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The smog and black from the factories filtered into the lower districts as night fell upon Gotham City. Spreading over the walls and outer parishes. On the outskirts, away from the loud noises of the streets kay St Judes Acre, a local cemetery which became the welcoming place for a majority of Gothams dead, well the dead many didn’t care about.
The local digger, Tom worked with sweat upon his brow by the light of a dim lantern. Rain hammered down upon him, a drizzle which seemed to pick up in harshness every few minutes, soaking his wool cap and dampening his collar. He spat on his hands, attempting to grip his shovel with a sense of purpose, and to not let the wet wood slide from his grasp once again.
"Stupid barrow-man," he muttered between breaths. "Said two feet was deep enough. Said the bobbies don't come past the ditch after ten. Easy for him to say. He isn't the one who has to smell the bodies when the winter ice thaws."
Beside the grave lay a rough hemp sack, half-submerged in a pool of black-brown water streaked with an oily rainbow sheen.
"Just another girl the Ripper tore apart," he grunted, tossing another shovelful of grey silt aside. "No name, no stone. Just 'Ivy' down at the dance hall. Well, Ivy, you've got the dirt now. Same thing waiting for the rest of us." He knew it was true. His own life was hardly a life. One day he would end up in a hole much like this.
According to some, the Ripper had recently been dealt with by some geezer dressed up as a Bat, a man dressing up as a Bat to fight Jack the Ripper? What a sight that must have been. But such a sight was not one Tom himself would’ve seen, happened in the more, upscale parts of Gotham, not a sight a twenty something grave digger would’ve seen.
Tom paused for a moment, and dug his shovel into the ground, leaning against the handle and wiping his brow. Each breath he took burnt due to the toxic fumes spewed out by the factories. But every time Tom found himself digging this hole, it seemed to fight back against him, the dirt itself slipping and sliding more and usual, the sack was almost covered once or twice, and Tom swore he didn’t put it anywhere near the pile of dirt. Each thrust of the shovel sank easily, and the mud answered with a wet sucking sound that reminded him of a throat clearing itself.
Below the surface, where runoff from the chemical benches at the copperas works drained into the ditch, the mud was green-black and thick, tangled with countless tiny roots.
Tom crouched and probed the wall of the grave with grimy fingers.
"The hell's that?"
The roots were white, not the dead white of cellar sprouts, but a bright, translucent ivory. In the lantern light they seemed to twitch. They grew thickest where the polluted water gathered. He wiped sweat from his brow and shook his head.
"Knew I shouldn't have had that drink. Get her in, Tom. Get her buried before someone starts looking your way."
He dragged the sack by its neck. It was surprisingly light, much lighter than the old market women he usually buried. As he tipped it into the grave, the bottom split open. A shoulder slipped free into the grey slush.
Tom froze.
He should have looked away, but the lantern light caught the skin. It was not the pale white of a corpse you’d typically see. Instead it shone with a faint pearly glow, and beneath it pulsed a weak green light. Across the throat, where three deep knife wounds had been, the flesh had already sealed shut beneath a layer of clear jelly that smelled faintly of bruised almonds and wet moss.
"Lord above," Tom whispered, dropping his spade.
The sack landed in the mud with a dull sounding thud.
The rain seemed to let up somewhat, nature itself heeding a call it had not sensed in generations. From the hole came a rattle like sound effect, it was low, somewhat creaking, something you’d hear one of the chairs make in the local pub. The roots down in the hole soon began to moved, wrapping around the body, and pulling it further towards the ground, more and more roots taking hold and wrapping themselves around the corpse.
These roots were different than normal plants, pale, thick as fingers, and there were hundreds of them. Creeping from every corner of the hole, spilling out like water. The hair of the woman changed, mutating, from a dark red, to a bright fierce unnatural colour. The colour of a fox’s pelt Tom had seen the Lords wear as they made their way through the streets.
Tom backed away until his spine struck the cold iron of an statue tomb. His knees felt like they were about to give way. "In the name of the Father," he began, his hand shaking as he searched his waistcoat for a some religious artefact he could use to protect himself. "In the name of..."
The sack burst with roots and vines ramming through it. The roots momentarily covered the ‘corpse’ entirely then, as quickly as the roots did, a hand burst free. The fingers did not match that of a corpse, they moved, healthy, almost like nothing had happened, fingernails small and green as nightshade. The shape of them was a woman’s hand, exquisite and slender. It reached out, not blindly like a drowned man grasping for a rope, but with a slow, sensual grace, the fingers curling around the handle of the dirt it grabbed hold into.
Then came the rest of her, prying herself free.
She didn't scramble or claw her way from the earth. She rose as a stem rises from the garden-Mold after a heavy night of thunder. The grey mud fell away from her shoulders revealing skin that was no longer mackerel-pale but a soft, breathing olive-green.
She stood up fully, stretching like a cat, her red hair falling behind her back. The dress she died wearing, now reduced to seemingly scraps, hourglass figure exposed to the hair, and slender arms on display same with her legs and chest and parts of her lower body covered by what remained.
“Cold” was all the woman whispered, looking up to the sky, the rain still light. Her voice was light, gentle, no viciousness to be heard. She was Mothers Nature answer, for too long had the factories and industrial war machine ravaged her lands, her seas, her roots. Mother Nature had chosen its champion.
The woman was lifted upwards, not by Tom, not by herself, but by the vines beneath her. All she wanted was to be out of the hole, and Mother Nature gladly helped.
