DC Comics novels--Batman

by Christa Faust

Slowly, painfully, he opened his eyes again.

  The Batmobile really was there, the huge ornament on its prow filling his vision. The piercing headlights sent the crowd of freaks scattering to the holes from which they had come.

  Even so, he didn’t dare believe it until he heard the voice again. It was deep, the words sounding as if they were carefully measured before he released them.

  “I’ve been thinking lately,” Batman said. “About you.”

  Gordon’s attention shifted to the Joker. The madman just stood there, his hair whipping in the wind, a surprisingly calm smile on his face.

  “About me. About what’s going to happen to us in the end.”

  The grinning ghoul showed no fear.

  “We’re going to kill each other, aren’t we?” the caped man asked. “Perhaps you’ll kill me. Perhaps I’ll kill you. Perhaps sooner… perhaps later.”

  A long pause. Gordon didn’t know how Batman could be so calm. Finally, his patience must have run out. He set his jaw, and launched himself at his opponent, his cape spreading wide like the wings it was meant to represent.

  The Joker grinned all the wider, and pulled a small, round object from an inner pocket. As Batman pressed down, the lunatic used the strange little device to discharge a stream of unknown fluid onto Batman’s arm. Uttering a grunt of pain, Batman rolled away from the prone Joker, hissing between his teeth and clutching at the wound.

  The Joker clambered to his feet and ran for the nearby fun house, its door painted to resemble the toothy grinning mouth in a clown’s face.

  Gordon watched this exchange from the space between his folded arms, not wanting to believe that it was real because he was so afraid that it wasn’t. Batman looked as if he was going to pursue his foe, but then he looked back over his shoulder.

  No! Gordon cried inwardly. Don’t let him escape!

  The Dark Knight approached the bars of his cage.

  “Jim?” he said, his voice both guttural and steady. He did something to the lock, and the door swung open. “Jim, are you… are you still okay?”

  Something about that simple, ordinary phrase unleashed an emotional flood. What did that even mean anymore? How could anything ever be okay again? Okay was for people who had never peeked past the polite curtain of normal everyday life and seen the horrors and madness that lay just behind. Okay was for people who still believed they could protect the ones they loved, who believed there were good people, good cops, good parents.

  Okay was for people who didn’t know the ugly truth.

  “Oh, god,” he choked out, wrapping his arms around his rescuer, gripping his cape.

  Once Gordon started sobbing, it was like a tsunami, washing over him. It felt like a kind of psychic vomiting, his tortured body and shredded soul wracked with anguish as he felt himself reliving every awful moment of torment, again and again.

  “It’s okay,” Batman said, holding him up. There was that word again. “It’s okay. Let it come.” Gordon would have collapsed face-down in the mud if his friend hadn’t been there to hold him up. He clung to the stiff, unyielding armor of Batman’s chest plate like it was a life raft. Like it was the only sure and solid thing left in a whirling vortex of trauma.

  Batman helped Gordon settle to the ground, gently this time. Finally the convulsions abated. The fear and the anger were still there, but he could hold them in check. At last his rational mind asserted control.

  When he was able to speak, he tried to convey the enormity of what had happened—yet simple, everyday words he’d used for decades suddenly seemed painfully inadequate. Still, he forced his lips to move, forced sounds to emerge. He needed Batman to understand the only thing that mattered.

  “He… He shot Barbara,” Gordon said. “He… showed me. He showed me what he did.” He wrapped his arms around his shivering body as guilt and shame and anger and horror and a thousand other dark emotions tried to rise back up. “He tried to drive me mad.”

  Just saying the words out loud gave his mind a solid handhold, and enabled him to begin pulling himself up out of the abyss. What had happened to him was awful, perhaps unbearable, but it wasn’t infinite. He was still here, and it was over… or it soon would be. The Joker had failed, and he would be brought to justice for what he had done.

  Had to be.

  “Listen,” Batman said, pulling a drop cloth off a nearby stack of crates and draping it over his shoulders. “She’s been taken to the hospital and has the best team of surgeons working on her right now. The police are following right behind me. I’ll stay here with you until they arrive.”

