Bartholomew snorted with surprise and slipped his glasses back on. “How unfortunate,” he said. “Because if the effects of that compound prevent him from dreaming much longer, I’m afraid he’s going to be driven quite mad.”
In his cell, the Joker began to laugh. Batman said nothing.
Then the Joker shivered once, and turned to stare at those who stared at him.
“I wonder what it is?” Bartholomew asked Batman. “I wonder what a man like the Joker would fear most?” He shook his head. “I wonder what he dreams?”
The Joker lurched toward the door of his cell and Bartholomew stepped back. “Don’t ask me you baby-faced moron!” the Joker cried. He bashed his head against the padded door. “Ask him! The lunatic in the cape!” He clenched his eyes shut. “C’mon, Bats! You know, don’t you? You know what I dream!” He howled in a staccato burst of laughter. It wasn’t funny.
Bartholomew blinked at the Joker’s outburst, then scribbled on the chart he held. Beside him, Batman’s gloved hand reached up to the side of his cowl and pulled it down imperceptibly. It was an almost unconscious habit he had developed over the years. Something he did just before he was to go into action, making sure his mask was firmly in place. Protective. Concealing.
Bartholomew stared into the Joker’s blazing eyes. “Is that true, Batman? Do you know what the Joker’s nightmare is?”
Batman didn’t answer so the psychiatrist turned to him. “Do you?”
But Batman was gone. Swallowed by the shadows. Cloaked by the darkness. Protected by the concealing mask of night.
Bartholomew shook his head again as he peered down the dimly lit basement corridor. He turned back to the man in the cell.
“How can he know what you dream?” the psychiatrist asked.
The Joker leaned up against the viewing window and dropped his voice to a whisper.
“Because, he dreams it, too,” the Joker hissed. “He dreams it, too.”
The laughter that followed almost burst Bartholomew’s eardrum.
Outside, within the beckoning shadows of Arkham’s stone walls, Batman returned to the night, haunted by the sound of that mad laughter, driven by a dream only two men know.
Best of All
Marco Palmieri
For once, he wasn’t laughing.
Something was very wrong, Wally realized as they walked down the darkened streets. In all the weeks he’d worked for him, he could remember no time when the Boss wasn’t at least on the verge of giggling hysterically. But that manic joviality, which had always seemed so inseparable from him, was gone now. As they strode through the gutted neighborhood, footsteps smacking sharply on the broken pavement, Wally looked up into the Joker’s face and was suddenly terrified, for not even a smile adorned those blood-red lips.
Then up ahead he saw the house.
It was an old, dilapidated brownstone, its sole distinction from the others being that it was completely bricked up. They went up the crumbled steps, frightening a skinny cat that fled silently into the shadows. The front door looked like a solid oak slab, sealed by bolts and several heavy padlocks. The Joker stopped and stared at the door.
“Open it.”
Wally took out the keys and was surprised at how easily the old locks responded. He grew almost excited as he drew back the last bolt and yanked on the door handle, but the Boss’s hand slammed it shut before Wally could open it more than two inches. The Joker glared at him dangerously.
“Wait here.”
Wally blinked uncertainly and stepped back. The Joker pulled open the door, revealing a cold womb of blackness, and disappeared into it, pulling the portal closed behind him.
Wally stuck his hands into his jacket and glanced around, hating every moment that he was forced to guard the door. He hated this town, and though he didn’t think himself superstitious, the whole neighborhood spooked him. It was rotted and decayed, like a corpse crawling with maggots. Whatever the Joker wanted here, Wally hoped he’d get it over with fast. He just couldn’t understand what any of this was about. Nothing the Joker did ever made any sense to him, but this trip was the worst. And that, Wally realized, was precisely what scared him. The Joker was getting weirder.
He lit a cigarette to calm himself. Easy, man, easy. Whatever’s going on can’t last all night. Boss said he wanted to get back to Gotham by morning. Just be cool.
