Capes and Bats
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CAT-TALES CCAPES AND BBATS CAT-TALES CCAPES AND BBATS By Wanders Nowhere This story is dedicated to Heath Ledger, my countryman, a light gone out of the world too soon. COPYRIGHT © 2011 BY Wanders Nowhere ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. BATMAN, CATWOMAN, GOTHAM CITY, ET AL CREATED BY BOB KANE, PROPERTY OF DC ENTERTAINMENT, USED WITHOUT PERMISSION CAPES AND BATS Forward by Chris Dee .............................................................................. i Capes and Bats Rumblings ..................................................................................................1 The Coming Guest ....................................................................................7 The Paper Trail ........................................................................................13 Outbreak ...................................................................................................19 Breakthrough and Breakout ..................................................................29 A Gotham Welcome................................................................................39 He’s Laughing .........................................................................................47 Changes ....................................................................................................57 Knights of the Breakfast Table ..............................................................67 Walking the Line .....................................................................................75 Blitzkrieg ..................................................................................................83 Unhallowed Eve ......................................................................................99 Masquerade ............................................................................................113 Dance of Illusions ..................................................................................125 Proof of Blood ........................................................................................135 Dark Knight Toccata .............................................................................153 Epilogue ..................................................................................................171 FORWARD “The Dracula of fiction is a metaphor,” Selina says in her dance with the real one. “The old fears of the night in a world moving on into daylight, a modern world overturning one ancient scourge after another… And of course sex.” Bram Stoker’s Dracula was written at a time when houses had two sets of stairs coming up to the front door: one for the men and one for the women, lest the men glimpse a little ankle as the women gathered their skirts. Today we have HBO, Victoria’s Secret—and Catwoman. Like Batman, Dracula’s story has been around for decades of tumultuous change. Like Batman, the writer who attempts him must decide which elements which can be updated and which are essential and sacrosanct aspects of the character. While Dracula has had a number of facelifts over the years, few if any have allowed him to confront his own mythos. Not Wanders Nowhere. Here, at last, is a Dracula worthy of the name. A powerful and imposing villain who is worthy of his legend. A powerful and imposing villain who is worthy to go up against Batman. But he hasn’t come to any generic Gotham City to challenge a generic Batman. He’s come to Cat-Tales Gotham. He’s come to a world where the real people who have invented themselves must come to terms with their public images and what those images mean. He’s also come to a Gotham where Christopher Nolan is shooting a movie about Batman. The story that results is a magnificent tour de force by a writer who is as connected to Dracula in all his many incarnations, who is as knowledgeable about those nuances and what they mean, as I am connected to Catwoman. Wanders Nowhere’s Dracula meets Chris Dee’s Catwoman… This could be quite a Halloween for Gotham. —Chris Dee Author of the Cat-Tales CAPES AND BATS Mist oozed in a cloud of vaporous poison from the wound of an open grave. Amid the headstones, a brutish, hulking shadow moved with shuffling inefficiency, arms outstretched, dead white eyes staring in every direction and none, fingers hooked in nerveless rigor mortis - Edward Nigma flicked the TV off and tossed the remote aside with a sigh. It was a tragedy. He had “Rogue’s block” - the next scheme of genius would not leap to mind - and he had turned to more relaxing pursuits. Yet tonight, and there lay the tragedy, he simply couldn’t find the mood for Plan 9 from Outer Space. He would never, of course, admit to being an Ed Wood fan in front of the other rogues. They wouldn’t understand; they’d see only the irony