The Joker sat up, his brow furrowed, staring at the woman before him.
His victim nodded. “I knew you’d appreciate that. The ultimate evil, the one before which all other wickedness would shudder. She began to spend all her time in libraries, doing research. Evil wasn’t defined anywhere. No one knew precisely what it was. The ultimate evil.”
“Yes?” encouraged the Joker. “Yes?”
“The theologians defined it as the absence of God. Delice didn’t believe that. That was too passive, too empty. She thought of evil as an active principle.”
“Oh, it is. She was right, it is. An active principle. Powerful. With its own logic, its own ethics.” He stood up and strode around the dungeon, his feet clacking on the floor as though he had been hoofed, his long, angular arms gesticulating, his fingers snapping. “She sought what I have always sought. Sometimes I have thought I came close. Innocence betrayed. Love shattered. Pain inflicted, mercilessly. I haven’t tried genocide, yet. It takes a large organization to attempt genocide, but I’ve considered it. What did she think of genocide?”
The woman chained to the bench shook her head. “That wasn’t it. She learned there is more evil in wiping out a species of animal or plant than there is in wiping out any subgroup of mankind. Mankind is capable of infinite schism, she used to tell me. Mankind splits into groups and languages and cultures at the drop of a hat. No, genocide wasn’t the ultimate evil, for even if she had wiped out one group of man, nine others would have sprung up in its place, hydralike.”
“Was it desecration? Blowing up churches? Wrecking temples? Is that it? I’ve done that, of course, on a small scale. How about instilling racial hatred? How about bigotry?”
“Evil, yes, but not the ultimate evil. Men are born fearing strangers and hating them. It is part of their old animal heritage. It is evil as many primitive things are evil; evil in that we should have overcome it by now but have not.”
“Then what?” cried the Joker. “Surely she found something more than mere negatives! Surely she found an answer!”
“Oh, yes, oh, yes,” moaned the woman on the bench. “She did. She found it.”
“How! Where!”
“She looked in a mirror.”
“What?” he screamed leaping at her with his claws extended. “What do you mean, she looked in a mirror!”
“It was an unusual mirror,” admitted the woman. “When she had no luck in the libraries, she decided to go to a witch. The witch gave her a recipe. She could find what she sought in a mirror of a certain type, a cursed mirror. It had to be washed with the blood of a newborn babe and dried with the hair of a murdered bride. It had to be silvered thrice beneath a waning moon and framed with the wood of a yew tree, uprooted in its prime by a condemned man.”
“Magic,” sneered the Joker. “Superstition! I don’t believe in it.”
“Neither did Delice,” said the woman quietly. “Not really. Still, she had tried everything else. She followed the ancient recipe word for word, almost entirely out of mockery. But, nonetheless, when she was done, she looked into the mirror and demanded to see ultimate evil.”
“What did she see?”
“Her own face. What she had become. She saw what I see when I look at you. I told you she is someone like you. So alike.”
He stood up, his face full of wonder, almost expectation. He turned around, thinking. “Where is she?” he demanded. “Right now, where is she? I want to meet her.”
“Nearby,” the woman said. “I was always with her when she traveled, so she must be nearby.”
“What happened,” he demanded. “When she saw herself?”
The woman was silent for a long moment. He started toward her threateningly, and her head came up as she said, “She had a religious experience.”
He laughed, the laugh rising to a roar, the echoes tumbling between the walls like stones rolled in an abyss, the room shattering beneath the sound. “A religious experience!” And he laughed again.
“You laugh,” she sobbed, “but it is true.”
“She was born again,” he cackled. “No doubt.”
“No,” the woman shook her head. “Oh, she longed to be born again and put away that face she had seen. She longed to be new and clean and not see that face again. But she could not be born again. The weight of evil was too heavy. She could not lay it down or overcome it. It hung from her in chains and ropes of guilt. It tied her feet with snares of horror. It confronted her eyes with terror. It filled her nostrils with rot. It sounded in her ears, like the cries of the damned. She could not get out from under it. I said she was like you.”
