Singh pointed to a chair, signaling for Barry to sit; Singh didn’t need any magic powers to make Barry follow his order. Singh remained standing. He tapped the stack of reports on his desk. “You’re a smart guy, Allen. And I like you a lot. We’ve had our differences and our troubles, but I like to think we respect each other.”
“Sir, I totally respect you. I know I’ve been a little out of it lately. There’s a lot going on right now, and I’m doing my best to juggle everything.”
“I know that. I believe you. That’s part of the problem: I believe you. But I can’t rely on you. I’m sorry about your father, but this is a police department. We have responsibilities.”
Barry had been in this position before. Being the Flash made his regular life so much more difficult; even super-speed couldn’t always smooth over the bumps and rough patches. “Sir, I realize that I’ve been cutting it close lately, but I always get the job done—”
“And you get it done well,” Singh admitted. He turned to look out his window, hands clasped behind his back. “But you’re always rushing, always harried. One of these days, you’re going to cut it too close. One of these days, you’re going to be so panicked, pushing yourself so fast that you make a big mistake. And in our line of work, that can be absolutely tragic.” He paused. “Do you hear me, Allen? Is this getting through to you?”
When Captain Singh turned around, Barry Allen was gone.
9
Barry couldn’t understand it. He’d been sitting in Captain Singh’s office, on the receiving end of a lecture about responsibility—that he probably deserved—and then, suddenly, he’d . . .
Well, without really wanting to, he’d stood up and run, vibrating through the wall of the captain’s office and blasting through Central City at invisible speed, until he arrived at an old, abandoned apartment building in the Fox district, a section of the city earmarked for massive infrastructure improvements and urban renewal. It was a small, four-block area where no one lived or worked. But here he was anyway. He’d run up a flight of stairs and into an apartment, where he now stood in the half-light that came through the boards on the windows.
What the heck is going on?
“Welcome, my puppet,” said an all-too-familiar voice.
Hocus Pocus stepped out of the shadows, leering and stroking his goatee.
Barry moved quickly, but not quickly enough; Pocus shook his head and said, “Stop,” and Barry stood perfectly still.
Just as he had at the park.
We thought it wore off, whatever he did to me. But it didn’t!
“So . . . this is what you look like under the mask,” Pocus mused. He took Barry’s chin in his hand and tilted his head this way and that. “Nothing exceptional. Nothing exciting. Nothing even memorable. Why do you hide your face behind a mask, Flash? I thought perhaps you were disfigured.”
The truth was that he hid his face so that jerks like Pocus couldn’t strike at him through his family and friends, most of whom were more vulnerable than the Flash. Ironically, right now all his friends and family were perfectly safe—Barry was the one in danger.
Not just “in danger”—he was also absolutely helpless. He couldn’t move a muscle. Hocus Pocus could shoot him, stab him, punch him, kick him . . .
If Barry could have shivered, he would have. He wasn’t afraid of Pocus, but he suddenly relived a stark, potent memory. He remembered the last time he’d been this vulnerable. Years ago. As a child.
The playground at Carmichael Elementary School. Recess time. A couple of months after his father, wrongly convicted for the murder of his mother, had been thrown into prison at Iron Heights. Joe, who’d become his guardian during the trial, had kept Barry out of school while his father was being tried, so Barry had just returned.
It was the worst, lowest time of his life. His mother was dead, and his father had been blamed for it. Barry knew his father was innocent, but no one would listen to a kid. So he’d watched in horror as his father went off to jail.
Back in school, he kept to himself, not even talking to Iris. He wanted to fold in on himself and vanish forever, but that was impossible.
And then came the playground that day. A mob of kids. Some older than him. Mocking him.
Your dad’s a murderer!
You ain’t got a mommy!
Your daddy’s in jail!
When they kill your old man in jail, you’re gonna be an orphan!
He’d done his best to ignore their taunts, their terrible jibes. But he was a child, and he could only take so much, and eventually he’d lashed out at them, swinging his fists manically, unable to see his targets through the tears in his eyes.
