A Study in Fear : Part III
In the bowels of the Earth it was winter. It was a bleak and soulless winter
with a black, starless, sunless, moonless sky above and a cracked a shattered
Earth below. Through the pitch night sky fell a snowfall of madness, each
snowflake unique in it's insanity and infamy. the wind does not blow here, it
screams. This.. is Arkham.
But it's not all bad.
"So Jonathan, what progress have you made with the bipolar Mr.
Dent?"
"Marvelous, incredible ! The aversion therapy that I suggested seems to
be working excellently"
The two men walked side by side down the narrow dimly lit corridor. The
walls were lined with steel doors, each labeled with the name of it's reluctant
occupant. Nigma, Jones, Crane, Zsasz, Cobblepot, Dent. A veritable who's who of
Gotham's criminally insane; each door the only thing holding back a world of
madness and mayhem. The two men stopped in a section of the corridor where the
wall had been replaced with a wide glass floor to ceiling window. Through the
glass they watched the huddled figure of a man cloaked in shadows.
"He's sleeping?"
"Yes, and nightmaring."
"How can you tell"
"The breathing patterns, the restless motion of his head and limbs
and...."
"And?"
"I've nightmared before now"
"Not surprising, the things that you must have seen down here"
The second man chuckled. "It's not what's down here that scares me.
It's what's out there.". He pointed a thin finger towards the ceiling,
indicating the world that still turned above. The other doctor nodded. At least
in here there were guards and guns and doors and locks and sheets of toughened
glass between the sane and the insane. Of course, there were escapes, but
nobody could be expected to second guess the devilish and devious lengths that
some of Arkhams inmates would go to to win their freedom. Even now, somewhere
in Gotham, the Joker was free to scheme and plot and act out the deranged
fantasies that occupied his mind. At least in here, they were under lock and
key. Out there...
Suddenly there was a scream from the other side of the glass, so loud that
it shook the panel it's frame and made both doctors jump with fright. The
huddled figure sat bolt upright and shook with terror, or perhaps rage. It
leapt from it's low bed and, turning, hurled itself bodily against the glass.
It shook in it's frame again, but held firm.
"Guard!" yelled the first doctor, subconsciously fumbling a radio
panic button from his jacket pocket.
"It's alright." said the other doctor, staying the first doctor's
hand from his panic button, and stepped closer to glass until his nose was
almost pressed against it.
The figure, now down on all fours, slammed a fist into the glass. Again, it
held firm. The figure stuck again, and again. Another fist against the glass,
and then another. Blow after blow bounced from the toughened glass, until dull
red patches began to mark the spots where raw and bloodied knuckles had struck.
The figure rose to it's knees, still punching, then to it's feet, lashing out
with fists and arms and elbows.
Finally, the hammering stopped.
Blood trickled like rainwater down the glass. The figure stood hunched, it's
shoulders rising and falling as it breathed hard. It spat a thick globule of
bloody sputum onto the glass, which hung there like a repugnant dead insect
larvae. The figure stepped closer to the glass, step by slow and calculated
step, until the figure was nose to nose with the doctor who remained calmly on
the other side of the glass. The figures breath caused pluming patches of steam
on the glass as it breathed, and a low feral growl escaped it's lips.
This, was Harvey Dent.
The face against the glass defied logical description. It's one side,
smooth. A glistening eye, a tidy crop of rich brown hair and smile both
handsome and wholesome. It had been a good face, this face. An honest face. A
face that went to work, paid it's taxes, loved it's wife and never mumbled the
middle of the national anthem. A face that had stood for law and order with
such conviction. Conviction long since shattered. And as for the other side of
that face? An eye that stared from a burnt and wasted socket. Raw and tortured
skin that ran in rivulets from brow to chin with pulsing exposed veins and
clotted fleshy masses that gathered alongside lines of almost protruding bone.
Half a smile from a lipless mouth which showed yellowed rotting teeth in black,
scaly gums. A face that lived in shadows. The face of a madness that had lived
in Harvey Dent all his life. The face that lives in all of us, and the face
that no one sees. The face behind the face that we show others. When acid had
struck District Attorney Harvey Dent's face it had burnt and stripped and
peeled away more than skin, flesh and bloody tissue. It had peeled away the
lies and deceit, the moral facade the Harvey Dent had hidden his other mind
behind, the disguise that he had worn every day of his life. This was the real
face of Harvey Dent, and this was his own justice.
