Marcus or The Joker: Part 2

"'Knock knock,'" the reflection said, savoring each consonant, "Who's there? Not you, darling."

The hand on the glass pulled back and, with a twitch, stepped through, as if the boundary between world and mirror was just a thin film of water. He wore the suit, of course—the one from the last scene, the one Nolan had tailored to fit like a second skin.

Purple and black, torn at the lapel, shirtfront dyed with a streak of arterial red. The makeup was precise, but alive: white as sunburn, the mouth bisected by a jagged gash of crimson, the eyes circled in green so deep it seemed to radiate out onto the skin.

He circled the chair. I tried to stand, but my body remained welded to the vinyl. In the mirrors, the others sat just as still, each with their own Joker leering behind them, breathing in tandem.

Joker—that's what he was now, not me, not a reflection, but a separate beast—tilted his head, examining me like a butterfly on a pin.

"Not much left, is there?" he mused, voice a rasp laced with honey. He leaned in, his breath sickly sweet with rot.

"You ever wonder if you were anyone before this?"

I wanted to answer, wanted to assert myself, but the words caught in my throat and died there.

He tutted, brushing an invisible speck from my shoulder.

"That's the trouble with you actors. Always hoping there's a script for afterwards. Always thinking someone will tell you who you're supposed to be when the lights go down."

He slithered behind the chair, hands coming to rest on my shoulders, fingers cold even through the suit.

"Tell me, Marcus—if that's even the name they gave you—do you remember anything from before the audition?"

I closed my eyes, hunting through the haze. I remembered the casting office, the sharp stink of disinfectant and cheap coffee. I remembered the camera's red light, burning into my face.

I remembered the words, the laugh, the feeling of becoming something that was not myself. But before that—nothing. Blank tape.

Joker hummed, the sound vibrating through my bones.

"See? You're just an echo. A punchline with no joke."

He spun the chair, fast enough to blur the lights. When I stopped, he was directly in front of me, hands clasped, face inches away. His eyes were wrong—too green, too clear, too happy.

"Here's the secret, kid," he said, lowering his voice.

"You don't exist. Not really. You're just what happens when the real story needs a patsy."

He tapped my forehead with a gloved finger.

"All those people out there—watching, waiting, needing you to be something—what happens when they find out you're empty?"

I swallowed, or tried to. My throat was lined with sand.

He grinned.

"That's right. They'll move on to the next show. The next mask. And you'll go back in the box, until someone needs to wear you again."

In the mirrors, the other me's began to fade, replaced by a line-up of Jokers, each with a different expression: laughing, weeping, screaming, bored. All of them watched me. All of them looked hungry.

Joker leaned back, draped himself over the table.

"So what'll it be? You wanna keep pretending? Keep clawing your way back to the surface, hoping someone will recognize you without the makeup?"

I managed to shake my head, but it felt more like a tremor than an answer.

"Good," he said, and the word was like a knife slid between the ribs.

"Because you're about to do the thing that makes you famous. The thing that cements the myth. And when you're done—when they're done with you—there won't even be a residue."

He stood, brushing off his lapels, and flicked a glance at the ceiling, as if waiting for applause.

"Lights, camera, oblivion," he said.

He walked back to the mirror, but didn't step through. Instead, he turned, arms open wide.

"You know what the best part is?" he asked, voice dropping to a whisper meant only for me.

I waited.

He smiled. "You still think there's a way out."

I tried to speak, to stand, to do anything at all.

But I was just a mask, in a room built to make them.

He laughed again, and the sound was the only thing that mattered.

...

Joker's laugh didn't fade. It swelled, looping back on itself, until it rattled the bulbs in their sockets and sent spiderweb cracks racing through the mirrors. The sound took on a physical presence, a pressure that squeezed the air from my lungs and set my teeth to vibrating.

I tried to look away, but the mirrors wouldn't let me. Everywhere I turned, the room's infinity reflected the same tableau: the mask in the chair, the monster in the suit, and a thousand pairs of green-rimmed eyes tracking my every flinch.

The surface of the table began to ripple. Makeup kits shivered and danced, their brushes swaying like snake tongues. One compact snapped open, its mirror glittering with the reflection of a grinning skull.

The bottles of foundation sweated, leaking slow rivers of beige and red onto the tile.

Script pages, once neat stacks, now uncoiled like snakes, inching their way across the table and onto my lap. Each line of dialogue crawled off the page and up my arms, ink forming letters that pulsed and burned before sinking into the skin.

Joker paced the perimeter, arms folded behind his back, never quite touching the floor. Every step left a little smear of something darker than shadow.

He muttered as he walked, not to me but to the ghosts in the glass.

"You know why they invented mirrors, don't you? Because people are terrified of disappearing. So they draw a line in the sand, say 'This is me,' and pray to god nobody wipes it away."

He stopped, spun on his heel, and threw his hands wide. The world shuddered. All at once, every mirror in the room erupted into a spray of duplicates.

Now there were hundreds of chairs, hundreds of Jokers, hundreds of masks—all trapped in the same sick ballet.

I tried to stand, but the script pages had twined around my ankles, pulling tight. Makeup brushes leapt from the kit and jammed themselves under my fingernails, bristles scratching at bone. The compacts bit at my wrists, their little jaws snapping open and closed.

