The custom sign had cost millionaire Bittner ten times the money it would have to supply the gate guard a box of treats. But that was Archie Bittner.
The pit bulls that roamed his grounds were also Archie Bittner. Even the guard was frightened of them.
They were the reason the guard—whose name was Donovan—kept to his guard station, well outside the gate, where the pit bulls could not go. They were an added incentive for him to uphold Bittner’s standing prohibition against letting visitors in.
Tonight, Donovan was doubly grateful for his station, as he huddled in the warmth of the electric heater he carted to and from work during the winter months. Winter had come early this year.
So when the purple TV repair van came down the road, its headlights throwing the benighted elms into stark relief, Donovan made no move to leave his shelter, not even when the van coasted to a stop and the driver’s window cranked down.
The driver called out to Donovan, his face in shadow.
“What’s that?” Donovan called back.
The shadow-faced driver repeated his question. It sounded like “Mumble muff muff” to Donovan’s old ears. Grumbling, he slid back the glass door and trudged over to the van.
“What’s that you say?” he asked querulously, his lined face smarting in the crisp night air.
“I said,” the driver repeated, shoving his lean chalk visage into the moonlight, “Trick—or treat?”
He displayed his teeth. It was more a creepy baring of teeth than a smile and it made Donovan think of those dreaded pit bulls.
“You startled me for a second there,” Donovan said, his heartbeat slowly returning to normal. “You look like that there Joker fella.”
“Sorry,” the white-faced man said contritely.
“Me, too. I got no treats. Boss’s orders.”
“Then how about a trick!” the other said, tossing a dark object in Donovan’s startled face. He fumbled, catching it with both hands before it could strike the ground.
Curiously, Donovan looked it over. It was a handsized jack-o’-lantern. It was heavy, as if made of lead. But the pumpkin skin felt plasticky. There was a metallic ring through the stem.
“Should I open it?” Donovan asked.
“Oh, I don’t know, should he?”
The white-faced man called the question over to the seat beside him. It was empty. But he received an answer—a kind of mewing chorus. The sharp profile snapped around.
“I think that was a unanimous yes,” he hissed. His lips peeled back in a toothsome grimace.
Donovan looked from that leer to the identical one on the jack-o’-lantern’s face and shrugged. He plucked the ring. It came up. The lid stayed in place.
“I think I broke it,” Donovan called out, holding out the dangling ring.
“Awww, poor baby,” said the driver. And something in his voice made Donovan take a second look at the metal ring. It seemed vaguely familiar on second inspection. When he recognized what it was, he hastily dropped the ring.
That was a mistake. He should have dropped the pumpkin and found the nearest deep hole.
The hand grenade concealed inside the jack-o’-lantern obliterated Donovan’s right hand and most of his face in a smoky flash.
The Joker stepped out of the van and walked past the dead guard, the sack of mewing kittens slung over his back.
“Nice bridgework,” he remarked to the fleshless grin that dominated what little remained of Donovan’s face.
Coming to the gate, the Joker transferred the sack mouth to his eternally grinning teeth and started to climb. At the top, he straddled the wrought-iron scrollwork and opened the sack.
“Meoow!” he told the clustered plaintive faces staring up at him. Kittens climbed over one another blindly. “Hungry? Good. I’m going to feed you now.”
The Joker plucked out a calico kitten, looked it over, and dropped it to the gravel below, adding, “I’m going to feed you to the dogs!”
The kitten landed on its feet and stepped around dazedly. Another followed. And another. After some difficult labial contortions, the Joker pursed his lips and vented a long, piercing whistle.
And out of the manicured shrubbery charged a blunt furious engine of snapping snarling teeth.
“Bon appétit!” the Joker called as one of Archie Bittner’s guardian pit bulls tore into the first chunk of feline bait.
Gathering up the wriggling sack, the Joker stepped from the gate to the top of the fieldstone fence. He walked gingerly and on tiptoe, for the fencetop was set with jagged fangs of broken glass.
