by Paul Dini
“Why not?” she asked.
“Because you’re a girl. Harlequin’s a guy.” The clerk pointed at a fluffy dress with a corset-style bodice. “Columbine’s the girl.”
Harley wrinkled her nose. “No, thanks. This is me.”
“But Harlequin’s supposed to be a guy,” he insisted. “It’s a character from a form of theatre called commedia dell’arte from Italy—”
“I don’t care if it’s a la carte from Kalamazoo,” Harley said. “I call the shots an’ I say it’s me.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “No offense.”
“Okay. Now back off, I’m tryin’ ta shop here.”
“Whatever you say,” he told her, backing off. “I’ll be at the counter when you’re done.”
Harley had already known what she wanted when she’d gone in, but now that she was here, her mind was filling up with even more ideas. By the time she checked out, she was practically euphoric, but a lot of that feeling was just from quitting her job. It was like she’d escaped from a prison she hadn’t even known she was in, a prison made of dos and don’ts. Mostly don’ts. Why hadn’t she realized how stifled she’d been at Arkham? She should have done this weeks ago.
Except that would have meant abandoning her patient, and she never would have done that. Good thing the Joker was in the medical ward. It would be easier to break him out from there than his regular cell.
She paid cash and turned down the clerk’s offer of help to carry her purchases to her car. Men always treated women like little babies who couldn’t do anything without help.
Harley smiled. Tonight, a bunch of men were going to need a whole lot of help when she finished with them.
* * *
All practical jokes had an underlying nastiness to them; the funniest ones were usually the meanest. Those unfortunate enough to be the butt of a practical joke were expected to laugh along with everyone else, be a good sport who could appreciate the comedic value of their humiliation. If they didn’t think looking stupid in public was hilarious, they were party-poopers with no sense of humor.
Well, tonight’s festivities would divide the good sports from the party-poopers, Harley thought as she filled some rubber chickens with ball bearings and sealed them with superglue. Replacing the light, aluminium springs in the fake snakes that jumped out of the can labelled PEANUTS with more heavy-duty coils wasn’t too hard, but cramming them back into the cans was really difficult. The rocks she attached to the top of each new snake actually helped.
When she was done with the props, she tried on the costume and was delighted at how well it fit. That stupid clerk had been full of it—no guy would have looked half as good in this Harlequin suit. But then, it was her name—Harley Quinn—just like the Joker said.
Harley took it off, made herself a light supper, and then settled down to wait. In comedy, timing was everything. It wasn’t time yet.
* * *
Every place has its own kind of time zone, and nowhere is this truer than in a mental hospital, especially an asylum for the criminally insane. Late at night, time bifurcates. The staff live in one temporal reality and the patients inhabit an entirely different one.
Two a.m. PT—Patient Time—sits at the border between staying up late and insomniacs’ purgatory. Anyone still awake after two a.m. is on a direct, sleepless course to Suicide O’Clock at three a.m. Patients who hear voices won’t hear anything comforting; if they have visual hallucinations, they won’t be pretty.
Four a.m. is officially Dead of Night. Insomniacs aren’t asleep but they aren’t as awake as they think they are. Four a.m. is the nadir before morning begins its approach. Breathing and respiration become sluggish, not just for patients but for the staff on the graveyard shift. This is when the two worlds of patients and staff are at perigee and the boundary between them becomes porous. Rational and irrational are not as easily distinguished from each other as in the daylight hours.
In the Dead of Night, anything can happen.
* * *
The guard at Arkham’s main reception desk tonight was a forty-four-year-old man named Gavin McDaniels. After a brief career as a minor-league football player and a longer sojourn as a bouncer for several of Gotham City’s more notorious clubs, he had fetched up as a security guard and part-time orderly at Arkham. He was calm, not easily riled, and not so corrupt as to exacerbate Arkham’s existing problems.
The remarkable thing about him, however, was that he slept with his eyes open. More remarkably, he didn’t know it. He was happily single and childless. If any of the ladies he had occasional, brief relationships with ever noticed this quirk, they failed to mention it.