"Tell me, Marcus," Joker whispered, voice suddenly inches from my ear, "If you had to choose, would you rather be the performance—or the thing that gets erased when the curtain falls?"

I jerked, tried to twist away, but his fingers gripped my chin and forced my eyes forward.

In the glass, my face was melting—features running together, eyes going black, mouth stretching wider with each pulse of pain. The other me's in the mirrors did the same, their flesh sloughing off until every mask was identical: painted, grinning, and empty behind the eyes.

I screamed. The sound came out as a dry croak.

Joker let go, stepped back, and laughed.

With every beat, the mirrors began to spidercrack. Lines radiated out from my face, shattering the world into fragments. Makeup bottles exploded, spraying color across the floor. The chair's vinyl creaked and split, the stuffing wriggling out in greasy worms.

I fought the script pages, tore at the words, but they only wound tighter, the ink biting deeper into my arms and legs.

Joker loomed, now ten feet tall, head bent to fit the ceiling, arms stretching out to the horizon.

"Here's the punchline," he roared, voice shaking the universe.

"There is no curtain, no audience, no second act. There's only this—forever."

The room convulsed. Mirrors shattered, the shards slicing at my face and hands. I tried to cover my eyes, but the glass found every weakness, carving laughter lines into my cheeks.

Joker's face filled the world, all teeth and joy and bottomless hunger.

I wanted to beg. I wanted to wake up. I wanted to die.

But all I could do was laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

And in the end, even that was taken from me.

....

At some point, I lost track of my own body. Maybe it was when the glass started to slice, maybe it was before that. All I knew was pain, and the echo of laughter.

The only thing left was the chair and the glue of my own terror. Joker filled the room, but also filled the air, the floor, the sickly light. He pressed in from all sides. His face was a tornado of green, red, and white, spinning so fast I thought my retinas would boil.

I screamed, finally. Not with words, but with the full force of animal panic. "Get out—get out—get OUT!"

Joker heard me. He always heard.

He leaned in, closer than skin, and hissed in my ear, "You really want out? I can do you one better."

He snapped his fingers.

The world detonated.

The laugh he let loose now was no human sound. It was a weapon, a pressure wave, a shriek that punched every last piece of glass into a billion shards.

The force lifted me from the chair, threw me into the wall, and even then, even as I bounced from surface to surface, I could see every sliver was alive.

Each piece of mirror was a window. And in every window, a Joker.

Not just one. Not just the version Nolan had made. There were others—hundreds, maybe thousands. Some were men, some were women, some were children in suits far too big.

There was a Joker in a clown suit with teeth made of nails. A Joker in a surgeon's gown, dripping blood. A Joker in black and white, silent-movie-style, smile painted on so thick it seemed to seep into the flesh. There was even a Joker with no mouth at all, just eyes that laughed.

They all laughed. Every shard, every reflection, every Joker, all pointed at me and roared.

The sound was a physical thing, a current. It dragged me across the shattered floor, skinning my arms and legs, tearing away the clothes, the makeup, the last of the skin until there was nothing left but bone.

The mirrors kept fracturing, each new edge spawning a fresh Joker, all of them hungry, all of them desperate to be the last one standing.

I tried to stand, to crawl, to cover my ears, but I no longer had hands. No longer had a face.

All I had was the memory of my own smile.

And even that belonged to them now.

The flood came next, a black tide of ink and blood and Joker faces, swirling together until the room dissolved and I was underwater, drowning in laughter.

The last thing I saw before it all went dark was a single piece of glass, floating in the ink.

I looked in.

It grinned back.

And I knew, even in the nightmare, that it would never leave me.

Not ever.

.....

I woke to the taste of iron and cold water.

The floor was tile, the air was a knife, and my arms burned with a million tiny lacerations. For a second I thought I was still dreaming, that the room would warp and the Joker would be there, waiting, hungry.

But all I saw was the inside of my own bathroom, lit by the shiver of early morning.

I was curled in the shower stall, naked but for a thin sheet of sweat and blood. The water pounded my skin, alternating between ice and fire. I tried to move, but every muscle rebelled. When I pushed myself upright, a sticky trail of red smeared across the glass.

My hands shook, but I forced myself to stand, bracing against the wall.

The mirror above the sink was cracked—five perfect spiderwebs radiating out from where, in some moment of sleepwalking rage, I must have slammed my fist. I studied the damage, trying to map the fractures to the ones in my head.

Behind the glass, my face was a ruin. Black circles under the eyes, lips split, jaw bristling with the start of a bruise. But underneath, I could see the mask, waiting, the smile itching to take over.

From the bedroom, Anne's voice:

"Marcus?" Unsteady, uncertain. The sound cut through the haze, made me wince.

I leaned over the sink, spat out blood, and watched it swirl pink down the drain.

There was a new message waiting in the system, hovering at the edge of my vision.

System: Immersion 93%. Instability nominal. Next threshold: imminent.

I laughed, but the sound was hollow. I tried to wipe away the blood, but it kept coming, more and more, until it was easier to just let it run.

Anne knocked on the door, gentle but insistent. "Are you okay in there?"

I stared at myself, waiting for the mask to answer. It didn't.

Not yet.

I turned on the hot water, let it scald my hands until I could feel them again.

There was only one thing left to do.

I smiled at the broken mirror, at the ghost inside, and whispered, "Knock knock."

This time, the voice that answered was mine.

But only just.

The city was waiting.

So was he.