Author's Note: Yes, we're switching back to Sergius's viewpoint to see what's been happening to him down in the basement, simultaneous with Cassandra's activities in the last couple of installments. He even gets to meet the mysterious client who's been paying The Spook to arrange tonight's fun and games. (This is an honor which Sergius would have been perfectly happy to live without, but I didn't exactly offer him a choice.)


Chapter Nine: Voice in the Darkness

Sergius had only caught a glimpse of his new surroundings before the hole overhead sealed shut. No lights were turned on; not so much as a gleam through a crack overhead; so he sat on the couch in total darkness and listened hard for two minutes before he moved.

His glimpse had shown bare walls and a dirty concrete floor and not much else. If there was a door, it must be behind him—but he wasn't in any great hurry to find it. Walking around in absolute darkness in a presumably booby-trapped basement didn't feel safer than sitting still for awhile.

Sure, there had to be some sort of lifting mechanism underneath the couch, but Sergius was no engineer. His chances of figuring out how to activate it, while working alone, without tools, and in total darkness, were right up there with his chances of being elected to replace Lex Luthor in the White House. Especially if it would be necessary to override "remote control" signals from The Spook's lair.

(Besides, even if Sergius could trigger something to start the couch moving upward, that still wouldn't do any good if he couldn't also figure out how to open up a hole in the ceiling for the couch to pass through.)

So he sat there and prayed Batgirl would have better luck in whatever was happening upstairs. Sergius knew he was not a particularly brave man. Writing about action heroes doing violent things to bad people was all very well and good, but he never lost track of the line between reality and fantasy. He wasn't a rough-and-tumble fighter; he wasn't a crack shot; he wasn't an expert fencer; he didn't have nerves of steel when trouble started. It had been embarrassing, counting on a teenaged girl to protect him from the costumed figures upstairs when a heroic man would have been pulling his own weight in each fracas.

Well, that particular embarrassment wouldn't be recurring in the next few minutes.

Sergius hauled out his handkerchief just in time to absorb a sneeze. The dust down here was awful, and he thought he smelled mold.

Batgirl would be looking for a way to come downstairs. Furthermore, Batman and his cohorts would be looking for Batgirl. By now they must have noticed she was missing . . . right? She probably called in every hour on the hour, or normally wore an active transponder, or something.

Suddenly Sergius saw a rectangle of light on the wall in front of him, the shadow of his own head and shoulders framed within the rectangle. He twisted around in time for his dazzled eyes to make out what he took for the silhouette of a broad-shouldered man standing in a now-open doorway behind him—then the door slammed shut and all was dark as before.

The Spook? Sergius rose to his feet and stepped back from the couch and then to the left, as quietly as he could. His left hand was still clutching the champagne bottle by the neck. If he had to use it as a weapon—

"Greetings, little man."

The resonant baritone had a rather British sound to it—overlaid with something else? One of those spots in the Caribbean, perhaps? Sergius was not Professor Henry Higgins, to pin down the locale of a man's childhood after hearing just a few words of the fellow's diction, but he wasn't tone-deaf either. This was a very different voice from The Spook's, at any rate, but Sergius didn't really think this a promising sign.

Well, talking had to be better than fighting, especially since when you were no good at the fighting. "Hello!" he said, noticing his voice was shriller than usual. "My name is Sergius. I'm a—"

"You are nothing," said the voice, apparently still coming from near the closed door. "You sit at your desk and you write a fable of wish-fulfilment, and then other nobodies purchase enough copies to keep you eating long enough to write another. But if you cease writing, your customers will find other wordsmiths to amuse them. If you die, who will weep at the funeral?"

So much for any hope that this guy is a fellow victim tonight. Sergius felt little temptation to argue about the quality of his social life with a strange voice in a dark cellar—so he kept his mouth shut. That didn't seem to matter; the speaker had more to say, and the rhythmic way he intoned each line made it almost hypnotic.

