The Further Adventures of The Joker (5 page)

“But, as I was saying, when the movie came out, one of the promotional gimmicks was the seats in the theaters were rigged with a mild electrical charge and a voice on the screen would announce—the Tingler’s in the theater, and bam, all the chairs in the place got a harmless dose of Ready Kilowatt. Nice idea, don’t you think? Scared the piss out of me when I was a boy.

“Commishy, however, will not only get a dose of Ready, he’ll get the old boy’s lifeblood. I flick this switch all the way, and bam, you get to see Gordon’s head fly off smoking.

“Isn’t this something? I enjoy our chats so much, I stray. Movie history is such a fascinating thing. However, the thing for me to decide now is the fate of our Commissioner Gordon. And this brings us back to Mr. Sardonicus and the Thumbs Up, or Thumbs Down cards. What shall it be?”

“Joker,” I yelled. “Don’t do it. Let Gordon go and I’ll let you strap me in the chair.”

“I’m going to get you anyway, Bats. Now, about Gordon’s fate. I’m afraid there’s no audience to do it. You’ve beat them all up. And since Commishy is out for the count, and you have a definite bias, and I so much prefer my own bias, I’m afraid that the burden is left to me. Or rather, my image on the screen will decide.”

The screen Joker came unfrozen and lifted up a large card with a fist and extended thumb on it. The Joker smiled and turned the card so the thumb pointed down. The screen froze again.

“There you have it,” said the Joker. “Say good-bye to the Commissioner.”

I knew then he was going to do it and there was no reason to try and stall. I started running, and he hit the switch. There was a crackling sound and Gordon’s head jerked and smoked and a lick of flame flashed off the side of his head and his hair and party hat caught fire.

I yelled, “Bastard,” made the front row of seats, put a boot on the back of a chair, and sprang for the Joker, just as he pulled back the switch and threw it again.

Kilowatts sizzled and more flames jumped from Jim’s body. He
was
dead. No one could take that kind of voltage. I could still feel the electricity crackling in the air, and could smell . . . plastic?

Even as my hands grabbed at the Joker’s coat and I jerked him from the Time Machine, felt how light he was, I realized, too late, the Joker had once again made me a fool.

He had used my rage against me.

The plastic replica of the Joker with the mechanical mouth and switch-pulling hand, exploded. It was filled with assorted Halloween candy and a nerve gas.

The explosion blew me off the stage.

An armrest struck me in the back, knocked what air I had left out of me. I lay crumpled on the floor between the stage and the front row, amidst Halloween candy and the burned replica of Jim. The electric shock had melted the plastic Commissioner and burned its clothes and hair off. The head had melted off at the neck and lay under a seat near my hand.

I was weak as a second-night bridegroom, but the explosion hadn’t done any real damage, and I hadn’t gotten as much gas in my lungs as I feared. I could feel its numbing effects, but it made me feel more slow than incapacitated.

But that was bad enough. It looked as if the Batman, who was born out back of the Gotham Theater, was going to die inside it. The real Joker appeared at the edge of the stage and looked down. He was dressed the same as his replica had been. He held a large, air-compressed gun in his hand.

“Trick or Treat, Bat Sap. I knew you couldn’t resist getting your hands on me,” he said. “Especially if you thought I had done Gordon in. And I will. Out of order, unfortunately. But, that’s life.”

I tried to breathe slowly, deeply, regain some strength. I eased my hand farther under the seat and touched the plastic Gordon head.

“I could have filled that model of me with my dissolving liquid, you know. But I wouldn’t have had time to gloat, and I gloat so well . . . See, I’ve already turned thumbs down on you. This pressurized gun holds one large pellet of my dissolvent and water, and all I have to do now is squeeze the trigger, and splat, you’re bat guano. So, before my gas wears off and you climb up here and knock knots on my attractive green-haired head, I will, for all the unhappy years you’ve given me, bid you
adieu
.”

