It was early spring when they pulled the first body out of the big lake which sits in the heart of Robinson Park. It was a little girl no more than nine her limp black hair still tied up in little pigtails. I remember one of the younger children, his face shining with excitement, running to tell the others in a breathless whisper that he had seen men in blue uniforms armed with loudspeakers shouting out orders to other men in speedboats trawling the green waters. They were looking for someone. Someone important he emphasized in that exaggerated way that children do.

I followed discreetly from a distance when a group of the older ones, bored and eager for adventure, made their way down to gawk at the battalion of police cruisers out in force, their hands cupped over their ears to keep out the noise of the news copters circling like vultures overhead.

Children are naturally curious and I do not believe in pruning back their horizons but in hindsight I should have been more circumspect to keep them away from the media circus. Sometimes we forget that children, even mine with their rough and tumble ways, are delicate blooms that need to be sheltered from the wind and the rain. The men in blue at the lake were not searching for some fool reveler drunk with champagne and fallen into its icy waters. They were looking for a body – a child's body.

I soon learnt as did the rest of Gotham that the girl they fished out was no nameless runaway. She had a name, a home – nicer than mine ever was - on the Lower East Side complete with a mother, a father and a dog called Billy. She disappeared 3 weeks ago while walking home alone from an apartment block on the East Side bordering the Park. She was there as she was every other day to work on a class project with her best friend from school.

They splashed a black and white photo of her on the front page of the Gotham Times – a delicate pretty girl looking up at you with a shy elfish grin. She was small for her age - perhaps that was why he took her – a bigger stronger child would have put up more of a struggle and attracted unwarranted attention. I don't know why, perhaps it was that seed of unease that had taken root in me, but I tore out the photo and kept it on my memory tree. My last thought that day as I watched the sun set from my perch high above the Park canopy was that she had such beautiful cornstalk eyes.

All that cruel and unusual season Gotham lived on tenterhooks, pulled along by an over zealous media intent on fanning the already rampant paranoia eating at the city until it took a black infectious consciousness of its own. Its was inescapable, no one could turn on the television, listen to the radio, walk down a street or pass a news stand without being assaulted on every side with pleas by tearful parents worried about their own broods, demands from child welfare groups that someone should do something, anything mingled with the baying from City Hall for the blood of the animal that did it.

I for my part kept my own close by on a tight leash; it was no longer safe for them to be out in the open after dark, not with the armed gangs of "vigilantes" now patrolling the Park eager to stake their names on a kill.

Even Gotham's finest led by our dear Commissioner Gordon leant their voices to the fray by issuing a public appeal for eyewitnesses to step forward. They surmise that the girl was waylaid somewhere along the 2 block route she normally took home by someone she knew either by sight or name. They reasoned that there was no motivation otherwise for the perpetuator to kill her if he was not known to her. Gotham's finest sometimes leave much to be desired. The body I saw fished out of the lake was bruised and battered beyond reason. I do not believe that whatever beast that did that needed additional motivation to drown her like a cat after he was done with her.

They did not know it then but she was only the latest of many. They found the others later one by one as the weather grew warmer and the lake slowly thawed out finally surrendering its secrets. He first started taking them off the streets in the winter, a string of little Jane and John Does, most of who will never be identified. No one in Gotham reports missing the forgotten children of neglectful and indifferent parents.

I suppose he was uncertain of his power then and the streets were full of easy prey. But he grew more confident over time and come spring he bloomed in his entire monstrosity. He decided he preferred the taste of other people's tender children better than their castaways.

It all seems so fresh in my mind, the memory of events of so many months back. It is now September and I am looking at the falling leaves through the skylights of my terrarium cell in Arkham. The children came to visit a few days ago, freshly scrubbed in their good clothes. All smiling faces, their arms full of fresh fruit and cheery hand made cards. We miss you they tell me in their many voices.

Dr Carver encourages them to come, she thinks their visits good therapy for my increasing depression, but I disagree – Arkham is no place for children – and their social worker agrees. Yet despite all her efforts, week after week for reasons I do not understand they sneak out from whatever foster home and homeless shelter the system has slotted them into and make the long journey by bus to Arkham.

This time round perhaps in recompense for my part in something which agrees even to their brutish sensibilities, my jailers have allowed me to keep the cards and the gifts of fruit.

Still I have given most of the fruit away. I have little desire to eat while I am placed on display here like some botanical curiosity and it would be a pity to waste such beautiful bounty. Fresh fruit is after all a gift meant to be enjoyed and I have no doubt that my fellow rouges will eat them all. The cards I have kept and stuck on the white floor of my cell. They are my connection to the sunlit world outside these four walls, outside Arkham.

I am lying on my back on the floor looking at the falling leave through the skylights of my cell when they announce the arrival of a visitor. I am first puzzled then curious. Is it the children? I wonder - I have a vague concept of time passing here, but for the skylights day and night would merge in this world of perpetual florescent - but it felt odd, it was too soon. They had just come a few days back and were not expected to visit again until much later.

