October 2nd
The Nexus hums. A sterile, white womb for realities that should have been stillborn. Morales summoned me. Young, burdened by a crown he never asked for. He thinks he understands the pressure. He doesn't. Pressure is for things that can be compressed.
He stood beside a portal, the air before it shimmering like heat off a corpse-paved street. "Rorschach," he said, the words heavy with manufactured authority. "There's tension. The team… they need a break from it. You need a break."
I looked at my gloved hands. No tremors. No fatigue. "Don't need breaks. Breaks are for things that can bend."
From the shimmering portal, a shape emerged. Short. Pink. An anatomical impossibility wearing a spider-suit. It was the pig. Spider-Ham. He trotted forward, hands on his hips, a cartoon grin plastered on his face.
"So," the pig squeaked, his voice a high-pitched assault on the senses. "I hear I'm babysitting the strong, silent type again. Don't worry, pal, I'll have you loosened up in no time!" He winked, an audible plink sound accompanying the gesture. "Yeesh. You're like Batman if he was allergic to fun and showering."
I didn't answer. The shapeless ink on my mask shifted with my breath. The multiverse, in its infinite jest, had paired a black-and-white photograph with a Saturday morning cartoon. The punchline, I suspected, would be grim.
The mission was reconnaissance. Minor "web shivers" on Earth-8311. The pig's world. Stepping through the portal was like being punched in the eyes by a rainbow. The sky was an impossible, screaming cyan. Buildings made of gingerbread and licorice grinned with window-pane teeth. A fire hydrant tipped its hat as we passed. The sun, a perfect yellow circle wearing sunglasses, winked down at us.
To me, it was hell in Technicolor.
I pulled out my journal and a small, stubby pencil. The book felt heavy, its pages whispering with a static only I could hear. "Surreal landscape," I muttered into my audio recorder, my voice a gravelly intrusion on the chirping birds. "Laws of cause and effect… suspended. Nightmare wrapped in whimsy."
The pig, walking with a jaunty bounce that defied gravity, slapped my back. The impact was comically light, accompanied by a thwack sound effect that seemed to hang in the air. "You say that like it's a bad thing," he chuckled.
I looked at him. At this world of laughing lampposts and pun-laden street signs. 'Acme Anvils: We Get Dropped Off Everywhere!' 'The Daily Beagle: All the Mews That's Fit to Print.' I felt like a stain. A patch of mold on a pristine, painted canvas. Good. Stains are honest. They show where the rot is.
The shivers led us to the outskirts of Toontown, to a derelict structure shaped like a giant rubber chicken. 'The Guffaw & Gag Prop Factory,' a faded sign read. 'Where the Jokes Come to Life!'
Inside, the light was dim. Dust motes danced in beams of light, but they moved with a strange, unnatural rhythm. The shadows were the worst part. They stretched and snapped back into place, jerky and inconsistent, as if drawn by two different artists with a grudge.
"Spooky joint, huh?" Ham whispered, his usual bravado faltering. He tried to whistle a tune, but the sound died in his throat. My attention was elsewhere. Along the base of the walls, dark stains marred the colorful paint. They looked like oil, but thicker. I knelt, my trench coat pooling around me.
I dipped a gloved finger into the substance. It clung to the fabric, and for a split second, I felt it move. A cold, familiar throb that echoed the whispers in my journal.
"Ink," I rasped, holding my finger up. "Identical to journal residue. Could be bleed-over from the Web's infection. Same material."
"Buddy, that's just bad animation," Ham said, trying to force a joke.
But his eyes were wide. A beat of silence passed. Then, the wall beside us seemed to twitch, the cartoon bricks rippling like disturbed water. Ham stopped smiling.
We found it in the main assembly room, huddled amidst a pile of discarded whoopee cushions and joy buzzers. It looked like a cartoon hound, the kind with long, floppy ears and a dopey smile. But only half of it. The other half was a churning mass of black ink, flickering between its original form and a monstrous, threaded parody. Its eyes, once friendly white ovals, were now empty sockets filled with a nest of writhing black lines.
My grapple gun was in my hand before I'd consciously drawn it. The mechanism clicked, a sound of grim finality. This was not a citizen. This was a tumor. The protocol was simple: excise it before it metastasized.
"Whoa, whoa, hold on!" Ham yelped, putting a four-fingered hand on my arm. "That's Barnaby! He delivers the paper! He's still one of us!"
I looked from the pig's desperate face to the twitching thing on the floor. It was a lie. A comforting, damning lie. "He's meat in denial," I said, my voice cold and flat. "Infection never stops at one frame."
As if on cue, the creature's head snapped up. Its mouth, a grotesque smear of ink and cartoon lines, opened. A voice, thin and reedy like a child's, echoed in the cavernous room—the same voice that whispered from my journal in the dead of night.
"Did you see the face, Walter? Did you see the face on the pretty patterns?"
My finger tightened. Ham's protest was a distant noise. I pulled the trigger. The dart-gun fired with a sharp thwip. The creature didn't scream. It simply collapsed, its form dissolving into a puddle of viscous black ink that seeped through the cracks in the cartoon floorboards, gone.