Paul Mendez, the head of security of Arkham, was among the few who did know, and it was why he always assigned McDaniels to the main reception desk on the graveyard shift. Anyone wanting to break in probably wasn’t going to use the front door. But any potential intruders casing the joint would likely go elsewhere if they saw an apparently wide-awake guard on the front desk.
Harley had found out about McDaniels’ eyes-wide-shut condition on her way out after a marathon therapy session with her puddin’ and filed the knowledge away for possible future usefulness.
* * *
McDaniels had been asleep for almost two hours when the distant sound of a car engine worked its way into his vague, random dreams without waking him. The front door opening woke him, but when he saw the red-and-black harlequin with tiny bells on the floppy points of her hat, he thought he was dreaming and started to doze off again.
“Hey, Gavin-baby!” said a comical female voice with a heavy Brooklyn accent. “How’s it goin’?”
McDaniels blinked at the clown-white face grinning hugely at him with red-and-black lips, and he jumped, startled. He forgot the alarm button and his radio. All he remembered was that any time you saw something like this in Arkham, you were in deep shit. He also recognized the voice, as silly and high-pitched as it was.
“Dr. Quinzel?” he said, blinking.
“Smell my poi-fyume! It’s from Paree!” The harlequin produced an oversized atomizer with a squeeze bulb. The cool mist she sprayed into his face did smell good. It was the last thing that crossed his mind before he hit the floor.
The harlequin leaned over the counter to look at him. “It’s called ‘Essence De La Lights Out,’” she added.
Gavin McDaniels didn’t answer. He was out cold and, for once, his eyes were closed.
* * *
The bells on Harley’s jester-style hat jingled cheerfully as she moved behind the reception desk and woke the computer terminal. Disabling the alarms and the surveillance cameras was absurdly easy. Hacking in from outside was damned near impossible, but if you were on the premises, you could go nuts. Just like everyone else, Harley thought, giggling. She erased herself from the surveillance record, then programmed every camera to replay video from one a.m. to three a.m. on a loop. Much better than knocking the cameras out completely; by the time anybody noticed, she’d be long gone. If anybody noticed.
* * *
Rosalind Bellefontaine, RN, didn’t make a big deal about being Arkham Asylum’s first transwoman on the nursing staff. She was innately modest—she had chosen a service profession because the focus was on other people, not herself. But she had also learned to be circumspect; being trans meant having to be ready to deal with situations that could, without warning, turn hostile or even dangerous, not just in Arkham but anywhere.
While Gotham City wasn’t the Deep South in 1956, it still had hazards for her that cis-gender people never had to think about; e.g., a neighbor who nodded hello every morning might, on learning you were trans, start slipping death threats under your door; or a belligerent drunk might follow you down the street, calling you “It.”
By contrast, Arkham Asylum could actually be more straightforward. You knew the patients were all potentially dangerous; you knew anything could galvanize the demons in their brains—or nothing in particular. However, the signals that presaged
trouble could be surprisingly similar in both the supposedly rational and the diagnosed psychotic. Nurse Bellefontaine had become adept at sensing a change in the weather and either heading it off or taking cover, depending.
There were also times when, suddenly and without warning, all bets were off. When Nurse Bellefontaine looked up from her desk outside the medical ward where she was filling in for someone on vacation and saw the figure of a harlequin in the hallway, her first thought was that some rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem had got off at the exit for Arkham again.
Though the Joker was the only patient in medical, Bellefontaine had insisted on having two orderlies on the ward with him. He was too feeble to create even a minor disturbance, but she wanted extra help in case the Joker’s gang tried to break him out. They were certainly crazy enough and a harlequin costume was pretty much their dress code.
In the bottom right-hand drawer of Bellefontaine’s desk was an electrified baton—essentially a cattle prod. Bellefontaine wouldn’t touch it, didn’t even like the idea of having something so barbaric in easy reach. But the head of security had insisted, saying it was better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it. Bellefontaine settled for locking the drawer and leaving the key in a bowl of paper clips on the desk. Now she grabbed the key out of the bowl and stuck it into the lock—and then, ashamed of herself, left it there.
