Marvel Novel Series 07 - Doctor Strange - Nightmare Read online

  “I’m glad you’re happy, Alicia.”

  A pause, then Alicia Jacks said, “I just hope this is going to be all right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve . . . I’ve heard him rehearsing his speeches. He used to do them for me, you know? But now he rehearses behind closed doors. But I’ve heard things and . . .”

  “Go on.”

  “It’s a different message. I know he says he’s seen the word of the Lord, that this is a Crusade for Change and he will be offering that change. He’s a good man, Doctor Strange, y’know?”

  “Why is this new message different?”

  “I . . . Lord knows, I . . . it’s just . . . I can’t put my finger on it, Doctor. But every day he . . . well, he looks a little bit worn out. This is going to be a great strain on him. He’s not a kid anymore, you know? But he thinks he is or acts as if he is. Drive, drive, drive, he says, but I don’t know. It’s wearing him out.”

  “Do what you can for him, Alicia. See that he gets vitamins and eats well—and sleeps well.”

  Strange looked at Clea, who looked back from behind hooded eyes. Alicia Jacks apologized for bothering Strange and quickly rang off.

  “Jacks is just one man,” Clea said.

  “And Joe Peerson is another—also that mysterious marksman,” Strange added.

  “A pattern will emerge, Stephen. You’ll see it and act on it.”

  “If I see it in time,” he said.

  Thirteen

  Strange lay awake in their big bed. Clea was asleep next to him, a satin sheet barely covering a curving hip. The constant murmur of the city outside was barely heard in this shrouded chamber. A stub of a candle still burned, putting highlights on the polished carved wood.

  Stephen Strange’s thoughts were troubled in the way they are when a name or a fact one knows, but cannot quite remember, hangs there, just out of recognition, tantalizing and annoying. There was some sort of pattern in all this, he thought. There had to be.

  That is something for another time, he thought sleepily. I’ll think about it . . . tomorrow . . .

  Sleep came quietly.

  Drifting . . .

  Fragments; color; whispers; part of a wall; a line from a spell about transmutation; the shrouded faces of vanquished enemies; a gray plain; walls, walls, more walls . . .

  Strange was walking along slowly next to a wall, looking around in bemused bewilderment. Where was he? What was this? Why was he here?

  The walls were gray metal and very high. Above them he could see the stark angles and planes of a mechanized city. Dark ports opened, cold blue lights snapped on, metallic creatures flew into them, the ports closed. A thin black line etched itself into a rectangle, the rectangle swung open, and a silver-domed human stepped out. He looked at Strange curiously, shrugged and walked on. The rectangle closed. Strange watched the man with the silver head turn and walk through a gray metal wall. A black sphere floated into view between the tall gray buildings, then sank out of sight.

  Strange stopped with his back against the cold gray metal wall. Why was he here? He couldn’t seem to remember exactly why he had come there. Or who he was, except in a vague, uninterested way. A port opened near him, creating itself out of nothing, and a slender young woman stepped out. Her head was hairless and the top portion of her skull was smooth silver. She glanced at Strange, seemed indifferent, and walked on. She wore snug-fitting gray clothing and Strange could see the play of her muscles and the sway of her long gray tail.

  Tail?

  Another black sphere floated into view between the buildings, grew closer and settled down between Strange and the next wall. It was as big as a small house, gleaming black, and heavy. A crimson line appeared, circumscribing a perfect circle, which swung out. A pinkish light illuminated the person who stepped out from the sphere. It was . . .

  It was . . .

  Strange knew he knew the person, but he couldn’t quite see what he or she looked like. If he could actually see the person, he knew he would know who it was. It wouldn’t be difficult. All he needed was a good look . . .

  It was . . .

  The person crossed the space to the nearest wall and melted into it and disappeared. The plug in the black sphere closed and the ball shape lifted and soared away between the dull metal towers.

  Strange walked on . . .

  . . . down a hospital corridor. A green-clad surgeon hurried past, followed by attendants moving a gurney upon which a figure lay under a red blanket.

  Blood.

  Gaping mouth, staring eyes . . . gray skin . . . the color of death . . .

  “Strange . . .”

  The face moved, the eyes stared, already filmed with the gaze of death. “Strange . . .”

  He bent over, the gray bony hand clutched at his shirt front. “Strange ..

  “Yes, what is it? What can I do for you? I’m a surgeon.”

  “Strange . . .”

  “Yes!”

  “Strange . . .”

  “Yes?” he said wearily. It would go on forever, a cycle of frustration and fear.

  He pulled loose from the grasp and strode into an operating room. A nurse put a scalpel in his hand. He put the sharp edge of the tool against the smooth, flawless flesh of a body . . .

  . . . blood . . .

  . . . Clea . . .

  . . . he wielded death in his hand, life and death, but he chose death. Others had died under his hand. He had tried desperately to save them, when he had been a surgeon.

  She was dying, this woman he loved. He could not stop it. With all his powers he could not stop the hand of death.

  He drew back the scalpel. The blood flowed backward, the flesh closed . . . He could do it . . . The room changed, then changed again. It was chaotic and confused. A long gray corridor . . . mirrors that reflected things that were not there.

