The Further Adventures of The Joker (14 page)

“Ahhh,” murmured the Joker.

“When she needed money, she would sell the drugs, to anyone. She liked to sell something very good to someone, get him hooked, then give him one of her specialties. She had a drug she called the purgatory pill, one that went on and on forever. The nearest thing to hell . . .”

“Oh, I like her,” whispered the Joker.

“Sometimes her victims came out of it. Often they didn’t. I was with her once when she visited someone she said was a friend, laughing when she said it, sniggering, really. The man was one who had spoken to her, only once, in a manner she hadn’t liked. Now he sat in a hospital ward, staring at the wall and screaming. He thought his flesh was burning and falling off his bones. He felt it. The doctors said he would be that way until he died. Of course, to him, it seemed forever. Delice laughed when we left there.”

“Why were you with her?” the Joker asked suspiciously. “Why you?”

“Why not me? She’d half killed my father. I was there, a kind of leftover. I was an audience. She needed an audience. That’s another way she’s like you . . .”

“Go on.”

“She liked to slip her purgatory pills into candies and give them to children. She’d watch while they jerked and flopped and howled and sometimes died. Her favorites were little girls. She liked to give them to little girls.”

“Scarcely worthy opponents,” sneered the Joker.

“No, but they were innocent, you see. It was her way of striking out at innocence. She had lost her own; now she would destroy others.”

“I do see,” he mused. “Well, it has a nice symbolic thrust to it. Speaking of little girls, why didn’t she give the pills to you?”

“Because I was her audience, I tell you. I was the one who saw what she did. I was the one who watched and judged and looked at her afterward, trying to find the real person inside her. She needed me.”

“Did your father die?”

“I suppose he did, eventually. She left him staring at the walls in a hotel somewhere. I remember she had a suitcase full of money and she was wearing a long, spotted fur coat. She said a whole species of jungle cats had died so she could wear that coat. She loved it.”

“What next?” the Joker asked, yawning.

“She got involved in assassinations. She was very beautiful. Had I said that? Very beautiful. There was an ultimate mystery about her, like death itself. Terror and longing, all mixed up. She could look in a man’s eyes and mesmerize him, make him want her, make him give up anything for her. Then, when she had him alone, she could kiss him with poison on her lips and watch him die.”

“And you watched?”

“I always watched. She always let me watch, wanted me to watch.”

“Wasn’t she afraid you’d betray her? Turn her over to the police? Help trap her?”

“Why would I do that? What would I have done without her. She was my whole life.”

“She mesmerized you, too, then.” The Joker laughed. “Rather nice touch, that.”

“The deaths were always listed as heart attacks. They really were heart attacks. Induced heart attacks. She moved through politics like the angel of death, selling destruction to the highest bidder. She became rich. Very rich.”

“Where?” The Joker licked his lips. “Where did she live?”

“She had a penthouse in Paris, and a villa near Rome, and an estate in Malaysia. She had a vast wonderful mansion in San Francisco, and a townhouse in New York. She had a pied-à-terre here in Gotham City. I came here with her. Otherwise I would not have been here for you to capture.”

“Came to see your brother?”

“Oh, no. No. After my association with Delice? How could I? He would have detested me. He might have felt he needed to do something, bring her to justice. I came with her, but I did not come to see him. No. I couldn’t risk that.”

“You risked a good deal, getting drunk in the Wild Card. Didn’t you know the place belongs to me?”

She turned her face away. “Perhaps I didn’t connect your name to his. Perhaps I wasn’t thinking.”

The Joker snorted. “Sat there, getting drunk, telling one of my own men that you were Batman’s sister? Everyone knows the Wild Card is my place. You couldn’t have been more stupid if you’d tried.”

“I suppose it was stupid. Yes. I know it was.”

“So. Is there more to this story, or should we fire up some of the implements. I have an hour or so to spend yet tonight. We can always continue tomorrow.”

“There’s more,” she whispered.

He yawned again and arranged several knives on the bench in order of size. “Yes.”

“She decided she wanted to involve herself in the ultimate evil.”

The Joker sat up, his brow furrowed, staring at the woman before him.