They’d retaliated, of course. Held him down. Punched and kicked him. Spit on him.
The worst, most humiliating moment of his life. He’d been outnumbered, completely overwhelmed. Utterly at their mercy.
Like he was now. In the thrall of Hocus Pocus, unable to help himself or anyone else.
He shoved away the memories. The fears. The pain. “What have you done to me?” Barry demanded. At least this time Pocus was letting him speak, which was good.
“Our earlier . . . encounter has left me famished,” Pocus said. “Bring me some food.”
Before Barry could retort, he realized that he’d run to Carmine’s, his and Iris’s favorite restaurant. So fast that no one could see, he zoomed through the kitchen, piling a plate with risotto, eggplant Parmesan, and garlic bread. In less than half a second, he was back at Pocus’s apartment. The magician had settled into an old armchair. Barry presented the plate.
Pocus curled his lip. “Am I supposed to eat with my hands?”
Again, against his will, Barry ran back to the restaurant, grabbed some silverware, and returned in the blink of an eye.
Pocus nodded approvingly and tucked into the meal with gusto, pulling out a large napkin from his sleeve and laying it over his lap with a flourish. Barry thought he’d never seen someone enjoy a meal so much.
“Where I come from,” Pocus told him, “food like this . . . Well, you just can’t get it. One more reason I’m glad I came here.”
“Where are you from?” Barry couldn’t move, but he could still think. Sometimes he thought his greatest super-power wasn’t his speed, but rather his ability to reason. Knowledge was power, and he was gathering it now. He knew where Pocus’s hideout was, for one thing. And now he knew that Pocus wasn’t from Central City.
“Where?” Pocus chuckled. “I was born not far from here, geographically speaking. But I don’t expect you to understand, and I’m not here to explain myself to you. I don’t need to explain anything to you, my little puppet. I command; you obey. It’s very simple.”
“How did you do this to me?” Barry asked.
Pocus licked some sauce from his fork and set the plate on the floor. “You are, shall we say, under my spell.” Pocus leaned back and steepled his fingers together. “Yes, under my spell is the perfect way to describe it. My will is your will. My wish is your command. Now, begone, you speedy little gnat. When I need you again, I will summon you.”
Still under Pocus’s spell, Barry ran out the door and down the street before he regained control of his body. But once he had, Barry immediately made a U-turn and blasted back to the apartment building.
Hocus Pocus, of course, was gone.
10
After superspeeding through Carmine’s to drop off some cash for the food he’d stolen, Barry headed to STAR Labs. Caitlin and Cisco were at their stations, eyes glued to their screens. It was as though they hadn’t even bothered to get up for a cup of coffee since he left.
“Guys!” he shouted as he zoomed into the Cortex. “We’ve got a problem!”
“No kidding,” said Cisco. “I’m getting nowhere with—”
“He can still control me,” Barry blurted out.
They both swiveled to him. “What?” Caitlin said.
“I was in Singh’s office, getting chewed out. Oh, man . . .” He realize
d that he’d bolted from his boss’s office. Not a good thing. But he shook it off; an apology would have to come later. Pocus was more important at the moment. “Anyway, next thing I know, I’m running to some old rundown apartment . . .” He quickly filled them in on what had happened and what Pocus had said.
“It really shook me up, guys,” Barry confessed. “I can’t lie. I wasn’t in control.”
“Hey, we get it,” Cisco said, prompting a supportive nod from Caitlin, who added, “We couldn’t stop clapping, no matter how much we wanted to.”
“This is different. It’s like he’s in my head now. What if I can’t get him out? What if he’s always out there somewhere, tugging on my strings?”
“That’s not going to happen,” Caitlin assured him. “We’ll figure out a way to stop him. We always do.”
“What do we have so far?”
“Not much. He said he’s from around here?” Cisco asked, puzzled.
“Born nearby, yeah.”
