Goddess: Descention

Book One: Asylum

Part Five: Internal

Desert Places

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

Between stars - on stars where no human race is.

I have it in me so much nearer home

To scare myself with my own desert places.

Robert Frost

(1874-1963)

Arkham Asylum

He could feel the toxins effects getting worse. He stumbled down twisted stairs that seemed to jump and slither under his feet. Once on the floor below Batman fumbled with one of the many pockets on his utility belt. Finally his groping fingers found the syringe that contained the antidote for the latest version of Crane's toxin. He injected himself under the chin as the lower half of his face was the only unprotected part of his body and hoped the antidote worked. He was never sure, Crane changed his formulas frequently, always trying to perfect his toxin and like bacteria growing more resistant to antibiotics, the effects of Crane's concoctions were becoming harder to alleviate and counter. Already Batman knew this toxin wasn't the same; the inescapable fear that dominates the Scarecrow's typical poison was not the driving force it usually was. Batman's strong analytical mind saw this at once, even through the haze the toxin created he could feel the fear but it took a backseat to an intense uncertainty and a persuasive need to yield to despair. Again he closed his eyes trying to discern any difference the antidote may have affected but all he could see were the hostages and their third eye glaring accusingly at him and a stray thought fluttered through his mind like a tiny seed on the wind that caught and took malicious root… I shouldn't have come up here, this was a mistake. I made the wrong choice and now he's free to kill again and again and again… What have I done?!

When he opened his eyes again the room slanted and twisted and all the color of the world seemed to drain away, all except the blood spattered on the floor and on the inmate laying prone behind the reception desk. Batman stood transfixed as he gazed at the blood on the floor and watched as it slowly twisted into the shape of a bloody red eye. Batman blinked and stumbled away and when he looked again the red eye was gone but the inmate was awake and crawling towards him scowling and muttering, "Your fault, all this misery, you know it's all your fault. You could have stopped it but you never do, you never really stop it do you?"

Again Batman staggered away from the reception enclosure and into the hallway with the empty cells that he fervently hoped were still empty. Batman tried to concentrate on the door at the end of the hallway as clanks and rustling noises tried to draw his attention to other horrors but he refused to look. His entire focus right now was to get outside so he could breathe.

He pulled open the door that led to the first stairwell and descended while gravity jumped and played under his feet. At the base of the stairs he returned to the three dead bodies that now seemed to float above another pool of blood on the floor. Each opened their eyes to reveal empty sockets, except the eyes that replaced the carved X 's in the middle of their foreheads; those eyes were whole and glared balefully at him. Then the corpses began to whisper in sombre discordant voices and they all said the same thing… " It's all your fault. We didn't have to die. Your fault, you wouldn't stop it, you never stop it. This is your fault."

It may have been the antidote finally taking effect or it could have been his own iron will or perhaps a combination of the two but for a moment sense returned to him and Batman tried to drown out the voices with his own internal mantra: This isn't real, you are hallucinating, it's not real, you know it is not real. But the reprieve was brief and his own mind was again betraying him, trying to take him to dark places, a dimension where the facts and control that he had cultivated all his life were meaningless. He felt himself succumbing to something deep inside himself, something he thought he had conquered long ago but it lived still and it was striving to reach the surface. It boiled up now, from the pit of his own personal hell. All the fear and loss and the senselessness he felt so long ago as a child surrounded by twin pools of blood forming under the bodies of his dead parents in a cold dark alley; it was all coming back now and he couldn't stop it.

On his knees at the bottom of the stairwell Batman struggled with a villain more powerful than any criminal Gotham had to offer, and more terrifying than any inmate Arkham could throw at him. At the bottom of the pit Batman fought himself: I did this to myself, to my family. They went into the city that night for me… It was my fault! It didn't matter that his parents were just granting him a simple childhood wish to see a film at the local theatre. He was the reason they were there and that was all encompassing.

It wasn't only the overwhelming guilt or the devastating solitude that he felt so long ago as he watched the life fade from his parents eyes that attempted to overpower him now, it was the futility of the purpose he had set for himself. Ever since that tragic night he had denied himself everything he had taken for granted before; contentment, happiness, hope, a future. His desolation had mutilated the man he would have become; in essence, killed him. The only life he had ever taken… was his own.

Now he was a warrior immersed in a war he will never win. He's won battles, many battles, but victory at the end of the war will forever elude him. As the reality of this ultimate defeat came crashing down on him he felt a rage rising, a fury he had used in countless battles before, always tightly controlled but now that control faltered…

"Sir?"

