Justice League of America - Batman: The Stone King

by Alan Grant

  As a child, Jonathan Crane had been severely traumatized by a flock of birds. Perhaps his vivid imagination had been fired by some illicit viewing of the Hitchcock movie, or perhaps he really had been attacked. No one but him would ever know. For years he'd hidden his growing psychosis from the world, until it had erupted one day in the psychology class he taught at Gotham University.

  The good professor turned a gun on his students–purely to illustrate a point, of course. The university authorities didn't see things the same way. His foolishness cost Crane his job, and so began his abrupt slide into poverty and obscurity. Crane didn't bother too much about lack of recognition, but he badly needed money for buying his life's obsession: books.

  He turned to crime, adopting the sinister imagery of the Scarecrow. Birds had frightened him; scarecrows frightened birds. Now Jonathan Crane–alias the Scarecrow–would frighten everybody. Fear became his stock-in-trade.

  His scientific genius allowed him to concoct a range of gases that could inflict fear, or terror, or dread, on anyone who absorbed them. As his ambitions grew, he experimented with gases that caused fear of specific things. Scarecrow loved to watch an arachnaphobe, for instance, imagining he was covered in revolting spiders. Or a claustrophobe believing he was entombed alive in his coffin.

  "Scarecrow," Batman said pointedly, "I'm here for two reasons. First, to verify that you are here, and not some ringer while the real Scarecrow goes on a rampage."

  "I'll have you know, sir," Scarecrow said haughtily, "that I would personally deal with any such imposter! There is but one of me."

  "Relax. I've heard more than enough to know it's you." He paused, knowing how strange his next words would sound. "Secondly, I want to ask you a favor."

  In the pale light Batman watched as the hood's rough-stitched mouth widened in a grin.

  "And what, precisely, would you want from me?"

  "A recipe," Batman said curtly. "For one of your fear gases."

  Scarecrow stamped his straw-filled boot petulantly on the floor of his cell. "Oh, yes," he drawled sarcastically, "I do have a certain reputation as an altruist to maintain. I mean, I always bestow favors on lunatics who have me locked away!"

  "I'll give you something in return," Batman offered.

  Scarecrow didn't react.

  Batman tried again. "I'll give you a book. A first edition."

  The Dark Knight knew his enemy well. If there was one thing Scarecrow cared for with a passion that defied explanation, it was books. In secret stores and warehouses throughout the city, the Master of Fear had a collection of millions that he had bought or stolen over the years. It was his ambition to own every book in the world, from those written in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs to the latest bestseller.

  Beneath his grotesque hood, Scarecrow's eyes lit up. "A first edition?" he repeated, savoring each word. He drummed his fingertips lightly against his sack-covered mouth. "By whom? Shakespeare, perhaps? Marlowe? Spenser?" His voice turned disdainful. "Or are we talking Agatha Christie and Jackie Collins?"

  "We're talking Universe," Batman said softly. "Scudder Klyce's Universe."

  Scarecrow sneered. "A work of genius, yes. But valuable? I'm certain I can purchase a copy for only a modest fee."

  "The author's personal copy?" Batman asked, "In mint condition, with handwritten margin notes, and a previously unpublished addendum?"

  Suddenly, Scarecrow's hands shot up to grasp the cold metal bars. "Do you jest with me, sir?" he cried theatrically, genuine anguish in his voice. "Is this another of your fiendish schemes to torture a poor man incarcerated against his will?"

  Klyce's Universe was one of the most peculiar of all American books. Published privately in the early twentieth century, it was an idiosyncratic and highly original interpretation of existence, a "verifiable solution of the Riddle of the Universe," as Klyce himself put it. Only a thousand copies had ever been printed, and most of them had disappeared from view.

  But the author's own copy was a rarity of great distinction.

  "I would give much to possess this book," Scarecrow said piously. "My services for, say, the coming year? Or a blank check drawn on an offshore account in the Windward Islands?"

  "Nothing so expensive," Batman assured him. "A recipe will be enough. For a very special fear gas."

