The Flash: Hocus Pocus Read online

  “I didn’t say nail polish!” Joe protested, but Barry was already gone, a stack of papers flurrying about in his wake.

  3

  Barry approached the pier from the north end of town. Since he wasn’t in costume, he didn’t want anyone to see him arrive, so he pushed his speed to the max. To the naked eye, he would be totally invisible. There might be a sudden strong wind along his route, but people in Central City had gotten used to winds blowing out of nowhere.

  Cisco and Caitlin were near the entrance to the old Tilt-A-Whirl. He kept his speed maxed, stayed invisible, and did a quick check of the area to suss out any hidden dangers. At this speed, his world was full of what looked like department store mannequins, silent yet frighteningly perfect. It was beautiful, Barry thought, to be able to examine the world as though he were above it and not a part of it. But it also felt sterile and fragile. Looking at his friends—as he did now—frozen in time made him fear for a day when, inevitably, they would stop moving altogether, stop living. He would do so, too, he knew, but his powers made him the likeliest to live the longest.

  He shook away the negativity. A few months ago, he’d been at his lowest point ever after his father’s death. But things were better now; no point wallowing in the future. With renewed resolve, he swept up and down the pier, checking for trouble, hidden or obvious. Nothing concealed under the boardwalk, or stashed in any of the trash cans, or lurking behind the artificial palm trees that stood along the length of the pier. No one up to any blatant skulduggery. Just families and friends out enjoying the last warm day of the season.

  Barry scooted over to Cisco and Caitlin. Cisco stood stock-still, his expression one of concern. Caitlin hugged herself as though cold, biting her lower lip.

  Barry scoped out a spot behind a stand of bushes, made sure no one could see him, and slowed down. The world rushed back in on him—sound and motion and a soft breeze coming off the river. Somewhere in the distance, a baby cried, joined a moment later by an older sibling demanding cotton candy. The pier, which moments before had been as still as a sculpture garden, came alive with the bustle of families and couples moving up and down the boardwalk, and a solitary art student with her sketchbook, frowning in consternation as she moved back and forth along the same three feet of ground, looking for the perfect lighting and angle to capture the Ferris wheel.

  Barry came around the bushes, tripped on a root, and almost spilled onto the boardwalk.

  “There he is!” Cisco proclaimed. “What took you so long?”

  It had been all of fifteen seconds since Barry had gotten the text.

  “I stopped for pizza,” Barry told him, ambling over to them. His eyes widened at the kettle corn. “I’m actually starving. Do you mind?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but rather snatched the kettle corn and started eating.

  “The machine needs fuel,” Caitlin said with a bit of snark.

  Barry couldn’t speak through his handful of kettle corn.

  “We didn’t invite you here to eat our food,” Cisco told him. “For which, by the way, you now owe me five bucks.”

  Swallowing, Barry said, “Why did you text me? Nothing’s going on. Why the emergency?”

  “We think we experienced a metahuman event,” Caitlin said very seriously, though Barry detected a hint of excitement in her voice.

  “Well,” Barry said, checking over both shoulders that no one nearby was eavesdropping, “Cisco’s a meta, so . . .”

  “Not like that. It seemed to be a spontaneous area-wide psychosomatic trigger that completely overrode nominal conscious controls!” Caitlin’s tone was slightly panicked, her speech rapid-fire.

  “Wait, what?” It wasn’t often that the Flash had to tell someone to slow down.

  “Dude made us applaud for him!” Cisco exploded. As though to demonstrate, he clapped his hands and stomped his feet. “Street magician. Right over there.” He pointed to the empty bench. “He told us all to applaud!”

  Barry rolled his eyes. They’d taken him away from work for this? His boss, Captain Singh, was already annoyed enough at his seemingly endless string of absences and sudden disappearances. With his superspeed, he could do his job a lot faster than most people, but he still had to show up at the precinct if he didn’t want the wrong people to start asking the right questions. And Joe could cover for him for only so long.

  “Guys, there’s no law against asking you to applaud.”

  “But then we did!” Cisco protested.

