Batman 3 - Batman Forever (12 page)

Thinking of Wayne grounded him just slightly, and he looked at the slack-jawed Stickley. “Riddle me this, Fred. What is everything to someone and nothing to everyone else? Your mind, of course. And now mine pumps with the power of yours.”

He flashed onto a movie musical that Stickley had fallen asleep watching three weeks ago and, to the tune of “Top Hat, White Tie and Tails,” began to sing, “I’m sucking up your IQ . . . Vacuuming your cortex . . . Feeding off your brain . . .”

And when Stickley had woken up, a British comedy of manners was on . . .

In a clipped accent, he said, “Fred, I must confess you were a wonderful appetizer. Simply divine. But now I yearn for a meal of substance. The main course. A wide and varied palate. Ah, to taste the mind of a hero. A nobleman. A poet. Einstein in a Jungian sauce with a dash of Nietzsche on top.”

He sensed that his mind was starting to peel away completely and, with what little control he had left, he reached over and shut off the machine. The light flickered and died and, with a sigh as if having just physically separated from a lover, Nygma murmured, “What a rush.”

Then Stickley, for what might possible have been the first time in his life, actually did something . . . interesting.

He spoke.

The reason this was interesting was that Edward had had no clue that Stickley
would
be able to speak, or think, or make himself understood after the treatment. So being subjected to the device wasn’t terminal. Clearly a best-case scenario.

“What the hell just happened?”

Nygma smiled gleefully. “A surprising side effect. While you were mesmerized by my 3-D TV, I utilized your neural energy to grow smarter. And yet, now that my beam is off, your intelligence—as it were—has returned to normal with no memory of my cerebral siphon.” Boisterously he added, “I am a Columbus of the mind. Land Ho!”

It took Stickley a few moments to truly comprehend what it was that Edward Nygma was telling him. Nygma had been . . . what? Puttering around in his brain? Sucking away neural energy? It was . . . it was like some sort of mind rape.

Making no attempt to restrain his fury, Stickley roared, “Bruce Wayne was right, you demented, bizarre, unethical toad. It
is
mind manipulation! I’m reporting you to the FCC, the Human Experimentation Board, the AMA, the police, the federal government. You’re going to court, to jail, and then to a mental institution for the rest of your twisted little life! But first and foremost, Nygma, you are fired! Do you hear me? Fired!!!”

Cackling with the demented glee he’d once seen a comedian display in a movie, Nygma shot back, “I don’t
think
so!”

He lashed out with a foot, kicking the chair to which Stickley was tied. The chair rolled back across the slick floor at high speed, Stickley yelling obscenities and totally unaware of his jeopardy until he smashed through the large round window at the end of the corridor.

Stickley shrieked . . . and stopped short.

The chair was teetering on the edge, glass plummeting down and away. Only one thing was keeping him from tumbling off the precipice, and that was the long wire attached to his headband.

Edward Nygma charged up to him, terror and concern on his face. Clearly he had not meant for this to happen, and the potential ramifications for the near fatality had . . .

Then he leaned in close, gripping the wired headband, and Stickley barely had time to realize that Nygma was concerned, not about him, but about his precious machine. With a twisted sneer of contempt he said, “Fred. Babe. You are fired. Or should I say: terminated.”

He yanked the headband off Stickley, and his former boss’s only means of support was gone. He barely had time to utter a screech before the chair tilted backwards and out, plummeting to the ground far below.

Edward didn’t even bother to hang around to see the landing. By the time Stickley hit, Nygma was already back at his cubicle. He was not, however, engaged in a flurry of activity as one might expect after having just committed his very first murder. Instead he was busy staring intensely at the photos of Bruce Wayne all over the interior of his cubicle. “Question marks, Mr. Wayne? My work raises too many questions?”

With mind-blinding fury, he started ripping the pictures down from the walls. “Two years—3.5762 percent of my estimated life span—toiling for your greater glory and profit. Well, let me ask you some questions, Mr. Smarter Than Thou. Why are you so debonair? Successful? Richer than God. Why should you have it all and not me?”

He looked around at the smashed and shattered remains of what he’d torn down. And then slowly his gaze turned to focus on a surveillance camera up on the wall. It was not being monitored, Edward knew, but it had dutifully recorded everything that had happened.

He reached up for the lens as he muttered, “Yes, you’re right, there are too many questions, Bruce Wayne. Here’s a good one. Why hasn’t anybody put you in your place? And it’s time you came up with some answers. Starting right now.”

T
he images were flying toward him . . . his parents lying in state . . . the leaves . . . the ground giving way beneath him . . . and the object . . . small, leather, clutching tightly to him . . .

And the giant bat (if it was a bat, or something worse, something spit out from Hell) lurching toward him. And it screeched at him in a voice that, for the first time, had discernible words:

You’re a killer, too . . .

Bruce Wayne lunged backwards and, in doing so, woke himself up.

He blinked against the intruding sunlight, which was pouring through the window thanks to Alfred’s having just moved the curtains aside.

“Dreams, sir?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

“No time for dreams,” he said, brusquely and falsely. “Status?”

Alfred didn’t even bother to point out that most mortals said something along the lines of “Good morning” rather than “status.” “The Batcomputer has been scanning the Emergency bands all night. No sign of Two-Face. He’s disappeared.”

“He’ll be back. Did you get those file tapes from Arkham Asylum?”

“In the player, sir, and ready.”

Bruce rose from the bed, bare-chested, and Alfred couldn’t help but notice the bruises that decorated his torso. “What a marvelous shade of purple.” He paused a moment and, when Bruce didn’t respond, he spoke again and made no effort to keep the concern out of his voice. “Really, if you insist on trying to get yourself killed each night . . .”