  Scarecrow visibly swelled with pride. "Name your terror, my man!"

  "Just one thing–" Batman's voice dropped an octave. His eyes were dangerous slits, and the self-styled Master of Fear had to suppress a distinct shudder at the menace the vigilante projected. "Double-cross me, and I will ensure you stay in Arkham for the rest of your life."

  He paused to let the words sink in, then added, "The hospital wing."

  Scarecrow raised both hands, palms facing out, in a gesture of compliance. "My word, sir," he protested, "is my bond!"

  Somewhere a dog was howling at the moon, as Batman swung again into the trees and out of the asylum grounds. He vaulted down onto the grass verge and, keeping to shadows, ran toward the nearest buildings, half a mile away.

  Once there, he would disappear among the rooftops. When dawn came, and it was time to retire to the Batcave, one of the many Batmobiles hidden around the city would be his transport.

  Bruce Wayne had found the old book in the cavernous attic of the Manor, still wrapped in heavy, ornate paper, a Christmas gift to his great-great-grandfather, possibly from Klyce himself. But the old man had died on Christmas Eve, and there would be no celebration in the Wayne household that year. Since then the book had waited in its dusty home.

  It was a high price to pay to a criminal, Batman knew. But the formula Scarecrow had given him might prove invaluable. An insurance policy against . . . he didn't know what.

  He would be busy in the Batcave labs tonight.

  CHAPTER 7

  Witches' Night

  Gotham City, October 28

  Cassandra had scarcely slept for forty-eight hours.

  Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the broken, lifeless body of Raymond Marcus. On its own that would have been bad enough, but looming over the dead man, a symbol of murder and destruction, was the bull-headed beast she'd seen in her tarot vision.

  Real fear gnawed away at her. She knew in her bones that her vision meant something. It hadn't just been a warning for the tragic Marcus. Cassandra couldn't explain it, not rationally and logically, because card reading, palmistry, and the other fortune-telling arts she practiced weren't rational themselves. They depended on the brain's right hemisphere, the pattern seeker, the home of the unconscious.

  Cassandra just knew, in a way she didn't understand and was afraid to analyze, in case picking her empathic gift to pieces destroyed it for all time.

  She'd canceled all her appointments and put a closed notice on her apartment door. That had brought the only smile she'd enjoyed since Marcus's visit, as she toyed with scrawling due to unforeseen circumstances on the sign. A great advertisement for a fortune-teller!

  She spent a day in the battered old armchair that had once belonged to her grandmother, flicking through the pages of reference books taken from her small library shelves. There were a lot of entries regarding bull worship–it had been commonplace for a long time in the ancient world, particularly during the zodiacal Age of Taurus, more than three thousand years ago.

  Widely regarded as the most advanced race in antiquity, the Egyptians had worshiped the sacred Bull of Apu for centuries. Bulls' bodies had been mummified in a way that suggested they were as important as the pharaohs themselves. Over the years, more than a dozen of the massive bull tombs had been unearthed during official excavations.

  On the Mediterranean island of Crete, the people worshiped bulls on a daily basis. Thousands of vases and pottery items had survived from the Minoan culture, many of them illustrated with the "bull dance." Graceful youths of both sexes took their lives in their hands and vaulted over the angry bulls' backs.

  And, of course, lurking in the heart of the famous King Mi
nos's maze was the most feared bull of all, the Minotaur. Half man, half animal, it prowled the miles of subterranean labyrinth beneath the royal palace, bringing death to any intruder in its domain.

  Bull worship died out sometime before the birth of Christ, but even in the modern world remnants of the old ways survived. Every summer in the Spanish town of Pamplona, a herd of wild bulls was released into the narrow winding streets. No teenage boy could call himself a man until he'd "run the bulls," sprinting through the medieval town with several dozen maddened animals in hot pursuit. Nowadays, even the tourists joined in.

  There were literally hundreds of mentions of bulls in her books, but only one Cassandra kept returning to.

