is kneeling in the corner on his padded knees, scooping sand up in his thick-gloved hands and depositing it in a little jar emblazoned with the Bat Symbol at his side. The wall is cracking open. It's a beautiful, perfect, textbook illustration crack, a jag through the plaster, wide above the baseboard but narrowing into a little hairline fracture as it travels upward and drifts to the left. At the bottom, where Batman's cupped hands are, sparkling brown-white sand is just cascading out, which doesn't make any sense, it's not like we're at the beach or anything, there's no sand anywhere near us, but here it comes pouring in from the wall. I wonder if it's some kind of insulation. "The Joker is behind this," Batman says to me, looking up briefly so I can see where he missed getting the black around his eyes. "The Joker is behind all of this, and once the wall is empty, I can find the clue to stopping the crime in Gotham. The Joker hid the clue in the wall." The sand clings in a fine layer to the fingers of his gloves, even as he upends his cupped palms over the jar. There are little roots in the sand now, I see, and I have this funny mental image of a desert and palm trees in the attic, spinning around and sinking down through the floorboards like a cartoon character down the drain after the bath stopper gets pulled. Batman is still scooping up the sand and putting it in the jar, making little Batman grunts as he does so, like he's afraid that if he doesn't add the growl to his voice I'll forget who he is.