The Further Adventures of The Joker (17 page)

“Meow?”
a gray kitten asked forlornly. The others joined in.

“Ah,” the Joker cooed, harvesting him with a hand under its stomach. “You
are
a tempting morsel, aren’t you?” And he stuffed him into the sack. The others followed.

When he was done, the sack mouth had to be held shut by both hands. The Joker started out of the alley, his ghoul’s grin wider than before.

A fat tabby scooted around the corner, paused, and hearing the mewing from the bulging sack, gave out an anguished cry.

The Joker swept it from his path with a vicious kick.

“No room for you, you mother!” he snarled, and melted into the night, resuming his lunatic ditty under his breath.

“I’m collecting kitties and puttin’ ’em in bags. Tum-te-tum-tum.”

No trick or treaters approached the mansion of Archie Bittner. Bittner’s palatial redbrick home was set back from an elm-guarded dirt road on forty acres of land in a southwestern suburb of Gotham City. A fieldstone fence ringed its grounds, broken only by a Spanish-style wrought-iron gate marred by a big metal sign. The paint was fresh. The sign read: POSITIVELY NO TRICK OR TREATERS.

The custom sign had cost millionaire Bittner ten times the money it would have to supply the gate guard a box of treats. But that was Archie Bittner.

The pit bulls that roamed his grounds were also Archie Bittner. Even the guard was frightened of them.

They were the reason the guard—whose name was Donovan—kept to his guard station, well outside the gate, where the pit bulls could not go. They were an added incentive for him to uphold Bittner’s standing prohibition against letting visitors in.

Tonight, Donovan was doubly grateful for his station, as he huddled in the warmth of the electric heater he carted to and from work during the winter months. Winter had come early this year.

So when the purple TV repair van came down the road, its headlights throwing the benighted elms into stark relief, Donovan made no move to leave his shelter, not even when the van coasted to a stop and the driver’s window cranked down.

The driver called out to Donovan, his face in shadow.

“What’s that?” Donovan called back.

The shadow-faced driver repeated his question. It sounded like “Mumble muff muff” to Donovan’s old ears. Grumbling, he slid back the glass door and trudged over to the van.

“What’s that you say?” he asked querulously, his lined face smarting in the crisp night air.

“I said,” the driver repeated, shoving his lean chalk visage into the moonlight, “Trick—or
treat?”

He displayed his teeth. It was more a creepy baring of teeth than a smile and it made Donovan think of those dreaded pit bulls.

“You startled me for a second there,” Donovan said, his heartbeat slowly returning to normal. “You look like that there Joker fella.”

“Sorry,” the white-faced man said contritely.

“Me, too. I got no treats. Boss’s orders.”

“Then how about a trick!” the other said, tossing a dark object in Donovan’s startled face. He fumbled, catching it with both hands before it could strike the ground.

Curiously, Donovan looked it over. It was a handsized jack-o’-lantern. It was heavy, as if made of lead. But the pumpkin skin felt plasticky. There was a metallic ring through the stem.

“Should I open it?” Donovan asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,
should
he?”

The white-faced man called the question over to the seat beside him. It was empty. But he received an answer—a kind of mewing chorus. The sharp profile snapped around.

“I think that was a unanimous yes,” he hissed. His lips peeled back in a toothsome grimace.

Donovan looked from that leer to the identical one on the jack-o’-lantern’s face and shrugged. He plucked the ring. It came up. The lid stayed in place.

“I think I broke it,” Donovan called out, holding out the dangling ring.

“Awww, poor baby,” said the driver. And something in his voice made Donovan take a second look at the metal ring. It seemed vaguely familiar on second inspection. When he recognized what it was, he hastily dropped the ring.

That was a mistake. He should have dropped the pumpkin and found the nearest deep hole.

The hand grenade concealed inside the jack-o’-lantern obliterated Donovan’s right hand and most of his face in a smoky flash.

The Joker stepped out of the van and walked past the dead guard, the sack of mewing kittens slung over his back.