His victim nodded. “I knew you’d appreciate that. The ultimate evil, the one before which all other wickedness would shudder. She began to spend all her time in libraries, doing research. Evil wasn’t defined anywhere. No one knew precisely what it was. The ultimate evil.”

“Yes?” encouraged the Joker. “Yes?”

“The theologians defined it as the absence of God. Delice didn’t believe that. That was too passive, too empty. She thought of evil as an active principle.”

“Oh, it is. She was right, it is. An active principle. Powerful. With its own logic, its own ethics.” He stood up and strode around the dungeon, his feet clacking on the floor as though he had been hoofed, his long, angular arms gesticulating, his fingers snapping. “She sought what I have always sought. Sometimes I have thought I came close. Innocence betrayed. Love shattered. Pain inflicted, mercilessly. I haven’t tried genocide, yet. It takes a large organization to attempt genocide, but I’ve considered it. What did she think of genocide?”

The woman chained to the bench shook her head. “That wasn’t it. She learned there is more evil in wiping out a species of animal or plant than there is in wiping out any subgroup of mankind. Mankind is capable of infinite schism, she used to tell me. Mankind splits into groups and languages and cultures at the drop of a hat. No, genocide wasn’t the ultimate evil, for even if she had wiped out one group of man, nine others would have sprung up in its place, hydralike.”

“Was it desecration? Blowing up churches? Wrecking temples? Is that it? I’ve done that, of course, on a small scale. How about instilling racial hatred? How about bigotry?”

“Evil, yes, but not the ultimate evil. Men are born fearing strangers and hating them. It is part of their old animal heritage. It is evil as many primitive things are evil; evil in that we should have overcome it by now but have not.”

“Then what?” cried the Joker. “Surely she found something more than mere negatives! Surely she found an answer!”

“Oh, yes, oh, yes,” moaned the woman on the bench. “She did. She found it.”

“How! Where!”

“She looked in a mirror.”

“What?” he screamed leaping at her with his claws extended. “What do you mean, she looked in a mirror!”

“It was an unusual mirror,” admitted the woman. “When she had no luck in the libraries, she decided to go to a witch. The witch gave her a recipe. She could find what she sought in a mirror of a certain type, a cursed mirror. It had to be washed with the blood of a newborn babe and dried with the hair of a murdered bride. It had to be silvered thrice beneath a waning moon and framed with the wood of a yew tree, uprooted in its prime by a condemned man.”

“Magic,” sneered the Joker. “Superstition! I don’t believe in it.”

“Neither did Delice,” said the woman quietly. “Not really. Still, she had tried everything else. She followed the ancient recipe word for word, almost entirely out of mockery. But, nonetheless, when she was done, she looked into the mirror and demanded to see ultimate evil.”

“What did she see?”

“Her own face. What she had become. She saw what I see when I look at you. I told you she is someone like you. So alike.”

He stood up, his face full of wonder, almost expectation. He turned around, thinking. “Where is she?” he demanded. “Right now, where is she? I want to meet her.”

“Nearby,” the woman said. “I was always with her when she traveled, so she must be nearby.”

“What happened,” he demanded. “When she saw herself?”

The woman was silent for a long moment. He started toward her threateningly, and her head came up as she said, “She had a religious experience.”

He laughed, the laugh rising to a roar, the echoes tumbling between the walls like stones rolled in an abyss, the room shattering beneath the sound. “A religious experience!” And he laughed again.

“You laugh,” she sobbed, “but it is true.”

“She was born again,” he cackled. “No doubt.”

“No,” the woman shook her head. “Oh, she longed to be born again and put away that face she had seen. She longed to be new and clean and not see that face again. But she could not be born again. The weight of evil was too heavy. She could not lay it down or overcome it. It hung from her in chains and ropes of guilt. It tied her feet with snares of horror. It confronted her eyes with terror. It filled her nostrils with rot. It sounded in her ears, like the cries of the damned. She could not get out from under it. I said she was like you.”

The words took him in a place he had thought long sealed away. Like him. Someone like himself. Someone who could appreciate what he was, who he had become. Of all the pains he felt since his transformation, the pain of loneliness was the worst. How many times he had longed for someone like himself, someone to understand the desire to be born new, out of his own skin, out of his own self . . .