  “That’s not illegal, either,” Barry pointed out.

  “You don’t understand.” Caitlin took Barry’s arm and locked her eyes on his. “This wasn’t a request. It was a command. He ordered us to applaud, and we did. Everyone did. Everyone within earshot on the pier. Whether they wanted to or not.”

  “You can’t be sure—”

  “I didn’t want to,” Cisco said. “I so totally did not want to applaud for that guy’s lame act. But I couldn’t help myself. I had to.”

  Barry narrowed his eyes. “‘Spontaneous area-wide psychosomatic trigger that completely overrode nominal conscious controls,’ huh?”

  Caitlin nodded and swallowed, her eyes wide. “Barry. He took over our minds.”

  The trio went back to STAR Labs together after Barry called the Central City Police Department and informed Captain Singh that he was pretty sure he’d left the iron on at home and that he would have to take a break to go home and check.

  “Again?” Singh managed to sound annoyed, angry, and resigned all at the same time. “Allen, this is the third time this month you’ve left the iron on, and now you’re taking a break before lunch. I’m not one to control my people’s private lives, but maybe you need to think a little less about a crisp pleat in your khakis and a little more about your job.”

  “Yes, sir. You are totally right, Captain. I’ll work on it, I promise.”

  STAR Labs was a massive complex in the heart of Central City, built years ago by the late Dr. Harrison Wells, who had actually—in a complicated series of events—turned out to be a villainous speedster from the future named Eobard Thawne, the Reverse-Flash. When Barry and his friends turned the tables on Thawne and defeated him, STAR Labs had—again, in a complicated series of events—ended up bequeathed to Barry.

  The building looked something like an upside-down stool with only three legs—massive pylons jutting out from the circular main structure. It was Barry’s home away from home, a workplace for Cisco and Caitlin, and the command center in a never-ending battle against evil metas, time travelers, and whatever else the universe (and the Multiverse) decided to throw at them.

  If STAR Labs was their command center, then the Cortex, located in the middle of the building, was its beating heart, a large, open, circular chamber with computer workstations and satellite medical bays attached via short hallways. In one of those medical bays, they ran a series of tests on Caitlin and Cisco, checking for modifications to their brain chemistries—specifically the cerebral cortex, which controlled voluntary movements, and the cerebellum, which ensured smooth bodily motion.

  The tests showed nothing.

  Barry slumped a little lower in his chair. Cisco and Caitlin were peeling electrode leads off their skin. They would look at the results in a moment, but he’d spent enough time looking at weird or off-kilter medical tests to know that there was nothing wrong with Caitlin’s or Cisco’s brain. Not now, at least.

  “Whatever he did to you guys, it didn’t leave any lasting damage.”

  “I guess that’s good news,” Cisco said. “We’re back in our right minds again.”

  “As right as yours gets, at least,” Caitlin teased.

  “Ouch.”

  “The truth hurts,” she said, grinning. “But remember—it’s the way our brains work that sets us apart from the rest of the world.” She paused for a moment. “And the superpowers, for you guys.”

  “Do you guys think you could describe this magician to a police sketch artist?” Barry asked. “Maybe we cou
ld get a decent enough likeness to do some facial recognition and see if we can track him down.”

  “Track who down?” said a new voice coming from behind them.

  They all turned to see H.R. enter the Cortex, wearing an expression of delight and carrying a small plastic bag.

  “A possible new meta,” Cisco said.

  “He can control minds,” Caitlin added.

  “And he’s a street magician,” Barry said. “Sound like anyone from your Earth?”

  A denizen of Earth 19, H.R. was an alternate version of the same Harrison Wells who’d turned out to be Reverse-Flash . . . and of the Harrison Wells from Earth 2 who’d helped them defeat Zoom. Despite their physical similarities, the three men could not have had more different personalities: H.R. lacked his doppelgangers’ scientific acumen, but he made up for it (sometimes) with creativity and verve.

  Right now, though, he merely frowned. “I don’t quite understand how you do magic with a street or why anyone would want to watch it, but there are things about your world that I confess still confuse me.”

