PROLOGUE
A LONE figure staggered through the mazy streets of Greenwich Village. It was late at night, and a pounding downpour had driven most Manhattanites indoors. But not this man, who moved along the slick, rain-spattered sidewalks hunched over, trembling, seemingly in the grip of profound torment.
He was searching for a particular townhouse, and at last he found it, on the corner of Bleecker Street and Fenno Place. The residence was made distinct from its neighbors by the large, circular skylight set into its angled roof. With nine panes arranged like an asymmetrical tic-tac-toe board, the skylight resembled some arcane ideogram.
The man climbed the steps and hammered on the front door, which swung inward immediately, as though a visitor had been expected. He stumbled across the threshold, and the door closed behind him. He looked round to see that no person had opened or shut the door. It had operated apparently of its own volition. Some automated mechanism, he assumed.
The hallway was spacious and filled with exotic furnishings: ornate mirrors, cavorting statues, intricately fashioned urns. A broad staircase curved upward. Dozens of candles flickered in tall candelabras, and the heady smell of incense wafted through the air.
The man thought he was alone, but then, as if from nowhere, another man appeared in front of him.
This other was tall and dignified-looking, clad in a loose, bell-sleeved dark blue shirt and skintight leggings, with a sash cinched about his waist and a high-collared cape hanging from his shoulders. Suspended around his neck was a golden amulet, square in shape and featuring a closed eye at its center. The ensemble was completed by a peculiar pair of gloves which reached to his elbows and had a spotted pattern somewhat like leopard-print. His raven-black hair was white at the temples and a neat little mustache adorned his upper lip.
He looked, in short, like exactly what he was rumored to be. A student of the occult. An expert in sorcery. A magician.
“Mr. Trent,” he said. His voice exuded calm, quiet competence.
“You—you know me?” said his guest.
“The face of New York real estate mogul Ronald Trent is not unfamiliar to those who read the newspapers and watch the news.”
“Yes. Yes, of course.” Trent was, in his way, famous. Some might call him notorious.
“And you are in trouble,” said the magician.
“I am,” Trent said. For someone like him, the hardest of hard-nosed businessmen, this was a difficult thing to admit. “How can you tell?”
“All who come to me as importunates are.”
“Importun—?”
Before Trent could finish echoing the word, the magician made a beckoning gesture. “This way. Follow me.”
* * *
“IT’S THE dreams,” said Ronald Trent, sitting in the magician’s book-crammed study. “The dream, strictly speaking. Same one, night after night.”
“And what happens in this dream?” the magician asked.
With some effort, Trent collected himself. Being out in the rainstorm had left him bedraggled, his hair awry, his clothing sodden, but this only added to a pre-existing haggardness. There were dark rings around his eyes, and his complexion was tinged with gray, suggesting he had not slept well lately, or indeed at all.
“Every night,” he said, stumbling slightly over the words, “I dream of a man in a hooded robe, bound in chains.”
“And what does he do, the hooded man?”
“Nothing. Just stares. Stares and stares at me. I can’t even see his face—it’s hidden in the shadows of the hood—but I know he’s staring. It’s like… like he’s judging me.”
“What might he be
judging you for?” the magician said.
Trent hesitated briefly. “Nothing. Nothing comes to mind.”
“I presume you’ve sought conventional treatment for your… problem.”
“I’ve been to doctors. To psychiatrists. The best money can buy. Even to a priest. Pills, therapy, praying, none of it helps. This has been going on for weeks. Weeks!” Trent clutched his gaunt cheeks with both hands, shaking his head from side to side. “I’m going crazy! I can’t focus at work. I’m barely eating. I dread going to bed. Every time I close my eyes and doze off, I’m there in that place. That same blackened, empty landscape, where everything’s all bent and sharp like thorns, and in the middle of it, staring at me, the hooded man.”
The magician nodded pensively. “I believe I know what is plaguing you, Mr. Trent, and I believe I can resolve the matter.”
