An early morning breeze swept through my room, its chill touch waking me.

"Alfred, would you close the window?" I asked without opening my eyes. When my butler didn't answer, I sat up in bed and looked around.

Throwing back the covers, I jumped out of bed. The window hadn't been open as I'd previously believed. The entire eastern wall was missing. Hidden behind the green canopy of a thick forest, the rising sun lit the horizon with pale light but failed to reach me.

The neatness of the wall removal was startling. The wood floor wasn't chipped or splintered, and the rug covering it didn't have a frayed edge where the rest had been cut away. One of the windows on the corner of the room had been bisected, but the glass had neither fractured nor broken. It was as if everything beyond a certain point had simply disappeared out of existence.

I wanted a closer look at where the eastern half of my room had vanished, but I didn't dare get closer without knowing which beams under the floor would lack the necessary support with one end no longer anchored on the opposing side of the building.

Moving away from the missing wall, I opened the door to my room and headed downstairs. I flicked a switch on the wall to test it, but the overhead lights in the hallway didn't turn on. Odd. The emergency generator should've engaged automatically in the event of a power outage.  I suddenly remembered the emergency generators were located on the eastern side of the house. Whatever had sliced off half my room might also have compromised the generators.

"Alfred!" I called out when I reached the bottom of the stairs from the second floor. No response. Increasing volume as loud as I could shout, I called for him again. "Alfred!"

Silence.

Deciding to ignore the thick foliage outside the house, I went to find Alfred first. His room was in the north wing, but unless something had chopped off that side of the house too, his room should've been undisturbed.

A firm knock on Alfred's door caused a hollow echo to trail down the hallway, but no sound came from within. I knocked again with the same result. Starting to be concerned, I tried the doorknob and found it unlocked. I opened the door and looked in.  The bed was made, neat and organized like everything else in the butler's room. A glance at the wall clock let me know it was near seven in the morning. Recalling Alfred's habits, I knew he'd be in the kitchen making breakfast.

My pace was fast, and an uncomfortable knot was twisting in my stomach. The kitchen was on the east side of the house, or at least, it had been there last night. Skidding around the corner, I stopped and stared. The kitchen and half the dining room were missing, replaced by tree trunks, ferns, and thick tangles of vines.

Alfred was gone. Wherever the rest of the house had vanished to, my faithful butler was most likely with it. It stood to reason if I found one, I'd find the other as well.

Walking across the spacious entryway, I glanced out the rectangular window beside the front door. The lawn only extended fifty feet before the trees and thick undergrowth blocked everything else from view.

Poison Ivy was supposed to be locked up in Arkham Asylum, but if the mass of greenery surrounding the house was any indication, she was loose and up to her old tricks. Deciding it was best to handle the situation as Batman rather than as Bruce Wayne in pajamas, I headed toward the library in the back of the house.

Stocked floor to ceiling with a multitude of books, the library was a wealth of factual information and fictional adventures. A few chairs and a sofa provided room for relaxing beside the sizable windows. The windows had formerly looked out into the backyard, but a mass of trees clustered together was the only thing visible now. Ignoring the library, I pulled down the pendulum inside the grandfather clock positioned between two bookcases to open the secret passage to the Batcave.

I raced down the steps of cold stone because if the plants outside were common everywhere, there was no time to lose. I ducked into a small tunnel at the base of the stairs where my suits were kept. Changing quickly, I hung my pajamas over an empty clothes rack on the way out. I was about to put on the cowl when I noticed something was wrong with the Batcave. The passageway where the Batmobile usually exited the cave was nothing but a solid wall of rock. Peering over the edge of the walkway, I saw the Batboat floating by the dock down below, but the underwater passage it required to enter Gotham Harbor was also gone.

Poison Ivy had never shown the ability or interest in reshaping stone, only plants, so it was feeling less and less like one of her schemes. Before discounting her completely, I had to be sure. I put on the cowl and strapped my utility belt around my waist. Climbing the metal scaffolding, I ascended to the landing pad where the Batwing waited.

Sleek, black, and shaped like a giant bat, the aircraft would give me a clear aerial view of Gotham and its current condition. That Batwing powered up, its engines humming loudly in tandem with the vibration coursing through my chair. I activated the thrusters to lift the Batwing off the landing pad before advancing the throttle slightly. Because the exits for my boat and car had both been blocked, I didn't want to go speeding ahead only to encounter an obstruction of solid rock. Only when I saw a clear opening at the end of the tunnel did I push the throttle to full.