“Well, he must have left town as a baby, then, because facial recognition is getting nothing on this guy. No driver’s license or photo ID card in any database. No hits at all. If he lives in Central City, he’s the only person here who’s never stood at an ATM and gotten his picture taken.”
“He doesn’t seem to need cash,” Barry said ruefully, thinking of the meal he’d swiped. “I don’t know what he’s after.”
“Sure you do!” H.R. breezed in.
Cisco bristled. H.R. just rubbed him the wrong way. But before he could snark something, Caitlin held up a hand. “Enlighten us.”
“He wants attention,” H.R. said.
“That’s ridic—”
Barry jumped up, interrupting Cisco mid-word. “No! It isn’t! H.R., I think you’ve nailed it!”
H.R. bowed. “I live to serve.”
“The one element in common across both of Pocus’s appearances is that he compelled people to applaud for him,” Barry reminded them. “He made everyone at the pier clap. He did the same thing at the park. He didn’t really get ticked off until I took his audience away. That’s when he started messing with the laws of nature.”
“So he’s an egotist with superpowers?” Caitlin asked.
“Dude’s obsessed with having people get their worship on. He needs a reality TV show or something.”
“Or he could run for president,” Caitlin said.
“Don’t even joke about that.”
Barry drummed his fingers on the table. Before he realized it, he was tapping so fast that the table was vibrating. He stopped before Cisco could remonstrate him.
“I bet the wand is the source of his powers,” he mused. “But there might be some other gadgets on him, too. Like something to amplify his voice when he wants attention.” He slammed his fist down. “We need to figure out how he’s controlling me!”
“If I may . . .” H.R. said.
“Don’t start with magic again.” Cisco sounded weary. “We have enough problems. We don’t need to add mastery of the dark arts to our list.”
“No, no,” H.R. promised. “I’ve been thinking. And I’ve been reading up on this cerebral cortex and cerebellum you were all so exercised about before. It seems to me that they’re kind of like cars on the road, no?”
“Not exactly,” Caitlin ventured.
“Please. I’m a writer. Let me have my metaphors.”
“That was technically a simile,” Barry said, cracking a smile for the first time since he’d been called down to Singh’s office.
“Very well, then—a simile. My point: You’ve been looking for someone who took the steering wheel, but maybe you should be looking for someone who hijacked the traffic lights instead.”
“Well, that clears everything up!” Cisco said sardonically.
“No, wait.” Caitlin clucked her tongue, thinking. “There’s more than one way to control a car.”
“How is that helpful?” Cisco asked.
“I think H.R. and Caitlin are on to something,” Barry said. “Think about it: You can control a car directly with the steering wheel, like H.R. said.”
“Or you can control it indirectly through the traffic signals,” Caitlin told them. “The car is still stopping and starting, but for different reasons. So that means we should be looking at . . .”
“The thalamus!” Barry and Caitlin cried at the same moment.
“Sure, that,” H.R. said cheerfully.
Cisco, who was pacing the Cortex, grunted. “OK, sure, that makes some kind of sense.”
“Your praise is like fine sugar in my Moroccan blend,” H.R. said. “And that is a metaphor.”
“Still a simile,” Barry told him, then jumped up. “Guys, hook me up again. We have to check my thalamus.”
Truthfully, he knew, they should have done that from the beginning. The thalamus acted as a go-between between brain hemispheres, but it also filtered data and was instrumental in perception. All sensory data except for smell—sight, hearing, taste, and touch—went through the thalamus. If you controlled a gateway like that, what couldn’t you make someone do?
In moments, they had him hooked up to the EEG and strapped into a series of MRI cables. Soon after, they had a 3-D model of his thalamus on the screens.
“Whoa . . .” Cisco breathed.
“What is that?” Caitlin shook her head and tapped at the keyboard.
Barry ripped off the wires and leads and zipped over to them. “What have we got?”
On the screen, his thalamus was etched in glowing blue lines. At this angle, it looked something like a soft boxing glove with a light bulb hanging off its rear. So far, so normal.