Trent looked at him with almost pathetic hopefulness. “You can? Really? I was told I should try you. Rumor has it that you specialize in this sort of stuff. If it’s true, if you can make the dream stop, you won’t regret it. I’ll pay you handsomely. I’ll tell all my pals about you. I’ll make you a celebrity.”
“I seek neither wealth nor fame,” said the magician. “My only goal is to help my fellow human beings. Go home now, Mr. Trent. I’ll call on you tomorrow night.”
Ronald Trent left the house on Bleecker Street feeling something he hadn’t felt for a long while. The magician’s confidence had kindled a flame of optimism in him. His nightmare might finally be over.
* * *
TRUE TO his word, the magician arrived at Trent’s the next evening. The real estate mogul lived in the penthouse of a tower he himself had constructed, a couple of blocks away from the city landmark that was the Baxter Building, home of the Fantastic Four. His apartment was an opulent palace with sweeping views of the Manhattan skyline.
Seemingly not surprised nor particularly impressed by the extravagance of the place, the magician encouraged Trent to go to sleep as normal, while he would wait in an adjoining room.
“But how?” said Trent. “How’s that going to work? What are you going to do?”
“It’s very simple,” the magician said. “I shall enter your dream, Mr. Trent.”
“You’ll what?”
“You disbelieve me?”
“No. I mean, yes. I mean, I don’t know what I believe.”
“You came to a practitioner of the mystic arts for aid, Mr. Trent. Have faith that
I know what I’m doing.”
Trent could have protested further but chose not to. The man had a point. Trent was desperate. The magician was his last resort. Enter his dream? Sure. If he said so. Why not?
Trent took himself to bed, popping a couple of sleeping pills which he washed down with a slug of bourbon for good measure.
Soon enough, sleep drew its curtain over him.
Then he was there again: back in that dark, twisted place of winding pathways and leafless trees and broken ground, like a world that had been devastated by some apocalypse, where whatever lived and grew, lived and grew stuntedly and soullessly.
And there, too, as expected, was the robed, hooded man, with his burden of heavy iron chains. He stood observing Trent fixedly, and Trent, as he always did, turned aside to avoid that mute, accusing stare, only to find that the hooded man still stood before him. This was the true hell of the dream. Wherever Trent looked, the hooded man was invariably in front of him. If he ran away in any direction, the hooded man loomed ahead. Trent couldn’t even close his eyes. The dream prevented that.
Something was different this time, however. Trent was no longer alone with the hooded man.
The magician was beside him.
With calm resolve, the magician approached the hooded man. Trent had never had the nerve do this. He had only ever yelled at the phantasmic figure to leave him alone or pleaded with him for mercy, in either instance receiving nothing but stony silence in return. It certainly had not occurred to him to speak with the hooded man conversationally, as the magician was doing now.
“You,” he said. “Whoever you are—whatever you are—why do you torture Ronald Trent in this manner? What has he done to deserve it?”
“He knows,” the hooded man replied in slow, sepulchral tones, like a monk intoning a liturgy. “He knows exactly why I visit him in his dreams night after night. He knows his shame. He knows the crimes he has committed. If you do not believe me, ask Chester Crang.”
Chester Crang.
The name fell on Trent’s ears like a hammer blow.
Of course. That was it. Crang. Crang and all the rest.
The hooded man might have said more, but then came a sound of hooves. They thundered from a distance, growing ever louder as a terrible apparition loomed over the horizon. It sped closer, revealing itself to be a coal-black horse with a horn sprouting from its forehead, like some demonic unicorn. Astride this creature sat a slender wisp of a man. The latter was clad in a forest-green
fishnet bodystocking, with an up-pointing collar around his neck and a tattered cape trailing behind. Red eyes leered dementedly from a face as white as chalk, below a shock of jet-black hair.
The magician turned to confront the new arrival. His jaw set into an expression of steely resolve.
“Nightmare!” he growled. “I had a feeling you might show yourself.”