He wanted to lash out at something, he needed to feed this fury…

"Sir, please respond."

Fists clenched, he rose to his feet. The bodies against the wall seemed to mock him now, their single central eyes stared at him accusingly and silently they asked… "Why didn't you save us?"

He shouted at them, " I can't save everyone!" and threw open the door, knocking over the carefully posed lifeless corpses.

"Sir, your vital signs are showing an increase across the board. What has happened? Please respond."

Batman could not hear Alfred over his com-link, he was immersed too deeply into his own world of rage and hopelessness. He could hear nothing beyond the whispering of all those he'd failed, graveyards full of people he let die because he could not do the one thing his enemies relished. He could not kill and those he hunted would escape to kill again and again, a cycle of death that knew no end. He stormed into the dark tunnel, still dimly lit by the waning flashlight on the floor and saw the inmates he had captured, still unconscious but in his mind's eye they were all looking up at him, smiling, gloating. He stared down at them. "It never ends." he growled through clenched teeth.

Back in the cave a distressed Alfred monitored Batman's vitals and knew that something perilous had happened, everything had suddenly increased: Temperature, heart rate and respiration all spiked and Batman hadn't checked in as was customary. Alfred decided to hack into his employers com-unit so he could hear what was going on…

Batman took a step closer to the callous men on the tunnel's floor and roared at their belligerent grins "It never ends!"

In the Batcave Alfred listened intently trying to understand what was happening. His employer sounded different, more dangerous than usual. There was a quality in his voice, a voice that he knew so well, that was uninhibited, desperate and dreadfully angry.

"Sir, Master Bruce, please acknowledge."

As Batman stood menacingly above them King Lukas began to wake and he heard Batman rasp,"You'll get free of this place and kill again. I'll catch you, bring you back here and we'll do it all over again, won't we?" Batman reached down and grabbed the groggy and still-restrained inmate by the collar and yanked him closer. " WON'T WE!?" Simms yelped in terror. He saw a crazed intensity in Batman's eyes. He'd seen that look before in this dungeon, that murderous glare seen through the bars of the isolation wards, where the dangerous ones go… the ones possessed. The demon had him but the King would not go down without a fight, he kicked and twisted but the demon's grip was too strong, all his strength seemed to seep away into the darkness of the beast's wild eyes.

Batman was beyond reason, like King Lukas before, his world now was colored in a red rage as he sought to stop the cycle of death. "How many!? How many more will you kill if you got out of here!?"

Alfred could hear the frenzied metallic clinking as Lukas Simms fought against his restraints, and Alfred heard his desperate cries, but he feared that Batman didn't or didn't care. Alfred determined the situation was critical; Batman has somehow been compromised and Alfred took matters into his own hands…

Batman tightened his grip around King Lukas' thick throat and squeezed with all his strength. "No more! It stops now, it stops tonight!" Batman growled as Simms gasped for breath but he was swiftly losing consciousness. King Lukas' struggles lessened but Batman's rage did not, not while this one still lived. There would be one less monster in his city tonight, one less child that would grow up without parents, one less living nightmare…

"Sir, I am initiating the Jupiter protocol. Master Bruce, you have five seconds to abort."

Alfred hoped this was just some type of ploy on Batman's part, and waited for the signal that would abort the drastic measure he was forced to utilize, but the signal didn't come.

Lukas Simms stopped fighting but Batman's gauntleted hands still had a hold of his throat, squeezing tighter and tighter… then he abruptly let go…

A high-pitched screaming tone penetrated Batman's toxin-fogged mind while a continuous electrical charge released from his armor, raced through him. He backed away from Simms and fell to his knees. All that existed in his world now was that frightening tone and the current that coursed though his body. His muscles seized and his mind was raked with the screaming reverberating sound. It felt like an eternity of agony had passed before the fog in his mind lifted somewhat and through the thinning haze and the screeching tone he heard or felt something else. Something from far away, from the same place he buried all the pain and sorrow and guilt of so long ago. It was an indistinct memory, an echo of a voice long forgotten, and it simply said… make your way.

Like a key that unlocked the door to this torturous place the unremembered voice released him and he was finally able to think clearly enough to reach for the controls in his gauntlet that would free him from this dreadful world of pain and deafening sound. He sat there for several long moments, muscles still quivering from the prolonged electrocution. He tried to sort out the events that had just occurred through what was left of the haze in his mind. Gradually his hearing returned and Alfred's worried voice seemed to come from somewhere impossibly far away.

"Sir, are you alright?"

