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Tim knows lots of things.
Tim knows how to factor polynomials and how to make emails seem like Jack Drake wrote them. Tim knows that adults give you less of a hard time if you’re quiet. Tim knows the secret identities of Batman and Robin.
Tim also knows things that are relevant to his current situation. He knows that he’s at the docks, because the smell that wafts in through the half-open cellar window is absolutely recognizable. He knows that he’s at the north docks specifically, because he tracked every turn of the van, even though his kidnappers blindfolded him. He knows the last three digits of the van’s license plate number. He knows that he was taken at 3:42 pm precisely while walking home from Gotham Academy, because he always takes the same path home (stupid, stupid, Robin would never make that mistake) and has timed every step of his journey. He knows Morse Code well enough that he could blink out all of this information so that Batman and Robin could see it in the ransom video and rescue him.
He also knows that none of this matters, because his parents aren’t going to pick up the phone.
One of the kidnappers—Tim has decided to call him Steve—enters the small cellar where they’re keeping Tim tied up. Tim quickly stops fumbling around with the knots that bind his wrists together and to the back of the chair.
Steve marches straight up to Tim and shakes the chair violently. Tim’s head whips up and down, hurting his neck. “What’s the real number?” Steve growls, ski mask inches away from Tim’s face.
He smells like the same type of body spray that the older boys in Tim’s Geometry class wear because they think it makes them cool. Steve has the same level of maturity as a fourteen-year-old.
And he’s got Tim’s life in his hands.
“I told you the real number,” Tim says quietly, not meeting Steve’s eyes. Adults don’t like it when you look them in the eyes. They also don’t like it when they ask you a question and you don’t answer, but Tim can’t fix that. So, he does what he can. Damage control. “I’m really sorry. But if you call the Drake Industries Secretary, she might be able to get you in touch with someone.”
Tim is a very helpful kidnappee. But it’s not going to make one lick of a difference. Even if Steve and the others get in touch with the secretary and the secretary gets in touch with Jack and Janet Drake, they’re not going to pay the ransom. Drake Industries doesn’t pay ransoms—company policy. And as for Jack and Janet Drake themselves? Tim’s death is probably more profitable than paying the ransom. Tim’s parents might have some affection for him, but in the end, he’s a just a tool.
“I don’t want the fucking secretary,” Steve snarls. Tim looks down. “Look at me, brat.” Tim’s eyes flicker up, falling on what he thinks is the tip of Steve’s nose. “What. Is. The. Number.”
“I told you,” Tim whispers.
And then his cheek is on fire.
The shock of it punches the air out of Tim’s lungs and he gasps, inhaling desperately. So that’s what a backhand feels like, the intellectual part of him thinks, filing the sensation away in the back of his mind. The rest of him wants to curl up into a tiny ball like a pill bug from science class.
Steve rattles the chair again.
“Tell me,” he orders, raising his hand again threateningly.
The door to the cellar opens and one of the other kidnappers—Tim named her Alex, and he thinks she’s Steve’s close cousin or something—come stomping down the stairs. “We’ve got them on the phone,” Alex says, voice humming with excitement.
Tim’s stomach sinks.
“You hear that, kid?” Alex says. “This’ll all be over soon.”
She looks at him through her ski mask like she expects him to be excited. Any other kid would be. After all, they’d be foolish enough to believe that their parents would just pay the bad guys some money and then they can go home to a warm bed and a doting family. But Tim knows lots of things, and one of them is that his parents will not pay the ransom.
It’s better this way. If Tim was a normal kid, he’d be disappointed, horrified, furious when his parents inevitably refuse. But because he knows it’s coming, the resignation has numbed him to all of that. He’s still scared—of course he’s scared—but you can’t feel betrayed if you never had any expectations in the first place.
Steve grabs Tim’s phone from Alex. The longer he listens, the more his face twists. “Listen here,” he says. “We’ve got your son. If you don’t pay, we’re going to shoot him and dump his body in the bay. Do you understand that?”
Tim can imagine his mother on the other end. Her disgusted sniff. Her no-nonsense tone. Her dreadful, devastating words.
“We’re gonna do it,” Steve says. “I fucking swear it, lady. He’s dead if you don’t pay up.”
Janet must hang up after that, because Steve hurls Tim’s phone across the room.
It’s funny, Tim thinks faintly. The police could track that phone, if only Mom and Dad called them. They wouldn’t even have to pay the ransom.
