Back to GatefoldIssue #1 by Meriades Rai
July 2007 |
The old man was tired. He had journeyed so far, in such a short time, and he had already achieved so much. But he couldn’t afford to rest. Not yet. The fate of this world depended upon it.
Disembarking at Stuttgart Airport, the man instructed the driver of a taxi to take him to the Robert Bosch hospital where he would find his fourth and final unsuspecting quarry. As he travelled, he patted absently at the pocket of the olive green cloak he wore wrapped about his frail shoulders. The pocket was almost empty now, where it had been full not so long ago. He had already made gifts of the sword, the crucifix and the ring; now just the gloves remained. The old man allowed himself a brief smile, but he didn’t dare tempt fate by thinking his mission a success. There was still so much that could go wrong.
The taxi deposited the old man at the hospital and he made his way, slowly and with the use of a gnarled cane, into the reception foyer, where he approached a pretty young woman seated behind the desk.
“Please,” the fellow said in German, his voice little more than a whisper. “I wonder if you could direct me to where I might find a patient of yours? His name is Stefan Strang – and I understand he was recently involved in a terrible accident…”
MARVEL 2000 PRESENTS
"MANIFESTATION"
Written by Meriades Rai
The darkness came to Karloff Amadeus Mordo in his dreams, as it had for a number of his ancestors in centuries past. From that moment on it was as if a fuse had been lit, and a gentle ticking from the shadows began to count down towards the end of the world, a consummation in fire and sorrow and blood.
It happened when Mordo was living in London, working as a successful finance executive, with a young English wife and two beautiful daughters. He had been born forty years ago in the township of Curtea de Arges in the southern Carpathians of Romania, but had fled that country a decade before and had rarely looked back. The night of the visitation he and his wife made love, quietly so as not to awaken the children but with no less passion. It was as he slipped into peaceful languor with his beloved curled against him, her naked skin still deliciously hot, that Mordo suddenly recognised a presence on the edge of his consciousness.
He hadn’t expected the calling, of course, this night or any other; the darkness hadn’t troubled his father, nor his grandfather, and Mordo had long since concluded that all those terrible stories related to him as a child had been nothing more than particularly grim fairy tales. He didn’t believe in his legacy until it came a-crawling, all fingers and tongues upon the skin of his sleep. Then he heard the voice, and it commanded him in whispers.
Mordo loved his family with all his heart. Thus, he wept uncontrollably as he butchered them.
He took a serrated kitchen knife and sawed through his wife’s tender throat whilst she slept, a show of contrition and loyalty that the darkness had requested. In similar fashion he then dispatched his girls, six-year-old twins with coal-black hair and sequin eyes, although their sacrifice was not mandatory; Mordo simply knew that their lives would be bitter and empty without their mother, as his would be, and he wished to spare them that pain. There was, he discovered, so much blood even in the body of a child.
He dismembered the corpses and disposed of the pieces in shoeboxes and plastic bags, buried far and wide in woodland where they would not be unearthed for some significant time, if at all. Then, desolate, he quickly settled his affairs, packed a few belongings – essentials only, nothing to remind him of his beautiful life, now lost – and returned to the ancient castle on the outskirts of Curtea de Arges where he had been spat out of his own parent’s womb in a stone courtyard in the freezing depths of winter. Here, in accordance to the ancestral legacy, Mordo began to prepare for the Manifestation, the first in this world for over three hundred years.
The castle had been built in the 9th Century and had been maintained for over a thousand years by generations of the Mordo clan. Of course, since it had been bequeathed to Karloff it had been abandoned and fallen into disrepair, not least the Great Hall; here, the walls and flagstones were splintered with ivy, and once-glorious tapestries now hung heavy with filth. Mordo had neglected his duties all these years. He had been seduced by the shining lights and the merriment of a brighter, more civilized world beyond the cloying shadows of the mountains and the wild, black forests. He had thought he could be free. But no man can be free when his soul belongs to the dark.
Mordo had almost forgotten the pervading sense of death and sorrow that lingered in this place. He stood beneath the balcony at the far end of the Hall where his mother, naked and in the grip of dementia, had hurled herself to her death when he was only four years old, and again he wept. He fancied that the stone beneath his feet was still stained with her blood, even after thirty years. Certainly the memories were suddenly as fresh as they had ever been. But time was of the essence, and there was little opportunity for reminiscence.
