Out of the Belfry, into the Fire

Cold Tea

January 6th, a messy, spidery hand wrote hastily across a Gotham bank-logoed note paper. Day Six of Experiment: Walking Dead.

The first two injections have proven successful. Despite the aforementioned side-effects on days 4 and 5, my body is sustaining without severe concern as of yet. Though, as the side-effects have worsened since the last entry, I maintain the hypothesis that without the final injection to rebalance what I have taken apart, it would eventually end in death. Despite numerous tests including those on the lab rat specimens, there is still the continued risk of my shortened life expectancy even with the final injection.

Despite the benefits to having continued experimentation on human subjects before my own self-injections, time, as I also have mentioned before, is shortening. The death of Jonathan Crane is inescapable, and if there is even a small chance that the Scarecrow will survive the final step beyond him, it is worth the risk. Had I chosen not to take the risk, the psychology of Jonathan Crane will have eventually killed both. The ravings of a madman in a cell forever would have been the end result for the body in which I dwell.

Despite the side-effects, I already feel the desired properties from the first two injections. Fear is conquerable. Senses are heightened when I can think through the pain. Despite the pain-ever growing, I can feel the limberness in my body growing more and more. Tests have proven that my physical abilities will be more than at first calculated; strength that could be compared to that of a primate, the agility may be soon compared to that of a feline.

At present, according to the experiments with the calculations added to compensate for the extreme differences of my weight, blood pressure, heart rate, and regular respiration rate from the test subjects, my body will entirely shut down for at least four minutes, but all vitals should start up again from this sort of heightened rapid hibernation period in complete working order allowing me, in a sense, to rise up from my old life like a phoenix from its ashes. Regenerated and rejuvenated, I truly will be the beast of terror to the core of my being unhindered by the past life of Jonathan Crane...

Jonathan stopped writing.

He stared hollowly out ahead of him for a long while.

His colonial-styled desk, completely bare of its varnish, was chipped and scraped of its cheap pink paint that someone had once tried to repaint it with. In the dim light, in which the paint color could not entirely be deciphered, it befit that creature sitting at it like a ghost on that very unbefitting computer swivel chair he was sitting on. The pizza party restaurant pen he was using wasn't the greatest touch either, and it was slightly maddening to be using it with its grinning, childish hamster mascot in stereo-typed cartoonish Italian attire. This was such important work, after all. In fact, one might call it his manifesto— the pinnacle of his scientific career, but his plain black pen he had been using earlier had run out of ink halfway through yesterday's log.

So childishly particular was Jonathan Crane!

As if the Scarecrow needed to have things match like in one of those silly little stories Jonathan used to cherish so much. As if fear needed a theme. As if fear needed to be decorated in classic gothic attire with those thick medieval candles dripping with wax, those thick velvet curtains that hid whispers of phantoms and ghouls and murderers alike, those headstones of mossy deprivation, those creaky wooden steps, those cobweb-covered libraries of forgot lore in which yellowed pages cracked and the smell of antique paper followed blowing a plume of dust away, those deep-chest pounding chords on an organ deep beneath the bowels of the entertainment of the witless posh and wealthy.

Fear did not have to be dressed as stereotypically as that hamster on his pen. After a fashion, all those vintage flourishes were only a comfort, a security blanket for the lonely child named Jonathan Crane. At one time he these had been accompanied by images less gothic. Mysterious islands of buried treasure, the kindly gentleman's home of the savior of a famous orphan in London, the stately curiosities on the mantelpiece of a certain home on Baker Street, the feats of a boy outwitting a tiger in steamy jungles, and the escapades of another boy finding adventure in a lazy backwater Old South town after tricking the other boys into doing his chores. Jonathan had at one time loved these images just as much as that of the vintage terror that remained with him to this day. It was part of that boy. It was part of the condolences offered to a creature too pathetic to face the world in reality— too spineless, too broken, too afraid, and... it was a distraction. A vampire worked better disguised as a proper man of his time far more than he did wearing a black and red cape of his old country. His country must be left behind, where the howl of wolves greeted him as warmly as the sweet old retriever for a common happy person's home where the sun shone brightly and blinded the vampire with pain and agony.