Justice League of America - Batman: The Stone King Page 3

  Struggling to contain the feelings that surged through him, working quietly with the flashlight, Peter started to clear away the rocks and boulders that obviously formed the chamber roof. All his dark, brooding thoughts of just a few minutes ago had dissipated, to be replaced by a strange sense of wonder. The Gotham pyramid was an unprecedented find, and now he was going to enter its subterranean chamber, hidden for hundreds, possibly thousands, of years.

  It wasn't the lure of treasure that drove him on as he carefully removed the small, square-cut slabs that the builders had used to roof the structure. It wasn't the thought of the ancient artifacts, buried for nearly five thousand years, that might lie inside, or the fame and fortune they might bring him. It was the purest feeling known to any archaeologist–the rolling back of the unknown, the discovery of another piece of the mysterious jigsaw that had been the culture of our predecessors.

  The roofing slabs fit perfectly into one another, and Peter couldn't help marveling at the craftsmanship and the knowledge these ancients must have possessed. Who knew–maybe this chamber was the stellar observatory that he suspected the site contained. Surely this would make Mills and the others sit up and take notice!

  Peter worked for a full ten minutes before he'd achieved his goal–the clearing of a circular space, almost like a chimney, that gave him enough room to lower his lean frame inside. Requiring both hands for the task, he switched the flashlight off and jammed it in his pocket before he began his descent into the darkness.

  Holding onto one of the slabs, its sharp edges threatening to slice his fingers, he lowered himself feetfirst through the hole he'd dug out. A momentary shiver of fear ran through him as his legs dangled in midair. What if the chamber had no floor? What if it dropped away for another fifty feet, right to the very base of the pyramid?

  But then his outstretched, scrabbling feet found solid ground, and with a sigh of relief Peter lowered himself down onto the chamber's dusty floor.

  The air inside the room was thick and oppressive, and the dust his excavations had kicked up made him cough heavily. Peter stood for a few seconds in the darkness, anticipation building inside him. For the first time in uncounted centuries, human eyes were about to view a long-concealed mystery.

  Peter took a deep breath and flicked on his flashlight.

  Meanwhile, on the pyramid's flat top, the others had packed up most of their gear and were ready to make the descent to the valley floor. The moon had risen now, its pale silver glow lighting up the sky and blotting out the stars.

  "What about Peter?" Jenny asked.

  "If the guy wants to act like a spoiled brat," Lorann Mutti replied, "we should just leave him to his tantrums. Let him find his own way back to Gotham."

  David Rymel nodded his agreement, and Len Dors's mustache quivered as he growled, "Serve him right, too."

  "It's not as straightforward as that," Jenny said quietly. "Peter has . . . good reason to be upset." Her voice tailed off; she had no desire to go into this, not now, not ever really. She threw the professor a sidelong glance and was glad when he came to her rescue.

  "Peter's been under a lot of stress," Robert Mills said, "with his postgraduate thesis due, and all the work we've been putting in here." He went on, making sure Lorann heard his words. "But we can't just abandon him. We're a team. We have to look out for one another."

  Mills snapped on his flash and walked over to the top of the rope ladder. "You guys finish up here. I'll go on ahead and coax Peter out of . . . whatever's bugging him."

  Without waiting for their reply, Mills swung his body out over the edge and started to descend.

  Peter Glaston played his flashlight over the chamber interior and marveled.

  The stone walls and corbeled ceiling had been constructed without mortar, the stones cut and shaped to fit so precisely that Peter could hardly see where they adjoined. Two larger stones set into the chamber wall had been incised with spiral shapes, and Peter frowned. Almost all of the spirals that he'd seen in Stone Age art were drawn clockwise; the two here were their mirror images, spiraling tightly into their centers but in a counterclockwise direction.

  The left-hand path . . . Unbidden, the phrase popped into Peter's consciousness. The left-hand path–the territory of witches and sorcerers. The path of black magic.