But then, there would be questions. Questions like, ‘who was supposed to be taking care of this child?’ And Tim knows that, legally speaking, he’s supposed to have some sort of adult looking after him. Gotham law is…flexible, if you have the money, but it would be a huge scandal.
Guess I’m just not worth it.
Steve storms over to Tim and grabs him by the upper arm, fingers digging into Tim’s flesh. Tim winces.
He should try to plead or bargain or something. But he can’t get any words past his lips. After all, Tim knows that adults give you less of a hard time if you’re quiet.
“You don’t want to do this,” Tim tries to say, but it doesn’t work. His mouth just. Won’t. Move.
Time seems to narrow, then collapse in on itself. And then Tim skips ahead to the present, and there’s a gun pointed straight at his forehead.
The third kidnapper is in the room. Steve and Alex are shouting.
Tim has a headache.
Tim is also going to die, which is a lot more pressing of a concern, but can’t he at least spend his final moments comfortably?
“Could I have some Advil?”
It barely comes out as a whisper, but all three kidnappers’ heads snap to him. Shoot. Well, at least Tim’s mouth is nominally working.
“What—what I mean is—”
In games of Would You Rather, Tim always says that he’d fight any creature with more human-like intelligence, because at least you could reason with it and convince it that your death would be inconvenient. Of course, that was Ideal Tim, not Tim Who Has Spent Several Hours Kidnapped and Can’t Make His Words Come Out Right. But the point stands.
“The New Jersey penalty for first degree murder of a minor is life in prison with no chance of parole.” Tim says. Okay. His brain is in fact mode. He can do that. Tim knows a lot about New Jersey Law. “The penalty for kidnapping a minor is 25 years with the possibility of parole.” If Tim could clasp his hands together like a businessman, he would, now. But he’s tied up, so that’s unfortunately not possible. “Really,” he argues, “killing me is more trouble than it’s worth. I don’t know your names.” Truth. “I don’t know where I am.” Lie. “I don’t know anything, really.” Definitely a lie.
Tim looks up at the third kidnapper—Bob, he decides, somewhat hysterically—and gives his best convincing face. Tim isn’t very convincing, normally. But it normally doesn’t take any convincing for people to think he’s not worth their trouble. So maybe, just maybe, this could work.
“Really,” Tim says. “It’s not worth killing me. I’m not saying—I’m not saying you will get caught. You seem like very. Um. Good kidnappers. But. Killing me doesn’t decrease your chances of getting caught. So. You’d just be risking life with no parole for no reason.”
Bob stares at Tim. Tim stares at Bob.
And then Tim sees Bob’s gun flying towards his face and thinks oh sh—
There’s a crack and everything goes black.
Tim wakes up on the rough pavement of a dirty, dark alleyway. He should probably be grateful to have woken up at all, but the pistol whip has transformed his headache into a horrible, splitting pain that spirals out from his temple. There’s a man leaning over him, one hand on Tim’s shoulder.
Tim scrambles back and hits the brick wall of the building behind him.
“Whoah,” the man says. “It’s alright buddy. Look. Do you want me to call someone?” Tim just stares, uncomprehending. “Do you know your parents’ phone number?”
Tim’s instincts scream to curl up and make himself small.
But he knows that the golden glow visible at the end of the alleyway means the sun is setting. And he knows that if he stays out in Gotham after sunset, injured and disoriented, he’ll be in for a whole lot worse than how he spent the past—
Tim doesn’t know how long it’s been. He always knows how long it’s been. He knows what time sunset should be tonight, but his mind is spinning too much for him to recall it. And then, the thought of doing the math to get from 3:42 pm to now is—
“Kid?”
Tim runs.
Lying in bed, after having spent a very uncomfortable hour piecing together an email to Gotham Academy—Tim knows that you’re not supposed to look at screens with a concussion, but what else was he supposed to do?—Tim decides that he’s going to do something. He isn’t sure what that something is, but it’s going to be big, and it’s going to make his parents sorry.
A few days later, once his brain has recovered enough for Plotting, Tim takes out his favorite notebook, the one with the Bat Signal on it, and sits down at his desk, pencil hovering over the paper.
His parents left him for dead. So, he’ll let them think that he’s dead. And then, after they’ve held the funeral and everything, after they’ve realized that they miss him and should’ve at least called the police, Tim will reveal himself, Tom Sawyer-style. And his parents will be so grateful that Tim’s actually alive that they’ll stay for a whole month.
