36

The Joker stood waiting at the end of the Ghost Train ride when the brightly painted doors flew open and the car came careening out, slamming into the emergency bumper at the end of the track. The Commissioner’s head whipped back, and then lolled forward, a string of drool connecting his chin to the sparse white hair on his chest.

“Ah, here they are now!” the Joker said. “My goodness, that’s some Ghost Train. When they went in, the chap in the middle didn’t look a day over seventeen, and his three little pals were professional basketball stars!”

The three grotesques still clustered around Gordon as the restraining bar lifted, and he rested his forehead against it.

“Look at him now, poor fellow,” the grinning man continued, leaning on his cane. “That’s what a dose of reality does for you.” Gordon’s diminutive captors dragged him out of the car. “Never touch the stuff myself, you understand. I find it gets in the way of the hallucinations.”

Propelled by his tormentors, the Commissioner stumbled and fell in front of the Joker, one hand sliding in a puddle of water and sending him flat.

“Why, hello, Commissioner,” the Joker said. “How’s things?” When he got no response, he leaned in close. “Commissioner?”

Still no response.

“Hello?”

Only a ragged panting.

“Anybody home?” he said, louder this time. This was beginning to be insulting.

Finally he straightened, letting his disgust show in his expression. The rain was falling harder again, pelting the onlookers and splashing in puddles all around them.

“God, how boring,” he growled. “The man’s a complete turnip!” He twirled his finger next to his head. “Take him away and put him in his cage. Perhaps he’ll get a little livelier once he’s had a chance to think his situation over. To reflect upon life, and all its random injustice.”

He leaned over, placing his chin on the cane, and stared down into a puddle, reminded of that runoff ditch, all those years ago…

“Hey, c’mon! Quit daydreamin’.”

Lifting his gaze, he watched as the pathetic shell of a man was dragged away through the mud like a whipped dog, but as amusing as it was, he quickly grew tired of the spectacle. Turning his face up to the cold rain, he closed his eyes and felt the pulse of a strange radioactive ache burning inside his chest. A sick feverish heat that could never be quenched, like an unrequited crush.

Where is Batman?

What’s taking him so long?

*   *   *

Gordon thought maybe he was back in that animal cage, but he couldn’t be sure of anything anymore. There was something that looked like iron bars casting harsh, film noir slashes across his shivering flesh.

It was as if he had forgotten what it was like to wear clothes. To be warm. To have dignity. To be worthy of a daughter’s love. Maybe he’d never actually had those things. Maybe that was all just a cruel dream and this, this was the only reality. Always and forever.

The freaks surrounded him, their shrill mocking laughter like vicious birds tearing into him from all sides. Terrible, unnatural faces distorted by cruelty floated through his blurry vision like creatures in a nightmare. A nightmare that never ended. Gordon curled tighter into a quivering fetal position, but the laughter was inside of him, as well. There was no escape.

“That’s so funny,” the skeletal man said. “That’s so funny.”

No escape.

There was a barker at this carnival, too. A voice he knew. That voice. That monster.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” the Joker cried theatrically. “You’ve read about it in the newspapers! Now, shudder as you observe, before your very eyes, that most rare and tragic of nature’s mistakes. I give you… the average man!”

The freaks oohed and aahed as Gordon tucked his head down under his arms, willing himself to disappear. Yet he remained, and the nightmare continued. With his eyes closed, he saw Barbara. When he opened them again, deformed and mocking faces swirled around him. The Joker was there, in the front, his leering expression only inches away.

“Physically unremarkable, it has instead a deformed set of values,” he mocked. “Notice the hideously bloated sense of humanity’s importance. The club-footed social conscience and the withered optimism.” More than ever, there was menace in those eyes. “It’s certainly not for the squeamish, is it?”

He put his head down again, but the voice didn’t stop.

“Most repulsive of all, are its frail and useless notions of order and sanity. If too much weight is put upon them… they SNAP!” To illustrate his point, he snapped his fingers. The deformed audience howled. In the distance, there seemed to be the growl of a motor.

“‘How does it live?’ I hear you ask. How does this poor, pathetic specimen survive in today’s harsh and irrational world? The sad answer is, ‘not very well.’ Faced with the inescapable fact that human existence is mad, random and pointless, one in eight of them crack up and go stark slavering buggo!”

The growl was closer, deep and vibrating up through the ground on which he crouched.

“And who can blame them? In a world as psychotic as this, any other response would be crazy!”

There was a bright and sudden light shining through the cage of his fingers. Moving light, coming from twin sources, washing over Gordon and piercing the iron bars that crisscrossed his broken mind. This wasn’t the maddening kaleidoscope of carnival glitter and neon that had come to define his new existence. No, this was a pure, clean colorless light that chased away the shadows. A light that shone on him like forgotten hope.

The thrum of the engines ceased, and he wondered for a panicky moment if it had been his imagination. Then he heard the whine of the canopy as it opened, and the familiar rustle of the cape. No sound from the boots, of course.

“Hello,” Batman said. “I came to talk.”