DC Comics novels--Batman

by Christa Faust

  Contents

  Cover

  Also Available from Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Note from the Authors

  1

  2

  Ten Days Before

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  Now

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  BATMAN

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  HARLEY QUINN: MAD LOVE by Paul Dini and Pat Cadigan

  BATMAN: THE COURT OF OWLS by Greg Cox

  BATMAN

  CHRISTA FAUST AND GARY PHILLIPS

  Based on the Graphic Novel by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland

  and Characters Created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger

  TITAN

  BOOKS

  BATMAN: THE KILLING JOKE

  Hardback ISBN: 9781785658105

  Ebook ISBN: 9781785658112

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  www.titanbooks.com

  First edition: September 2018

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2018 DC Comics.

  BATMAN, THE JOKER, THE KILLING JOKE and

  all related characters and elements © & ™ DC Comics.

  WB SHIELD: ™ & © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (s18)

  TIBO41406

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  Designed and typeset by Crow Books.

  To all who have taken the journey into the worlds of Batman

  NOTE FROM THE AUTHORS

  Our story is set when The Killing Joke was published, 1988, but this will not be stated explicitly. While we have sought to preserve the context of the original Moore–Bolland story, as with the retro-influenced Batman: The Animated Series from the ’90s, and the current Gotham TV show, our novelization will be a mash-up of anachronisms—boxy Ford LTDs and Malibu SS muscle cars tooling around, GCPD blimps patrolling the skies, Art Deco high-rises, hidden laboratories with voltage coursing through glass tubes and big dials on machines, the thawing Cold War, people smoking indoors and, most importantly for our story, emerging technologies foreshadowing the positive and negative aspects of their impact on our culture.

  1

  The black cat crept along the narrow top of the brick wall, its wet fur glistening as rain fell on nighttime Gotham.

  A powerful beam of light swept down from above, momentarily illuminating the feline’s depthless eyes, which twinkled in the harsh glare. The light swept past, a thrum of muffled turbines accompanying the moving illumination. The searchlight came from one of several Gotham City Police Department patrol dirigibles crisscrossing the wet sky.

  * * *

  From up above Gotham seemed quiet, but the officers in the blimp knew this was deceiving. As one of them piloted the rigid aircraft, another wore earphones connected to a console that controlled what was essentially audio surveillance equipment. The state-of-the-art electronics were channeled into a unit attached to the blimp’s undercarriage. While very much in the experimental stage, the gear could detect such occurrences as a voice raised in distress, a scream, or a gunshot, often before there was visual contact.

  A third officer, Nancy Payton, used a pair of military grade binoculars that looked more like something out of that science fiction film she’d seen on television. These were connected by heavy cable to a control unit, and had several electro-mechanical additions to their bulky frame. The lenses utilized a modified infrared light, the better to peer into the darkness.

  All of the equipment bore the logo of a division of Wayne Technologies.

  The blimp continued soaring across the night sky, just beneath a roiling layer of clouds lit from beneath by the silvery lights of the city. Down below, a large black vehicle glided through the dark slick streets over which the dirigible had just passed.

  * * *

  The grim figure behind the wheel was protected from the downpour by a rounded bullet-resistant glass canopy that allowed him a full 360-degree view of his surroundings. He was known to the denizens of the city, and beyond, as Batman. His was a fearful reputation as a detective and a seeker of truth. Some called him a vigilante, others a hero. Few dared to cross him.

  His vehicle, the Batmobile, was a one-of-a-kind wonder, from the carbon fiber armored hull to its custom-built, fuel-injected V12 engine, a 980-horsepower iron monster capable of achieving some 230 miles an hour if the need arose. The battering ram on the prow of this land ship was a stylized version of Batman’s cowl. The sleek vehicle ran low to the ground, but there were heavy duty hydraulics installed that, at the flip of a toggle switch, would enable the car to rise up, whether to avoid obstructions in a high-speed chase or to engage in an evasive maneuver.

  Given the nature, some might say obsession, of his work, Batman routinely modified the various potent gadgetry he had incorporated into the blue-black behemoth. There were ports that slid open, allowing blinding white light or explosive spheres to shoot out. A pair of spring-loaded forward-facing Browning machine guns could pop out on either side of the hood. These were particularly effective in disabling opponents who wore armored exoskeletons, and for less formidable targets they could be switched to non-lethal “sleeper” rounds.

  The Batmobile also boasted side-mounted electro-stun disc launchers, and a prototype laser device capable of cutting through as much as eight inches of steel. That was a recent addition. The vehicle even possessed compressed-air launchers that could shoot wickedly barbed grappling hooks from either side. When a hook became attached to a wall or any structure stable enough to act as an anchor, the car could instantly be powered into a sudden 180-degree turn.