  It was a crude drawing of a beast found on a shard of pottery from ancient Lebanon. Scholars took the half human, half bull to be a representation of the Middle Eastern storm and war god, Baal. In the pantheon of gods, Baal had been a rising star who was finally elevated to the status of Jehovah's number-one enemy.

  The lines of the drawing were too thick, the perspective all wrong, but the artist had captured one thing perfectly: pure evil seemed to shine from Baal's brutish eyes.

  But by the end of the day Cassandra was no closer to an answer.

  Then she heard the news from cities across America. The security guard in New York who'd run amok, burning down his own museum; when they found his body, he was wearing a horned shamanic mask. Underneath, his flesh had been stripped to the skull. The Keystone City subway driver who claimed he'd been possessed by "a weird blue light." The near-aborted shuttle launch in Florida, where Superman was said to have battled with a "mysterious globe of blue light."

  Cassandra didn't know how, but it was obvious to her that these events were connected. Something terrible was starting to happen, and she felt as if she were the only person aware of it.

  Now, in the afternoon of the day after these incidents occurred, she found her feet carrying her toward Gotham Cathedral. It hadn't been a conscious decision. In fact, at first she didn't even know where she was going. But some part of her obviously did, and it was with a feeling of shock that she found herself standing across the street from the badly damaged church.

  POLICE LINE–DO NOT CROSSwas stenciled on the yards of tape stretched along the bottom of the wide steps that led up to the cathedral entrance. There were a couple of police cars parked down on the street, and a solitary policeman chewed gum as he stood vigil. Close to him were a dozen large bunches of cut flowers, placed there by grieving relatives of the victims and the public, who had heard the news on TV and radio. It was one of the few ways people had of showing solidarity with others in a time of grief. A way of saying, "We feel for you, even if there's nothing else we can do."

  Cassandra gave a mental shrug. The cathedral was obviously off limits. Perhaps she should just go home again.

  But whatever impulse had brought her here was stronger and more daunting than an official police line. Despite her best intentions, Cassandra marched straight up to the young cop. He saw her coming, her striking platinum hair framing her pretty face, and straightened his cap.

  "Can I help you, ma'am?"

  "Someone I know died here the other night." Cassandra spoke without thinking. "I'd like to go in and pay my respects."

  "I'm sorry, ma'am. I can't allow that."

  At that moment, a group of men and women in plain clothes, accompanied by a couple of uniformed officers, exited and began to make their way down the steps.

  "Okay, Andy," one of the officers called, "Forensics are finished now. You stay until the EPA arrives to check the site."

  "How long?"

  The policeman shrugged. "If they're not here in a couple of hours, call in."

  The young cop gave his colleague a thumbs-up sign and watched as the group drove off before he turned back to Cassandra. She wasn't there.

  As soon as the young guard had turned away, Cassandra seized her chance. She stepped behind one of the tall pillars at the cathedral entrance, out of sight of the small group on the steps.

  The cathedral's studded oak doors stood half open, and as she slipped through them Cassandra felt that she was entering another world. The traffic noise from the street could no longer be heard, and the air inside was calm and still and peaceful. Stained-glass windows filtered the light, casting a warm golden glow.

  Twisted roof beams lay here and there where they'd fallen, two of them on top of a row of smashed wooden pews. A Bible had fallen open among the debris, a poignant reminder that faith didn't always save, at least not in this world.

  She stood for a moment at the top of the aisle leading up to the altar, bowing her head and making the sign of the cross above her heart.

  Cassandra was no Christian. In fact, it was only a few centuries since the church would have burned her at the stake as a witch. But she had great respect for all religion. Humanity had always believed in something far greater than itself, something that was sensed rather than known: an order higher than mere mortals, where all the banalities of evil made sudden, perfect sense. Who was she to judge how they worshiped it?

  Her head still slightly bowed, Cassandra walked down the aisle, footsteps echoing on the checkered tile floor. She was puzzled to see chalk scrawls on the floor, until she realized they were the outlines of bodies. She wondered which one marked where Raymond Marcus died, searching for his miracle.

  Cassandra said a short, silent prayer that in death he would find relief from the pain that had plagued him in life.

