Steven Strange felt weak. The assaults on his astral body had required massive energy for him to defend himself. He felt drained and hazy. It was time to go back to the realm of the undreaming, he thought. He turned, spreading his cape, preparing to go back through the planes of unreality to the dreaming mind of Billie Joe Jacks.
“Winds of Watoomb! Take me to the portals of reality!” But before Strange could make the confirming gesture of execution, his world exploded.
White-hot heat struck him, followed by searing, numbing cold. Winds whipped the clouds around him, tumbling him, sweeping him along. He fell, pinwheeling through nothingness . . .
. . . blackness . . .
. . . sparks of fire exploded into quivering spheres of pale light.
. . . pain plucked at his senses . . .
. . . flame . . .
A spider as large as an elephant grabbed him in sticky, hairy claws, pulling him toward a beaked mouth dripping with saliva. The bulging beaded eyes glared, the ridged beak gaped—
“Mighty Tarag! Destroy this apparition of evil!” The fingers of his imprisoned arms flexed and the spider spasmed and dropped Strange. The hairy black body quivered, then split open in a bloody cleft. From the rupture slithered a luminous snake, its scales shining, its reptilian eyes hooded. The forked tongue slid out and back and the hiss drowned out all other sounds. The creature reared back its head, fangs glistening, and struck down at Strange, who was but a tenth its size.
Strange rolled aside. There was red rock under his body, hot red rock. The snake’s head brushed Strange in its attack and the ivory fangs gouged twin grooves in the stone.
“Haggor!” Strange cried, stretching out his hand as the giant reptile pulled back for another strike. “Haggor, save thy servant!”
A hissing fog boiled, blindingly white, from Strange’s fingers, and foamed over the snake. The serpent twisted and hissed as it disappeared in the roiling mist. For a second all was obscured—the ruptured carcass of the spider, the coiling snake, the flames beyond. Then the fog melted away and yet another savage creature stood poised to attack.
It was a man shape, covered in snakeskin, heavily muscled, eyes white, without pupils. He moved gracefully, almost sinuously, as he dodged an instinctively aimed bolt of light fired from Strange’s outstretched arm.
“No good, Strange,” the man shape said. There was a forked spear in his hand and he hurled it. The moment it left his hand another appeared. The first spear sank into the hot stone next to Stephen Strange as he scampered to his feet. The second and third spears were turned aside with a flick of Strange’s fingers, as the sorcerer studied the creature before him.
In the long career of Dr. Strange, he had met numerous enemies in many guises. Some took the images of monsters, imposing humanoids, devils, and demons. Others sought to deceive him by assuming the persona of nonthreatening beings and creatures, to allay the fears of their enemies by misdirection. Yet all, in some manner, were projections of evil, of greed, envy, and lust for power. There was no doubt in Strange’s mind that this snakeman was also the physical manifestation of some sort of evil.
The snake creature continued to hurtle spears and Strange continued to turn them aside. Then, with disconcerting suddenness, the snake thing smiled. Fangs showed, dripping with poison. The creature laughed—a hoarse, wheezing snort of triumph.
“By the—ahh!” Strange’s fingers contracted in pain and he clutched his injured hand to himself. As he had been about to abolish the snake thing, pain had struck. He looked around in confusion. The spell he was about to evoke was one of the best, an invocation of the Vishanti, a protective incantation that would fire enemies into a nether world.
But it hadn’t worked and as he looked he saw why. The forked spears he had so carelessly shunted aside had plunged into the hot rock in a carefully designed pentagram around his astral body. He was imprisoned and helpless. He heard a rumbling laugh and looked quickly at the snake man to see the beginnings of the metamorphosis.
The green-scaled skin became slack, sloughing off into long shreds of emerald, revealing beneath, a lean body of green flecked with black. The discarded strips of skin became an odd cloak, fastened at the wrists and streaming back to join a wider panel hanging down from a high dark collar.
White skin . . . gray, untidy hair . . . bulging, staring eyes . . .
“Nightmare!”
Insane eyes glittered as the smile of triumph spread across the dead-white face. “Strange,” he said, his voice the howl of midnight wind through the canyons of the mind.
An ancient enemy. Strange’s earlier premonitions had been correct. It had not been Mordo or Zota or any of the dark forces he had met early in his revitalized career.
Nightmare!
The lord of the dream dimension, the tyrant of the occult divisions that lurked beyond the walls of sleep. Time and again it had been Doctor Strange and only Strange who stopped the supernatural creature from invading and controlling the world of man by controlling his dreams.
Now the supernatural sorcerer had trapped Strange within the powerful pentagram, the basic symbol of all magic, black or white. Strange knew he could not pull the spears from the hot rock; that he would not be able to take the pain nor would he have the strength. He was trapped.
“What is it this time?” Strange said. “The same sad attempt at invasion?” He looked at the figure of Nightmare, his face in an expression of aloofness and disgust.
