There is ruin and decay
In the House on the Hill:
They are all gone away,
There is nothing more to say.
-from The House on the Hill, by Edwin Arlington Robinson
…
To be painfully honest, he'd never liked Carmine Falcone. But past enmity notwithstanding, the front page did not please him in the least.
The enormous photograph was simple, symbolic, verging almost on caricature. An aging, unconscious man, his coat bizarrely and jaggedly torn, was tied to a shining harbor light. Falcone, silhouetted and defeated.
The illicit king of Gotham was overthrown. Rachel Dawes was still alive. Gotham City was beginning to hope, of all absurd things.
No, this did not please him at all.
Jonathan folded the newspaper carefully and set it aside, not bothering to reread the momentous article he'd already skimmed a thousand times between appointments since Darcy Crandell had shyly set it on his desk at eight o'clock that morning.
He breathed deeply and slowly, trying to ignore the inevitable press of mental claustrophobia. He had been immune to panic for many, many years, but this quiet, white-hot bile and frenzy was the closest thing to it that he had felt in a long time. His plans couldn't die stillborn, murdered by a clearly disturbed individual masquerading as a bat and a crime lord brought low. The inmates and hired thugs had shouldered his yoke with dutiful, cowed silence and were dumping the toxin into the Gotham River each night by way of the old hydrotherapy room in the bowels of Arkham. He had overseen the operation himself only the other night. It was running perfectly. It was falling into place. Everything had been going so well…
He stood roughly to his feet, eyesight blackening and distorting as blood redistributed itself through his body. It was an hour until lunch—the combined time would allow him some escape, some room to think. He knew he had to leave.
Doffing his white doctor's coat and hanging it on its peg by the door, he picked up his empty briefcase and opened the office door—nearly crashing into his intern. Darcy Crandell stepped back, eyes wide and startled.
"Dr. Crane," she exclaimed shakily, "—I made copies of the agenda for the staff meeting this afternoon." As if for proof, she extended a sheaf of glossy new paper.
"Place them on my desk," Jonathan replied, words scraping in his throat, "And mind yourself better next time, will you?"
Carefully contained anger welled up in her features at his deliberate ingratitude. He could see it behind the dark flats of her eyes, in the stifled flush of her cheeks. He had caught himself doing this often lately: lashing out at her, just to see the appearance of that familiar, subdued fury. It dizzied him to see it—it was like watching Amy from across a deserted playground.
He tugged away from the thought with practiced self-denial, rousing himself with the sound of his own voice. "Ms. Crandell, I will be taking an early lunch today. You will see in my schedule that I have no appointments between now and then, but please take any calls I may receive and type up my notes for the meeting."
Had it been a weapon, her expression could have killed him where he stood, but she only nodded mutely and walked past him to the desk, her bearing stiff and abstinent. Amy would have remarked upon his surliness but, fortunately, his intern lacked the authority to further perpetuate that similarity.
Disgusted with himself, he left the room, mentally counting up the change in his wallet for the train fare as he did so. Where he wanted to go was a long way from here.
…
Everything else had changed.
The neighborhood had grown dangerous and ugly, its borders with the distant fringes of the Narrows becoming increasingly vague each time he paid a visit. At this early hour, the chapped sidewalk and filthy streets were abandoned, and the blinds of every house were drawn tightly shut like weary eyelids. But once night fell, he knew the avenue would be teeming with the city's worst, most depraved inhabitants. People like him.
No birds sang in the gaunt, stunted trees; the only sounds were the hourly grumble and whine of the monorail on its tracks overhead and the shrieks and laughter of children at play in the nearby schoolyard of West Gotham Elementary School. All else was eerily still, like a stifled scream. He surveyed the street once more, ensuring that it was as empty as it seemed, then turned to face the familiar sight before him.
Home, sweet home. Everything else might have changed, but it hadn't changed at all. Not once during the thirteen years since he'd first slammed the front door and left for college, with no goodbyes save for the six twenty-dollar bills folded neatly in his pocket. Nothing to treasure, nothing to love, nothing to remember by. Only the heady freedom surging in his blood and the howling empty where he would have mourned his own departure.
Jonathan pushed open the squeaking chain-link gate, but didn't step into the weed-choked yard. For an instant, he hesitated, simply looking at the dilapidated, one-story wreck before him.
He remembered when this house had been the only ugly wound among the dozens of pristine, carefully manicured residences that lined both sides of the street. Now, it reigned supreme over its many look-alikes, the no-longer-solitary exemplar of what its neighbors had been dragged down to become.
Ignoring the signs that proclaimed the place condemned, Jonathan strolled lazily up the front walk, sidestepping the straggling clumps of unruly plants that caught at his shoes. The door had long since been boarded up, but the wood had decayed and weakened over the years, and the nails had rusted or fallen out—opening it was a simple task that grew simpler each time.
He pushed lightly on the door and it groaned inwards, revealing a dank, lightless foyer. To his left was a narrow corridor leading to the dusty kitchen, no longer fragrant with lemon soap, no longer serenaded by fuzzy crackle of opera. The radio was gone, leaving only a ring of discoloration where it had sat and corroded for years, and the forgotten blood that had dripped onto the tiles when he'd returned from school with various injuries had dried and flaked away into nothing.
