Marvel Novel Series 07 - Doctor Strange - Nightmare Page 6

  But nothing launched itself out of the mist at him. The cold increased—he sensed this rather than felt it—and the light was leeched away bit by bit. Billie Joe Jacks’s dream was a trap!

  “Back!”

  Dr, Strange twisted in the air, making the glowing shields vanish with a gesture, and he shot back through the mist toward the point where he had entered Jacks’s dreamland.

  Only he was wrong.

  He traveled the distance through grayness as thick as mush and did not find the exit—could not find the exit.

  “This dreamland is without a compass,” he grumbled. He found it harder to breathe and that momentarily confused him. In his astral body he could sail through the vastness of the void, through minds and unknown dimensions, through the very rock of the planet itself—there was no need to breathe. But he was feeling a shortness of breath. It was, in fact, almost the only thing he felt.

  “By the vapors of Valtorr!” he exploded. His hand traced a line of cold fire in the sky, slicing through the mist like a giant’s sword. He carved himself a passage toward the light. But the mist closed in around him, blinding him, filling in the wound as water does after the blade of the paddle.

  He stopped and thrust out his arms to the side, pressing out a mighty psychic weight. “Circle of Shangtor, I command you! Appear!”

  A radiance grew from his forehead, spreading into a sphere and pressed out to his fingertips. Within it, Stephen Strange was bathed in light. He could see and breathe and feel.

  It was then the demons struck.

  Lightning splashed off his shimmering sphere of golden light. A sharp-winged bat shape slanted by, screaming hoarsely. Another followed, screeching wildly, and a second jagged bolt of electricity caromed off his protective shield. A third shape zoomed by, sprinkling droplets of liquid fire. They struck his sphere of light like coals and ran down the sides to drip into the mist and be lost.

  A shadow loomed up in the gray mists, a black shadow, its origin unseen, but monstrous and hulking. A long-fingered hand rose and lightning cracked, making sharp shadows on the clouds. The electricity struck and Strange’s golden sphere rippled with scarlet, then purple, then ragged black streaks. The golden sphere of light vanished.

  “By the hoary hosts of Hoggoth!” Strange exclaimed in surprise. His golden sphere was a new protective spell, tested and defeated on its first serious conflict.

  Against the mountain of mist, Strange saw the shadowy figure raise its long arm again. He wasted no time. His own hand flew up, fingers spread.

  “Cassorak! Spin your web of silver steel!”

  A cold blue flame exploded from his palms, spreading out through the grayness, joining and rejoining in a melded web of gleaming silver bands. Around the edges of the web it crossed and recrossed itself, weaving a still larger network.

  The figure in the clouds launched still another blast of sheer energy against Strange. The flashing strokes of power met and exploded among the silver bands. Sparks flew, the light was blinding, the colors running through the spectrum from intense yellow to fiery red to quivering purple, then back again.

  Strange’s bands of silver steel were twisted and black, bent and tarnished beyond saving. He swept them aside with a word and raised both hands.

  “Reveal yourself, you who would strike from ambush!”

  Only the wind answered his cry.

  The gray clouds closed in again. Dr. Strange turned in the air. “May the dead Dormammu defend me! Begone, this stifling cloak of numbness!”

  The length of his blue-clad body crackled with fiery sparks, running up and down his lean frame like ants on an overturned hill. Then with a rush, feeling returned to Strange’s flesh. Once again he felt the cold air, the whip of wind twisting his crimson cloak, smelled the dry ozone of the aerial heights, and he sucked in the chill air with gratitude.

  But the Sorcerer Supreme had no time to digest the confusion of the dreamland in which he hovered. A lightning bolt, shimmeringly golden, struck at him. The canyons of drifting grayness were illuminated as if a giant strobe had gone off, and Strange was hurtled into the grayness by the great pointed spear of energy.

  Pain suffused his body, crackling off his fingertips as he tumbled without dignity through the cold wet clouds. Gasping with pain, he drew himself up. “By the hoary hosts of Hoggoth!” he exclaimed. “That was a mighty blow—one only a sorcerer of immense power could summon!”

