Batman 3 - Batman Forever (2 page)

What difference did it make? He was damned anyway.

He had no clear idea of what he was going to do, or where he was going to go. He only knew that there were too many ghosts in the mansion. That if he had to deal with one more mourner or high-muck-a-muck or captain of industry or president of some massive conglomerate . . .

One more sad word or pat on the back or “Stiff upper lip, son . . .”

One more quick glance in his direction . . .

One more bit of guilt . . .

One more . . .

No more . . .

There was nothing he wanted to deal with, nothing he wanted to face, nothing he wanted to
do
except to get away, to escape, to hide. Hide from the mourners and the ghosts of his parents. Hide from the things he’d learned. Hide from himself.

The embankment that he scampered down was sharply angled. About a hundred yards off was a precipice which, if he tumbled over it, would send him plunging to the roaring water below. His parents had always loved the view from the mansion on high. His mother, something of a romantic, had likened it to living in an Emily Brontë novel. But the warning for her son to keep away from precisely the area he was now wandering about in had been just as strident as the admonitions of the young man’s father. Just as strident, and—at this moment—just as ignored.

The young man skirted the edge, still at a safe distance. Whatever shouting might be coming from the direction of the mansion was now drowned by the roiling surf far away and far below.

That’s when there came a crack of thunder that seemed to explode directly over his head. The young man let out a yelp and jumped, and once more his feet went out from under him. But this time he was at a sharper angle than he’d been previously. This time he didn’t just fall to the ground. He skidded, trying to slow himself down as he tumbled, the world spinning out around him. He was completely disoriented. He had no clear idea how fast or how far he had gone. He knew only that not too far ahead, the edge of the embankment was waiting for him.

Half of him welcomed the notion.

But another half . . . that which powered his will to live, his need to survive . . . refused to accept that it was all to end in a heels-over-head plummet into icy waters. For a split second the two sides of him warred, and ultimately, it was his determination to live that won out.

That is to say, it won out in the mental argument. The ground, however, which slid away under his grasp, was not cooperating.

The young man’s descent toward certain doom was accompanied by an eerie silence. One would have expected a long, terrified scream, but there was nothing. A gasp of surprise, perhaps, but nothing beyond that. He was developing a stoicism that bordered on the superhuman, and were he allowed to live to manhood, there was no telling where such resolve might take him.

At that moment, as if by some meteorological miscue, the clouds parted. The rain did not abate in the slightest, but nevertheless there appeared, pale and unwavering, the moon.

Something fluttered across it.

The ground around the sliding young man was illumined, and he had a brief glimpse of just how close the drop-off was.

It couldn’t have been more than twenty feet.

The young man tried to dig his heels in, tried to slow his descent by a few seconds so he could come up with something.

As it happened, it took far less time than that, although it wasn’t something for which he could exactly take credit.

All he knew was that, abruptly, he was no longer sliding. Ten feet from a one-way ticket to oblivion, the young man had gotten a reprieve.

Of sorts.

He was no longer hurtling toward certain doom on a cliff-side.

Instead he was sinking to an uncertain doom below.

It was as if the earth had decided to end the suspense and bury him right there and then. Before he fully realized what had happened, the lower half of his body had simply vanished, sucked down into a cascading pit of dirt and muck. His legs pinwheeled, seeking ground like a drowning man hoping that, by some miracle, his feet would touch bottom. But there was nothing. For all the young man knew, and for all his frantic mind might allow him to envision, he was about to plunge into a tunnel that would drop him straight into the center of the earth.

He sank lower, up to his armpits, the dirt covering his head. Even so, his hands clawed at the soft loam, hoping against hope that he might still be able to save himself.

Instead he dropped through the hole and vanished from sight. All that remained on the surface that affirmed his existence was the mournful calling of his name by a British manservant, desperately trying to maintain his reserve but—moment by moment—felt himself giving way to desperation and even despair.

The moon hid behind the clouds once more, waiting.

The young man tumbled, Alice down the rabbit hole, plummeting to that place where a grinning creature solemnly announced, “We’re all mad here.” Or so, at least, it seemed.

And then he landed.

It was a rather abrupt stop as he thudded to the ground. It seemed to him that he’d been falling forever. But it was hard to tell how much time had actually passed. It might have been barely seconds. He might have fallen six feet or twenty or two hundred. It was impossible to say. He was inside a small cavern an indeterminate distance underground, with no clear idea of how to get out.

Not that he was being given a lot of time to think. Dirt and mud continued to rain down on him. He rolled out of the way and scrambled to his feet, his eyes trying to adjust to the gloom. The cascade of earth continued for a few moments more and then slowly came to a stop.

Moonlight streamed through the hole above him, briefly supplementing his own vision, which was actually fairly acute in darkness—so much so, in fact, that his father had once commented that it almost seemed as if he were born for night.

Thoughts of his father, the doctor, prompted him to do what his dad would have done in this situation: methodically check himself over to make sure there were no broken bones. He flexed his elbows and knees, patted himself down . . .

And then realized that
it
was missing.