Mordo hired a dozen men, paying them to abduct young girls from as far afield as the Czech Republic and Serbia rather than arouse suspicion among the locals. No one asked questions, for trafficking sex slaves was commonplace in Eastern Europe. Even so, once they’d delivered their cargo in the backs of lorries Mordo slaughtered these hirelings and burned the remains, mindful that the only cure for loose tongues was to remove them at the root before they could inflict harm. He then interned the terrified girls in the dungeons in the bowels of the castle, from where he would remove them one at a time and take them to the summit of the tallest tower. Here he chained them to the walls and proceeded to strip away their flesh with knives heated in a brazier, working meticulously so as to keep the skins as whole as he was able, and to ensure that the victims were alive throughout, enhancing the potency of the sacrifice. Day and night, those poor wretches who remained in the dungeons awaiting their turn in line could only listen to the distant, godless screams that echoed down to them from above, wondering if any brave soul would come to save them.
None did.
For three weeks, Mordo laboured tirelessly. After incinerating any unwanted remains – bones and internal organs – on a pyre, he stitched together over five hundred strips of dried and salted flesh into a carpet to cover the floor of the Great Hall. He then took the many buckets of blood he had collected and daubed the walls, painstakingly, so that not a single stone was left untouched. The stench was overpowering, but he persevered. Eventually, all was ready. Mordo positioned black candles at the five points of a star engraved into the sheet of skin underfoot. He lit them, placed the palm of his right hand to each flame until the flesh roasted and dripped and he was insensible with pain, then anointed the pentacle with his molten skin, stood back and waited. Within the hour, the Manifestation began.
At first, there was a faint soughing in the air, like wind passing through the branches of trees; then, the shadows shifted and thickened and rose. The candle flames flickered, but were not extinguished. The soughing became louder. Now it was interspersed with a wet hissing, like a thousand tongues probing between lips. Weeping. Cracking. The ragged gasps of suffocation. Then, finally, a chorus of brisk sucking, the sound of axe-blades cleaving through succulent flesh.
The darkness congealed. The air was hot, and permeated with the scent of rot and sex and fear. And then, one by one but in quick succession, the five members of the Cabal materialized before Mordo’s eyes. For the briefest second he witnessed something like their true form, and if his recent experiences had not already rendered him insane then his mind would have snapped and shrivelled in shrieking terror. Thankfully each wraith instinctively appropriated a more human countenance, although in all cases they continued to radiate some unique sense of horror.
The first of the five was a man, tall and spindle thin, wrapped in a black waxen shroud, his jagged bones clearly visible beneath a layer of translucent skin. He was entirely bald and there were no eyes in his empty sockets, just shadow. His arms were impossibly long, trailing almost to the floor, and his fingers longer still, culminating in claws as wicked as razors. He moved spasmodically, like a child’s wooden puppet. When he smiled, he revealed a pair of sharp, crooked fangs that protruded from the centre of his upper jaw, surrounded by a haphazard cluster of smaller teeth.
“Welcome,” intoned Mordo, in a dialect that was a blend of old Carpathian and an inhuman tongue that was far more ancient. “The darkness accepts Varnae, King of the Nosferatu and the Seven Realms of Night.”
To the right of the thin man there was a woman, far shorter than her companion and more full-bodied, voluptuous even, clad in swathes and skirts of brightly coloured cloth stitched with fragments of mirror. The woman’s hair was raven black and fell in gentle waves to the curve of her hips. A white mask, the kind that extended from a hand-held pole, fully obscured her face; it was featureless, save for two black eye-slits in the shape of inverted teardrops. Featureless, that is, until it grew an impossible smile – wide and scarlet and wet.
“Welcome,” said Mordo. “The darkness accepts Morganna le Fay, WitchQueen of the Faerie Realms.”
The next member of the circle was another man, although this was perhaps not immediately obvious. He was hunched and misshapen, his body twitching and shifting without pause beneath a cloak of fetid sackcloth. His face was wrapped in strips of filthy linen; what little of his flesh that could be seen was red and scabrous, weeping pus and infected blood. He radiated a stench of utter decay, like meat and intestines left to rot in the summer sun. As he stood there, it became apparent that the movement of his cloak was caused by an infestation of maggots and lice.
“Welcome,” said Mordo. “The darkness accepts The Tatterdemalion, Lord of Nightmares.”
The fourth affiliate was most definitely female. Her body was slender and supple, and scarcely clad in a gauze of sheer, black nylon that clung to her like a second skin. Her flesh was dark, a scorched copper-red; her hair was russet threaded with gold, and fell about her shoulders in what must have been hundreds of intricately woven braids. Her breasts were thrust high and firm, her legs long and slick and culminating in cloven hooves. Her eyes were the colour of smoking coals. She danced in the shadows now, slow and wanton, her body moving like some forbidden music, radiating the musk of lust. At the juncture of her thighs, her nylon-sheathed sex throbbed like a second heart.
