DC Comics novels--Batman

by Christa Faust

  Another was dressed in rags and spattered with blood and feathers, giggling and stroking the limp and headless carcass of a plump white chicken. Twin women, skinny and hunchbacked with choppy blonde bobs parted on opposite sides, shared a single, massive pelvis from which sprouted two thick but normal legs and two narrow, crooked torsos, topped by sharp-chinned and hateful faces howling with vicious laughter.

  They were all laughing, laughing at him. The only one who wasn’t laughing was the Joker, who maintained an uncharacteristically stoic expression as he watched Gordon try and fail to comprehend his bizarre surroundings.

  They were in some kind of derelict amusement park. Above them loomed the warped and weathered bones of the rollercoaster, against which a jumble of old signs had been haphazardly stacked. Some were shaped like what they were designed to sell—a giant hot dog, a carousel horse, or a sexy girl in a spangled pink costume. Others featured strange words and phrases spelled out in chipped florescent paint, dusty dead neon, or broken bulbs. TEN-IN-ONE and BUCKET TOSS and ALIVE!

  The Joker’s impromptu dais was topped with what had once been a seat on some kind of whirligig ride for children. At first glance, it appeared to be balanced on a massive pile of dead babies, their chubby limbs skewed and dirty, their eyes vacant black holes. That couldn’t be right, but he felt like he couldn’t trust any of his senses. He still felt like he had been drugged, his mind simultaneously sluggish and hyperaware of every surreal detail.

  Without warning, Gordon was hit with a powerful sense memory so pure and intense that it eclipsed everything. It was the first time he held the newborn Barbara in his arms, in the maternity ward. She stopped crying as soon as the nurse handed her to him. He could feel her tiny hand gripping his finger as he smiled down at her, drunk on the sweet smell of her funny little tuft of strawberry blonde hair. In that moment, he could feel his heart opening wide like a previously locked door, and he knew then that he would gladly die for that little girl.

  But where was his little girl now?

  The present reasserted itself on his reeling senses, abruptly returning him to this twisted reality. It felt like a kick in the stomach.

  Barbara? Where is Barbara?

  Babies. They couldn’t be real…

  They weren’t babies. They were just dolls. Hundreds of naked baby dolls piled up in some kind of sick mockery of a mass grave. But why? Who would do such a thing. Dead dolls. Dead babies. Dead daughters.

  Dead.

  His mind reeled, caught in a disintegrating spiral of horror and shattered memory. Was he dreaming? Was he dead? Was he in hell?

  A sharp smoky stench of burning plastic pulled him back from the brink. Focus. He had to focus. He fixed his slippery mind on that smell. When he looked up, he found the source. What he had first taken for makeshift torches were actually burning doll heads, hoisted on sticks. Droplets of flaming liquid rubber sizzled on the ground around them while the bland and cherubic faces slowly melted into leering plastic skulls with staring glass eyes.

  Focus. He had to focus.

  Again unbidden, an intense memory of Barbara flooded his senses. This one of her laying bloody and broken on the floor. Of the Joker, looming over her with cold, crazy eyes and that horrible smile.

  “You,” he said, fixing his woozy gaze on the Joker lounging atop his throne of dead dolls. “Oh no. I… I remember.”

  “Remember?” the Joker replied. “Oh, I wouldn’t do that.”

  * * *

  “If you’d like to make a call…”

  No, the voice was real. The black plastic phone handset was right there, just inches from her face. Her woozy gaze locked on the neat little circle of holes in the center of the receiver. The voice was coming from the hand set.

  “If you’d like to make a call…”

  She would like to make a call. Now, if only she could find a way to hang up and try again.

  She must have grayed out again, more than once maybe, because it seemed like a really long time passed between her wanting to make a call and figuring out how to make her hand reach over and push down on the cradle. But somehow, she did, and was rewarded with the best sound she’d ever heard.

  A dial tone.

  She dialed a number she knew by heart. The emergency hotline in the Batcave.

