Chapter 8

Chamsky turned to his partner. "I really don't feel like watching this nut. Why the hell did they put us on shift down here, anyway? We had to watch him two days ago." He shifted on his heels.

Leonards turned to look at him. "Because we drew the short straw again, Brent. You think I like being down here any more than you do? This maniac's killed more guards than any other prisoner in this loony bin!"

A cheerful voice popped up behind them, sounding from behind the wired embedded Plexiglas observation port behind them in the wall. "You don't say prisoner, dear boy. You say 'patient'" He giggled almost hysterically. "And 'loony bin' is so cliché. This is a diagnostic center for the mentally unstable." The prisoner waggled his eyebrows. "God knows they had a hell of a time engraving that on the front plaque."

Chamsky pounded his nightstick against the Plexiglas. "Knock it off." To think, he would have said he couldn't stand the laughter most of all. Only, there wasn't anything about being on duty with this patient that he could stand in the first place.

----

Then again, very few people worked at Arkham Asylum voluntarily. The pay was good, but it had to be. No one would come anywhere near these creatures for any other reason. Not too many jobs with a mortality rate like that. The asylum had a hard time finding constant replacements for their security guards. Try not to think about how bad the doctors had it, what with the continued visits to "patients" and all.

Nobody pretended that Arkham Asylum was there to help its patients. At best, it was a place to keep them controlled – out of the rest of the world's way. Maximum security prisons hadn't made a single dent in the more notorious felons that inhabited Gotham. So it had been decided then, that only a place like Arkham was appropriate. Trouble was that at first, they seriously underestimated the ferocity and the mania of the patients. Nowhere was this clearer the first time the Joker had arrived.

Perhaps there had been a chance…a long-shot….that they could have treated the Joker the first time he had come to the asylum. At that point he was considered only a minor felon, convicted of five murders. However, no one had known just how many other murders the Joker had already been responsible for. Whatever chance they had been given, though, disappeared when the treating physician at Arkham had taken over his case. Her name was Dr. Harlene Quinsel.

Quinsel had studied the Joker's case files carefully, and she was certain there was something she could do to help him. Had the other doctors noticed that her close study had bordered on an obsession, they never would have allowed her near him. She was, though, one of the most respected doctors in her specialty. So it was they were willing to be more liberal with the chances they gave her in his case. She had a way to cure him, or so she seemed to imply.

Her treatment had come to a lot of closed-door, one-on-one sessions with him. The other doctors considered it a great risk, but at first it seemed to be working. The Joker had shown marked signs of improvement. As they had found out later, though, it had he been the first of many elaborate facades yet to come...

He had played on some subconscious aspect of Quinsel's nature, or so it seemed. When the Monday morning quarterbacking had been done on the affair, no one was quite surer whether there was already a layer of insanity in Quinsel's mind or whether the Joker was far better at warping people's psyches then they had given him credit for originally. Whatever it was, by the time the Joker was through with her, Harlene Quinsel was gone. What was left was a shell of a human being that responded only to the depths of lunacy and depravity of the man who had helped establish them.

No one knew whether it was him or her that was responsible for the first breakout. All they knew for certain was that Dr. Quinsel had been playing with his medications, and then recommended a session of electroshock therapy.

When the session was over, the other treating physician and the two guards who had been in the room were dead. There was no sign of either patient or doctor. The only evidence that they had been in the room was a single word scrawled in blood on the wall. Shocking.

One of the guards' throats had been cut. The other was found soaking wet, and clearly the victim of some kind of electrocution, some kind of wires from the machine on his head. The doctor had been injected with enough Haloperidol to stop a small elephant.

In fact, the only sign of the two killers was a straight-jacket and a white lab coat with Quinsel's name on it. Someone had slashed a deep line through the name-tag, though.

The Joker had shown his face less than a week later, accompanied by a woman in red-and-black, with a jester's cap and makeup. He had called her Harley. Harley Quinn. It was obvious who she had been, and just as clear that her mind had been shattered and dashed into a million pieces. The first time she and the Joker had been returned to Arkham by the Batman, she had said she didn't care.

They quickly realized having someone who worked at Arkham stay as a patient was not a good idea, and she was transferred to another institution any time she and the Joker were captured. Still, it made no difference. When he escaped, he would always find a way for her to go with him… where was the fun in creating art without inspiration? He had, however, committed enough crimes by himself to show that he could find inspiration almost anywhere.

-----

The laughter behind the Plexiglas stopped a moment. "You drew the short straw? Gentleman! I am deeply wounded! I would think you would find it an honor to be in the company of an artist of my caliber! Why would you say such a thing?" The laughter began again, this time with the Joker pounding on the glass, eyeballs glistening and rolling back in his sweaty skull. One could see the slight remains of paint in the creases of his grotesque grin, and the guards shuddered for a moment, held in the captivity of his absolute mania.

Chamsky turned to Leonards again. "Explain to me again why we don't have him gagged and jacketed?"

Leonards shrugged. "Because every time they put a gag in his mouth, he swallows it, and when they go in to get it out, he manages to get past them, and take a person or two with him when he goes. I don't like it any more than you do, but this is the way things have to be."

The Joker went silent again. "Besides that…they don't make straitjackets the way they used to anymore. Since Houdini passed on, the quality has gone so far down. Believe me, I know!" He heaved a mock sigh, his antics only beginning.

