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Jason sat heavily on his motorcycle, breath coming faster than it should. He hadn’t run, not really. Just left with a little more haste than he’d intended.
He pulled out his phone, looking at his contacts, finger hovering, uncertain.
He needed help. He just wasn’t quite sure who to ask. Dick would be too humiliating, Bruce completely out of the running. Babs’ tech would come in handy, but it came with the price of her judging looks, and Jason wasn’t up for that. Not after what he’d just seen.
Damian was a baby, not a possibility at all, and he knew Cass and Steph were already working a major case down in Amusement Mile. Close enough to consider for backup, but he didn’t want to disrupt their case. Not for something like this.
He sighed. He knew who the best choice was, but actually making the call? Putting into words what the issue was?
Not ideal.
But he knew he couldn’t do this alone.
He called Tim.
*
“Okay, I dropped everything for your mysterious mission,” Tim said, swinging in from the fire escape into the living room of Jason’s current favorite safehouse. “What’s up?”
Jason was pacing the room, and he glanced up at Tim before pacing some more. “I just… Okay. This is going to sound crazy.”
“Nothing new there,” Tim muttered, even though there was no one else here to appreciate the burn.
Jason didn’t comment on it, didn’t pick the fight that Tim would clearly have enjoyed. “I followed a lead today into Bristol.”
“Congratulations?”
“I’ve been after this drug ring that’s been selling to middle schoolers down in the Narrows. I found the supplier, and I followed him, and he went to this house in Bristol. Big house, obviously, but with an unkempt yard and it looked abandoned.”
That was unusual enough for Bristol; if you were wealthy enough to own a house there and not bother to live in it, you could afford to pay for grounds keeping.
Jason hated that he’d spent enough time there to know that. The kid he’d been absolutely wouldn’t have. He could picture the derisive snarl he would have given to someone commenting that.
“In Bristol?” Tim scrunched his nose up, thinking.
“So I follow him in.” Jason took a deep breath. This is what he’d been dreading, but he had to say it. “There was something wrong with that house.”
“Like, mold? Bad plumbing?” Tim said.
Jason shook his head. “The supplier disappeared quickly – probably some tunnel underneath, we all know how many fucking caves are underneath that part of town – and I tried to make it to the basement. I couldn’t find it.”
“Maybe there wasn’t one?” Tim said.
“There are visible basement windows along the sides of the house,” Jason said. “I went back out and tried to pry one open, and it wouldn’t budge. Then I tried to break one, and the glass wouldn’t bust.”
“You couldn’t manage to break a window?”
“That’s what I’m saying. There’s something wrong with that house.” There was more; the creeping terror he’d felt, the way he’d been convinced he was being watched. The way fear had choked him, the way the walls had felt like they were closing in.
The way he’d found himself running, some deep prey-animal instinct pushing him out of the house, all the way out of the gate, until he’d found himself on his motorcycle, panting, chest heaving.
“So you called me for help because you think some house is haunted,” Tim said. “And you lost your suspect because of it.”
“I didn’t say it was haunted,” Jason said defensively, even though the fucking house was absolutely haunted. “I just said there’s something wrong with it, and I need a second set of eyes.”
Tim eyed him. “Okay.”
“You’ll do it?” Jason hated that he sounded surprised. He’d done all sorts of stupid shit for the other Bats. He rarely asked for favors. It was only fitting that Tim would agree to help.
“Yeah, what the hell,” said Tim. From his tone Jason knew that he was absolutely going to be collecting blackmail material.
Maybe what he’d experienced had been a fluke, and they were going to stroll in and find his supplier and get to kneecap the guy. Maybe Tim would tease him for being a chicken.
But just in case it happened again…
Tim was analytical and not prone to gullibility. He didn’t succumb to flights of fancy. If he felt the same things that Jason had, it would cement it in his mind.
He wasn’t sure what they’d do if the house really was haunted. He’d been a vigilante long enough to know that the world was filled with strange and terrible things. He’d had experiences himself that he couldn’t explain, and memories that rattled him to the core.
And if he did something truly embarrassing while they were in there, he was pretty sure he could blackmail the kid into silence. He had some dirt on him.
“Great, let’s go.”
“Right now?” Tim said, even though he was suited up. What, did he think they were just going to sit around and wait for the supplier to escape more than he already had? They had to get back there before the trail got too cold.
