Batman (9 page)

The hallway ended on a catwalk overlooking a giant cistern, lit by a few bare bulbs. The sockets looked old, but the bulbs were new.

There were dozens of these in Gotham City, designed originally to hold drinking water and later repurposed for storm water overflow. They were huge cylinders with pumping machinery built into the walls near the bottom. The catwalk ran around the entire circumference of the cistern, about eight feet below its ceiling. He didn’t see a door other than the one he’d used to enter.

As Robin paused on the catwalk to take this all in, the door clanged shut behind him. He didn’t bother checking to see if he could open it. Whatever the Riddler had in store for him, it had begun. Looking back would just waste time.

Below the catwalk, inflow tunnels ringed the cistern wall. He counted six of them, and a blank video screen had been placed over each one. While the cistern itself was old stone, covered in stains and slime, the screens were brand new. At the bottom of the cistern, thirty feet or so below the catwalk, lay a drain ringed with brick. Seeing it set off the first alarm bell in Robin’s head. Usually they were kept closed to hold water. This one was open.

He heard a roar, and water burst out of one of the inflow pipes. The flow arced down into the cistern, forming a small whirlpool over the drain. A moment later, a second pipe started discharging water. Then the next four, at even intervals, until the cistern was filling faster than the drain opening could evacuate the water. The small whirlpool became a maelstrom, thundering in the closed space as the water level rose toward the catwalk.

Not good.

Robin looked up. The ceiling was steel and concrete, with a few empty light fixtures and a single question mark hanging from a short cable. There was no emergency exit. There were no vents large enough to accommodate his size.

In short, there was no way out.

Moving at a trot, Robin made a circuit of the catwalk to make sure he wasn’t missing anything. Along the way he tapped at the walls sharply with his bō, listening over the roar of the water for any change in the resonance. A hidden exit wasn’t impossible… but it didn’t turn out to exist. Robin got all the way around the catwalk, back to the door, and this time he did try to open it. He couldn’t put it past the Riddler to resort to the obvious.

The knob didn’t turn.

He’d been right. There was no way out.

No
, he corrected himself.
In a Riddler puzzle, there’s always a way out.
He was still certain of his analysis—his death wouldn’t come until later. That lunatic wouldn’t have set everything up the way he had just to have him walk into a room and drown. He
loved
drama, and was a big believer in letting the tension build.

So the problem wasn’t with the room, it was with Robin. He was missing the key needed to understand the puzzle… yet he didn’t have any information. The Riddler had left no clue.

Again he corrected himself. The Riddler
always
left a clue. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a riddle. And by definition, riddles could be solved.
Great
riddles had solutions that looked obvious in hindsight. The trick was to see—but to see what?

The water. Without the water, there was no threat. With no way to go up, and no way to go through the door, so the solution had to be in the whirlpool. It was holding its shape as the water rose and the noise grew louder in the smaller volume of air.

That had to be it.

By timing the discharge from each pipe in a certain pattern, the Riddler had created the whirlpool.
Detect the intentionality
, Batman always said.
Learn to distinguish it from the random
. And here, the intentionality was in the maelstrom.

The water level was within six feet or so of where he stood. If he was still on the catwalk when the water submerged it, the force of the whirlpool would sweep him around, turning every railing and post into a lethal weapon. He wouldn’t survive that. It left one option, and only one: to get out through the drain. And that meant jumping into the heart of the beast.

The water roared and rose.

The catwalk began shaking. If it fell apart, the pieces of it would spin uncontrollably, killing him in the water. He had to be out of the chamber before that happened.

I’ve done a lot of crazy things in my life
, Robin thought,
but this might just be the craziest.
No sense in trying the re-breather—it would just be snatched away by the force of the water.

He jumped.

While he was still in the air, the screens lit up over each tunnel. He caught sight of two of them before he hit the surface.

FORWARD STEP

Then Robin hit the water and was instantly tumbling in the vortex of the current. It was freezing cold, so cold that his heart skipped a beat at the moment of contact. He couldn’t fight the current, but he had to know what those words had been. For the Riddler, the clues were
everything
. If he couldn’t read them, he was certain he would die.

The whirlpool dragged him toward the funnel at its center, and Robin tried to angle his body around so he could break the surface just once more before he spun down the drain. His cape lashed around him in the torrent, once nearly wrapping around his head, but just as he reached the wall of the funnel he detected an upward current, and forced himself into it. His head briefly broke the surface. He was spinning around fast now, so fast that he couldn’t tell what order the words were in as they registered in his mind.

BACK STEP FORWARD STEPS ONE TWO STEP BACK FORWARD TWO ONE STEPS STEP BACK FORWARD STEP TWO BACK STEPS ONE.

Then the funnel closed around him and he was corkscrewing feet-first down into the drain. The pressure popped his ears and he could hear the groan in his head as it squeezed his sinuses. He held his breath and tried to keep his legs straight and his arms folded across his chest.

It felt like he was encased in ice. The urge to breathe was nearly irresistible, but Robin held out as he hit the wall twice in quick succession. The second time he felt something gash the back of his leg.

Arrrr!
he thought, but he kept his mouth clamped shut.

A moment later he was in free fall, and before he could react he landed in a deep pool. The water had found the next chamber, but the drain in this one was much smaller. Without a whirlpool, the pull was much less—it must not have been constructed to accommodate all six of the inflow tunnels at once.

It was pitch black in the chamber.

Robin swam to the surface and kicked away from the torrent pouring down from above. He found a wall in the dark and grabbed something that offered him a good grip, treading water as best he could, trying to get his breath. Already his fingers and toes were getting numb. Soon hypothermia would set in, and before that happened, his brain would get foggy. The real riddle here wasn’t how to swim—it was how to keep himself warm long enough to figure out what he had seen up above.

