Nightmare in Arkham
Chapter 37: "The Last Laugh"
-"No, this can't be real!" Bruce said dumb-foundedly, "You're dead! I saw you-"
-"Oh Brucie," The Joker replied, "You of all people should know it takes a Hell of a lot more than a little bonker on the head and a chemical bath to take me out."
-"So then, where have you been all this time?" Robin asked nervously.
-"Why, I've been hiding within the mind's eye of all of our faithful viewers, watching every little detail play out like a motion picture." The Joker said casting his arms out.
-The sound of crickets could be heard inside the boiler room.
-"You're nuts pal," said Freddy.
-"Perhaps, but then again…aren't we all just a little insane?" The Joker asked turning to the faithful viewer currently reading this and giving him/her a wink.
-"That's it! Enough of this crap!" Freddy angrily proclaimed.
-Freddy turned his sights on Bruce and raised his claw to finish him off but before he could bring his claw down something struck Freddy's gloved hand and impaled it to a boiler. It appeared to be a steel rod until a flag popped out of the end with the word "BANG" written on it.
-The Joker lowered his flag gun and said, "Hands off, buddy."
-The Joker then walked up to Robin, Batgirl, and the five teens. He looked at Robin and Batgirl.
-"Now listen carefully, kitties. Dr. Leland is in the race of her life to evacuate Arkham and she needs your help to do it."
-"But-"
-"Oh, don't you worry your little heads, Uncle Joker will take care of things from here. You two just worry about getting the asylum emptied, okay? Okay great! Let's shake on it!"
-The Joker grabbed Robin and Batgirl's hands and sent a jolting shockwave through their bodies from the electric hand-buzzers on his hands and they both vanished from the dream world.
-As soon as the Joker turned around, Freddy's claw slammed into his face.
-"Who the hell do you think you are?!"
-The Joker turned his head toward Freddy revealing four deep slash marks across his face. Despite the severity of the wounds none of them bled and the Joker seemed completely unaffected by the blow he had been dealt.
-"Ya know," The Joker casually replied to the startled dream demon, "It's the darndest thing: I haven't quite figured that out myself. Why don't you probe my mind and see if you can find a better answer?"
-"With pleasure!" Freddy clutched his blades around the Joker's head and almost immediately scenes from the Joker's past began playing before Freddy's eyes. When the Joker was a little boy, his father would beat him senselessly but the moment that ruined him was when his father broke his nose after the child Joker tried to make him laugh while dressed up as a clown.
-"Oh, give me a break!" Freddy said with disappointment, "You think you're the only one with 'daddy issues'? Try having a hundred maniac fathers all at once."
-Freddy was about to say something else when something unexpected happened: another scene flashed before his eyes. This time the Joker had a loving father who took him to the ice show. The Joker went insane coming home from the ice show only to find that his mother had run away on him. Freddy was puzzled.
-"What the fu-" The Joker grabbed onto Freddy's index blade, which rest directly on top his head.
-"Dig a little deeper," The Joker said smoothly. Then he slowly forced Freddy's blade through his skull and into his brain. As he did this, hundreds upon thousands of backstories flashed before Freddy's eyes. The deeper it went, the more absurd the stories became:
*The Joker was a Vietnam veteran who was traumatized after seeing his drill sergeant get murdered by an unstable soldier.
*The Joker had no father and was raised by a psychotic, overly-religious mother who everyday would scold the Joker by telling him the whole world was going to "laugh at him".
*The Joker was a child of the Norse god, Loki
*The Joker never had any parents and he was his own grandfather (this one actually made more sense than half of the other ones)
*The Joker was a black man from South America who went insane after getting half of his face blown off by an angry Mexican Grampa in a wheelchair who talked with a bell.
*The Joker was a lego character.
*The Joker almost had parents but the animator died of a sudden heart attack before they could be created.
*Cheese
-"What kind of lunacy bullshit is this?!" Freddy demanded.
-"Well, if I'm going to have a backstory, I prefer to make it multiple choice."
-Suddenly, Freddy was sucked through the hole in the Joker's head and sent straight into the maniacal clown's mind. The world that Freddy found himself inside of was beyond all rational thought. It was a world that looked as if the Wonderland of Lewis Caroll had somehow fused with the dark twisted mind of H.P. Lovecraft.
-Even in Freddy's world of nightmares there was structure and planning in how it worked and how it was controlled by its master. But in this world, there was no logic, no reasoning, just random, chaotic insanity that made it clear to Freddy that he had entered into a completely alien world beyond the realm of comprehension.
-The Joker materialized out of a mass of foamy bubbles that spewed out of a crevice in the floor. Pointing to the slashes on his face the Joker asked Freddy with a twisted grin, "You wanna know how I got these scars?"
