Vicki drove recklessly through the early morning traffic of Gotham city. Despite it being Saturday and the sky only starting to tinge with dawn, the streets were still clogged with cars and busses, the thoroughfares sluggish and the sidewalks dotted with pedestrians walking here and there with their heads tilted down.
The fuming red head cut dangerously around other cars and laid on her horn until she could get around others. She made record time getting across uptown and then across the bridge out of Gotham and toward the coast. As she sped across the coastal highway northward toward Wayne Manor, her conversation with Bruce last night replayed in her head.
"Vicki, you can't keep doing this," Bruce hissed after hauling her bodily out of the lecture hall.
Vicki yanked her arm out of Bruce's large calloused hand and gave him the kind of glare that made smaller men flinch. She yanked her blouse back into place and brushed her hair over her shoulder before replying.
"I can't imagine what you mean, Mr. Wayne," she replied, dripping with a false innocence. "I can't report on the intentions and investments of one of the most powerful men in Gotham?" she asked, her voice thick with sarcastic surprise.
Bruce looked back at her blankly, his expression carefully controlled. But, she could see the roiling emotions behind his eyes.
"Vicki, this is my private life. This is something I'm doing for my own closure. Don't you think it's in poor taste to invade that?" Bruce shot back, his voice rising slightly at the end, betraying his own emotion.
Vicki scoffed to hide the slight twist in her stomach that those words brought. This time last year, she wouldn't have so much as glanced sideways at a story like this. But, this wasn't last year and she couldn't afford to be as discerning as she had been then.
"This investigation is going to be the deciding point as to whether or not the stately Wayne Manor, one of Gotham's oldest standing structures, remains standing. That is, if the gossip I hear is to be believed. I think it is most definitely in the public's interest to know what goes on here," Vicki returned, sniffing primly.
Bruce's expression contorted in rage for a moment before he forced himself back under his own rigid control. "Vicki," he snapped, his hand slashing across the air, "Quite frankly, this is none of your or anyone else's business. Wayne Manor is my family home. This is the investigation that I'm funding personally, not a cent of company money has been used here. Wayne Manor isn't even in the city of Gotham. You're just desperate for a story!"
Vicki squawked in indignance, but Bruce held up a hand for silence.
"I understand that desperation, but I hope you don't think that what we shared between us in the past affords you any kind of liberties when it comes to me," Bruce gritted out.
Vicki stared at him, her eyebrows raised in shock even as his were lowered over blue eyes glittering with determination.
Before she was aware of what she was doing, her hand swung out hard at his face, the slap loud and resounding in the otherwise silent hallway.
The two of them continued to stand staring at each other, Vicki's chest heaving with gasps of breath, her hand still in the air, her eyes wide and frenzied. Bruce stood much the same as before, his hands in fists by his side and a distinct red mark growing on his cheek.
Without another word, Vicki turned on her heel and ran down the hall to the exit.
Vicki clenched her teeth as the emotional bile of shame and defeat hit the back of her throat. Backing down from Bruce had been the last thing she had ever wanted to do, but the man had perfected the art of cutting a person to the bone with a single well placed insult. Vicki still felt like her guts were pooled around her feet, the shame and depression that the truth of Bruce's words had revealed a heavy pall over her mind.
Her heart was still thudding heavily in her chest, her face hot with shame as she pulled up to the front gates of Wayne Manor.
Last night, while driving home through tears of frustration, Vicki had made the decision to crash Bruce's little psychic investigation. The Wayne family was highly respected in Gotham. It was one thing to whisper insinuations that the current Wayne family head believed in ghosts and paid exorbitant fees for swindler psychics to traipse around the family homestead and tell him that his mommy and daddy were still watching over him. It was quite another to run an article with photographic proof to back up that claim.
She pulled a heavy red pair of bolt cutters from her passenger seat as she stepped out of her little smart car. She had picked them up at a hardware store before leaving that morning and was glad to have them as she approached the gates. They appeared the be wrapped in chains.
As she marched forward, however, the gate and chains began to rattle. Vicki paused, her heart stuttering in her chest, worrying that someone might have seen her. That possibly Bruce or Barbara might have foreseen her meddling and were coming to greet her now. Vicki stared wide eyed as the gates slowly pulled themselves open, the chains rattling as they were pulled loose, dropping to the leaf strewn driveway once the gates were open.
Vicki cautiously returned the bolt cutters to her car, considering the open gates. The gates must have been automatic. Maybe they were more modern than they looked and would open for any car that drove up. Obviously, the chains were just for show. She thought that was a little careless, but maybe the Manor got more traffic than she thought and the convenience out weighed the risk.