The words had come so fast that he couldn’t tell whether any of them had occurred twice. No, they couldn’t have. There were six tunnels and Robin knew he’d seen six words.

The solution fell into place.

One step forward, two steps back.

The water level continued to rise. He had no way of seeing if there was any way out. Then, gradually, the sound of the water started to change…

That was it. He’d taken one step forward when he jumped off the catwalk. The only way out was to take two steps back.

Something hit him in the leg and he realized it must be a piece of the catwalk. He swam to the far side of the chamber, hearing the muffled clangs of other debris hitting the drainpipe walls on their way down. Reaching up, Robin found he could touch the ceiling. Soon this chamber would be full.

When that happened, water would no longer be able to flow down from above—it would begin to back up. Then it would be time to take his two steps back… if he could hold his breath long enough and not pass out from the cold. He reached for his re-breather now, only to find that it had been swept away by the current.

Damn.

He started hyperventilating, trying to get as much oxygen into his blood as possible before the water reached the ceiling. As he did so, he worked his way around the edge of the chamber until he could feel the flow from the drainpipe without it dragging him out and down.

The top of his cowl touched the ceiling. Robin kept breathing. The rushing of the water grew louder in the confined space. It reached his mouth, and he tipped his head to keep breathing. Every gulp of oxygen mattered.

It reached his nose.

He filled his lungs one last time and sank down as the last few inches of air were forced out of the chamber. The sudden muffling, together with the absolute darkness, was disorienting. Robin felt along the wall looking for the drainpipe. He couldn’t afford to go past it. He tapped on the wall as he went, and when he heard an echo he felt with his feet. There was the mouth of the drainpipe.

He doubled over and pulled himself in, then kicked his way up, pulling with his hands when his fingers found small ribs or ridges on the pipe’s interior. He’d been moving so fast on his way down that he had no idea how long the pipe was. Paradoxically he was relying on the Riddler’s hatred of chance to save him. The man wouldn’t design a trap that couldn’t be escaped. He’d save that for the big finale, when people were watching.

God, I hope that’s the case
, he thought fervently. It seemed like a lot of faith to put in a homicidal maniac. At the moment, though, faith was all he had. Faith in his ability to hold his breath, faith that the tunnel wouldn’t be blocked with pieces of the catwalk, faith that the cistern wouldn’t be full to the ceiling…

Faith in the Riddler. He needed the Riddler, and as the cold started to fog his mind it seemed to Robin that Batman had needed the Joker, too.

* * *

Then he was out of the drainpipe, in open water. Now that the cistern was nearly full, the whirlpool had all but abated. He pushed up, lungs burning and heart hammering against his sternum. Looking up he saw the wavering pinpoints of the lights spaced along the cistern’s ceiling. He couldn’t feel his legs, but he kept telling them to move.

When Robin’s head broke the surface, at first he didn’t notice, he was so lost in his own mind. But the change in sounds registered, and he exhaled with a grunt that echoed in the few feet of air left in the container. He was so exhausted that the weight of his cloak almost dragged him right back down again, but he thrashed over toward the wall and banged his hand against a catwalk strut that had survived the whirlpool.

How long had he been in the water? Three minutes? Four? He didn’t have much left in him. Where was the door? He held onto the strut and looked around, trying to get his bearings.

In the dim light Robin could see that the water had receded a little, exposing the ruined remains of the catwalk and the door through which he had come in. He climbed out of the water and worked his way along the wall until he got to the door. The immediate cold faded, but he was still numb. Stretching from the nearest broken piece of the catwalk, he could just barely reach the latch.

It wouldn’t turn… but when he tried to turn it, he heard a mechanical
thunk
from somewhere nearby. A moment later, water started to fall into the cistern from the ceiling.

In the water, one of the Riddler’s signs lit up again, blinking rapidly.

TWO… TWO… TWO… TWO…

So there was still a second step, but he didn’t know what that could be. And his mind was so muddled, it was all he could do to think. There was no other way out, and if the cistern filled to the top…

“I already took one step back, you bastard,” he said out loud, trying to clear his head by talking. “I can’t take another without going through that door.”

TWO… TWO… TWO… TWO…

What could it be?
Robin wondered. But what if it didn’t refer to the second step? What if he was trying to get Robin to…

The hell with it
, he decided.
Even if that’s not what he means, I’m gonna call
.

Batman answered immediately.

“Robin. The tooth came from Killer Croc.”

“Killer Croc?” Robin replied. That shocked him into greater clarity. “Someone pulled one of Killer Croc’s teeth? No way. You’d have to kill him first.”

“That was my first reaction, too, but the facts are the facts. It’s Croc’s tooth. He’s involved in the Riddler’s plan somehow. What’s your status?”

Robin glanced around the cistern, suddenly aware of what might be lurking beneath those dark waters.

“I’m trapped in a room somewhere near the Sionis mill. It’s flooding. That’s the Riddler’s plan for me.” He gave Batman a quick update. “One step forward, two steps back. Funny, right? Also, the ‘two’ kept blinking. I’m pretty sure he means that it’s going to take the two of us to solve this puzzle. For some bizarre reason, he wants us to stay in touch. So, you know. Water’s rising here. Maybe you can pitch in.”

“The Riddler loves thematic consistency,”
Batman said.
“The solution will be somewhere in the Flood Control Facility.”

“That’s what I was thinking, too,” Robin agreed. His teeth were chattering, but the numbness was beginning to subside.

“I’m on my way. How fast is the water rising?”
asked Batman.

“Not too fast,” Robin said, “but don’t stop to smell the flowers, if you know what I mean?”

“I do.”
Batman clicked off, and then all Robin could do was wait and shiver. The water rose, but slowly.

He had a little time.

Posted by JKB

Wednesday, 12:37 p.m.