12 Days of Clois Claim: #016 Reality (100 challenge)
Rating: All
Summary: Clark wakes up to find Richard in the Fortress of Solitude, but what is real and what isn’t when Clark falls under Baron Sunday’s spell?
Copyright 7/10/2007
As usual - I take my Loises & Clarks well blended.
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“Rise and shine, sleepyhead,” a man’s voice said as Clark struggled to open his eyes. He squinted against the brightness that surrounded him.
“Richard?” Clark managed to ask, finally getting his eyes to work. Richard White was standing a short distance from him, a wry smile on his face. Clark sat up, and looked around. They were in the main chamber in the Fortress of Solitude, only he couldn’t quite remember how he had gotten there. Or why he had been asleep on the floor.
Richard’s presence was an even deeper mystery. The man was dressed in slacks and a white dress shirt open at the collar with the sleeves rolled up. He didn’t seem to be bothered by the freezing air temperatures of the Fortress and he was still smiling at him. That was a little strange since Richard had died one year before, murdered during an investigation into arms smuggling.
“Um, aren’t you dead?”
The other man shrugged.
“Does this mean I’m dead?” Clark asked.
“What’s the last thing you remember?” Richard asked as a response.
Clark frowned as he tried to think back. “Going out to Baron Sunday’s plane at Metropolis International.”
“Without backup?”
Clark hung his head. “I didn’t want Lois in the line of fire. Baron Sunday is a very dangerous…”
“You went out into a dangerous situation without backup.”
“I am dead, aren’t I?” Clark asked again.
“Not yet…” Richard nodded to a holographic image that was taking shape in the air of the Fortress. It wasn’t Jor-El’s face that was coalescing. It was a scene in a hospital room, somewhere. Lois’s face came into focus. Her eyes were dark with worry as she looked down at an unconscious man lying in a hospital bed, a respirator tube pushed down his throat. With a start, Clark realized the man in the bed was himself. In the background he could hear the fitful beeping of a cardiac monitor. It sounded slow, even for him.
“Clark, why did you go out there alone?” Lois was asking. “You knew Hendricks was able to affect you... You knew he had used his powers to kill before…”
A man in a doctor’s smock came into the room and checked the readings on the various instruments on the rack by the bed. “How is he?” Lois asked.
“I’m not going to lie to you, Mrs. Kent,” the doctor said. “Without knowing what is causing his unconsciousness, there’s not a lot we can do. I will tell you that he’s losing ground and our tests aren’t showing anything unusual, except that he’s failing. No drugs, no injuries, nothing.”
“Except that he’s unconscious and he’s stopped breathing on his own and that pretty well rules out simple catatonia,” Lois added. The doctor looked glumly at his patient. “Thank you, Doctor Klein.”
“Lois…?” Clark murmured. He turned back to Richard. “What’s going on? Why are you here?”
“Why do you think I’m here?”
“I asked you first,” Clark pointed out.
Richard chuckled. “Maybe I’m the ghost of Christmas present?”
Clark glowered at him.
“I’m a manifestation of the part of your mind that isn’t hiding in a corner cowering in terror,” Richard explained.
It was bright and noisy, the crystal singing replaced by a terrifyingly loud cracking and crashing. A woman screamed and he heard a baby crying. There had been warmth and now he was cold. Then it was dark and the baby’s cries echoed shrilly in his ears. He felt his heart go into his mouth, his pulse beating wildly in his ears as he pounded on the lid that imprisoned him. He tried to break through the lid, tried to escape. The baby kept crying and the noise outside the coffin grew unbearable.
Then there was silence. A deafening silence broken only by the intermittent sobbing of the baby. A terrifying silence that went on forever. He was buried alive.
Clark was gasping for breath when he realized Richard was still there, watching him.
“Flashback?” Richard asked.
“I don’t know, maybe… Although I would have expected you to be in a flashback. You show up often enough in my nightmares,” Clark said.
“I suspect this one is more primal,” Richard said.