I dutifully move away from the glass walls and onto the steel bunk which they have thoughtfully bolted down into the center of my prison. I smile as my jailers shuffled into the holding area each man single file equipped with an automatic weapon and a personal respirator. I wonder if they seriously believe Cavendish when he tells them that having their own air supply will protect them from me. The last man in line is holding a small folding chair. The chair is for the benefit of my visitor – she is tall and pale with a dark head. I cannot see her eyes; she has hidden them under a pair of black shades. Her nose is high and perfect as is her soft red sensual mouth turned up at the corners in a sardonic smile. Her clothes are casually nondescript – a pair of well worn leather pants topped with a black t-shirt and an overcoat – she manages to bring off the ensemble even if she does lack Selina Kyle's sense of chic. She wears nothing else that would allow me to identify her further. She is my colorless mystery visitor for the day.

Dr Arkham prohibits the press from visiting and I am sure I have not met her before but there is something uncannily familiar in those lips, that smile and in the way she carries herself; she moves like she's floating on air and then it strikes me who my visitor is.

She sits down on the proffered chair and smiles at me as the guards make their exit. They tell her she has ten minutes alone with me, but I know she knows they are lying. Everything I say and do in this place is recorded, analyzed, and studied. Oracle has an entire library devoted to each one of us – Joker, 2 Face, Penguin, Riddler – our likes, dislikes, loves and hatreds, all gleaned and harvested from the Arkham archives.

I return her smile but I do not move from my place in the centre of my cell. Her voice is strong, confident – pleasant not surly like our last meeting – she goes through the motions of asking me how I am. She tells me that she is my civilian sponsor under the Arkham rehabilitation program and that Carver has briefed her that I am not eating or sleeping well.

I turn my face and focus on the cards on the floor. Her gaze makes me weak, awkward, exposed, and I will not be put into such a position by someone like her. She senses my growing detachment and tries to reach out to me, but I have retreated back into the Green where she cannot hope to find me. She tries again, again and yet again – her voice never wavers but grows softer, gentler as she talks to me – but I do not wish to engage. Soon her time is up and the guards come back in single file to escort her out. She turns back once to look at me, our eyes meet, and she leaves. If she is disappointed with this meeting she does not show it.

I am alone again with my jumbled thoughts. I think she looks sad but I am not sure. I find that I am not sure of anything anymore – friends, foes, lovers, whores. Carver has been asking me about Harley, I have not seen her since we were brought in. Carver wants to know why Harley is angry at me, what she really means to ask is why Harley wants to kill me. I shrugged off the question. It is after all not the first time my friend has made known her intention to "murderise" me.

It is late at night, when I finally allow myself to remember. For me and many others it was the spring Gotham went mad. The little girl I saw fished out of the lake was not the last. There were two more victims that spring – another girl and then a boy – both under the age of ten and snatched out from under the watchful eyes of their parents. Both killed with the same modus operandi - battered within an inch of their lives and then drown in the lake in Robinson Park. The media dubbed him "The Water Baby Killer" but he was generally referred to in conversation as the Beast after the one in the Book of Revelations.

In private, the more superstitious among Gotham's finest called him a magician, a ghost and said that he could walk through walls to avoid detection and change his appearance to suit his purposes. The experts called in from Metropolis to help with the investigations were still unable despite the flood of eyewitness reports to compile a coherent description of the perpetuator. They only knew that he was male and of uncertain age. The best that the boys in blue could do in the meanwhile was to run up the usual suspects – sex offenders, known pedophiles – and shit on their rights while they wait for him to make a mistake. Waylon told me this one night by the waters edge; he had come up from the sewers that open under the lake. Most of the other rouges were keeping low profiles to avoid the public ire and Jervis for one was missing.

I have always liked Waylon; there was a kinship between us that I am hard to put into words. I think him beautiful with his yellow eyes and solemn smile. That night was no different from the many others we shared before – him and me talking softly by the water - but no, I am mistaken there were three of us that night. Harley was sulking in the shadows watching us.

Harley had come down to act as an extra pair of eyes and ears, the Park is a large place and even I cannot be everywhere at the same time. I was surprised by her interest. She never cared about the children; they were distractions as far as she was concerned, unnecessary competition for my attentions. My relationship with Harley is at best difficult, complicated by my romantic infatuation with her and made all the worse by her obsession with the Joker and her possessiveness of me. I have not seen her since we were hauled back to Arkham and I have no wish to see her.

It was Harley who spotted her first, that night after the boy was found. She was standing on a branch on a tree fronting the lake looking down at the spot where the first body was discovered. We shadowed her as she moved silently from site to site, seeming to float on air, visiting where the body of each victim was retrieved in chronological order. If she knew we were watching her she gave no hint and then as sudden as she had come she was gone.

She returned a few nights later, and as before we followed her. I knew who she was by sight and reputation but our paths had never crossed. To be honest I was expecting the Batman, the new one who goes around with the strange violent boy Robin, to come and demand that I tell him what he needed to know to catch the Beast. Robinson Park is after all my sphere of influence but I am not omnipotent. I did not expect her interest in the matter.

In my dreams, it always plays out the same. I shout out a warning but Harley doesn't hear. I watch as they run one after the other into a blind corner where the shadows are deepest. I know something is wrong as I follow into the thick sticky blackness where she – Batwoman – is waiting for me her lips curled up in that strange smile and I know I am alone and Harley is gone and at this realization I wake and find myself back in my terrarium cell in Arkham drenched in my own acidic sweat.

***

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