  “Alfred,” she said into the receiver. “Patch me through to him.”

  * * *

  “Remembering’s dangerous.” The Joker shifted from his lazy, insouciant pose to sudden predatory intensity, that razor sharp grin thrust forward like a weapon. “I find the past such a worrying, anxious place. ‘The past tense,’ I suppose you’d call it.”

  He snickered between clenched teeth. Gordon raised himself up on his knees and made another feeble attempt to twist his shaking body and pull away from his bizarre captors. He was rewarded with another vicious pop of the leash, choking off his air and making him gag.

  “Memory’s so treacherous,” the Joker continued. “One moment you’re lost in a carnival of delights, with poignant childhood aromas, the flashing neon of puberty, all that sentimental candyfloss. The next, it leads you somewhere you don’t want to go…”

  Gordon couldn’t concentrate on the Joker’s unhinged monologue. His own mind was lost in a maze of jumbled memories. He remembered watching teenage Barbara sneaking out of her room late one night and down the fire escape—to meet some boy, no doubt—and him lighting a cigarette and thinking he should probably at least try to stop her. Then their eyes met through the rain-streaked window and she flashed that rakish little smile and his heart melted.

  His girl, far too much like him for her own good.

  Where is she? What in God’s name has the Joker done to her?

  Why couldn’t he stay focused? What was wrong with his mind? Had he been drugged? Poisoned? Was he dying?

  Barbara? Where are you, Barbara?

  At some point they untied his wrists, though he couldn’t exactly remember when or how. He gripped fistfuls of dirt in his tingling hands and ground his teeth, desperate to anchor himself in the here and now. Yet everything around him was so surreal, he couldn’t be sure what was real and what wasn’t. Harsh, mocking faces. The Joker. This was madness.

  Gordon struggled to block it all out and focus on the dirt between his fingers.

  This. This is real.

  “…somewhere dark and cold,” the Joker continued, coming slowly to his feet, bending his lanky body without moving his head so that his smile remained locked in place. “Filled with the damp, ambiguous shapes of things you’d hoped were forgotten.” He ambled slowly down the steps from his junkyard dais, kicking a stray doll out of his way.

  “Memories can be vile, repulsive little brutes,” he said. “Like children, I suppose.” He laughed, gestured, and Gordon’s captors forced him again to his feet, dragging him away. Above them hovered a tattered, lurid banner with dripping red letters.

  GHOST TRAIN

  But he could hardly see it. Instead he saw Barbara.

  Barbara!

  Barbara at two, naked except for a diaper and one red sock, refusing to be dressed and running through the apartment like a tiny demon, drunk on the brand-new power of the word NO.

  Barbara at six, holding his hand and pulling him urgently toward the adult section of the library because the books in the kids’ section were so boring and she’d read them all anyway.

  Barbara at eleven, in front of her school, pulling away from his clumsy attempt to kiss her cheek and rolling her eyes dramatically.

  “God, Dad,” she had said. “You’re embarrassing me!”

  “Barbara,” he cried, unable to stop himself, just as he was unable to stop the gut-wrenching sobs that shook his body as he stumbled toward his unknown fate. “Oh no. Oh no.”

  “But can we live without them?” The Joker was still talking, behind him but getting closer. It seemed as if he would never stop talking and talking and talking. “Memories are what our reason is based upon. If we can’t face them, we de
ny reason itself! Although why not? We aren’t contractually tied down to rationality.”

  The Joker’s voice was suddenly way too close, his hot breath on Gordon’s cheek.

  “There is no sanity clause.”

  Gordon was sure for the hundredth time that he was going to pass out, but he didn’t. He couldn’t. The horror just went on and on. The cackling laughter of the circus freaks felt like acid on his exposed skin. His mind swirled, senses reeling and body pushed beyond the brink of endurance. He couldn’t think.

  Why couldn’t he think?