The air screamed past the cockpit glass as the Batwing shot from the cave at an incredible velocity and out from the side of the cliff Wayne Manor, or what was left of it, was built upon. Pulling back on the controls, I banked upward sharply, ascending into the sky.

In all directions, as far as I could see, the forest covered everything. No elevated trains, towering skyscrapers, or even the smokestacks from the industrial district were visible. Gotham City was gone.

I realized Poison Ivy couldn't be responsible for something on this scale. Her plants usually grew over whatever was in the vicinity, but they couldn't have wiped out all traces of an entire city. There weren't even any ruins. It was as if Gotham City had never been there at all.

A sudden thought made me check the instrument panel, but the dials and controls were clearly labeled and legible. The Mad Hatter had tried to imprison me in a dream world once before, but I'd seen through it because dreams function on the right side of the brain and reading comes from the left side. It's impossible to read anything in a dream, so I knew this couldn't be an illusion by the Mad Hatter. Somehow, this was all very real.

I flew over what should've been Gotham Harbor, but it was nothing more than a small inlet from the ocean. On the opposing side, the highways and cities supposed to be there were missing as well, replaced by endless forests.

Nothing was where it was supposed to be with the exception of a portion of Wayne Manor and some of the Batcave. Pitching the controls to the left, I performed a wide and slow turn. During the maneuver, I noticed something I had to circle around and see again to be sure I hadn't imagined it.

A small river trickled into the inlet that should've been Gotham Harbor. Walking next to the bank, and occasionally drinking from the stream, was a herd of giant mammoths. They looked like elephants, but a shaggy outer coat gave them a decidedly unique appearance. I didn't think it was possible for them to be here as they were supposed to have been extinct for countless centuries.

The Batcomputer could compile the data from the Batwing's sensors as well as my observations of the house and native wildlife to give me a possible explanation, so I turned back toward Wayne Manor. The view from the air was shocking. A perfect square had been cut out of the forest where Wayne Manor resided. It was as if a section of trees had been surgically extracted and the manor and its surrounding grounds left in its place.

I landed the Batwing on the front lawn, now only a quarter of its original dimensions, and climbed out for a closer look. Kneeling down, I examined the driveway and discovered the paved surface ended cleanly along the edge of the forest. To my left and right, the property halted at the exact same point. No breaks, chips, or cracks marked the cement. It was the same precision I'd seen in my room.

Standing up, I walked over to a tree growing near the dividing line. The part of the tree which should have extended over onto the grounds of Wayne Manor had simply vanished. The bark hadn't splintered, and there were no signs of cuts with a saw. No burn or scorch marks from the use of a laser were evident either. Sap oozed out of the tree and puddled near the roots. I looked up into the branches and found every branch halted at the property line, but no leaves or stems littered the ground. Like Gotham City, it was if they hadn't been broken but simply vanished.

A stray thought passed through my consciousness, and it gave me pause. If a portion of the forest had been cut away, and a part of Wayne Manor put in its place, was it possible wherever the rest of the Manor still stood a section of the forest had appeared there? It could've been a complete exchange, one slice of territory for another, but it would be impossible to tell until I discovered where I had ended up.

Climbing back into the Batwing, I flew back to the Batcave and landed. I pushed the cowl off my face and let it hang behind me like a hood. The cave was dark, and the marginal light provided by the Batwing's flight tunnel wasn't nearly enough. I found an electrical generator used as a backup power system, but it was low on fuel. I'd recently purchased more gasoline, but it had been stored in the portion of the cave now inaccessible, hidden behind a wall of stone. I powered up the generator, but I knew it wouldn't last long.

Using the Batcomputer to activate the wireless link to the Batwing, I ran a topographical analysis of the surroundings scanned during my aerial survey, trying to determine if Gotham had been changed or if I had been moved somewhere else. After a few moments, the computer beeped, providing an answer that couldn't possibly be correct. A distant mountain identified by scan was recorded in the data files as having been leveled by a mining operation in the year 1922. As strange as it seemed, if the mountain was still standing, it could only mean I was back in time further than 1922.

I thought back to the mammoths I'd seen by the river, a horrifying conclusion clawing at the edges of my sanity. I input the dimensions of the inlet supposed to have been Gotham Harbor, correlating with data on known erosion levels, weather patterns, tidal effects, and a host of other information before asking the computer to determine how far into the past I was currently.

I leaned forward when the response appeared on screen. 200,000 years. I stared unblinking at the numbers. It simply wasn't possible.

The generator consumed the last of its fuel and shut down. Lights cut off, and the computer screen in front of me slowly dimmed as the final amount of its power faded away, leaving me alone in the darkness of the Batcave.