“Can’t stop it,” I said opening the lid. “You might try flying. Or when we get near the bottom, you might want to open this bar and leap.”
“If you’re trying to frighten me,” she said over the blaring music, “you’re doing a good job.”
The snake crawled over the lip of the plastic and looked around. Diedre pressed herself into the corner. I laughed. There are few moments in one’s life as precious as that moment was to me. I vowed to carry a little videotape recorder with me as soon as I could steal one. The snake dropped to the seat next to me.
“He’ll bite you,” Diedre cried.
I reached into the purple bag and pulled out a small bottle of greenish liquid.
“Special antibite venom prepared for herpetologists in Argentina,” I said. “I take it periodically. Never know when it will come in handy.”
The snake had curled into and under the imitation-leather cushion of the seat.
“Now,” I said, “you want to see the really interesting things I have in this bag?”
“No,” she said, starting to stand, looking over into the night—and then she shouted. She did not scream, which was a pity. She shouted for her father, Hector, the Sottos, even for God.
“No help for you, my sweet,” I said gleefully. “Look at this.”
I pulled out the dark bottle of acid and held it up to the sky.
“Isn’t it beautiful,” I said with a sigh.
“You’re crazy,” she said, looking down at the seat, wondering where the snake would emerge.
“You are not well-read,” I said with a sad shake of my head. “Madness is a social construct to identify the deviant. If you’re not like other people, you’re strange or crazy. Using that definition, I suppose I am crazy; but I’m very happy, which almost no sane people can honestly say for themselves. Now, I would suggest you either jump or watch me open this very potent bottle of acid.”
“It’ll get on you,” she squealed, looking down into the darkness for help.
“So?” I shrugged. “Would it scar me for life? I can live with that, but don’t worry. I’ll be careful.”
I began to open the jar as I watched her rise, watched the wind blow into her face, watched her dark hair flow backward like the masthead on a ghost ship I had the good fortune to board a decade earlier just off of Cape Town.
And then it happened. One of the great disappointments of my life just at the apex of one of my greatest triumphs. First, the music stopped. As we sped around, the lights of the wheel went out. I looked for someone in the darkness and thought I saw a figure as we swept past the ground. I hurled the bottle of acid toward the figure, heard the bottle clatter, break and hiss against something hard as we rose.
“All out,” I said to Diedre. “It’s time to see if some vestige of wings will magically appear.”
The wheel was definitely slowing down but it would make at least two more turns because it was going so quickly. Plenty of time to play out my scene. We swooshed down once more and Diedre gasped. The snake had appeared at the top of the seat. I turned for an instant to enjoy the sight, and that is when the figure rushed out of the darkness and leaped onto the back of the gondola.
A hand came out and swept the snake into the darkness. I imagined but did not see it twisting like a piece of thick cord. I hoped it would survive and breed. Was it a fertile female? One could only pray, so that her offspring could prey.
The hand that grabbed my sleeve was gnarled. It was, as I knew, Hector’s. I put my hands around his neck and pushed. The wheel slowed and Hector began to lose his grip. I felt something on my neck as I laughed. Oh, the drama of the moment. I let go of Hector with my left hand and reached for the thing on my neck, an enormous mutant spider, the prize of my collection, bred by a voodoo master in Haiti, guaranteed to have no antidote. I loved this creature as if it were my own offspring. I could not let him go into the night. I let go of Hector and gently returned the spider to my valise as Diedre pounded at me with her fists. I ignored her, but I couldn’t ignore the thud of Hector’s wrench against my skull.
I tumbled forward, breaking the bar of the gondola. We were about ten feet over the ground and stopping. I landed in the dirt in front of the wheel and rose, ready to take on Hector. I had to retrieve my valise before I set fire to the circus, stole one of the vans, and headed into the night.
