Chapter Twenty-Two
. . . The blackness was netted with tendrils of pain . . .
. . . The blackness was threaded with filaments of pleasure . . .
Strange fought the seductive pull of the wavering threads and cried out a rune from the oldest book he had ever read.
They floated high above the auditorium. There were stars above and below, organized chaos. Lights illuminated the tangle of cables and the oblong boxes of the video trucks. People moved between them. The great parabolic dish antenna was moving slowly, in a precise path across the sky.
“Stephen! What happened? Jacks should not have been able to do that! Unless he had help—!”
“He had help,” Strange said, shifting the spectrum of his eyes to enable him to see the radio waves pouring like a searchlight from the parabolic reflector. He reached out a hand. “Great silver shield of the Seraphim! I command you to deflect the beam!”
An invisible circle came into being directly in the path of the broadcasting signal, diffusing and deflecting it in every direction outward and upward, except in the direction of the ComSat far out in space in synchronous orbit. They would soon learn that their signal had been somehow stopped, but it would give Strange and Clea a little time. And even finding what had happened would not mean they could stop it. They might transmit the signal to another projecting antenna, but it would all take time.
“Jacks is an agent for the powers of Nightmare,” Strange said. “But an effective one. He had surprise on his side.”
“And considerable power,” Clea added.
They floated down, became invisible and went through the stage door right behind a harried floor manager. Billie Joe Jacks was on the dais before eleven thousand attentive members of his burgeoning Temple of Light church.
“Change!” shouted Jacks. “In order to create that new person you want to be, you must hate the old one enough to kill it. Yes, I said kill it! The snake must shed his skin, in order to grow a new and better skin. So must you! So must I!”
His voice dropped to a more intimate level. “I want to change things. I want to see things happen. I don’t just want to talk about them!” There was a loud murmur from the rapt audience and he let it die before he spoke again.
“What single ability do we have? The ability to change. For five nights I have talked change. This is the sixth and final night of the Crusade for Change. We have spoken of all the aspects of human and societal change and of progress—or the lack of it.” He laughed in a self-deprecating way. “Many people have talked of changing humanity, yet nobody thinks of changing himself. Well, I have changed!” His last sentence was a challenging roar.
“He certainly has,” whispered Clea.
“I have changed because you don’t change the world without changing yourself. It has been said that not everything that is faced can be changed—but nothing can be changed until it is faced!”
The roar of the crowd showed that they agreed. There were occasional cries of “Amen!”
“We are all in the process of growth. Even a rock becomes gravel and gravel becomes sand. Sand becomes sandstone and sandstone becomes rock.
“What I have to say to you tonight is this, my friends. Tomorrow we shall change. Tonight we shall think what that change should be. You become a different—and better—you. You must find out what that different and better you should be like. Tonight, you think about that. Tomorrow you act on that thought. You become that better you. Do you hear me?”
The audience shouted back, “Yes!”
“Do you believe me?”
“Yes!”
“Do you follow me?”
“Yes!”
“Will you change?”
“YES!”
In a calm voice Billie Joe Jacks said, “Thank you, my friends.” He seemed suddenly drained, suddenly weak. His pale fingers clutched at the edges of the lectern and he managed a weak smile. The curtain came down to thunderous applause.
Alicia Jacks and a middle-aged man walked quickly out and took Billie Joe in their arms. He seemed on the point of collapse. Strange and Clea floated down from the shadows where they had been hovering. A line of rent-a-cops kept everyone back, including the many newsmen and -women that surged forward, but Strange and Clea walked through them with no trouble.
Alicia Jacks looked up, her face drawn. She looked years older than she was. “Doctor Strange! Oh, thank God you’re here!”
The middle-aged man looked up, frowning slightly.
“Doctor? What specialty?”
“I used to be a surgeon, but I’m not . . . practicing any longer.”
“Oh. Well, this man needs a specialist. His heart is almost gone. I’m Doctor Spicer, by the way.”