“Do you have something better to do?” Jason raised an eyebrow.
“I just thought we’d do some research first. See if there are any registered caves on the property. Find out the owners, if they have any connection to your supplier–”
“What do you think I was doing while I was waiting on you to show up?” Jason said. “You do remember that I’ve been doing this longer than you, right?”
Tim didn’t take the bait. “Anything interesting?”
“There are no registered caves on the property, but given the karst designation of the area and the frequency of caves and sinkholes on adjoining properties, it’s likely. The owners are generational; the current one has been in a nursing home for almost ten years and the property is allegedly being cared for by a son in his sixties who lives out of state. It’s unlikely either are connected, I’m working on finding out who is being contracted to care for the property. All signs point to no-one. Now can we go?”
“Yeah, we can go,” Tim said.
Jason knew if he delayed any longer, he might lose his nerve.
The drive back to the house was quicker than Jason would have liked. They both parked their bikes outside the gate, just out of sight of the house. Jason kind of wanted to drive right up to the front door, but that would alert the supplier, if he was still inside.
Jason had his doubts.
Tim was staring up at the house through the wrought iron gate, a thoughtful expression on his face. “I didn’t realize this was the place you were talking about.”
“You know it?” Jason hadn’t forgotten, exactly, that Tim had grown up in this neighborhood, but he hadn’t given it any thought.
“Kinda. It’s.. you know, that house.”
Jason did not, in fact, know. “Like infamous?”
“The one kids would dare each other to go up and ring the doorbell, or try to sneak into the carriage house,” Tim said. “You know, dumb preteen horror stuff.”
“Did you?”
Tim shook his head. “Not sure anyone actually did, honestly. They mostly lied because no one could open the gate.”
“What do you mean? The gate swings right open.”
Tim’s brow furrowed. “Are you sure? I remember one time we tried and tried but couldn’t get it to budge.”
“Guess someone fixed it since you were a kid. When was that again, last year?”
Tim flipped him off.
“So if you’ve heard of the place, what rumors did you hear about it?” Jason asked as they moved towards the front gate, the same one he’d entered through the day before. He remembered the way it’d slid open easily, like it had just been oiled. Knowing the house’s history now, that seemed doubtful.
“Just the usual stuff. Everyone just called it The House, and none of the rumors were ever the same – ghosts, ghouls, murders. Girls buried in the backyard. Kids disappearing. Screams in the night. Lights in the windows. Pretty generic stuff.”
For Gotham it wasn’t even particularly creative. The real news stories were infinitely more terrifying, and that had nothing on the lived experiences they both had.
Screams in the night were hardly the stuff of nightmares when you’ve clawed your way out of your own coffin.
“Yeah, that sounds pretty generic,” Jason agreed. They stood in front of the gate. He nudged Tim. “Want to do the honors? Live out those childhood dreams?”
He wasn’t sure that his hand would be steady. There was a thrumming in his chest, the steady precursor to fear.
Tim rolled his eyes and pushed the gate. It swung open easily and silently, looking almost inviting. The house itself loomed down the driveway, the architecture similar to that of Wayne Manor: a gothic revival monstrosity with steeply pitched roofs and peeling gray paint.
“I can see why the kids thought the boogeyman lived here,” Jason said.
“It has a certain je ne sais quoi,” Tim said. Neither took a step forward.
“No one ever made it past the gates?” Jason asked.
“No one that I personally knew,” Tim said. “Some people always claimed they did, but it was probably posturing.”
Or it wasn’t. Jason didn’t know what he would have done if he’d experienced what he had earlier as a schoolkid, but bragging about it to his classmates to make it feel less visceral seemed like a logical step. Making it into a legend, a story to be whispered amongst his peers, so that it wouldn’t just haunt him.
The thought propelled him forward, taking the first step onto the property. Tim followed, almost duckling-like in the way he stayed in Jason’s wake.
Jason brought him for his pragmatism, not for being weirdly timid. He turned, grabbed Tim by the shoulder and made him walk by his side. Tim could have easily ducked out of the way but he let himself be manhandled. Jason narrowed his eyes at him.
He was supposed to be the rational one, dammit. He should have found Cass.