“No,” came a voice from the darkness, and the lights of the Ferris wheel came on. Surrounding me were the Sottos and McCoy. Hector had dropped from the wheel. In one hand, he held my valise. In the other hand, he held his great wrench. Diedre sat above us in the gondola, looking down. I blew her a kiss, laughed, and rushed for Hector with a shout of glee.
“Tonight,” I whispered in his ear as I ducked under his swinging wrench and grasped him around the waist, “prepare to meet the devil.”
I pulled, trying to crush his chest, but he was surprisingly strong.
“Beelzebub, I love this,” I whispered, turning him around to face the watchers. The wrench hit me in the back of the head, not a full blow but enough to make me lose my grip. I didn’t care. I grabbed the valise from Hector’s hand and opened it as the Sottos and McCoy advanced on me.
“Watch,” I called up to Diedre. “I dedicate the ears of your father to you, querida. If only you had a flower to throw me, a blood-red rose.”
A hand touched my shoulder. Hector on the ground grabbed my pants leg. I pulled away, removed a round object from my valise, and held it over my head. I laughed. Into the night I laughed. Loud enough for Gideon to hear me fifty miles away in the bay I laughed.
“Don’t go near him,” Diedre screamed.
There they stood, their faces frozen in that wonderfully comic rictus of fear. If only that instant could last forever. They were beautiful. And then it passed. Hector was on his knees and then standing before me. I threatened him with the object in my hand. A thin trickle of blood came from the corner of Hector’s mouth as he spoke.
“You’re a liar,” he said.
“Let me through,” I warned.
Hector shook his head no.
I shrugged. It hadn’t worked for Lon Chaney’s Erik, either, but he had had the last laugh and so too would I. I threw the crystal sphere to the ground. It burst sending out a spray of liquid that sent the small crowd back a step. Some of it landed on Hector’s arm. He did not move back. He touched the liquid, put it to his lips calmly.
“It’s water,” he said.
I reached down for my valise, but Hector’s wrench hit my wrist sending the valise skittering along the ground. Then they moved in on me.
Ah well, I thought. I had survived much worse situations than this. I would, I was sure, live to laugh again.
Someone Like You
S. Tepper
“Have I told you how happy I am to have found you,” whispered the Joker as he tightened the thumb screws on the woman’s hand.
She screamed, unable to control the sounds that came pouring from her throat. Each time he stopped his manipulations, she felt that she would be able to be silent the next time, but each time the pain took her by surprise, more intimate and horrid than she had remembered. Memory was not reliable. The torture had been going on for more than a day now, but it seemed forever. Like weeks, months.
“Think of it! Batman’s sister!” whispered the Joker in her ear. “I never knew he had a sister. Does he know who you are?”
She had told him before. He seemed unable to hear it often enough. “He knew he had a sister. But he thinks she died,” the woman gasped.
“Tell me. Are you his full sister? Half sister?” The Joker licked his red lips, as though they were rimmed with honey.
She choked on the words, words she had said over and over. “Half. His mother had been married before when she was very young. Her husband ran off, taking the child with him. She never saw either of them again.”
“Why do you say, ‘her husband’ when you mean, ‘my father?’ Why say ‘the child,’ when you mean, ‘me
’?”
She gasped again, unable to answer. He watched her agonized face for a moment, then, realizing she could not speak, he loosened the devices on her hands.
A terrible throbbing replaced the immediacy of mutilation. She could speak once more. She could think once more, could search her mind for a reason for what she had said.
“I got into the habit of thinking of them as other people,” she whispered through a dry mouth. “I’ve always spoken of them in that way. My father always spoke in that way. In the third person. He and she. When he went out to get us something to eat, he would say, ‘He is leaving now.’ If I did something he didn’t like, he would say, ‘She has been a bad girl.’ As though we were characters in a drama, playing parts that had been written for us. Not as though we were real ourselves.”
The Joker regarded her thoughtfully. “Almost a pity,” he said. “I like perception. I’d almost like to let you live. If it weren’t that you are Batman’s sister, I would . . .”