The chair where he—Jonathan knew better now than to call that indistinct shadow-man his father—had sat in the living room was also gone, but the effects of the cigarettes he'd smoked still lingered on the yellowed, peeling wallpaper. The only piece of furniture sitting there now was the table Jonathan had brought for his experiments.
The house was neither the most ideal nor hygienic workspace, but it had been a rather ironically apt location for him to develop his toxin in solitude.
He'd learned early on that his own apartment was no place for a laboratory. The rank smells of failed efforts had lingered for days. Clumsy spills and unfortunate overflows had threatened to permanently stain his expensive carpeting and glossy wood floors. And, of course, the nosy prying of his socialite neighbors alone had been more than enough to wreck his aspirations to work in the privacy of his own home.
So he had returned to his former address and found it derelict, forgotten in the city's bustle and growth, just as he'd hoped. His mother was gone without a trace, his old possessions had disappeared, every scrap of memory had evaporated—all connections to a past life had vanished. The place's disrepair and damp didn't bother him in the least; in fact, it pleased him in some dark way to find it broken and bleeding. He hadn't come to restore it or resurrect his past—he just needed a safe, quiet place where he could conduct his research.
And the decrepit house had served its purpose well. He had put the final touches on his finished product almost a week ago. His work was done, even if things would have to go a little slower than he'd planned.
He'd spent the past few nights emptying the crumbling living room of his supplies, but some evidence of his labors still remained. Scrawled on the walls in various inks were his frenzied notes and formulas, growing visibly more strained and hasty over time. A few musty-smelling chemistry books, relics from his college days, their pages yellowing like bone. A dozen unmarked atomizers sat on the table, full of his personal supply.
Even though his meticulous collection of data had ended long ago, Jonathan had found himself setting aside small samples of the toxin for his own use. Even that hideous mask that had been used during the experimentation period, when he had needed to examine how the use of props had affected his subjects, had been saved and folded neatly on the desk. When he'd finally confronted himself about his macabre hoard, it had become clear to him what he needed to do, what he had wanted to do all along: play an even more active role in Gotham's destruction. To become synonymous with the devastation itself.
He picked up one of the canisters in which he'd stored the substance. It had come a long way from the syringes he'd used on the inmates at first—the blatant impracticality of scampering around on doomsday jamming needles into jugulars had long since occurred to him. Now, he could simply spray the chemical into the faces of his opponents and they would be just as crippled as they would be by injection, transformed, reduced to that sniveling fear that he hungered to see. When Rā's al Ghūl chose his time to strike, Jonathan would strike with him, enacting his revenge upon the city that had tormented and mocked him from youth. He would haunt Gotham's footsteps like a ghost until it was cowering in fear, and then, oh, then—
His thoughts were dizzy, distracted, ecstatic, whipping past him as his heart raced at some swift, wicked speed. One by one, he'd pluck them from the apocalypse and extort every instant of delight from them that he'd ever been denied, every drop of blood and tears that he'd ever shed, from their nourishing panic.
He would choose his targets carefully: everyone who had ever heard his name, everyone who had passed him in the putrid streets, everyone who had ridiculed him and hurt him… Come to think of it, everyone he'd ever known would suffice—
Even Darcy Crandell?
Annoyed, revolted, he turned away from his work, glowering into the stagnant half-darkness. How could he hesitate? For this, he wanted her gone all the more. His feelings for her were just as superficial as her myriad small resemblances to Amy. She was nothing, nothing. A figurehead for some raw, weak place in him, nothing more. He couldn't act on this deep-rooted, boyish obsession; it would destroy him, destroy his plans—
Unless… He paused. Unless it purged him of these vulnerable emotions and left him clean, clean like he'd once been. Unless sating his want would allow him to focus on what mattered most.
Indulgence. He hated it in others; finding its potential in himself sickened him. But it would end this in-between life he'd been thrust into when he'd chosen his new intern. End it at last. The unfamiliar, nameless pain of emotions would disappear as quickly as it had come.
He packed the atomizers into his briefcase. There was enough to last him a year or so in those twelve small canisters, so long as he kept his doses small and concentrated. The last shipment would arrive soon, but he had no need for any more of the blue-petalled poppies. With Falcone behind bars, it would be best to simply destroy the final delivery once it came.
As he left the house, he didn't even look behind him. He would waste no time on emotional qualms, not when they were eating away at the rest of his world. His duty here was over; there was no need to look back.
A shadow detached itself from the graffiti-covered walls as he passed, following him as he headed purposefully for the station. He heard the footsteps echoing his own before he had gone much farther, and quickened his pace ever so slightly, the sound of his own shoes on the concrete dead and empty.
"Hey, buddy."
Jonathan kept walking, eyes on the sidewalk before him.
"What's in the case, pal? Guy like you isn't born skinny like that. You have some smack on you, don't'cha?"
The streets were empty; Jonathan was in a particularly malignant mood. An idea came to him, leisurely and beautiful and fatal.
Well, why not?
