JLA-Batman - The Stone King by Alan Grant

Author:Alan Grant [Grant, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-03-28T10:10:28.627000+00:00

CHAPTER 9

The Stone King

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.

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