Goddess: Descention

Chapter Three: Internal

Chapter 3: Internal

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

Arkham Asylum

After binding the subdued inmates to metal pipes that ran along the walls Batman left the ‘King’ and his ‘court’ to wait, whimpering in the semi-darkness, for the authorities to retrieve and continued down the tunnel. He retraced the inmates’ path in the dark passage and soon found an unlocked access door. Batman listened before he passed through, but he heard nothing in the immediate area. He heard muted voices from somewhere above however and Batman wondered if the riot police had finally breached the building. He pushed the door open wider and could see dim orange emergency lighting flicker in the room beyond but something was on the other side of the door. He pushed through the access door and saw that it led to a stairwell and just inside he found what had been holding the door in place.

Bodies. Three of them, two Arkham guards and a woman dressed in scrubs with a floral pattern; a nurse. They sat against the wall in a row, legs folded into the lotus position; hands on knees, palms up, eyes closed as if in meditation, though one of the guards had fallen over. Most disturbing however was the ‘x’ carved in the middle of each of their foreheads.

Batman blocked out the revulsion of what he was seeing and studied the bodies objectively; their wounds, their placement, he made note of all the details. The Arkham guards were both stabbed several times, but the nurse suffered only two wounds, a puncture to her abdomen that incapacitated but she died from the single slash to the throat. The crosses carved into each of their foreheads was done post-mortem, the wounds were too clean. Batman didn’t believe this was the work of Simms and his crew, they didn’t have weapons on them and even on the outside Simms’ body was his weapon, he relied on his own brute strength rather than knives or even guns and the wounds on the guards were similar to the ones he found on Simon Dunstan. Made from a small blade but very sharp and this time the wounds’ placement told a slightly different story than those of Dunstan. The presentation of the bodies, which was something else Simms never did, was probably not meant to be disturbed, the guard that fell over and blocked the door was likely pushed aside when Simms and his men passed through. Batman knelt beside the fallen guard and briefly examined him. Based on blood lividity, muscle flaccidity and body temperature he determined they were killed no more than two hours ago. He also noted something slightly different between the two guards, one was missing his key-card. He found it on the floor between the guard and the door and picked it up. He took out a device and scanned the prints on it then he put it back where he found it. Batman looked again at the nurse, she was in her early fifties perhaps but the cause of her death was what really interested him. The manner of her death was different from the guards. Her wounds were clean and precise unlike the guards but the slash to her throat was diagonal; starting high on the right and finishing low on the left. That indicated a backhand slash, perhaps a defensive strike. Batman examined her hands, there was blood on them, there was blood everywhere and most likely her own but on a hunch he took a fingernail scraping, if only to prove what he had already suspected. Batman stood over the victims once again, he gazed down at their posed bodies and he knew who did this.

As Batman turned back toward the door, his mind raced. It’s been less than two hours, there was still time, he could still be in the bay, or at least still in the bay area. As he pulled the door open to step back into the dark passage beyond several strategies came to mind. He would have to plug the fissure somehow so any more inmates bent on escape this way would find only a dead end. He would call Gordon, intensify the search in and around Gotham Bay, now that he knew who he was looking for and how great a threat they faced… Then he heard a muffled gunshot followed by stifled shouts and screams from somewhere above. For the second time tonight Batman was pulled in two directions, he could turn and chase the devil he knew or climb the stairs and face the devil he didn’t.