“Welcome,” Mordo breathed. “The darkness accepts Satana Blackheart, Priestess of the Hellbound Islands of Pain, Desire and Regret.”
And, finally, there was the last of them. A man, slight and elegant, dressed in a robe of indigo silk trimmed with black. There was little that was remarkable about him, save for one thing – he possessed no head. In its place there was a shifting whorl of smoke and flame and ghostly light, flecked with tiny slivers of what looked like black glass. There were no recognisable features – no eyes, no mouth – and yet, for any who gazed upon this individual, there was no doubting that he was staring back in turn. And, if one listened hard enough, they might hear the echo of distant drums.
“Welcome,” Mordo whispered. “The darkness accepts Dormammu, Emperor of The Eternal Dread.”
For a moment, none of them spoke. The shadows pulsed. The light of the candles guttered and spat. And then, slowly, four turned to face one.
Dormammu.
“You commanded the Manifestation?” rasped Varnae, in the same ancient tongue as that used by Mordo. “I did not give permission.”
“Nor I,” murmured Morganna le Fay, although the red smile on her mask did not flicker as she spoke. Her voice was as soft as the wings of a butterfly, beating fitfully as it succumbed to formaldehyde. “There are more appropriate ways to instigate an audience with us, as you well know.”
Dormammu turned in the direction of the WitchQueen, the conflagration between his shoulders shimmering. When his disembodied voice came – deep and fierce, with the resonance of a hammer pounding rock – the very air around them all seemed to crackle. “When a threat arises that would imperil each of us and our fiefdoms, I have no desire to indulge in protocol,” he declared. “There has been a rift…”
Dormammu’s crown of fire flickered, and the shadows seemed to deepen about him.
“He is free,” he hissed. “Escaped from the chamber of hooks and now abroad here, the Junction of Worlds… our feeding grounds. He means to gather a new coven against us. Four haunted souls, to be woven and stitched into the tapestry of our destruction. Four disciples. Four defenders.”
The five members of the Cabal seethed as one, swaying like corn beneath a bloodstained summer sun.
“We must hunt now, as we did before,” Dormammu breathed. “And when we find them… whoever these wretched defenders prove to be… they will perish screaming, in fire and blood and pain.”
# # # # # # # # # #
The nurse’s name was Gretchen and she was just his type – cropped, ash-blonde hair, sparkling blue eyes, and an athletic figure with plenty of half-moon curves. Not so long ago, he would have charmed her breath away. But not any more. Not since the accident. Lovely Gretchen was all sultry smiles whenever she leaned in close to straighten his sheets and fluff his pillows, but that just made everything worse. She wasn’t flirting with him. She pitied him.
It was enough to make Stefan Strang wish that he’d never been dragged from what remained of his car before the gas tank had ignited. There was only one release from this nightmare – and that was death.
“Ah, Doctor Strang… good morning. Did you sleep well?”
A man’s voice, speaking in German. As Gretchen padded away to tend to another patient, her pert rump moving suggestively in her starched white uniform, Stefan glowered at the fellow who was lurking at the foot of his bed like a baleful troll, clipboard in hand. Doctor Matthias Kramer was a short, portly fellow, balding, with more than one chin and spectacles that didn’t suit him. A brother in the medical profession, although nowhere near as celebrated and successful as Stefan, who was one of the foremost brain surgeons on the planet. At least, he had been before the accident. Now he was just another nobody, drifting amongst the wreckage.
Apparently, Stefan had met Kramer a year ago at a conference in Paris. He had even spoken to him at length about the merits and pitfalls of some pioneering new interventional cardiology technique. Upon meeting again in less convivial circumstances a few days ago Stefan hadn’t remembered a word of their conversation. In fact, he hadn’t recalled Kramer at all. Why would he? One didn’t tend to recall fat and balding and ordinary, after all; only a man like Stefan, tall and elegant, with black hair and olive skin and dark, hypnotic eyes the colour of decadence, was likely to be memorable over time.
“I told you,” Stefan rasped, his voice reduced to a gravelly whisper by the injuries he had sustained to his throat and chest, injuries that would never fully heal. Unlike Kramer he spoke in English. “Don’t call me Doctor any more. There’s hardly any point, is there?”