Bruce, not wanting to get into it so early in the morning, walked away from Alfred, toward the TV and video player. He stepped over the ripped, dented, and punctured costume that lay on the floor. It wasn’t that he was slovenly; it was that he had literally forgotten about it. An old costume was an old problem. He was already on to the next one.

Alfred picked up the battered uniform and continued, “. . . would it be a terrible imposition to ask you to at least take better care of your equipment?”

“Then you’d have nothing to complain about.”

“Hardly a worry, sir.”

Bruce turned on the TV and, as he loaded the tape in, said, “Speaking of equipment, I want to get back to work on the prototype.”

Alfred shuddered. “Sir, the last time you tried to run it through a test—the relay overloads and short-circuiting almost . . .”

“I remember what happened last time, Alfred. I was wearing it, remember?”

“I doubt I could ever forget.”

“It was just a test, Alfred,” protested Bruce. “And it wasn’t so bad . . .”

“Once the burns healed,” Alfred sniffed.

“You’re exaggerating. Besides, if I’d been wearing the prototype yesterday, things might have gone very differently.”

“Indeed they might have. For one thing, they might be scraping your incinerated remains off the side of the Second National Bank building.”

“Alfred . . .”

“With a spatula.”

“All right, all right.” He flipped on the TV and started up the videotape. There was the tortured face of Harvey Dent, staring in the camera and sneering at the off-camera doctor who was asking him questions. The date and time on the video track indicated that it was one of the last interviews . . . if not the last . . . before he’d made his break. He was methodically flipping his coin, reaching the same height with each toss.

“Come on, Harvey,” Bruce said urgently. “What’s on those twisted minds of yours? Where are you going to strike next?”

Harvey, of course, didn’t hear him. Instead he was saying to the doctor, “Where would be the ideal place for a man like me, Doc? Ideal means imaginary. But to me, Doc, it’s not imaginary. It’s someplace that I’ll find. I’ll find a land where light is shadow and freaks are kings.”

And then suddenly Harvey shifted his gaze . . . and was looking straight at Bruce Wayne as he said, “You’re a killer too, Bruce.”

Bruce’s head turned quickly to see Alfred’s reaction. But Alfred was merely standing there, calm, passive, holding the costume draped over one arm.

Quickly Bruce rewound the tape, ran it again. And again. Two-Face was saying, “Where light is shadow and freaks are kings.” This time, though, he didn’t turn and look at Bruce. Instead he just sat there, staring at the doctor.

The doctor said from offscreen, “And where would that be, Harvey?”

Dent studied him a moment and then said, “You’re so smart.
You
figure it out.” Then he leaned back and lapsed into silence and not all the doctor’s probing could prompt another response out of him.

There were other times, other sessions on the tape, but a disconcerted Bruce Wayne decided now was not the time to hear them. Instead he shut off the VCR and brought the TV on line.

The station owner, a man with whom Bruce had had dinner several times and who considered Bruce Wayne to be one of the true treasures of Gotham City, was staring into the camera with the words “EDITORIAL” pasted across the upper right-hand side. “The city should charge Batman with felony landmarks destruction. His vigilantism is a plague on Gotham.”

Bruce moved away from the TV, making a mental note not to pick up the dinner check next time, and stepped into a high-tech workout machine. His pressure on the footpads brought the machine to electronic life. “Good morning, Mr. Wayne. Select difficulty level.”

“Bruce, please,” he corrected, feeling that if he couldn’t be informal with an electronic system of weights and pulleys, who
could
he let down his hair with? “Maximum resistance.”

He began running through his regimen. Alfred, meantime, had come out of the bathroom, having begun to run Bruce’s bath for him. The butler slowed and glanced appreciatively at the TV screen, and Bruce looked over to see what had caught Alfred’s attention.

It was a file interview with Chase Meridian, as she dissected the mind-set of multiple personalities.

Bruce made an impatient noise. “You know what she said to Batman last night? She practically accused him of being crazy.”

He waited for Alfred to concur loyally that such an assessment was completely out of bounds. Tacky, even. Instead, Alfred considered the matter and then said, “Sir . . . you are a good man. A brave man. But perhaps you are not the most sane man.”

The comment stopped Bruce cold as he turned to look at Alfred. Any number of times, this man who had become like a substitute father to him had made oblique comments about Bruce’s mind-set. Most of them had been cloaked in withering or drily sarcastic terms. But Alfred had never made such a flat, inflectionless . . . and even slightly frightening . . . assessment of his employer’s mental state.

Alfred immediately became aware that perhaps he had crossed the line that he should not have. Trying to angle the conversation into a more social, even jocular, direction, he suggested, “Perhaps the lady is just what the doctor ordered. She seems lovely . . .”

But Bruce wouldn’t be put off. Instead he stared at Alfred as if he were dissecting him with his eyes in hopes of finding some sort of answer to long-standing questions.

“Alfred,” he said slowly, “why did I become Batman?”

You’re asking me?
was the first thing to come to Alfred’s mind. But he had the good grace not to say it. Instead he simply repeated what Bruce himself had said on occasion. “To avenge your dear parents. To protect the innocent.”

But Bruce waved off the rationalizations as if they no longer interested him. “To fight crime, of course. But there’s something else . . .”

He looked toward the window, blinking against the autumn sun. The day couldn’t have been more unlike that hideous night. “What was I doing outside the night of my parents’ wake? What sent me running into the storm?”

Alfred shrugged. From a distance of many years, he was able to look back at himself, running around like a madman and shouting Bruce’s name into the storm. At the time that very question had flamed in Alfred’s mind.
Where could the boy have gone? What could have driven him out? Why the bloody hell wasn’t I watching him?

“I don’t know,” Alfred admitted. He thought of Bruce’s parents for the first time in . . . oh . . . a day or two. “Such a tragic loss. Rain fell like tears that night.”