Red Hood and The Syphon

PART 1 - Chapter 1

Paint peeled off uneven plaster. The room was aglow with candlelight flickering from the wicks left by the wax melted thick against the bare wooden floorboards of the apartment. A faint smell of burning meat lingered around the room, sickly sweet and enough to gag on. Red paint was spread about the floor in a large pentagram, symbols and lines scattered in and around it as two people knelt on either side of the circle. They chanted in an old language as the heat of the room rose and a baby screamed from somewhere in the haze. 

Suddenly the room grew still and the coppery smell of blood replaced the sickly odour of burning flesh. A shadowy figure loomed over the pentagram with its notable top hat perched upon its head, tall and threatening as fear engulfed the whole dream. Then, as it did every night, the dream ended with a flash of golden light that burned Elizabeth Ray’s brown eyes even after she had woken up.

It was still pitch black outside of Beth’s window, the night still clung to the world but only for a brief while longer. The rain had let up over Gotham City. The thin blanket stuck to the cold sweat on her arm as Beth sat up on her mattress, which she swore had more springs than padding. Her head throbbed so much that she was glad for the lack of sunlight, she squeezed her eyes shut and tried to find an orientation where the pain didn’t make her want to throw up. Eventually accepting her fate, Beth swore some profanities, pushed herself out of bed, and stumbled through to her kitchen. 

The apartments in Crime Alley were small. They all were, it wasn’t just her that had gotten a rotten place to live. It was a blessing that her door still had working locks and the window to her fire escape hadn’t been smashed. Though, she supposed, given that she lived in a shitty apartment in Crime Alley, Beth was more likely to live next door to the burglars of Gotham City than to be a target of their crimes. The apartment had three rooms in total. A small bedroom that fit her bed and just about a dresser for her clothes, a bathroom that managed a toilet, a shower, and a sink, and the main room that had her couch and tv that looked older than she was and the kitchen where she found herself in the early hours of the morning nearly every night thanks to the admirable efforts of the hat man in her dreams.

Finding nothing but a carrot that seemed to want to take root in the plastic tray, Beth decided to risk the water in her kitchen sink. She breathed out a prayer that one costumed prick or other hadn’t poisoned the water supply to the city again and poured herself a glass of water to try and quiet the dizzy feeling that getting out of bed had left her with. The water tasted fine so Beth pushed any anxiousness of being murdered from afar out of her head and went to have a cigarette on her fire escape to try and stop the smell from clinging to everything she owned and to avoid paying repairs for smoke damage.

Nothing warmed her up like breathing ash and embers into her lungs. She shivered in the light breeze and bent her shoulders around the cigarette like it was the last fire in a blizzard. Every night the same depressing feeling, that this would be all she did forever. If she was lucky, Beth’s upstairs neighbour and childhood friend Lewis Green would dangle dangerously over the railing to his own section of metal stairs after hearing the window opening. He was just as much of an insomniac as she was. Beth and Lewis had been friends since they were little. Both of them met the Gotham citizenship requirement of having dead parents. Beth had met Lewis outside Ma Gunn’s School for Wayward Boys and after a day or two of Lewis deciding that the children’s home runaway was worth the effort, he put his charisma to use and convinced the elderly convict than ran the boys home to accept a girl into her school just that once. He had saved her life, life on the street for a young kid wasn’t safe and giving her a place to stay and eat was probably why Beth had kept herself alive for so long.

“Are we sharing?” 

Beth lifted her eyes to see the flopping black hair of just the boy that had taken up her thoughts. Lewis had sort of amber eyes that shone against his brown skin. He was lanky even after puberty had finished with him but he smiled like the playful boy he was as he leaned over his fire escape railing to talk to her.