But it was too late now. They were already on the property, and Jason didn’t want to force himself to return a third time. He wasn’t sure he could.
“Front or back?” Tim asked.
“Back,” Jason said. Going in through the front seemed like the bold move he would normally favor, but he was staging an investigation. He had to try subtlety.
Well. As subtle as they could be at this point. He’d already failed once.
They made their way around back, using the shadows to their advantage but not bothering to go full-Bat – as they all called it – and disappear entirely. Joining the shadows fully seemed like a bad idea to Jason; he wasn’t sure why Tim followed his lead.
The back of the house was just as foreboding as the front. Jason approached one of the basement windows, glancing back over his shoulder at Tim, who leaned in and gave it an experimental push.
Nothing.
Jason took out the glass breaker he kept in one of his pockets and gave the glass a sharp hit. The glass didn’t break, and the sound of the metal head of the glass breaker hitting the glass was dulled somehow, like there was an invisible force somehow protecting it.
“Do that again,” Tim said, leaning forward. Jason personally thought it was an idiotic move to lean in when asking someone to try to break a window, but he obliged.
The window stayed stubbornly intact.
Tim said, “Something’s protecting it.”
“No shit.” Maybe Jason should have just lurked outside the gates and took the guy out when he left. Eventually he’d have to, right? He could lay siege to the place. Totally classic form of warfare, it should get its chance to shine as a form of crime fighting.
Unfortunately he was not going to suggest that out loud to Tim. He’d get shit for it for the rest of his life, and probably somehow after.
Tim took a small pry bar out of his utility belt and attempted to pry the window open, and then, when that didn’t succeed, attempted to pry the window itself from its frame.
“This is a dead end,” Jason finally said when Tim took a small explosive device out of his belt.
“Just let me try–” Tim started, but Jason pulled him away.
“I have a better idea.”
Normally he was all for explosives, but on the off chance that they hadn’t been heard, that would guarantee that the supplier would be alerted to their presence.
Though if his next plan didn’t work, they were coming back to blast the hell out of that window.
The back door looked totally innocuous. Jason approached it like it was set to explode anyway, moving closer and closer with caution. He inspected the lock; it wasn’t anything complex and he knew he would be able to pick it quickly. He tried the door first, though, out of habit.
The handle turned easily.
The door opened.
Jason stood there, looking into the house. It looked perfectly normal for an essentially abandoned house – dust covers, the faint smell of mildew, the overall sense of a house gone to rot.
Tim came up on his left side, scrunched his nose. “You didn’t say it looked like a mausoleum.”
“That’s because it didn’t,” Jason said. The house he’d been in earlier that day had been clean and almost inviting, and it had made the darkness that overtook him feel all the more surreal. This kitchen looked more what he would expect.
Maybe the rest of the house looked different. Maybe this was a second kitchen, one missed by a cleaning crew. Nevermind there was no sign that anyone ever came here.
Fuck, he hated this place. Maybe he should just burn it down. That would deal with the drug supplier lurking in the hidden basement.
He could probably get away with it, if he made it look like an accident. Loosen a gas pipe, drop a candle, let Tim use his explosives, something dumb enough to not look premeditated.
“You probably just didn’t come to this part of the house,” Tim said, then stepped inside.
Jason stayed outside for another few seconds, watching warily to see if anything happened. If Tim seemed to react to anything that wasn’t there. He didn’t.
So Jason stepped inside, and the door slammed shut behind him.
Tim jumped. “Jeez, you didn’t have to do that, I thought we were being stealthy.”
“I didn’t,” Jason said. He looked back; there was nothing to actually see, just a door. He followed his gut feeling, though, and reached for the knob.
It didn’t turn.
“Fuck,” Jason said, then tried again. Shoved his shoulder against the door, but it didn’t budge.
“Very funny,” Tim said, but there was a tenseness to his posture that told Jason that he already knew that Jason wasn’t just fucking with him.
“You give it a try,” Jason said, stepping back and trying not to feel claustrophobic. It was a giant fucking mansion they were in, not a wooden box. They weren’t trapped. They would find another exit.
Tim did not manage to open the door.
He kept trying, longer than Jason had – twisting the knob, examining the lock, trying to pry up the hinges.
“Hit it with something,” Jason suggested. Tim opened a few cupboards until he found a steel kettle, and hit the door with it as hard as he could.
