DC Comics novels--Batman

by Christa Faust

  “Miss Barbara was found in a state of undress. The Joker removed her clothing after shooting her. Uh… I’ve received a video transmission and, well, certain indignities were broadcast all across Gotham City by some means.” He took a breath. “It’s all rather sick.”

  “Yes, sick.” Batman went stony. He concentrated on closing the gap between himself and the red dot.

  God help anyone who got in his way.

  * * *

  He arrived at the location the red dot indicated, an area under a cloverleaf of expressways on the edge of the Narrows. It had become a shanty town for the homeless.

  The rain had started again. He leapt out of the car as the canopy slid back, spotting two men dressed in threadbare clothing. They were struggling with each other near an open fifty-gallon barrel in which kindling burned for warmth.

  “Gimma that,” one of the men said, tugging on the arm of the other with both his hands.

  “Let go, he gave it to me.”

  “But you can’t use it.”

  “You just want it to sell ’cause it came from pasty face.”

  The one doing the tugging was shoved by the other one, who wore a black watch. The shoved one stumbled backward and collided with Batman. He turned, startled.

  “Oh Lordy,” he declared, weaving on his feet, obviously inebriated, glaring up. “You’re taller than I thought you’d be.”

  Ignoring him, Batman looked past him to the other one.

  “Where did you get that watch?”

  “Red lips gave it to me. He was in that old purple car of his, giggling up a storm. He pulled to the curb and called me over, handing it to me. Said it didn’t go with his outfit.” His eyes were bleary but he seemed less out of it than his companion. Incongruously, he was clean shaven.

  “Did the Joker say anything else?” He kept the anger out of his voice. Inducing fear would only make it more difficult.

  “He put the car in gear and told the ones in the back seat with the old man slumped between ’em, ‘On to the big top,’ and laughing like fingernails on a chalkboard, blew out of here.”

  “The big top,” Batman rasped as he turned to head back to his vehicle. The old abandoned carnival? It seemed like the ideal backdrop for the Joker’s brand of theatrical black humor.

  He thought of Barbara, fighting for her life in the hospital. Her fortitude and quick thinking might lead him to her elusive tormentor after all. He made her a silent promise that her efforts would not be in vain.

  At that moment the Bat Signal cut through the night air.

  * * *

  Bullock and a uniform cop were there on the rooftop next to the shining klieg light. The stump of a cigar ever present in the corner of his mouth, Bullock stepped forward. For once, he gave no smartass comment as he handed over an invitation-sized envelope. It had a bat on it.

  Batman opened the envelope and extracted its contents.

  34

  The carnival car slammed through the first set of doors, leaving them in utter darkness. Then it slammed through another pair, and Gordon bent forward, his head down and his hands covering his throbbing head.

  The tiny grotesque in the tutu grasped his shoulder with claw-like hands, while from behind another grabbed a handful of his sweaty hair, yanking his head back.

  “Up, up!” the creature said in a horrifically childlike voice. There above them was a huge screen, filled with the Joker’s leering face.

  “A-a-ah,” the maniac said. “Heads up, Commissioner! No fair hiding your eyes on the Ghost Train, you old fraidy cat!”

  It’s not real. None of this is real.

  It was alternately too dark and too bright, irregular strobe lights flashing as the ride progressed. Crashing through more doors, up and down the rolling track, they traveled from one room to the next, each with its own gigantic screen. They all showed the same image. The Joker’s hateful visage, repeated a hundred times.

  Gordon twisted in his tight canvas straps, struggling to turn his head away, but the screens were everywhere. Different shapes, different sizes, there wasn’t anywhere he could look that wasn’t infected with those leering red grins.

  “Oh, I know,” the Joker continued. “You’re confused. You’re frightened. Who wouldn’t be? You’re in a hell of a situation.” Over the aging sound system, that voice was even more horrifying, setting every nerve on end. “But, y’know, though life’s a bowl of cherries and this is the pits, always remember this…

  “Music, Sam…”

  What?

