I've always been able to wake myself up when I need to, so I thought it would be safe for us to fall asleep in Dr. Crane's office.
I woke up a little after 3:00, shivering.
"What happened to the heat?" Al mumbled. I listened carefully.
"The pipes aren't rattling." It was then that I remembered my patients' occasional complaints of the boiler dying in the middle of the night. It had happened only twice since I'd started working there. And this made three.
We ran up the stairs to the window at roof level. Dr. Crane was still hanging there, limp, right where we'd left him.
"Oh, shit! His feet are blue!"
We ran out and untied him. He fell to the ground, unmoving. Al ripped off his tie and let the socks fall out of his mouth. This was the part where he should have gasped for breath. He didn't.
I started hyperventilating.
"We—weren't—supposed—to—kill—him!"
Al put her fingers to the side of his neck.
"Heart's still beating. Get him inside."
We each took an arm and dragged him into the building, being much more gentle than we had been getting him out of it, and quicker, too. At the top of the stairs, I lost my grip on his arm. I grabbed for him. Missed. Al started to lose her balance. I grabbed her instead. She let him go.
I burst into tears as he went tumbling down the stairs.
"Stop crying," Al demanded as we ran after him. "We can still fix this."
"Fix it how?" We picked him up and rushed him into his office.
"I don't know. Somehow." We dropped him on the rug.
"Get our coats from the lounge. Blankets if you can find any. We need to get him warm." My medical training was starting to kick in. I pinched his nose shut, tilted his head back, bent down to his icy, blue lips, and breathed into his mouth.
It was my first time doing mouth-to-mouth outside of class. The fact that I couldn't stop crying was working against me. I could feel his heartbeat getting weaker by the second.
Al burst in with a stack of blankets from the supply closet, her coat (I had left mine in the bathroom, I remembered then) and two bottles of water.
"We can't give him water!"
"Microwaved it. Put them in his armpits." She unfolded a blanket while I breathed into his mouth again.
Helping her cover him with the blanket, I felt his chest rise under my hand. I heard him draw a breath on his own.
"Oh, thank God."
Al got up and went to his desk. I continued wrapping him in the blankets—too many of them, although I didn't realize it at the time.
"We can still do this." Her voice was shaking. "We'll get him warmed up. In a few hours, it'll be safe for us to sit him up for a little while. He'll be a little bruised from the fall, nothing more serious than that. When everyone starts coming in, we can tie him up again…leave him in his chair this time…" She looked like she was going to be sick.
"Oh, what are you so worked up about, princess?"
"Look, just because my old man could pull a job without breaking a sweat doesn't mean I…" Her voice dropped to a whisper. "I just wanted to shake him up a little."
"Yeah…me, too." I put my arms around him, using my own body heat to warm him. I left the blindfold on—he wouldn't be getting up anytime soon, but he could regain consciousness for a few seconds at a time, and there was no way I was letting him see me after all this.
Al took the red marker and a piece of paper, and started writing him a note. I could hear her whispering the words as she wrote them down.
Dr. Crane moaned faintly. I felt his arm move, realized he was coming to, and pulled away before he could feel the shape of my female body.
"It was never my intention to kill you, Dr. Crane," Al wrote, "in spite of your many crimes. You may want to invest in some routine maintenance for your—look out!" Glass broke. I only had time to close my eyes and turn slightly away before the handful of powder hit my in the face. "Don't breathe!" Al screamed. "Don't breathe!" She grabbed the back of my shirt and dragged me to my feet. I felt her slapping my face with her shirtsleeve as we ran.
"Mmm!" I said, fighting the urge to inhale.
"Think I got it." I opened my eyes, ran my own hand over my face, felt no remaining powder, and inhaled.
There must have been traces of it left. When I inhaled, everything distorted. My heart rate must have tripled in that second. But running was exactly what I needed to do, and Al was there to steer me in the right direction.
"Guard," Al whispered, forcing me to slow to a walk. We approached the front desk, IDs handy.
"Working late, girls?" the night guard asked.
"Didn't realize how late it was," Al said brightly.
