The Further Adventures of The Joker (43 page)

The Joker lies on the cold stones of Arkham’s front plaza. Batman leans beside him. A black blade slices through the rope that binds the Joker’s legs, but he cannot move. His hands are locked before him, beyond any sensation.

“Nothing
ends in Arkham,” the Joker gasps. His throat burns with the aftertaste of the smoke from his own charred flesh.
“Nothing!”

Batman’s cowl becomes a sudden black shadow over the Joker as a searchlight hums into life on Arkham’s roof. Then another, and another, until the mask of night is removed from the Joker’s defeat.

Batman steps back and lifts his head. The Joker squints through the blinding light and sees the outlines of others who have been waiting. One of them is the man with two faces. But they wait no longer.

“It’s time it ended,” Batman calls out to the watchers of Arkham. He looks down at the Joker and suddenly the Joker knows what Batman plans to do. Everything else was nothing compared to the final defeat that faces him.

“Time to see you as you really are,” Batman says. He bends down and his black gloves are like claws as he digs into the soft white folds of the Joker’s flesh. He grabs at the outthrust cheeks, slips long fingers into the grimacing mouth, squeezes them like talons to get a good grip, a sure grip.

The Joker isn’t laughing.

And the Batman pulls against the flesh. And pulls against the blood. Until the watchers of Arkham gasp as they peer beneath the Joker’s mask and at last see that the Joker is revealed as . . .

The Joker’s waking scream of anguish echoed down the dark corridors of Arkham. The viewing panel on the door to his cell slipped open.

“Ten days,” Bartholomew said. “Been like this for ten days.” The chief psychiatrist slipped off his black-framed glasses and pushed his hand through his graying hair. “Ever since you brought him in.”

Beside the doctor, Batman stepped up to the viewing panel. In the cell, the Joker flopped on the padded floor, arms firmly held against him by the straitjacket he wore. He cackled softly to himself. The words he said were unintelligible. A thin trickle of drool at the side of his grinning mouth fed a growing dark stain beneath him.

“I finished my analysis of the chemical compound he had packaged in that shipment of sandbox sand,” Batman said.

Bartholomew whistled softly and turned to look at the costumed man beside him. They were almost the same height. “Johns Hopkins told us they’d need two more weeks to even finish the preliminary spectroscopy on it.”

Batman didn’t acknowledge the awe in the psychiatrist’s voice. “It’s molecularly similar to his Joker venom.”

Bartholomew shuddered. “Hideous stuff.”

“Absorbed by the lungs,” Batman continued. “Crosses the blood-brain barrier. Direct stimulation to the amygdala.”

Bartholomew nodded. “Causing the victim’s sleeping mind to create its worst nightmare.”

The Joker sat up slowly in his cell, becoming aware of his audience at last.

“Exactly,” Batman said. “The children of Gotham wouldn’t have had a chance if that sand had made it into the toy-store distribution network.”

“Neither would you,” Bartholomew said, “if the Joker hadn’t inhaled the dose he tried to use on you.”

The Joker pulled himself up on his cot, then stood. He seemed to make an effort to adjust his straitjacket. He wiped his spittle-covered chin on his shoulder. He was making himself look presentable.

“Do you know what the prognosis is?” Bartholomew asked Batman. He held his pen ready to make a note on the Joker’s chart.

“His system should metabolize the compound within six months,” Batman said.

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

F
or 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 pressed 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.