Layers of Fear (Part 2)

Above Gotham City, the cold wind howled, but faster than the wind was Bruce, fleeing for his life through the black rainy night.

A deformed monster chased him from behind. Its limbs were impossibly long, making it resemble a spider. More importantly, it had Alfred’s face, and one of its arms held a cup of hot milk.

Alfred’s voice came with the unceasing screams behind him, strange and shrill. "Master, you have to drink your milk before you sleep. Have you forgotten?!!"

"You’re not a good child!!" Alfred’s face grew increasingly distorted. He waved his several-meter-long limbs and crawled across the ground like some enormous arthropod. His head spun one hundred and eighty degrees as he kept shouting, "Good children must finish their milk before they sleep!!!"

As Bruce ran forward, he recalled what had happened several minutes earlier.

After finding the globe and the note, he had been attacked by the Joker beneath the bed again, then sat bolt upright in bed once more.

Without question, he had more clues now. A globe? Bruce wondered. What could a spinning globe represent?

But the thing under the bed was extremely difficult to deal with. No matter what angle Bruce used to reach for the globe, its dagger struck him, and he woke up again.

Unable to make progress there, Bruce could only leave the room once more and explore the hallway and other rooms. Yet just like the traps in the bedroom, he was killed by the Jokers in the other rooms again and again.

Soon, Bruce stopped in the middle of the hallway and looked back at his bedroom door.

Every time he woke up, he opened the bedroom door from inside, was killed by the Joker outside, returned to the bed, and opened the door from inside again.

But he had never stood in the hallway and opened the bedroom door from the outside.

Standing in the pitch-black hallway, Bruce gripped the bedroom doorknob and thought for a long time. Then he deduced the rule of this place—he had to Face Fear.

In the bedroom, his greatest fear had been that story he had heard as a child. Perhaps he had believed he had long forgotten it all, but clearly, he had not forgotten it in Dream. That fear had been carved into a deeper layer of his consciousness, only now unearthed to become a mountain obstructing his search for The Truth.

And in the hallway, perhaps what he feared most was opening his own bedroom door. He knew it did not merely mean the end of one desperate day; it also meant the next desperate day was about to begin.

Bruce recalled that, for a very long time, he had been deeply afraid of returning to his room to sleep. Whenever he pushed open his bedroom door to rest, a powerful sense of guilt and blame filled him, because he felt there were more important things waiting for him than sleep.

And now, as he gripped the bedroom doorknob again, that familiar feeling washed over him once more, just like the fear he had felt when looking beneath the bed.

But he still pushed the door open directly, and on the other side was the second floor of Wayne Manor.

The moment he stepped onto the second floor, the door behind him vanished. But Bruce knew something even more terrifying would happen next, because the second floor had more rooms than the third. More importantly, this was where Alfred rested.

As he entered the second-floor hallway, he encountered Alfred carrying a tray with a cup of hot milk on it. Alfred looked at Bruce and asked with concern, "Master, did you have another nightmare? Have some milk."

Bruce did not move. Then, all at once, the cup of milk turned into a ridiculous bomb and exploded with a bang. Alfred was blown to pieces, and Bruce jolted awake in bed again.

The second time, he tried to pick up the cup of milk, but it still turned into a bomb, blew him up, and forced him to start over.

"Face Fear…" Bruce muttered.

What was he afraid of? Alfred? Or did he not dare face Alfred’s concern?

He woke up again and again. No matter how Bruce tried to pick up the milk, no matter what he said, he always woke up in the end.

But soon, Bruce’s thoughts became clear. When he faced Alfred again, he said, "Thank you, Alfred, but could you take the milk to my room?"

This time, the milk did not explode. Neither Alfred nor Bruce was blown up. Alfred merely smiled, nodded, and said, "Of course, Master."

Bruce was now on the second floor, and he had instructed Alfred to take the milk to his bedroom on the third floor. Therefore, he had to return to the third floor, but there were no stairs here for him to use.

The quickest way was to wake up again and appear on the bed in the third-floor bedroom. But Bruce discovered in surprise that the entire second floor was too normal. There was no terrifying Joker with a dagger, no collapsing staircase.

Bruce realized he could not enter the next loop.

When you realize you are dreaming and want to wake up, what do you do?

