Marvel Novel Series 07 - Doctor Strange - Nightmare

by William Rotsler

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.

  Twenty-Five

  Blackness networked with crimson filaments. The red lines grew thicker until there were black lines across the scarlet sky. A speck of throbbing light appeared . . . grew . . . and Stephen Strange exploded into the mind dream of the sleeping man.

  At once he noted another speck of light. With disconcerting swiftness, the speck grew to a pulsating sphere of sparkling light. The globe of expanding light exploded with a soundless flash and from it rode the devilish form of an immense black stallion! And on his back was the green-clad Nightmare!

  The green cape flowed behind and the dark baleful eyes glared at Strange. The crimson world swirled around them, the red shrinking to a scarlet net and the black expanding; then the cyclic growth returned . . . The blackness shrank to a thin network of intersecting lines across the crimson world.

  Strange knew that here, in the dream dimension, Nightmare was at his strongest and he, the invader from reality, was at his weakest.

  Nightmare wasted no time. The silver hooves of the ebony mount struck out at Stephen Strange. Here, in the dream dimension, his astral body was not invisible and invulnerable, but all too fragile.

  Strange evaded the hooves but made no spell. He needed to find out more. “You could not keep me prisoner in the negative world,” he said to Nightmare as the creature turned his mount for another charge.

  “But this is my realm, Strange!” Nightmare trumpeted. “Here you will die! You are not fighting one of my lesser creations now, Mage—you are in combat with Nightmare!” His mocking laughter filled the air as the great black stallion charged again.

  Strange again evaded the stallion’s attack. It was not too difficult and the ease of it disturbed him. It was as if Nightmare and his ebony charger were only a diversion.

  Nightmare had always been Doctor Strange’s most enigmatic and most ephemeral enemy. He rode the paths no waking man could measure, to be seen only in dreams, and to vanish in a blink. He struck through the weakest point—the subconscious.

  Time seemed to slow. The prancing steed moved in slow motion, Nightmare’s long cape swirled in graceful settling arcs. The monster’s mouth moved slowly, the words coming as an extended, distorted echo.

  The subconscious . . . that dungeon in our mind where monsters were chained . . .

  . . . The rusty doors opened . . .

  . . . Dark things stirred in the blackness . . .

  . . . A man in a medical gown and cap walked out; he had the face of Stephen Strange . . .

  . . . Me, thought Strange, the me of years ago . . .

  . . . by all the gods!

  . . . The medical man, arrogant and haughty, sneered at the stumbling drunk who emerged from the dungeon . . .

  . . . The broken Stephen Strange, the doctor who floated on the tide of self-pity and liquor . . .

  . . . The surgeon held out something in each hand . . .

  . . . life and death; the ankh and the skull . . .

  . . . The skull chattered; the derelict Strange cowered . . .

  . . . Then the Ancient One floated from the dungeon’s mouth, sitting in the lotus position, but his face was that of a skull, for Strange’s mentor had died . . . or rather, had moved on to another dimension, one denied to Strange . . .

  . . . Mordo, his most ancient of enemies, strode forth, as arrogant and as powerful as any Strange had met. He sneered at everyone . . .

  . . . Other crypts opened around them and other enemies came forth, but all wore the haughty face of Stephen Strange . . .

  . . . No . . .

  . . . A soundless cry came as dust on the wind . . .

  . . . “Magician!”

  . . . Strange saw the last figure to emerge from the dungeon. It was again himself, but the blue-clad, red-caped image of himself at one of the most important and powerful points in his career . . .

  . . . The master of the mystic arts, answerable only to himself, powerful and superior . . .

  “It is your time, Magician!”

  Strange stared at the figures, but there was really only one figure . . . himself—himself at a period when he had no doubts or fears. He knew power then and thought he knew the proper application of it.

  He had seen himself as he was then and that had been the reason Strange had put sorcery aside at that time. He’d become self-righteous, which was possibly the worst sin of all.

  But to face himself, the himself of that time, was not fair. They had fought once before, Strange’s more certain self and his doubting reality, during the epic battle with Eternity.

  “You are confused, Magician!” the other said. “By opening yourself to many realities you have learned that nothing is as it seems! You thought you could triumph—but you cannot!”

  The other Stephen Strange sent a blast of pure force against him. Rays of light exploded, dissolving all the others. Now there were only Doctor Strange and his earlier, more certain, more powerful self. Another blast threw him back, but Strange rose above it with a hoarse cry.

  “I can!” he cried and sent his own blast of lightning at the other figure. They were both bathed in light, battered by the titanic forces each released. The rocky landscape upon which they stood flowed like lava beneath their feet.

  They slugged it out in the most primitive of ways, blasting at each other relentlessly. Yet Strange held his ground, though only barely. The bowl of crimson sky rainbowed and grew dark. The air was hot, the rocky ground smoking and slick.