of the great Riddler dulling his famous brain on Z-grade flicks by the infamous ‘worst director’ in Hollywood history. They’d only laugh. But Eddie saw deeper into the director than even the cult film enthusiasts who loved his films for their zany eccentricities and Wood himself for his tenaciousness. To Nigma the director’s zeal hid obsession; his films were puzzles, riddles no less, not particularly well thought-out but nonetheless iced with layers of meaning. Edward D. Wood did not direct films for profit any more than Edward Nigma committed crimes to get rich. There was an underlying passion, a compulsion, to pour his soul out there, reel after reel of hastily-painted canvas for the world to see. Eddie imagined him to have felt the same wild, burning feeling racing up from his heart and throbbing in his temples when he was in his element that Nigma himself felt when arranging a spectacularly perfidious riddle-caper and stroking his fingers while watching Batman’s brain tick over trying to figure it out. Yes, Ed Wood would - a pun, lament! - have made a magnificent Rogue, had this unrealized genius been of a criminal bent. And then there was the name. Edward D. Wood, Jr - Edward - Ed-wood - DO DRAW, DO WED? - oh, for an I to make DEAR ODD WIDOW! - the only Hollywood-spawn with a better name was Edward Woodward. Of the Rogues, only Selina and perhaps Oswald would have the tact not to blurt out ‘he has the same first name as you! Ha ha ha!’ and dismiss his interest as merely stemming from that association. Cretins. SINISTER LENS CRAB - Nigma jumped from his couch, hand snatching up the question-mark cane, as something black fluttered back from his window and into the night. SINISTER LENS - no crustacean, but he could have sworn he saw something watching him, staring through the glass – something that fluttered away on leather-black wings... He was absolutely not hiding behind the couch right now. He was tactically using it as a brace against impending attack, a stratagem honed in many confrontations with Batman. Yes, that was it. He was absolutely not hiding behind a couch brandishing his Cat-Tales cane from seeing a bat - a stupid little bat of the non-riddle-solving, non-leg-breaking kind - at his window. A bat. A stupid little bat. And Riddler knew that fear of the other Bat wasn’t even the reason he had reacted with such paranoia. It certainly wasn’t the ‘horror’ of the Ed Wood film he’d been viewing. It was something else entirely, and it was the reason tonight wasn’t a good night to be watching Plan 9 or anything else that might remind one of B-grade horror antics in any way. It was the calendar. October 26th. Halloween was coming up, and Jonathan Crane was about to be insufferable. Halloween. It was his time. A kitschy, laughable modern holiday cobbled together out of a jigsaw of ancient, world-wide traditions. Pagan rites, harvest festivals - invoking the whispering gasp of the autumn’s cold wind through fields of corn - the stench of rotting pumpkins, their carved orifices more and more corpse-like as they grew putrid - the death-omen cry of ravens - NEVERMORE - a time of simultaneous growth and decay, when the spirits of the dead and the devils of the Pit were free to walk the world and sow terror wherever they went. It was truly meant to a celebration of the macabre, a festival of Fear. The other rogues would never understand. He was the Scarecrow. This went far beyond mere theme. The fools would see only ‘Halloween, pumpkins, scarecrows, Trick or Treat. Boo! Ha ha!’ The fools! How could they understand? He didn’t like Halloween. He hated what it had become. Commercialism had wrapped its clammy paws around the holiday and strangled the fear out of it. It was all about candy and children in silly costumes and that Disney Halloween special with its comical - but in places, pleasantly chilling - interpretation of Sleepy Hollow. All Hallow's Eve as it was meant to be had been mangled into a mockery that was safe, complacent, and comfortable. That would need to be rectified. Batman had, for whatever reason, Hell Month. Calendar Man - ha! - had all his little ‘events’. The Scarecrow needed Halloween. Oh, the other rogues used it, too - in the early days there had been the ‘Holiday’ killings, all but wiping out the Mob as it existed in Gotham, paving the way for the rise to power of costumed lunatics, and starting on Halloween - and Joker sometimes used the holiday to play some particularly murderous prank. Crane would be offended, but the jester’s penchant for a gruesome body-count left the city quivering in fear, which the Scarecrow could redirect with ease to his own efforts. Yes, this Halloween - he had said it many times before, but now he really meant it - would be one Gotham city would never forget… Crane unfolded from the hotel room couch and crept