Most people would choose to jump from a building. The sensation of falling would quickly jolt them awake. But there was another way: inflict enough pain, or rather, commit suicide.

"Face Fear…" Bruce repeated the words again. Then he thought that no human being could avoid the fear of death. Suicide should therefore be the best way to Face Fear.

He found a screwdriver in one of the rooms. Its point was sharp enough to pierce his heart. But when he held it against his chest, Bruce realized that besides death, another fear surrounded him, making his hand tremble uncontrollably.

What if this was not a dream?

What if he had been deceived?

What if this entire sequence—waking from his bed, leaving the bedroom, coming to the second floor, meeting Alfred, and asking him to take the milk upstairs—had all happened in reality?

What if, after the screwdriver pierced his heart, he did not wake up, but instead collapsed to the floor in agony and could only wait hopelessly for death to arrive?

That would be the greatest joke of the century.

Bruce had no doubt that some lunatic would set layer upon layer of traps just to create that joke, guiding him until he willingly plunged a sharp tool into his own heart and embraced death.

Bruce suddenly realized that he understood every madman in the world. Whether they laughed wildly, screamed, harmed themselves, or attacked others, perhaps they were just like Bruce now.

Perhaps they attacked themselves only to break free from some terrible nightmare. Perhaps when they attacked others, they were attacking some monster within that nightmare.

Just as, if an observer watched everything Bruce had done during this period, anyone would think he was insane.

He had leaped around his bedroom, flipped up the mattress, moved the desk, repeatedly entered the washroom, continuously twisted the doorknob, and examined every object in the room without pause, like someone with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder endlessly repeating compulsive behaviors.

To an observer, he had an inexplicable fear of the stairs. He would rather jump down from the atrium than set foot on them. He crawled on the floor and under the bed, then spent a long time thinking after taking out an utterly ordinary globe.

He stood blankly before his door without pushing it open. Faced with the butler bringing him milk, he suddenly wore an expression of grief and terror. He held the cup of milk as though it were a bomb, then swung his arm and threw it away…

At the instant the screwdriver pressed against Bruce’s chest, he suddenly understood the Joker.

The Joker laughed endlessly, and others called him a madman. But perhaps he had merely seen a funny joke in his hallucinations. In his own Dream, the choices he made were perfectly normal.

Every madman was a normal person in his own world.

Just as Bruce’s hand around the screwdriver slowly tightened and drew a wound across his chest, he suddenly heard a shrill scream. Then a monster with Alfred’s face appeared behind him, twisting its head as it shouted, "Master! Why aren’t you in your room?!"

"You ran all the way here just to avoid drinking milk! Come back with me! You can’t sleep until you’ve finished your milk!!"

No matter what, seeing his butler turn into a long-limbed arthropod with a constantly rotating head was rather shocking even for Bruce. His first reaction was to evade the attack.

He rolled to the right, then seized the moment Alfred turned around and fled.

There were no stairs anywhere on the second floor, but the instant Bruce rushed into the hallway, the window at the end burst open with a bang. Cold wind rushed in, and Bruce had no other choice.

When he jumped from the window, he had expected the weightlessness and dizziness to wake him again. But it did not happen. He crashed solidly onto the ground, intense pain shooting through his back and shoulders.

The pain was far too real, making Bruce begin to doubt whether he had truly returned to reality. But clearly, that monster defying all common sense reminded him that this was still a Dream.

The rain grew heavier, and the monster’s howls behind him became increasingly shrill. Everything seemed to descend into greater chaos, as though it had suddenly changed from a puzzle game into a horror game—one with an extreme chase sequence.

Bruce quickened his pace because he was not sure whether, if that monster truly caught him, he would have another chance to wake up.

Bruce knew the roads outside Wayne Manor extremely well, because he had walked them countless times. But now, he found that the area around his home seemed to have become an endless maze.

The monster kept chasing, and Bruce kept running. Like those common nightmares of being pursued, the longer it went on, the more his mind and strength were drained.

What was the rule? Bruce wondered. Face Fear?

Fear…

Suddenly, he stopped at a familiar intersection, one he had passed several times but ignored.

It was an intersection he knew extremely well. He knew exactly how many chunks of rubble lay there and how many wires ran through it, because a single gunshot there had changed his life.