  Strange swam upward through the blinding clouds, aiming back toward the target zone, willing himself through space. His astral body had received a powerful blow, one that would have shattered mortal flesh into disparate atoms gleaming with psychic florescence in the void. In this dreamland of Billie Joe Jacks, Strange realized he could be hurt. And if his astral body were hurt—destroyed—there would be no Stephen Strange. His mortal flesh would go on for a time, waiting . . . Then it would swiftly decompose.

  He could be killed here, in the mind of the evangelist, just as certainly as in the reality of Earth. Still, he bored through the clouds, his senses telling him there was something lurking beyond the mist.

  He was ready when the second lightning bolt flashed. As swift as the great electrical charge was, Strange was faster. The Shields of the Seraphim winked into being and the bolt dispersed its massive energy off their protective ring.

  “By the eternal Vishanti—show yourself!”

  Blue sparks crackled from his fingertips and the clouds melted back before him. Standing ankle deep in foaming mist was a powerfully built black man, his expression scowling and angry. His fists were up, cocked, ready to strike out. In place of the traditional padded gloves were gleaming metal coverings, studded with razor-sharp points that would tear flesh from bone. The fighter wore gray trunks with a black stripe and advanced toward Strange in the fast one-two step of the accomplished professional.

  Strange frowned in puzzlement. A prizefighter had been perhaps the last person he expected to see beyond the clouds. Was this some manifestation of a mad mind?

  Still some distance away, the fighter’s left jabbed out and a blue flash coming from it momentarily blinded Strange. Then the right fist struck out and another great blinding bolt of electricity lanced forth. Strange was hurt; his flesh seemed afire as he plummeted down. But he caught himself and rose swiftly to the level of the attacking prizefighter.

  “By the mighty Arambula, I command you to reveal your name!”

  The fighter jabbed, but the blue flash was only light, not a powerful striking force. The black man seemed torn with hatred and the words came reluctantly. “Joe . . . Joe Peerson . . .”

  The name triggered a memory within Strange. A fighter all right, a contender; someone known and becoming powerful—like Billie Joe Jacks.

  “May the crimson bands of Cyttorak bind you now!” Red bands popped into existence, surrounding Peerson, sinking into the clouds below and extending upward into the swirling mist. They could be seen, faintly, faded into the grayness above and below. Peerson struck at them with his mailed fists, but the columns were like steel and he staggered back, holding his injured hands.

  “May you stay imprisoned until the dream of Billie Joe Jacks ceases to exist!”

  Peerson moaned and stepped forward, his pugilistic nature gone, replaced by a genuine fear. “No! Strange, this dream is not Jacks’s but—” He looked around, fearfully. “This is dreamland, man, don’t you understand that? Nobody’s dream, but—everyone’s dream!”

  Strange frowned. “A dimension of dreams?”

  “Yeah, yeah, you get it. Hey, look, man, if I’m imprisoned here till it stops, hey, I’m here forever!”

  “Go, then, to the land of the undreaming!” He gestured and Joe Peerson disappeared. Then as the crimson columns faded, Strange was struck in the back by a blast of coruscating fire.

  Strange cried out in pain, but the spells woven into the very molecules of his cloak saved him. Even in astral projection, these spells were valid. He whirled, his body once again flooded with almost u
nbearable pain.

  The wall of grayness extended upward as far as the eye could see, pocked with bits of darkness, marred with shadowed clefts, each of which could hold an enemy. “By the sculpting claws of Cappello! Let the clouds begone!”

  The cliff wall of mist swirled and dissipated, moving off to join up with nearby mountains of clouds. What was left was a man, clad in black, holding a weapon of some sort. It was long and silvered, glittering in the shadowless light, the tip of it glowing with a cold fire. The man raised the weapon to his shoulder and aimed it.

  “Eternal Ito! Protect me!” A shimmering veil of rainbow light swept across space between Strange and the marksman just as the glittering weapon fired. A ball of searing flame arced across from the weapon to Strange’s protective veil. The flame rainbowed off the veil, and before it dissipated, the marksman fired again.

  “Rings of Raggador!” Strange cried out. The veil of rainbow light curved out at the edges, surrounding the marksman, encasing him in a fiery ring of light. The light shrank to a dot and winked out of existence. The marksman was gone.

  Nine

  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 b
lack 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.