"Harvey, you need to make a decision. You need to decide to stop
fighting this. You need to decide that you don't need this". The first
doctor withdrew a small silver disk from his pocket. Holding to the dim light,
the glimmer showed the face of Abraham Lincoln on both sides; one side
crisscrossed with hack marks. The doctor pressed the undamaged side to the glass.
"Do you want it Harvey?"
"Damn you.." cursed Two Face. He had moved his face away from the
glass and pressed his scarred, lurid skinned hand against the glass as if he
might be able to feel the cool silver surface of this coin through the misted
partition.
"Do you want it Harvey?" asked the Doctor again, "Or can you
decide without it?"
The hand against the glass fluttered spasmodically.
"I...", Dent's voice failed him, his mind failed him, and most of
all his all consuming belief in the randomness of fate, luck, karma and destiny
failed him. He wasn't impartial. He could only make the right decision, or the
wrong decision. He couldn't make the random decision. And the random decision
was what Two-Face's universe required. Harvey Dent slumped to the floor, and
Two Face slumped with him, the two locked in combat on an unimaginable
battlefield. As one of them began to sob, the Doctor walked away.
"He seems to be relapsing.. " said the second Doctor, casting a
critical and doubting eye over the notes that he had been handed by the first
Doctor just minutes before. "He still seems incapable of making a decision
without this coin".
"Just the opposite." said the other Doctor. "This is
precisely the reaction that I was hoping for. Harvey Dent is now locked in an
internal philosophical battle with his other self, Two Face. How long this
lasts can vary; a few minutes, a few hours, even days. But each time, one of
them is coming out on top. Each time a decision is being made eventually. And
the time is getting shorter. Soon Harvey Dent will have come out on top and Two
Face will be no more. Dent will know what the coin represents, and he will be
unable to even look at it.. for fear that he may once more loose ground to his
other personality."
"And what if Two Face comes out on top?"
"He won't. He can't."
"Why not."
"Because Two Face is the one who is having all the nightmares."
The two doctors walked away, deeper into the catacomb understructure of
Arkham. Deeper into the madness. It was hard to believe, but there were one or
two people that were kept even deeper underground than Harvey Dent. As they
faded into the shadows of the corridor, the first doctor fumbled with a small
device in his pocket. Unseen by his compeer, he depressed a switch on a small
remote control that he had secreted in his pocket since they had come down
here. In Harvey Dents observation cell, the vents in the ceiling opened, and a
bilious green gas blew forth. It was thick, like a fog, and it fell into
puddles beneath the vents. Then slowly, as it continued to pump into the room,
the puddles grew larger and thick probing tendrils crept out from their
bellies. Harvey Dent knew what the gas meant, and he scrambled up onto the bed.
Some decisions, both Harvey and Two Face could agree on.
The fog grew thick, and quickly grew into a carpet that covered the entire
floor of the cell. Then it began to scales the walls, to fill the room with
itself. It crawled around the legs of the small bed, and poked wispy heads like
cobras above it's edge. It rolled in waves against the window, collapsing in on
itself like a heavy sludge polluted waves. Inch by inch, foot by foot it grew.
It was relentless. Soon, it was up to Harvey Dent's chest as he stood on tip
toes of the top of the bed. As it passed his mouth and nose he took one final
breath and held it for as long as he could. It was only when the gas had
reached the ceiling, and he could hold his breath no longer that both Harvey
Dent and Two Face began to scream.
Dr. Rosen stood in front of his audience, and the audience at home, and the
millions around the world who were now following what he was doing on a live
feeds from the Internet or their TV sets. Dr. Rosen stood in front of them and
for the first and only time in his life he knew that what he was doing was
right. He had made them sit up and take notice. He had shaken them from the fog
and mire of their day to day lives. He had shown them truth. And it was true
that Dr. Rosen was a better person now. The spotlight was on him. Hot and white
like a new sun it bathed him in artificial radiance that made his skin feel
pallid and dirty. He knew that he had bathed or shaved for some time now, and
he could feel wet sticky patches growing under his arms even now as he stood in
silence in front of the cameras. The cameras that were the eyes of the new
world that he was creating.
Behind the cameras the audience was unnervingly silent. They had seen the
evangelical host of the TV show that they had come to see hot dead before their
eyes, his life leaking out onto the stage floor beneath him, his body now cold
and gray sprawled across his toppled and defaced alter. Some of them had come
to be healed. Others to be converted. Others to save their mortal souls.
