"Your next appointment is ready, doctor." The nurse's voice intruded into his reverie.
Yes, he thought. Ready, willing, and conspicuously able; he comes to me.
Long fingers pressed their tips together as the doctor watched his 'appointment' on surveillance monitor: a bulky, well-dressed man, perhaps an ex-football hero with too many yards gained on easy street. He wore tight white gloves that he rolled back to glance at his watch, shifting in the chair as if waiting for a proctologist.
The doctor smiled. He was a psychiatrist, and that wasn't a watch. A small red light started blinking on the monitor. His smile became teeth.
The big man stopped fidgeting and looked up at the near-invisible lens. He smiled too.
"I suppose I should be grateful that you're seeing me," huffed the stoop-shouldered man, awkwardly easing his bulk into the chair. The expensive suit was cut to minimise his size but failed to hide a paunch.
"A mutual friend recommended you, doctor...?" Oddly there was no name on the framed diplomas behind him; the doctor wasn't listed in the phone book, nothing on the office door. Rich and powerful men respect anonymity; they know its value.
"You are a patient, and I am the doctor." A thin old face thrust forward, his nose a predatory beak. "Confidentiality is assured; although I must admit I've been watching you for quite some time. Watching and waiting."
They looked at each other; it was a long hard look. The doctor's face was all bone and sharp angles, a widow's peaked skullcap of iron grey hair that matched the hooded eyes. His patient was the opposite. A puffy face and lantern jaw, black hair fashionably cut, capped teeth and faint evidence of extensive plastic surgery. The eyes were hard and blue as sapphires.
The big man stretched himself like a great cat and sat upright in the chair. Suddenly he was bigger, his paunch and chins disappearing with a near-audible sigh of relief. He reached into his mouth and removed pads. "My friend said you helped him." His voice was clearer, different. He peeled off his gloves. "If you'd harmed him in any way, we wouldn't be talking."
The hands weren't entirely organic; there had been repairs, improvements. He reached one across the table. "Pleased to meet you, doctor."
The other took it without hesitation, the long, slim fingers lost in calloused striking surfaces and scar tissue. "I shall, of course, be gentle with you too," he said dryly.
The handshake stiffened and disconcerting electric-blue eyes locked on to stone cold greyness. If pain was being communicated, neither acknowledged its existence. The big man sat back down with a thoughtful expression.
"We are not always what we seem," he murmured, inconspicuously stretching his fingers.
No," the other agreed. "Most see only the persona. Myself, I have preferred to study the darker side where the real desires lie. The shadows have become my domain and I do not find myself alone."
The man frowned at a bad memory. "Everybody has a shadow."
The doctor smiled thinly. "But we talk of shadows that have men."
His patient raised an eyebrow. "Good men or bad?"
The other gestured to his couch and picked up a notebook. "Why don't you tell me?" he invited.
"Yes, yes," the doctor was bored after listening to the old story. "Your parents were gunned down before your eyes by some worthless sociopath and, being a child, you were powerless. Your perfect world exploded into gunfire and blood." He yawned discreetly. "You vowed vengeance, and rebuilt your life around that theme. You have been overwhelmingly successful in this endeavor. You are rich, powerful, feared by even the worst psychotic killers. As they say in Gotham, 'You de 'Man'."
The doctor fiddled with the ring on his wedding finger, idly polishing its large red gemstone.
"You have, of course, zero sex life. The thrill of combat, even the satisfaction of inflicting acute pain and massive injuries has palled." He looked up. "In short, you are near psychological exhaustion and fear the temptation to lose control, to cross the line. Excellent."
His patient's grip on the couch became audible. "My friend would never talk about how you helped him. I'm beginning to see why."
"Your friend is virtually a child," snapped the doctor. "You have earned manhood."
"Alpha male? Is that cure or disease?" The patient's sarcasm frosted the air.
"There is no cure," said the doctor, shaking his head irritably. "There are only us and them, the use of our powers for good or evil. The problem is knowing which side you are on. Hearts and minds, the private war."
His patient frowned again. "What would you know of my war; the sacrifices, casualties..." the frown deepened, "... mistakes."
Sitting beside him in a leather armchair, the doctor leaned forward and made a tent of his long fingers. "One who looks behind the door because he has stood there himself. However, I am not the patient today, nor is it the man I need to speak to."