  What? No!

  “No!” Gordon snapped. He took a deep, shaky breath to steady himself, and squared his shoulders. “No,” he said again. “I’m okay. I think the Joker gave me something so I couldn’t fight back, but I feel like it’s starting to wear off now. You have to go after him. I want him brought in… and I want him brought in by the book!”

  Batman nodded, eyes narrow and mouth set in a grim, hard line.

  “I’ll do my best.”

  As he turned, moving quickly toward the fun house entrance, Gordon called after him.

  “By the book, you hear?” he said. “We have to show him!”

  Batman hit the fun house door with his shoulder, barreling inside without acknowledging Gordon’s words. But he had heard. Gordon was certain.

  “We have to show him that our way works!” But Batman was gone. Gordon put a palm over his eyes and slumped down.

  It was out of his hands now.

  38

  Batman paused for a moment inside the fun house door to let his eyes adjust to the gloom. The place had a sad smell of mildew and neglect mixed with rat piss and a strange plasticky candy undertone that reminded him of those weird fruit-scented markers for children.

  There were scattered, uneven fairy lights in mismatched colors running the length of the skewed hallway he’d entered, but no other illumination. As his eyesight acclimated, he could make out a series of distorted, leering faces on the walls that seemed to flicker and twitch. Their eyes followed him as he started down the hall toward a shiny red door.

  The floor slanted upward and the ceiling slanted downward, creating a claustrophobic sense of forced perspective as he moved closer to the illusive door. Although it had seemed very far away at first, when he reached it far too quickly, he found that it was really child-sized. Forced to double over, he dropped into a crouch and reached for the coin-sized doorknob.

  His broad shoulders barely fit through, and the doorframe scraped painfully against the acid burn on his left arm, rupturing several blisters and causing a new hiss of pain to slip from between his teeth. There was a drop of nearly three feet from the miniature door jamb to the floor of the new corridor.

  “So…” The Joker’s voice echoed through the fun house, making it impossible to pinpoint exactly where it was coming from. “I see you received the free ticket I sent you. I’m glad. I did so want you to be here.”

  Batman kept moving quickly but cautiously forward while clocking his strange surroundings. The walls were covered with slanting and overlapping screens flickering with surreal images of the madman’s face, but grotesquely distorted. All wild, mad eyes and wolfish, cannibal teeth.

  “You see,” the Joker continued, as the strange stylized faces seemed to mouth his words. “It doesn’t matter if you catch me and send me back to the asylum. Gordon’s been driven mad. I’ve proved my point.”

  Batman didn’t bother to contradict the Joker’s self-satisfied monologue. He just kept moving.

  “I’ve demonstrated that there’s no difference between me and everyone else!” The talking faces on the screens went maddeningly out of synch with the audio, adding to the feeling of distorted unreality. “All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That’s how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day.”

  There was a stuttering, subliminal flash of something across all the screens, a bright burst of color underc
ut by a flicker of something bloody. Something too awful to describe, and gone before his mind could register its significance. By the time he realized it was just a distraction, it was too late.

  The floor of the corridor dropped out from under him. If not for his finely honed reflexes, he would have plummeted to the bottom of a deep shaft. As it was, he only caught himself with one hand as he fell, grabbing the edge and hanging above what must have once been a ball pit.

  Looking down, he could see row after row of thick metal spikes. A forest of shiny metal tubes, each one freshly sliced on a wicked hypodermic angle, their needle-sharp tips dripping and glistening with some oily, iridescent substance.

  “You had a bad day once, am I right?” the Joker’s disembodied voice asked as Batman twisted his body to pull himself up over the edge of the pit. “I know I am. I can tell. You had a bad day and everything changed. Why else would you dress up like a flying rat?”

  A fleeting memory flashed through his mind. His mother’s arm around his small shoulders, comfort and protection against the chill of that long-ago alley. The warm, gentle perfume drifting from her soft fur coat and her reassuring smile, telling him everything was going to be okay.