  Those terrible little not-children who had been leading him along shoved him forward so he staggered and half fell into a rusty, faded Ghost Train car with a warped and peeling smile painted across its dented nose. Bony, skittering hands far too strong for their size held him down and strapped him in to the ancient ride while his head lolled back in a dizzy swoon.

  “So when you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought,” the Joker said, “heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember there’s always madness.”

  The obscene cherubim checked the straps, making sure Gordon was safely strapped in for the ride.

  “Madness is the emergency exit,” the Joker added. “You can just step outside, and close the door on all those dreadful things that happened. You can lock them away.”

  With a theatrical flourish he pulled a massive skull-topped lever. The little car lurched forward and smacked into a swinging door embossed with a leering clown face, propelling Gordon into the blackness within.

  “Forever.”

  * * *

  As the Batmobile screeched to a stop in front of the My Alibi bar, the working girls and hustlers who had clustered around the battered front door scattered like cockroaches. He wasn’t looking for them. He was looking for a lead and he wanted it quick, no time for subterfuge disguised as Matches Malone. There had to be a line on the Joker somewhere in this waterfront dive bar. He was up to something, something he couldn’t name, but he’d known him too long to ignore his instincts.

  He’d shown the Joker’s wanted poster to a couple of stickup men jonesing for Giggle Sniff. The damned drug was in short demand thanks to Batgirl busting Python Palmares and the burning of his lab.

  Then on to various other bottom feeders, from them up the chain to Junior Galante after knocking out a couple of his goons, and even Oswald Cobblepot—no Joker ally—about to make parole to re-open his damn Iceberg Lounge. He’d come up blank so far, but it was just a matter of whether this low life or another was going to know what he wanted to know.

  Inside, the bar was a long narrow room with a low and uneven tin ceiling stained by decades of nicotine and bad intentions. There was a large rusty drain in the center of the floor to allow the blood and vomit to be hosed off after every shift. A couple of crooked old neon beer signs were the only thing that could have passed for décor, and only one of them actually worked, casting a sickly green glow over the hostile patrons. Rough working women. Surly longshoremen and low-rent bagmen. Old men with faces like clenched fists.

  None of them were the Joker or any of his known henchmen.

  Batman cut a swath through the intoxicated crowd as he strode toward the bar. No one was too drunk to get the hell out of his way. He headed straight for the bar’s most infamous patron—at least for this evening.

  Sneaky Danton sat in the gunfighter’s seat at the far left end, bookended by a pair of salty ladies. They were the best out of a bad crop, which wasn’t saying much. A butter-faced pair of bottle blondes similar enough to be sisters, both barely clad in miniskirts and tube tops. As Batman twisted a leatherclad fist in Danton’s shirtfront, hauling him up off his barstool, the two women quickly remembered something important they needed to do elsewhere.

  The burly, neckless bartender reached for a sawed-off shotgun clipped under the bar, and there was way too much bloodshot white showing around the pale blue irises of his eyes. Without taking his own eyes off the squirming criminal in his grip, Batman pulled a black spiked elongated casing from his utility belt and held it aloft for the bartender to see.

  “I wouldn’t,” he said. “There’s enough explosive compound here to bring this place down around that square head of yours.”

  The bartender offered a shaky smile and raised his hairy-knuckled hands like it was all just a foolish misunderstanding. He also remembered something important he needed to do and shuffled out through the back.

  Batman laid the device on the bar. Then he took the rumpled wanted poster from an inner pocket. With unnerving calm, he smoothed it out on the sticky surface.

  “Where is he?”

  “Wh… what?”

  Batman cracked Danton’s head sharply against the wood, and then pressed the thug’s cheek against the Joker’s two-dimensional ruby red grin.

  “Where. Is. He?”

  “He’s not here, I swear!” Danton blubbered, looking like he was trying to tuck his head down into his body like a turtle. “I ain’t seen him since he got out, and neither have any of my girls. Nobody has, honest! He usually comes to see his regulars as soon as he’s loose, but this time, nothing. He’s like gone ghost, man. Disappeared.” When the Dark Knight didn’t release him, Danton’s eyes practically bugged out of his head.

