The Further Adventures of The Joker (42 page)

Then he realizes that he is alone.

And not alone.

“Who’s there?” the Joker asks the shadows in the hall outside the lounge.

One shadow answers.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” the Joker says happily. “Yet.”

Silently, the Batman closes the door to the corridor behind him.

“I need your help.” Batman says the words as if he were spitting out poison. “I want the antidote.”

The Joker slaps his hands to the balls of his cheeks. “What? No buttering me up? No asking me about the wife and kids? Just, ‘Gimme the antidote,’ as if . . . as if . . . I mean nothing to you?” He wipes a single heartfelt tear from his eye. “And here I thought we had something special between us, a certain
je ne sais quoi?
A, how you say, give-and-take relationship.”

The Batman waits.

The Joker holds two fingers to his lips to cover a giggle. “You know. I
give
you the antidote. And you . . .
take
me away from all of this.”

“There is no negotiation.”

The Joker shrugs and sits back down to watch the television. “Then there is no anti—”

The Joker’s feet dangle above the floor as Batman jerks him into the air by the collar of his Arkham-issued white shirt. But the white-faced man rolls his eyeballs back, sticks out his tongue, and hangs limply, offering no resistance. Batman heaves the man across the room.

The Joker stretches out on the floor where he has landed and rests his head on his hand. Then he thrusts out his bottom lip. “Whatsa matter, Batikins? In the old days you could have held me up like that a good three or four minutes without breaking into a sweat.” He narrows his eyes in concern. “Say, are you getting enough sleep?”

“Get up,” Batman says.

“You’re not thinking too clearly, Batpal. If you beat me silly—well, sillier—what are you going to do with me then? Take me away to . . . Arkham? Naa, a tad redundant. You going to kill me? Naa, what would the ACLU say? You going to torture me to reveal the secret of the antidote? Maybe slip toothpicks under my nails until I—”

A black hypodermic needle glints as Batman fills it with a clear ampule from his belt.

The Joker stands, grinning. “Would it make a difference if I just said no?”

Batman snaps the hypo into the barrel of his gas pistol.

The Joker carefully undoes the buttons of his institutional shirt, offering his pale chest as an easy target. “If I have an antidote to the nightmare compound, don’t you think I also have an antidote to your truth compound? And don’t you think I loaded myself with it because I knew you might try something like this?”

Batman takes aim.

“Go ahead, Batchump. All it’ll do is put me to sleep for a day or two. A day or two during which you
won’t
sleep. And by the time I wake up, you can bet that pink toad, Bartholomew, will have an injunction against you
and
have transferred me someplace you’ll never find me. Not in the time you’ll have left.”

Batman hesitates.

The Joker smiles. He lowers his voice, twitches his lips. “So what you got to ask yourself, punk, is, ‘do I feel lucky?’ ”

Batman lowers his pistol.

“Oh, wipe that silly frown off your face,” the Joker says as he slowly buttons his shirt again. “You get me out of here tonight and the antidote’s all yours.”

Batman holds his pistol uselessly at his side. He looks away, shakes his head to clear it. “I . . . I can’t help you escape.”

The Joker waves his hand. “Of course you can. It’s easy. I do it all the time myself.”

“No,” Batman says.

The Joker checks his reflection in the television screen and rubs his hands through his hair until it all stands on end like a green cloud. He smiles at his perfection and turns away from the television. “Think of it this way: If you don’t help me, inside two weeks you’ll have your own cell here and inside a month you’ll be dead. Then I’ll escape anyway but there won’t be anyone who’ll be able to bring me back.”

He holds up a finger.
“But,
if you get me out of here tonight, I’ll give you the antidote, and things will be back to normal, or abnormal in your case. I’ll be free, like I’m going to be anyway, but you’ll still be around to hunt me down and give my poor life some meaning in these dark and dangerous days.” He holds out his hand. “Whaddaya say, B.M.? Is that a deal or is that a deal?”

Batman stares at the Joker’s mad eyes. He breaks down his pistol and replaces it in his belt.

The Joker waves his hand toward Batman. “C’mon, shake on it?”

Batman’s hands stay at his side. The Joker reaches out to his own hand, rips it off from his wrist, and holds the stump up to Batman’s face. “See? Nothing up my sleeve . . .” He cackles.