  He awoke suddenly. There was a siren off in the distance, its shrill note rising and falling, a deep-throated horn blaring. He wiped sweat from his face and looked at Clea. She had turned on her back, the satin sheet stretched tight across her lower hips. She looked beautiful. There was no incision across the soft smooth flesh of her stomach.

  He had difficulty going back to sleep.

  Fourteen

  “Brethren, I speak to you today from the Temple of Light!” The television screen framed Billie Joe Jacks nicely and the lighting technicians had done him justice. Strange detected the makeup, but that was hardly unusual for anyone on the tube these days.

  “Brethren, this hour, this minute, this second is the first moment of the Crusade for Change! This world changes on the surface every day. The world we knew as a child is as distant today as Jupiter is from the Sun! The world of our parents has vanished! Technologically, we are changing as swiftly as some speeded-up movie. The minds of men are delving into everything: the radio waves coming from distant stars and galaxies which are unimaginably far away, the planets, the structure of metals, and the nature of time itself. There are far too many who know how to explode the heart of the atom!”

  Billie Joe’s face was stern, earnest, and commanding. Strange saw what there was in this man that had brought him from a small church in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, to the worldwide network of stations and satellites that was making this broadcast one of the ten most watched programs of all time.

  “Our lives are changing, rocketing into the future at speeds we cannot possibly hope to comprehend. This morning’s world is not tonight’s world and tomorrow’s world is beyond understanding or believing. Man is in danger of being made obsolete by his own headlong progress.”

  Strange nodded. Jacks was taking the usual anti-technology line. If he had been a caveman he would have resisted fire—probably as a tool of the devil.

  “Progress,” sneered Jacks. “Each hour that passes brings this planet, this system of planets, this galaxy forty-three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in the constellation of Hercules . . . and yet there are misfits and malcontents who
insist that there is no such thing as progress.

  “Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, ‘The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.’ And by that test, has our ‘progress’ been progress?”

  Jacks leaned forward into the camera lens. “Has it?” he insisted. He flung a hand into the sky. “I insist that it has not! Anything that makes the world more humane and more rational is progress, I say. That’s the only measuring stick we can apply to it.” He settled back and spoke in calm, even tones. “In a world where the two greatest powers—not even counting the others—can each destroy totally the lands and populations of the other, fifty or a hundred times over with atomic fire, I say we have not made the world more humane or rational.”

  Stephen Strange found he agreed, but he kept his caution up.

  “Speed is frequently confused with progress, but it is not progress. Some say progress is the substitution of a complicated nuisance for a simple nuisance. Well, my friends, I am here today to make a very progressive suggestion: let us not have any more progress!”

  Jacks beamed out at his worldwide audience. “Let us instead have change. Change is not progress. Change is not our enemy. What single ability do we all have? What solitary ability do we all possess? Change.”

  He took a deep breath. “The world is changing faster than people are. Our problem is that we hate change and we hate progress, and we love them at the same time. Change keeps things from becoming static and boring. But what we really want is for things to remain the same . . . but to get better.

  “We have only two things to dread: changing . . . and not changing. But you don’t change the world—you change yourself. You don’t change the men who are learning about microbes or stars. You don’t change the men and women who are building machines or discovering processes. You don’t stop those who are searching our genes and chromosomes for better people. No, you change yourself.”

  Jacks looked straight into the lens. “And that is the most frightening thing of all. You are the only you you know. Without that you, you do not exist. To change that you is to not be.”

  Again he leaned forward. “But you must change. You cannot help it. You were once young and foolish and naïve. Today you are older, wiser and not so naïve. You know the world is complex, not simple. You have changed. The toughest sort of mountain climbing is getting out of a rut. Today, we start making those first steps . . . out of the rut!”

  “Make your point,” muttered Clea.

  “Each new plateau reached by the human race has been the result of some change, some maladjustment, some twisting of the silver cord of life. It is no accident that it has been the so-called ‘maladjusted’ individuals who have been responsible for the ascent of man to higher and still higher levels of comprehension and ability. And I come to you today as one of those maladjusted individuals.” Jacks’s smile took the sting from his words. He spoke on, confidentially and person to person.

  “Progress is merciless. It has no purpose; it just happens. It chews up everyone in its path—and we are all in its path—then spits us out and spits out things and events we cannot understand. The only value it seems to have is to make a few people rich. Progress is manufacturing beer cans that last forever, and expensive cars that rust out in three years. Progress is getting you across the country or across an ocean faster than ever before and then losing your luggage. Progress is inventing television, the greatest teaching tool in history, and boring you to death with it. Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backward faster.

  “Changing is applying your own God-given intelligence to your life and your world. Being changed is what happens to you and me when outside forces force us to be different. But only you can change yourself!

  “Why should you do it? For the Lord? For me? For society? No! But we shall not survive without changing—not you, not me, not your nation nor mine, not our world! To change with change is the changeless state. All things change. This species gives way to that, to one better equipped to survive. But—!” His finger pointed again at the heavens.