  “If knew anything, I’d tell you, man. I don’t owe that freak nothin’!”

  Batman’s cowl communicator crackled. He touched the side of his mask over his ear.

  “Yes?” he hissed.

  * * *

  “Miss Gordon?” Alfred Pennyworth was saying urgently on the other end of the phone. Had she blacked out again? “Miss Gordon, are you all right?”

  “Just put me through to him!” she snapped, then added, “Please.”

  She bit hard into the inside of her cheek and squeezed the sharp edges of the little chip in her hand, desperate to stay focused, to drive back the blackness that kept creeping up on her. When Bruce’s familiar, gravelly voice came on the line, she felt a shaky wave of relief so powerful it nearly took her breath away.

  “Don’t ask any questions,” she said. “Just listen. There’s no time. The Joker’s got Daddy.”

  There was a weighty pause on the other end of the line.

  “I’m listening.”

  “I know you can activate the tracking in my watch remotely,” she said. “You told me you couldn’t but don’t bother to deny it.” She paused, fighting a massive wave of dizziness and nausea. “I slipped the watch… into the Joker’s pocket… Track him and find out where he took my father.”

  “What the hell did he do to you?” Bruce asked, genuine concern mixed with anger in his normally steady voice.

  “Forget about me,” she said. She could feel that she was fading fast. “He’s taking it to the limit this time. His eyes…”

  “Sir,” Pennyworth’s voice came back on the line, cutting in to their call. “Sir, we have received an… unusual transmission via the Batcave’s main computer.”

  “Find Daddy,” she whispered. “Please…”

  She could hear sirens in the distance, getting closer.

  When the blackness came this time, she embraced it, swan-dived into it. Batman knew what to do. He would take the reins now. Her father would be saved. She didn’t have to fight anymore. She let it all slip through her fingers like the fragments of a bad dream.

  If this was death, so be it.

  33

  Batman pushed the Batmobile’s limits as he raced toward the tracer’s origin point. A glowing green screen in the center of the console showed a ghostly maze of Gotham City streets, with a pulsing red dot moving along a back alley. Barbara’s watch.

  As soon as she told him about it, he’d activated it remotely. To his surprise, it was on the move. That meant the Joker might not have found it. There was still a chance.

  It wasn’t moving fast enough to be inside a vehicle. The Joker had to be on foot. What the hell is he up to now?

  The b
ig car zoomed past traffic by moving into the opposite lane. An eighteen-wheeler came from the other direction, the driver pounding on his horn. At the last possible second the Batmobile roared back into the proper lane, the wind from the passing truck buffeting the car.

  The Dark Knight’s eyes flicked back and forth from the street to that red dot on the screen as he circumvented every obstacle and slipped between and around slower vehicles. Time was the enemy. With every moment that passed, the madman might find the watch. If he did, there was no telling what he might do to his prisoner.

  Predicting the Joker’s insane actions was a waste of time, especially now. He’d gone to a place they never could have expected. Batman had to locate his quarry before the question became moot.

  “Alfred,” he said, thumbing the car’s communicator on. “Any word on Barbara’s condition?”

  “She’s en route to Gotham General’s trauma center right now,” Pennyworth replied. “They are preparing for emergency surgery.”

  “Prognosis?” Batman asked, ripping into a hairpin turn and zooming the Batmobile through a red light.

  “Master Bruce,” Pennyworth replied. “Preliminary indications are it’s a spinal injury which, as you know, are very complex. Every case is unique. If she survives, it’s next to impossible to predict the long-term effects this early.”

  “If she survives?” Batman felt the muscles in his clenched jaw twitch as he gripped the wheel hard. “Just give it to me straight, Alfred.”

  There was a pause, faint static crackling in the Batmobile’s soundproof cockpit. “It doesn’t look good, sir. She may be physically compromised for the rest of her life.”

  There was a hesitation.

  “What else aren’t you telling me?”