Nightmare laughed. His green cloak billowed in the hot winds. They were in a hellish landscape. Volcanoes spat fire and molten rock; hot puddles of lava bubbled nearby. Ebony smoke polluted the sky; flames sputtered up from a hundred cracks in the rusty soil. Distantly, there were screams and cries. It was not hell, but a localized imitation, and Strange knew it. It all existed in the mind, the dreamland of Billie Joe Jacks. Yet . . . that dream connected to the dream dimension, drew from it, was controlled and inspired by it.
“This time it is different, Strange,” Nightmare sneered, his mad eyes staring lecherously.
“No,” Strange countered. “You have been defeated before; you shall be defeated again.”
“Not by you, Strange.” He gestured and lava broke the surface nearby, burbling up through cracks, flowing down the rock toward Strange. It came on relentlessly, steaming, crusty on top where it was relatively cooler—red-centered, burning, the molten heart of a planet bursting forth.
Stephen Strange did not hesitate. He pressed his long fingers to his temples. “In the name of Haggor, by the powers of the darkness beyond the darkness, protect thy servant!”
The lava seemed to naturally flow to one side or the other, steam rising, searing the rock beneath, flowing past the spears stuck in the rock, creating a little island in the stream of molten rock. Nightmare’s eyes blazed and with another gesture he caused a thunderclap over Strange’s head.
The roiling black smoke parted and down from it, screeching shrilly, came a thing right out of a madman’s nightmare. The flames lit its leathery wings with red as it plunged down, its outstretched claws like scimitars, its beak like the gouging mechanical maw of a dredging crane. Strange instinctively crouched, not from fear, but to draw the thing below the level of the topmost tips of the spears, into the magical dome of force that imprisoned him.
The screeching bird of prey was Strange’s way out—if he lived.
The swordlike claws raked at him, the great batlike wings beat the air above him, the shrill cries assaulted his ears. Strange ducked, avoiding the first and second strikes of the razor-sharp claws; then he leaped.
The winged creature was the size of a small airplane. When its extended claws brought the foot below the tips of the spears Stephen Strange leaped and grasped the scaly leg.
“Oshtur! Haggor! Part the way!”
The bat wings fluttered as the creature tried to stay airborne against the sudden weight. It rose above the pentagram of spears and the spell vanished. A spear was bent, another ripped from its rocky socket, as the mighty wings beat the smoky air. Strange pulled himself up against the furry underside of the monster, clinging to the leg, avoiding the vicious slash of the other foot.
Strange could not have escaped by himself from the imprisoning pentagram, but he who had created it—Nightmare—had sent in something that could lift him from the dome of force.
Dr. Strange drew back his hand, fingers together like a blade, and cried out, “By the dagger of Cim!” Then he plunged his hand into the breast of the creature above him. The screeching escalated into a deafening cry and then suddenly Strange was falling, for the bat-winged monster was gone, with the suddenness of a dream.
He fell to the red rock and saw Nightmare swinging his arm toward him. Green bands flew out, expanded, became an emerald net. Strange gestured in return and the net dissolved at the joints, becoming motes of light which lost their pattern and drifted away to die.
Nightmare uttered a harsh cry of anger and the volcanoes beyond belched their fiery contents. Ash and lava rained down and Strange crossed his hands over each other, creating a dome of white light above himself.
“The twelve moons of Munnipor! The sixty aspects of Serenity! The hundred and forty-four seals of Agapotti!”
The volcanoes stopped and their cones melted into the red soil and the soil became flat and smooth. The bubbling lava ceased and spread itself thinly. The broken and bent spears wilted into the smoothing plain. The smoke drifted up and away.
The dreamworld was silver and flat, extending to the horizon and up into the purple night. Nightmare’s reflection on the shiny plain beneath his green-clad feet was warped and bent. He uttered a curse and a ripple swept across the silver plain like a tidal wave, rising, threatening to engulf them all.
“Aggari! Shanshor-tillmonti!” Strange said in a dead tongue. The tidal wave drooped and melted into the silver plain. But Nightmare gestured again and from behind Strange, rising like the heads and necks of prehistoric dinosaurs, came ripping up five tentacles. The tips of the tentacles split and parted to reveal dagger teeth. Strange turned to protect himself, and when he turned, Nightmare launched a beam of light from each finger. The beams solidified and became golden bands which wound themselves around Strange, holding him helpless for the five striking heads.
“Shagorri!” Strange exclaimed. “By the powers of the nameless stone of Shagorri, I banish you!”
The golden bands melted. The attacking silver heads withdrew into the featureless silver plain. Strange staggered. He was exhausted from fighting his way through wave after wave of the creatures Nightmare had sent against him. It was Nightmare’s realm and he drew power from it. Strange was an invader, far from his physical body, extended out into the dream dimension, weakened by the demands upon his energy.
“By the eternal Vishanti!” he said and gestured. Nightmare froze. The last ripples where the monster heads had sunk into the silver plain grew smooth. The sky cleared, horizon to horizon, then everything faded.
at
Medical Comics and Stories!
No comments:
Post a Comment