Still a little doubtful, Vicki crawled back into her car and drove through the gates still standing patiently open. The gravel churned and the chains rattled as she drove over them.
As she drove forward, the house rose regally out of the overgrown vegetation all around it. The stone it was built out of was a pale gray, the windows dark, but reflecting back pale pinks and purples as the sun slowly rose in the east behind it. Huge weeping willows, twisting corkscrew, and ancient oak trees reached long spindly fingers toward the house's windows and out over the old rutted gravel driveway. Vicki pulled her car under a particularly bent willow tree, the long weeping branches swinging shut behind her car so as to completely obstruct it from the view of anyone driving by.
She approached the house on foot from there. The gravel crunched under her sneakers. Leaves rustled slightly in the brisk early morning fall air. She passed a beautifully carved fountain standing in the middle of the round drive way. It was still now, green algae marking the places on the face of frolicking cherubic children where water used to flow and spit. The only water now was gathered in the base of the fountain, still and covered with a thick blanket of lilies and algae. As Vicki watched, a small green frogged climbed on top of one of the lily pads and cocked a particularly cognizant eye in her direction.
It coughed out a deep croak and Vicki quickly hurried on.
The steps of the Manor were undiminished by time. They were made of a pale warm beige cement, carefully crafted curling black rails edging the sides until they reached the stone wall exterior. Moss and algae had begun to grow in the shadowed crevasses of the stairs, nature slowly encroaching on the monuments that man had built with his own two hands. But, the steps were still sturdy looking and Vicki climbed them with confidence.
The doors were huge wood monstrosities. They had large black iron lion heads with rings in their mouths as knockers and carved black iron handles with a button on the top for a latch. Vicki tried the doors, pushing and pulling, but they didn't so much as rattle in their casings. She gave them a solid kick for her trouble.
"So much for the front door," she sighed, running a hand through her thick red hair and staring unhappily at the unmoving double doors.
Vicki jogged down the front steps and then a little farther, before whirling around and checking the rest of the front of the house for any windows or doors that she might be able to reach. She didn't see any.
"Back door it is," Vicki muttered, taking toward the right of the building, intending to walk along the edge of the house until she saw a point of entry.
This soon turned out to be completely inadvisable. Tall hedges that had probably been closely cut and carefully manicured in the past now grew like large green sentries all along the exterior walls, preventing sight as well as entry. Vicki was forced to swing further into the wild gardens and forest surrounding the manor, long lacking maintenance let alone a simple pair of pruning shears.
Here and there she would find a path of stepping stones, a crumbling garden bench or what might have been a beautiful fish pond at one time. Thorny bushes, huge twisting tree trunks and long reaching vines had taken over much of the ground and rendered all paths and order nearly unrecognizable among the chaotic clash of nature.
Vicki was stepping cautiously over what might have been a small tumbled bridge when she heard the distinct snap of a twig somewhere behind her.
Vicki's head swung around and her eyes surveyed the greenery around her. The leaves and branches she could see were still and unmoving. Still, she called out, "Hello!"
There was a long pause. The only sound she could hear was the rustling of leaves high above her. All else was silence.
Her face pulled into a grimace, Vicki soldiered on even though the feeling of a cold finger running down her spine dogged her. 'It was just an animal,' she told herself, though she moved faster and checked the location of the manor on her left more often. The windows were still high up on the wall. She didn't see any doors through the dense foliage.
"Vicki," someone whispered.
The young journalist turned around quickly, almost stumbling over a protruding tree root in the process of trying to turn around as quickly as possible. Once again, nothing seemed to be moving in the greenery all around her. There were no further sounds, no movement among the trees or underbush.
But, that didn't detract from the fact that Vicki was sure she had just heard someone whispering her name. She couldn't have determined the gender or age of the voice, but the memory of it was clear in her mind.
The hairs on the back of her neck stood up and tears began to gather on her long lashes as she cast around for any kind of reasonable explanation. Maybe Bruce and his psychic friends were playing a trick on her? But, she hadn't seen any cars and the chains had been wrapped around the gates when she had come in. Although, she supposed they too could have hidden their cars and replaced the chains after coming in. Or, she could be going mad, the sharp decline in her career and her stinging pride hurrying along the process.
Or, there could really be ghosts at Wayne Manor.
Strangling off a cry of fear before it could struggle out of her throat, Vicki turned and started running, crashing through the foliage all around her. She was running full tilt, as fast as the could through the overgrown yard toward the back of the house. Behind her, she felt almost sure she could hear the sound of someone following her, their footfalls covered up by the all the noise she herself was making.
