by Peter David
He tried to peer down at it, and no, he wasn’t imagining it . . . there was something there. Something large, the size of a human, but he knew immediately that it was anything but. It was climbing up the sheer rock wall toward him, small clicking noises coming from the scrape of its claws against the stony surface.
Automatically he backed away from it. Behind him, above him, all around the bats were becoming more and more agitated. It was as if they had made no motion until now because they were waiting for something. For some thing. And that thing, whatever it was, had now arrived.
He retreated further until he stumbled against the mound of dirt. And there he froze as the thing pursuing him climbed up and into the small cavern with him.
He could make out nothing of it, for it seemed clothed in darkness, as if it were pulling shadows from everywhere within the cavern and wrapping them around itself. It stood there for a moment, as if contemplating the young man. And at that moment, the young man wanted nothing but to be as far from this place as possible. To run from it, fly from it, forget that he ever saw it . . .
That’s not the way it will be, came the voice once more. He couldn’t tell whether the obscured form shambling toward him was the source, or whether it was from within his own head.
“Let me out,” said the young man as the thing came nearer, nearer still. It seemed to be limping sightly, as if walking was an alien practice.
Let me in, came the response, and the creature lifted its head to gaze at him. Its eyes were burning red, its ears tall, and it was covered with dark, matted fur. It spread its wings and they just seemed to keep going and going, encompassing the whole of the cavern, leaving no place to run.
The rest of the young man’s thoughts were a torrent, and it would not be until years in the future that he would be able to pick out any of the individual notions tumbling through his mind. A bizarre cascade of images, past, present, and future, all leading toward something greater than himself . . . something less sane than himself.
There was fire in the creature’s eyes, fire in its heart, a massive bat image that was enveloped in flame, and it surrounded the young man. And finally, finally, after everything he’d been through, the young man did emit a genuine, wholehearted, unstinting shriek of pure undiluted terror. “I’m in Hell!”
You’re home. Same thing.
The creature drew the struggling young man to him as the moonlight held steady.
Everywhere now, the bats were shrieking, as if roaring approval . . . or joining in a song of celebration.
And then the young man’s straggles ceased, and suddenly the world made sense again.
Bats flew through the light from above, their shadows cavorting against the walls, like some sort of flapping signal to the future. Hundreds, thousands of screeching voices came together in unison.
And with the cries of the leathery creatures providing an ungodly orchestral tone, the young man danced with the devil in the pale moonlight . . .
II.
“Hey, Eddie . . .”
Edward Nygma looked up at the hulking lummox and his snickering cronies who stood nearby. The eighth-grade lad blew air impatiently from between his lips. It was library study hall, and he was working on his fifth crossword puzzle in the last fifteen minutes. Edward had thick brown hair that he was constantly pushing out of his eyes, and an expressive face that didn’t seem to be made of flesh so much as rubber. Behind his eyes there was a fiery intelligence that did not suffer fools gladly. “Got something on your mind, Raymond? A thought, maybe? And you’re afraid it’ll die of boredom?”
“Got a riddle for you.”
“A riddle, Raymond?”
“Yeah. That’s right. You’re always doing puzzles and stuff. A riddle.”
Edward glanced around, but there was no teacher anywhere in sight. Typical for this dump. He put the puzzle down and sighed. “Okay. What’s the riddle?”
“What has four wheels and flies?”
Edward looked at him pityingly. “A garbage truck,” he said.
Raymond’s face clouded. “You heard it.”
“Just a wild guess. A shot in the dark which, by the way, I wouldn’t mind taking at you.”
“Is that supposed to be funny?”
“No, this is. Wanna hear a knock knock joke for morons?”
Raymond glanced at the others, who shrugged. “Okay.”
“Fine,” said Ed. “You start.”
“Okay. Knock knock.”
Ed propped his chin on his hand and replied, “Who’s there?” Then he batted his eyes.
Raymond’s mouth opened, and then it closed. “Huh?”