The silence that followed was heavier than any anvil this factory ever produced. Ham stared at the spot where the hound had been, his shoulders slumped. When he turned to me, his face was a mask of fury.
"You didn't even try to save him!" he shouted, his voice cracking.
"Wasn't a 'him' anymore," I replied, reloading the gun. A necessary action. Always be prepared.
"That's not your call to make!" he jabbed a finger at my chest. "You sound like every villain who ever thought they were the only one who saw the truth!"
I didn't argue. Arguing was a luxury. A pointless expenditure of energy better used for observation. I turned away from him, opened my journal, and wrote. The pencil scratched against the page.
Mercy is delay. Delay is death.
When I looked up, Ham was staring at me. The anger had faded, replaced by something colder, something that looked unnervingly like pity. His usual humor was gone, and in its absence, the silence felt vast and crushing.
We walked out of the factory into the oppressively cheerful sunlight. I took three steps before Ham spoke, his voice quiet.
"Uh… Rorschach?"
I stopped.
"You're leaking, man."
I looked down. My footprints, which should have been dusty outlines on the colorful cobblestones, were stark black smudges. Not dirt. Ink. Wet and glistening. With every step I took, a faint residue of the infection I carried bled into this world's fragile reality.
Wordlessly, I scraped the soles of my boots against the ground. More ink seeped from the leather. It didn't stop. I was a carrier. A walking contagion.
We found a bench overlooking a seltzer river that bubbled with real fizz. The pig sat down with a sigh that seemed too heavy for his small body. He produced a sandwich from a pocket that shouldn't have been there. It was, of course, a perfect, glistening ham sandwich. He offered me half.
"No."
"You gotta eat," he insisted, his voice gentle now. "Even grimdark avengers need fuel."
Practicality won. I accepted the offering. We ate in silence for a few moments, the only sound the glug-glug of the river.
"You know," Ham said, staring at the water, "the jokes… they're like armor. A weapon. You get 'em laughing, and for a second, they can't scream. You keep the noise going so you don't have to hear the silence." He took a bite of his sandwich. "It gets real loud, the silence."
I chewed the cartoon food. It tasted like… food. Simple. Uncomplicated. "Different tools," I said, the words surprising even myself. "Same job."
Ham looked at me, a flicker of genuine curiosity in his big, cartoon eyes. "And what's your job?"
The answer came from a place deeper than thought. A place of cold alleys and whispered conspiracies. "To keep the silence from winning."
For the first time since we'd met, I felt the pig wasn't looking at a monster. He was looking at the shape of a man inside a cage of his own making. He saw the loneliness behind the mask.
A low tremor shook the world. It wasn't the ground; it was the sky. The very fabric of the air vibrated. Above us, the invisible threads of the Great Web shuddered violently. Ham clutched his head.
"A tear," he grunted. "A small one, but… that signature. It's the Weaver's Child."
I pulled out my camera, a battered, analog model. The order from Morales came through our communicators, his voice tinny and urgent. Return immediately. Do not engage. I repeat, do not engage.
I ignored it, focusing the lens on the distortion in the sky. It was a dark, rippling patch against the blue, like a drop of ink in water. "Orders delay inevitability," I muttered. "Delay is death."
I pressed the shutter. Click. The image, when it developed, would show what I already knew. The distortion wasn't just a random tear. It was shaped like an eye. The same eye that stared back at me from the pages of my journal.
Back in the Nexus, the debrief was tense. I handed the data canister and the photograph to Morales without a word. Gwen Stacy, her arms crossed, glared at me from across the room.
"So, the mission was a success?" she asked, her voice laced with ice. "The murderer and his little ink trail took care of business?"
"He did what he had to," Ham said, stepping forward. I didn't turn to look at him. "He saved lives."
"By killing one of us?" Gwen shot back.
"By not letting it spread," Ham countered, his voice firm. He understood now. Understood the brutal calculus of survival.
The argument faded into murmurs and hostile glares. A crack had formed in their little band of heroes. I was the wedge. As it should be. Trust is a weakness.
Alone in my assigned quarters—a gray, featureless box—I sat at a metal desk. I opened the journal. The pages were still, the usual whispers muted to a low hum. I picked up my pencil.
October 2nd. Addendum.
Cartoon sees truth. Masks laughter with courage. Braver than most.
I paused, the pencil hovering over the paper. My hand, of its own volition, added another line.
Journal whispers less when he's near.
I stared at the page. The ink of my own writing was stark and final. It didn't move. It didn't writhe. It was just… words.
I closed the journal, the sound of the cover thudding shut echoing in the small room.
"Even infection fears ridicule," I muttered to the empty air.
The camera of my mind pans back from the desk, from the still, silent journal. The lights in the sterile room dim, plunging the scene into shadow.
And then, faintly, an echo. Not the whispers of the Weaver's Child. Not the hum of the Nexus.
It's the sound of a cheerful, squeaky laugh, replayed from memory. A small, defiant noise against an overwhelming silence.