  The chamber was completely empty, except for a large rectangular block of granite that stood against the west-facing wall. By the light of his flashlight, Peter could see a shallow runnel that ran the full length of the stone. He couldn't be sure, of course, but on other artifacts he'd seen, a carved runnel was to allow blood to drain off. The stone was an altar . . . and someone had used it to make blood sacrifices.

  Peter's gaze was drawn to a spot on the floor just in front of the altar stone. It was hard to tell in the flickering shadows, but it seemed that the hard-packed earth floor had at some point been disturbed.

  Eyes narrowing, Peter sank to his knees in front of the altar block. He'd been extra careful not to touch anything in the chamber for fear of contamination–the bacteria on a normal human hand could be enough to do it, and once contaminated, it was near-impossible to get a proper radiocarbon dating fix. Peter and Mills might not get along, but Peter had never forgotten the first rule the professor had taught him: Never do anything to disrupt an ancient site.

  But now Peter's head was pounding. He'd discovered something unknown, something no one else even suspected. His thoughts of Robert Mills, of careful assessment, of nonintrusion, were forgotten as he stared hard at the small patch of disturbed soil. Something had been buried there.

  Balancing the flashlight on the floor to illuminate the spot, he leaned forward and began to scrabble at the surface with his bare hands. He knew that he shouldn't be doing this–that he should call the professor and arrange for a proper stone-by-stone excavation–but his mind was curiously detached, he felt driven, and he didn't even register the pain in his fingertips as they scraped at the stony earth.

  The soil came away more easily than he'd expected, and his heart thudded as his right hand closed around something cold and hard. He tugged at it, twisting it slightly to ease it from the earth that held it. It came free with a jerk, sending an almost electric tingle shooting up his wrist and arm.

  Peter picked up the flashlight in his other hand and focused its beam on his find.

  It was a carved stone ax head, made from some kind of heavy granite rock, four or five inches wide and double that in length. At each end it had been honed to a razor-sharp edge that seemed unaffected by its long years below ground. And on each side of the ax blade, a spiral was carved–a counterclockwise spiral.

  In his excitement, Peter hadn't heard the noise behind him as Robert Mills lowered himself into the chamber. But the student heard him now, as a low, angry growl escaped from the professor's lips.

  "Glaston! Glaston, what the hell do you think you're doing?"

  Peter tried to answer him, but no words would come. His right hand and arm were still tingling, as if the ax head he held were sending out jolts of low-voltage current. His thoughts refused to focus. There was a buzzing in his ears, low and rhythmic and throbbing. It almost sounded like voices chanting.

  Slowly, Peter rose from his knees to stand fully erect, swiveling to face the accusing gaze of his teacher.

  "Heaven knows, I've tried to make excuses for you, but this is unforgivable!" Mills hissed through clenched teeth. "Who knows what damage you've done here? Come on–out! Now!"

  Peter stood paralyzed, trying to figure out what was wrong with him. His mouth had gone dry and his tongue felt thick and swollen, preventing any attempt at speech. Images flashed deep in his mind, disturbing pictures that were gone before he could pin them down. The noise in his ears grew louder.

  Yes, it was definitely chanting. But the words sounded completely alien, in no language that he had ever heard.

  "Are you deaf?" Mills barked. "I want you out of here before the room's completely contaminated!"

 
He reached to grasp Peter's arm, trying to tug him away from the altar, and found himself surprised by the student's strength as he resisted. "Stop acting like a spoiled brat, or–"

  The professor broke off as Glaston's right hand, the one clutching the ax, rose above his head. In the light of his flash, Mills could see that the boy's face was blank and expressionless, but his eyes glinted in a way Mills had never seen before.

  "Wh-what are you doing?" Mills felt suddenly afraid. Something was wrong here. Glaston hadn't spoken since Mills surprised him, and that look in his eyes was inhuman–even murderous!

  He looked up at the ax head held high in Glaston's hand. As if refusing to accept the atrocity that he knew with awful certainty was about to be committed, he took note of the artifact. The dark, beautifully shaped stone. The curious left-hand spiral, like none he'd ever seen before. The impossibly sharp blade, honed to a razor edge, that was coming down fast toward his head. . . .