  And then…

  “You had a bad day, and it drove you as crazy as everybody else. Only you won’t admit it! You have to keep pretending that life makes sense. That there’s some point to all this struggling.”

  No. He wasn’t going back there again. The Joker wasn’t going to get to him that easily. He had fought against the siren song of that particular memory loop, every day of his adult life, and wasn’t going to give in now. He pulled himself the rest of the way up out of the pit, and continued down the curving corridor toward the sound of the Joker’s voice.

  “God, you make me want to puke!”

  The feeling was mutual, but Batman wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of a response.

  When he reached the dogleg twist at the end of the hallway, it led into a new section labeled BARREL OF LAUGHS. This was a series of rotating cylinders painted to look like giant barrels on the outside, but all slippery steel on the inside. The steel had been defaced with dripping acid-green spray paint, one short word repeated over and over.

  HA! HA! HA! HA! HA!

  At the far end of this moving tunnel, the shadow of the Joker was visible. At first it looked as if he was brandishing his walking stick, but then Batman realized it was a microphone.

  “I mean, what is it with you?” the lunatic persisted. “What made you what you are? Girlfriend killed by the mob, maybe? Brother carved up by some mugger?” He paused, then added, “Something like that, I bet… Something like that.”

  Again, the memories of that night tried to force themselves up into his conscious mind. Details leaked out around the edges. Blood on his mother’s fur coat. His father’s hand—the big strong hand he was supposed to hold so he would be safe crossing the street—palm up and twitching on the crimson-soaked concrete.

  He shook his head to keep it clear, and stepped into the first of the rotating cylinders. It was designed to be slick and disorienting, but Batman managed to keep his balance, moving gracefully against the spin and using the textured tread of his boots to prevent him from slipping.

  “Something like that happened to me, you know,” the Joker said as Batman made the tricky transition between a cylinder spinning to the left and one spinning to the right. “I… I’m not exactly sure what it was. Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another. If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice.”

  The Joker’s laughter echoed back through the cylinders, mirrored in the spinning graffiti surrounding Batman as he made his way into the final one.

  HA! HA! HA! HA! HA!

  He kept his focus riveted on the wall of the room ahead—one that wasn’t rotating—fighting a creeping feeling of vertigo. Just another few feet and he’d be back on solid ground.

  “But my point is…” the Joker continued. “My point is, I went crazy. When I saw what a black, awful joke the world was, I went crazy as a coot! I admit it! Why can’t you?”

  Nearly there. Just a few more feet. He steadied himself against the spin and then leapt forward, diving out of the revolving barrel and hitting the solid floor with a tight tuck and roll. When he leapt to his feet, coiled and ready to strike, he spotted the jocular bastard ducking through a doorway marked HALL OF MIRRORS.

  “I mean, you’re not unintelligent,” the Joker said. “You must see the reality of the situation. Do you know how many times we’ve come close to World War Three over a flock of geese on a computer screen?”

  As Batman ran toward the door leading into the hall of mirrors, he noticed that the floor beneath him had become a metal grate, replacing solid wood. Abruptly a loud, whistling jet of stale air shot up from below, smelling like old hydraulic fluid and burning dust. He also noticed a small set of dark, empty bleachers to one side of the grate. Here carnival goers could watch as the compressed air upended loose skirts, annoying the women and amusing the spectators.

  “Do you know what triggered the last world war?” the Joker asked. “An argument over how many telegraph poles Germany owed its war debt creditors. Telegraph poles!” That elicited a burst of cackling laughter.

  Batman paused for a moment in the doorway. There were two paths from which he could choose, both lined with cracked and dirty mirrors creating the illusion of dizzying gray infinity sweeping vertiginously off in all directions. On the left-hand path, far down the crooked corridor, he spotted a fleeting flash of green and purple.

  A thousand fleeing Jokers.

  Batman followed, trailed by a legion of his own reflections.