But Tim knows that’s not realistic. His parents are probably relieved not to have him underfoot anymore—he tries not to be an annoyance, but again, he tends to be more trouble than he’s worth—and would more likely than not just be angry that he hadn’t updated them with his survival. What an inconvenience to replan for the continued existence of your eleven-year-old kid.
New plan, then.
Over the course of the next week, Tim buys a fog machine, several sets of LEDs, mirrors, multiple Arduinos, and as many flip phones as he can get without his parents noticing. He plants audio recorders in the walls and prepares several hiding places around the house. He comes up with the most dramatic, spooky lines of dialogue he can. It takes a lot of work, but Tim transforms Drake Manor into a haunted house.
Tim’s parents left him for dead? Fine. Then he’s going to haunt them.
Tim is aware that he could just drop it. He could use the landline and tell the secretary to tell his parents that he’s still alive. He could slip quietly back into his old life and join his parents in pretending the kidnapping never happened.
But the energy of the Plan buzzes beneath his skin. And Tim is not letting this go.
Tim’s parents come home the next day.
Tim starts small. Janet hears shuffling in the walls late at night. A strange draft floats through the house, even when the windows are closed. Little things—Janet’s favorite earrings, Jack’s cufflinks, a couple of fish forks—go missing.
Janet calls the exterminators, who, of course, find nothing. Jack spends several hours on the phone ranting at the heating company. Jack and Janet grow snappish, each thinking the other moved the missing items. After all, they’re the only ones in the house.
The doors of the house won’t close properly, and one day, all the hinges are removed and piled on the kitchen table. Jack and Janet debate leaving, but it’s the Summer Gala Season. Leaving would be incredibly bad for the company. Still, Tim’s got another week at most to really get to them.
Jack and Janet are woken up at odd hours of the night by spooky orchestral music that seems to come from both the ceiling and the floor. Running on very little sleep, they hurry to get ready for the next day only to find all their shoes covered in a strange, green substance that’s technically a modified form of oobleck but, to untrained (aka, adult) eyes, looks like it could be ectoplasm. Janet’s pearl necklace snaps in the middle of the gala—Tim knows his plan worked because Janet spends the rest of the night shouting at Jack.
Tim escalates. When Janet looks in the mirror just before a gala, she sees Tim, his mouth open in a silent scream. And then, when the mirror cracks, her own shrill scream fills the air. The projection took a lot of finagling, but now that Tim’s not going to school, he has the time. Jack tells Janet she’s being hysterical, but he changes his tune when glowing fog fills the guest bedroom that night.
This time, instead of an exterminator, Jack and Janet call a ghosthunter.
Tim doesn’t know if the man is a crackpot or not. He seems insane to Tim, but Superman exists. Either way, there’s no actual ghost for the ghosthunter to find. He draws some circles on the floor, chants in dramatic Latin, and then takes his hefty fee and leaves.
At night, Tim makes the walls groan. He fills all the rooms with the pitter-patter of a child’s footsteps—no matter where Jack and Janet try to sleep, the footsteps trail after them, a ghostly child searching for his parents. When they wake up, all the mirrors have shattered.
Jack spends several hours the next day yelling at the ghosthunter over the phone. Apparently, he wants his money back.
The footsteps continue.
That night, Tim enacts the final stage of his plan.
At 10:00 pm, just as Tim’s parents are about to fall asleep, every television in the house begins to play the same video over and over again. Tim stares dead-eyed at the screen, fog obscuring the room behind him. He’s wearing his Gotham Academy uniform, his collar soaked with the blood that drips down his face from the gory bullet wound in the middle of his forehead. “Help me!” He screams. “Mom! Dad! Please! Help me! I promise I’ll be good. I promise—please. Please. I’m so cold. I’m. Don’t leave me here. Please don’t leave me here. Help me! Mom! Dad! Please!” It repeats and repeats and repeats until Jack and Janet have unplugged every single television.
At 10:53 pm, Jack and Janet begin to receive texts from an unknown number. It’s the same words as the video, sent at precisely thirteen-second intervals. It takes blocking three numbers for the messages to stop.
At 11:43 pm, after Tim’s parents have almost fallen asleep for the second time, curled up in bed together and nearly shivering in fear, all the windows in their bedroom shatter in unison.
At 12:27 am, the footsteps grow thunderous. “Jack,” Janet screams. “Do something!”
“Right,” Jack says, somewhat shakily. He marches out of the room.
Janet curls up in bed, sobbing.
“Mom,” Tim’s voice whispers. “Mom, please, can you hear me?”