The words took him in a place he had thought long sealed away. Like him. Someone like himself. Someone who could appreciate what he was, who he had become. Of all the pains he felt since his transformation, the pain of loneliness was the worst. How many times he had longed for someone like himself, someone to understand the desire to be born new, out of his own skin, out of his own self . . .
“Where is she? Where? I want to meet her!”
“Perhaps she will come here. She has a habit of finding me, wherever I am hid.”
“You, Batman’s sister?”
“Me. Whatever I am.”
He licked his lips, almost afraid to ask. “What did she do, when she had this experience?”
The woman sobbed and cradled her hands, rocking to and fro. “She decided she must expiate the evil she had committed. She decided she must somehow pay for everything she had done. She could not destroy herself, for self-destruction would only add to the evil. She had to find a way to sacrifice herself. A way to die without killing herself. Perhaps she thought you would do it. Perhaps that’s why she came here, to Gotham City.”
The Joker frowned and shook his head in abrupt negation. “She’s a fool if she thinks I would destroy her. Why would I? Destroy someone like me? She would be my helpmeet, my delight. Together we could rule the world. If I had that poison of hers, that purgatory pill, do you know what I could do with it?”
“What? What would you do with it that she has not already done? What assassinations? What terrible fates wished on the kindly and the innocent? What would you do?”
“Something,” he mused, staring at the cobwebby ceiling far above their heads. “Something she never thought of. We would think of it together. We would build upon the foundations we two have laid. We would become more than the sum of our parts. We would shine in the firmament of darkness like black stars . . .”
“She thought you would destroy her,” said the woman after a long time. “Even now, she is probably waiting for you to do it. To destroy her, so that she may expiate her sins.”
“Not a chance,” the Joker said with a laugh. “Do you have any idea how lonely I have been? How I’ve longed for someone to understand me? To work with me? The very thought of her fills me with feelings I haven’t had in decades. I’ll find her. I’ll convince her of the glory of our future together. You say she is like me! I’ve longed for someone like me. Is she still beautiful?”
“When I saw her last, she was beautiful. She was sitting before the mirror, brushing her hair. She was beautiful, yes.”
“Is she shapely? Strong?”
“Yes. When I saw her last she was.”
“Where did you see her last?”
She did not answer. Instead, she asked, “Will you let me live, for her sake?” She looked him in the face, her eyes wide, the burns on her face crusted red against her white skin.
He stared at her for a long moment then laughed, shrilly. “You tried to trick me, didn’t you? Of course I won’t spare you for her sake. Goodness would spare you, but evil would not. Evil would kill you, as I will kill you, without even staying around to see how it goes.” And he capered around her, connecting this and connecting that, throwing a switch here and another there, barely noticing the quivering flesh, the howling lips, the blood that oozed thickly and more thickly still. “What I will do is let it end sooner than otherwise, if you’ll
tell me where she was staying!”
“In the hotel,” she cried. “Just across the street from the Wild Card, where we met. In the Gotham Hotel.”
“Ahh,” he whispered, licking his red lips, running his bony hands through the stiff green foliage of his hair. “It’s only half an hour or so from here, through the tunnels. What room? Tell me what room!”
“What room? Fourteen-oh-two, I think. Yes. Fourteen-oh-two.”
“Then I’ll find her there. I’ll find her there. I want her more than I have wanted anything for years. Everything you tell me about her excites me.”
He threw a final switch as he left the room. Behind him the woman’s voice rose in a gurgle of final destruction.
From a pay phone in the street, he called the Gotham Hotel and asked for Delice Domain’s room. The phone rang. A voice said, “This is room fourteen-oh-two, Gotham Hotel. Miss Demain is away at the moment. Please leave a message.” The voice sounded odd, as though someone had been speaking through a distorter.
So she carried an answering machine with her? Well, why not? Why trust hotel operators to convey important information. People couldn’t be trusted. He liked even that in her, that lack of trust. And how delightful that she was out, that she would return and find him waiting for her!
Room 1402 was almost adjacent to the firestairs. He slipped into the corridor as soon as he was sure it was empty. He knew a great deal about locks and was prepared to pick the room lock, but it wasn’t necessary. The door was open.