“Why do you hate him so?”
“You see me as I am,” he said simply. “Look at me. This is his fault.” He stood up and turned before her, like a model, raising his arms, pointing his feet as though about to dance.
She stared through blood-rimmed eyes at the tall, green-haired, white-skinned mockery of a man, whose twisted mouth flowed across his face like a skein of blood. He seemed invented, like something dreamed up by a bad artist during his final drunk. He looked mythical, demonic.
He was all too real.
“Will killing me bring you back to yourself?” she asked wonderingly. “Will torturing me change you?”
The Joker laughed, softly. “No, but it will change him, when he knows what I’ve done. Very complacent, Batman. Very pure. But also very sentimental. He oozes compassion. He’ll ache over your demise, pretty lady, believe me he will. He’d grieve even without knowing who you were, but when I tell him you were his sister, when I send him the tapes of you twisting and writhing, the sound of your screams, of your voice, pleading . . .”
“I haven’t pleaded with you.”
“Oh, but it’s early days. You will. Sooner or later. Before the end.”
“I know someone like you,” she whispered. “A woman. A woman exactly like you.”
His eyebrows went up in astonishment. “Someone like me?” He laughed, a tumbling cacophony of sound. “Oh, that’s unlikely!” He posed, pranced, looked at her over his shoulder. “Like me?”
She shook her head slowly, setting off waves of pain. “Not in appearance. No. In the way she is. Inside, she’s just like you.”
“What’s her name?” he asked, interested despite himself.
“Delice Demain,” she said. “She used to love jokes, painful ones. She loved hurting people. She thought it would lessen the hurt and loneliness she felt, but it never did. Still, she went on hurting others. She did it well. I don’t know how many people she destroyed.”
The Joker grinned, the shark-gape grin that made him look like a sliced melon, red lips slashing his head virtually in half. Still, there was something almost plaintive in his voice as he said, “She sounds interesting. I’ll make you a bargain. Let’s play Sheherazade. You tell me about this woman, keep me interested, and as long as you do, I won’t play with my toys.” He gestured toward the instruments mounted on the wall and scattered on the bench near her, the knives and electrical appliances, the branding irons, the devices of pulleys and clamps.
“And when I can’t keep you interested anymore?”
“Why then, we’ll proceed, of course. I’m only offering a delay, not a reprieve.”
His victim laughed, a low, humorless laugh, with as much pain in it as a voice could hold. “I should be able to talk about her. I know her well. I was one of her victims.”
“No, my dear, you are my victim. Believe it. Anything else you have experienced will pale beside this.”
“Before I was your victim. I was hers.” The woman sobbed, cradling her crippled hands in her lap. “I met her when I was only a child.”
“Delice Demain,” the Joker said.
“Yes. Delice Demain. She was my father’s . . . acquaintance. Perhaps I should say his nemesis. My father was handsome, virile, amoral, impatient, still quite young. Thirty, perhaps. I was only a child, around ten. I can’t remember exactly. We moved around so much, I didn’t go to school. He taught me everything I knew. Then he met Delice.”
“Not very interesting thus far,” commented the Joker, toying with the thumb screws.
“Delice manufactured drugs. She was clever. No, she was brilliant. She was self-taught. By the time she reached her teens, she read chemistry books as though they were novels. She had a complete laboratory in a trunk, and she moved it around with her, wherever she went. At first he . . . my father . . . helped her. Then there came a time she used . . . used my father to test her drugs. Drugs to make men passionate. Drugs to make men happy. I have seen him lying on the bed beside her, his eyes staring into nothingness, full of ecstasy or empty fury or bottomless despair. Often he did not know where he was or who he was. Soon he stopped knowing anyone. He stopped knowing me.”
“Ahhh,” murmured the Joker.
“When she needed money, she would sell the drugs, to anyone. She liked to sell something very good to someone, get him hooked, then give him one of her specialties. She had a drug she called the purgatory pill, one that went on and on forever. The nearest thing to hell . . .”