-"What are you talking about? I gave them to you."
-"No, no, no, that's not how I remember it. Ya see, my father…well, my father was not a very nice man."
-"No! Shut up!" Freddy slammed the Joker against a fleshy wall just under a lime-green eyeball.
-"That's my work, you hear me?! It's mine!" The Joker just pushed Freddy away and continued his story.
-"And every day he would torture me in ways that I don't even think you could have come up with."
-Freddy snarled in anger.
-"But the one method my father used that terrified me above all others…"
-Out of a sideways mouth in the wall emerged a large man wearing the ugliest clown makeup imaginable.
-"What's wrong sport? Don't ya like clowns?" The man said as he walked toward Freddy. Freddy had no time to respond as the clown punched him square in the face, kicked him in the balls, and knocked him to the floor. Freddy got back up and lunged for the clown but he caught him in midair and hurled him into the vertical mouth from which he entered.
-Freddy passed through the fleshy tunnel before being expelled out of the rear end covered in slime. Surveying his surroundings, Freddy was surprised to find himself in a surprisingly inviting setting. It was inside of an elegant family living room, and sitting on the couch across from Freddy was a beautiful, petite young woman. As Freddy stared mesmerized at the beauty in front of him, the Joker put an arm around his shoulder.
-"But my mother, oh, she was an angel!" The woman put a hand to her lips and gave a little Betty Boop giggle while the cutest little blush formed on her cheeks. Then she removed her hand and her tongue shot out of her mouth like a chameleon and constricted itself around Freddy's body. Then she instantly turned from a pretty young lady into a disgusting, ugly, morbidly obese hag.
-"Oh, I'm sorry, did I say 'angel'? I meant repulsive, raunchy old whore."
-The hag retracted her tongue and pulled Freddy forward until their faces were close enough to where it appeared they were kissing. The stench on her breath was mixture of latex and period blood. Then the male clown burst through the front door breathing heavily in a rage.
-"And after my father discovered my mother pouring treasure into a foreign lap, he went off crazier than usual…he went to the kitchen and grabbed a butter knife."
-The father clown stormed into the kitchen of the house and reemerged with, not a knife, but a three-foot long katana. With a rage-filled cry the father went on a berserk rampage throughout the house slashing and chopping up everything within sword reach. Eventually the father found his way over to the mother and Freddy, cut through the mother's tongue with one clean swipe, then split the mother's head in half. Then he turned on Freddy.
-He brought the sword up but as he was bringing it down, Freddy clapped his hands around the blade and flung it out of the father's hands where it embedded itself in the wall just a few inches in front of the Joker's face. The father upper-cut Freddy in the face and ran toward the blade.
-In one fluid motion the Joker grabbed the sword by the hilt, pulled it from the wall, and lopped off the father's head. The body slammed into the wall and the Joker kicked the head like a soccer ball and sent it flying across the room where it landed beside Freddy.
-Freddy turned his gaze onto the head and when he looked back up the Joker, who had been standing twenty feet away, was now standing over the dream demon with the katana in hand.
-"Then my father took the knife and placed it right about…here," The Joker positioned the blade horizontally across Freddy's face just below his eye, "Then, out of nowhere, my father says…"
-"I need about tree fiddy," Said the severed head. The Joker brought the sword away from Freddy's face and stabbed it into the stump on the clown's neck.
-"Well, it was about that time I realized by father was about four stories tall and was a crustacean from the Paleolithic Era."
-The sword started to glow and then the blade turned into a long serpentine neck and the hilt transformed into a large Plesiosaur-like body with the clown head attached to the front of the neck.
-"Now, as you'd imagine, this took me completely by surprise! I just had to call someone and tell them the news!"
-A telephone dropped down from the ceiling like a vine from a tree branch and the wire wrapped itself around Freddy's neck and hoisted him into the air until he was eye level with the Plesio-clown. The phone rang in Freddy's ear and a voice spoke from the other line.
-"Excuse me sir, do you have Prince Albert in a Can? You do…"
-The clown head on the Plesiosaur transformed into the demonic head of Pennywise from Stephen King's "It".
-"Well you'd better let the poor guy out!" Pennywise shouted at Freddy. Then Pennywise unhinged his jaw like an anaconda and swallowed Freddy whole. As Freddy passed down the throat, the experience was like Alice falling down the Rabbit Hole but instead of floating furniture, Freddy came face to face with terrifying images that would have given David Lynch nightmares.
-After falling for what felt like hours Freddy finally smashed through a glass ceiling and landed on a hard ceramic floor. When he landed, a deck of poker cards rained down on him along with countless shards of glass. The Joker walked over to him, picking up three cards as he did so. These cards were three Joker cards (all except the Joker of Hearts).