A pleasant room. One light on, beside the phone. The green light blinking on the answering machine, to show there had been a call. No one in the room.
He mused, beside the door. Where should he wait? In plain sight, where she would see him when she came in? Hiding behind a curtain or in the closet? Or, perhaps he would leave a message, on her machine.
Perhaps, first, he would see what message was already there.
He pressed the button.
“Hello, Joker,” the voice said. It was a familiar voice. It was a voice he knew.
He ran, all the way down the stairs to the street, down the alley, into the ramified passages that would eventually lead him to the underground torture chamber. He had been gone only a little more than an hour. Only a little more. Surely not too long. It couldn’t have been too long.
But it had been too long. The woman was dead.
He stood looking down at the bloody, contorted body, at the face which, somehow, despite the terrible death it had suffered, seemed to be at peace. The loneliness rose around him like fouled water in an underground sewer, drowning him, and he still heard the words of the recorded message ringing in his ears.
“Hello, Joker, this is Delice Demain. The joke’s on you. Batman never had a sister.”
Help!
I Am a Prisoner
Joey Cavalieri
All I ever wanted was to make people laugh. I wanted to take everybody on a trip with me to the places in my head. I had so many imaginary lands charted in my daydreams, topsy turvy principalities that rivaled the ones I admired as a lonely child: the depths of the Okefenokee Swamp; the untamed snowdrifts of Lower Slobbovia; the shifting desert sands of Kokonino County; the crisp, brittle atmosphere of the planet Mongo.
When I was young, I walked down the shadowy streets of Caniff’s China. I drank mead with Val, protected by Foster’s lofty turrets and stone battlements. The foreboding mists surrounding Eisner’s Wildwood Cemetery were just as inviting to me as a sunny day in Barks’s Duckburg.
The thing I wished for, strove for, when I grew up was what I nearly achieved. I wanted to draw a comic strip that people made a part of their day, every day, a strip that guaranteed them a laugh in a newspaper that often proffered nothing but bad news and bad weather. One ray of light among the murky tabloid shadows. A strip that could stand alongside “Peanuts,” or “Calvin and Hobbes,” or “Gasoline Alley.”
Now my comic strip kills people.
It’s all because of the Joker.
I have this theory that one can get into any building on Gotham’s Upper West Side by leaning on a doorbell, affecting the right aceent and saying “Chinese food” into the intercom.
I didn’t remember ordering, but it didn’t matter. I’d fallen behind on my strip and hadn’t left my atelier in days. It reached the point where I was ordering cold noodles with Szechwan sauce or moo shu pork practically for breakfast. Tipping the delivery kid was the high point of my social life.
I swung the apartment door open wide without bothering to consult the peephole. No delivery boy. I saw no one, until a fist the size of a bowling ball knocked me back across the living room. I collapsed in a heap on the floor.
My vision was blurred. I imagined that somehow my eyes had been knocked out of alignment. Through a haze I saw a massive man, more like a mountain, with arm muscles as big as my head.
The burly man-mountain stood over me, preparing to hit me a second time. I had enough presence of mind to envision my head bursting apart like a garbage bag full of red paint, spattering my ink-stained wall-to-wall. He cocked his arm back. I looked up, speechless, as much in appeal as to see my attacker. His black marble eyes stared back, cold and expressionless, like windows in a deserted house. Nobody home. No appeal, no pleading, no begging, nothing I could say would stay a second blow.
But someone stopped him.
Another man strode into my apartment, looking the place over as if he were going to buy it. His purple spats sank into the thick carpet in slow, measured steps. He paused to admire some of the artwork on my walls, treasured pieces I’d collected over the years. “Barney Google . . . with the goo-goo-googly eyes,” I heard him say. There was no greeting, no explanation of who he was, or why he was here. He took his time, frosting the framed artwork with his breath and wiping it off with a purple glove. “Terry and the Pirates!” he said, “Bonnnnnnng!” intoning an imitation of a Chinese gong from an old radio show.
