Hello to the Night
Chapter Six
1
October 19, 9:04 PM
Slade smiled to himself in satisfaction as he stared at the two large sacs of blood.
Tim had been the perfect distraction, even not actively working for Slade, as he sent one of his small-time criminals to the blood bank in Metropolis. There, the criminal had indeed found blood that Pop Haly, the ringleader of one of the few remaining pure-Romany circuses, had donated.
With the blood of a Romany patriarch, the curse couldn't fail. Such a powerful curse… such a simple incantation.
The smile slipped from his face, and his expression became as blank as the natural state of his mask.
He faced the four women who would become the first members of the new Masquerade and poured the blood into four small cups.
"For the glory of Raven," he told them as he handed each member a glass.
"For the glory of Raven," the cultists agreed as one. "Energía por energía. Sangre por sangre. Los Pecados del Padre, estan pasando al Hijo. La Danza de las Muertes, la Reliquia Requiem. Yo invoco el Pavor que Pecado hace."
Each cultist drew a dagger down her arm, taking a single sip of the Romany blood. "Energía por energía. Sangre por sangre. Los Pecados del Padre, estan pasando al Hijo. La Danza de las Muertes, la Reliquia Requiem. Yo invoco el Pavor que Pecado hace."
Another sip. "Energía por energía. Sangre por sangre. Los Pecados del Padre, estan pasando al Hijo. La Danza de las Muertes, la Reliquia Requiem. Yo invoco el Pavor que Pecado hace."
He faced a group of petty criminals— the gang he had set up for robbery of the Mayor's house. "Have fun, boys."
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11:41 PM
Robin observed the barricade of the underwater entrance to the Island. It was strong.
He'd disliked having to close the haunted house down. As tired as he was, the business was starting to grow on him.
Well, maybe we could do it again next year, he thought. If there's enough of the city next year.
They'd requested that the ferry to the island be shut down, and the Mayor had granted that request.
Unless the Masquerade intended to dance their way across the turbulent water, there was no way they would get to Titan Island.
11:55 PM
He returned to Titan Tower to find Tim sitting outside the front door.
"You won't kick me out, will you?" Tim begged. "You haven't found any way to stop Slade… and the Masquerade starts in five minutes!"
"We don't know that! He never got my blood," Robin told him.
"He has other ways! He's clever… he's got to have other ways!" Tim argued. The teen looked desperate.
Robin relented. Slade was Slade. Probably, Slade already had Romany blood. "They won't get here… but we don't have any way to get you to the mainland, unless you want us to carry you."
Tim blinked. "Thanks… I'd leave now and get out of your hair, but I don't have anywhere to go and no money to get me there. I used all I had getting to the Tower. Ever since Dad kicked me out, things have been just so hard…"
Robin puzzled over that. Tim couldn't have been sixteen— hell, he would have been surprised to learn that Tim was fifteen! That pullover would be worth fifty dollars, even used, back in Gotham. New, it had to have been closer to ninety or a hundred. How did an obviously rich kid wind up in Jump City, with no money, working for Slade?
"Come inside," Robin offered. "You can keep us up all night, telling us your story."
There. That solved the problem of what would keep the Titans awake that didn't involve laughter, along with the problem of "What Do You Do With a Young Tim Drake?"
October 20, 12:00 AM
Twelve people danced through the night, singing, laughing and jesting. It would have been more, but two of the petty criminals had challenged the Masquerade.
Each of the former cultists had picked up an instrument: one had a Congo drum, one had a pair of cymbals, another had a guitar, and the fourth had a violin.
The Masquerade's grotesque dance paused for a moment at a house, but soon picked up the pace. The tempo of the drumbeats sped up, until the song seemed almost frenzied.
A window slid open, and a man with no shirt leaned out. "SHUT UP! THE NOISE IS KEEPING US AWAKE!"
Enraged, the Masquerade stormed the house, up the stairs and the foremost member snatched the man up by the throat.
The man's last words were, "Cymbals… so sharp…"
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12:01 AM
"So, Tim Drake," Starfire asked casually. "Where did you come from?"
