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“Have you heard the stories?” asked the boy in an agitated, excited whisper. “Like the one about the sewer crocodile monster? Or the man made out of clay?”
The boy was huddled in a stained and patchy coat, sitting across from the quiet traveller on a wooden pallet chipped and splintered in the corners. The dirt ground was icy and hard, and an orange light danced across his face. He said, shivering in the dusty, fumy air, “You’ve come to a beast of a city, my man.”
The traveller looked across the trash can fire and into the boy’s eyes. They were dark and full of fear and wonder. The little homeless hub was located in a junkyard, between piles and piles of old, rusty cars and discarded refrigerators. The homeless folks had put down threadbare tarps and blankets, made tents out of salvaged clothing and steel struts, where they sat in a circle around the burning trash can, stealing any warmth they could get. It was late autumn, nearly winter, and the first snow of the season was already falling. A day ago, the people of Gotham had woken up to tiny flakes of gray snow drifting from the sky, though they’d never piled into drifts. Hypodermic needles littered the rutted ground. Sometimes, bodies were found inside misshapen trunks and old, abandoned coolers, but no one talked about those. The residents whispered only conspiracies and shared knowledge. The yard was a dumping ground for the city’s gangs and crime kingpins.
The traveller looked down at his shoes again. They used to be expensive leather dress shoes, maybe, but they had been worn. The toe cap had fallen off, and there was a hole near the tip. The follower could see his own socked toe peeking out. He’d been asked once if he needed a place to stay, though no one had inquired about where he’d come from, or how he’d come to be in his situation. It didn’t matter to them. Everyone in this city had a story to tell and demons to shun. His was a perfectly normal one. Everyone was busy surviving; no one gave a shit about what troubled others.
The traveller told the boy that he hadn’t heard those stories. He wanted to hear them, as there was a lot of time to kill, and this city greatly intrigued him.
The boy’s eyes began shining.
Eager, he started to tell.
You’ll encounter many unexplainable things here. Many horrors. If you aren’t careful, too curious, or simply lose your way, you can easily wander into the den of monsters. You see, this is a cursed city.
If you simply look at Gotham, you might already feel the darkness rippling underneath her skin. The way she sleeps in the day and awakes in the night; the way her gargoyles and flying buttresses seem to dance and snarl in the searchlights and police strobes. How much she attracts the dark that shrinks away from her streets and courts during daylight, filtering through her smog and streaking between her jagged fangs of skyscrapers. Gotham, with her crooked skyline and a million decaying lights pouring their colors into acid puddles, police sirens singing their screeching songs, has a propensity for stories. But can you say they aren’t true? I have witnessed some with my own eyes, even. Like the green lady of the vines, or the man made of clay.
In this city, you can find a medley of beasts, a primordial soup of the most base evils. From killers that stalk the night with tally marks carved into their skin, to clowns born out of crime. People in Park Row still talk about the Night of Horrors, in which monsters walked the streets and a man made of straw patrolled the streets on the back of an undead warhorse.
My cousin had once been inside the sewers and seen the man-crocodile: it was at least eleven feet tall and covered in scales. Its roars made the sewers quake, and its tail alone can kill five men in one powerful sweep. Can you imagine such a thing? A man-crocodile, its armor shining puke-green when you shine your flashlight on it, its maw opening in a flurry of spittle and nauseating smell of rot. Stalking the tunnels beneath our feet.
Or, here’s a nursery rhyme about a secret society of owls for you: Beware the Court of Owls, thus sings the poem—
—that watches all the time,
ruling Gotham from a shadowy perch,
behind granite and lime.
They watch you at your hearth,
they watch you in your bed…
Owls! A secret court in this city, ruling her from the shadows! Do I believe such a thing? I will let you in on something: everyone does, to an extent, but no one admits it. No one talks about it in the open. It’s one of those urban legends that are trusted as facts. It’s a nursery rhyme to warn your children of real monsters. I heard the Court was made up of immortal founders of Gotham who survived on the flesh and blood of her inhabitants for generations—old, undead things who had been walking among us for centuries. What do they look like now? People, just like us? Or are they rotting corpses, vampiric monsters with ashy skin and needle-like teeth? Reptilian creatures that would shed their human membrane to sport scales? Who would know anyhow? If they really wear masks of owls, how can you tell them apart from the rest of us?