One of Raymond’s cronies started to snicker. Raymond looked at him suspiciously. “What? What’s so funny?”
“The joke,” said the crony. “Well . . . kind of funny.”
Raymond still looked utterly befuddled. Knowing that he was already pushing his luck, nevertheless Edward said, “Maybe you’ll understand it if you try it.”
“Okay,” Raymond said gamely. He turned to the kid standing next to him. “Wanna hear a knock knock joke for morons?”
“I’m sure he does, Raymond,” Ed said brightly. “Why don’t you start?”
“Okay. Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?” came the reply.
And once again, Raymond stood there.
Ed looked back down at his puzzle and commented, “That’s what we love about you, Raymond. Your train of thought is powered by the little engine that couldn’t.”
He snickered slightly, but his private amusement was cut short by Raymond’s rough hand grabbing him by the back of the hair and snapping his head back. Ed gasped.
“How’d you like me to bend you into a question mark, funny guy?”
“Ohhh, I don’t think so,” Ed grunted.
“I was really tryin’ to be nice. The shrink, and the guidance counselor, and the parole officer . . . they all say I should try and be nicer. Talk t’people that I’d just like t’beat the crap outta and be int’rested.” His face grew darker. “But it’s so much easier to pound . . .”
“Wanna hear another riddle? Legit!” he added when Raymond growled in response. “Really! A famous one! Real old!”
“This better be on the level,” Raymond told him.
“It is! I swear!”
“Go on.”
“What walks on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening?”
Not letting up on the pressure, Raymond nevertheless sounded curious. “I dunno. What?”
“Raymond!”
It was the stern, angry voice of a teacher, heading their way. He wasn’t especially tall, but he carried himself with a confidence that seemed to add a foot to his height. He had a newspaper tucked under his arm. He peered up and over his thick glasses at Raymond, who promptly eased up the pressure.
“Hi, Mr. Pike,” said Raymond. “Problem?”
Edward was rubbing the back of his neck. “What’s the matter?” he asked derisively. “Run out of comfy sofa space in the teachers’ lounge?”
“You’re not funny, Edward.”
“Yes, well,” and he glanced up at Raymond, “that seems to be the consensus today.”
“We were just talking,” said Raymond sullenly.
“Talking doesn’t usually require students twisting someone’s head in a painful manner.”
“Right,” Edward said gamely. “Leave that for the teachers.”
Impressively, Mr. Pike looked even less amused than before. Edward quickly put up his hands and said, “Right. I know. Not funny.”
“What’s the answer, Eddie?” said Raymond.
“Go find your own answers, Raymond,” said the teacher. “Now.”
Raymond seemed to study him with a manner of sullen glare that Pike sensed probably extended back to Neanderthal times. Then Raymond and his pals moved off. Mr. Pike turned to Edward and said, “I was helping you, Edward. A little less smart-mouthing would be in order.”
“And you shouldn’t be sitting around doing puzzle books. This is the library, for crying out loud. Read one of the books.”
“Already have, sir. All of ’em. I have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge.”
The comment sounded so pompous that Pike assumed Edward was screwing around again. But then he saw the intensity with which Edward Nygma had spoken, and thought, Son of a gun means it. After a moment, he tossed the newspaper down in front of Edward. “Here. Read today’s paper yet? Gotham Globe?”
“No sir.”
Pike nodded once, and then walked away. Edward immediately picked up the paper and started flipping through it. He didn’t have to read it. Not immediately, in any event. His mind would snap pictures of each page, to be digested at a convenient time later on.
The paper was in sections. He went through the sports section in a heartbeat, moved to the science section. This he took marginally longer with, but moved rapidly past that and picked up the news section.
And stopped dead at the front page.
The headline was somewhat sordid. THOMAS WAYNE MURDERED. ONLY CHILD SURVIVES. Subheadings above the article read, PROMINENT DOCTOR AND WIFE SLAIN IN ROBBERY. UNIDENTIFIED GUNMAN LEAVES ONLY CHILD UNHARMED.