Thirty minutes later, there was a glow down the street, and Wally saw a police cruiser making slow progress in his direction. “Aw, crud,” he muttered, and flattened himself against the door. The car kept coming, ignoring the junkies huddling in the doorways and alleys, and getting closer to the house. His fingers clawed at the door. The glow from the headlights grew brighter. He found the handle and got it open, slipping inside as the cruiser went by.
“Damn,” he whispered in the darkness. If the cops were looking for them, they had to get out, fast. But where the hell was the Joker? “Boss? Hey, Boss, where are you?” No answer. His eyes were adjusting to the darkness, but not enough. All the windows were bricked, and not even moonlight was getting in. Wally fumbled for his penlight, which cast a weak yellow beam ahead of him. A large black rat scurried away in flight, disappearing through a crack in the dusty wooden floor.
In that dust he found a trail of narrow footprints.
Wally went forward hesitantly, putting his hand out to feel his way. Too often he encountered cobwebs so thick he had to pull hard to part them. A wide archway in the lefthand wall opened into the living room, littered with broken lamps and overturned furniture that looked as if they had lain that way for decades. Across the room was another doorway, and down a short hall he found a staircase. The footprints went up.
He almost fell into a wide hole that had rotted through the middle of the stairs. Steadying himself on a creaking banister, he wondered briefly if perhaps the Joker had fallen through the hole. He sent his light in. Nothing but more rats.
Another hall on the second floor. He found a splintered door still held up by one hinge, its dusty fragments strewn inside a little room. Wally waved his penlight around. Old children’s toys were scattered about, easily as old as the furniture downstairs. In one corner lay an old doll, a purple harlequin, dull with age and dust. Its porcelain mouth was grinning, and a wide crack ran down the side of its head.
He suppressed a shudder and swiftly backed out of the little room, reminding himself about the cops outside. He went further down the hall and found another staircase. The footprints went up.
The stairs were narrow, leading up to a small attic dimly lit by the amber glow of a flashlight. A sooty skylight hung overhead, intact despite its age and the dismal ruination of the rest of the house. And as the rest of the attic came into view, Wally found the Joker, sitting there on the floor, surrounded by stacks of boxes and piles upon piles of papers, contemplating a tattered old photograph.
But again Wally felt that something was terribly wrong. The Joker was ignoring his presence, despite the fact that the old stairs had creaked all the way up. He just kept staring at the photo, a three-inch black-and-white of some gawky-looking little boy. What the hell was going on? “Boss?” No response. “Boss, listen, we’ve gotta get outta here. There are cops crawlin’ around outside.” The Joker’s eyes didn’t waver from the photo. “Damn it, Joker, are you listening to me? Don’t you understand we’re hot?”
For half a minute longer the Joker stared at the photograph, then with perfect calm he gently slipped the photo into his vest pocket, and slowly picked himself up off the floor. “No, Wallace, I’m afraid it’s you who doesn’t understand,” he said as he brushed the dust off his purple tailcoat. “I told you to wait outside.” He was grinning now as he slowly stepped toward his henchman.
Wally started shaking, his forehead already wet with sweat. “Boss, please, I’m tryin’ to tell you we’re in trouble—”
The Joker’s brow furrowed somewhat. “Wallace, Wallace, you don’t have to explain. I understand, my boy, really I do.” He pres
sed a reassuring hand on Wally’s shoulder as the hireling inched away, backing into the banister. The Joker kept coming, pressing himself closer until his grin filled Wally’s field of vision. His soft purple glove touched the back of Wally’s neck. “Wallace, what is it? You look so pale. I’m worried about you, my boy. You desperately need some cheering up.”
“Oh, no, please . . . no, no, no . . .”
Something pricked his neck. He tried to squirm free but the Joker was already stepping away from him. First Wally started to twitch, then thrash as his body went into sudden convulsions. His knees buckled and he smashed his face on the banister, splitting his lip. In seconds his motor control was gone, and he tumbled backward down the stairs, breaking bone and wood as he fell. He landed on his back, facing the laughing silhouette that watched him from the top of the steps.