Batman snatches the fake hand from the Joker and hefts it in his own. “Gas or explosive?” he asks.

The Joker smiles as he stretches his arm and pushes his real hand through the cuff of his shirt. “Remember who you’re dealing with here, B.M. Of course it’s explosive. It’s a
hand
grenade.” When his laughter subsides, he adds, “Pull out the thumb, count to five—or is it two?—then toss and run. That’s the only way to smuggle things into Arkham, you know. By making them look like things that already belong here.”

Batman disables the explosive hand, turns his back on the Joker, and goes to the door. He opens it silently and checks the hall beyond with a narrow sliver of mirror from his belt. “Come here,” he says and the Joker goes to him. “We do it my way, understand? No one gets killed. No one gets hurt.”

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you that a thing worth doing is worth doing well?” the Joker protests. “I’ve got a reputation to maintain and an Arkham breakout without a few gratuitous deaths will never make the eleven o’clock—”

Batman’s hand goes around and tightens on the Joker’s throat. “Or we could both end it here and now. Together.”

The Joker pats Batman’s cheek and for once he doesn’t laugh. “You forget, Batman. Nothing ends in Arkham. Nothing.”

Batman’s cape moves with the beat of an immense batwing as it flows through the air and envelopes the Joker in blackness.

“My way,” Batman says again, and then the two of them, the Batman and the Joker, move out into the tunnels of Arkham, into the shadows where nothing ends.

Together.

The moonlight and sudden night air on his face remind the Joker of birth. The swift flutter of Batman’s cape as it withdraws fades to nothing, and the Joker stretches out his hands and arms to steady himself and finds he is on Arkham’s south wall, fifteen feet up, tottering on the rough-edged stones.

“Jump,” says Batman but the Joker cannot see him.

Behind the Joker, the dark mass of Arkham is silhouetted against a night sky of low clouds faintly underlit by the distant glow of Gotham City’s lights.

“A perfect escape,” the Joker says wistfully. “Without a single death. How amazing. How disappointing.”

“Now!”

With a snicker, the Joker throws himself from the wall without knowing where or how he will land, or even if. But Batman catches him, saves him, lowers him gently to the ground.

“That’s it,” Batman says.

The Joker turns away and brushes his hand against the ancient stones of Arkham’s walls. He has never touched them from the outside. “So quickly?” he asks.

“My way,” Batman says.

“I wish you had let me see more of it.” The power of Arkham resonates beneath the Joker’s fingertips, calling him back.

“I wish you had seen less as it is.”

The Joker nods and takes his hand away from the wall. His smile widens. “Perhaps that’s our secret,” he says and turns back to Batman, a living shadow against the dark surrounding forest.

“Our secret?” Batman asks.

“If we saw less, if we knew less, then we would not need to be what we are, don’t you think?”

“If we saw less, if we knew less, then we would
be
less.”

“Of course,” the Joker says. “Of course, you’re right.” And he laughs and he screams and he swings his fist at Batman’s face.

A fraction of a second too late, Batman blocks and the Joker’s blow connects with the top of his cowl. He flips backward, landing in a crouch, balancing on both feet and one hand. The other hand holds a Batarang. Dried leaves crackle beneath him as he shifts his weight. Behind him, the forest is dark and silent.

“Have you guessed?” the Joker asks, turning his body to provide the smallest target. “Has it taken you this long?”

The subtle crunching of the leaves is silenced.

“You haven’t?” The Joker’s laughter stops in amazement.

“There is no antidote?” Batman asks.

“Right again, B.M.” The Joker chuckles. “For getting me out of Arkham, your reward is a few more weeks of sleepless nights, and an end to dreaming. You know what happens when you’re prevented from dreaming?”

The Batarang sings through the air. The Joker arches back and the weapon sparks against the stones of Arkham and buries itself in the ground.

“The dreams build up inside you—” the Joker laughs, “—until they burst out while you’re awake.” He dives and rolls away as a second Batarang slices the air above his head, dying against the stones.

“Only then,” the Joker says as he comes back to his feet and clasps his hands together, “they’re called hallucinations. And because of my nightmare compound, they’ll be hallucinations of the things you fear most as well.” He pulls his arms apart. Two hands move grotesquely with one wrist. “Just like your dreams.” He pulls a thumb from his second false hand.