"I lived in Gotham until six months ago. My dad kicked me out of the house…" Tim shook his head. "I don't remember why. So I wandered around Gotham, doing odd jobs… just trying to keep my head above water, I guess. But they kept firing me for no reason. Jobs started to come fewer and farther between. Eventually, I couldn't pay rent, or even for a hotel room."
Robin's brows furrowed. He motioned Raven over. "Raven… I'm going to go look up the name Tim Drake. There's something about what he told me earlier… it seems off. Why don't you come with me?"
"Afraid?" She intoned.
His eyes narrowed slightly. "Of curses? You bet. Just because he doesn't have my blood doesn't mean he didn't find another Rom."
Tim continued his narration, seemingly oblivious. "So I started breaking into empty houses… The cops eventually caught me in one, busted me for a misdemeanor B&E. I got two weeks in Juvie, considering that it was a first offense."
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1:10 AM (October 20)
No one would ever understand just how the Masquerade traveled as quickly as it did, but the twelve singing, dancing corpses increased their numbers to forty-two by the time they arrived at the other side of town. By the time they made it to the docks across from Titan Island, they were fifty.
The water should have been impossible to cross. They had no way— no boat, no bridge. The tunnel had been barricaded.
Lewd songs leapt from their rotting throats, and they danced across the waves. Cruel laughter became their melody.
2
1:13 AM
Starfire looked out the windows to glimpse a sea calm as glass, with a group of about fifty dancing across it.
"They're coming!" She whimpered.
Tim fell silent, coming to stand beside her.
"Man, whoever heard of villains timing their attacks to go along with holidays?" Beast Boy complained.
Raven stood by the window, a familiar twinge in her temple. "I don't think he's doing exactly that. I think he knew that we were going to do the haunted house, and timed his attack when we would be most likely to fall into the trap."
"When we were tired," Cyborg snapped his fingers.
Robin stood and silently left the room.
Raven wouldn't have noticed if she hadn't seen the reflection in the window. She turned abruptly. "I don't want to watch. Just because Slade was behind this doesn't mean my fans had nothing to do with it." With that, she strode from the room.
As she left, she heard Starfire explaining to Tim just what she'd meant.
"You're kidding right?" She heard Tim chuckle. He didn't chuckle for long: somebody, probably Starfire, knocked the wind out of him.
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1:15 AM (October 20)
"Robin?" Raven asked. She headed over to the evidence room. Robin sat at a computer terminal.
He turned to her. "What's going on out there?"
"Not much. The Masquerade draws closer."
"I've logged on... I'm going to Google 'Tim Drake Gotham City' and see what it comes up with."
He typed in, Tim Drake GothamCity
The monitor flashed, Results: 25.
He sighed. "Okay, let's just take the first one… it's an online article by Gotham's biggest newspaper."
Raven watched as he clicked the link.
Their eyes widened.
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1:16 AM
The Masquerade danced across the still waters, singing and laughing. The earliest members of the Masquerade held body parts— the pieces of the first man they'd ripped apart.
Back to back, oh, belly to belly, well I don't give a damn 'cause I'm stone dead already…
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The article on the monitor read Son of J. Drake Goes Missing.
Robin and Raven's eyes met. Hers were still growing wider.
"Oh my god…" He breathed.
"He's still Slade's tool!" Raven's eyes darkened.
Robin jumped when he heard something shatter beyond the wall. It didn't sound like a lot of glass, so it wasn't one of the windows.
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1:17 AM (October 20)
A lamp exploded, showering Tim with glass.
"Holy shit!" Tim cried. "What the hell was that?"
"It was friend Raven," Starfire said sadly. "I feel badly for her. I think I will go see how she is doing."
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1:19 AM
She found Raven and Robin staring wild-eyed at each other, their mouths agape. Black light was fading in Raven's eyes.
"Is something happening that I should know about?" Starfire inquired sweetly.
"Tim's dad didn't kick him out…" Robin said. "Slade kidnapped Tim."
Starfire shook her head. "That cannot be! Tim says he came here on his own!"
"Maybe he let Tim think that?" Raven asked, ruthlessly. "He just took him, and put him on the street, after convincing Tim that he couldn't go home?" Neither she nor Robin seemed fazed by the thought of such cruelty.