But let’s not talk about that, as I fear the Court, just as everyone else here does—(here, the boy’s voice quivered and dropped into a whisper)—we only dare to talk about the Owls in poems, because even telling their stories can attract their attention. You’ll have to be a little superstitious to live in this city. For, as the last lines of the rhyme say, speak not a whispered word of them, or they’ll send the Talon for your head.
But the most intriguing story, the one most commonly used to scare children into behaving, is the story of the bat-man.
Do you know this entity? You must’ve arrived on a peaceful week. On a bad night, you can easily look up and see the beacon in the sky. It’s usually this bright yellow circle printed in the clouds, which are always thick and low-hanging in Gotham. The circle has within it the shape of a bat, and on moonless nights (which are most nights in Gotham) it is Gotham’s moon. That’s the bat-man’s summoning song, as fruit flies are to a bat, or the pollen is to the bees.
The bat-song always heralds trouble, for unlike the other monsters, the bat-man is a protector of the city, and the only time he shows himself is when the city is in trouble.
Everyone knows about the bat-man, but no one knows for sure who or what he is. He dissolves from the shadows and dissolves back into it. Somewhere out there, there must be a lair of some kind—an ancient subterranean city, or an eyrie on the tallest skyscraper… Who the fuck knows?
All you have to know is that there are two versions of his story.
The first version is supernatural. It tells of an inhuman origin of the bat; that the man is not really a man at all, but some creature born into this city at the time the city was formed.
His very soul was formed by the Mother City; he was born from her and had nourished from her milk, and in her he’s stayed for three-hundred-and-ninety years, protecting her and protecting the closest thing he knows for a roost.
Or, perhaps he was born earlier than that; perhaps he existed before the city’s birth, before the Europeans alighted in the New World. Before the one single continent cracked and formed into the lands we know now.
He’s a primordial creature, or so it says in the first version of the story—an abomination, an eldritch monstrosity with a tenuous connection to Gotham’s humanity… Before she’d made her summons, he was only an egg, a fetal form that existed between being and non-being, until Gotham—her people, her culture, her soul—settled in the land and woke him up with the bustling. She was what had breathed life into his mouth.
Then the ground cracked, the bat-man rising from the fissure, already in his adult form, already tall and terrible. He was awakened, and in his heart, he knew from day one that it was his purpose to protect his city.
That he has done for nearly four centuries, though some say he comes out for periods of hyperactivity between periods of hibernation. He will sleep when the wind is calm and the streets are clean. But when crime erupts… when the rust of darkness begins to sweep its tongue over his city… he emerges from his long slumber, hungry for blood.
You do not want to be caught by bat-man while doing harm to Gotham, not during his active periods.
But there’s another version of the story. Another bat-man who is also hungry for blood, but who is a lot more like you and me.
The second version of the story tells of the bat-creature as a human—a once-human—who, by means of misfortune and divine intervention, had transformed into the creature he is today.
You see, the bat-creature was once a boy.
I cannot tell you when this happened. It’s a story that’s been passed from mouth to mouth for so many generations that all peculiar details have been eroded away.
So, let’s go with the timeless phrase that every child and adult in the world is familiar with: Once Upon a Time.
Once upon a time, in Gotham, or in where it used to be Gotham, there was a boy.
The boy wasn’t extraordinary; he was born like any other kid from his generation. He might have been poor; he might have been rich. He might have been from one of those families that had enough to feed themselves but not much left beyond basic comforts.
The point is that the boy wasn’t special in the metahuman or alien-from-another-world sort of way. He couldn’t fly, or lift buildings, or hear others’ thoughts. Not at the time, at least. But everyone says that the boy had parents who loved him, and before their demise, he’d lived a sheltered childhood without worries. Without evil.