  “It’s all a joke!” the Joker said, bringing his laughter under control. “Everything anybody ever valued or struggled for…”

  Batman reached a series of angled chambers combining mirrors and clear glass, designed to confuse and disorient the patrons.

  “It’s all a monstrous, demented gag!” Batman followed his voice through the maze and into a dead-end room shaped like an asymmetrical octagon. “So why can’t you see the funny side?” Strangely enough, the clown sounded subdued. The question seemed… serious.

  Every wall reflected a different distorted, full length image of the Joker. Some angled to the left, some to the right. Some angled up, some down, but off all the reflections, three were straight on, and Batman focused on those. His eyes flicked from one to another and back again.

  One of the panels had to be clear.

  But which one?

  “Why aren’t you laughing?” the Joker asked, his long white face suddenly mournful. Was it because Batman refused to participate? Was that betrayal reflected in the eyes?

  He made his choice.

  Arms thrust forward so his gauntlets would take the brunt of any impact, he burst through. With a sense of satisfaction, he watched surprise—and then terror—sweep over his quarry’s features.

  “Because I’ve heard it all before,” Batman said, “and it wasn’t funny the first time.” He grabbed the Joker by the collar, pulling his face nose-to-nose with his own. Distorted reflections mimicked the movement all around, repeated over and over in the warped depth of the fun house mirrors.

  The Joker let out a wild howl. It might have been fear or it might have been mirth, but as Batman hurled his foe through another pane, shattering it instantly, the sound most certainly was pain.

  Batman followed his adversary through the impromptu exit from the hall of mirrors and into what seemed to be a drab, dimly lit service corridor. A section of the fun house never meant to be seen by customers, allowing access to the wiring and machinery that powered the various moving attractions, it was lit only by two dull yellow bulbs, wrapped in rusted cages and protruding from the unpainted wooden walls. At the far end of the corridor was a metal door propped open with a chunk of broken brick.

  “Incidentally,” Batman said as he approached his fallen opponent. “I spoke to Commission
er Gordon before I came in here. He’s fine. Despite all your sick, vicious little games, he’s as sane as he ever was. So maybe ordinary people don’t always crack.”

  The Joker peered over his shoulder and scrabbled in a pocket for some weapon. Batman stepped down on his wrist like he would on the neck of a striking snake.

  The Joker swore and twisted his trapped hand, dropping the weapon. Batman could see it clearly now—it was a rubber wristband fitted with a hypodermic needle. He kicked it out of the Joker’s reach.

  “Maybe there isn’t any need to crawl under a rock with all the other slimy things when trouble hits,” he growled, dragging the clown to his feet and pulling him close. Tiny fragments of glass twinkled in the purple weave of the Joker’s jacket, falling around them like glitter in a snow globe. “Maybe it was just you all the time.”

  “NO!” the Joker cried, gouging at Batman’s eyes with hooked fingers and twisting the fabric of his cowl so he couldn’t see.

  “Unngh.” Batman had to let go of his opponent to readjust his eye-holes and knuckle the streaming tears from his swollen and stinging eyes.

  “Don’t,” he spat, hearing his foe giggling again behind him. Then bright shooting stars exploded in his head as something hard struck home on one side. He was flung to the side, dropping to his knees. Grasping a railing of some sort, he shook his head, forcing fury to eclipse the pain as a pulsing knot began to form just above his left ear. Struggling to get his mask—and his wits—properly realigned, he heard a familiar sound.

  The soft, deadly ptchik of a switchblade.

  Before his brain had time to fully process this new information, his hand shot out to intercept the downward swing of the Joker’s attack. Grabbing the wrist in an iron grip, he used the Joker’s own momentum against him, twisting the wrist of his blade hand and pulling him into an uppercut to the midsection.

  The Joker doubled over with a comical squawk, blade flying free from his open fingers. He stammered and sucked wind as Batman twisted a fistful of the Joker’s tacky shirtfront and raised him so they were face to face. The Joker looked genuinely frightened and almost childlike in that moment.