Out of the Belfry, into the Fire

Scurrying Rats

The darkness of mid-December had fallen.

Pamela Isley looked intently up at the falling snow through the high window of her miserable cell. She sat completely still except for her eyes as they lingered occasionally on a flake, watching it disappear behind the windowsill. It was the time of year she always had felt herself begin to hibernate. She had never been a winter person, but each passing winter seemed to grip her deeper with the feeling drabness and weariness than the last winter just as each summer invigorated her more with each passing year as though the sun itself gave her strength more than food or water.

Snow would bury her until spring in the bowels of Arkham if she remained, and she would come up fiercer than the year before like the toughest-rooted network of dandelions with a vengeance. Her vines would constrict, her thorns pierce, her veins boil green with resolve, and nothing would stop her.

Isley stared. Still unmoved, she watched the snow continue to fall.

Slowly, after a moment, she reached out a hand to stroke her potted plant like one might stroke the breast of a delicate bird or the fingers of an infant. The perpetual light, dim though it was, was a sickly light in her cell so that she was never completely in blackness. It used to bother her, but it did not anymore. She barely noticed anymore.

She stared the harder out the window as though with the purpose of throwing fire from her emerald eyes out at the snow to melt it for a premature spring and light up the winter night like the goddess of new birth.

Yes, winter was a natural force that helped make the beautiful array of one of earth's gardens so unique from another. From the tropical yield of the Amazon with its glorious green giants and fiercely bold blossoms dressed in orange and crimson where no snow fell at all, to the delicate simplicity of the moss and lichen of the north where winter was longer than summer, nature had no room for monotony. The sweetness of the deadly holly, like everyone kept reminding others about this time of year, was the symbol of the resilience of even the more leafy of green, and the majesty of pines ever-growing on Mount Gotham were a thing to behold, but as a weak and flawed human herself in her physical form, perhaps Isley was only losing the heat of the body that kept a person warm through adolescence. Perhaps the prime of life had reached full-blossom only to begin the slow decline of decay. Perhaps behind her resilient beauty, her blood was already becoming cold.

Perhaps... but Isley did have other theories less common to other people. Chemicals, no matter what their natural source, often had effects on the body that one did not originally plan. It was the way of any human tampering with nature. Isley would accept whatever came as a consequence for her chosen path of life. If it made her a martyr for her cause, so be it!

Isley closed her eyes thoughtfully—proudly, as she gently touched a leaf of her potted plant again.

Then, as though that touch had the power of a switch, there was a strange electronic sound— a deep boom in the skeletal walls of the asylum. The lights flickered.

Slowly, Isley opened her eyes.

The lights went out.

She leered and stood up stepping swiftly for the door.

Even in the ladies' wing, she could hear the inane laughter of the Joker behind the alarm that suddenly started wailing. She opened the door, plant at her side, and she marched out with everyone else. She slipped past a guard rushing after the Joker himself before long. Her pursed lips bloomed into a smile with the ease of a bud stretching open for the sun, but she jumped at the sudden sound of someone marching behind her like a dog tearing through a garden.

"You're not getting out under Lockup's watch!" seethed Lyle Bolton.

Her eyes went wide.

Had she had some of her poisons she could have defeated the brute easily but unarmed she was a wildflower in the path of a mower to the likes of Bolton. Curse her frail body!