  Unsure what to do next, Cassandra looked around her. The ornately carved pulpit was little more than matchwood, and several of the cathedral's impressive stained-glass windows had been damaged beyond repair. A jagged hole gaped in the center of the altar recess–she remembered the radio announcer saying that a bolt of energy had come bursting up through the floor.

  The altar table itself had been fragmented by the impact, barely recognizable slivers of wood lying everywhere.

  She bent to pick up a short length of fractured wood, feeling a little guilty as she gingerly touched it.

  Upon lifting it, she was immediately plunged into a vision of another world, as daylight turned into darkness.

  Cassandra saw a street she didn't recognize, but knew from the buildings that it was someplace in Gotham. Indistinct crowds of people thronged the street, laughing and moving along in dancelike steps. A firecracker cartwheeled into the air, its bangs and crackles punctuated by the laughter of the crowd.

  Now she could see the people more clearly. Every one of them wore a mask. Some were cheap plastic replicas of celebrities and presidents, while others bore the image of skulls, animals, and even characters from children's cartoons.

  "Trick or treat?" she heard a young boy in a mask call out, and realized that this was Halloween. Witches' night. In olden times, it was a celebration of another year safe from evil. It was also when ordinary mortals had to take extraordinary steps to banish evil for the coming year.

  The whole city seemed to be engaged in the street party. The sides of buildings were lit up with neon signs. Holograms depicting jack-o'-lanterns were projected in the air. Mobs of people streamed from all directions. Music boomed from the open doorways of a dozen bars and diners. A group of teenage girls wearing pop-star masks and carrying lit candles led an impromptu dance on the pavement, bringing traffic to a halt.

  Suddenly a bearded student, his face made up to resemble a werewolf, pointed upward. Cassandra looked, and her blood turned to ice water in her veins.

  Towering over the street, a thousand feet high, was the horned monster she'd seen in Raymond Marcus's tarot card.

  Terrified, Cassandra tried to drop the fragment of wood she held. But her fingers were locked rigid around it, and try as she might she couldn't move them. The church interior was like a distant dream. Reality was now witness to the Halloween street party.

  The music had magically halted. The dancing girls stood rooted to the spot, gazing up. The shrieks and laughter of the j
oyous crowd were silenced, and a grim oppression seemed to settle like a blanket on the whole street.

  The massive figure moved for the first time, tilting its head downward to look at the silent figures on the street far below. A huge drop of blood slid from the creature's stained pelt, splashing over a group of people as it landed on the tarmac.

  Its eyes blazed red, then cobalt blue . . . and all hell broke loose.

  Jagged streaks of lightning leaped from the behemoth's eyes, striking a half-dozen different buildings. Huge chunks of masonry broke free, tumbling end over end, smashing to the ground amid the recent revelers. Cassandra saw the bearded student in the werewolf makeup fall, flattened by a billboard that had dropped from ten stories above.

  The air was full of frightened screams, and the terrified crowd scattered in panic as the whole city began to crumble around them. Gaping holes yawned in the streets, swallowing a thousand people at a time. Flames leaped from several buildings as gas and electricity lines were severed.

  Human blood ran through the gutters in surging rivulets.

  "Ma'am?"

  Suddenly, Cassandra was back in the cathedral. She was still on her knees, but the sliver of wood had fallen from her hand. Her heart was beating at an incredible rate, trapped in her frozen body. She couldn't see for the tears that filled her eyes.

  "Are you all right, ma'am?" The young policeman stood behind her, his face concerned. Although they'd taught him how to handle situations like this at the police academy, somehow, it hadn't prepared him for the real thing. "You really shouldn't have come in. I . . . I'm sorry about your loss," he added, feeling totally inadequate.

  In silence, Cassandra allowed him to take her arm and lead her back outside.

  She had foretold Raymond Marcus's death. As if on cue, the man had died. Now she needed to find out what this vision meant . . . and how to prevent it from coming true.

  There was only one man she knew who could help her. But first, she would have to find him.

  The sun was a distant yellow disk, planet Earth invisible against its glare.