-"But then, I realized something: it was all just one twisted nightmare that I had when my dad knocked me out during his little temper tantrum. But my mother," The beautiful woman appeared alongside the Joker, "That sweet, beautiful angel, made everything better with a kiss."
-The woman kissed the side of the Joker's head and the wounds inflicted by Freddy healed instantly. Then she walked away with a friendly wave. The Joker sighed.
-"Then, I had to go and fuck myself up by turning on the TV. For two whole hours…I was forced to watch George Clooney play Batman. That's how I got these scars," the Joker said knocking on the side of his head. Then he turned to the audience and said, "And let me tell ya, those scars ain't ever gonna heal."
-Now Freddy's rage was beyond human description. He summoned all of his strength and charged the Joker, slashing and clawing and stabbing the Joker all over his body trying to inflict even the most minute amount of damage. Finally, Freddy landed a devastating blow when he stabbed the Joker in the chest. When he did this he also impaled all three of the poker cards. And this time the Joker allowed himself to bleed.
-Freddy stepped back with a victorious smile. But the smile faded when the Joker looked up with an angry, albeit painful, expression.
-"Now that was rude. I think me and my friends need to teach you some manners."
-"Friends? What fri-"
-The blood that mingled with the poker cards gave off and eerie glow. Then the blood fused with the cards and they each materialized into the three most sadistic, vile and terrifying clown creatures ever conceived by the human imagination: Jeff the Killer, Laughing Jack, and Jason the Toymaker.
-Seeing these monsters caused a cold feeling to run throughout Freddy's entire body. This feeling was completely alien to him as he had never felt it in his entire life (living or dead).
-"It's play time boys," the Joker said with a menacing smile. The three clown monsters smiled just as wickedly as they began to advance on the dream demon.
-"So, you like murdering children, huh…my forte," Said Laughing Jack as he floated within inches of Freddy.
-"Stay away from me! Stay away!" Freddy brought his claw up but before he had a chance to swing it, Jason the Toymaker appeared behind him and wedged his fingers between the webbings of Freddy's claws and anchored his own claws into the palm of Freddy's hand. Freddy screamed in agony.
-"Now, now, dear boy, children shouldn't play with knives," Said Jason, "Someone could get hurt!" On the last word Jason forced Freddy's arm behind his back. Ignoring Freddy's pained screaming, Jason took out a knife in the shape of a wind-up key, stabbed it through Freddy's clawed hand, and pinned it to his back, twisting it until it was buried all the way up to the handle.
-Freddy's loud tortured screams were interrupted by Jeff the Killer as he appeared right in front of him and placed a finger to Freddy's lip.
-"Ashshshshshshshshshshshsh…" As Jeff said the next four words he drew his face closer and closer to Freddy until their noses touched, "Just…go…to….Sleeeep."
-The instant the last word escaped Jeff's mouth, the three monsters sprang on Freddy and began biting and stabbing and clawing and ripping Freddy's flesh apart, all the while laughing like a pack of vicious hyenas. But instead of blood, an angelic white light seeped out of the wounds. Then, as all three of the monsters simultaneously stabbed into Freddy's heart with broken mirror shards and ripped his chest open, there was an explosion of white light and the souls of every last person Freddy had ever killed came pouring out in a geyser of angelic beauty. Joker laughed with joy at the spectacle but then is laughter turned into a startled gasp as one of the souls took on human form and slowly made its way over to him. It was the soul of Harleen Quinzel, completely healed of the wounds inflicted by Freddy and looking more beautiful than the Joker had ever seen her in his life.
-Harleen stopped beside the Joker and looked solemnly into his eyes. The Joker trembled at the sight of his fallen queen. Then, for the very first time, Harleen saw a tear fall from the Joker's eye.
-"I'm sorry, Harley. I didn't mean for this to happen to you. But just know that I always loved you, I just…I just had a funny way of showing it."
-Harleen smiled warmly at the Joker, then she presented the Joker with two poker cards: Queen of Hearts and Joker of Hearts. With an equally warm smile, the Joker took the joker card and he and Harleen joined the hands that held their respective cards and kissed in front of the celestial fountain of freed souls until the fountain finally receded. Then she rejoined the other departed souls in their flight to freedom.
-The Joker heard something metallic fall at his feet. He looked down to find Freddy's one remaining claw. He took the claw and placed it within his coat before walking over to the torture scene. There he found Freddy lying in the middle of the three monsters balled up in a fetal position trembling like a frightened child. The Joker leaned down and violently grabbed the collar of Freddy's sweater in both hands, forcing the fallen nightmare king to look him square in the eyes.