“Stephen Strange.” He looked down at Jacks, who seemed all but dead. He was breathing erratically, his face pale and wet. To Alicia he said, “Is he often like this after a . . . a sermon?”
“No, not at all. The ministry exalts him. He . . . he comes away excited, invigorated, except . . .” She hesitated. “Except since this crusade started. It’s all part of what I said before, him being different? I can’t explain it, but . . .”
“That’s all right, Alicia,” Strange murmured. He turned to Clea. “It’s tonight then. On the flight here I thought that this pentagram of cities was too small, and I was right. Think of the location of these cities . . .”
In her mind Clea saw the mental projection Strange made. A globe of the world appeared, and a series of red lights glowed in a five-sided figure around Charleston, West Virginia. Then another set of five appeared; London, Spain, western America—a perfect pentagram. Then another, larger, pentagram appeared . . . and another, one inside the other, layer after layer, with Charleston, West Virginia as the focus.
“It happens here, tonight,” she said.
“After everyone sleeps. It will start from the East, where they are already asleep.”
“But you severed the transmission!”
“Did I?” Strange knew that the technicians were used to various sorts of interruptions and alternate plans existed. They could reroute and use land transmission lines to get to another antenna . . . or a dozen. Strange had perhaps stopped the message from being broadcast for only a few seconds—not enough.
“Nightmare’s power is awesome,” Clea said softly. “He plopped us both right into that blackness—and look what happened? Fifteen or twenty minutes went by, just like that!”
“We shall be more prepared,” Strange said. “Nightmare must be defeated.”
Clea shivered, but not from any chill. Dreams were powerful things. All primitive tribes believed in and feared their power. The strongest man in the world could rise trembling and frightened from a nightmare. They did attack when you were at your most vulnerable. How can you escape your own mind?
“Come. There is work to do,” Strange said.
They turned toward the exit.
High in the metal latticework in the theater’s overhead, a dark figure moved. A flat leather case opened and the sections of the weapon within were lifted out. The expert hands, wearing black gloves, snapped the long rifle together. At the muzzle end was a two-inch diameter tube a foot and and a half long. The man lifted the silencer over the guardrail of the catwalk and aimed it down at the figure of Stephen Strange as he walked along.
The marksman tracked Strange’s crimson-caped figure, his finger tightening on the trigger. Just past that piece of scenery, just before the lighting board, there would be a clear space. A perfect flat shot, no obstructions, an easy kill.
His finger took up the slack in the trigger of the high-powered rifle. One of the killer’s special explosive bullets rested in the chamber.
Stephen Strange felt something. He didn’t know what it was. Just something.
The human mind is a more complex observer than we give it credit for. But if we go on ignoring telltale signals the mind soon stops sending them. We live in a crowded world full of poisonous smells—movement, sweat, the odor of fear, machines that belch smoke, factories that pump excrement into the air. Our senses of smell and hearing are overloaded. We just stop hearing the cars and buses, the radio next door, the fights down the block, the siren and thumps and rattles. It’s easier; otherwise we’d be jumping at every garbage-can rattle, hiding at every squeal of brakes, running at every siren.
But beneath it all is the primitive. He never dies; he just gets ignored most of the time. We use him only for great emergencies. Sometimes when we are not looking he pokes through to say or do something that scares us or embarrasses us. “Was that me?”
Our eyes and ears and noses are conditioned to ignore. We see hundreds of patterns of light every day, hear hundreds of sharp noises and stealthy sounds, smell hundreds of odors, good and bad. It is the selectivity of the mind that makes a difference. Just as the eye of the trained fighter sees the slight drop of the guard in an opponent, just as a musician perceives the imperfection in a note, just as a cop smells fear in a suspect, the selective mind sees things that do not fit, that do not belong, that are different and dangerous in some way.
Stephen Strange heard the almost imperceptible click of the sniper’s rifle being put together. He took a few more steps, disturbed by the faint tugging at his subconscious.
A click?