  The others were descending. They were almost at the fifth course when they heard the scream.

  Jenny froze. "That sounded like Rob . . . like Professor Mills!" she exclaimed.

  "Maybe he's fallen." Lorann shone her flashlight down the pyramid face till its beam was lost in the shadows. "Can anybody see anything?"

  They scrabbled down the rope ladder till they stood on the ledge mat was the pyramid's fifth step. Four flashlights shone as one, and for an instant the hole Peter had made seemed to blaze with reflected light.

  "There's someone in there!" Len Dors handed his flash to Lorann and swiftly began to lower himself through the opening. "Keep your beams on me."

  There was a dull thump as Len landed on the chamber floor.

  "Catch," Lorann called down, dropping Len's flashlight.

  There was a long, pregnant silence.

  "Len?" Dors heard the anxiety in Jenny's voice as she craned her neck, vying for a better view of the chamber interior. "What have you found?"

  But Len Dors couldn't answer. He stood rooted to the spot, the flashlight fixed on the chamber's altar stone. The body of Robert Mills was draped across it, lying on his back. An ugly wound in his head oozed blood, staining his silver hair before dripping to the ground, where the dry earth absorbed it greedily.

  "Professor?"

  There was no reaction, and Len's voice was hoarse with shock as he called up to the others. "It's the professor. He–he's lying here bleeding. It looks like he's been attacked!"

  Quickly, the student knelt by the altar and grasped the professor's wrist, feeling for a pulse. There was none. "I–I think he's dead!"

  Up above, Jenny felt suddenly faint. "Omigod!" she whispered. Then, louder, her voice strained. "And Peter?"

  "Not here," came Len's muffled reply.

  Jenny moved away from the aperture, one hand reaching to steady herself against the pyramid face. Above, the half-moon's light cast an eerie glow. "Peter!" she shouted. "Peter, where are you?"

  But the only reply was the night wind soughing through the cottonwood trees on the far side of the valley.

  In the chamber, Len Dors's brow furrowed as he saw the wide, dark stain on the left side of Mills's chest. He angled the flash beam to get a better view. The stain was blood. The professor's jacket and sweater had been torn away, and the flesh of his chest had been gouged open to expose his rib cage.

  Len doubled over, vomiting painfully on the chamber floor, when he realized the professor's heart was missing.

  CHAPTER 3

  Fear Is a Gift

  Gotham City, October 24

  Seven p.m., and the streets of downtown Gotham were all but empty.

  Most of the day people had gone, on the exodus of buses and cabs and trains and subways that every evening carried office workers and store assistants, city tycoons and street vendors, home to the suburbs. The city was theirs during daylight only.

  When night fell, it was as if a new species ventured out from its hiding places to take over the streets.

  Within an hour, downtown would be buzzing with life again. The bars and restaurants would fill up, crowds would stream toward the theaters and night-clubs. Malefactors would begin making their illicit plans, and the cops on patrol would check their guns and ammunition.

  But not quite yet. The limbo would last for an hour or so, as late workers straggled home, and the night people prepared themselves for the hours of darkness.

  A hundred feet above Kane Avenue, Batman moved through the city like a wraith. Time and again a grapnel flew from his hand, anchoring itself on a flagpole, or the cornice of a building, or one of the thousands of grimacing gargoyles mat adorned the rooftops. Then he would dive from his perch, swinging on the grapple's attached bat-line, reveling in the chill night air as he headed inexorably for his next landing.

  He stopped for a minute every now and then, balancing deftly on some precarious ledge, raising his night binoculars to the slits in his mask, scanning the quiet roads below for signs of trouble. He didn't expect to find much–it was still too early–but he went through the routine anyway. In a city like Gotham, it was virtually impossible to predict where trouble would erupt next.

