Catwoman: Elusive Jewel ANIMATION
Carnival of Whispered Steel
A coin, flattened by a thousand fingertips and polished to a dull, human luster, sat like evidence on the Ferris wheel’s ruined axle. It looked absurd there — a bright promise against rust — and Selina, who had never been inclined to treat absurdities as anything but opportunities, smiled in the dark.
She was known in maps and murmurs as Catwoman Selina Kyle, though tonight the name felt worn like a glove she could slip into or out of as easily as shadow. She climbed the fence of the amusement park with the same graceful impatience that had seen her through rooftops and bank safes. The place had a name once — Luna Park, Moon Hollow, something that had imagined itself good — but by the time she reached its heart an old sign sagged like a hesitant grin and the rides had become something else: teeth and memory, waiting.
The city beyond held its neon—distant, domesticated—while inside the park the light was an animal that didn’t bother to pretend it belonged to anyone. The carousel’s painted horses had been stripped of their riders and given snarls. Their eyes were coats of shadow. Music Box Alley hummed without wind; the melody was a thread of notes that unstitched itself into something like hunger.
Selina didn’t come for money. She had been hired once, long ago, to lift coins from a slot and leave better for the next gullible hand. Tonight she had come for a rumor: that the amusement park had started taking more than laughter. People spoke of missing mouths, of teeth in the ticket booths, of laughter heard from inside the funhouse when no one had entered it. She had come for curiosity — which for her was an appetite like any other — and the particular pleasure of being the least expected thing inside a place that expected everything.
She moved like a shadow that remembered how to be persuasive. Her gloves were thin, black; her boots made no sound on cracked asphalt. When the carousel’s lights flickered and came back, they did not so much illuminate as offer themselves like bait. She tilted her head. The painted horses watched. One exhaled.
“You’re a late-night patron,” a voice said, dry as sawdust and amused as an oiled hinge. It came from the direction of the ticket booths where papier-mâché faces had leaned toward each other in ancient conspiracy.
A man stood there, if he could be called a man — all linen and hat and too many buttons, a mouth that suggested secrets as if it were trying them on. He had the posture of a ringmaster who’d kept his job through charm and small cruelties. He regarded Selina as if she might be both a potential thief and an amusement.
“Late enough,” Selina said. “You run this place?”
“I tend its moods,” he said. He stepped forward only enough to outline the flash of a ring. “Names are sticky here. People who come with names bring them like labels on their coat. I prefer to see what you keep in your pockets.”
She kept her fingers light. “You could look and see for yourself.”
He laughed in a way that might have been a kindness. “Curiosity then. Bravery then. Or boredom. Boredom is heavy business.” He made a theatrical bow. “I am called Mr. Marris.” He said it like a secret that wanted to be traded. “And you are—”
“Selina,” she supplied. “Selina Kyle.”
“Selina,” he repeated, tasting the consonants as if composing a song. “You walk into my park like a cat into a room full of glass and don’t worry about the noise.”
“You did say you liked moods.” Her voice was velvet, and in it was the exact warmth a cat uses to coax a lap into agreement. “What’s the mood tonight? Appetizing? Vindictive? Confused?”
He considered. “Hungry,” he said, finally. “And not always at the same place. Sometimes the carousel takes a piece of a person and calls it art. Sometimes the tunnel eats words and spits out secrets. We are a communal organism, Selina. We work by appetite.”
“So you feed it,” she said.
“We feed it,” he corrected. “We are both feeders and fed. Everything here pays for its existence.”
Selina’s lips curved. “Is there a price list?”
“Only taboos.” He gestured, and the park seemed to lean in. “Ask the carousel. Ask the Hall of Mirrors. Ask the one that used to be the clown. But be polite. The rides are temperamental.”
“Which is to say they’ll bite?” she asked.
“They’ll bite,” he agreed. “And they will feel quite justified.”
Selina’s laugh was a small, bright thi
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