He twisted his ring and caught light from the discreetly positioned wall fixture; it reflected across the recumbent patient's face. "I wish to attempt hypnosis. I need to talk to the boy."
The laugh was almost a bark. "My inner child? I doubt he still exists and besides, I can't be hypnotised."
The light from the jewel swung to and fro as the doctor caressed his ring-finger. "True, you have tried to dispose of him," he soothed. "As to my powers of hypnosis--well, I'm afraid that began quite some time ago. Didn't it, Brucie?" The ring blazed at a snap of his fingers and the patient jerked bolt upright.
"Help me! You have to help me." The big man struggled briefly against the doctor's expertly applied hold before falling back. Suddenly he burst into tears. "You don't know what it's been like--what he's like." It was the voice of a scared young teenager.
The doctor calmed him down. "Ah... your other personality?"
His patient tried to sit up again, but was overcome with emotion. "I'm not him. I never wanted to be him. I hate him!"
"Calm yourself, Bruce..." the doctor began.
"But I'm Brucie, Brucie. I never got to be Bruce." Anger shut off the tears. "That's just been him pretending to be Bruce all along. I never got to grow up, he stole me."
The doctor nodded thoughtfully, his voice was comforting. "You can tell me what happened now. I will understand."
Despite his hatchet face and granite eyes, something about this elderly man was reassuring. Brucie felt he really did know everything and after all, he was the doctor. Brucie had been taught to trust doctors.
"Like a priest?" he asked. "You won't tell anyone..." he couldn't repress a shudder, "...you won't tell him?"
"Not a living soul," promised the doctor. "I keep all the secrets. You will tell me everything you remember." He took Brucie's wrist in a professional manner, feeling the agitated pulse. The doctor's hand was cool, dry, and sensitive; like a father's hand. "Why don't you start with the last time?"
Brucie shuddered, but the grip on his wrist tightened, oddly comforting. "Guns, he doesn't like guns," he began hesitantly. "Beat anything human in hand-to-hand; clubs, swords, even arrows."
The doctor permitted himself a smile, he'd always liked guns.
"No, he's not scared of them... not scared of anything really." Brucie didn't sound proud of it. "Doesn't like drugs, or women getting hurt. I don't either, but I don't go around... Oh God! I don't want to remember." His heels drummed an unconscious tattoo on the couch.
"We have to remember in order to forget, Brucie," soothed the doctor. "You must express it as poison from a wound."
"It was kids, kids about my ag..." Brucie swallowed. "Anyhow, they were black and they were very bad. Pockets full of money and that crack stuff. They had lots of guns and used them without a thought; but they were so young..." His voice broke. "He hung them between two tenements by a clothesline threaded through their ankles. All night, hands and mouths taped. Said afterwards he hadn't thought about the crows, the rats. He did, lots."
The doctor made more notes and nodded to himself. "I take it he is still... ah, pure of body?"
"Thank God," breathed Brucie. "I don't think I could bear the sex stuff as well. That terrible leather-clad woman with her whip and poor little R..." He shuddered involuntarily though his eyes remained wide open and locked on the ring. Brucie's lips barely moved. "The things he really wants to do, you can't begin to imagine."
"Without imagination, we are trapped in a reality not of our own making," the doctor observed dryly. "You, alas, are trapped in a powerful imagination that has effectively created its own brutal reality. While most captivating from a professional point of view, it is highly inconvenient for you."
"Do you know what it is? Can you help me?" Brucie was so relieved to be able to talk at last, to be believed.
"Now, we must help each other if we go walking with shadows," said the doctor. "We must go back to when it began; to when the shadows seemed darkest and without end. Back when you just wanted to find the deepest hole, curl up in it, and die." His hand moved slightly as he spoke, as if conducting an invisible orchestra. The light grew dimmer, the shadows waxed.
Brucie's eyes focused inward. "It was the anniversary of their murder. I couldn't pretend anymore, nothing was ever going to be the same again." He shuddered. "I couldn't keep that hungry-looking man with the desperate eyes out of my dreams. His gun jerking, jerking... they say I had a breakdown. Maybe I wanted to die, maybe I plain didn't care. I just had to get away, find a hole with no bottom. Somewhere no one could ever hurt me again."