  There was a sudden blare of tinny, off-key music blasting through rusted old speakers wired to the little car, and pouring out of invisible speakers mounted in the walls. It sounded like a cross between a warped calliope and a child banging on a xylophone. It was coming from all sides at once. Surround-sound of the damned.

  The video image of the Joker, repeated endlessly down the pulsing walls of the tunnel, was suddenly wearing a natty straw boater with a green and purple band. He tipped the hat like a hammy Vaudeville performer and, to Gordon’s horror, he began to sing.

  “When the world is full of care,

  And every headline screams despair,

  When all is rape, starvation, war

  And life is vile

  “Then there’s a certain thing I do,

  Which I shall pass along to you,

  That’s always guaranteed to make me smile…

  “I go loo-oo-oony

  As a light-bulk battered bug,

  Simply loo-oo-ony,

  Sometimes foam and chew the rug.”

  The seasick sway of the wobbly ride and the grating discord of the off-key music amplified and intensified Gordon’s torment as the straps chafed his raw, exposed skin and the collar around his neck squeezed his breathing down to nearly nothing. His heart pounded against his ribs as if it was desperate to escape from his chest, and he found himself fervently wishing that he would just pass out. But his mind wouldn’t stop racing, eyes wide and burning and unable to look away.

  “Mister, life is swell

  In a padded cell,

  It’ll chase those blues away.

  You can trade your gloom

  For a rubber room,

  And injections twice a day!”

  Why was the Joker subjecting him to this baffling travesty? And where was Barbara?

  Barbara!

  They slammed through another door, the grip constant on his hair, his captors staring straight ahead with unblinking eyes. The caterwauling continued. The madman was dancing now, joined by several of the other freaks, twisting and writhing in a parody of a classic Hollywood musical.

  “Just go loo-oo-oony,

  Like an acid casualty,

  Or a moo-oo-nie,

  Or a preacher on TV

  “When the human race,

  Wears an anxious face,

  When the bomb hangs overhead,

  When your kid turns blue,

  It won’t worry you,

  You can smile and nod instead!”

  There was the subliminal flash of a blurry, red-and-white image flickering randomly across different screens down the length of the tunnel. Gordon’s gut told him that image was something both important and horrifying that he needed to see, but as soon as his woozy gaze could focus on it, it would hopscotch away to another screen, leaving a leering close-up of the Joker in its place.

  “When you’re loo-oo-ony,

  Then you just don’t give a fig…”

  Again, that awful, twitching flash of red and white raced over the screens, a jarring counterpoint to the Joker’s demented Busby Berkeley number. Was that a human leg? Convulsing, bloody fingers? A curtain of sticky, clotted hair? It seemed crucially important for him to focus on that, but all the images seemed to ebb and flow, melding into some kind of unbearable sensory overload.

  “Man’s so pu-uu-ny,

  And the universe so big!

  “If you hurt inside,

  Get certified,

  And if life
should treat you bad…”

  The jittery, bloody images were more frequent now, and worse, they seemed to rise up off the screens, straining toward him like speeded-up footage of plants growing toward the sun. It was appallingly clear now that these images were female body parts. Every single part.

  The rickety little car seemed to be heading right for a large, swimmy and low-quality projection of video footage that looked like something cops might pull off a gas station security camera. At the center of the image was what appeared to be a dead female body, legs splayed at crooked and unnatural angles. A dark figure was crouched over her as its familiar white face turned towards the camera.

  The Joker.

  His crooning voice continued as his image on the big screen slung an arm around the nude and prostrate woman, lifting her shoulders off the rug.

  Is that… is that my rug?

  The tunnel of twitching, bleeding female body parts seemed to be closing in around him, each one more appalling than the last, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the big screen in the middle. In that rough staticky footage, the Joker was tipping the woman’s lolling head toward the camera and lifting one bloody hand to make it wave, silently mouthing the words.