Batman’s arm snaps down and a billow of smoke erupts at his feet just as the Joker’s second hand-grenade flies at him. The Joker twists and dives away. The explosive hand detonates. The Joker hears the grunt of a man who has lost his breath.

“Just like your
dreams,”
the Joker cries into the night. He pulls a button from his shirt, scrapes a nail across it, counts to three then tosses it into the air. The button flares with four seconds of magnesium light. Long enough to see the stark outline of a man crawling away on the ground, seeking shelter beneath the trees.

The Joker pounces. He feels the explosive huff of breath burst from Batman’s lungs. Batman’s arm comes back to drive an elbow into the Joker’s side but the countermove is slow and the Joker is on his feet again without being touched. Slowly, the Batman rolls over.

“It’s only been ten days without sleep, B.M.. but already your reflexes are off. You let me jump on your back! You couldn’t block my punch. You’re decaying in front of me.”

The Joker laughs.

Batman sits up, hands at his belt. The Joker flicks another flare button and the unstable chemical bursts into metal flame and adheres to Batman’s emblem. Batman’s hands leave his belt and swirl his cape around him as he rolls on the forest floor to extinguish the flame. But by the time the flare is spent, the Joker’s foot has found the Batman’s head, again and again.

A final kick goes into the side of Batman’s chest, just beneath the lip of his body armor. The Joker falls back, laughing with the memory of the satisfying give he had felt as a rib collapsed.

Batman moans, face down in the dead leaves and dirt.

The Joker sniggers as he catches his breath. “Whaddaya say, B.M.? You want to spend the last days of your life fighting hallucinations till you drop and die? Or would you rather end it? Here and now?” The Joker pulls the rest of the buttons from his smuggled shirt. Ignited in the proper positions, in the mouth, on the eyes, there are enough buttons to kill.

Batman rolls over. Blood glistens at his mouth, bubbling at the corner of his lips as he wheezes with each breath. The Joker drops to his knees at the Batman’s side. He holds the fistful of flare buttons in his hands. “Tell the truth. Haven’t you always wanted to go out in a blaze of glory?”

“Here and now?” Batman asks. His voice is weak, confused.

“That’s the idea,” the Joker says. He holds the buttons in the open palm of his hand.

“No,” Batman says.

The Joker picks out the first button. He shrugs. “All good things . . .”

“Not here,” Batman coughs. He tries to get up, can’t make it, falls on his side with a sigh, hand going to his side. “Not now.”

The Joker scratches the surface of the button and begins his count. “Count of two,” he says. “Or is that five?”

The Batman’s arm snaps up toward the overhanging trees. The Joker hears the hiss of a Batarang, the twang of a silken rope, the creak of a tree branch.

The button flares. The rope tightens on the suddenly stretched branch and the stretched branch straightens. Batman lifts up into the air, roaring in pain and defiance, until he is upright, holding himself on his rope above the ground.

His feet snap closed on the Joker’s hands. The Joker’s real hands.

Wrapped by white skin, pressed in against the others resting there, the button flares.

The Joker howls.

Batman shouts in triumph as his protective boots push in on the Joker’s flaming hands. The blinding white glow of the raging magnesium shoots out from between charred fingers like a captured sun. Thin strands of glowing white smoke stream into the Joker’s red-rimmed mouth as he takes in another desperate gasp of air to scream and scream and . . .

. . . there is nothing to wake to.

The chemical ignition is spent. The Joker twitches spasmodically. Batman releases his feet and drops to the ground, stumbling as the pain of his shattered rib burns through him.

The Joker babbles deliriously on the floor of the forest. The ruined flesh and bones of his hands are fused together. The skin of his hands is no longer white.

Batman limps over to stand above the Joker. He coughs out blood but the injury is still not enough to stop him. Never.

“You’re wrong,” Batman says hoarsely. “It
does
end in Arkham. For you.”

With one arm clenched against his side, Batman snaps his rope from the tree branch and ties the Joker’s legs together. Then he drags the writhing man around the great stone walls of Arkham to the thick twisted iron bars of the main gate. The Joker screams as he is pulled across the hard ground, but not in pain.

The gates swing open before the man from the shadows and the gibbering burden he pulls. All the lights of Arkham blaze through its windows like eyes searching for something that has been missed.