A metallic click? A piece of photographer’s equipment? A strobe being set into the shoe atop a camera? The cover of a tape recorder being snapped back into place over a cassette?
No.
It came from . . .
. . . where?
From up high, from . . .
He started to turn. The dream was with him. He turned in the direction of the sound, his hand shoving at Clea, getting her out of the way. His other hand started to move up, ready to direct a spell. But even a spell needed a target. An incantation needed definition, borders, direction.
Up.
His eyes swept across the scenery into the dimness of the lattice of catwalks. Bulky lights were set in metal holders nailed to wooden railings. Cables were curled on catwalks, or ran down in thick black lines to the floor boxes.
Time seemed to go by with agonizing slowness. It was a familiar feeling, however frustrating.
Where was he? It? They?
A figure bent over a railing in a shadowed area near the roof. Something glittered in his hand.
Once again Stephen Strange attempted to utter a protective spell, and again he knew he would not be in time. Even as Clea tumbled away, startled, Strange knew that the marksman would fire. He saw the explosion of light and knew that he had failed.
Strange fell toward the littered backstage floor just as the bullet exploded against the concrete wall. Chips blasted out in every direction. The strike against the wall was the only sound. The silencer had been very efficient.
Strange realized he was unhurt, and returned to a normal sense. He looked at Clea as he rolled behind a pile of black cables. She was all right, but surprised.
All the movement on the catwalk ceased. The police, guns drawn, ran up from where Joe Peerson was being taken out on a stretcher.
“What’s going on?” one demanded.
Strange pointed at the catwalk. “You’ll find a would-be assassin up there. I would imagine he is an expert, which means you are probably looking for him.”
The policeman gave Strange an odd look, then started sending men up the ladders into the loft.
“Stephen!” Michele Hartley ran down to him, black mink flying. “Darling, darling, are you all right?” She stepped over him as the lights of the television cameras came on. He realized she was upstaging him artfully. As she bent over him, he saw the effect of her low-cut dress.
“Thank you for your consideration,” Strange said and got to his feet. The actress patted him solicitously, then called out to the cameras.
“He’s all right; Doctor Strange is just fine!”
Strange’s expression changed to one of determination. “By the eternal Edora, sorceress of Far Kalisher . . . strike!” The lights blinked out, all at once. The cameramen cursed and set down their cameras to peer once again into their interiors.
“Not a foot of it recorded,” one wailed.
By then Strange and Clea were walking swiftly away. Michele Hartley ran after them. “Stephen? Stephen?” She saw them step around a theatrical flat and she hurried; but when she rounded the corner they were nowhere in sight.
“Where did they go?” she said softly. There was an edge of whimpering in her voice. She really wanted to get him to come back to her hotel with her. She knew she wouldn’t sleep well now. In fact, she dreaded sleep. When she didn’t do certain things, her dreams were bad—very bad. You might even call them nightmares.
The Reverend Jacks went on the air all around the world that night. People listened. Eager crusaders picked up the phone to volunteer. Money was stuffed into envelopes and mailed. Dollars, kroner, yen, pounds, marks, francs, lire—all denominations. Checks were hastily scrawled while others vowed to go to the bank or post office in the morning and have money orders sent.
Hour after hour, as the night moved across the face of the world the television and radio satellites flooded the air with the message from Reverend Jacks.
There were phone calls, telegrams, arguments, debates, earnest conversations with doubters.
“He’s got something there, y’know. I trust him.”
“Faker.”
“It is time for a change!”
“Snake-oil salesman, man . . .”
“No, he makes sense.”
“Boondoggle.”
“Didn’t you listen? It is time for a change. I’m going to sleep on it, and then, by God, tomorrow I’m going to do something about it!”
Night.
Enthusiastic people, thinking of bettering themselves, of bettering their society, went to bed, thinking of Reverend Jacks.
They dreamed. They all dreamed.
“Dark forces—!”
Demons . . .
Alakazar.
Tralucifer nexus.
Pelzarian, the elephant god.