“Oh, I like her,” whispered the Joker.
“Sometimes her victims came out of it. Often they didn’t. I was with her once when she visited someone she said was a friend, laughing when she said it, sniggering, really. The man was one who had spoken to her, only once, in a manner she hadn’t liked. Now he sat in a hospital ward, staring at the wall and screaming. He thought his flesh was burning and falling off his bones. He felt it. The doctors said he would be that way until he died. Of course, to him, it seemed forever. Delice laughed when we left there.”
“Why were you with her?” the Joker asked suspiciously. “Why you?”
“Why not me? She’d half killed my father. I was there, a kind of leftover. I was an audience. She needed an audience. That’s another way she’s like you . . .”
“Go on.”
“She liked to slip her purgatory pills into candies and give them to children. She’d watch while they jerked and flopped and howled and sometimes died. Her favorites were little girls. She liked to give them to little girls.”
“Scarcely worthy opponents,” sneered the Joker.
“No, but they were innocent, you see. It was her way of striking out at innocence. She had lost her own; now she would destroy others.”
“I do see,” he mused. “Well, it has a nice symbolic thrust to it. Speaking of little girls, why didn’t she give the pills to you?”
“Because I was her audience, I tell you. I was the one who saw what she did. I was the one who watched and judged and looked at her afterward, trying to find the real person inside her. She needed me.”
“Did your father die?”
“I suppose he did, eventually. She left him staring at the walls in a hotel somewhere. I remember she had a suitcase full of money and she was wearing a long, spotted fur coat. She said a whole species of jungle cats had died so she could wear that coat. She loved it.”
“What next?” the Joker asked, yawning.
“She got involved in assassinations. She was very beautiful. Had I said that? Very beautiful. There was an ultimate mystery about her, like death itself. Terror and longing, all mixed up. She could look in a man’s eyes and mesmerize him, make him want her, make him give up anything for her. Then, when she had him alone, she could kiss him with poison on her lips and watch him die.”
“And you watched?”
“I always watched. She always let me watch, wanted me to watch.”
“Wasn’t she afraid you’d betray her? Turn her over to the police? Help trap her?”
“Why would
I do that? What would I have done without her. She was my whole life.”
“She mesmerized you, too, then.” The Joker laughed. “Rather nice touch, that.”
“The deaths were always listed as heart attacks. They really were heart attacks. Induced heart attacks. She moved through politics like the angel of death, selling destruction to the highest bidder. She became rich. Very rich.”
“Where?” The Joker licked his lips. “Where did she live?”
“She had a penthouse in Paris, and a villa near Rome, and an estate in Malaysia. She had a vast wonderful mansion in San Francisco, and a townhouse in New York. She had a pied-à-terre here in Gotham City. I came here with her. Otherwise I would not have been here for you to capture.”
“Came to see your brother?”
“Oh, no. No. After my association with Delice? How could I? He would have detested me. He might have felt he needed to do something, bring her to justice. I came with her, but I did not come to see him. No. I couldn’t risk that.”
“You risked a good deal, getting drunk in the Wild Card. Didn’t you know the place belongs to me?”
She turned her face away. “Perhaps I didn’t connect your name to his. Perhaps I wasn’t thinking.”
The Joker snorted. “Sat there, getting drunk, telling one of my own men that you were Batman’s sister? Everyone knows the Wild Card is my place. You couldn’t have been more stupid if you’d tried.”
“I suppose it was stupid. Yes. I know it was.”
“So. Is there more to this story, or should we fire up some of the implements. I have an hour or so to spend yet tonight. We can always continue tomorrow.”
“There’s more,” she whispered.
He yawned again and arranged several knives on the bench in order of size. “Yes.”
“She decided she wanted to involve herself in the ultimate evil.”
The Further Adventures of The Joker Page 10