Justice League of America - Batman: The Stone King Alan Grant (e book reader pc txt) 📖

She'd canceled all her appointments and put a closed notice on her apartment door. That had brought the only smile she'd enjoyed since Marcus's visit, as she toyed with scrawling due to unforeseen circumstances on the sign. A great advertisement for a fortune-teller!

She spent a day in the battered old armchair that had once belonged to her grandmother, flicking through the pages of reference books taken from her small library shelves. There were a lot of entries regarding bull worship–it had been commonplace for a long time in the ancient world, particularly during the zodiacal Age of Taurus, more than three thousand years ago.

Widely regarded as the most advanced race in antiquity, the Egyptians had worshiped the sacred Bull of Apu for centuries. Bulls' bodies had been mummified in a way that suggested they were as important as the pharaohs themselves. Over the years, more than a dozen of the massive bull tombs had been unearthed during official excavations.

On the Mediterranean island of Crete, the people worshiped bulls on a daily basis. Thousands of vases and pottery items had survived from the Minoan culture, many of them illustrated with the "bull dance." Graceful youths of both sexes took their lives in their hands and vaulted over the angry bulls' backs.

And, of course, lurking in the heart of the famous King Minos's maze was the most feared bull of all, the Minotaur. Half man, half animal, it prowled the miles of subterranean labyrinth beneath the royal palace, bringing death to any intruder in its domain.

Bull worship died out sometime before the birth of Christ, but even in the modern world remnants of the old ways survived. Every summer in the Spanish town of Pamplona, a herd of wild bulls was released into the narrow winding streets. No teenage boy could call himself a man until he'd "run the bulls," sprinting through the medieval town with several dozen maddened animals in hot pursuit. Nowadays, even the tourists joined in.

There were literally hundreds of mentions of bulls in her books, but only one Cassandra kept returning to.

It was a crude drawing of a beast found on a shard of pottery from ancient Lebanon. Scholars took the half human, half bull to be a representation of the Middle Eastern storm and war god, Baal. In the pantheon of gods, Baal had been a rising star who was finally elevated to the status of Jehovah's number-one enemy.

The lines of the drawing were too thick, the perspective all wrong, but the artist had captured one thing perfectly: pure evil seemed to shine from Baal's brutish eyes.

But by the end of the day Cassandra was no closer to an answer.

Then she heard the news from cities across America. The security guard in New York who'd run amok, burning down his own museum; when they found his body, he was wearing a horned shamanic mask. Underneath, his flesh had been stripped to the skull. The Keystone City subway driver who claimed he'd been possessed by "a weird blue light." The near-aborted shuttle launch in Florida, where Superman was said to have battled with a "mysterious globe of blue light."

Cassandra didn't know how, but it was obvious to her that these events were connected. Something terrible was starting to happen, and she felt as if she were the only person aware of it.

Now, in the afternoon of the day after these incidents occurred, she found her feet carrying her toward Gotham Cathedral. It hadn't been a conscious decision. In fact, at first she didn't even know where she was going. But some part of her obviously did, and it was with a feeling of shock that she found herself standing across the street from the badly damaged church.

POLICE LINE–DO NOT CROSSwas stenciled on the yards of tape stretched along the bottom of the wide steps that led up to the cathedral entrance. There were a couple of police cars parked down on the street, and a solitary policeman chewed gum as he stood vigil. Close to him were a dozen large bunches of cut flowers, placed there by grieving relatives of the victims and the public, who had heard the news on TV and radio. It was one of the few ways people had of showing solidarity with others in a time of grief. A way of saying, "We feel for you, even if there's nothing else we can do."

Cassandra gave a mental shrug. The cathedral was obviously off limits. Perhaps she should just go home again.

But whatever impulse had brought her here was stronger and more daunting than an official police line. Despite her best intentions, Cassandra marched straight up to the young cop. He saw her coming, her striking platinum hair framing her pretty face, and straightened his cap.

"Can I help you, ma'am?"

"Someone I know died here the other night." Cassandra spoke without thinking. "I'd like to go in and pay my respects."

"I'm sorry, ma'am. I can't allow that."

At that moment, a group of men and women in plain clothes, accompanied by a couple of uniformed officers, exited and began to make their way down the steps.

"Okay, Andy," one of the officers called, "Forensics are finished now. You stay until the EPA arrives to check the site."

"How long?"

The policeman shrugged. "If they're not here in a couple of hours, call in."

The young cop gave his colleague a thumbs-up sign and watched as the group drove off before he turned back to Cassandra. She wasn't there.

As soon as the young guard had turned away, Cassandra seized her chance. She stepped behind one of the tall pillars at the cathedral entrance, out of sight of the small group on the steps.

The cathedral's studded oak doors stood half open, and as she slipped through them Cassandra felt that she was entering another world. The traffic noise from the street could no longer be heard, and the air inside was calm and still and peaceful. Stained-glass windows filtered the light, casting a warm golden glow.

Twisted roof