There was no response over the communicator, whether because of Mad Hatter's jammer or something else.
But Batman could no longer return to the entrance.
He raised his head. Beyond the dense fog lay utter darkness, with neither sky nor ground in sight.
In the dimness, countless crumbling Gotham Gothic buildings, broken iron bridges, twisted streetlamps, and overturned carriages piled together into a three-dimensional cage. The walls were blackened brick and stone, their cracks embedded with shattered pocket watches and teacups. Every watch face had stopped at six, the glass webbed with cracks like countless blinded eyes.
The paths widened and narrowed without warning. An alley wide enough to walk abreast one moment became so narrow the next that he had to squeeze through sideways. The masonry creaked shut behind him, and when he looked back, the way he had come was already a cold, solid wall.
Batman's reason told him everything before him was merely Mad Hatter's trickery. Visual misdirection and mechanisms created the illusions, combined with the toxic mist's hallucinogenic effects to produce these fantastical sights.
Yet everything before him seemed so real.
Mad Hatter's murmurs drifted through the dense fog:
[Lost? Never mind. We have all eternity to find our way.]
Broken staircases would suddenly appear around corners, leading upward straight into the fog or plunging downward into bottomless darkness. Rusted chains wound around the railings, copper bells dangling from their ends. When the wind blew, they rasped like the coughs of the dying. When he tried to climb a wall, the masonry clung to his hands like slime, and countless tiny, bloody scratch marks appeared across its surface.
Absurd scenery that should only have existed in fairy tales had been forcibly recreated in this gloomy underground space. Every shift of light and shadow, every strange sound,