It was the child who had caught Edward’s eye. The boy seemed roughly Edward’s age. There was a huge picture of the crime scene plastered all over the front page, and on the right-hand side of the picture, the “Only Child” was staring straight into the camera.
Edward’s gaze flicked to the caption, which described the photo’s subject as “the grief-stricken Bruce Wayne.”
“No,” whispered Edward. “No . . . they got it wrong. He’s not stricken with anything. Look at that. Look at that.”
He saw, there in Bruce Wayne’s face, an intensity that mirrored his own. An anger, a frustration at the hand that fate had dealt him. There were no tears on Bruce’s face. Instead there was a smoldering intelligence that Edward intuitively sensed was on a par with his own.
There was something in Bruce’s eyes, something in that gaze. There was Bruce, in a moment of raw emotion, his parents just having been cruelly taken from him. And there was no self-pity. Just cold, hard anger.
It was the sort of anger that Edward himself felt virtually every hour of the day, trapped in public school, imprisoned in classes where he was bored out of his mind because he was light-years ahead of the other kids. But his anger was free-floating, nebulous, indulging itself in games, riddles, and parlor tricks. Bruce Wayne was focussed. Bruce Wayne was not intimidated.
Bruce Wayne, in Edward’s snap opinion, was one hell of a guy.
Ed still had the newspaper with him when he was walking home from school. Not that he needed it to read; the contents were safely locked away in his skull, thanks to his photographic memory. But he wanted to clip out the articles and pictures about Bruce Wayne. He found the young man fascinating, as if he had discovered a soul mate of sorts.
They were very different, of course. Wayne, born to the purple, as it were. Rich boy, all the breaks. Best schools. Best education. Best everything.
Edward Nygma was born to a lower-middle-class family. No breaks. Inadequate schools. Least of everything. By all rights, he should have been wildly envious of Wayne’s financial and social situation. But the circumstances surrounding Wayne’s newly orphaned status placed him, for once, in an unenviable predicament. And the equanimity with which he was reacting to the stress garnered Edward’s admiration.
Suddenly the newspaper was yanked out of Edward’s hand. He spun to find himself facing Raymond and one of Raymond’s main henchmen, a pasty-skinned fool named Gil.
“What’s the answer to the riddle?” demanded Raymond without preamble.
“What, can’t you figure it out for your—”
Raymond grabbed him by the front of the shirt. “I was try in’ t’be nice and I still don’t like you jerkin’ me around. There’s no teacher around now. You better tell me.”
“Why? So you can tell other people and feel smart?”
“Yeah.”
“Awright, awright! The answer is . . . man.”
“Man?” said Raymond in confusion.
“Yeah. In the morning of his life, man crawls on all fours. In the afternoon of his life, man walks on two legs. And in the evening of his life, he walks on two legs, with a cane for his third leg. It’s the riddle of the Sphinx.”
“It’s stupid,” Raymond said.
“It’s not stupid.”
“Yes it is. What’s babies and old man have to do with days?”
With tremendous frustration, Edward said, “It’s a metaphor! It’s—”
“I don’t care what it’s for. It’s stupid!” Raymond said more emphatically, and he threw Edward down with tremendous force.
Edward’s skull struck the curb with a sickening crack. He lay there, unmoving, but his eyes stared skyward in disjointed confusion.
“Get up!” shouted Raymond. “Get up, ya wimp! Ya stupid . . .”
“Oh God,” Gil said. “Raymond . . . look . . .”
Blood began to trickle out of the side of Edward’s mouth. Edward still didn’t move, didn’t make the slightest effort to wipe it away.
“I think you killed him,” whispered Gil.
Raymond looked down in confusion. “No I didn’t. Lookit him. His eyes are open. He’s faking.”
“He’s faking bleeding?” Gil pulled at Raymond’s sleeve. “C’mon. Let’s go. I mean it, let’s go.”