  “It’s not a . . . Street magician doesn’t mean . . .” Cisco threw his hands up in the air. “Never mind.”

  “Oh, good, we’re moving on,” H.R. said, his eyes dancing. “I have an announcement to make! I have discovered the purpose of life. Or at least the purpose of life on this specific Earth.” He delved into the bag and produced a small brown bead, which he held out to them between his thumb and forefinger. “This!”

  Cisco leaned in for a better look. With a fevered gasp, H.R. yanked the bauble away as though terrified for its safety.

  “It’s a coffee bean. Covered in a layer of peanut butter. And then further covered in a layer of dark chocolate. And then—as if the wizards of food preparation felt they had something to prove—coated in a hard chocolate shell. All evolution and social advancement on your Earth is clearly aimed at the endpoint of producing this specific delicacy. And can you believe they just sell them in stores for a mere pittance, with no ID necessary?” His eyes danced and he jiggled a little as he chomped the bean.

  “How many of those things have you eaten?” Cisco asked, stepping away.

  H.R. blinked rapidly. “Was I supposed to be counting?”

  Cisco groaned. “Just what we need. Something to make him talk even faster. At this rate, pretty soon only Barry and Wally will be able to understand him.”

  “Did someone say my name?” Wally West blasted into the Cortex a little too fast and nearly collided with Cisco, who jumped out of the way and screamed a high, shrill scream.

  “Kid Flash!” Cisco complained. “More like Skid Flash!”

  “Still getting the hang of my speed,” Wally admitted. “What’s going on? Anything cool?” Kid Flash was so excited he was bouncing up and down on his toes, rubbing his hands together. “Need me to do something? Run somewhere? Fast? I’m getting a lot faster. I bet I can—”

  “Slow your roll!” Cisco told him. “What are you even doing here?”

  Barry checked his watch. “Don’t you have class right now?”

  Iris’s younger brother, Wally, was a freshman in college, carrying a significant course load. He was also Central City’s newest hero: Kid Flash. A few months ago, the team had been trying to restore Barry’s powers in order to fight Zoom, and Wally had been caught up in the resulting wave of energy. Months later, he’d begun exhibiting superspeed, and now, even though he was still in training, he’d been given a costume and allowed to operate in public, albeit with Barry always looking out for him.

  “My Fundamentals of Engineering class doesn’t start for, like, five minutes,” he told them, stretching out five minutes as though it were all the time in the world. “Plenty of time for me to do whatever. You guys ready for lunch? Want Thai food? From Thailand? I’ll go get it. Who’s up for drunken noodles?”

  “Wally,” Barry said very calmly. “Go back to school.”

  Wally grimaced and stopped bouncing. “C’mon. I’m pulling all A’s in my classes right now. I want to Kid Flash it up.”

  “If you want to keep pulling all A’s, you need to get to class. Trust me—we’ll call you if we need you.”

  “But—”

  Barry pointed to the door. “Go.”

  In a blur, Wally was gone.

  “That kid needs to learn some control,” Cisco said.

  “I’ll work with him,” H.R. volunteered.

  “Oh, that’s a great idea!” Cisco said with withering sarcasm. “Overcaffeinated ADHD meets superspeedster. The two great tastes that taste great together.”

  “Can we focus on the issue at hand?” Caitlin asked. She tapped one of the screens. “Typical mind control involves alteration of brain waves and brain chemistry.”

  “I love that we live in a world where there’s such a thing as typical mind control,” Cisco said mordantly, slumping into a nearby chair.

  “But in this case,” Caitlin went on, “there’s no evidence of such a thing in our brains. Even after the effect wears off, there should be markers in the cerebral cortex at the very least.”

  “Maybe they’ve faded by now,” Barry suggested.

  Worrying her bottom lip, Caitlin shook her head and scrolled through the data on her screen. “We got here and ran the tests really fast. We should be seeing something.”

  There was silence in the Cortex Bridge for several moments as Barry, Cisco, and Caitlin all stared at their computer screens, as though the longer they stared, the more likely an answer was to appear.