He laughed that insane laugh, and it went up my spine and kicked around inside my head, and just before he pulled the trigger, I grabbed the plastic head, twisted and tossed it. It hit the gun on the tip of the barrel just as the Joker pulled the trigger. The plastic head took the blast I would have gotten, and the chemical splashed on either side of it and on the Joker.

He yelped, jumped back, and dropped the gun. The mess had splattered on his coat and pants, but hadn’t touched his flesh.

I was still weak, but I managed to pull myself over the edge of the stage. It seemed to take hours.

The Joker was screaming with rage. He ran at me as I came up on my knees, and he kicked, and as he did, a thin blade sprang from the bottom of his shoe.

Normally, I could have blocked it with time to spare, but I was still weak from the gas, so I only managed to twist partially out of the way. The blade tore into my side like a nuclear missile.

I grunted, slammed his shin with my forearm, and the Joker went stumbling back.

I was on my feet now, and the Joker slapped at me with his right palm. Again, too slow. His hand hit my shoulder, and he had one of his souped-up joy buzzers strapped to his palm, and when it hit me, a shock like a lightning bolt went through me.

For a moment, I thought I’d go down.

So did the Joker, and he got in too close.

I snapped out a lazy left jab and grazed his cheek and he went back a foot and his hand went inside his coat and came out with a deck of cards. He threw them at me. They were metal cards with razor-edged sides. I tried to dodge them, but it was like trying to move out of the flight of a flock of geese. A number of them hit me and stuck, the worst being one that tore through my cowl and cut deeply into my forehead.

I yanked it free and shook like a dog and the others flew out and away from me like panicked pigeons.

I smiled at the Joker.

He, of course, was smiling back. But there was nothing mirthful about his grin.

The effects of the gas had worn off, and I charged him with a yell.

He knew the bloodlust was on me and he tried to run for it.

I caught him by the shoulder and spun him around and hit him with a left hook in the midsection, and he blew out his breath and went skidding across the stage. He got up, wobbled toward the screen, put his hands on it, touched the bottom of his image, tried to get his breath back.

I calmly strolled over and took him by the shoulder and turned him around. I smiled at him. A nice, big smile.

He could hardly find his voice. “I give.”

“Okay,” I said, and hit him with a hard right cross that connected with the side of his jaw and knocked him through the screen and onto the floor of the room beyond.

The rip in the screen went from top to bottom, splitting the Joker’s film image as if it had been halved by a giant cleaver.

I went through the split into the darkness and the light from the projector followed me in. I took hold of the Joker’s lapels and pulled him to my height and let him dangle in my hands. He was unconscious. A bruise the color of my cloak was forming on his paper-white cheek. He looked like nothing more than a pathetic clown puppet. I thought of all the people he had murdered, all the lives he had shattered and haunted, including mine, and I thought how easy it would be to snap his neck, to make certain it all ended here.

Then I remembered where I was. The Gotham Theater. The place I had last been a child and my parents had sat on either side of me and I had felt loved. And moments later I had felt dark and empty because that love had been taken away from me.

I was a crime fighter, not a murderer like the Joker, and I hoped that’s how I would always be. Still, I hoped Arkham Asylum held him this time, because next time around I couldn’t be sure of the color of my soul.

I dragged him through the split in the screen and onto the stage, over to the Time Machine. I set him in the seat, unfastened the air hose from the gun and the compresser behind the curtains, and used it to bind him to the chair.

I stared at the projector light, watched dust ride down its beam. That beam had held all kinds of dreams and that night so long ago. I had shared a dream with my parents. A dream where a man in black fought the bad guys and always won and got the girl in the end.

I took in a deep breath, climbed off the stage, and checked on the Joker’s men. A few of them were moving. I unfastened my cloak and used the pen knife in my utility belt to cut it into strips. I used the strips to tie the hands and feet of the thugs.

I used the rest of it to bind my wounds, then I went out of the theater and out to the Batmobile, used the phone inside to call Jim.

I put a hand to my injured side, walked down the alley and out back of the theater, stopped where my parents had fallen.