“Bonnnnnnng” was exactly how my head felt. Then, my eyes readjusted from their haze. When I got a good look, I nearly swooned again. I saw his face, as white and final as moonrise. His smile came right from the label of a poison bottle, a Jolly Roger. Both of those were warnings that what resided within could kill you. This grin was no different.
He placed his hand on the man-mountain’s shoulder and spoke with a breezy familiarity, like he’d known me all my life, or he was just finishing a conversation we’d begun a short time ago. He didn’t even look at me during his monologue. “So, I says to Punch here, I says, ‘Punch, do you want to spend the rest of your life sucking back Thorazine in your OJ three times a day? No, of course you don’t.’ I says, ‘Punch, I’ve been in and out of Arkham Asylum so many times that they’re thinking of installing a revolving door just for me. But there’s one thing, Punchline, ol’ pal. Once we hit the open air, we’ll be hotter than a Gotham sidewalk in an August heat wave. You’ll be able to fry eggs on us. You can come with me,’ I tell Punch, ‘but I won’t be able to rejoin that ol’ gang of mine for a while. I’ll only be followed and . . . what’s that awful word? . . . apprehended.’ ”
The man-mountain picked me up by my shoulders. He held me that way, rooted to the spot, while the Joker sat on the couch. “ ‘We’ll need a place to cool off for a little bit. And this,’ ” he said as he ran a purple-gloved finger through the dust on the end table, “ ‘must be the place.’ ”
Why did the Joker pick me?
I’m his favorite cartoonist.
A lot of people I respect, other artists, writers, critics, you’d be surprised, say they don’t like “Boomertown.” They say it’s a hollow comic strip based on a demographic, not on any real experiences from my sheltered life. They say that baby-boomer humor is on its way out. The folks who don’t like it don’t think I draw all that well either. But it’s got me a couple of awards from the American Cartoonists Federation, and it’s got me into a couple of hundred papers.
It’s also got me this place, a duplex apartm
ent on Gotham’s Upper West Side. I use the upper floor as my atelier, my studio. It’s a new building, and the real estate market being what it is, it’s expensive, so I don’t have many neighbors.
Right above the drafting board is the skylight. “Natural light,” the real estate lady said, “Perfect for an artist.” That skylight cost me at least twenty-five percent more in rent, but it’s worth it. I see the sun overhead in the morning, and the moon at night. Often, when I’m behind in my work, they’re my only companions.
I gained two more companions, unwanted ones.
Two massive hands gripped my arms to my sides. The sullen giant had a narrow focus to his attention, but I took up all of it. He was eager to toss me to the floor at the slightest indication of movement, even an exhale. “We have quite an aficionado here, Punch,” said the Joker, pulling down framed Sunday comic strips on my walls. The original art from the old days was particularly rare, since comics syndicates seldom returned drawings to the artists, but discarded them after use. “Winsor McCay’s ‘Little Nemo in Slumberland’ . . . Crockett Johnson’s ‘Barnaby’ . . . ‘The Kin-der-Kids’ . . . ‘Polly and Her Pals’ . . . ‘Alley Oop’ . . . You’ve got good taste, fella.” The Joker smashed the glass frames against the coffee table, raining shards over a thick art-book collection of “Thimble Theatre.” “And if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s good taste.” He shredded the heavy drawings to confetti. He danced about the room and tossed the paper tufts everywhere, giggling.
I fought against the restraint. “That . . . that stuff was irreplaceable!”
He stopped. “Irreplaceable?” He walked toward me. I tried to get away, but the man-mountain held me still. “You don’t know the meaning of the word.” There was hardly an inch between us when he pulled his lapel flower up close to my face. “Your miserable life is irreplaceable.” It squirted.
“My eyes! They’re burning up! Acid!”
“Not acid, you big sissy. Lemon juice. Packs quite a wallop, though, doesn’t it?” He produced a walking stick, seemingly from nowhere, and twirled it like a drum majorette. The tip of the cane had a fist-sized replica of the Joker’s head. “Now Punch and me, we’re guests here. So you could at least show us a little. Damn. Hos. Pit. Al. Lit. Tee.” He punctuated each syllable by jabbing me hard in the stomach with the cane head while Punch held me fast.
The Further Adventures of The Joker Page 11