It’s all hearsay now, with the truth lost to time and the murk this city has coughed up. Whoever the boy used to be, it matters no more. The point is, he isn’t that boy anymore; he’s changed since then, and he is no longer the innocent he once was. Gotham has shaped him into a vessel for herself, a cocoon attached to her hive. They’re one and the same and cannot live without the other.
The boy met a monster. Of course, there was a monster—there always will be one. It’s the evils that exist that change people into other entities. Don’t ask me who the monster was or what he looked like. I know no more about that than I know how and why the boy was orphaned by the said monster. I only relate what I hear being talked about.
The boy was with his parents. I don’t know what they were doing at the time—possibly busy returning home after a carnival, taking the shortest way they knew through the concrete-and-rebar maze of the city’s bowels. Gotham changes by the day. You won’t ever see her the same. And so every night you have to learn her ways all over again as if she’s yet another stranger you have to learn to woo. So this family, they were as familiar with Gotham as one could be, and they were as good as lost.
It was nighttime—had to be; I think. Bad things always happen during nights in Gotham. This is the time when she is most awake. And all her villains.
Unbeknownst to the boy, the happy life he’d known was about to end. Traveller—in Gotham, monsters are of a special breed. I don’t know if this particular monster flew, if he had gigantic claws, or if he was ugly and sported needles for teeth. I don’t know if he flew from the sky or dug his way out of the ground. But he descended upon the family.
The monster killed the boy’s parents—first the mother, whose bright jewels caught his eye. The father, who jumped in front of the boy to protect him, was in turn torn to shreds.
It all happened in an instant. Before the bodies fell to the floor, the boy was already covered in blood. And even as the monster was eating his parents’ carcasses right in front of him, it took the boy a long time to realize what had happened.
When it finally dawned on him, he looked up and saw that they were in the central walk in Robinson Park, except that at the time it wasn’t called that. Still, even then, the park was the center of Gotham and opened to the city court, or whatever passed for a court at the time. There was a bronze statue of the goddess there—the goddess Gotham, with her eyes blindfolded. In one hand, she held a scale; in the other, a sword.
For some reason, the monster did not kill the boy that night. He left the parents in pieces and their son crying over them as he disappeared into the night.
So, the nightmare was over, right? The boy thought, prayed so. But when he had finally crawled his way back home, when the sun was starting to sneak up the horizon, he realized that the monster had been there.
The monster had found the boy’s house and killed everyone there, too. That home was filled with death. Brothers, sisters, servants, all gone. The monster had murdered them all and had left the boy not only an orphan but all alone in the world. All this time, he’d been waiting for the boy in his own deserted home. His eyes shone red when the boy found him perched in the study, where he’d made a nest out of ruined furniture—cracked bookcases and tables and grandfather clocks.
The monster stood before the boy and said, “I will not kill you.”
As the monster spoke, his shadow stretched over the boy, his voice a hum from another world. He was terror incarnate.
He said, “I am Gotham’s messenger. I am here to deliver you to her.”
The monster only spoke this before grabbing the boy and ripping out his throat.
Can you picture it? What that was like? Watching your family die in one night, then fall victim to the same beast that had taken them? How horrifying would that be, to have your throat ripped open, your body left in the study, where your blood drenched the carpet? You say nothing. I can see you’re shocked, but it’s just a story here, though a lot of us believe it to be true.
It’d been a mercy if the boy had died that night. But he was still alive.
The monster dove off into the night. He’d fled, leaving devastation in his wake, and the body of his last victim, who was still gurgling breath—dead, but grabbing onto life. The boy did not die. As the monster had promised, the boy had only been reborn into a second life.
As he lay there, struggling to breathe, wings drew out of the boy’s back. Bat wings.
