panic, she forced herself to stay calm. When you're dealing with the unknown, she reminded herself, you should always expect the unknown!

The image on the card seemed to expand until it filled her consciousness, sucking her into it like a visual whirlpool. Marcus, and the whole consultation room, could have gone up in flames and she wouldn't have noticed. Her entire attention was fixed on that hidden figure.

Suddenly, it revealed itself to her. It was a man–or at least the semblance of a man. It stood on two bare human legs, but from the waist up it had the body of a beast Thick, matted hair covered its torso, darkened here and there by black stains that she somehow knew were blood. Its head was that of a bull, red eyes glinting dangerously from a deep-shadowed face surmounted by two golden horns. The figure was chanting, a singsong noise that made no sense to her at all. She looked at the ground beneath the beast and saw the twisted, broken body of Raymond Marcus lying there, drenched in his own bright red blood.

"No!"

Marcus started as Cassandra jerked from her reverie. Her breathing was fast and shallow, and though she tried to hide it, her deep blue eyes showed terror.

"What is it?" he demanded anxiously. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," Cassandra lied. She shook her head, as if to clear it of the final traces of that hellish vision. "If I were you, Mr. Marcus," she told him, doing her best to keep her voice even, "I would go home now. I would not go to the Gotham Cathedral tonight."

"And that's it?" Marcus's disappointment was so profound that, for a moment, it made him forget his pain.

Cassandra nodded in silence. It was obvious she wasn't going to say any more. Marcus got to his feet, pushing back his chair.

"Twenty bucks, right?" He started to dig in his jacket pocket for his wallet, but Cassandra quickly shook her head. She always hated taking the money; despite all the readings she'd done, it never seemed to get any easier to accept people's payment. But this was different.

"I failed to give you what you wanted, Mr. Marcus. There will be no charge."

"Wish my doctors had the same attitude," Marcus riposted. "I'd be a rich man."

The heavy bead curtain across the doorway clacked as he walked through it, and out of the apartment.

For a long time after his departure, Cassandra sat at the table, trying to understand what she'd seen. She'd never had a hallucination in her life before, let alone a full-blown vision. It just didn't seem to make any sense. What were the cards trying to tell her? Why would this bull-headed creature want to slaughter Raymond Marcus?

She couldn't help wishing he'd never come.

Twenty feet under the surface of Forty-first Street, Batman moved cautiously along a wide, red-brick sewage tunnel.

Gotham's underground services had been laid down during the late nineteenth-century boom the city had enjoyed. No expense had been spared on hiring the best engineers and a skilled workforce, and buying top-grade materials. The result had almost been a work of art, solidly built brick tunnels that curved gracefully as they converged toward the massive treatment plant discreetly tucked out of the way near Gotham Docks.

But the sewers had deteriorated badly since those first halcyon days. Successive city administrations had ducked the issue of repairs and maintenance. "Out of sight, out of mind," as one mayor had memorably put it, shortly before he was arrested for embezzlement. Now the elegant brickwork was crumbling away in hundreds of locations, and backed-up sewers were a common problem in several districts.

Batman ran as fast as he dared on the slippery surface underfoot. He wore noseplugs, with filters specially designed to keep out both infection and the sewer's noxious stench. A powerful penlight lit his way through the Stygian darkness. Just outside the focus of its beam, he could hear the squeaks and grunts of the sewer's inhabitants. Rats.

Suddenly, he pulled up short. Something had changed. Batman flicked off his flashlight and strained his ears, listening intently.

From several places, he could hear the steady drip-drip of falling water. A distant rumble echoed hollowly–a subway train on the nearby downtown line. Apart from that, there was only silence . . . and it filled him with sudden suspicion. Why had the rats gone quiet? What were they
doing?

He could picture them–ten thousand rats seething with disease, yellowed teeth bared, waiting like predators just beyond the range of his vision. Waiting for Otis Flannegan, their human leader, to give them the order to attack.

An ordinary person might have panicked then, gone running blindly in search of an exit from the awful darkness of this claustrophobic place. But Batman had lived with fear all of his life, and had come to treat it almost like an old friend. He never tried to quiet it, never ignored it.

Batman knew fear for what it really was: a gift. A message from his unconscious mind, warning him to be alert to danger he might not consciously be aware of. Fear was a feeling to be listened to, heeded, and acted upon.

Batman's hand slipped to his Utility Belt and popped open a pouch. Fortunately, he'd come prepared. Rats had extremely sensitive hearing in the high-frequency range; the sonic gadget he'd spent most of the daylight hours preparing in the Batcave should be enough to scare them off.