“Tim,” Janet cries. “Tim, I’m sorry. Please. Just leave us alone. I’m so sorry!”
Tim, sitting cross-legged in the attic and watching on a monitor as he speaks into a microphone, clenches his fists. “You’re not really sorry,” he accuses. “You just want me gone. And now I’ll never leave!”
“Please!” Janet screams. She rushes over to the wall and puts her two palms against it. “Please, Tim. I’m sorry. I swear I’m sorry.”
Jack bursts into the room carrying a shovel. “Step away from the wall, Janet,” he orders.
“What are you doing?” Janet asks shakily.
Jack answers by swinging his shovel at the wall. Janet shrieks as the shovel pierces through the plaster and dust swirls into the room.
Again and again and again, Jack swings the shovel, until there’s a gaping hole in the bedroom wall.
And still, he raises his arms, ready to swing again.
Janet catches him by the shoulders. “What are you doing?”
“Fixing it!” Jack screams back. “I’m fixing it! It’s about time someone manned up around here. Come out, creature!”
“It’s Tim,” Janet says, voice cutting in and out as she breathes heavily. “It’s Tim. God, Jack, it’s Tim.”
“Timothy Jackson Drake!” Jack roars.
Tim, even holed up safely in the attic, flinches.
“He’s dead!” Janet says. “You can’t fight him off with a shovel!”
“I can damn well try!” Jack screams back, and then chokes on the plaster dust.
“What do you want?” Janet wails. “We can’t bring you back. Just leave us alone!”
When Tim speaks, he sounds like he’s about five, curled up underneath the table and crying. “You wanted me to go away. You wanted it so bad, Mommy. So now I can’t go away. Now I’m stuck!”
Jack tries to swing the shovel again, wild and uncoordinated, but Janet catches it by the bottom of the handle and wrenches it away from him. Without his makeshift weapon, Jack collapses to the ground, shaking. Janet, barely able to keep her balance, leans against the remaining section of the wall.
“Tim,” Jack whispers hoarsely.
“Daddy?” Tim responds. “Daddy, why did you leave me? I don’t like—I don’t like it here. I’m cold. Please help me.”
Janet lets out a wordless sob and collapses to the ground next to her husband. They sit there, huddled together, shaking, as Tim lets audio of himself crying play on repeat.
Tim counts the seconds down.
At 12:57 am, the front lawn catches on fire. It takes until 12:59 am for the smell of smoke to filter in through the shattered bedroom windows. Eyes wide with terror, Jack and Janet stumble to their feet and race outside in their nightclothes to see what their poltergeist has thrown at them now. Standing together, they watch their picture-perfect lawn go up in flames.
For two minutes and thirty-four seconds, they are paralyzed. And then, Janet comes to her senses, gets the garden hose, and douses the flames. When she’s done, all that’s left is the ashes of the lawn, a flowerbed covered in shattered glass, and two traumatized, terrible parents.
Jack and Janet get a hotel for the rest of the night and leave Gotham the next morning.
Tim knows that foster care is not a good place. Tim also knows that he wouldn’t last even a week on the streets. And he also also knows that if he reveals that he had been pretending to be his own ghost, his parents will be livid.
Luckily, Tim Planned for this.
Jack and Janet return two months later, planning to stay in the brownstone. But first, they check on Drake Manor to see what condition it’s in. After all, they’ll need to contact an agent to sell the place.
They are, of course, shocked by what they find.
The lawn has regrown perfectly—Tim paid a landscaping company and hid the transaction report. The windows are all repaired, and the mirrors too. There is no hole in the wall where Jack attacked it with the shovel.
And Tim is waiting at the door. The perfect, dutiful son, ready to greet his parents with a hug.
It’s Gotham, after all. There are strange toxins in the air. Fear Gas does odd things to the brain—sometimes causing hallucinations, delusions, or confused memories even months after exposure. It’s a documented fact.
His parents ask probing questions, of course, but Tim just responds with perfect confusion. Timothy Drake was never kidnapped. There was never any ghost haunting Drake Manor. And the house is neat and clean, just the way it’s supposed to be.
“I missed you,” Tim says.
“I—” His mother stumbles over her words. She never does that. “I missed you too, Tim.”
She didn’t. Tim ‘dying’ had so little effect on her life that she can bounce back in a day. In fact, by the next morning she already seems annoyed at Tim’s very existence. But that’s okay. He can slip into the background, silent and invisible, so that he doesn’t cause any bother.
Tim knows lots of things, and one of them is how to be a ghost.