"You have never harmed me, and I am not a sadistic man. I do not need to kill you. I do not even need to hurt you . . . or not much. But I need her to worry about you. If this Batgirl conforms to the usual patterns of her kind, she shrugs off threats to herself, but assigns an inflated value to the lives of 'innocents.'"

Sergius got the idea. He hadn't been dragged to this house tonight to be a detective—he'd been selected as the sacrificial lamb. Sure, the baritone said killing him wouldn't be necessary . . . but people had been known to lie, and that part about hurting him "not much" was not as comforting as the speaker might mean it to be.

"So you're not a sadistic man," Sergius repeated, trying to emphasize what little they could agree on. "Great! Me neither! But just what sort of man are you, then? Why do you even care what Batgirl worries about?"

"Ah!" said the baritone sadly. "Thereby hangs a tale."

"I'm not going anywhere," Sergius observed, moving around one end of the couch to keep it between himself and the speaker, who was now on the move as well. Sergius decided, regretfully, not to bother trying to yank the door open; he couldn't see it and with his luck, it would require a key or passcode anyway. Or if he did get it open, he'd probably just run straight into a trap outside. But he was profoundly reluctant to let this unseen broad-shouldered fellow with the odd accent get within arm's reach. Master villains in fiction often had a melodramatic need to lecture about themselves; was it too much to hope that this fellow was a traditionalist in that regard?

Apparently it wasn't too much. The baritone began speaking again, almost chanting: "Once I was a name to be reckoned with. Once I could reach out and bend men's souls to my will and then make them forget what they had done. Once I had a king's ransom in diamonds within my grasp, and planned to use it as the foundation for greater things to come.

"But then I was thwarted by the activities of the insolent wench known as Batgirl. The loss of the diamonds was a mere setback, for I escaped to try again, yet I knew I must find and crush her ere I could hope to regain what I had lost and then go far beyond it.

"Carefully I set my trap. Nervously she walked into it. All necessary preparations were made for her emotional collapse, to be followed by her destruction, and yet somehow, in the final confrontation . . ." The voice trailed off regretfully.

She kicked your butt? Sergius thought, but clamped his lips together rather than ruin the moment.

"Then came the years in prison, little man. Have you so much as set foot inside a prison? The greater part of my power was gone, yet I could have been a 'boss,' leader of one of the gangs, if I cared to seize the burden. Had I expected to spend the remainder of this mortal incarnation behind those walls, I should have done so. Instead, it sufficed to become the gray eminence behind the boss of one of the strongest gangs. That assured me of certain creature comforts and peace of mind. After the humiliation visited upon me by Gotham's Batgirl, I could not accelerate my escape as I once would have easily managed. Yet eventually I was able to persuade the parole board that I had repented of my 'sins' and only hoped to eke out a living with my less frightening skills.

"Once liberated, I could easily gather the tools of my art and prepare to start my work anew, but the dark powers, which I had once invoked so easily, remained largely deaf to my voice. I was not surprised, for I knew there must be a final settling of accounts with She Who Carries The Mantle Of The Bat before my credibility was restored on other planes. Hence I unearthed some wealth which the police had never found, and commissioned the services of The Spook to bring her here so I might complete the task at which I failed before."

"If you're talking about revenge for something that happened several years ago, then this can't be the same Batgirl who gave you grief," Sergius objected, still slowly circling the unseen couch. "The old one had creamy skin and long red hair. This girl is darker and shorter and probably a heck of a lot younger." Is it possible that this guy hasn't even bothered to look at her face since The Spook captured and unmasked her?

The hearty laughter filled the air and echoed back from the concrete walls. "Do you think me blind, scrivener? I know she is not the same woman who twice humiliated me. It matters not whether this Oriental chit is the second 'Batgirl' or the twentieth. She is the Lady of the Bats here and now, as truly as any female ever was, and thus the proper target for what I tried and failed to achieve aforetime."