"Yes, better now." He replied, his voice husky with fatigue. Better but not alright, not entirely, Batman was appalled at what he had been about to do. He pulled off one of his gauntlets and reached toward the inmate he had just very nearly strangled to death. Batman was relieved to feel Simms' steady pulse, and no broken bones. His surroundings still swam before him, but the towering rage that he felt was dissipating. That sense of futility still lingered though, as he looked over at the inmates that lay cuffed beneath the walls of Arkham.

"May I ask what happened Master Bruce?"

Batman himself wasn't sure what happened; how that murderous rage overwhelmed him. He had been under the effects of Crane's toxins before, but they never had such a profound effect on him. Secretly he feared his reaction was inspired by more than the powerful poison. Then there was that voice, was that just part of the hallucination or was it…Batman looked down at his gloveless hand, at the small white scar in the middle of his palm… a memory? He stood unsteadily and tried to shake the fog in his mind that still lingered."Long story, I'll explain later."

"Understood."

With his gauntlet still off Batman took an empty syringe from one of the many compartments on his belt to obtain a sample of his own blood. He wanted to isolate and analyze this new toxin back at his lab. He had to find a way to counter it's effects; he would not allow this breach of his moral code to happen again. Without his old friend's intervention…

"Alfred?"

"Yes Sir?"

"Thank-you."

"Of course Sir."

Arkham Asylum

Commissioner of the Gotham City Police Department, James Gordon watched as an occupied ambulance pulled away from Arkham Asylum's east-wing building only to be replaced by an empty one with a body on a gurney waiting for it. The living had already been taken to Gotham General, the dead had to wait their turn. The area had been deemed contained and the other emergency services were finally being allowed into the prison compound. It was three in the morning and James Gordon was exhausted, but he would see this through.

He stayed close to his car and it's radio so he could call in orders, or redirect his men. Earlier he had to yell at a wayward police helicopter pilot who was too busy taking pictures of the chaos on the compound to search the bay for escapees. And, after he received an 'anonymous' tip that two inmates had indeed escaped he sent a dozen squad cars, that's all he could muster, to comb the mainland's shoreline for escapees or any evidence of them. So far nothing, but he had no doubts about the source of the information, if he said two inmates escaped then two inmates escaped. But if the report he just received from inside the prison was true, it was far worse than two escaped run-of-the-mill Arkham prisoners, if there were such creatures.

He supposed he should go to the prison himself, speak with the warden, who didn't like to be called a warden, he calls himself an administrator. Arkham ceased being a hospital years ago, if it ever really was one. Whatever the case, it was a prison now, and prisons have wardens; a duck was a duck. Although he was Commissioner, Gordon didn't play political games, he didn't hide behind euphemisms, and he wasn't hiding now, he was waiting.

Now that the crisis was winding down Gordon expected to hear from that special source. He pulled out a special phone he found in his office one day and, as he looked at it in the palm of his hand, it started to vibrate as if on cue. The text simply read: Bridge 10 min. Gordon got in his car and drove towards Arkham's gates.

Gordon pulled over half-way across the bridge where Batman was waiting, crouched on the railing. Before he closed his car's door Batman spoke, "There's an escape route on the eastern side of the prison, under the east-wing, I plugged the hole temporarily." Straight to the point, thought Gordon, no euphemisms here either. Gordon nodded and Batman continued on to describe the escape route, the body of Simon Dunstan, the live inmate he found swimming across the bay and the location of Lukas Simms and the men he left cuffed in the tunnel.

"Sounds like you've been busy tonight." Unfortunately, Gordon thought. Still there was no mention of the incident in the basement of the east-wing. Whenever any of Gordon's men encounter the Batman, the Commissioner was the first to know about it. "I heard Crane set a trap…." Gordon left it hanging there, hoping Batman would elaborate.

"Was anyone else affected?" Batman replied and Gordon caught the significance; Anyone else, so Batman was affected.

"No, no one, ventilation system must have carried it away." Batman was relieved, but also curious as to how it might affect others; would it be the same for anyone or was his violent reaction distinctive only to him.

"And the wounded guard?"

"He was in surgery last I'd heard, the prognosis was good though, but sadly, that's all the good news I have tonight."

"Crane is missing." It was a statement not a question.

"Yes, but there's more, other than the ones you've accounted for there's still several missing, but that's not the worst of it…" Gordon paused to take a breath before he continued but Batman finished the thought for him…

"Zsasz is one of them." Gordon looked down at his shoes and nodded the affirmative, when he looked up again Batman was gone.

This story continues in Goddess: Descention, Book Two