“With you intruding into my realm, mage,” replied the rider, reining in his mount, “how could I not? Have you come to spoil my fun?”
“I should hope so.”
“Pity. I think, however, that you have overestimated your worth, and you will now pay the penalty.”
Trent’s dream had taken a truly unexpected turn. The magician’s presence had upset the status quo, drawing in a new element—this horrendous horse and its even more horrendous rider.
The two of them, the magician and the personage he had addressed as Nightmare, squared off against each other, clearly readying to fight.
And that was when Ronald Trent woke up.
* * *
HE WOKE up sweating, tangled in the bedclothes, heart racing, as was the case every time he had the dream.
Things had changed, though.
The hooded man had mentioned Chester Crang to the magician.
If the magician investigated the name… If he learned what Trent had done to Crang, and to numerous others like Crang…
That must not happen.
Trent clawed his way out of bed and reached for the semiautomatic pistol he kept in his nightstand drawer.
The magician was seated on the floor in the room next door, in the lotus position. His eyes were shut tight, his breathing almost imperceptibly slow and light. Trent crept towards him barefoot on the thick-piled carpet. He could scarcely believe what he was doing. But he had not risen this far in life, had not accumulated so much money and prestige, only to have some Village weirdo ruin it. Kill him, dispose of the body somehow. No one would know.
He racked a round into the chamber of the semiauto and leveled the gun at the magician’s head.
Just as he was about to pull the trigger, Trent saw the eye on the magician’s amulet open.
Next thing he knew,
he was being bathed in light.
The light emanated from the eye, a beam of brilliance that encased Trent, stopping him in his tracks. It was not simply light. It was more than that, much more. It was honesty. It was integrity. It was truth in all its forms.
The light penetrated through Trent’s skin somehow. It pierced him to his heart, to his soul. It filled every corner and crevice of him with its illumination, finding the shadows within him, the dark places where he stowed his sins.
Trent couldn’t bear to look at it, but neither could he escape it. The amulet’s light exposed him to his core, and all the guilt he had ever felt rose to the surface. Everything he had fought to keep down, pretended he was immune to, came seeping out.
He dropped the pistol. He sank to his knees. Pressing hands to face, Ronald Trent started sobbing piteously, like a scolded infant.
When the bout of weeping had run its course, Trent looked up to find the magician, awake now, standing over him. He held the pistol in one hand and its magazine in the other, with the slide on the gun locked back to show that the weapon was unloaded and made safe.
“Wh—what just happened?” stammered a timorous Trent.
“The Eye of Agamotto protected me while I was in my trance state,” the magician said. “It shone its light on you, delving into the goodness that still resides in you. Yes, even a man like you, Mr. Trent, has some goodness within him, however small and shriveled it may be. And now you know what you must do.”
“Yes,” said Trent. “Yes. Chester Crang. A business associate. I ruined him. Cheated him in several deals. Bankrupted him. Last I heard, he was living out of a rat-infested shoebox apartment in the Bronx, drowning his sorrows in drink. And there’ve been others. Rivals I’ve ruined by undercutting them, refusing to pay their invoices, trampling over them on my way to success. So many! One even committed suicide, so I’m told, because of me.”
“You have much to atone for,” said the magician. “That was what your dream was trying to tell you. The hooded man was a manifestation of your guilt. Perhaps now is the time to start putting things right.”
Trent frowned. “I—I don’t know. Is it possible? After all I’ve done?”
“Redemption is always possible. No life is so far gone along the road of damnation that it can’t be turned around. Believe me, I know.”
The man appeared to speak with authority, and Trent drew encouragement from
this. “Yes,” he said, his voice filled with righteous determination. “Yes! I can make up for what I’ve done. I can repay my debts. It’s never too late.”
The magician gave a thin smile. “It never is, Mr. Trent. See to it that you do what you should, and from then on you will sleep as soundly as a baby.”
“I will,” Trent declared. “I swear it.”