Nothing, just the same dulled noise as the window outside.
“Well,” Jason said. “The way out is through.”
Tim had a faraway look in his eye. “You weren’t just full of shit earlier, were you? This place really is… There’s something wrong with it.”
“We’re going to figure out what it is,” Jason said, like there was going to be a rational explanation. “Maybe there’s a force field around it. We should cut the power.”
“There’s a force field around a random abandoned mansion,” Tim repeated like it was the dumbest idea Jason had ever had, like he hadn’t grown up in Gotham and somehow it was out of the realm of possibility.
Jason flipped him off and went in search of the breaker box. He assumed it would be nearby, and found it almost immediately in a room just off the kitchen. The breakers were old, the type that screwed in, and he marveled that a house this grand belonging to someone with this much money apparently hadn’t had its electrical systems updated in half a century.
He flipped the main breaker, and the faint hum of appliances in the background abruptly shut off.
The lights had already been out, but now the darkness felt more complete. Like a tangible thing, ready to embrace him.
Jason had to force himself to walk back to the kitchen and Tim, to keep his pace steady.
He remembered earlier, the way he’d run like a prey animal, and could feel the urge to move settle into his muscles.
Tim was inspecting the contents of the fridge.
“We’re not here for a snack,” Jason told him, though he peered in, also curious.
“Have you ever heard of these brands? I’m trying to research them but there’s no signal.” Tim asked. He had his phone out, but Jason could see an error page open. Jason tried his own, tried all his communicators. Nothing but the faint hum of static. They were completely offline.
Isolated.
That in itself was a thing to worry about. Their network was enhanced and could reach the deepest sewers in Gotham, and out here, this close to the Cave…
“Gonna go try to bash in another window,” Jason said. He wanted out of here. He didn’t want to stare into a fridge where every brand name was slightly off, like they were generic brands from an alternate dimension.
He shouldn’t have fucking came back into this house.
He’d convinced himself it was all in his head, when he called Tim. Had thought he was having some sort of violent flashback or break, that the madness had crept back into him and taken hold, that he needed a witness to tell him that it was all in his head, he’d imagined it all, everything was as it should be.
Instead, Tim was strangely quiet and fixating on obscure details.
Bruce did the same thing. It was always in an attempt to make the world make sense again. To regain trust in the universe. To settle his feet beneath him and convince himself that he was sane.
“What did you see?” Jason said abruptly. “When I was in the other room?”
Tim didn’t look at him. “Nothing.”
“Just tell me,” Jason said. He hated the faint pleading note in his voice. “Before… This place tried to make me feel like I was losing it. If you bottle it up, if you don’t acknowledge that it’s happening, it’ll do the same to you.”
He had to know that Tim was experiencing it too. Had to know that it was something outside his own mind, that he wasn’t just projecting it onto Tim.
“It really was nothing,” Tim said, and his smile felt forced. “Just scared of the dark.”
They were Bats. They embraced the darkness, lost any childish fear of it around the time they’d put on the Robin suit.
“No splitting up,” Jason said roughly.
He wanted to grab hold of Tim, to have some physical contact between them to reassure him that he was truly there, but he refrained.
He wasn’t sure how Tim would react. He didn’t want to know how Tim would react.
“Lead the way,” Tim said, his voice still off, wooden and flat, and Jason kept him in the corner of his eye as he led the way deeper into the house.
He couldn’t remember if he’d seen this part of the house earlier, if these were the same rooms he’d made his way through. There was dust everywhere, even on the floors, and it appeared undisturbed.
The house was big, but Jason had searched it earlier. It made no sense that they didn’t come across any evidence of that now.
The house was big, but it wasn’t so big that he missed this much of the main floor. The upstairs? Maybe, he hadn’t even ventured up there, he’d been so focused on his search for a basement. But the ground floor?
He should have been here already. Should remember these rooms.
Should remember something.
He stopped short. He remembered the terror he’d felt, that creeping sense that he was being chased by something. He remembered rooms and halls, doorways and hardwood floors, but nothing specific. Nothing concrete.
He tried to picture furniture, the layout of the house, any of the details he’d been trained to notice. The things that were second nature now.
Nothing.
It was like his mind filled in the blanks; the vague impression of furniture. The illusion of domesticity. A mirage.