"You aren't going out without coats, are you?" Al laughed vapidly. "At this time of night? In the Narrows?"
"Who would rob us?" Al asked.
"The buses don't run this late."
"We like to walk."
"But…"
"Open the damn door," I snapped.
Ten seconds later, we were out in the street…in the cold…
…and suddenly I was back at the pond…the ice cracked under my skates…
"E equals mc squared," Al said. We kept running.
Halfway back to the apartment, someone stepped out of the shadows ahead of us. He might have pulled a gun. We knocked him down and kept running.
Same thing happened a few minutes later. A group this time. Al skidded to a stop, staring at the leader.
"Gene?"
His ugly mug split into a big grin.
"Hey, it's the princess. How's your pop?"
"In prison. But my friend and I are in trouble. Think we could hole up with the boys?"
"Sorry, no can do. Everyone split when Big Al got nabbed. Most of us will go back to him when he gets out, but…"
"Yeah, I get it. Think you could get me a car, then?"
"Ten minutes. Wait here." They melted into the shadows.
I sank to my knees on the sidewalk.
"You going to make it?" Al asked.
"Yeah." I was shaking, but mostly from the cold. "Everything's all…weird and…twisty-like, but…" I took a deep breath. "Truth is stranger than fiction, and reality is scaring me a lot more than that stuff could."
Al sat down beside me.
"Courage, young one. We'll get out of this yet."
Five minutes later, a car pulled up. A junker, but a car was a car. When Gene got out, Al kissed him on the cheek and gave him the bottle she'd taken from Dr. Crane's office.
"Thanks, babe. If you can, get this to the cops, but don't get yourself in trouble on account of me. It belongs to Jonathan Crane."
"I'll do what I can. Where are you headed now?"
"I hear Metropolis is lovely this time of year."
I kept my eyes glued to the rearview mirror until I saw the Gotham skyline growing small behind us. About that time, the heater kicked in, and I drifted off to sleep.
--
I woke up on the floor of Dr. Crane's office. He was lying beside me, still blindfolded and wrapped in blankets, one arm slung across his chest, powder stuck to his hand. Al was gone.
I was on my feet and running before I even began to think.
She didn't leave me before. She wouldn't leave me now.
You're dreaming.
--
I woke up in the car next to Al.
"Bad dreams?" she asked sympathetically.
"Yeah. Are we there yet?"
"Look around you. Beautiful Metropolis." I sat up and looked out the window, wide-eyed.
"It's so…clean! And look! The snow sticks!"
"Fuck!" Al screamed, and slammed on the brakes. As the car spun around on the icy road, I saw…him again…standing in the middle of the street with a smile on his face.
He couldn't have gotten here so fast—
--
I woke again on the floor with Dr. Crane's piercing blue eyes inches from my own—
--
--and on the roof, naked, bound, and gagged—
--
--and blindfolded, with Al screaming for help—
--
--and in a hospital gown in my mother's room—
--
--and strapped to a table, lost amid the screams in Ward 5.
--
That last one was real. Dr. Crane—the Scarecrow—was captured and committed to Arkham himself. After a few days, the drugs wore off and the drips ran out, and we (most of us) returned to lucidity just in time to watch ourselves starve to death.
It was Al who saved us. She managed not to panic, and got us all screaming the same thing. After a few hours of the song that never ends, the laundry women called some guards and went in to investigate the boiler room.
They got us out, twenty-nine of us with our minds intact. Three more were released after years of therapy. The rest stayed in the State Psychiatric Hospital for the rest of their lives, which wasn't very long for most of them.
No one suggested keeping them at Arkham. The very thought of the place would set them all to screaming like you've never heard in your life.
As for Dr. Crane, he escaped Arkham after a very short stay, and is currently at large.
I changed my name, I moved to another state, I lived my life for years without ever seeing his face or the mask he uses now. But I have not fallen asleep once in all this time without fearing that when I woke up, it would be with his blue eyes boring into mine and his toxin back in my lungs.
Or maybe all these years of paranoia have been just another dream, and I'm still in Ward 5 with all the others.
Sometimes I call Al just to make sure she isn't screaming.
She feels the same way.
