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Chapter 26 : Bait Taken
🕑 Added 2025-06-28 08:30:00 +0000 UTCHeres chap 26. Chap 27 was posted by mistake. Thank you Orion for pointing it out.
**Zsasz's Hideout**
In the bowels of an abandoned meat processing facility, Victor Zsasz sat motionless before a wall of television screens, his scarred flesh pale as bone in the flickering light. The building still reeked of old blood and industrial decay, making it the perfect cathedral for someone who worshipped at the altar of death.
Around him, the tools of his trade lay arranged—knives of every conceivable shape and size, each one honed to razor sharpness, each one hungry for flesh.
"He doesn't get it—" he snarled, flinging the chair across the room with a crash that echoed through rusted hooks and decaying walls. "He doesn't get ANY of it!"
On the central screen, Alex Thorne's face lingered in still-frame — mouth mid-sentence, eyes brimming with quiet authority. The interview had been playing on loop for hours. Zsasz didn't just watch. He absorbed. Every twitch. Every inflection. Every condescending pause as Thorne dissected men like him with sterile words and smug detachment.
"He's not a visionary. He's a narcissist with a flair for performance art. All ego, no substance."
That line.
That line.
Zsasz screamed.
A sharp, guttural, animal sound.
He grabbed the nearest knife from the table—long, curved, still wet—and drove it into the screen. Sparks burst. Glass cracked. Thorne's mouth split open under the blade in a shattered smile.
"YOU THINK THIS IS A GAME?! A STUNT?!
I'M NOT SOME STREET-CLOWN CARVING HEADLINES INTO CORPSES!"
He tore the blade free, panting, eyes wild with fury and something worse—hurt. Real, deep, humiliating hurt. A high priest mocked before his altar.
"You think you can reduce me to a footnote in your little journal? A paragraph between your coffee and your therapist?"
He turned in a circle, manic, mouth twitching.
"You sit in your little tower, flapping your tongue like you understand death—like you've ever heard it breathing behind your neck! You analyze me like I'm some lab rat!"
"You want to study monsters, Thorne?" Zsasz whispered, his voice barely audible above the building's mechanical hum. "I think it's time you met your professor."
He moved to a makeshift desk where he kept his correspondence materials—expensive paper stolen from hotel lobbies, ink made from a mixture of his own blood and industrial chemicals, pens that had been sharpened to write with the precision of surgical instrument. The letter he composed was a work of art in itself, each word chosen for maximum psychological impact:
"Dear Alex,
I watched your interview with great fascination. Such confidence when discussing the psychology of predators. Such authority when analyzing the minds of those you call monsters. But I wonder—have you ever truly understood what drives us to create our art?
You speak of the Architect as if he were some common criminal, some garden-variety killer who lacks vision and sophistication. How deliciously naive. You analyze death from the safety of your ivory tower, dissecting the sublime truths that we artists reveal with each carefully placed cut.
I think it's time for a more... practical education. Consider this your enrollment in my advanced seminar: The Art of Revealing Truth. The curriculum will be intensive, and I assure you, the lessons will leave lasting impressions.
Class begins very soon, Mr. Thorne. Attendance is mandatory.
Your devoted instructor,
V.Z.
P.S. - I've added forty-seven new marks to my collection since my return to Gotham. I wonder how many you'll inspire before our studies are complete?"
Zsasz sealed the letter in an envelope that he marked with a small symbol carved into the paper itself—a stylized representation of a human face with no features, the kind of blank canvas that he specialized in creating. Tomorrow, he would begin the delicate process of delivering his message and commencing Dr. Thorne's education in the true nature of mortality.
**Alex's Apartment**
Alex Thorne sat in his spartanly furnished apartment, the glow of multiple computer screens casting harsh shadows across his angular features. Around him, the tools of his academic deception lay carefully arranged—psychology textbooks with highlighted passages he'd never actually read, research papers on criminal behavior downloaded but never studied, diplomas and certificates that told the story of a brilliant young mind dedicated to understanding human evil.
It was all theater, of course. Alex had learned everything he needed to know about human nature not from books or professors, but from the memories he'd consumed, the experiences he'd absorbed from his victims. Every act of violence, every moment of terror, every final desperate breath had become part of his vast library of knowledge about what people truly were beneath their civilized pretenses.
The interview with Vicki Vale had gone exactly as planned. To the viewing public, he'd appeared as the voice of reason, the academic authority who understood both the psychology of vigilantism and the importance of due process. To Batman and the GCPD, he'd planted subtle misdirections that would send their investigation down blind alleys and false leads. And to Victor Zsasz—well, he'd presented himself as the most irresistible target imaginable.
A soft knock at his door interrupted his thoughts. Alex smiled, already knowing what he would find. The building's security was adequate for keeping out ordinary intruders, but it was useless against someone who truly understood the art of infiltration. He opened the door to find the hallway empty, but on the floor lay a manila envelope with his name written in the spidery handwriting that seemed to crawl across the paper like dried blood.
Inside, he found exactly what he'd been hoping for—a photograph from his television interview with a red circle drawn around his face, and beneath it, a letter written in the same crawling script that betrayed its author's deteriorating mental state. As he read Zsasz's words, Alex felt a familiar warmth spreading through his chest, the satisfaction of a master manipulator watching his carefully laid plans come to fruition.
Victor Zsasz had taken the bait completely. The scarred killer saw him as an arrogant academic who needed to be taught the true nature of death, never suspecting that his prospective victim was actually the apex predator who'd been planning his destruction since the moment news of his latest killing spree had broken.
Alex walked to his window and looked out at the city sprawling below, a cancer of corruption and violence that fed on the innocent and protected the guilty. Somewhere out there, Batman was weaving his web of surveillance, convinced that technology and preparation could prevent the coming storm. Somewhere else, Victor Zsasz was planning his next lesson in the art of revealing truth, already imagining the screams he would elicit from his new student.
They were all dancing to his tune, playing their parts in a symphony of violence that would culminate in the kind of justice that Gotham's broken system could never provide.
Alex returned to his desk and began typing his next academic paper, ostensibly a analysis of how media coverage influenced criminal behavior. But his real thoughts were focused on the tools he would need, the preparations that had to be made, the careful choreography required to transform Victor Zsasz from predator to prey.
The game was entering its next phase.
***************
Note : Zsasz could've taken our MC then and there—but where's the fun in that? The letter wasn't just a warning; it was foreplay. He wanted to savor the hunt, to let the fear simmer in his prey's veins before the blade ever touched skin.