A dream.
He knew he’d been inside. He knew it.
But now there was no sign of that, just an endless maze of dusty rooms. Furniture covered, ghost-like. It all made perfect sense, given what Jason knew about the place.
But earlier, it had made sense for the place to be warm, lived-in. And that’s what he’d seen.
He turned to Tim. “What do you see?”
Tim had been quiet as they’d gone through the rooms. Observant.
Wary.
The room they were in did not have any windows. He wasn’t even sure what the room was meant to be – the draped furniture looked like chairs, maybe a table, and he couldn’t seem to focus on the wall.
“A room,” Tim said. “It’s dark.”
“Are there any windows?”
Tim’s brow furrowed. “No.”
They’d both lived in Wayne Manor. They knew how a house like this ought to be laid out. “There should be windows.”
Tim nodded. “There should.”
They stood there silently.
Jason had a terrible thought. “We should test the air.”
Tim cut a sharp glance his way. “You think there’s something in the air? Like Fear Gas?”
“It would explain a lot,” Jason said. He hesitated, but withholding important information never helped anyone in the end. “I don’t remember the house looking like this earlier.”
“You said that when we came in.”
“The dust on the floor,” Jason said. “It’s undisturbed.”
Tim looked down, looked back down the hallway they’d come from. There were no footprints, no scuffs in the dust. There was no sign they’d been there at all.
Jason very deliberately dragged his foot along the floor. It ought to have left a mark.
The dust remained.
It was like they were ghosts.
“What the hell?” Tim’s voice was barely a whisper.
Like he thought that someone might be listening. Something.
There was an oppressiveness to the air, something heavy, almost tangible. Jason listened to it, felt the weight of something other.
He’d felt this weight before, in some of the darkest times of his life. It was the oppression of earth overhead, a wooden box in the ground, of knowing that if he didn’t do something drastic he would die here, suffocating under the weight of it.
His breath was coming faster. Panic was creeping up on him again, the same panic that overtaken him before. At least this time he wasn’t alone.
“Fuck the supplier,” Jason said, making the decision he should have made the first time. The one he would have made if he’d trusted himself more. “We need to get out of here.”
Tim was silent.
Jason glanced over.
Tim was gone.
He looked around, spinning in place, like Tim was somehow silently lurking behind him. Like he was just fucking with Jason, but there was no one there. Jason looked back at the floor, at the uninterrupted dust, horror dawning on him.
How long had Tim been gone? He’d just spoken.
Or had he? Had Jason lost time in the panic? That’d happened to him before, after he’d come back. A defense mechanism, but unsettling.
Was his mind trying to protect him here, too?
“Tim?” he called out, then he yelled. “Tim!”
He only realized then that they were in costume, that he should be yelling, “Red Robin!”
Somehow, he didn’t think it mattered. Not here, not in this strange place. He felt like he was very far away from Gotham. Very far away from human concerns.
A tiny part of him, some traitorous part, whispered that he might never have returned, that he was still dying in that warehouse, that none of this was real, none of it ever had been….
He pushed away those thoughts, strode through the doorway. He had to find Tim and get out of here, and he was going to make sure no one else ever got caught up in this hellhole either.
No longer concerned about stealth, he did his best to make an impression on the house as he made his way through. A trail of breadcrumbs to follow later in the form of overturned tables and broken lamps. Fuck it. If he had his way that would be the least of the owner’s worries.
If the supplier reemerged, Jason would kneecap him and then… who knows.
Ask him why the hell he was in this terrible place. Maybe leave him here, that would show him.
Or it would make the darkness stronger, that little voice inside whispered. It felt louder now.
He realized he hadn’t come to an end of the first floor yet, was still pushing over tables and chairs and vases and lamps in indistinguishable rooms, and yet he kept entering undisturbed ones.
He turned on his heel, backtracked.
The room behind him was untouched. He stared at a vase he knew he’d thrown to the ground not five minutes before. It was untouched. Dusty. Whole.
None of it made sense. The rooms couldn’t reset so quickly.
There couldn’t be this many rooms. Jason knew Wayne Manor like the back of his hand, and the first floor he’d walked so far was ten times the size of Wayne Manor’s.
If what he’d walked had been real.
He stopped, froze.