  Strange uttered a spell, but the other Strange countered it before it was even completed. The other Strange wrote letters of fire in the air, encircling Strange, but he rendered them powerless with a gesture and a curse of rejection.

  They stood at last, gasping and staring, facing each other. The other Strange put his hands to his face in a sudden spasm of pain and when his hands dropped away he wore another face—that of Baron Mordo.

  “Madness, Strange!” he exclaimed.

  The universe fell away from Strange and he toppled into a swirling gray wind. His body stretched and grew soft, his bones softened and his control was nil.

  “Madness!” Mordo cried. “Madness is chaos, the world inside o
ut! Madness is your destiny, Strange!”

  The universe was an endless dropping. Colors melted around him like ribbons, flaming after him as he fell . . .

  . . . and fell . . .

  . . . and fell . . .

  . . . Someone screamed . . .

  . . . The voice was familiar . . .

  . . . It was his . . .

  . . . He could not stop the screaming . . .

  . . . No!

  . . . Clea! He reached out in his thoughts to his acolyte. She stood like a sentinel only a few inches away, through the skull bone of the sleeping evangelist . . .

  . . . Clea!

  . . . Stephen! Her voice was faint but it gave him a marker, a milestone, a measure of where he was. He flashed a tenuous line of intangible thought through the void . . .

  . . . Clea!

  . . . Stephen!

  . . . Her mind was a headland against which the sea of madness broke. Yet the madness plucked at his mind like the swift outgoing tide . . .

  . . . The Ancient One, dissolving away, not in age and self-determination, but in senility and madness . . .

  . . . Clea, a rotting corpse on the altar of a bloated nameless god . . .

  . . . Mordo standing triumphant . . .

  . . . Nightmare’s gloating laughter . . .

  Nightmare!

  In a flash of incandescent memory, Stephen Strange remembered the ending of the titanic battle with Eternity, in which Nightmare had been but a spear carrier. The world had ended, when Baron Mordo’s insanity had gone over the brink. Strange remembered the smashing blow of feeling as the lives of four billion people were snuffed out in an explosion that had obliterated the planet. Clea, Wong, sacred relics and humble stones—gone!

  Strange remembered wishing he had been destroyed, too. Only his own powers, and that of prolonged life granted him by the Ancient One, had saved him. But for what? He remembered floating in the awful emptiness, amid the molecular fragments of the shattered planet, wishing that he, too, were dead . . . regretting the death of friends, the destruction of mankind’s home, of the hopes and dreams of an entire race.

  He realized then that he could not continue to go on bathing in self-pity, in self-recrimination. He lived . . . and he was the Sorcerer Supreme. He could not accept defeat.

  He cursed himself for a novice then. He had remembered Nightmare’s brief appearance during the struggle. He had journeyed to the dream dimension, for it was littered with the awesome remnants of every man’s imagination and the raw material for endless dreams. He had passed through the galactic garbage and universal hopes of a race, careful not to make a misstep that would destroy him, for he was the only hope of mankind.

  He remembered his resolve to hold on to sanity, for if he did not, he was lost . . . and man was lost. The creatures of Nightmare’s domain had attacked him, but he had overcome them. Nightmare loosed a horde of demons upon him; knife-edged beaks and scimitar claws had struck at him.

  “The dark forces gather, then die with the dawn,” he had chanted. “By the light deep within me—begone!” Nightmare had made a mistake; he had underestimated the powers of Stephen Strange. Strange fought through Nightmare’s bastions to confront Eternity and more by logic than by the mystic arts, he had persuaded him to restore the world. From the void . . .

  . . . from the atoms wandering in the nothingness . . .

  . . . from the rough clots of stone and shreds of gas, planets had been created, stars set afire, worlds inhabited with one-celled creatures . . .

  . . . From the primordial ooze came advancing the multicellular creatures. Lightning struck the ooze and started life and there was no stopping it: reptiles and grass, mammals and primates, then man! The recreation of the world had taken place in moments . . .

  . . . with help from . . .

  . . . the Ancient One, now a part of eternity itself . . .

  . . . a world restored . . .

  . . . a mind restored . . .

  . . . from algae to lizards to man, from stone spears to rockets to mystic sorcerers . . .

  . . . sanity regained . . .

  “Nightmare!”

  The madness vanished; the veil was lifted. Strange stood on a spotless plain of white that extended to the featureless horizon in every direction—the killing ground. No cover, no weapons save the mind and the knowledge it contained.

  And Nightmare.

  The gray-skinned figure stood warily, his gray hair disheveled, his green cloak hanging limp, his hands curled and fingers ready for primitive battle.

  “Strange!”

  The Sorcerer Supreme smiled faintly, with the thin echo of ancient haughtiness. “Using my own doubts and fears against me was a good tactic—but not good enough.”