Kramer smiled, briefly. “You earned your title, Stefan,” he murmured, dropping the German. “All those years at the best medical schools, and your training throughout Europe, Africa, the United States…”
“But none of that’s any use to me any more, is it? Is it? Isn’t that part of the rehabilitation program here? To get me to accept what fucking happened to me?”
Kramer continued to smile, and began to check off items on his clipchart. If he was making any attempt to conceal his schadenfreude he was failing. Stefan glared at him hatefully, bile rising in his throat. So patronising, so false…
…so much like him. Doctor Kramer was taking a measure of delight from this situation because Stefan was and had always been a sly, objectionable, recalcitrant bastard. Almost as much of a bastard as karma.
Stefan closed his eyes, and felt his misery overwhelm him. His face was swarthy, his jaw itching. He needed a shave, he needed a bath. He needed a cigarette. And he needed… he needed…
Lying there in the hospital bed, he opened his eyes and lifted his arms from beside him. He stared at the bandaged stumps at the end of both wrists, where his hands had once been before the accident. Before the amputation. Karma and then some. Tears welled, and he felt his lower lip begin to tremble. He needed his hands back. Good Christ, he needed his motherfucking hands back.
“You have a visitor,” said Kramer.
Stefan glanced across at him, blinking. “What?” he breathed. His heart skipped. “Clea…?”
Kramer’s eyes narrowed. “No,” he said, slowly. “No, I’m afraid we still haven’t been able to track down your mysterious Miss Belsamo – any more than the police have, as a matter of interest. This is a gentleman. An elderly fellow. He arrived here about half an hour ago and asked for you by name, although he steadfastly refused to give us his own in return. Very persistent. He’s become most agitated waiting for you to awaken. Normally we’d have sent him away, but he seems so frail we were afraid he’d have a heart attack on the front steps. Will you speak to him?”
Stefan said nothing for a moment or two. His face was itching. His stumps were… twitching. It was driving him insane.
“No,” he whispered bitterly, laying his head back against his pillow. “Get rid of him. I need a bath.”
Kramer sighed. “Whatever you say, Stefan. Although I don’t know how the old goat will take the news…”
# # # # # # # # # #
The accident occurred on a winding mountain road between Goppingen and Augsburg, some fifty kilometres southeast of Stuttgart. The ascent was steep, the road narrow and full of treacherous switchbacks, but the driver of the silver Porsche 911 Carrera 4S convertible was a slave to speed, and a sense of danger. It was a beautiful late summer evening, the setting sun haemorrhaging scarlet beyond the dark skyline of the Swabian Alps. The air was cool. Tchaikovsy’s Romeo and Juliet was erupting from the disc player like an epiphany, grand and rousing. Overhead, the universe sparkled in the gathering twilight.
For Stefan Strang, life was wonderful. But not for much longer.
He didn’t hear the purr of his car cell phone over the noise of the music, but he saw its blinking light. The miniature screen displayed the caller ID. Stefan smiled. He switched off the stereo and held the cell to his ear.
“Hey, lover,” he murmured in Italian rather than German or English, his tone intimate. “You change your mind about tonight? Because I’m only an hour away, and I can - ”
“Doctor Strange?”
Stefan flinched at the voice on the other end of the cell. It wasn’t that the speaker had got his name wrong – almost everyone did, after all – but rather that he was unexpectedly male.
“Who is this?”
“My name, Doctor,” the unfamiliar voice snarled, “Is Guiseppe Balsamo. I trust you know who I am – after all, you’ve been fucking my wife’s brains out in a château in Lausanne three times a week for the past six months.”
Stefan’s eyes shot wide and dark, and his right hand gripped the wheel whilst his left pressed the cell to his ear. “Oh, Christ,” he breathed. “Fuck. Listen. I’m sorry, I… I think there may have been some misunderstanding here. You see - ”
“Don’t insult my intelligence with more lies, Doctor. I’ve heard far too many of those already, from the faithless slut I married.”
Stefan licked his lips, his heart hammering in his chest. “Clea,” he hissed. “Is she…?”
“You sound concerned, my friend,” the voice hissed. “Did she tell you what kind of man I was? That she was afraid of me, of what I’d do if I ever found out about you and her rutting in your little love nest like filthy pigs? Well, she was right to be.”
“Now, listen. If you’ve fucking done anything to - ”
“I hope you both said your goodbyes at the end of your last sordid liaison, Doctor. As far as my wife’s concerned, she’ll not get another chance. For anything.”