Wondered for the first time if he’d been lost in an illusion this whole time. It made sense, more sense than Tim suddenly wandering off or being kidnapped.
Tim would have made some noise. Would have responded to Jason.
He stopped. Running around wouldn’t solve this maze. He was letting this place get to him.
What did he know?
He couldn’t trust his eyes. He wasn’t sure yet about his other senses, but what he was seeing was not reality. He knew that.
It couldn’t be.
He closed his eyes. Took stock of what he could observe like this, without visual distractions. The air still smelled musty and faintly mildewed, matching what he knew about a house that had been closed off for a long time.
The silence had felt oppressive, but now that he focused, it wasn’t precisely silence after all. He could hear the faintest whisper of air.
Eyes still closed, he tried to follow it to the source. He felt obscurely like he was attempting to escape a kidnapping, like he was caught in a villain’s lair.
Maybe he was.
He found the source of the air, could feel the cool flow on his skin. The mysterious basement.
He slowly opened his eyes.
He was standing in front of a bookshelf. The air was coming from below it; that math wasn’t too hard. It obscured a passage, likely to the basement. A less likely but not completely impossible option was it led to a cave like Bruce’s. Either option seemed like the most likely way to find Tim.
If Jason had picked up anything in his years in the vigilante business, it was that hidden doorways usually led to the answer to the mystery.
It took a few minutes of attempts but eventually he got the bookshelf to creak open, revealing a dark, yawning abyss leading down.
It looked too dark to be a basement, but he’d seen the windows, knew it existed. This had to be it.
He pulled out a light, aimed it down. The stairs were rickety and wooden, the sort of aged that he would associate with an old farmhouse, not a mansion in Bristol.
He looked back. There was still the chance Tim was still here, hidden somewhere in the house proper, but he had to follow his gut.
And his gut was leading him down these creepy-ass stairs.
He couldn’t abandon Tim, not after he’d been the one to bring him here.
He made his way down the stairs. They creaked underfoot; a few wobbling like the screws holding them in place were slowly trying to escape. He kept his weight to the center, one hand on the flashlight and the other trailing along the railing, though it was as rickety as the steps.
He couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d entered some sort of liminal space. It’d happened before, on missions, usually the kind that the Outlaws went on. Gotham was usually terrifyingly rooted in reality.
But this felt like something else.
Truthfully, he’d felt it since he came in the house, the feeling that this place was rooted elsewhere, that the creeping dread he’d felt was environmental just as much as it was psychological. But down here, the feeling was magnified.
The stairs went on and on, further than a single flight. Jason only realized it after a while, after it was pointless to start counting them. It felt like the descent into the Cave. It felt like the descent into hell.
Finally, finally, after a step that nearly broke under his weight, he set foot on the floor. It was hard dirt. He could see no footprints, no scuffs, nothing.
He swung his light around, trying to see where he was. Nothing was in sight, like the steps led down into an abyss. He realized suddenly that he was alone, that barring Tim no one knew he was here, that all the tracking bits of technology that he normally felt stifled by were absent, and he felt that absence keenly.
He felt suddenly like he could wander in this darkness forever, that he might never find his way out. It would become a labyrinth just like the ground floor had, only instead of decaying decadence he’d just be surrounded by nothingness.
He needed a lifeline.
He had 150 feet of grappling line on him. He carefully knotted it to the bottom step, tugged on it, tested it.
It should hold.
And if something interfered with it… Well, Jason needed to know he wasn't alone down here. That information would be equally useful.
There was no telling which direction Tim might be, if he was even down here. Jason took the direct approach and called out into the darkness, hoping for a response.
At first, nothing.
He took a few steps out from the bottom of the staircase, shining his light up to notice that the doorway looked very small and inconsequential above, a rectangle of slightly less palpable darkness. Another lifeline.
He called out again, and this time he closed his eyes, focusing entirely on what he was hearing, not the tenuous connection he had to the outside world.
And this time, he heard it.
Barely anything, muffled, but unmistakable a response. He took off in the direction it’d come from, barking out instructions to keep making noise, do anything to lead Jason there, and he kept going, kept going, until his line went taut and the circle of light from his flashlight just reached a chair.
A plain wooden chair, and there was Tim, sitting in it, holding himself very stiffly.