  SAY HI DADDY!

  It was Barbara.

  He could no longer tell if he was screaming inside or out loud, but her name echoed through him like the shockwave from an explosion, shattering everything in its wake.

  “Don’t get ee-ee-even,

  “Get mad!”

  “Mad!” echoed the hell-chorus from the freakish non-children clutching at him and shrieking in his ears. “MAD! MAD! MAD!”

  He no longer seemed able to control his thrashing body as he threw himself against the straps, sobbing and howling.

  “BARBARA!”

  He had to get to her. Had to…

  “Barbara…” His voice was nearly gone now, just a tortured whisper punctuated by flecks of spit and bile. “Barbara, baby. Oh God, no…” There was silence, then a hint of static over the sound system. It was still on.

  “This footage has been broadcast to every computer in Gotham City,” the Joker purred from somewhere in the dark. Inside Gordon’s head, maybe? “There’s no way to call it back. Every cop, every librarian, everyone is watching.”

  “Everyone is watching!” His chanting captors echoed their master. “Everyone is watching!”

  “Everyone knows you failed to protect her.”

  “Everyone knows!” More chanting. “Everyone knows! Everyone knows!”

  “He knows,” the madman said.

  Gordon wanted so desperately for it to go away. To bash his own head against the iron safety bar until it all went away for good. But he couldn’t even move. He couldn’t escape the atrocities endured by his only daughter at the hands of that giggling monster. They were all around him, inside him, seared into his mind forever.

  For a horrible moment, it seemed as if the Joker had the right idea, after all. That the reality of his complete and utter failure—both as a police commissioner and a father—was simply too painful to endure. That the only option was to retreat into madness.

  The shameful, cowardly and overwhelming desire for abdication that Gordon experienced in that moment would haunt him until the day he died. With that realization, a flame of anger appeared deep within him.

  35

  There was a ticket made of card stock inside the envelope. Batman held it in his gloved hands. The ticket read:

  BONUS BROTHERS

  CARNIVAL AND AMUSEMENT PARK

  ADMIT ONE

  He turned it over. There was a handwritten note on the back, in loopy purple crayon letters.

  With Compliments

  Batman’s eyes narrowed, fist crushing the ticket.

  The big top.

  He left the roof, the crumpled ticket on the ledge as Bullock watched him descend on his grapple line toward the idling Batmobile.

  36

  The Joker stood waiting at the end of the Ghost Train ride when the brightly painted doors flew open and the car came careening out, slamming into the emergency bumper at the end of the track. The Commissioner’s head whipped back, and then lolled forward, a string of drool connecting his chin to the sparse white hair on his chest.

  “Ah, here they are now!” the Joker said. “My goodness, that’s some Ghost Train. When they went in, the chap in the middle didn’t look a day over seventeen, and his three little pals were professional basketball stars!”

  The three grotesques still clustered around Gordon as the restraining bar lifted, and he rested his forehead against it.

  “Look at him now, poor fellow,” the grinning man continued, leaning on his cane. “That’s what a dose of reality does for you.” Gordon’s diminutive captors dragged him out of the car. “Never touch the stuff myself, you understand. I find it gets in the way of the hallucinations.”

  Propelled by his tormentors, the Commissioner stumbled and fell in front of the Joker, one hand sliding in a puddle of water and sending him flat.

  “Why, hello, Commissioner,” the Joker said. “How’s things?” When he got no response, he leaned in close. “Commissioner?”

  Still no response.

  “Hello?”

  Only a ragged panting.

  “Anybody home?” he said, louder this time. This was beginning to be insulting.

  Finally he straightened, letting his disgust show in his expression. The rain was falling harder again, pelting the onlookers and splashing in puddles all around them.

  “God, how boring,” he growled. “The man’s a complete turnip!” He twirled his finger next to his head. “Take him away and put him in his cage. Perhaps he’ll get a little livelier once he’s had a chance to think his situation over. To reflect upon life, and all its random injustice.”