“Nice bridgework,” he remarked to the fleshless grin that dominated what little remained of Donovan’s face.

Coming to the gate, the Joker transferred the sack mouth to his eternally grinning teeth and started to climb. At the top, he straddled the wrought-iron scrollwork and opened the sack.

“Meoow!” he told the clustered plaintive faces staring up at him. Kittens climbed over one another blindly. “Hungry? Good. I’m going to feed you now.”

The Joker plucked out a calico kitten, looked it over, and dropped it to the gravel below, adding, “I’m going to feed you to the dogs!”

The kitten landed on its feet and stepped around dazedly. Another followed. And another. After some difficult labial contortions, the Joker pursed his lips and vented a long, piercing whistle.

And out of the manicured shrubbery charged a blunt furious engine of snapping snarling teeth.

“Bon appétit!”
the Joker called as one of Archie Bittner’s guardian pit bulls tore into the first chunk of feline bait.

Gathering up the wriggling sack, the Joker stepped from the gate to the top of the fieldstone fence. He walked gingerly and on tiptoe, for the fencetop was set with jagged fangs of broken glass.

Halfway along the south wall, his right-heel tap caught on a short chunk of glass. The Joker’s grin widened—in fear. His right hand clutched the sack in desperation. His other arm windmilled and he threw out his free foot in a reflexive attempt to keep his balance.

He failed. On the way down, he whistled.

The Joker landed like a stack of cordwood.

The sack burst open at the mouth and spilled dizzy kittens.

And twin pit bulls came charging in their direction.

The Joker saw them coming. He scooped up a kitten in each hand and leaped to his feet. Legs apart, he stood his ground as they bore in on him. When he could count their teeth, he began throwing kittens. Jaws snapped like beartraps. And kept chomping.

“Here’s dessert,” the Joker said, tossing a few more. The last kitten landed in front of the bone-worrying dogs and its ears went back.

The Joker tiptoed around the dogs, throwing a limp-wristed wave after him. “Tah-tah,” he squeaked. “Don’t forget to clean your plates, children.”

Archibald Bittner mistook the sound for a tree branch scraping an upstairs windowpane when the brass knocker clanked the first time. He made a mental note to have the gardener prune the pear trees.

The knocker sound repeated, this time more insistent. Then impatiently. And then frantically as if a lunatic had gotten hold of it.

Archie Bittner wasn’t sure what to do. He was not used to callers. He employed a gate guard to turn away the unwelcome—which to Archie Bittner meant everybody. Too stingy to hire a butler, Bittner was forced out of his easy chair to answer the door himself.

So secure was Archie Bittner in his castlelike home that he neglected to ascertain the identity of his visitor by peeking through a window. He simply opened the door.

The face framed in the doorway was so much a caricature of a human being that, at first, Bittner took it for a grotesque statue placed on his doorstep by pranksters. That illusion was dispelled by a nervous stretching of the rictuslike grin on the visitor’s jester visage.

“Trick or treat!” it chortled.

“I beg your pardon?” Bittner replied.

“It’s Halloween,” the clown scolded. “Don’t you read the funnies?”

“Yes, yes, of course. Aren’t you rather
old
for this?”

The wide grin thinned. The long face sucked in at the cheeks, and his eyes grew clown-sad.

“Awwww, do you really think so?” he asked.

Taken aback, Bittner demanded, “State your business.”

“Monkey business.” He held up his white sack and fingered the drawstring open. “Give or take?” he said.

“Again?”

“If you have no treat, I will share with you.”

Archie Bittner blinked. “If it will end this quickly, very well,” he growled. But the gleam in his eyes said that Archibald Bittner was not a man to turn down something for nothing.

“Uh-uh. Naughty, naughty,” the trick or treater told him. “You don’t just put your hands in. Look before you leap.”

Bittner cleared his throat. “As you say.” He bent over to look into the fat hollow of the sack. “I can’t see anything. Bring it up to the light.”