  Nightmare snarled and tentacles rose from the featureless plain in a circle around Strange, long colorless arms that sought his flesh. “By the Ethnarch of Judah!” he cried and the tentacles withered and died under his focused power.

  Naked women sprang from the plain, coming up as featureless blobs that colored themselves into flesh and formed into women and broke loose from the extension. They all had the faces of a mad Clea and they attacked with shrill screeches. Strange banished the harpies with a gesture and a curse from the Book of the Tetrarchs.

  He lunged toward Nightmare and the green-clad ruler of the dream dimension leaped at him. Strange grasped the other’s wrist and the wrist became a loathsome tentacle. The gray face before him became a rotting reflection of his own. The green cape swirled around Strange and tightened into a steel cocoon.

  Strange fought for air as the cocoon tightened. The moment he remembered he did not need air, that this was an astral projection, the strangulation stopped and the cloak fell away. But it had confused Strange; he could be hurt, he knew that, yet he retained aspects of his astral invulnerability. He had no time to think it out, for Nightmare drew darkness around them.

  Twenty-Six

  Everyone fears the dark. It is instinctive, Going back through countless genetic generations to the hairy, heavy-jawed near-humans that cowered naked in caves. Some of the sons and daughters of mankind feared darkness more than others, but all feared it. Unknown terrors lurked in darkness. Death, pain, embarrassment, and things too horrible to even think about lurked in darkness—any darkness: the darkness of night, the darkness of the closed bedroom, the darkness of alleyways and cemeteries and chill streets. Even the darkness of one’s own mind held fears—that great hairy black monster penned in some abandoned, shunned closet of the mind. You only had to open the door and it escaped, controlling you, changing you.

  Man is a predator—even to his kind, even to himself. Madness is deadly for it removes the strictures and restraints that civilization has placed there for its own protection. The beast moves within us.

  Madness is a condition where dreams overflow into life—or life flows into a dream state.

  In the land of the insane, the sane man is destined for extinction.

  None of us are absolutely certain of our sanity. We perch on precarious ledges, crouch on frayed strings stretched across the abyss of certainty. We race barefoot along dark passages filled with tacks, certain we will not stumble, with the beast slavering behind us. Those who believe they are free of any contamination of lunacy are lying, to themselves or others.

  You define your own sanity. The insane always act rationally, always. They proceed quite logically and ruthlessly and with great certainty upon the path they know is true—but their truth is a sham; their foundation is sand.

  Nevertheless, every man has a sane spot somewhere.

  Nightmare’s laughter was a sour odor in Strange’s face. His senses were assaulted. Nightmare’s touch was acid fire. The air reeked of the stench of sewers. The sounds were shrieks, the tastes were foul.

  Fear . . .

  “Fear is the mother of morality,” said Nietzsche.

  “Fear is the proof of a degenerate mind,” wrote Virgil.

  Fear has an unusual power. St
ephen Strange burst free, sending Nightmare staggering back, flaming colors and dripping stench, and blasted him with a bolt of icy flame.

  Fear means you can lose something.

  Fear whispers the worst to you and scampers away.

  Fear corrupts.

  But panic is fear on fire and Stephen Strange was not panicking. He sent flame bolt after flame bolt at Nightmare, keeping him off guard while he thought.

  Could he defeat Nightmare in his own realm? Or could he hurt him somehow, seal him off forever within the dream dimension, and let the forces that were here, the ones that were pressing Nightmare out, destroy him? Or could he aid those forces and destroy him now?

  There seemed to be no plan because it was all plan; there seemed no center because it was all center.

  Stephen Strange floated in a windless sea—no transition from the confrontation with Nightmare. Dreams have sudden and unexplained twists, abrupt changes of scenery, linked only in the most inaccessible depths of the subconscious.

  There was unlimited grayness and he was neck deep in smoky waters. What had Chekhov said? When a man is born he can choose one of three roads. There are no others. If he takes the road to the right, the wolves will eat him up. If he talks the road to the left, he will eat up the wolves. And if he takes the road straight ahead of him, he’ll eat himself up.

  “Pu-sarrumas, son of Tudhaliyas!” cried Strange, calling upon the wizard ruler of the Hittite empire. The waters drained away and odd black things flopped savagely in the receding waters. The darkness overhead lightened. It was dawn on the edge of the world. The sea was smoke blue, the rocks rough and new, the sand coarse and speckled. There was a footprint; it was not a human footprint. It pointed along the shore. Strange heard a plaintive cry. Perhaps a child, or a woman? Someone in pain . . .

  But there is absolutely no inevitability as long as you are willing to contemplate what is happening, thought Strange.

  It’s all a dream . . . but a reality, too.

  Kismet is: what is written is written, and our destinies are graven on stone long before our birth. Protest is useless, anxiety is blasphemy.