He wasn’t bound by anything that Jason could see. Here, though, that meant nothing. Tim wasn’t moving and he wasn’t yelling, and as Jason focused the light on him, his eyes were wide with horror.
Help me, they seemed to say. Get me out of here.
He was ten feet away. Jason couldn’t let go of the line he was holding, couldn’t let loose because he knew they would never find their way out of here.
“Can you move?” Jason demanded. “Anything, just scoot closer.”
Tim seemed incapable of either shaking or nodding his head, which answered the question. Jason gave it a moment’s thought.
There was nothing physical binding him.
Most of what happened here seemed to prey on the mind. On perception.
Jason pulled out a batarang and threw it at Tim, aiming to hit him square in the shoulder. Tim flinched, pulled his arm up to protect himself reflexively.
He stared at his arm, moved it. Waved his own fingers in front of his face.
“Get up and get over here,” snapped Jason, who felt like the more time spent in this basement, the harder it would be to move. “It’s just this place playing tricks on you.”
Tim looked at him for a moment, looked at his hand, and slowly reached for his face. Jason could see the confusion there when he didn’t encounter a gag, when he patted himself down and found no ropes, no duct tape, nothing at all binding him.
“How?” Tim’s voice was rusty, strained. Jason thought of the muffled cries he’d followed here. “What the fuck is happening?”
“This place is messed up,” Jason said. “Come on.”
Tim seemed to notice the line Jason was clinging to like a lifeline for the first time. “What’s that?” Then he looked around. “Wait, where are we?”
“You tell me, you’ve been here longer than I have,” Jason said.
“It was just a basement,” Tim said. “Shelves and boxes and exposed rafters. Total cliche. Didn’t really fit the house, now that I think about it.” He looked around. “It wasn’t this.”
When had it changed? Jason didn’t ask. Didn’t want to know if this darkness was his doing. If what they were seeing reflected his own fears.
Tim’s had been basic. Kidnapped, bound, alone.
Jason’s had been more intense. Did this place prey on the individual’s fears? Their experiences?
It had hit the mother lode when Jason walked in, it seemed.
Tim stood shakily, like he still expected something to hold his legs fast, but once he was standing, he didn’t hesitate to join Jason, to grab onto his arm firmly. “Should have kept contact the first time,” he said as they began to follow the line back to the steps.
“When did you get snagged? How?” Jason asked. Because he was starting to suspect that Tim hadn’t been with him nearly as long as he thought he’d been, because the sheer size of the basement seemed to be a shock to him.
It was nothing compared to the amount of walking they’d done upstairs.
“We were in the kitchen,” Tim said. “You went to cut the power off, and it went dark, and when I opened my eyes, I was down here.”
Fuck. Who had been with Jason upstairs? What had been with Jason?
Had it all been in his head?”
“We’re burning this place to the ground,” Jason said. Then, because Tim lacked context, he shared what he’d been through.
Tim looked troubled. “If we can’t trust our perceptions, how do I know you’re you?”
“Ask me my opinions about Mr. Rochester,” Jason suggested.
Tim let out a surprised bark of laughter. This place wasn’t built for mirth, the sound seemed to hang in the air. “Fair enough, but please don’t get into it.”
Tim had once gotten between Jason and Stephanie when they argued about Byronic heroes. He’d called them both nerds. It wasn’t something the house would know about either of them, wasn’t something that could be manufactured based on personality.
It was something that Tim’s brain could have filled in, but Jason hoped he didn’t think of that.
He didn’t need to doubt reality more than he already was. More than Jason already was.
The line they were following went loose.
Jason stared down at the reel in his hand. They ought to be within sight of the steps; only fifteen feet remained. But the line was loose, and when Jason took a few steps forward, he found the jagged end lying on the dirt floor.
“What did that?” Tim whispered. His voice was admirably calm, but his hand had tightened painfully on Jason’s arm.
“Hell if I know,” Jason muttered back. There was no reason for them to keep their voices quiet, but something about this house… He didn’t want to disturb it.
Didn’t want any more of its attention than he already had.
There was a scuffling sound to their left. Jason turned, and caught sight of the supplier he’d followed here what felt like a million years ago, clutching a pair of bolt cutters and staring blankly in the opposite direction.
He was whispering something, and it took Jason a moment to realize it was pleas. Begging the house to let him go, that he’d done what it asked, that he would do anything to just leave.