Halfway along the south wall, his right-heel tap caught on a short chunk of glass. The Joker’s grin widened—in fear. His right hand clutched the sack in desperation. His other arm windmilled and he threw out his free foot in a reflexive attempt to keep his balance.
He failed. On the way down, he whistled.
The Joker landed like a stack of cordwood.
The sack burst open at the mouth and spilled dizzy kittens.
And twin pit bulls came charging in their direction.
The Joker saw them coming. He scooped up a kitten in each hand and leaped to his feet. Legs apart, he stood his ground as they bore in on him. When he could count their teeth, he began throwing kittens. Jaws snapped like beartraps. And kept chomping.
“Here’s dessert,” the Joker said, tossing a few more. The last kitten landed in front of the bone-worrying dogs and its ears went back.
The Joker tiptoed around the dogs, throwing a limp-wristed wave after him. “Tah-tah,” he squeaked. “Don’t forget to clean your plates, children.”
Archibald Bittner mistook the sound for a tree branch scraping an upstairs windowpane when the brass knocker clanked the first time. He made a mental note to have the gardener prune the pear trees.
The knocker sound repeated, this time more insistent. Then impatiently. And then frantically as if a lunatic had gotten hold of it.
Archie Bittner wasn’t sure what to do. He was not used to callers. He employed a gate guard to turn away the unwelcome—which to Archie Bittner meant everybody. Too stingy to hire a butler, Bittner was forced out of his easy chair to answer the door himself.
So secure was Archie Bittner in his castlelike home that he neglected to ascertain the identity of his visitor by peeking through a window. He simply opened the door.
The face framed in the doorway was so much a caricature of a human being that, at first, Bittner took it for a grotesque statue placed on his doorstep by pranksters. That illusion was dispelled by a nervous stretching of the rictuslike grin on the visitor’s jester visage.
“Trick or treat!” it chortled.
“I beg your pardon?” Bittner replied.
“It’s Halloween,” the clown scolded. “Don’t you read the funnies?”
“Yes, yes, of course. Aren’t you rather old for this?”
The wide grin thinned. The long face sucked in at the cheeks, and his eyes grew clown-sad.
“Awwww, do you really think so?” he asked.
Taken aback, Bittner demanded, “State your business.”
“Monkey business.” He held up his white sack and fingered the drawstring open. “Give or take?” he said.
“Again?”
“If you have no treat, I will share with you.”
Archie Bittner blinked. “If it will end this quickly, very well,” he growled. But the gleam in his eyes said that Archibald Bittner was not a man to turn down something for nothing.
“Uh-uh. Naughty, naughty,” the trick or treater told him. “You don’t just put your hands in. Look before you leap.”
Bittner cleared his throat. “As you say.” He bent over to look into the fat hollow of the sack. “I can’t see anything. Bring it up to the light.”
“Up to the light? Surely.” And suddenly the sack was in his face and an insistent steel-strong hand was at the back of his neck, pushing him in.
The sack went over Archie Bittner’s balding head and the Joker looped h
is bola tie around Bittner’s neck. He pressed the clasp stone and tiny motors whirred. The slide raced along its cord track to squeeze Bittner’s throat. It kept on squeezing.
It was so dark inside the sack that Bittner never registered the transition into unconsciousness.
Police Commissioner James W. Gordon looked up from his desk and the quarterly budget reports that seemed to land there six times a year to the smart rapping on his office door.
His aide McCulley poked his blank face in the half-open door.
“Yes, what is it?” Gordon demanded gruffly.
“The switchboard is lighting up. TV reception all over the city has gone haywire.”
“Then why don’t they call the stations?”
“It’s not one station, Commissioner, it’s all of them. And you know what that means.”
“Oh, God,” said Commissioner Gordon, who did know what it meant. He turned to the portable TV set he kept in his office to watch himself during his frequent evening news appearances. The ruddiness of his cheeks drained to near-white—almost the color of the chilling face he saw in his mind’s eye.
The picture tube took a seeming eternity to warm up. In his many years in office, Gordon had contended with serial killers, terrorists, and other vicious criminal elements. But none of them froze his blood as did the thought that the Joker was again on one of his wild tears.