  The automobile was as legendary as its owner, and the secrets of its armaments were jealously protected.

  Little escaped the masked figure’s attention. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a man weaving about on the sidewalk, leaning forward to grasp a lamppost to steady himself. Batman slowed, and his first impulse was to stop and render aid, but then he saw the man bring himself upright.

  He wore a carnival clown grin on his face.

  Batman frowned beneath the cowl. Anoth
er foolish individual high on drugs, likely the one known on the street as “Giggle Sniff.” It was a new concoction that had come to his city, one more way to addle the mind and destroy the body. Medical types were still assessing its long-term effects, but the implications of its symptoms were inescapable, especially to the Dark Knight.

  At times his crusade, to cleanse Gotham of such poison as an example, seemed overwhelming. The power-mad Ra’s al Ghul had suggested a simple solution—burn it all down and start over again. That approach lurked in a corner of Batman’s mind, and at times he wondered if the leader of the League of Assassins might be right.

  No, he thought, dismissing the idea yet again, determination steeling his resolve. Gotham can be saved. Even if it took him the rest of his life. And tonight he was taking what he hoped would be a bold step on that journey.

  The growl of the engine was almost imperceptible as the buildings sped past. Before long he was on the outskirts of town, where the landscape flattened out and the wind blew even more fiercely among gnarled trees older than the city itself.

  Massive wrought-iron gates appeared in the powerful beams of the headlights. Batman pulled to a stop at the entrance to Arkham Asylum. Even in daytime, the place was dreary and foreboding, even more so in this weather. Opening the canopy that was more like the cockpit of a fighter jet than a car, he unlimbered his tall form and stepped into the rain. Kevlar-woven cape trailing behind him, he strode toward those gates, his tread surprisingly light for a man of his heft.

  He was the product of years of intense training in an assortment of disciplines, having studied with masters throughout the world as a teenager then as a young adult. He learned martial arts such as hapkido and wing chun, chemical analysis, safe cracking, and acrobatics that included what was called traceurs, running up then backflipping off walls, contorting himself into seemingly bone-breaking positions. He perfected heart and pulse control learned from a hidden sect of yogis all said to be more than one hundred years old.

  Yet none of that would help him this night.

  * * *

  The gate wasn’t locked. He unlatched it to swing open with a screech of old metal. Knowing he was being watched from all sides, he strode toward the foreboding stone structure with lights shining in its windows.

  Two men awaited him at the front door. As he came closer thunder boomed and a jagged bolt of lightning sizzled the air overhead. The flash of charged light against the asylum’s rough-hewn walls and stilted roofs only made it seem more menacing, as if it hadn’t been built, but emerged from the underworld, exiled and unwelcome.

  In the early years of the 1900s its founder, Amadeus Arkham, had presented himself as a pioneer in the field of psychiatric treatment. Arkham’s mother Elizabeth had suffered from mental illness and had died an apparent victim of suicide. This had spurred him to renovate his family estate and devote his resources to helping others, that they might not suffer as she had.

  Yet the place had been built on a lie. Amadeus Arkham had ended his mother’s life, cutting her throat to end her suffering. Then he’d repressed the memory, hiding the truth from his own orderly mind. The subsequent murder of his wife and daughter had shocked him into remembering, sending Amadeus down a spiral of madness until finally he was committed to his own institution.

  The history of Arkham Asylum was steeped in blood.

  Batman was here to confront his greatest foe. Their own bloody conflict seemed endless, with more collateral victims than he could count and no good end in sight.

  There had to be a resolution.

  Reaching the front door, he gave a curt nod to the two men standing side by side as the rain beat down steadily. One was Tim Carstairs, a uniformed GCPD patrolman who Batman had encountered a few times before. The other held a Styrofoam cup of coffee. This was the police commissioner, James Worthington Gordon. Gotham’s top cop was dressed in a tan trench coat, his off-the-rack brown suit and striped tie visible underneath. Dollops of water dripped from the brim of the uniform’s cap and the Commissioner’s fedora.

  The Commissioner possessed a misleading appearance. White haired, sporting a white walrus-brush mustache and glasses, he might just as easily have been a harried high school principal who’d gotten turned around on the highway and had stopped to ask for directions. Yet Batman knew him well from their years of association. Beneath that mild-mannered exterior was a man who, in his younger years as a plainclothesman, had risked his life and the health of his family to confront and weed out the corruption that choked the police department like kudzu.

  His was a disciplined resolve that had remained strong as he rose through the ranks.

  2

  Gordon took another sip of his tepid coffee and handed the cup to his subordinate. He pulled open the door, which moved on silent hinges, and Batman stepped inside without saying a word. Gordon followed.