Fuck. He exchanged a glance with Tim. He couldn’t leave someone here like that, no matter how shitty a person. He’d been here hours longer than Jason had. He couldn’t even imagine what could have happened to him down here. “I did come here to catch him,” he muttered.
Tim didn’t answer, just flung out a pair of bolas and watched them tangle around the supplier’s legs. He would have tripped if he’d tried to run, but he stayed still as they approached, grabbed him by the arms, and moved decisively towards where Jason thought the stairs were.
He kept his eyes trained on Tim and the supplier, didn’t look at the looming darkness. Let Tim lead the way.
It took much, much longer than fifteen feet ought to have. Jason didn’t let himself think about being lost in the darkness, didn’t let himself think about what would happen if the stairs weren’t where he thought they were.
Just kept his eyes trained on their feet, on Tim’s boots, and then suddenly he could see the frayed end of his grappling line, lying there in the dirt. They followed it, and then there were the stairs, leading up out of the darkness.
The supplier said nothing as they made their way up the stairs, keeping him between them. Tim didn’t say anything until they stepped through the doorway, and the air felt somehow lighter. His shoulders dropped, as if a heavy weight had been lifted from them.
“Just have to find our way back to the kitchen,” he said, as if it was that easy.
Somehow, it was.
The house seemed to have shrunk back down to normal mansion-like dimensions. A few doorways and they were entering that kitchen.
Jason turned to the supplier. “How do we get out?”
The man had a wild look in his eyes. “We can’t, we can’t.”
“You’ve been staying here for weeks,” Jason said harshly. “Show us how.”
The supplier pointed. “The mud room. The door opens easily there.”
Tim looked skeptical. Jason felt skeptical.
They dragged the supplier to the mud room, and there was another door there. White-painted wood that again gave Jason the impression of an old farmhouse rather than the mansion they were in, and he thought he’d do some research on this house once they were free. There were carvings in the frame, old-looking scratches that had been painted over. He could see Tim staring at them, clearly memorizing them, since his tech wouldn’t work here.
He reached out, and the handle opened easily. The door swung open.
Freedom awaited.
Tim moved to the door, but Jason said, “Hold on one second.”
Took the risk of letting go of Tim to go back in the kitchen and turned on all the eyes on the gas stove, enough that he could hear the hiss of natural gas but not enough to ignite.
He hurried back, snagging a bottle of gin from the counter on his way – Tim had stayed in his eye line the entire time, unwilling to let him out of his sight. He had a twist to his mouth, like he disapproved of what Jason was about to do in principle but knew it was prudent.
“We’ll never know what happened here if you do that,” Tim muttered as they stepped out the door.
The night air had never felt better.
“Fuck knowing,” Jason said. “I don’t want to fall asleep tonight knowing this place is still here, able to do that.”
Wouldn’t be able to fall asleep knowing that, if he was honest.
Tim had no arguments after that, just looked like he was thankful Jason was doing something about it, so that it wouldn’t haunt him, either.
They dragged the supplier a healthy distance away, behind a small stone shed that had likely once been the groundskeeper’s shack, bound his hands and tried to question him while Jason carefully cut off one of his sleeves and used it and the bottle of gin to build a Molotov cocktail. He wasn’t going to risk any investigations leading back to Gotham’s vigilantes by using explosives.
The man didn’t have anything useful to say. Now that he was out of the house, he just looked sunken and tired and relieved, like the thought of prison was a welcome respite after what he’d experienced.
Jason couldn’t blame him.
He figured the gas had had plenty of time to permeate the kitchen. He hit the Molotov cocktail, threw it, aiming for the door he’d left ajar, and watched the place burn.
“Next time you think about asking me on a case like this,” Tim said, the flames reflecting in his eyes. “Don’t. How are we going to explain this one to B?”
Jason had no intention of explaining anything. He shrugged.
Tim stared at the flames, at the way they were licking up the sides of the house hungrily, devouring it more quickly than it would seem to be possible. Jason moved towards the gate.
He wasn’t going to be here when the flames hit the basement, when they started devouring the dark and strange places within. When they destroyed whatever had been carved in that door frame.
He hoped it was a cleansing fire, and not one of release.
Gotham didn’t need any more horrors on the loose.