The harlequin laughed loudly in a high, silly voice that made all the small hairs on the back of Bellefontaine’s neck stand straight up. Patients laughed, screamed, cried, wailed, or ranted at all hours of the day and night. This was not a patient, and the sound she made was far worse; Bellefontaine recognized the voice.
“Dr. Quinzel?” she asked. For a second, she held onto the desperate hope that the doctor had been at a costume party and someone on the staff had called her, even though she’d walked off the job that day.
“Good night noice!” the doctor said in a heavy Brooklyn accent. “Ya got it in one!” She dipped and made a sweeping motion like a bowler; something slid along the polished floor all the way to the desk. Bellefontaine stood up to look; it was a large sack with a rubber chicken stuck to it. The chicken was very lumpy, like it was stuffed full of marbles or ball bearings and Bellefontaine knew she was in deep shit at an unprecedented level.
Dr. Quinzel cartwheeled up the hallway, doing a double airborne somersault before bounding to a stop next to the sack. She bowed, grabbing up the rubber chicken with a flourish as Bellefontaine lunged for the panic button on her desk, pounding it over and over.
Nothing happened.
“Security breach! Help! Help!” she hollered. She heard the distant sound of feet running up the stairs and, behind her, the two orderlies in the medical ward rushing to unlock the doors. She stepped back and her gaze fell on the still-locked bottom drawer of the desk.
Dr. Quinzel giggled merrily, as if this were all just a harmless prank.
No, she couldn’t. She just couldn’t. But maybe someone else might have to. Bellefontaine crouched down and opened the drawer just as Tony and Marcus came out of medical.
“Stay clear, Roz,” said Tony, “we’ve got this.” He lunged at the harlequin and she swatted him with the rubber chicken. There was a sharp rap as it struck the orderly’s head and he went down with a soft, slightly surprised grunt. Bellefontaine crawled under the desk just as Dr. Quinzel swung the chicken at Marcus; there was another sharp crack and Marcus hit the floor. Nurse Bellefontaine hugged her knees, trying to will herself invisible.
“Hi!” Dr. Quinzel peered at her upside down over the edge of the desk with a zany smile. “Bettah cover yer ears, Roz!”
The doors to the medical ward exploded in a blinding flash of light.
* * *
Harley strode into the ward with her pop-gun in one hand and her chicken in the other.
“Knock-knock, puddin’!” she said joyfully. “Say hello to your new, improved Harley Quinn!”
The lights were low but Harley spotted him right away. They had him in the bed farthest from the now non-existent doors. She did a couple of flying cartwheels as she rushed to him, then threw back the covers and made a quick assessment. He didn’t look any better than the last time she’d seen him—if anything, he looked a little worse. His poor nose! His poor lips! She ran her hands over him in a fast once-over-lightly. Underneath the hospital gown, everything from the neck down was in bandages or plaster but there was nothing to indicate he couldn’t be moved. Under other circumstances, of course, she’d never have considered such a thing, but these were the desperate times that tried a doctor’s soul and called for desperate measures. Fortunately, he was well medicated; the morphine bag was almost full and she found another in the cabinet next to the bed.
She hauled him up out of bed, wedging her shoulder under his arm. “We’ll just take this with us,” she said, rolling the IV tree with them as they went. “Can ya walk if I help ya, puddin’?”
The Joker laughed as his bare feet stumbled. “Name the dessert, I can walk on it.”
“That’s the spirit!” Harley dragged him out of the ward and paused at the ruined entrance. The nurse was gone but there were several mean-looking orderlies coming up the hall. She waited until they were only a few feet away so they could get the full benefit of the flash-bang she tossed at them. Judging by the smell, she’d singed their eyebrows. Harley stopped only long enough to hang her bag of tricks on the Joker’s IV tree.
“Ooh, did you mug Santa?” the Joker giggled.