Raymond paused in confusion and then, with a final defiant bit of anger, he tossed the newspaper down next to Edward.
Edward, from a place very far away, heard the pounding of their feet as they ran off. But they seemed almost incidental to him. Two creatures of little to no consequence.
He turned his head slightly to see the newspaper on the sidewalk next to him. The picture of Bruce Wayne stared back at him. Blood oozed, turning the picture into a dark, red splotch.
Why had this happened to him?
Why had the world put both himself and Bruce into such untenable positions?
Why were brutes in charge of things?
How could he improve his personal situation?
When would matters improve?
Who was he? Who was . . . anybody? And why . . . why had he not seen things clearly before?
Suddenly everything made perfect sense.
Suddenly his life’s mission stretched out before him, his ambitions clear. He was bleeding, and might be very sick, or perhaps even about to die. But none of that altered the fact that everything made perfect sense.
Questions filled his mind . . . and he had all the answers . . .
III.
Harvey Dent, district attorney to Gotham City, stood on the flat roof, looking out over the array of similar buildings that spread out before him like an ocean made of tar paper.
It was a low rent section of Gotham, a housing project funded by the Wayne Foundation some years back. As the night air cut through Dent’s overcoat, he pulled it more tightly around him. The moon had risen, and he looked at his long shadow, cast against a nearby roof door, his coat flapping around his calves. Not too far above, the North Shore expressway was rather devoid of cars. Not surprising, considering it was the middle of the night.
Dent was fairly tall, squareshouldered, and solidly built. His face was craggy, his black hair shortly cropped and graying slightly at the temples. His thin lips were pursed and he licked them briskly as the cold air dried them out.
He found his thoughts wandering to the first occasion he’d had to meet Bruce Wayne, the head of the Wayne Foundation.
Wayne had seemed a nice enough guy. A little distracted at times, as if his mind were a million miles away. Harvey Dent had been part of a city council project seeking funding for the project, and Dent—along with several other politicos—had had a lunch with Wayne to discuss it. Wayne had arrived forty-five minute
s late, and hadn’t even apologized, apparently uncaring or simply unaware of his tardiness. Dent had done much of the talking and, as he had done so, found himself fascinated by Wayne’s steady gaze. It seemed as if Wayne had been looking straight through him, to a point at the far end of the room.
“We don’t want people to have to live in fear of crime . . . in fear of their lives,” Dent had said. It had been that comment that seemed to rivet Wayne’s attention, for Wayne’s scrutiny had swung back to Dent at that moment, focussing on him and—Dent felt—dissecting him.
“You really care about people, don’t you?” Wayne said.
“No two ways about it,” replied Dent.
“Tell me more,” Wayne had said, as if truly paying attention for the first time. Not that that was necessarily the turning point in the conversation. For all Dent knew, Wayne had intended to contribute to the project all along.
What Dent had not been expecting was the amount of Wayne’s contribution. A dozen donors had garnered the group about half the money required to accomplish the project. To Dent’s astonishment, Wayne had single-handedly kicked in the other half.
Now, though, as Dent stood on the roof, he wondered if his promise had been all that sincere. Crime hadn’t seemed to take all that much of a downturn. In fact, if anything else, it had become . . . well . . . stranger.
Indeed, that was part of the reason that he was here tonight.
He looked out again across the rooftops. He could easily understand why his . . . caller . . . wanted to meet here. Surprise was impossible. No way, on this flat terrain, could any cops be hiding, or any sort of trap sprung. It would be seen coming a mile away . . .
Dent’s shadow moved, but Dent didn’t.
Harvey had caught it out of the corner of his eye, and his head snapped around to catch sight of the silhouette moving out of Dent’s shadow. The figure stood to its full height, the scalloped cape flaring out, dark eyes invisible behind the mask and pointed-eared cowl.
They stood there for a long moment, taking the measure of one another.