“Up to the light? Surely.” And suddenly the sack was in his face and an insistent steel-strong hand was at the back of his neck, pushing him in.

The sack went over Archie Bittner’s balding head and the Joker looped his bola tie around Bittner’s neck. He pressed the clasp stone and tiny motors whirred. The slide raced along its cord track to squeeze Bittner’s throat. It kept on squeezing.

It was so dark inside the sack that Bittner never registered the transition into unconsciousness.

Police Commissioner James W. Gordon looked up from his desk and the quarterly budget reports that seemed to land there six times a year to the smart rapping on his office door.

His aide McCulley poked his blank face in the half-open door.

“Yes, what is it?” Gordon demanded gruffly.

“The switchboard is lighting up. TV reception all over the city has gone haywire.”

“Then why don’t they call the stations?”

“It’s not one station, Commissioner, it’s all of them. And you know what
that
means.”

“Oh, God,” said Commissioner Gordon, who did know what it meant. He turned to the portable TV set he kept in his office to watch himself during his frequent evening news appearances. The ruddiness of his cheeks drained to near-white—almost the color of the chilling face he saw in his mind’s eye.

The picture tube took a seeming eternity to warm up. In his many years in office, Gordon had contended with serial killers, terrorists, and other vicious criminal elements. But none of them froze his blood as did the thought that the Joker was again on one of his wild tears.

Terrorists had agendas. Serial killers fit psychological profiles. And criminals, even the deranged ones, operated to
modus operandi.
Not the Joker. He was outside the pale—beyond insanity. Psychosis personified.

The commissioner watched the picture jump and twitch over a familiar macabre melody.
Funeral March of the Marionettes,
Gordon recalled.

The picture resolved into a flat whiteness. For a moment, he wondered if he had turned into an
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
rerun by accident. Then a gray outline appeared on screen. The figure of a man seen in profile. Not the rotund profile the music had come to suggest, but the reed-thin, Ichabod Crane silhouette of the Joker.

Then the Joker glided into view. He lined up with the silhouette and turned to face the camera. He smiled. But then, he always smiled.

“Good eeeevening,” he said in an unctuous Alfred Hitchcock imitation. “Our story for tonight is about a man who had no treats, and therefore had a trick played upon
him.”

Gordon groaned. He fingered his eyeglasses nervously.

The camera tracked the Joker as he stepped up to an overweight man who sat, bound by purple ropes, to a highchair. The man’s balding forehead shone in the TV lights as if waxed. His mouth was gagged with a baby’s bib.

“Meet Archibald Bittner, captain of industry, Scrooge extraordinaire, and dishonorer of Halloween,” said the Joker in his normal reedy voice. He went on: “You may be asking yourself, you out there in TV land, what has Mr. Bittner
done
to deserve my attention. The answer is simple: Nothing! Nothing at all. Mwee-hee-hee-hee.”

Gordon clutched his armrests at the familiar laugh. It never failed to make his blood run cold.

The Joker went on.

“I am after bigger game,” he said. “Batman. You all know Batman. I know Batman. Yet, who really, really knows Batman? Who is this . . . this masked rodent? No one knows. He comes, he goes. I stick my finger up my nose. That’s a joke. Laugh if you’ve got the moxie.”

The Joker snapped his fingers in the air. Two men stepped on camera to take their places on either side of the bound figure of Archie Bittner. One wore a black jumpsuit with an orange pumpkin over his head. The other wore orange with a black pumpkin.

“Before I go on, and believe me, I will go on,” the Joker said, “meet my costars. Jack-O’-Lantern and Punkin Head. Which is which, you wonder? Dear me, I can hardly tell myself. They’re twins, you know. That’s why they dress that way. That, plus I pay their salaries.”

The two henchmen stood with their jack-o’-Lantern faces impassive. They looked like Halloweeny smile buttons. Except their fixed pumpkin grins exactly copied the Joker’s own.

The Joker leaned into the camera and said conspiritorially, “Nonspeaking roles. That way I don’t have to pay ’em so much.” And he winked like a demented owl.