What was not normal at all were the tiny specks moving along it. Almost as if dust had been trapped in his brain and was being blown around. But dust couldn’t get into his brain, and neither could wind.
“Nanites,” Cisco said with authority.
“Little microscopic machines?” Barry said. “In my head?” It was crazy, but now it was almost as though he could feel them, itching their way through his head. He wanted to rip his skull open and scratch his brain fiercely.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Cisco said, leaning in, awestruck. “I mean, sure, I’ve seen nanites. I’ve made nanites. But these are, like . . .”
“Light-years ahead of yours?”
“Light-years? More like parsecs.” It took a lot for Cisco to admit that someone had out-engineered him. But the evidence was right there in front of them. “This isn’t just beyond anything I’ve ever seen—this is beyond anything anyone has ever seen. Our ‘magician’ is actually the world’s greatest scientist.”
They all mulled that over for a moment. It wasn’t a terribly comforting notion. They were used to outthinking their adversaries, exploiting their scientific acumen to leapfrog the bad guys. This time, they were the ones being outthought. They were the ones being leapfrogged over.
“He doesn’t seem like a scientific genius,” Barry said after a moment. “I’m not basing that on anything but a gut feeling. He just seems like a regular guy trying to be a magician.”
“Maybe he stole this tech, then.”
“Guys,” Caitlin said, “we’re forgetting something really important.” Before they could respond, she’d marched over to the analysis station and started connecting leads to her head.
“Oh man!” Cisco slapped a hand over his mouth. “What if these things are still inside us, too?”
Once Caitlin had hooked herself up, Cisco ran his hands over the control board. Soon they were looking at a 3-D scan of her thalamus. It looked blessedly normal. A little boring, even, without all the nanites swarming its surface. Barry felt relief and a little flush of jealous anger at the same time.
They tested Cisco, too. He was similarly clean of nanites.
“I don’t understand.” Cisco forced past a lot of pride to say those words. “Why are they still in Barry, but not in us?”
“Because I touched the wand?” Barry leaned back in hi
s chair, fingers steepled in front of him. It was still a chore to ignore the creepy-crawlies in his brain, but he was making his best effort. “Maybe that gave me an extra shot of—”
“Nanite juice?” Caitlin said.
“Gross,” Cisco opined. “But better than what I was gonna say.”
“Which was?”
Cisco looked away in shame and mumbled, “Nanite . . . stuff.”
His mortification was given a reprieve by the chirping of Barry’s cell phone. It was Joe.
“Barry, Singh’s on the warpath . . .”
“Flash stuff is going down, Joe,” he said. “I’ll handle it.”
“I don’t think you get it. He’s—”
“I’ll handle it. Singh and I have a rapport these days.”
“I wouldn’t count on that. And I would get here fast. Even for you.”
Barry grumbled in annoyance as he hung up. “I have to go, and come up with an excuse for why I left Singh’s office on the way. In the meantime, you guys . . .” He waggled his hands all around the Cortex. “Y’know—science it up. Get these things out of my head.” Something occurred to him. “Is Wally still going on patrol later?”
“Every day when his classes are over,” Caitlin said.
“Whatever you do, don’t let him go after Pocus, OK? The last thing we need is another speedster under this guy’s control.”
“Right,” Cisco said, “we’ll just stop the kid who can move at the speed of light.”
“Be persuasive,” Barry told him, and zipped away.
On his way to CCPD, he came up with an excuse. He rehearsed it to himself at Mach 2.
“‘So sorry, Captain Singh . . . Got a text that my landlord smelled gas coming from my apartment . . . Had to go . . . I could swear I said something to you . . . Maybe you didn’t hear me?’ Yeah, that sounds good.”
He raced into the building and then emerged from the fire stairs as regular, harried Barry Allen. Something was strange, though. As he walked through the normally buzzing, busy, loud precinct, everyone went silent around him. Joe, standing in a corner chatting with Detective Patterson, caught sight of Barry. His expression immediately turned sad. What was going on?