Sergius couldn't remember the last time he had heard anyone call a girl a "chit" in real life. (But in fiction set in Regency England? Yes.) You didn't even hear "Oriental" used for "Asian" all that much, nowadays. Just how old was this ex-convict? Or how old were the textbooks from which he'd learned his English, once upon a time?

"Besides," the mellifluous voice added, "I have reason to believe the first bearer of the mantle still lurks somewhere in the shadows of Gotham, whispering advice to her namesake. Thus, crushing the new one shall also serve to make the old one heartsick, which is not insignificant."

Hmmm? That was the first Sergius had ever heard of any such connection. As far as anyone knew, the old Batgirl might have left Gotham for good at the same time she quit the costumed lifestyle. From what he'd once seen of her, and had heard about her from others, she'd probably had to beat off would-be suitors with a stick in her "secret identity." Perhaps she had finally met the one she didn't care to rebuff, and they'd married and then moved to California (or wherever) to start a new family?

After all, there'd been years with no Batgirl in Gotham before a new one popped up in a different costume, so there was no clear reason to think they two had ever met, much less had a mentor/protégée relationship as the voice now implied.

Perhaps even a family bond? A close genetic tie seemed improbable, but there were other ways to become kinfolk. The Asian lass could be the redheaded woman's foster child or stepchild or sister-in-law or something . . . maybe she hadn't been allowed to risk her neck by continuing the family tradition until she reached a certain age? (Hence the long vacancy in the role of Batgirl?)

A strong hand grasped Sergius's wrist. "This will be over quickly," said the voice, and then something struck hard enough to leave Sergius seeing stars—


Author's Notes:

In this chapter, I had Sergius reflect on the years-long gap between the disappearance from the public eye of the redheaded original Batgirl (Barbara Gordon) and the appearance in Gotham of the new, differently-costumed Batgirl (Cassandra Cain). Even as I wrote that, I anticipated that alert readers would wonder if I had carelessly forgotten about a handful of stories set in the "No Man's Land" era in which Helena Bertinelli (better known as Huntress) briefly served as "Batgirl" in a costume which she had invented herself; the same outfit which Cassandra began wearing soon afterward. The answer is simple: I didn't forget; but I assumed Sergius never really knew about Helena's brief time as "Batgirl" in the first place!

I figure he was gone from Gotham during NML, leaving right after the federal government ordered the area evacuated, and only came back a year later when the city had been largely rebuilt with the help of Lex Luthor (who evidently saw it as a beautiful opportunity to turn himself into a "national hero" and then run for President of the United States). So Sergius completely missed Helena's months as Batgirl, and since Gotham was officially "off limits" at the time, I strongly doubt Helena ever got interviewed on TV or anything similar while she was doing her Batgirl act. All Sergius knows is that when he came back to Gotham there was already "a new Batgirl" in town; one who speaks very little. How would he know she is wearing someone else's old outfit?

(Remember, we comic book readers usually know a lot more about such nitpicking details as who wore which costume in which story than the average member of the "general public" in the DCU is in any position to realize. As another example, I've said before, over the years, that I don't think the "typical Gotham resident" has any idea that the "second Robin" actually died way back in 1988 and was replaced by a "third Robin." Tim Drake, when he took over the role, looked about the same in that costume (black hair, fair complexion, similar height and build) as Jason Todd before him, and Tim didn't make a point of telling every civilian he met: "Hello, glad to meet you! I'm Robin Number Three! My immediate predecessor got himself killed last year!")

P.S. As to the voice which Sergius heard—while the things the voice refers to from previous clashes with the original Batgirl are "in continuity," I did make some arbitrary assumptions about sort of accent this man has (and I also chose to make him a baritone). The comic book writer who created that villain many years ago never saw fit to mention such details in the scripts. But it just doesn't seem right to me to have that guy speak as if he had spent his entire life in Gotham City, so I improvised.