  He leaned over, placing his chin on the cane, and stared down into a puddle, reminded of that runoff ditch, all those years ago…

  “Hey, c’mon! Quit daydreamin’.”

  Lifting his gaze, he watched as the pathetic shell of a man was dragged away through the mud like a whipped dog, but as amusing as it was, he quickly grew tired of the spectacle. Turning his face up to the cold rain, he closed his eyes and felt the pulse of a strange radioactive ache burning inside his chest. A sick feverish heat that could never be quenched, like an unrequited crush.

  Where is Batman?

  What’s taking him so long?

  * * *

  Gordon thought maybe he was back in that animal cage, but he couldn’t be sure of anything anymore. There was something that looked like iron bars casting harsh, film noir slashes across his shivering flesh.

  It was as if he had forgotten what it was like to wear clothes. To be warm. To have dignity. To be worthy of a daughter’s love. Maybe he’d never actually had those things. Maybe that was all just a cruel dream and this, this was the only reality. Always and forever.

  The freaks surrounded him, their shrill mocking laughter like vicious birds tearing into him from all sides. Terrible, unnatural faces distorted by cruelty floated through his blurry vision like creatures in a nightmare. A nightmare that never ended. Gordon curled tighter into a quivering fetal position, but the laughter was inside of him, as well. There was no escape.

  “That’s so funny,” the skeletal man said. “That’s so funny.”

  No escape.

  There was a barker at this carnival, too. A voice he knew. That voice. That monster.

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” the Joker cried theatrically. “You’ve read about it in the newspapers! Now, shudder as you observe, before your very eyes, that most rare and tragic of nature’s mistakes. I give you… the average man!”

  The freaks oohed and aahed as Gordon tucked his head down under his arms, willing himself to disappear. Yet he remained, and the nightmare continued. With his eyes closed, he saw Barbara. When he opened them again, deformed and mocking faces swirled around him. The Joker was there, in the front, his leering expression onl
y inches away.

  “Physically unremarkable, it has instead a deformed set of values,” he mocked. “Notice the hideously bloated sense of humanity’s importance. The club-footed social conscience and the withered optimism.” More than ever, there was menace in those eyes. “It’s certainly not for the squeamish, is it?”

  He put his head down again, but the voice didn’t stop.

  “Most repulsive of all, are its frail and useless notions of order and sanity. If too much weight is put upon them… they SNAP!” To illustrate his point, he snapped his fingers. The deformed audience howled. In the distance, there seemed to be the growl of a motor.

  “‘How does it live?’ I hear you ask. How does this poor, pathetic specimen survive in today’s harsh and irrational world? The sad answer is, ‘not very well.’ Faced with the inescapable fact that human existence is mad, random and pointless, one in eight of them crack up and go stark slavering buggo!”

  The growl was closer, deep and vibrating up through the ground on which he crouched.

  “And who can blame them? In a world as psychotic as this, any other response would be crazy!”

  There was a bright and sudden light shining through the cage of his fingers. Moving light, coming from twin sources, washing over Gordon and piercing the iron bars that crisscrossed his broken mind. This wasn’t the maddening kaleidoscope of carnival glitter and neon that had come to define his new existence. No, this was a pure, clean colorless light that chased away the shadows. A light that shone on him like forgotten hope.

  The thrum of the engines ceased, and he wondered for a panicky moment if it had been his imagination. Then he heard the whine of the canopy as it opened, and the familiar rustle of the cape. No sound from the boots, of course.

  “Hello,” Batman said. “I came to talk.”

  37

  It could have been a second, it might have been a lifetime, but that clear true light didn’t go away. It shone through his eyelids, reminding him that there really was a different world outside this horror. Outside this cage. Outside his head. With that white light came hope. Hope of rescue and return to the real world, and that hope was…

  Terrifying.