The last thing Wallace felt as his eyes rolled up into his skull was the painful, uncontrollable urge to grin.
From above, it looked like a war zone.
The street below Grandvue Hospital swarmed with police, many of them occupied simply with redirecting traffic and keeping back the curious. Firefighters and paramedics sifted through the debris for victims of fallen masonry, gently loading them into waiting ambulances. Spotlights across the street shone into the gaping hole in the northwest corner of the third and fourth floors, where Gordon and his men surveyed the devastation.
Mingled with the rubble and ash were smears of bright red.
Batman could pick out Bullock’s thick baritone over the other voices as he crept silently through the shadows outside. “. . . forty-three confirmed dead, including the woman driving by when the wall was blown out. Ninety-four injured, seventeen of those critical.”
Gordon was scowling at the ceiling. Much of it had caved in, and he could clearly see the blackened ruin of the fourth-floor ceiling beyond it. “Has the rest of the building been evacuated?”
Bullock’s jowls quivered slightly as he shook his head. “Not completely. Several patients in intensive care aren’t ambulatory. Ride could kill ’em. Some docs insisted on staying behind to take care of ’em ’til they were strong enough to move.”
“What caused it?” Batman asked as he stepped into the light.
Gordon and Bullock turned as one, the sergeant making a noticeable effort not to look startled. “Some kinda incendiary,” Bullock said. “Took out the nursery and a pediatrics ward right below it.”
Batman noted the pattern of destruction. “But the explosion took place in the nursery.”
Bullock nodded. “Chemical residue on some shards of glass suggest the bomb was planted in a baby bottle. Witnesses confirm the blast occurred right after a nurse took in a cart for the two A.M. feeding.”
Batman looked at Gordon. “I’ll want some of the shards for analysis.”
Gordon peered back at him through the smoke issuing from his pipe. “You’ll get them. Parquette and Silva already took them downtown to the Department labs. I’ll signal you the minute they’re through.”
“What do you have on the nurse?”
Bullock drew out a dog-eared notepad from his coat. “Cassandra Alvarez, thirty-seven. Registered nurse, twelve years, exemplary record. Well-liked by her co-workers. No criminal record. Died in the explosion.”
The Caped Crusader dropped slowly to one knee, reaching out two gloved fingertips to the edge of the crimson puddle at his feet. The blood shone against the dark fabric of his gauntlet.
“I’ll need her dossier,” he said finally, “plus those of anyone else who might’ve had contact with the cart.”
“I’ll get right on it,” said Bullock, and went back to coordinating the other detectives milling about the wreckage. Batman continued to stare at his fingertips as Gordon watched him intently.
“How many children?” he asked softly.
Gordon breathed out a cloud of smoke. “All twenty infants in the nursery died in the blast. Five of the kids in this ward were crushed to death when the ceiling caved in. The other three suffered second-degree burns and multiple broken bones, but they should make it.”
“Children . . .” he whispered.
A draft was blowing into the room. Gordon thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his trenchcoat. “I don’t mind telling you I’m scared. Few clues, no suspects, not even a motive . . . it’s my worst nightmare come alive.” He paused, frowning at the street. The last of the ambulance doors were slamming shut, sirens kicking in as they drove off to St. Matthew’s, across town. Gordon listened as the whine faded into the distance. “This city’s child mortality rate has gone through the roof in only a few weeks. Kids falling out of windows, drownings, gas leaks, fires . . . Too many fatalities in a very short time. Now this.”
“Our quarry’s becoming more ambitious.”
“Then I take it we’ve drawn the same conclusion.”
“Probably. You believe in coincidence even less than I do. But we’ll find him.”
“You sound certain. I wish I could be. But my gut tells me we’re going to see a lot more death before this is over.”
“No.” Batman closed his fist over the blood and stood up. And it seemed to Gordon suddenly that the figure beneath the flowing blue cape and cowl was no longer merely frightening, he’d become menacing. “No more deaths. Tell your men, Jim. Warn the public. We’re dealing with a terrorist bent on mass infanticide. Do what you can to protect the kids.” He turned back to the hole in the wall, his cape billowing as he strode toward it.