Salvation. It seemed so far away now, as far away as freedom.
The new and the old worlds watched and waited. Strangely, no one was
praying.
The spotlight was cut by a shadow. Something silhouetted itself against the
light, sending a vast black shadow down over the congregation, alter and
preacher. The shadow, blurred at first, took form. Dr.Rosen was frozen in the
center of the shadow as if someone had tilted the Batsignal down from the sky
to point directly at him. His hands trembled and the small gun he had been
holding clattered to the floor. His knees quaked and knocked together. Sweat
ran down his face like fat salty slugs. He closed his eyes, and when he opened
them took comfort in the face that the shadow was growing smaller. Until he
realized that the shadow was getting smaller, because the Batman was getting closer.
Much closer.
Out of the gloom that clung to the edge of the beam from the spotlight he
came, cutting out the light. A thing of wings and cape and ears and hood. A
thing which flowed and dropped and flew from the rafters which housed the
enormous lights. He landed without a sound and closed the distance between him
and Rosen without moving. He spoke without making a sound.
"Let these people go"
And Rosen fell to the floor, with a pain in his chest which his medical
training told him was nothing short of fatal.
Outside, it was still raining, as if every sin could have been cleansed from
these streets, washed into the sewers and spewed out into some dark and
terrible sea. But this was not the great flood, nor even a minor one. This was
just Gotham City, and this was just rain. Jim Gordon stood out in the rain and
defied the common sense to use an umbrella. The media were clammering around
him, and had been since they had carried Dr. Rosen out of the TV studio on a
stretcher. They had not clammered from photographs for the stretcher or the
paramedics; as one picture of a body covered by a sheet is much the same as
another. Now they wanted more than blood, they wanted scandal and intrigue and
gossip and hearsay and official denials what could later be quoted. They wanted
the grease that oiled the drums of the printing presses. Gordon corrected
himself... of course they wanted blood.
"Commissioner, is it true that Batman apprehended the terrorists?"
"Commissioner, is it true that Batman may have killed the ring
leader?"
"Commissioner, how long with the Gotham City Police Department condone
the use of excessive force by vigilantes?"
"Commissioner, is your office prepared to admit that Batman is not an
urban myth?"
"Commissioner"
"Commissioner"
"Commissioner"
Gordon pushed his way through them without even offering his standard
"No comment". He had never pandered to the media. He was a man of the
people, and he hoped that the people knew it, hoped that they saw it the way
that he refused to sit up and beg for thier attention and approval. He wished
he could show it to them in clean streets and safe suburbs and 8 o'clock news
bulletins which didn't begin with the words "Arkham Escapee..". But
this was Gotham. The people could take it. Gordon pushed past the last of the
reporters, ducked under a line of police tape and disappeared behind the ops
truck. The white noise of accusation and inquiry died out behind him. The
harpies would circle for another hour or so, then disperse. He hoped that none
of them though to check the other side of the TV studio, where right now
Bullock and Montoya were spiriting the former hostages away. Gordon hurried on,
round the ops truck and through a small body of parked police cruisers. He
found what he was looking for. Slumped up against the side of one of the
cruisers, his cape folded around him like a pair of great leather wings, his
head hung low. He found Batman.
"Jim.." whispered Batman. Gordon could hear the strain in his
voice. He could hear the defeat, the failure. He had heard it before, when they
had seen other lives lost. When they had failed.
"Batman," the word sounded ridiculous, but Gordon had no other
name for this friend, "it wasn't your fault. You couldn't have known"
"I tried to save him"
"The paramedics told me; but they said that there was nothing that you
could have done. Rosen was dead before you even got to him"
"I should have saved him"
"You couldn't"
"Jim," Batman's voice, so level, so deep. "That just isn't
good enough"
Batman stood and turned away and Jim Gordon realized that he was about to
experience one of those rare moments when he would see Batman leave. He watched
as Batman turned; his cloak unwrapping and unfurling, flowing out behind him.
He watched as the figure, it's shoulders low, walked slowly away. He couldn't
be sure when Batman left his sight. He had thought that he had been walking
straight away from him and in the light of spinning police cruiser lights
and the glare from persistent helicopter search beams should have been visible.
But, he was gone, and Jim Gordon realized that no one ever saw Batman leave.