  Popping another bean into his mouth, H.R. broke the silence. “Have you considered,” he asked, jittering from side to side, “that it might actually be magic?”

  “There’s no such thing as magic.” Cisco did a double take. “Wait a sec. Is there magic on your world?”

  “Not that I know of. Unless you count the magic of marketing. But no. Still, didn’t the great Hemlock Holmes say that once you eliminate the impossible, whatever is left, no matter how improbable, must be the answer?”

  “It’s not Hemlock Holmes. It’s Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Well, that’s just ridiculous,” H.R. said, and left.

  “Guys, I’m not ready to call in Harry Houdini for a consult yet.” Barry ran his hands through his hair as he glared at the screen. “We’ve seen a lot of weird stuff, sure, but all of it has been explainable in scientific terms. I don’t think we’re totally through the looking glass here. Not yet.”

  “Points for the literary reference,” Cisco said somberly. “We’ll keep crunching data here and see if we can learn anything. In the meantime, enjoy the park.”

  “What?”

  Cisco pointed to a video image from a camera posted at Central City Park. On the grainy feed, the tuxedoed magician was standing amid a crowd of people, just beginning to wave his wand.

  “Time to get speedy,” Cisco said, and he grinned with delight.

  4

  By the time the Flash arrived at the park, the magician was into his third trick, causing fire to dance in a circle circumscribed by his wand. The crowd seemed split on how impressive this was. Some were cheering him on, while others were just laughing at him. At the Flash’s speed, they were all moving in slow motion, as though caught up in some sort of transparent gelatin.

  Cisco and Caitlin had said that everyone on the pier had been applauding, so the fact that some people weren’t clapping meant that whatever wonky mind control the magician possessed, he hadn’t used it yet. Barry considered snatching away the man’s wand or quickly tying him up at superspeed, but . . .

  The man hadn’t actually done anything wrong, so far as Barry could tell. He couldn’t let a man go around controlling people’s minds willy-nilly, but it was entirely possible the magician didn’t even know he had superpowers and was totally innocent in all of this. So Barry slowed down to normal speed, and the world rushed back in—sound roared at him, and everyone sped up to real time.

  “FOR MY NEXT ACT,” the magician boomed more loudl
y than should have been possible, “I’LL NEED A VOLUNTEER!” He scanned the crowd, stroking his immaculately styled goatee. “YOU, SIR! DRESSED SO JAUNTILY!”

  How can he make his voice so loud? Barry wondered. And then he realized that the magician was pointing at him!

  “No, thanks,” the Flash told him. “But I’d like a moment of your time.”

  The magician offered an indulgent smile that teetered on the edge of a frown. “Perhaps after my act,” he said in a normal voice.

  Barry sped to the man’s side in less than a blink of an eye. “Perhaps now?” he said.

  The crowd, thrilled at the sight of the city’s hero, began applauding. Barry offered a wave to his adoring public, then turned back to the magician.

  Who was furious.

  “YOU DARE . . .” His voice was as loud as a cannon again as he seethed at the crowd. “YOU DARE SEEK THE FAVOR OF THIS CRIMSON JACKANAPES?” Turning to the Flash, he twisted his face into a rictus of sheer rage. “AND YOU! YOU DARE UPSTAGE THE GREAT HOCUS POCUS?”

  With that, he thrust his wand out over the crowd. The ground rumbled and suddenly split beneath their feet. People screamed and flung themselves away, but too many were caught off guard. The Flash didn’t spare even a microsecond to think; he dashed away from the magician—the Great Hocus Pocus, as he called himself—and began sweeping people away from the path of the sudden chasm.

  Moving people from danger was the Flash’s top priority and also pretty much the most routine of his superpowered exploits. Someone was always in the path of danger, and there was never enough time to move, so the Flash was always yanking, shoving, and hauling people out of the danger zone. The problem, though, was that he was superfast, not superstrong. He could get to a two-hundred-pound grown man—like right now, for example—faster than the ground could open under the man’s feet, but it wasn’t like he could just pick the guy up and carry him away safely.