“What about you?” Gordon asked.
Batman stopped at the jagged edge of the floor, staring calculatingly at the blackened skyline of Gotham City.
“I’m going to bring him down.”
He took hold of the line that waited for him outside the hole and vanished into the night like a dark wind.
He longed for sleep, yearned for the calm and serenity that came with blissful unconsciousness. Yet the solace he so craved somehow always eluded him, for in his most private moments he would lay awake remembering, always remembering, until he at last closed his eyes, only to find himself suffocating in his dreams.
He could still see Mommy walking into his room as he scratched contentedly away at his sketchpad. “Sweetie? Can I talk to you?”
He looked up at her. “Sure, Ma.”
She glanced briefly at the cartoons flashing across the TV screen. His toys, of course, were scattered everywhere, and she smiled warmly when she spotted his favorite, Mr. Giggles, the old purple harlequin doll he’d kept since he was a baby.
Then she did something very odd: she sat down on the floor next to him. “So how was school today?”
“Z’okay,” he said. “Mommy, are you awright?”
The grin spread across her face uncontrollably. “Just fine, sweetie. But you see, I’ve got a really big surprise, and I’m trying to think of a good way to tell you.”
“What? What is it?”
“Well, you know that baby your friend Stevie’s family just had?”
“Yeah.”
“Well . . .” Mommy looked left and right, as if to make sure no one could overhear, then leaned real close and whispered, “We’re gonna have one, too.”
His eyes popped. “Aw, cool! Really? When? Can we go tonight? You got enough money?”
“Whoah, honey, take it easy.” She laughed. “It isn’t like buying a new TV. The baby’s gotta grow first.”
He frowned. “You mean like fruit?”
“Uhh . . . not exactly. It’s a little different.”
“I thought we hadda go to th’ ospital.”
“That comes later. We won’t have the baby until next year, around the beginning of summer.”
His face fell. “Aw, why so long?”
“I told you, sweetie, the baby needs to grow.”
“Where?”
She took his hand and pressed it to her stomach. It felt warm. “In here.”
He looked up at her doubtfully. “You sure?”
“Pretty sure.�
��
“Wow.” He sighed. “Can I pick if it’s gonna be a boy or a girl?”
She took him in her arms and kissed him, then winked. “We’ll see. But listen, sweetie, I’m gonna need a lot of help, and you’ve got be my special guy until the baby arrives. You think you can do that?”
“Sure. What do I gotta do?”
“Just stay close to me, and help me, and protect me, and keep me warm, and don’t ever forget I love you very much.”
“But what about Daddy?”
“He’ll be helping, too, but he’s gonna be working real hard at his job. So when you’re not in school, I might need you to keep me company.”
“Didja tell him yet?”
“Sure did. I just got off the phone with him.” She pinched his chin. “He’s pretty darn excited, let me tell you.”
“Are you happy, Mommy?”
“Oh, you bet I am.”
He looked down for a moment, as if thinking hard, then looked up at her again. “Me, too.”
Then she hugged him again, for a real long time.
After Daddy got home from work that night, he took them all out to a restaurant. He kept kissing Mommy and asking her if she felt okay. Mommy just laughed and told him she was fine. It took him days to calm down a little, to stop bringing home baby stuff and to quit running around, as Mommy said, like a chicken with his head cut off.
“See, sweetie?” She laughed. “This is how your father acted before you were born.”
Daddy looked up from the crib he was building and scowled. “Hmph,” he said, and dove back into the instructions.
But a few weeks later, Daddy lost his job, and nothing was ever quite the same afterward.
It really wasn’t so bad at first, but as time wore on, his father found that no one would hire him, and he quickly became more and more depressed. Then he would drink, and the depression became anger, and he and Mommy would start yelling at each other. Sometimes after a fight, Daddy would storm out of the house, slamming the front door, and she would sit alone in her room and cry.
The Further Adventures of The Joker Page 33