What robs away innocence? The dying of one’s physical body, or the shrivelling of the emotional self? The boy’s transformations reflected the transformation of his mind—the leathery skin was the sack that replaced his flesh of life; his freshly glowing eyes were the bulbs that grew in the absence of humanity; his sharp-tipped ears gave his hearing so precise he would detect the smallest stir, so that he knew everywhere when injustice happened. And the wings—those black, monstrous wings—gave the reincarnated boy the sail to descend upon the evildoers, to deliver his patron’s justice.
The monster stole the boy’s life, and the boy was delivered into Gotham’s embrace. That night, he was transformed into an avatar of Gotham herself. The bat-man.
As the avatar of Gotham, the bat-man does not think of revenge. He thinks instead of his city, the family he lost, the family he yearns for. All must be found in Gotham. He perches on buildings, along the gargoyles; he roams the streets, carried by monster wings.
What does he drink to survive? The blood of sinners. He sleeps in the crypts underneath this city and walks during the night. Unlike the previous incarnation, he does not hibernate. He does not rest. He really is Gotham’s vengeance.
Only a small part of the bat-man is still human. He remembers these things, but since his transformation, everything he’s done has really just been an animalistic instinct. Gotham must be cleaned of her crimes, he knows, and so all his actions are for that one, singular, brainless purpose. To clean her, to build his brood for this purpose, to raise new families. The boy had been reborn, not as a man, but as a symbol.
And so, traveller, that’s the human story of the bat-man.
You cannot miss him if you see him, for he has wings and flies over alleys and skyscrapers. You do not want to be caught dealing or murdering. He has eyes that glow—eyes everywhere—and he punishes those who poison his city.
The bat-man is both her protector and her demon.
The fire crackled as the boy finished his story.
It was close to midnight. In the distance, police sirens blared, and a resounding screeching of wheels. A copter quaked the ground as it roared overhead, spearing twin columns of searchlight through the streets. Traffic went on as usual.
Their fire was getting dim. The boy fed newspapers and flattened cardboard boxes into the garbage can, and then stirred it with a long, broken-off bumper. Fire crackled and burped brilliantly, a swelling orange glow in the dim junkyard.
After their tale, the traveller was silent. He sat and stared into the fire, and the boy stole a look, studying the traveller’s blue eyes and run-down attire, wearing what had once been a luxury shirt. He wondered how much the shirt had cost when it’d been purchased. The man was wearing a winter hat that looked incongruous with the rest of his torn-up, dirty outfit.
In the background, Gotham moaned and bustled with life.
Abruptly, the traveller rose, bringing up a breeze of air that made the fire flutter. The boy’s eyes followed him, wide with surprise, the dumpster flames reflected in his dark irises.
“Not staying? The fire is warm.”
“I have duties to attend to.”
As the boy went back to feed the fire, poking at it, shaking his head, and mumbling something about hopeless tourists, the traveller turned around and stalked out of the junkyard.
Outside the crooked wire fence was a parking lot, now occupied only by an old pickup truck with a rusted hood. It’d been parked here for so long that all four of its wheels were gone. The copter made a lap around this part of the city and came back around, throwing a wash of light over the truck, the yard, and the old brick building in the distance with its crumbling fire escape. He heard the boy curse out loud behind him, and someone else laughed.
He rounded a corner and was in a deserted alleyway. The noises became distant, but it was only here that the sound of the true Gotham became near. Her veins pumped beneath the paved road, through the side walls of the buildings rising on both sides. Her neurons tingled and singed with every step taken on top of her flesh, every brush of a finger over her exposed skin.
The traveller shook, letting out a sound that was nasal from his excess tears. He was silent for a moment, but then he looked up, blue eyes fixing on the bright circle lighting up the clouds. The center of the circle boasted the symbol of a bat.
A black tarp hid the motorcycle behind the dumpster, slick and advanced, unlike anything seen roaming the street. He pulled out the black-as-night pile from its pad and began unbuttoning his jacket and shirt.
Sniffling back the fluid gathered in his nose, he coughed to clear his throat. When he straightened, that lost traveller was gone, and left in his place was someone regal, severe, and primeval. He tugged off his hat, revealing his black hair.
And then he pulled on his cowl.