* * *
BACK IN his townhouse on Bleecker Street, which he had dubbed his Sanctum Sanctorum, Dr. Stephen Strange contemplated a job well done. Ronald Trent would keep his vow, he was certain. Like Ebeneezer Scrooge, he had been changed by a dream vision and nothing would ever again be the same for him.
Strange recalled his encounter with the entity known as Nightmare during his intervention in Trent’s dream. He had suspected that Trent’s underlying guilt was so strong that it had attracted the attention of the Dream Dimension’s most dastardly denizen, who derived his power from the misery of sleeping mortals. Trent had unwittingly been drawn into Nightmare’s realm every night in his slumbers, and Nightmare had been feasting off his anguish, like a vampire sucking blood.
Projecting his astral self into the Dream Dimension, Strange had planned on bargaining with Nightmare to leave Trent alone. In the event, the two of them had had a face-off, during which Trent had returned to the waking world. Strange, alerted by the Eye of Agamotto that his physical form was in danger, had fled from the battle before it had even begun, leaving with Nightmare’s mocking laughter ringing in his ears.
“Going so soon, Strange?” Nightmare had crowed. “But we’ve hardly started. Coward! Perhaps you are not all you’re vaunted to be. Perhaps the Ancient One chose his disciple unwisely. I have no doubt we two shall meet again, and then we’ll test your mettle, Strange. Yes, then we’ll see whether you are deserving of the responsibility bestowed upon you.”
Nightmare, like most of his kind, was a braggart and a blowhard. Doctor Strange remained confident enough in his magical abilities that he could outmatch almost any eldritch foe, and those he couldn’t outmatch he could outsmart.
Yet he had not been a fully-fledged sorcerer for long. However well his master, the Ancient One, had trained him and prepared him, perhaps he did not truly know all the dangers he might face in times to come.
He had chosen a difficult, treacherous path in life, and while there would surely be further successful days like today, he foresaw that there would be perilous ones too. Ones where his life, his very soul, might
be forfeit.
Strange sent up a prayer to the great Vishanti, the trinity of gods who guided the hands of virtuous mystics. He beseeched them that whatever trials he faced in the future, he would be equal to the challenge.
Not just for his sake, but for the sake of everyone on Earth.
ONE
IN HIS castle in Transylvania, Baron Karl Amadeus Mordo brooded.
Baron Mordo spent a lot of time brooding. He had much to think about, and much to be resentful about.
Mostly his broodings centered on the Ancient One, his former mentor, under whom he had studied the mystic arts for a number of years. Those years had been spent in the Ancient One’s Tibetan mountain retreat, far from civilization, with none of the comforts and luxuries Mordo was accustomed to. Living according to a spartan regime, sleeping on a straw-pallet bed, eating like a peasant. And all for what?
His hope had been that one day, thanks to the Ancient One’s tuition, he would command every magical secret there was to know. As scion of a family of magic-wielding aristocrats, Mordo felt that ultimate sorcerous power was his birthright. But whereas his parents Nikolai and Sara had sought only to shore up their personal status by magical means, Mordo had harbored greater ambitions. He’d wished to become nothing less than Sorcerer Supreme.
That dream had been dashed when the Ancient One rejected him for another pupil, Stephen Strange. The upstart American had usurped his place in the Ancient One’s favor; soon enough, Mordo had been banished from his master’s presence and had made his way home to Europe sullen and defeated, like a dog with its tail between its legs.
That was months ago. Now, finally, Baron Mordo decided enough was enough. With his magical education incomplete, there remained spells and rituals he had yet to learn, ones that would elevate him from adept to mage. The Ancient One had withheld them from him, so Mordo had to take them by force.
A fire blazed in the huge hearth in Mordo’s private chamber, which occupied a whole floor in one of the castle’s turrets. He watched the flames crackle and writhe, and a broad smile settled upon his face. Mordo was a squarish, heavyset man, with bushy eyebrows and a pronounced widow’s peak whose M-shape was mirrored by the W-shape of the thick goatee beard on his chin. ...
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