"Ah," breathed the doctor, "the child's instinctual desire to return from whence he came. So, we approach the point."
"I'm afraid now, doctor." Brucie gripped on to him tightly. "I don' wanna go back there."
"I will be with you every step of the way, be it ever so dark or narrow." The doctor's eyes were hard as a statue's, but it was the voice that held Brucie. So reassuring, so familiar. "I promise you will find me beside you at the end."
Brucie strained and shuddered. "Oh, I'm back in the caves beneath the manor. No one knows them better than me, but there are ways I don't go." His face worked. "I'm in one of those now, the longest and deepest. I've no clear memory how I got here, can't find my way back... and my light is dying."
Brucie gasped. The light did go out. It was pitch black again.
"Where are you?" he cried, in a child's voice.
Eyes! Two pale, cold spots in the brooding dark, a crimson mouth opening beneath them. It spoke in a voice of old shadows.
"I am here, as promised. As I was in the beginning."
Brucie writhed on the darkened couch, hands pressed over his eyes. "No! No! You can't be the monster. You're my doctor, you're meant to make me better."
"Yes, poor Brucie, I am the doctor--and I believe I have made you very well indeed." He smiled thinly. "After they found you, Alfred brought you here. You were catatonic, suffering from dehydration and hypothermia." He looked up from his notes. "You were such promising material that I became absorbed in moulding the man. Forgot about the boy."
Brucie winced as if under the knife. "Yes! What about me?" he wailed.
The doctor twisted his ring thoughtfully. "You are of course, like your other, a split-personality. Unfortunately the shadow is far more complex and irreducibly dominant. You can let that drive you back into catatonia again, or accept the compromise I can offer you both."
"Compromise?" moaned Brucie. "He never compromises."
"I shall... ah, make him an offer he can't refuse," said the doctor. "As I shall you."
"... and that's it?" The patient was sitting up and readjusting his padding, getting into the old familiar part.
"No more having to pretend like this all day, mentally exhausted, impatient for the night," the doctor assured him. "You simply switch off at dawn and relax."
"What about Brucie?" The patient wasn't entirely convinced.
"Playboy all day, not a shred of responsibility, and no more nightmares." The doctor smiled. "A child's what I want to be when I grow up. What, after all, he was born to be."
"Hmm, and nobody else knows." It wasn't a question.
"Strictly between me and my shadow," promised the doctor, helping him on with his coat. "Just one item you forgot."
"Oh, the bill?" The patient was momentarily embarrassed at the oversight.
"Oh no." The doctor laughed like an old raven. "You have to switch over now. You have the rest of the day off. Everyday."
The big man smiled, inclined his head. Abruptly, he relaxed, almost staggering.
"Doc, he's gone, he's really gone. I'm alive. Gollee! I'm a man." Bruce threw his not-inconsiderable arms around the doctor and managed a short jig before his enthusiasm could be restrained. He pulled out his wallet and stared at all the platinum credit and select club cards. "I'm rich, I'm Mr. Big." The other hand fumbled in his pants pocket. "I'm... Oh boy, girls here I come."
The doctor watched him on the screens as the limo drew up. "Have a nice day, Bruce," he whispered. "The first of your life for... Well, a very long time."
Bruce's money and that killing machine of a body would get him out of most adolescent scrapes. Now a dark knight could watch over the poor sheep for at least another decade of active duty without going rogue. The active sex life wouldn't hurt either.
The doctor laughed; it bounced around the room as if seeking exit. "They shall all make penance and be absolved," he said to himself. "A favour owed but an advisor gained, a confidant for the self-isolated soul in its hours of need. Yes, a father confessor."
The buzzer interrupted his reverie.
"You have another...uh, person, doctor." The receptionist hesitated, and it took a lot to scare her. "He doesn't have an appointment and won't give his name."
The doctor checked the screens. This one couldn't be more different than the last. A short redhead, wiry, poorly dressed, and nothing other than small change and bad fillings showing on the x-ray. He was utterly nondescript, yet the doctor recognised him at once, or at least his far more significant other.
The doctor smiled, taking a special set of ink-blot tests out of a drawer. He'd been looking forward to this one. This killer was the future, the real challenge.
"That's quite all right, nurse," he soothed. "Pray send Mr. Kovacs in."