Justice League of America - Batman: The Stone King by Alan Grant (best english novels to read .txt) 📗

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