The power of the mind . . . the untapped flow of energy that is the common mind . . . the genetic power of a million million million minds back through the eons . . .
Na-brashon trux Tropoconia!
Invisible energy flowing outward from the core of the exploding universe . . .
Time . . .
Enough time for eternity, and not a nanosecond more . . . but enough time for everything to happen.
Everything.
In every dimension, flashing outward from the unimaginably distant center of the universe . . .
Energy—energy to be used; energy to be tapped, to be controlled, and used . . .
Stephen Strange reached into the endless flow of energy from the beginning of time.
Nexus consanto!
Ridge-backed dinosaurs . . . methane . . . chariots . . . a fragile plane of wood and fabric . . . a goddess . . . an apple with a bite from it . . . a desk sign: Certified Public Accountant . . . Julius Caesar . . . Edmond Rostand . . . John Dryden . . . a Caterpillar tractor . . . Australia . . . Stanislaus Zbyszlco . . . asteroids . . . Excalibur . . . salt . . . a Yorkshire terrier . . . Hannibal’s saddle . . . Sir Thomas More’s favorite cap . . . an Iroquois headdress . . . dirt . . . diamonds . . . fragrance . . .
A tornado of things and swirling air and gasps of black vacuum . . . energy in a billion billion forms . . .
The phosphenes of the mind . . .
Stephen Strange drew from it all, absorbed it into himself, selected, distilled, chose.
“Clea,” he said.
“Yes, Stephen?”
“It is time to confront Nightmare.”
“Again,” Clea said, and Strange remembered.
By Oshtur’s fearsome visage, before which all things do shake . . . By Hoggoth’s hoary legions which bid the cosmos quake . . .
“To the killing ground . . .”
Billie Joe Jacks was wan and pale, his limbs trembling and beads of cold sweat on his forehead. His wife and aides helped him to the cot in his dressing room. Alicia blinked, her eyes unfocusing for a second, then she ordered the aides out. “Let him rest,” she said. Then she, too, left.
A wan light illuminated the barely breathing evangelist. The door opened quietly and Dr. Strange and his student, Clea, entered. They looked at the figure for a moment, then Strange sat down. Without a word he closed his eyes and his invisible astral body lifted from the husk that was Stephen Strange’s mortal flesh.
The astral projection arched through the air and vanished into the head of Billie Joe Jacks.
The faithful Clea stood guard, her feet spread, her senses on full alert, the guardian of the portal to the dreamland of Billie Joe Jacks—and the lifeless body of her lover and mentor.
On the nightside of the world, people stirred restlessly in their sleep. Their dreams were . . . different. They saw bizarre sets, like some surreal movie . . . great black reaches of space, but not empty space. Things moved toward them in the void—nameless things. Doors opened into their collective minds. Green-clad, a long cape moving in an unfelt wind, a tall unkempt figure told them things.
They couldn’t quite understand him.
They couldn’t quite hear him.
He spoke in a hundred languages, in scores of local dialects, in the voices of their fathers, their mothers, their village headsmen, their mayors and dictators and commanding generals. He spoke in the voices of their doctors and film idols and priests.
They couldn’t quite understand him.
They couldn’t quite hear him.
He murmured to them, his voice certain and persuasive. They listened, restlessly. The primitive subconscious listened and believed. With each conversation, with each belief, however reluctant, Nightmare grew in power.
Heads moved on satin pillows and Japanese head-blocks, on down, feathers, and foam. They cried out softly. They began to sweat. They grasped wrinkled sheets with desperate hands. Some awoke, staring wide-eyed into the darkness of mansion and hut, ghetto and suburb, sky and thatch.
As he grew in power, fewer were able to awaken. They dreamed of long halls, complex mazes, tighter and tighter rooms, trying to run through gluelike mud, pursued by nameless fears. But they did not awaken.
They could not awaken. They lived a nightmare. It was endless. The only release was to listen . . . to understand . . . to believe . . . to obey . . .
And Nightmare grew in power.
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