"But that's just the case of everything in this country, these days. America used to be the first in everything…but now we're just going through the motions. It makes me wonder why I even bother bringing my art to the public. Are they worthy?"

Chamsky and Leonards both ignored him. They had heard it many times before. This was the typical 'Joker rant'. Calling his murders 'art' and complaining that he was never appreciated for the skill he showed. It was almost funny--- except nobody who worked at Arkham was allowed to think that anything that this man did was funny.

"I mean these murders I keep hearing about from the other guards, the ones that everyone thinks the Killer Croc is responsible for. Blood just…isn't his thing. I know the Croc personally, and he doesn't have the stomach for it."

"Now, we have some of the more imaginative reporters from the local newspapers saying that it was done by 'vampires'. " He shook his head. "Isn't that just like the youth of today? At first I thought, 'Oh, someone's finally being creative! Cutting of the teeth, and the like.', but now, they are just doing the same thing over and over again. There's no style, it's too systematic. Anyone with a slight overbite will start thinking he's Bela- frigging- Lugosi."

He began to laugh again as Chamsky pounded on the Plexiglas.

"For the last time, you sick grinning bastard, knock it off!"

"Now, really, how often has asking me worked before? I have as much right to enjoy myself as you do. You don't want me to start screaming about Rodney King, do you?" He cackled, his voice deepening and becoming unbelievably loud. "ATTI-CA! ATTI-CA! ATTI-CA!"

Leonards put his hand to his forehead. "He's improving, at least. Yesterday it was Sly Stallone. You can only take 'Adrienne' yelled at top volume in a shitty Brooklyn accent, before you start feeling a little nuts yourself." He patted Chamsky on the shoulder. "He may call himself an artist, but he's only a little better than the acts you see at the Gotham Improv."

The Joker made a tsk-tsk sound with his teeth. "No appreciation!? Not just appreciation, but RESPECT!" He shrugged. "But that's just one of the problems with these accommodations. If I were a difficult guest, I would be complaining to the management by now. I mean, the view is terrible, there's no TV in the room, no room serviceI wonder if housekeeping is even in order." He threw up his hands. "I mean, the décor? Good Lord. Pink Padding. How trite." He thought this over for a second, and made the tsk-tsk sound again. "I've got to know why you have everything look like puke. And not even the good kind of puke either---"

Chamsky began fishing through his pocket for aspirin. Prolonged exposure to the Joker left everyone in Arkham with a migraine even the extra strength tablets couldn't chase away. "How long before our shift is over George? It's two o'clock in the morning, and I want to get some sleep."

Leonards was about to look down at his watch when the Joker piped up. "Relax. Your shift is over in an hour and a half."

Both guards snapped to attention. There wasn't supposed to be anything in the Joker's cell. He wasn't allowed to have anything.

"How the hell do you know what time it is?" Leonards asked.

The Joker did his best innocent schoolgirl imitation. "Oh! I just looked at this."

He then proceeded to produce a watch from seemingly nowhere. It was a pocket-watch like an Englishman would have carried. "It's amazing what you can get for fifty cents and six box tops these days!"

He turned his hand, staring at the watch's face. "It's supposed to glow in the dark if I hit one of the buttons on top of it, but none of them seem to be doing a thing."

Both guards ran for the door, Chamsky reaching for the emergency alarm and lock-down switch. But it was too late. Before he could reach it, the Joker had flung the watch in to the Plexiglas frame. It exploded backward, slamming both guards in to the wall behind them. The Joker stepped out in to the main part of the room, reaching down to pick up Chamsky's pistol.

"Oh dear. Looks like I ate all those Rice Krispies for nothing." He walked around the two guards, now pinned beneath the crushed wall, face-up. Both were unable to speak, but the fear in their eyes was clear. "Now, this is normally the time when I would find some clever method to kill you, but seeing as I'm going to have company in a few short moments, I'll have to economize." With that, he aimed the gun, putting a bullet through Chamsky's heart, following with a shot through the eye to Leonards.

"And, as I said, I have to be going. These amateurs need someone to show them what a murder is supposed to look like! Besides, what would be the fun in having Bat-sap catch me here?" He tucked the gun in to his belt. "And so, to quote that great literary lion, 'Exit, stage right!'

By the time the Arkham emergency staff of guards and medics reached the room, Chamsky and Leonards were already dead. Chamsky had bled to death, clearly in agony as blood had filled his throat, choking him. Leonards had been forced to wait as part of his brain lay bubbling on the floor beside him with the piece of skull that had held it in place, unable to do a thing but watch.

The Joker was nowhere to be found.

Unfortunately, that wouldn't be the case for long.

However, the search for the Joker would have to be postponed. The inmates seized the chaos of the explosion to make a general break. Fortunately, Arkham had a direct link with the Gotham City PD so that within fifteen minutes, the riot squad had arrived and things were rather rapidly put back into order.

Unfortunately, in those fifteen minutes, six other inmates—all of them high security risks--- managed to steal away into the night.

With the memory of a similar prison break not that long ago in the Commissioner's mind, Gordon called in half of the department to begin a hard-target, in-depth search of Gotham City for these inmates. The phrase 'shoot to kill' was frequently heard.

It would be days before any crime fighter in Gotham---- professional or otherwise--- realized the significance of what had happened. By then, it was nearly too late for everyone.