"What if Slade was the one who kept getting Tim fired?"
"Such planning! Slade has been planning this for months!" Cried Starfire.
"But how did he know that we would have the haunted house?" Robin scratched his chin and turned back to the monitor.
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1:18 AM (October 20)
Tim brushed shards of glass off of his hoodie hesitantly, and stared at the shattered lamp. "Man… that was weird. She's not even in here… Guess her fans are getting to her, huh?"
"Yeah, no kidding," Beast Boy agreed dully.
Cyborg didn't take his eyes off of the window. "That is the creepiest freaking thing, man…"
"I always hated ghost stories," Beast Boy shivered.
Tim could only agree. He stared out the window. Ghost stories suck.
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1:21 AM
If any fearless person whose sense of humor hadn't already checked out had been watching and listening to the Masquerade, they would have laughed themselves into a fit over its songs.
They had gone through Zombie Jamboree ten times already and had sung Kinderly (a medieval song about the natural cycles of life) perhaps four times. They then sang some more obscure hits by the Medieval Babes, including Adult Lullaby, Maiden in the Mor Lay, and (this one they particularly liked), So Sprecht Das Leben, a song in which Life and Death argued over which of them owned the world.
Now, as they sang and danced across the ocean to the Island, whirling in the light of the torches and lightning, they began to piece together their own song to a frenzied funeral dirge.
Many of the lyrics made little sense, but the few understandable lines had something to do with 'enough irony to die of.'
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Robin shook his head in a mix of frustration and regret. "We aren't going to figure this out any time soon… We need more information. And to get it, we have to stay alive."
Raven nodded agreement. The twinge in her temple had grown worse, but she refused to give in to the threat of a migraine. She had to stay together now. She had kept the migraines at bay for over a week now. She could do it another night.
"We must make all the citizens leave the city." Starfire's face looked unusually solemn.
At that point, Beast Boy came careening down the hall and through the open door.
"The Masquerade has reached the Island," the changeling gasped. "What do we do now?"
"We wait for dawn," Robin told him grimly. With that, Robin exited the program, entered the Tower control program, and typed a single command string.
The overhead lights in the Tower flashed red, and metal sheets slid down to cover the windows. The effect turned Titan Tower into something liked a closed box.
"That's our last line of defense," Robin said, quietly. "They won't be able to make it through that, I guarantee you."
Raven gave a mirthless half-smile. "We didn't think they'd be able to make it to the Island in the first place."
"That was an oversight. But unless they're all clones of Superman, or they can dance themselves through the strongest metal in the world, they won't make it through that."
"So… we have a bunch of zombies singing and dancing outside our door. They can't come in, which is good. And we don't intend to go out there. So what do we do?"
"We wait." Robin told him, his jaw set in grim determination.
"And whatever we do, we don't fall asleep, and we don't laugh," Raven added.
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October 20, 6:23 AM
The sun rose over the sea in a beautiful blend of colors.
The city had thirty-eight fewer to see this sunrise than it had to see the previous one.
The Masquerade vanished, leaving a city full of turmoil and fear in its wake.
But, Raven knew as she stared at the rising sun, it would return. The Masquerade would keep coming back, until one side or the other found victory.
Slade plays a vicious game, Raven thought. But we Titans can play along. Especially Robin and I…
We learned from the best, after all.
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…
Hear the tolling of the bells-
Iron Bells!
What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!
…How we shiver with affright
At the melancholy menace of their tone!
For every sound that floats
From the rust within their throats
Is a groan.
...Feel a glory in so rolling
On the human heart a stone-
They are neither man nor woman-
They are neither brute nor human-
They are Ghouls:
— Edgar Allan Poe, The Bells
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Um, the humor in the last chapter? Probably the last of the real humor. These characters are going to get very cranky, very soon.
"Energía por energía. Sangre por sangre. Los Pecados del Padre, estan pasando al Hijo. La Danza de las Muertes, la Reliquia Requiem. Yo invoco el Pavor que Pecado hace," is Spanish for, "Power for Power. Blood for Blood. The Sins of the Father are passing to the Son. The Dance of the Dead, the Relic Requiem. I invoke the Dread that Sin makes."