I glanced up at that one lonesome streetlight. Certainly it was not the same light of long ago, but it was in the same place. I looked at it the way I had that night when my parents lay on either side of me.

It occurred to me that maybe I, too, had been shot that night, only wounded, and that I lay in some hospital somewhere in a coma, dreaming all I thought I had lived. Living in a permanent dark world where a man can dress like a bat and fight a criminal who looks like a psychotic clown.

Sirens wailed in the distance.

—For Kasey Lansdale

“Definitive Therapy”

F. Paul Wilson

ARKHAM ASYLUM

Medical History

NAME:
“The Joker”
  DATE OF BIRTH:
Unknown
  MR#
20073

ATTENDING PHYSICIAN:
Dr. R. Hills & staff

CHIEF COMPLAINT:
Committed to life internment by court order. Returned to this facility after the most recent of his periodic escapes.

HISTORY OF CHIEF COMPLAINT:
A career criminal with a long, well-publicized, well-documented history of antisocial and sociopathic behavior in the guise of a self-created public persona known as “The Joker.” Convicted of multiple murders. Multiple escapes and readmissions to this facility. See old charts.

PAST HISTORY:
Little available besides what is in the public record. The patient relates a history of juvenile delinquency, which meets the criteria for Severe Conduct.
Disorder, undifferentiated type (312.90).

ALLERGIES:
None known.
  MEDICATIONS:
On no meds

PREVIOUS HOSPITALIZATIONS:
Many to this facility. See previous charts.

FAMILY HISTORY:
Unknown. Patient uncooperative as historian.

SOCIAL HISTORY:
No external stigmata of alcoholism or drug abuse.

SYSTEMIC REVIEW:
According to what little history can be gleaned from the patient, he has been in generally good health for most of his life. He has a past history of facial trauma combined with toxic chemical exposure resulting in permanent disfigurement of the facies, the integument, and its appendages. No history of hearing loss or visual impairment. No thyroid disease or diabetes. No asthma, emphysema, or chronic lung disease. No heart disease or hypertension. No history of ulcer or colitis. No GU infections or past disease. No seizures or strokes. His psychiatric history has been exhaustively explored and documented at this facility. His facial/chemical trauma was once posited as the source of his psychopathy, but the patient relates a long history (undocumented) of criminal antisocial behavior since his early teens, long predating the trauma.

DICTATED BY:
Harold Lewis, M.D.
  SIGNATURE:
Harold Lewis

Physical Exam

NAME:
“The Joker” (legal name unknown)
  MR#
20073

ATTENDING PHYSICIAN:
Dr. R Hills & staff

VITAL SIGNS:
BP:
122/78
  P:
82
  R:
10
  T:
98.6

PHYSICAL FINDINGS:
A thin, facially disfigured Caucasian male, apparently in his midthirties, alert, well-oriented, in no distress. The head is normocephalic with slight evidence of proptosis. Neuromuscular paresis and cicatricial disfigurement of the facial tissues have resulted in a permanent rictus. Ears, nose, and throat are negative. The neck is supple, the thyroid is negative to palpation. The chest shows a moderate pectus excavatum. The heart is normal in size and rhythm with no murmurs. The lungs are clear to auscultation and percussion The abdomen is soft, no masses, no organomegaly, no tenderness. Normal uncircumcised male genitalia. The lymph nodes are negative. The limbs are intact and freely movable. The deep tendon reflexes are +2 bilaterally, the pupils are equally reactive to light and accommodation. The skin is markedly pale. Its appendages—the hair and nails—are green. This does not appear to be factitial since there is no sign of natural color under the cuticles or at the roots.

PROVISIONAL DIAGNOSIS:
1. Antisocial Personality Disorder (301.70)
2. Probable Delusion Disorder, grandiose type (297.10)
3. Rule out Bipolar Disorder, manic, mood congruent with psychotic features (296.44)
4. Rule out Intermittent Explosive Disorder (312.34)