“Mom told me I would wake up screaming when I was little, but I could never tell her what the nightmares were about. They stopped when I got older.”
“But whatever it is, it’s still frightening enough to drive you to digging a hole, jumping in and pulling it in after you.” Richard gave him a speculative look. “Tell me about Hendricks.”
“If you’re a manifestation of my consciousness, then you already know about him.”
“Humor me.”
“I was in Jamaica, working my way around the world before college. I’d been selling stories to the editor of the Jamaica Sun-Star, doing okay. I made friends with a fellow name of Matt Young. He was an NIA agent working with the local authorities to get a handle on the arms smuggling that was happening. An exclusive on it would have made a great start to my career.”
“What happened?”
“I was tagging along with him and we ended up in a shoot out. A pilot named John Hendricks had been hired by an anti-Castro group to drop of shipments in Jamaica where they would then be ferried into Cuba. He was killed in the shoot-out. At least we thought he’d died. The NIA and the Nacionales laid all the blame on Hendricks and that’s the way I wrote it and that’s the way it was published.” Clark paused a long moment, remembering the heady feeling of his first scoop.
“But…?”
“But, I was very young, and not nearly suspicious enough. Hendricks wasn't dead. He was also an innocent man who had been framed by Young and his partner. They were the real smugglers and they used my inexperience to pull it off.”
“Clark, did your editor ask any questions about the story? I mean a major piece from a rooky?”
“Not that I recall…”
“You have an eidetic memory.”
Clark sighed. “No, he didn’t ask.”
“Doesn’t that sound suspicious?”
“You think Joe Cochrane was in on it, too?”
“You tell me.”
“Perry would never have published it without making sure I had all the research necessary to prove my case,” Clark said. “I can’t ask Cochrane about it though. He died about a year after I left there. A heart attack, supposedly.”
“What about Young and his partner?”
“Clemens died of an apparent heart attack about four days ago. He was a bus driver. Been on the job about three months. Superman had to stop the bus to keep it from crashing into traffic jam when Clemens collapsed. The man was dead before the bus stopped. Young is in a coma. He had some sort of psychotic break – pulled a gun to defend himself from whatever he was seeing in his head. Then he collapsed and his heart stopped. I managed to get it beating again, but he hasn’t regain consciousness as far as I know.”
“And Hendricks?”
“The article destroyed his family, his reputation. I thought he was dead. From what Lois came up with, Hendricks let everyone think he was dead. About seven years ago Baron Sunday showed up in Europe with his magic show. Was a big hit, made enough to buy his own jumbo jet to live in. He was booked into to Metropolis a few times. According to his PR he spent several years studying magic and Voudon before going on stage. It’s funny…”
“What’s funny?”
“Sunday’s assistant, Ziggy,” Clark answered. “At the theater I was watching very closely.” He tapped the corner of one eye in emphasis. “To see how Sunday pulling off some of those illusions. Sunday seemed to know I was doing it and his assistant seemed scared out of his wits about something. And then, when he hypnotized Jimmy and Jimmy actually got injured bumping into an imaginary desk…”
“Mind over matter?”
“That doesn’t explain how a man can walk into the newsroom, drop dead in front of a dozen witnesses and turn out to have been dead for years. That’s just creepy.”
“Necromancy?”
Clark glared at him. Richard shrugged. “You have to have considered it or else I wouldn’t have said it. I am simply a character in your head.”
The holographic image of Lois began to speak again and Clark realized that the heart monitor had been beeping softly in the background the entire time he and Richard had been talking.
“Clark, you have to face the fear and go through it to the other side,” Lois was saying. “Your whole life has been about not showing fear... Pushing it out of your head. But this fear is part of you. It's something so terrible you've pushed it way down, and it's time to let it out, Clark. Because this thing could... this thing is killing you. You’re letting it kill you.”
She leaned over and gently kissed him on the forehead.
He felt the flutter of a kiss against his skin and raised his hand to touch the place she had touched.
“Clark, please come back to me. I don’t want to do this alone…”
TBC...