-"Freddy, Freddy, Freddy, do you know why I prefer insanity over fear? It's because insanity lasts forever; it can never be fully understood nor can it ever be cured. Fear, on the other hand, especially your kind of fear, dies the moment the victim opens their eyes. Case in point…"
In the real world, the Joker opened his eyes. Freddy was on top of him and he kicked him off sending him straight into a hard concrete wall. Freddy surveyed his surroundings. He was inside of a very small, crammed room with one wooden bed, a mirror, and a single dim light bulb that buzzed on the ceiling.
-"Where are we?" Freddy asked anxiously.
-"We are inside of the "Double Grave" cell at Arkham. They call it that because it's buried twelve feet underground and no one can hear you scream from inside it. And this will be your tomb."
-Freddy laughed nervously, "You think you can kill me? Ha! Even if you do, I'll be back! As long as there is fear, I will always find a way!"
-"Well actually I think that's going to be quite impossible this time."
-"What makes you think so?"
-The Joker smiled so evilly that it brought that strange, chilling sensation back to Freddy's body. The Joker got up, walked over to the mirror, wretched it from the wall, and brought it over to Freddy. When Freddy saw the reflection starring back at him, the scream that escaped his lungs was louder than the combined screams of all of his victims.
-When those three clown monsters tore the souls out of Freddy's body, they didn't' just rob him of all of his kills, they stripped him of his powers and reduced him back to the same pathetic mortal that he was when he entered the courtroom to stand trial all those years ago. His flesh wasn't even burned anymore.
-"Hey Freddy, why is this joke as sllllloooow as molaccccccceessssss…Cause it's ma last joke!"
-With that, the Joker flicked one of his fingers against a tooth in his upper jaw and it flashed red. A droning siren noise began howling inside of the cell as a timer appeared on the tooth revealing it to be a bomb.
-"No! No! No! This isn't real! This isn't real!" Freddy shouted.
-"One, two, no one's coming for you," Sang the Joker.
-"Shut up! Shut up! SHUT UP!"
-"Three, four, your whining is such a bore,"
-"Somebody wake me up! WAKE ME UP GOD DAMNIT!"
-"No one can hear you," the Joker said in a sing-song voice, "You've killed most of the occupants and the ones you haven't killed have been evacuated. It's just you and me, my friend."
-Now Freddy realized what that strange chilling feeling was. For the very first time in his long, abominable existence, Freddy finally recognized the icy grip of fear.
-"Five, six, see you on the River Styx,"
-Freddy sank to the floor, cowering just as he had made so many innocent children do before. And then he actually started weeping. For now, this was to be his legacy: dying six feet below his victims in the very place he had escaped as a common nobody. He might as well have just been found guilty and sentenced that day.
Then he felt something bump into his shoulder. Freddy looked down to see his claw lying right beside him.
-"Seven, eight," The Joker spoke these words rather than sang them, "Ya know, it's still not too late…"
-In that moment, Freddy's fear turned to rage. He slipped his hand into his glove, pounced on the Joker, pinned him down on the bed, but right before he could deliver the final blow…POOF
-The Joker's tooth short-circuited in a tiny flash and a puff of smoke. But this was enough to make Freddy jolt back in shock. For some time Freddy and the Joker just starred at each other in silence. Then a strong sense of relief washed over Freddy accompanied by an equally strong sense of amusement at the Joker's failed attempt on his life. Freddy started to snicker, which turned into a chuckle, which turned into a roaring laughter.
-Eventually the Joker saw the humor in what had just transpired as well and started laughing with Freddy. Freddy was so caught up in his moment of relief and was laughing so hard that he failed to notice the green smoke pouring out of the Joker's tooth. Freddy just found his laughter involuntarily growing more hysteric and uncontrollable and before he knew it he was cackling with breath that he didn't even know he had. Then his eyes bugled open, his muscles froze-up, and his face contorted into a wide Joker smile.
-"Nine, ten…sweet dreams, friend."
-The very last image that Fredrick Charles Krueger would ever see in his loathsome existence was the tiny sparkle on the Joker's bombed-tooth that created the illusion of a shining smile. Then the illusion turned into something very, very real: Freddy's doom.
-A blinding flash of light filled the room and consumed Freddy. His flesh was vaporized instantly leaving nothing but a skeleton. Then the skeleton dispersed into several pieces and faded into oblivion. The last part of Freddy to fade away was his glove, which was burned to cinders and sent to the far corners of the ether.
-Long before the blast had destroyed Freddy, it had completely erupted out of the entire asylum and consumed it along with the island on which it stood. So big and so bright was the resulting white flash from the bomb that it lit up every single minute inch of Gotham City, even the sewers where the rats and scum presided. The Joker's last smile would be one seen by all.
-By the time the flash had finally subsided, Arkham Asylum, along with its entire foundation, had vanished completely. I was as if it had never existed.