"Where is the music?" she asked. She looked down at her hands, turning them over, watching her green skin, how it was different, but set off no alarms in her head. "The fiddler... he had a coat with brass buttons. And there was smoke. Not this smoke. Sweet smoke. Tobacco and gin."
"You... you’re supposed to be dead” Tom managed to squeeze past his teeth. His teeth were chattering so hard he nearly bit his tongue. "The... the one they found all disfigured, the Rippers work…."whatever Tom wanted to say, his words failed him, the concept of death seemed useless to this woman.
She turned her great, green eyes upon him. The light from his lantern caught her mouth. Her lips were not black with death; they were a bright, wet crimson, the colour of a crushed poppy, swelling slightly as if she had just been kissed in a hot room.
"Pamela," she said, testing the syllables of what her name used to be. She shook her head, and a shower of small, green elder-buds fell from her hair into the mud, where they instantly struck roots and began to push up tiny, pale green leaves. "No. That was... that was the girl who died in the alley. The girl who let them touch her for money”.
With every step she took toward him, the graveyard changed.
"You’re... you’re an angel……" Tom breathed, his terror beginning to melt into something heavy and warm that gathered behind his eyes. "Or a ghost... the Ripper, he... he cut you proper, miss. I saw the bill at the station-house. They said your throat was….” Words failed him.
“I remember…..being afraid” the woman known to Tom as Pamela or Ivy muttered, looking qt the now the flourishing ground beneath her. Her breath reached out and into Toms lungs, the scene of flowers blooming, something hot, damp and earthy. A heavy intoxicating musk. “Then it was cold……like ice…….I was floating in a river, then a vine pulled me under” she spoke. “What is your name?” she finally inquired to the man who was literally digging her grave just moments before.
“Tom” he managed to whisper. He took his cap off, not knowing he had done so. Hands shacking and his legs feeling light. “I-I-I bury people miss”.
"Do you, Tom?" She tilted her head, her red hair shifting across her shoulders. A single tendril, thin as a thread of silk, crept out from her temple and brushed against his cheek. It was warm unnaturally warm and where it touched his skin, the sting of the salt-rain disappeared, replaced by a gentle, throbbing heat. "Do you hide them in the dark? The poor, small things?"
"I have to," he said, his voice dropping to a low murmur. He couldn't look away from her lips. They were moving so sweetly, like the petals of a flower opening to the evening air. "They pay me about two shillings for each hole. I need bread miss” truth be told he was starving.
"There is no bread here," she said, looking around the soot-blackened graveyard. "Only iron and soot. They have choked the earth, Tom. They have poured their vitriol into the well-springs. I could feel it down there... the poor roots, crying out in the dark, drinking the poison because there was nothing else."
She stepped closer. Now there was only the width of his spade between them.
"You aren't afraid of me now, Tom?" she asked. Her voice had dropped an octave, losing its dry, rustling edge, becoming something like honey and ginger.
"No, miss," he said, and it was the truth. The graveyard had vanished. There was only her, and the smell of summer, and the look of her skin under the lamp. "You’re... you’re beautiful. More beautiful than the Queen's pictures. More beautiful than anything in Gotham."
She laughed a low, bubbling sound that sounded like water rising. "Gotham," she said, her green fingers reaching out to touch his chin. Her skin was smoother than silk. "A city of stone and iron. A city that kills the ground beneath it to grease its wheels."
Her hand moved down to his throat, her thumb resting against the hard knot of his windpipe. Her touch didn't hurt; it felt like a warm velvet collar, but he could feel the immense, silent strength.
"The city killed me, Tom," she murmured. "The little man with the white apron and the shiny blade. He thought he was putting me out like a candle. But he only planted me, made me come to realise my future."
"Pamela..." he gasped, his breath coming short now, not from fear, but from the heat that was radiating from her body. It was like standing before an open furnace-door in the middle of January.
"Don't call me that," she whispered, a warning almost. “Pamela was meat for the market. I am... I am the weed that grows through the concrete. I am the poison that makes the well sweet."
She looked at his mouth. Her tongue flickered across her crimson lips.
"You have been very good to me, Tom," she said, her fingers tightening just enough to hold his head still against the box-tomb. "You gave me a bed when I was cold. You said a prayer for me with your rough voice."
"I... I wanted to do right by you," he choked out, his eyes dimming slightly as the scent of the orchids grew so powerful it felt like wine in his veins.
"Then do right by me now," she said.
She leaned in, and the world went dark for him not the dark of the grave, but the deep, velvet green of a forest at midnight.
Her lips met his.
They were hot so hot they seemed to scorch the skin from his mouth but there was no pain in it, only a sudden, blinding rush of everything he had never known. He tasted honey, and bitter almonds, and the cold, mineral taste of the deep well-water. He felt her tongue against his, wet and heavy, and with it came a strange, prickling current that ran down his throat and into his chest, like a thousand tiny needles made of fire.
His arms went around her without his willing them to move. His fingers sank into the thick, mossy hair at her back, feeling the vines pulse against his palms, their little thorns pricking his skin, but he only held her tighter, pulling her green body against his wool jacket until he could hear the wet, heavy thudding of her heart or whatever it was that beat beneath those emerald veins.
Tom felt his breath leave him, his strength leaving him. His legs gave in, and he regrettably separated from the satisfying kiss. Falling backwards, an open mouth smile splattered on his face, fingers twitching ever so slightly. Eyes locked onto the red headed beauty who looked down at him, a look of sorrow in her eyes. Pamela was gone, replaced, by something poironous and deadly.