She rounded the corner of the building and could see a paned glass enclosure rise above the riot of greenery, its panes of glass opaque in the pale light of the rising sun. She ran toward it, sure she could hear her own name whispering in the sound of crushed leaves and broken twigs.
There was a wrought iron door made of the same thick opaque glass as the rest of the addition to the Manor set into the northern side of the house. Vicki literally threw herself at it, the door opening in easily at her weight. The young woman fell to the cracked cement floor with a quiet 'Oomph!'
In the aftermath, only the sound of her heavy breathing and her soft whine of pain filled the damp morning air.
Slowly, Vicki pushed herself up onto her elbows and then hands and twisted to look behind her out into the overgrown grounds of the estate. Pinkish dawn light illuminated the tall grass and twisted old trees. Dew shined where the light caught it. Vicki's trail of destruction was clearly visible through the tall grass from the woods at the side of the house all the way to the door of the greenhouse.
Sniffing and feeling wretchedly stupid, Vicki pushed herself into a sitting position and rubbed her eyes and nose on the sleeve of her shirt. Her body was jittery with adrenaline, her heart beat still rabbit fast in her chest, but she was starting to think that she was letting all this talk of ghosts get the better of her.
Vicki stood on shaky knees and turned around again to look at the greenhouse she now found herself in. Unlike outside, everything inside the greenhouse was brown and dead. The leaves of plants, brown and withered, lay on the cracked and neglected cement floor. The skeletal forms of flowering trees reached up toward the sunlight. Dead papery weak ivy clung to the walls and the frames of the glass panes.
Faintly, Vicki heard a far away humming sound. Following it, she walked deeper into the greenhouse, the light somehow thick and viscous after struggling through the opaque glass that made up its walls. She walked slowly, her head swiveling from side to side, and finally sound the source of the buzzing tucked into the far corner of the greenhouse.
There, hanging from a twisted and dead tree, was a huge fat bee's nest. The bees flew in circles around it and crawled sluggishly on every nearby surface. The milled around on the outside of it, occasionally flying in and out of the exit built into its bottom. They hummed and buzzed all around their nest, their bodies round and bulbous to match their hive.
Vicki frowned at the bee's nest. She didn't understand how they could possibly survive inside the greenhouse, where everything else was dead. What did they eat? How did they build their nest?
Unnerved, Vicki backed slowly away from the bees and their insistent buzzing.
She moved quickly in the opposite direction, away from the bees and toward where the greenhouse connected to the rest of the house. Since the door to the greenhouse was open, she hoped that she might have found the entrance that most people used. Maybe all the constant in and out traffic was what let the bees in in the first place? Vicki desperately hoped so.
As she suspected, there was a small plain door with a window set into the stone side of the house, exiting into the greenhouse. Vicki heaved a sigh of relief as she reached it, hoping that her ordeals outside would stop once she got inside and found a good hiding place to wait out Bruce and his psychics.
She stepped up the one step to the door and tried the knob. It jiggled in the door, but otherwise didn't turn to allow her in. Growling in frustration, Vicki took the knob in both hands and turned and shook the knob violently. The whole door shook, loud convulsions against the doorframe. But, it stood its ground and wouldn't allow Vicki inside.
Whining in the back of her throat and glad that no one was around to hear it, Vicki let her forehead fall forward against the glass fo the door. She needed to get inside and going back into the yard went against every fiber of her being.
Sighing, Vicki tried to muster her courage. She had to go back outside. There had to be another entrance somewhere, a back door or a cellar door or an open window or something.
She was just about to force herself to turn around and march herself back outside, when she heard the voice again. It was quiet, just a whisper against the shell of her ear. Her hair tickled her face as hot breath brushed against her skin.
"Vicki," it said, the words formed like a caress.
Gasping, Vicki turned around quickly and looked around. But, just like before, the greenhouse was empty of anyone else but her. She could hear the faint buzzing of the bees from far away and the rustling of leaves brushing against one another outside. There was every indication that she was alone with herself.
Vicki's gasping breaths began to form together into wracking sobs. Wetness gathered on her thick eyelashes and spilled onto her cheeks as she continued to look for and not find the source of the voice.
"What is going on here," she warbled. "Who's there!" she yelled desperately into empty and unresponsive greenhouse full of dead plants.
She expected to hear nothing, only her own echoing sobs coming back to her. Except that there was a response. A faint wheezing laugh. And, it came from right above her.
Eyes wide, tears streaming down her cheeks, her lower lip trembling, Vicki slowly tilted her head up.
And screamed.