Terrorists had agendas. Serial killers fit psychological profiles. And criminals, even the deranged ones, operated to modus operandi. Not the Joker. He was outside the pale—beyond insanity. Psychosis personified.
The commissioner watched the picture jump and twitch over a familiar macabre melody. Funeral March of the Marionettes, Gordon recalled.
The picture resolved into a flat whiteness. For a moment, he wondered if he had turned into an Alfred Hitchcock Presents rerun by accident. Then a gray outline appeared on screen. The figure of a man seen in profile. Not the rotund profile the music had come to suggest, but the reed-thin, Ichabod Crane silhouette of the Joker.
Then the Joker glided into view. He lined up with the silhouette and turned to face the camera. He smiled. But then, he always smiled.
“Good eeeevening,” he said in an unctuous Alfred Hitchcock imitation. “Our story for tonight is about a man who had no treats, and therefore had a trick played upon him.”
Gordon groaned. He fingered his eyeglasses nervously.
The camera tracked the Joker as he stepped up to an overweight man who sat, bound by purple ropes, to a highchair. The man’s balding forehead shone in the TV lights as if waxed. His mouth was gagged with a baby’s bib.
“Meet Archibald Bittner, captain of industry, Scrooge extraordinaire, and dishonorer of Halloween,” said the Joker in his normal reedy voice. He went on: “You may be asking yourself, you out there in TV land, what has Mr. Bittner done to deserve my attention. The answer is simple: Nothing! Nothing at all. Mwee-hee-hee-hee.”
Gordon clutched his armrests at the familiar laugh. It never failed to make his blood run cold.
The Joker went on.
“I am after bigger game,” he said. “Batman. You all know Batman. I know Batman. Yet, who really, really knows Batman? Who is this . . . this masked rodent? No one knows. He comes, he goes. I stick my finger up my nose. That’s a joke. Laugh if you’ve got the moxie.”
The Joker snapped his fingers in the air. Two men stepped on camera to take their places on either side of the bound figure of Archie Bittner. One wore a black jumpsuit with an orange pumpkin over his head. The other wore orange with a black pumpkin.
“Before I go on, and believe me, I will go on,” the Joker said, “meet my costars. Jack-O’-Lantern and Punkin Head. Which is which, you wonder? Dear me, I can hardly tell myself. They’re twins, you know. That’s why they dress that way. That, plus I pay their salaries.”
The two henchmen stood with their jack-o’-Lantern faces impassive. They looked like Halloweeny smile buttons. Except their fixed pumpkin grins exactly copied the Joker’s own.
The Joker leaned into the camera and said conspiritorially, “Nonspeaking roles. That way I don’t have to pay ’em so much.” And he winked like a demented owl.
Pulling back from the camera, the Joker straightened his trademark purple zoot suit and said, “As I was saying: Batman! Who is he? Why does he vex me so? These are tonight’s questions. And answers? Answers I have none. But I’m gonna get ’em. For tonight begins the Joker production of the miniseries, The Unmasking of Batman. Sorry it wasn’t in your local listings. Lack of advertisers. They hated the script.”
McCulley poked his head in Gordon’s office.
“The TV people say it’s a microwave transmission,” he reported. “Remote. Probably mobile, or on a mobile relay. No trace possible.”
Gordon waved him away impatiently. The Joker was speaking again.
“In tonight’s stunning opening episode, and in honor of Halloween night, we’re going to begin with the unmasking of Archie Bittner. What do you say to that, Arch, me lad?”
Bittner made inarticulate noises through his gag.
The Joker yanked the gag away. “Speak up, man. Don’t be camera shy.”
“I—I-I’m not wearing a mask,” he sputtered, his eyes shifting nervously from the camera to the Joker’s rigor-mortis face.
“I’m not wearing a mask!” the Joker shrieked in delight. “Let’s all write that down. It’s destined to become a classic in the annals of television, right up there with ‘To the moon, Alice’ and ‘Just the facts, ma’am.’ ”
“But I’m not,” Bittner repeated.