It had fallen from him during his plunge. It had to be somewhere in the pile of dirt nearby, beneath the hole. He ran to it, shoved both his hands in deeply. It was all he could do to stifle a sob. Losing his footing, losing his life . . . these were things with which he could cope. But losing
it,
losing that which was his last connection to his parents, was a calamity that threatened to overwhelm him.

He shoved deeper and deeper into the dirt, hot tears mixing with the mud that caked his face. Then, finally, his questing fingers seized on a small, solid object, and he pulled it to himself with a heartfelt gasp of joy. He lay there like that for a moment, sprawled on the dirt, clutching the object that had come to mean so much to him. Then he rolled over onto his back and looked up.

The ceiling was moving.

Not down toward him precisely, but more side to side. As if it were stirring somehow, alerted to his presence.

He squinted upward, trying to make out precisely what would cause such a phenomenon. And then he started to distinguish small, hanging forms, like . . . bananas . . . but that made no sense. Whatever kind of bizarre cave he’d landed in, the concept of tropical fruit growing there seemed fairly unlikely.

At that moment, high above, the moon emerged from behind the clouds once more. Faint streams of light poured through the hole that had been the young man’s unexpected entranceway.

Now he was able to make out just what precisely was above him.

Bats.

Hundreds, thousands of them. Hanging, dangling from every crevice, their wings flexing slightly, their eyes glittering.

The young man froze, afraid that the slightest motion might set them off. But even as that concern implanted itself in his mind, he realized that it made no sense. He had plunged squarely into their midst through the most disruptive of means. That alone should have been more than enough to set them off, send them hurtling through the air, filling the cave all around him with the beating of their wings and their high-pitched squealing.

But there was nothing. Beyond the slight stirring of their leathery wings, there was no movement.

Slowly, ever so slowly, the young man eased himself away from them. At one end of the cavern there was an opening outward. He heard a distant dripping and . . . no. More than a dripping. A rushing of water. There was some sort of underground stream nearby, which probably fed directly out to the ocean.

He made his way toward the hole and peered through and down. He couldn’t quite make it out fully, but he had an impression of massive scope. A vast cavern below him and, sure enough, far below a stream. But he quickly sensed that there was no easy way down. The wall was too sheer. He’d have to get spelunking equipment, more lights if he wanted to explore this vast area.

You’ll have to build stairs . . .

It was as if another voice had spoken within his head. A voice that sounded like his own but colder, deeper, a dispassionate whisper.

The bats began to stir. It was as if they had heard it, too.

Stream’s wide enough . . . You could put the boat there . . .

There it was again . . . the voice that chilled him, that sounded so alien and yet so familiar.

Then there was a gentle scraping from below him . . . below . . . as if something was coming up toward him.

He tried to peer down at it, and no, he wasn’t imagining it . . . there was something there. Something large, the size of a human, but he knew immediately that it was anything but. It was climbing up the sheer rock wall toward him, small clicking noises coming from the scrape of its claws against the stony surface.

Automatically he backed away from it. Behind him, above him, all around the bats were becoming more and more agitated. It was as if they had made no motion until now because they were waiting for something. For some thing. And that thing, whatever it was, had now arrived.

He retreated further until he stumbled against the mound of dirt. And there he froze as the thing pursuing him climbed up and into the small cavern with him.

He could make out nothing of it, for it seemed clothed in darkness, as if it were pulling shadows from everywhere within the cavern and wrapping them around itself. It stood there for a moment, as if contemplating the young man. And at that moment, the young man wanted nothing but to be as far from this place as possible. To run from it, fly from it, forget that he ever saw it . . .

That’s not the way it will be,
came the voice once more. He couldn’t tell whether the obscured form shambling toward him was the source, or whether it was from within his own head.

“Let me out,” said the young man as the thing came nearer, nearer still. It seemed to be limping sightly, as if walking was an alien practice.

Let me in,
came the response, and the creature lifted its head to gaze at him. Its eyes were burning red, its ears tall, and it was covered with dark, matted fur. It spread its wings and they just seemed to keep going and going, encompassing the whole of the cavern, leaving no place to run.

The rest of the young man’s thoughts were a torrent, and it would not be until years in the future that he would be able to pick out any of the individual notions tumbling through his mind. A bizarre cascade of images, past, present, and future, all leading toward something greater than himself . . . something less sane than himself.

There was fire in the creature’s eyes, fire in its heart, a massive bat image that was enveloped in flame, and it surrounded the young man. And finally, finally, after everything he’d been through, the young man did emit a genuine, wholehearted, unstinting shriek of pure undiluted terror. “I’m in Hell!”

You’re home. Same thing.

The creature drew the struggling young man to him as the moonlight held steady.

Everywhere now, the bats were shrieking, as if roaring approval . . . or joining in a song of celebration.

And then the young man’s straggles ceased, and suddenly the world made sense again.

Bats flew through the light from above, their shadows cavorting against the walls, like some sort of flapping signal to the future. Hundreds, thousands of screeching voices came together in unison.

And with the cries of the leathery creatures providing an ungodly orchestral tone, the young man danced with the devil in the pale moonlight . . .