“Where is she? Where? I want to meet her!”

“Perhaps she will come here. She has a habit of finding me, wherever I am hid.”

“You, Batman’s sister?”

“Me. Whatever I am.”

He licked his lips, almost afraid to ask. “What did she do, when she had this experience?”

The woman sobbed and cradled her hands, rocking to and fro. “She decided she must expiate the evil she had committed. She decided she must somehow pay for everything she had done. She could not destroy herself, for self-destruction would only add to the evil. She had to find a way to sacrifice herself. A way to die without killing herself. Perhaps she thought you would do it. Perhaps that’s why she came here, to Gotham City.”

The Joker frowned and shook his head in abrupt negation. “She’s a fool if she thinks I would destroy her. Why would I? Destroy someone like me? She would be my helpmeet, my delight. Together we could rule the world. If I had that poison of hers, that purgatory pill, do you know what I could do with it?”

“What? What would you do with it that she has not already done? What assassinations? What terrible fates wished on the kindly and the innocent? What would you do?”

“Something,” he mused, staring at the cobwebby ceiling far above their heads. “Something she never thought of. We would think of it together. We would build upon the foundations we two have laid. We would become more than the sum of our parts. We would shine in the firmament of darkness like black stars . . .”

“She thought you would destroy her,” said the woman after a long time. “Even now, she is probably waiting for you to do it. To destroy her, so that she may expiate her sins.”

“Not a chance,” the Joker said with a laugh. “Do you have any idea how lonely I have been? How I’ve longed for someone to understand me? To work with me? The very thought of her fills me with feelings I haven’t had in decades. I’ll find her. I’ll convince her of the glory of our future together. You say she is like me! I’ve longed for someone like me. Is she still beautiful?”

“When I saw her last, she was beautiful. She was sitting before the mirror, brushing her hair. She was beautiful, yes.”

“Is she shapely? Strong?”

“Yes. When I saw her last she was.”

“Where did you see her last?”

She did not answer. Instead, she asked, “Will you let me live, for her sake?” She looked him in the face, her eyes wide, the burns on her face crusted red against her white skin.

He stared at her for a long moment then laughed, shrilly. “You tried to trick me, didn’t you? Of course I won’t spare you for her sake. Goodness would spare you, but evil would not. Evil would kill you, as I will kill you, without even staying around to see how it goes.” And he capered around her, connecting this and connecting that, throwing a switch here and another there, barely noticing the quivering flesh, the howling lips, the blood that oozed thickly and more thickly still. “What I will do is let it end sooner than otherwise, if you’ll tell me where she was staying!”

“In the hotel,” she cried. “Just across the street from the Wild Card, where we met. In the Gotham Hotel.”

“Ahh,” he whispered, licking his red lips, running his bony hands through the stiff green foliage of his hair. “It’s only half an hour or so from here, through the tunnels. What room? Tell me what room!”

“What room? Fourteen-oh-two, I think. Yes. Fourteen-oh-two.”

“Then I’ll find her there. I’ll find her there. I want her more than I have wanted anything for years. Everything you tell me about her excites me.”

He threw a final switch as he left the room. Behind him the woman’s voice rose in a gurgle of final destruction.

From a pay phone in the street, he called the Gotham Hotel and asked for Delice Domain’s room. The phone rang. A voice said, “This is room fourteen-oh-two, Gotham Hotel. Miss Demain is away at the moment. Please leave a message.” The voice sounded odd, as though someone had been speaking through a distorter.

So she carried an answering machine with her? Well, why not? Why trust hotel operators to convey important information. People couldn’t be trusted. He liked even that in her, that lack of trust. And how delightful that she was out, that she would return and find him waiting for her!

Room 1402 was almost adjacent to the firestairs. He slipped into the corridor as soon as he was sure it was empty. He knew a great deal about locks and was prepared to pick the room lock, but it wasn’t necessary. The door was open.

A pleasant room. One light on, beside the phone. The green light blinking on the answering machine, to show there had been a call. No one in the room.

He mused, beside the door. Where should he wait? In plain sight, where she would see him when she came in? Hiding behind a curtain or in the closet? Or, perhaps he would leave a message, on her machine.