  “To become a different you, you must find someone you’d rather be! And there is nothing in our society that does not need changing on one level or another!”

  Stephen Strange was watching with careful eyes, evaluating both method and thought, both meaning and attitude. This was an inspired Jacks, a magnetic personality, one that was certain to gather about him many people. Not just the eternal malcontents who attach themselves to any sort of possibility for change, hoping that when everything is uprooted and turned over they will be on top. No, he would attract the more stable, those who were altruistic, those who sincerely wanted justice for the oppressed and to right the wrongs of society.

  “Today! Tonight! This marks the beginning of the change! The world will be different tomorrow from what it is right now! Why? Because you have listened. Some of you will turn me off, close your minds, and forget my words. But some of you will understand, some of you know that a better world lies ahead, if we work together. We are doing the Lord’s work, we are doing man’s work! Together, hand in hand, and mind in mind, we will change the future! New let us pray.”

  The camera pulled back, showing the crowded Temple of Light and dissolved to the spire over it as the prayers of the faithful rose. Strange leaned forward and pressed the button; the image collapsed in upon itself, became a dot and disappeared.

  “He’s magnetic,” Clea commented. “You do listen.”

  Strange nodded. He had sensed something more than just the personality of the evangelist. He was not certain just what. He stared at the blank gray screen.

  Gray.

  The color of clouds—gray.

  Nightmare was somewhere behind this, Strange knew, but at just what point did he plan to appear? If he thought to make everyone listening to Billie Joe Jacks fall asleep from boredom and invade on a broad front in that manner, he was doomed. Billie Joe seemed to electrify, not bore.

  In fact, Billie Joe Jacks was far more electrifying and commanding than he had ever been—curiously powerful. Strange leaned forward and turned on the television set again, getting a curious look from Clea.

  There was a newsman with a hand mike, holding it in the face of a famous Protestant minister, an evangelist who had adopted the charismatic image of a television evangelist early, and had risen to international fame. “—and I applaud the Reverend Jacks for his challenging statement. I want to say, here and now, that I support his Crusade for Change. It is time that—”

  Clea spoke over the minister. “Everyone is getting on the bandwagon. They see his effect. Remarkable.”

  “Indeed,” Strange added.

  The network had shifted across the country to interview another famed minister. “Carl Eisenberg here with the Reverend Curtis Smith, of the United Protestant Reformed Church. Doctor Smith, what are your thoughts on the first speech in the Reverend Jacks’s Crusade for Change?”

  “Well, Carl, it is a clarion call for unification, there’s no doubt about that. We here at the UPRC have long hoped and prayed for a force to unite all the Christian factions.”

  “Thank you, Doctor. Now to Paul Wright, with Richard Cardinal Buttner, in Philadelphia.”

  Stephen Strange snapped off the set. The silence deepened for a long moment. “They are getting on the bandwagon fast,” Clea said.

  “Aided by the technology he seems to want to destroy,” Strange said softly. But what exactly was the plan?

  Fifteen

  “Doctor Strange, this is Alicia Jacks.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Jacks, what can I do for you?”

  “I hate to be calling you; I know you must have important things to do, but . . .”

  “Go on, please,” he said into the telephone.

  “It’s Billie Joe. He’s . . . he’s not well.”

  “Is the crusade taking that much of his energy?” St
range asked. The well-televised crusade had been taking up much of the airwaves for ten days.

  “He’s . . . weak, Doctor Strange. I’ve been giving him the vitamins, seeing he gets rest and all, but . . . he’s so weak in the daytime. He’s . . . he’s aged five years. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Would you like me to see him again?”

  “Oh, I . . . to be frank, Doctor, I don’t think he’d see you. After . . . after our visit he was, well, very much against you. He called you—no, I shouldn’t.”

  “Go on, Mrs. Jacks, it’s all right.”

  “Well . . . uh . . . he called you a devil, an acolyte of Satan, things like that.”

  “And a charlatan, no doubt.” Strange smiled faintly. “But what can I do for you. I do not practice medicine any longer, you know, Alicia.”

  “No, it isn’t . . .” She seemed very hesitant. “It’s . . . it’s not really medical. I think . . . it’s . . . oh, I don’t know how to put it.”

  “Psychic?”

  “Well, I . . . I just don’t know. He should be well. He’s always been very healthy. We’ve done crusades before, several of them, that were just as demanding, or almost so, anyway. It’s . . . something else, Doctor Strange.”

  “I’ll come see him tonight. You are appearing at Madison Square Garden, are you not?”

  “Yes. I’ll . . . I’ll have tickets for you at the box office. Or would you prefer to come backstage first?”

  “I’d like to get as close as possible, yes.”

  “I’ll arrange it. We are scheduled to start at five o’clock, you know? That gives the engineers time to do a bit of videotape editing before we go on the air at eight.”

  “I understand. Clea and I shall be there.”

  “Thank you, Doctor Strange. I just know you can help.”

  Strange hung up the telephone and stood silent for a minute, thinking. Then he went into his library, hunted through the shelves, and found two thick, dusty volumes. He sat down and started searching through their thick parchment pages.