  Movement drew his gaze to the fringes of the Clock District. In contrast to most of downtown, here there were hundreds of people out and about. Of course, Batman concluded, there was a major All-Faith religious meeting tonight at the Gotham Cathedral. At a similar meet a couple of weeks earlier, the worshipers had witnessed what the newspapers later called a "spontaneous miracle." Listening to the praises and prayers offered up by John Consody, the charismatic preacher, a blind man found that his sight had returned.

  "Faith is the key," Consody told his congregation. "Just have faith, and you too can move mountains!"

  Maybe he's not so wrong, Batman thought. The human mind is an amazing thing.

  But ultimately, the only thing Batman had faith in was himself.

  After the dam burst, Batman had reported his suspicions about the substandard materials to one of the few people he called a friend–Jim Gordon, commissioner of the Gotham Police Department. Two highflying executives from the company that had built the dam a decade ago were under arrest, with charges pending. Several more employees were being interrogated as to their role in the scandal that had so nearly caused disaster. It might take a long time, but eventually justice would be done.

  And justice was something that Batman pursued with every fiber of his being.

  Batman replaced the infrared binoculars in their pouch in the Utility Belt that circled his waist. There was nothing here that required his services. At least, not above ground.

  He swung himself up over the parapet of a building and dropped lightly to his feet beside the small array of lights that acted as a guidance beacon for aircraft heading to Gotham Field. Quickly, he popped the catch on another of his belt's pouches and pulled out a sheet of paper. Unfolding it, he bent to study the map of the Gotham City sewer system.

  He'd memorized it years earlier, but this was the latest version. It showed all the new tunnels, constructed as part of the city's rolling program to replace the original nineteenth-century sewer system. Although a technical marvel in its time, it had long since passed its use-by date. The brick-lined tunnels were crumbling, the old iron pipework was rusted and leaking, and the budget for emergency repairs marched steadily upward every year.

  The map also showed those old tunnels that had either collapsed or been closed down and were no longer viable. There was a whole network of them underneath Gotham Cathedral, and that was where Batman was headed.

  Otis Flannegan was down there somewhere, hidden in that maze of tunnels, with the loot he'd stolen in a series of daring robberies during the past few weeks.

  Otis Flannegan: the Ratcatcher.

  Where he found Flannegan, Batman knew he'd also find his "pets." Rats. Tens of thousands of them.

  Batman folded the map into a small square and stashed it away. He readjusted his bat-line, then kicked off backward over the parapet and dropped quic
kly down the side of the building, his cape billowing around him like the wings of some hell-spawned demon.

  He landed in a dingy alley. Teenage vandals had smashed the streetlights, and the local restaurants used the alley as a convenient–if illegal–dump. Black plastic trash bags were piled five feet high, the stench of their rotting contents filling the narrow area. There was no one around.

  Batman smoothly levered up the manhole cover at the side of the alley. He went in feetfirst, then replaced the cover behind him before scrambling down the rusting iron rungs set in the wall of the access shaft.

  Within seconds, he had left the city behind and disappeared into the shadowed world below its streets.

  "The sign outside says you do tarot card readings. I want to know my future."

  Raymond Marcus sat in the small consultation room, fighting to still the involuntary twitch that threatened the entire left side of his face. His cheek was puffed up and swollen, half closing his left eye. He should have taken his dose of painkillers an hour ago. But they clouded his mind, and tonight–for once–he wanted to be able to think straight. No matter how much it hurt.

  Across the table from him, Madame Cassandra pursed her lips. "That's a tall order. The future doesn't give up its secrets easily," she said quietly. "There are so many possibilities, most of them intertwined. It's easier–and usually more accurate–if you can focus on one particular problem."

  "Oh, I can do that all right," Marcus said bitterly. "Problem: facial neuralgia. Result: constant pain verging on agony. Treatment: painkillers so strong they're destroying my mind."

  Cassandra looked directly at him, and in the light of the small art nouveau lamp on the polished tabletop, Marcus noticed her eyes for the first time. They were the deepest blue he'd ever seen, set off perfectly by the duster of platinum curls that fringed her pretty face.

  "And what exactly do you want to know, Mr. Marius?" Cassandra asked.