“That lard-ass had it comin’,” Harley said. They reached the end of the hall and started down the stairs. More security thugs came at them as they hit the landing on the next floor but Harley was ready for them. She tore open the chicken, spilling the ball bearings all over the floor. The security thugs skidded wildly and went down on top of each other.
“Now that’s what I call funny!” the Joker laughed and Harley felt her heart soar.
Yet more thugs were running up the stairs from the ground floor but Harley already had a tin labelled PEANUTS in her free hand.
“How ’bout a snack, fellas?” she said and flipped off the lid. The snakes sprang out and hit them hard, the rocks on the business ends drawing blood. Instead of tumbling down the stairs, they collapsed where they were, blocking her path. “Shortcut!” Harley yelled. With one arm around the Joker and the IV tree in her other hand, she leaped onto the banister and slid the rest of the way down to the ground floor.
“I always wanted to do that,” she told the Joker when they landed in the lobby.
“Don’t let’s do it again soon,” he said weakly. “Or ever.”
More security thugs poured out of an entryway on the other side of the reception desk. She opened another tin of PEANUTS on them. While they were all rolling around on the floor groaning, she found one more item in the bag and threw it into their midst.
There was a burst of light followed by an immense cloud of very thick, dark, and extremely foul-smelling smoke. Harley managed to get herself and the Joker out the front door before it reached them.
“I love the classics,” the Joker sighed as Harley shoved him into the car.
“I love you, puddin’,” she said, chuckling.
“Oh, my dear Doctor Harley Quinn,” he said and tapped one of the bells on her hat, “I love you, too.”
Harley thought her heart would burst with happiness as they drove off into the sunrise, laughing all the way.
They were still on the road when the early morning sunlight poured over the countryside. It occurred to Harley rather belatedly that she hadn’t actually planned past the big moment they ran out of Arkham Asylum and drove away. The fairytale version of the story would have ended there, with them living happily ever after. Obviously this was definitely no fairytale—fairytales didn’t involve running from the cops. Or Batman.
But that didn’t mean she was out of ideas. They needed a place to hide out, and it so happened there was a defunct amusement park somewhere in the
vicinity of where they were right now. And as if on cue, she spotted a very faded, weather-beaten sign.
HAPPY-HAPPY JOYTOWN AMUSEMENT PARK
exit 47, 25 miles east on Rte 51
Harley pulled over to see if the sign was as easy to knock over as it looked.
It was. So were the three on 51 East.
* * *
Happy-Happy Joytown probably hadn’t been much to write home about even in its prime. But all amusement parks had a certain je ne sais quoi that made them the same country, no matter how far-flung they were from each other.
Coney Island was where Harley’s spirit had been tested, the place that had made Harley who she was. In a way, she had been born in Coney Island, not Mt. Sinai Hospital, and that drew her to Happy-Happy Joytown, ruin though it was. She felt at home as soon as she drove onto the grounds and she found the Tunnel of Love almost immediately, like it had been sending out a signal only she could follow.
“Are we there yet?” mumbled the Joker, stirring fitfully in his partly reclined seat. “It hurts.”
“We sure are.” She parked in front of the tunnel’s dilapidated entrance. As ruined as it was, the word LOVE hadn’t faded too much. The O was a heart.
Harley had turned down the drip rate on the bag dangling from the rear-view mirror, both to conserve it and to make sure her puddin’ didn’t get more than he needed. Now she could turn it up again. “Gotcha covered, Mistah J. You’ll feel bettah in a second.”
The Joker took a deep breath and let it out in a contented sigh. “My Harley Quinn always makes me feel better.”
Harley allowed herself a moment of love-euphoria. Then she reclined his seat all the way, kissed his forehead, and told him she’d be right back, remembering to take the keys with her. She didn’t want him waking up disoriented and driving off to look for her.
* * *
There was no water in the Tunnel of Love but a few of the boats were still attached to the rail and pulley system. It took only a minute for Harley to walk through the canal to the largest chamber.
