Down And Dirty

June 1987

All the King's Horses

V

ADMISSION ONLY $2.50 said the sign over the darkened ticket booth in front of the Famous Bowery Wild Card Dime Museum.

The booth was empty, the museum doors locked. Tom rang the bell by the ticket window. After a minute he rang it again. There were shuffling noises from within, and a door in the back of the booth opened. An eye appeared, a rheumy pale-blue eye on a long fleshy stalk that curled around the doorframe. It fixed on Tom, blinked twice.

A joker stepped into the booth. He had a dozen eyes on long prehensile stalks that sprouted from his forehead and moved constantly, like snakes. Otherwise he was unremarkable. "Cancha read?" he said in a thin, nasal voice. "We're closed." In one hand he had a small sign, which he slid in front of the ticket window. It said

CLOSED.

The way the joker's eyes kept moving gave Tom a queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. "Are you Dutton?"

One by one the eyes turned, stilled, until every last one of them was fixed on him, studying him. "Dutton expecting you?" the joker asked. Tom nodded. "All right, c'mon round the side." He turned and left the booth, but two or three of his eyes stared back at Tom, curious and unblinking, until the door shut.

The side entrance was a heavy metal fire door opening on an alley. Tom waited nervously while locks were unlocked and bolts lifted inside. You heard stories about Jokertown alleys, and this one seemed to him especially dark and gloomy. "This way," eye-stalks said when the door finally opened.

The museum was windowless, its interior hallways even gloomier than the alley. Tom looked around curiously as they passed down several long corridors, with dusty brass railings and waxwork dioramas to either side of them. He had floated over the Dime Museum thousands of time as the Turtle, but he'd never set foot inside.

With the lights out, the figures in the shadows seemed remarkably lifelike. Dr. Tachyon stood on a mound of white sand, his spaceship painted on the backdrop behind him, while nervous soldiers climbed from a jeep. Jetboy clutched his chest as steel-faced Dr. Tod pumped bullets into him. A blond in a torn teddy struggled in the grasp of the Great Ape as he scaled a model of the Empire State Building. A dozen jokers, each more twisted than the last, writhed suggestively in some dank basement, clothing strewn all around them.

His guide vanished around a corner. Tom followed, and found himself face-to-face with a roomful of monsters. Drenched in shadow, the creatures looked so real that they brought him up short. Spiders the size of minivans, flying things that dripped acid, gigantic worms with rings of serrated teeth, humanoid monstrosities whose skin quivered like gelatin; they filled the room behind the curving glass, surrounding him on three sides, crowding each other, slavering to break out.

"Our newest diorama," a quiet voice said behind him. "Earth versus the Swarm. Try the buttons."

Tom looked down. A half dozen large red buttons were set into a panel by the railing. He pressed one. Inside the diorama a spotlight picked out a wax simulacrum of Modular Man suspended from the ceiling, as twin beams of scarlet light flashed down from his shoulder-mounted guns. The lasers struck one of the swarmlings; thin tendrils of smoke rose, and a long hiss of pain issued from unseen speakers.

Tom pushed a second button. Modular Man vanished back into the shadows, and the lights found the Howler in his yellow fighting togs, outlined against a plume of smoke from a burning tank. The simulacrum opened its mouth; the speakers shrieked. A swarmling quivered in agony.

"The children love it," the voice said. "This is a generation raised on special effects. I'm afraid they demand more than simple waxworks. One must adapt to one's times."

A tall man in a dark suit of old-fashioned cut stood in a doorway to one side of the diorama, the joker with the eyestalks hunched over beside him. "I'm Charles Dutton," he said, offering a gloved hand. A heavy black cape was thrown over his shoulders. He looked as though he'd just stepped from a hansom cab in Victorian London, except for the cowl drawn up over his head that kept his face in shadow. "We'll be more comfortable in the office," Dutton said. "If you'll step this way."

Tom was suddenly very uneasy. He found himself wondering, once again, what the hell he was doing here. It was one thing to float over Jokertown as the Turtle, secure in a steel shell, and quite another to venture into its streets in his own all-too-vulnerable flesh. But he'd come this far. There was no backing out now. He followed his host through a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY and down a narrow flight of steps. They passed through a second door, through a cavernous basement workshop, into a small but comfortably furnished office.

"Can I get you a drink?" the cowled man asked. He went to a wet bar in the corner of the office and poured himself a brandy.

"No," Tom said. He was -a cheap drunk, too easily affected by booze, and he needed all his wits about him today. Besides, drinking through the damned frog mask would be a bitch.

"Let me know if you change your mind." Cradling the snifter, Dutton crossed the room and seated himself behind an antique clawfoot desk. "Please, sit down. You look terribly uncomfortable standing there like that."

Tom wasn't listening. Something else had caught his eye. There was a head on the desk.

Dutton noticed his interest and turned the head around. The face was remarkably handsome, but the oh-so-perfect features were frozen in a rictus of surprise. Instead of hair, the top of the skull was a plastic dome with a radar dish beneath. The plastic was cracked. Severed cables, blackened and half-melted, dangled from the jagged stump of its neck.

"That's Modular Man," Tom said, shocked. Numbly he eased himself down onto the edge of a ladderback chair. "Only his head," Dutton said.

It had to be a wax replica, Tom told himself. He reached out and touched it. "It's not wax."

"Of course not," Dutton said. "This is authentic. We bought it from one of the busboys at Aces High. I don't mind telling you, it cost us quite a tidy sum. Our new diorama will dramatize the Astronomer's attack on Aces High. You'll recall that Modular Man was destroyed during that fracas. His head will give a certain verisimilitude to the display, don't you think?"

The whole notion made Tom ill. "You pla

"The boy was cremated," Dutton replied in a matter-offact tone. "We have it on good authority that the mortuary substituted a John Doe, cleaned his bones with carpet beetles, and sold the skeleton to Michael Jackson."

Tom found himself at a loss for words.

"You're shocked," Dutton said. "You wouldn't be, if you were a joker beneath that mask. This is Jokertown." He reached up, pulled back the cowl that covered his face. A death's head gri

Tom had seen thousands of jokers in his long years as the Turtle, but always at a distance, on his TV screens, with layers of armor plate between them. Sitting alone in a gloomy basement with a cowled man whose face was a yellowed skull was a little different. "Yeah," he said uncertainly.

"We are always in the market for new exhibits, the more spectacular the better. Des is not normally given to hyperbole, so when he tells me you're offering us something truly unique, I'm interested. Exactly what- is the nature of this exhibit?"