“Isn’t he a scream, ladies and germs? Isn’t he a find? Oooh, I am such a casting genius. Now, the unmasking of Archie Bittner. Shall we begin? Get a good grip now, boys.”
Punkin Head and Jack-O’-Lantern laid their hands on Bittner’s shoulders to quiet his squirming, as the Joker presented his back to the camera, revealing his hitherto-concealed left hand curled around the bone shaft of a wicked knife.
Gordon gasped. And all over the city, that gasp rose from a million throats.
The Joker lifted the knife in a quick upward stroke.
“But I’m not wearing a mas—mummph.” Archie Bittner’s voice choked off as an unseen hand clamped his mouth. He began to jump in his seat. His agitated shoulders were visible around the Joker’s narrow purple back. On either side of him, Jack-O’-Lantern and Punkin Head strained to hold him steady.
The knife fell. Only the Joker’s elbows moved after that. There was no sound at first. Then came the gritty grating sound of metal scoring bone blended with the drumming of feet. Archie Bittner’s feet, Gordon realized, as horror crept over his craggy features. He knew men only made such sounds in their death throes. Mewling noises, muffled and frantic, added to the horrible symphony.
Commissioner Gordon turned away, moaning, “That fiend!”
“Here it comes, the grand unmasking!” The Joker’s voice chortled. “Did he do it? Or . . . ?”
Irresistibly, Gordon’s sick eyes were drawn back to the screen. He knew that he’d have to see how far the Joker had gone for himself. Just as the rest of the Gotham City audience would. For a lunatic, the Joker manipulated like a master psychologist.
As Gordon watched, the Joker’s back slowly straightened.
He spun like a dervish, venting a maniacal tittering laugh.
“Unmasked!” he shrieked. “Unmasked for all the world to see!” And then he stepped aside to reveal the seated figure of Archie Bittner, his naked skull, like a meat bone that had been rendered, staring with uncomprehending eyes—staring because his eyelids had been peeled from the raw bone along with the rest of his face.
His eyes, however, were dead.
The Joker held something limp and pale in front of the camera.
“Under it all, lies the ultimate mask,” he said gleefully. “And its name is bone, bone, bone!”
He stuffed the face of Archibald Bittner into his breast pocket and leaned drunkenly into th
e camera.
“Tune in tomorrow at this same time for chapter two and the unmasking of—but that would be telling. It may be a lucky member of our audience. It may be you! And if my dear, dear friend Batman is watching, if you’d like to spare the people of Gotham further installments, meet me at the place where it all began. I propose a temporary truce. Unmask for me, on camera, and my collection of faces will grow no larger.” He pointed to the camera like a bizarre parody of Uncle Sam. “You see, it’s you I really want to make a star.”
The screen went black. Within seconds, local affiliate transmissions resumed. A TV anchorwoman cut in with a hasty recap of the Joker’s latest outrage. Gordon switched channels. All around the dial, anchorpeople were recapping the Joker’s pirate transmission.
A phone outside Gordon’s office started ringing. Others took up the clamor.
“Who is it?” Gordon asked when McCulley put his head in.
“Everybody,” McCulley said. “The mayor. The governor. But mostly it’s the press.”
“Tell them all I’ll get back to them. And then meet me on the roof.”
“Yessir.”
Up on the roof of Gotham City Police Headquarters, Commissioner Gordon hugged himself against the biting air as his aide turned on the modified spotlight. The big tungsten lamp came on instantly. It sent a brilliant yellow beam into the sky. Fortunately, there was low cloud cover. Against the steely banks, a familiar symbol showed mistily—a stylized bat in a disk of gold.
Hours later, the clouds had thinned and the Bat-Signal ghosted in and out of view. Gordon’s teeth chattered and his thick hands were stuffed deep into his pants pockets to warm them.
McCulley came up the roof hatch.
“Nothing, Commissioner,” he said morosely. “No calls. No visitors.”
“Go home, McCulley. It’s going to be a long night.”
“Yes sir. Shall I—”
The Further Adventures of The Joker Page 13