He took a few steps further, then stopped sharply and turned to face the burly ruffian, a brave cruelty swelling in him.
"Why don't you see for yourself?"
The piggy man's yellowish eyes narrowed in confusion. He was clearly perplexed by the unusually eager acquiescence coming from his prey. Jonathan held up the case and unlocked it, holding it up with an almost childlike pride so that the other man could see the neatly-packed contents.
"What the hell are those? Nobody packs their big H like that." The thug poked a meaty finger in the canisters' direction.
"They certainly don't," Jonathan replied coolly, in his affable therapist's tone. He took one of the canisters from its resting place and held it up. "Because this isn't heroin."
"Wha-?"
Before the would-be mugger could react, Jonathan sprayed a short, brisk quantity of the toxin into the other's face, taking care not to breathe himself. He'd managed to build up a slight immunity to the poison during his extensive work, but without his mask, an undue surplus could just as easily debilitate him as anyone else.
The thickset man coughed and struggled for breath in the noxious cloud. Jonathan watched him with calm familiarity. He could almost predict the symptoms as they appeared—neuromuscular spasms, cardiac arrhythmia, a panic attack, and, finally, the augmentation of the subject's personal phobias to startlingly realistic levels.
The thug screamed in raw terror, arms flailing helplessly as he stumbled away from some unseen nightmare.
Giddy with victory and satisfaction, Jonathan murmured, "Perhaps this will make you think twice about trying to take someone else's medicine next time."
Another raw scream was his only answer. Jonathan glanced at his watch and sighed. He would have loved to linger, but his train would be arriving soon, and only a few trains had routes that made stops near Arkham. Sadly, he would have to hurry.
Author's Note
Heh heh…that Crane. He's still got 'it,' despite his momentary softening in Chapter 8. Sorry this is (yet again) a belated posting; my friends and I went out to a Friday screening of Corpse Bride and I had no chance to post. Apologies!
Azina Zelle – I devoured your new chapter! C'est delicious. Please keep writing…pleeeease.
crazedPeanut – Heh, I liked that line too. It's like when a shark smells blood in the water. Crane's just like, 'Aha, oh really?' And Darcy's like, 'Errr, yeah. I am afraid of the dark.' The beginning of a terrifying relationship.
Dot – Heehee, I'm glad someone besides me got my little Crane's Addiction jest. Me and my stupid humor.
Dr. E.Vance2 – You bet your top-notch writing skills that her achluophobia's going to show up in later chapters! (rubs hands together and sniggers evilly)
Eccentric Banshee – That's a very plausible alternate ending. Jonathan Crane turned on the lights just long enough for her to make it into the cell, then turned them off and shut the door and walked away like nothing happened… Mwahaha. Definitely brother-ish behavior, I agree. Dream jackpots are always a good thing. I had one once, where I was at a party and I was talking about Cillian Murphy and all of a sudden, he popped out of nowhere, and I was totally humiliated because I had just been gushing about him. So I stammered out an apology and he was like, "It's absolutely all right," and we ended up making out somewhere. Yay.
Hellish Yet Shell-less Peanut – Ah, Pillsbury. (scarfs cookie) Yum. Thank you. Anyways, my story will cover his descent into madness, his escape from Arkham, and a little bit of post-Batman Begins. Not much though. It gets very dark. Literally. Please keep reviewing! I loved hearing from you.
Hikyaku – Jane's Addiction, the band Crane's Addiction, being his obsession with fear. It's okay if you don't get it. It's probably too lowbrow. As I said above, my sense of humor is still stuck on a carpet square in a kindergarten class.
Jonathansgirl18 – Here it is, just for you: Mike walked into Jonathan's office to get a pen. Before he could react, a lanky figure dropped from the ceiling and pinned him to the ground. 'Mwahahaa!' A familiar voice cackled. Mike tried to scream, but a lethal plastic fork stabbed into his back before the sound could leave his mouth. He died instantly, of course.
Jumana – I love Azina Zelle's stuff too. Her Crane is downright creepy and basically everything I aspire to make my own Crane be.
Kagerou-chan – Jane's Addiction rocks. I thought my idea of 'Crane's Addiction' was ridiculously funny. I was snickering obnoxiously about it all week.
Karina of Darkness – Late-night reviews are always fun to read; thanks for sharing. ;-)
Mizamour – Mr. Freeze is AWESOME. He's totally twisted and his reasoning is more crookedy than a crooked thing, but he has this tenderness to him…he's doing it all for his Nora…(sniff)
Rachel – I've never had my story called 'crack' before. Needless to say, I am flattered. :-) Plus, you're the first person to mention Ingram. Bless your soul.
Skyler McAndrews – Right behind you on the 'hot Crane-in-a-dark-cell' thing. Please keep the ideas coming.
Valse De La Luna – Argh, three APs. I can only begin to imagine. Only AP History and Chem for me! Hurrah.
VampireNaomi – I hope you get some sleep…it's okay, he's not real… :-D (hug)
Well, I love you all and I hope you keep reading…after all, things come to a head (or at least prepare to come to a head) between Mike and Jonathan in Chapter 10. Much tension!
Love and hugs,
Blodeuedd