Shadows over Arkham
A Fanfic
“I know.”
The voice was cold like ice and resonated off of the walls of the padded cell. It was like His voice, but different. The Bat spoke in clear rounded tones, cultured, the voice of an ivy league graduate and product of a dozen private institutions. This voice was frigid rasp full of hatred, menace, and a warmly familiar pleasure, much like the Joker’s own.
Joker stopped pretending to be asleep, opening his eyes at last to glance left then right, as far as the frame chaining him in place would allow him to do so. After his most recent escapade the Clown Prince of Crime had been bound hand and foot thrice, then locked into a rolling frame not unlike a hand cart, and placed full view in an enclosed plexiglass shell that barred the cell from the rest of the asylum. He could see out, and the guards could see in, but he could neither move nor interfere with the day-to-day night-to-night operations of the Asylum. However, he couldn’t see anyone.
“Hel-lo?” He purred cheerily. “Is that you Batsy? Or one of the kids? I’ve got to tell you, if you’re trying to spook me with a scare job, you’re going to have to try a lot harder.”
“This is no game, Joker,” The voice said. “You’ve played your last hand.”
“Oh,” The pasty skinned madman leered with a rictus grin. “a heavy, put me down for a hunno, I’m good for it.”
“You’re a good for nothing, Joker,” His visitor taunted from the darkness. In fact, no matter how hard Joker squinted into the shadows he couldn’t see anything but the same stretch of empty hallway he had been watching for the last two days. With the lights out it was just dark enough to ephemeral blued ghosts fading into voids of nothingness, and there wasn’t even a rat for company. More importantly, he saw none of the guards, nor heard any of his nearby fellow inmates who no doubt would have been disturbed by this conversation. “A wild animal fit only to be put down.”
The Joker barked a short laugh.
“Oh really, and who’s going to do it mystery man?” He asked. “You? Even if you did, you’d just become as bad as me: a murderer.”
“Justice,” the stranger counted coolly. “For the countless victims you’ve claimed.”
Now the Joker rolled his eyes. “God,” he muttered. “You’re boring. Batman would be appealing to our shared humanity by now, trying to talk me onto some kind of better path I no doubt have. You’re no fun.”
“I don’t need to try and talk you down from the ledge,” The voice whispered. This time it was in the Joker’s ear. It was in the cell with him. He could feel someone moving around him like a stalking panther. “Because I already know there is no other road for you than over it, Joker.”
Suddenly where there had been nothing the darkness split and on the outside of Joker’s cell the air began to bleed bright red, revealing a long flowing cape as it opened. A gaunt dark figure loomed in the hallway beneath a large slouch hat, face obscured by a red scarf. Only the chiseled aquiline nose and burning blue eyes could be seen, and the latter were like gleaming bullets that promised only swift inevitable death.
“For who else knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” The apparition sneered.
The Joker blinked.
Then he began to laugh long and hard only to stop when his laughter was not the only such cacophonous racket that filled the air. intruder’s laugh was louder than his. It rang from every surface. Outside the Asylum lightning flashed and thunder pealed as though at his command. The snarling cackle was like a living thing crawling across the walls and floor drowning out the Joker’s own, who found his mouth pulled into an unfamiliar frown at being upstaged.
“I’ve heard you were dead, old man.”
“Wherever the weed of evil sprouts, The Shadow shall always be there to pull it out from its villainous roots.”
The Joker yawned. “I’m sure this kind of grand guignol is very impressive to children,” he said half believing it himself. “But we both know how this is going to go. You’ll talk a good game, then you’ll disappear back into whatever rat hole you crawled out of thinking I’m scared. The Bat isn’t going to let you do anything to me, and when I get out again to give Gotham a wedgie you won’t be anywhere to stop me.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Joker.” The Shadow said.
“I won’t be here because you won’t be here.”
The Joker was about to ask The Shadow what he meant when the spectral man reached down with a gloved hand bearing a ring with a girasol gemstone set into it, and drew a gleaming nickel plated .45 pistol. Then he pointed it at the cell, aiming through the large holes through which sound and air carried.
“Oh.”
“Your last words?”
The Shadow tilted his head to the side fractionally.
“Funny.”
The Joker’s invective dies on his lips as the .45 belched out a range of shots. One would have done well enough as the sudden final expletive awoke the entire asylum. However, long experience had taught the shadow that there were some foes for which surety was more valuable than the conservation of ammunition, and so the pistol continued to howl sending round after round into the Joker’s corpse after the first shot painted a perfect red circle in his forehead.
Lungs, kidney, heart, stomach, intestines, all were perforated and torn to pieces by heavy American hollow points. Then it was done and the Joker hung as an inert ragged ruin from the frame into which he had been chained. With a straight jacket he couldn’t even put his hands up. A last moment was wasted to leave a calling card apropos of the monster that had been slain. What the Bat had never understood was that The Shadow did not fear the taint of evil as men did, for it was already immersed within it: a sin eater who carried the weight of other men’s evil as he delivered justice onto them. The Shadow knew what evil lurked in the hearts of men, for he knew well the bitter fruit of crime and tasted its poison.
A playing card then, placed against the wall and held in place by a small square of sticky adhesive.
On it, a Joker had its eyes scratched out and three words:
The Shadow Knows!
Dawn brought the late arriving guards, hospital administrators, and the Gotham City Police no closer to discovering who killed the Joker. A thorough search of the asylum bore no evidence of a break in. The scholarly investigation of the forensics found no origin of the bullets, no cases for the cartridges, no fingerprints or filmic evidence. It was as though The Joker had lived and died, entirely untouched in his cell. Only a very old cold case about a ninety year old vigilante in New York even hinted at the goings on, and officials were certain it was the work of a copycat.
Then again, they didn’t go out of their way to look very hard either. The Joker had killed so many people - more than cancer the locker room joke went - that it was accepted canon that someone was going to ice him one day. In truth, many police officers promised themselves to get drunk, and in a multitude of darkened offices and creep joints the criminal underworld of Gotham breathed a sigh of relief. The terror of the Joker was ended and with it people could get on with their lives.
And the Bat?
Rumor had it he’d been off world on some caper with the Justice League, or across the planet dealing with some other emergency. Only by the time he got back would the Joker’s death even become known, and none of his students or assistants had known that a Shadow had walked over his grave.