He held the small metal box gingerly, unwilling to switch it on until absolutely necessary in case it scared Flannegan himself away, and began to move stealthily forward in the darkness.

There was a sudden, high-pitched whistle, and Batman knew his fear had served him well. Flannegan used a whistle to control his rodent army. But even as Batman's gloved finger hovered over the sonic emitter's trigger, the rats attacked.

There were several on a narrow ledge just above his head, which he'd failed to see in the pitch-black shadows. They launched themselves at him like tiny dervishes, eyes glowing red, their angry squeals filling his ears. One landed on his wrist, and the sonic emitter went spinning from his hand, splashing into the stream of muck and effluent at his feet.

Batman wasted no time cursing his bad luck. He brushed two rats off his shoulder, and lashed out with a foot to scatter the small band nipping at his ankles. His costume was Kevlar-lined, impervious to inflictions such as rat bites. His cowl and mask protected his face, and gauntlets covered his hands. But the rats were present in such numbers, it would be only a matter of time before they bore him to the ground and found their way through his defenses.

He squeezed the touch-sensitive barrel of the pen-light he still carried in his other hand, and saw for the first time the peril that he faced. Thousands of rats were streaming down the tunnel-side ledges toward him, a living river with murderous intent. And there, directing them in their charge, was the surreal figure of the Ratcatcher.

Otis Flannegan's head and face were covered by a gas mask, its rubber hose snaking down to the oxygen canister fixed to his belt. He wore fisherman's rubber wading boots that came up to his thighs, and a gun butt jutted from the holster around his waist. In his left hand he carried a powerful work lamp; as he switched it on, the sewer was flooded with bright light.

"This is my domain, Batman," the Ratcatcher exclaimed, and Batman could hear the mania that lay beneath the man's words. "And my little friends do not like intruders."

As Ratcatcher's eerie whistle sounded again, Batman pulled his bola from a pouch in one long-practiced gesture. Holding it in the center, where its three leather cords were joined, he whirled it at full speed in front of him, careful to keep it low. The trio of half-pound lead weights at the end of the leather rope sang in the foul sewer air.

Rat after rat dropped like stones as the spinning weights thudded into them, breaking bones and crushing skulls. But still the others came on, oblivious to pain and death as they strove to obey their master's orders.

Batman knew he couldn't keep this up for long. Spinning the bola in front of him, he inched his way toward his sonic emitter that lay in the muck.

Once, Otis Flannegan had been the official Gotham City ratcatcher, employed by the Sanitation Department. For years he had more or less lived in the sewers, punctuating his mass poisonings of rats with bizarre attempts to turn them into his pets.

It was during one of his rare outings aboveground that Flannegan had run into trouble. Not used to alcohol, he'd gotten drunk and somehow found himself involved in a street brawl. A man had died, and Flannegan exchanged one dark home for another when the judge sentenced him to fifteen years in Blackgate Island penitentiary.

After a short while, his "pets" helped him escape from prison. Consumed with thoughts of vengeance, Flannegan had kidnapped several of the people responsible for his incarceration: the policeman who'd arrested him, the witnesses against him in court, even the judge who'd handed down the sentence.

For months Flannegan kept them locked up in a subterranean cell, feeding them scraps, constantly taunting them, making them pay for the indignities they'd heaped upon him. He'd have kept them there until they rotted and died, had it not been for Batman's intervention.

The vigilante found Ratcatcher's secret jail, freed the prisoners, and sent the miscreant back to Blackgate. Ever since, Ratcatcher hated Batman with a passion that dwarfed everything else in his life, except love of his rats.

He'd last escaped during the Cataclysm, when Gotham was hit by an earthquake measuring 7.5 on the Richter scale. Half of downtown had collapsed, whole blocks had sunk into the ground, and the map of the city changed forever.

Flannegan had managed to stay on the loose ever since, an uncatchable fugitive in the subterranean domain he had made his own.

"That's right, boys!" Ratcatcher laughed as his rat packs threw themselves at Batman and his whirling bola. "You'll have him in a minute. Bite him! Rip him! Kill him!"

The high-pitched whistle sounded again, and Batman risked a glance behind him. Hundreds more rats were scuttling from their holes and hideouts, scampering over the pitted surface of the brickwork, running along the narrow walkway to attack from the rear.

No way I can hold them all back,
Batman realized.
Phosphor grenades might blind them, but I'd need hundreds to be rid of them all. There's only one thing to do . . .