  They’d had a conversation earlier by phone, and something in his gut told the Commissioner he should be here when the man in the mask arrived. He couldn’t exactly put his finger on why, but he hadn’t made it this far by ignoring his cop’s intuition.

  The reception area was well lit, but the hallways beyond were jumbles of angular gloom. Sitting at the receptionist’s station was a woman with short-cropped blonde hair. There was a sign on her desk.

  You don’t have to

  be crazy to work

  here—but it helps!

  She held an unlit cigarette in her hand and gaped as Batman stood over her. Mutely she pointed down one of the halls, where the shadows of prison bars cut obliquely across the walls like glimpses of the internal landscapes of the inmates’ minds. This, Gordon knew, was the maximum-security wing. Batman strode past.

  The woman picked up her cigarette lighter, then stopped before sparking it to flame. Smoking was forbidden here, but who enforced such rules at Arkham? The stale scent in the air told a different story. Perhaps the sight of Batman had suggested to her that she address her vices.

  If only that worked on everyone, Gordon mused.

  Gordon started after the caped man. As he did, he paused momentarily to touch the peak of his water-soaked hat. A courtly gesture to the receptionist out of step with modern times, but there you had it—he was a man with one foot in the past, but understanding time stood still for no one.

  He followed the dark form down the corridor, Batman’s footfalls a whisper to the slap of Gordon’s shoes against tile. Periodically halogen lights gleamed overhead, so that their shadows were dark and crisp on the sickly yellow walls. They passed a metal door marked with a name and a number.

  Wesker, A.

  0770

  There was a window cut into the door with three bars. Gordon turned his head slightly to see into the cell and noted Arnold Wesker sitting on his bed. He was doing a crossword puzzle, most likely in the Gotham Gazette, one of the two dailies in town.

  Wesker’s was a classic case of dissociative identity disorder. Alone, he was a quiet man of modest means and ambitions—but he had a talent. He was quite adept at throwing his voice in his use of his ventriloquist dummies. Unlike most such acts, however, the little pals sitting on his lap took on personas of their own. Nor were his ambitions the same as other performers, entertaining at kids’ parties or on the stage between the burlesque acts.

  Through the forceful personality of the wood-and-wires construct he called Scarface, Wesker planned and pulled off daring heists and murders. He dressed the dummy in ’30s style gangster attire and outfitted it with a working miniature Tommy gun. While there were many social norms Wesker alone was too timid to cross, Scarface had no such limits.

  “Bats.”

  The word was startling in the silence of the hallway. It came from the once matinee handsome Harvey Dent. They had turned a corner and passed his cell. Dent had formerly been the district attorney of Gotham City, a hard-nosed yet fair prosecutor who was being groomed to run for the mayor’s office. But a tough public official like that made dangerous enemies. During a very pub
lic trial the gangster Sal Maroni threw sulfuric acid into Dent’s face, permanently and hideously disfiguring one side of his countenance. The incident drove Dent insane.

  After sessions with Dent, Arkham Asylum’s chief psychiatrist Dr. Joan Leland speculated that his personality had been fractured due, in part, to an abusive childhood. At any rate, following the incident “Two-Face” had been born. The Gotham villain would flip an old silver dollar coin, one side scarred, the other pristine, to choose how to carry off a scheme, or even decide the fate of an individual—sometimes permanently.

  Again, Batman didn’t break his stride. Dent stood at the door, his hands on the bars of his cell as he watched them pass. Gordon glanced at him, though. So much promise, so much disappointment.

  The two drew close to their destination, a cell numbered 0801 and indicating, tellingly, “Name Unknown.” A second uniformed police officer stood there on duty, arms crossed, slumping against the door, a bored look on his doughy face. Badoya, his name tag read. He had an old-fashioned ring of keys fastened to his belt loop. His nose looked as if it had been broken at some time in the past. The cop came alert as the two visitors arrived and unnecessarily saluted his boss, the Commissioner.

  “If you would,” Batman said. The cop out front and this man were not the usual guards. If he were to speculate, he’d say both were part of the around the clock duty assigned to the Commissioner, and that Gordon had put them in place for his arrival tonight.

  Normally there would be an orderly on duty whose function was to unlock the cell doors. Yet even by Arkham standards the occupant with the chalk-white complexion required extra precautions. For the Joker had plagued Batman and the city for many years with his deadly machinations. The giggling mass murderer was responsible for a body count that hadn’t been—couldn’t be tabulated, but it was monstrously high.

  Or it could be that Gordon was more concerned with what the masked man had in mind with this meeting, thus putting his own men in place.