The line clicked, then went dead. Stefan’s face was deathly pale, his brow reamed with sweat. He was close to hyperventilating. The Porsche swayed, from one side of the narrow road to the other, but he didn’t really notice. Fuck. Fuck. His mind was awhirl. He knew that he needed to call the police. If even half of what Clea Balsamo had told him about her sadistic shit of a husband was true, then –
Stefan never even saw the other car, save for a sudden flash of headlights in the split second before impact. The Porsche was hogging the centre of the road. There was no avoiding the oncoming vehicle. There was no time to scream. There was a violent, ungodly crunch of splintering metal, followed by the screech of rubber and the shatter of glass. The world bucked and twisted and snapped. There was pain. There was blood. The world turned upside down, once, then again. Metal splintered like kindling, shards and flecks lacerating his skin, especially about his wrists and forearms. So much blood.
When the rescue team pulled Stefan from the wreckage they were relieved – he, at least, was a survivor, compared to the four fatalities incurred from the other car. It was just too late to save his hands…
# # # # # # # # # #
Stefan jolted, and let out a half-cry. His eyes flew open, and his began gulping for breath. Beside him, nurse Gretchen glanced down in concern, frozen in the act of pouring her patient a glass of ice water from a pitcher.
“Hey,” she said, gently. “Doctor Strang? Please, be calm. You were dreaming. It was only a dream.”
Stefan fought against his panic. “The accident,” he rasped. “God, the pain…”
Gretchen rested the back of her hand against his forehead, and sighed. “You’re feverish again. These nightmares are getting worse, not better. I need to get Doctor Kramer. Unless, of course… I can help.”
There was something about the tone of her voice that made Stefan look up, his breath catching in his throat. Suddenly, there was a sense of anticipation in the air, an electric charge. Gretchen was smiling, but no longer with kindness. Instead, her red lips were curled with mischief, and her blue eyes glinted with something like hunger. She cocked her head to one side, then raised her hands to the neck of her tunic. She undid her top button, revealing the barest swell of her bosom. Then, slowly, her fingers moved down and settled on the next button. And then, more slowly still, the next…
“Gretchen?” Stefan said, weakly, unable to tear his gaze away. “Listen, not that I don’t appreciate this, but I’m thinking now probably isn’t the best - ”
“But I’ve been such a good little girl,” the nurse replied, with that mocking pout. “How long are you going to keep me waiting for what I want?”
She unlaced the final button, then slowly drew her tunic apart, revealing an expanse of smooth flesh. She wasn’t wearing a chemise, or a brassiere. Her breasts spilled free, her nipples hardening at contact with the cool air. Stefan’s jaw sagged; he wanted to object again, but he was mute with astonishment. He was also, exasperatingly but predictably, hardening with arousal. Gretchen teased the fingers of one hand beneath the waistband of her white skirt and gently circled her hips, her eyes never leaving his. Stefan was transfixed – until he spied a hint of movement from the corner of his vision. Reluctantly he glanced away from the angel at his side, down to the foot of the bed…
…and his heart spasmed.
There was a spider crawling over the hill in the sheets made by his slightly raised knees, starkly black against the white linen. A big fucking spider. The biggest he’d ever seen. A tarantula. It was the size of a small dog. Christ, he could see his own stricken expression reflected in its eyes.
“Jesus fuck,” Stefan croaked, discovering to his horror that he was unable to move. He was paralysed. His head was swimming. The tarantula continued to crawl towards him. Slow. Its step was hypnotic. It clambered over the lump of his distended groin, and the sensation made him feel physically ill. And then, appearing over the mound of his knees… there came another. And a second later, a third. And, even worse, there was now movement beneath the sheet as well.
“Gretchen,” Stefan whispered, his voice almost tearful. “Gretchen? What’s happening? Please, I don’t… I can’t…”
He looked back at the nurse, who had now discarded her tunic and was feeling her own breasts, her head thrown back in ecstasy, her eyes closed, a low moan rising in the back of her throat. As Stefan watched, she began to pinch and pluck at her nipples, making them harder, rougher, redder. Then she started to wriggle her fingers. Slowly. Like spider’s legs.
Gretchen stepped back from the bed. Her skin was rippling, about her ribs and stomach. Like the sheets. There was something moving beneath her skin. The flesh of her breasts was undulating. And her throat. She brought her head forward once more, her mouth slit wide with a dark smile. And then… and then, with a hiss, her eyes simply vanished, sinking back into her face like it was quicksand, followed by her nose.
Stefan screamed. Gretchen’s mouth twitched, then detached and turned sideways, so that it now split her face vertically, from chin to crown. It wasn’t a mouth any longer, although it still had painted lips. It was a vulva. It trembled, and sucked, wet and hungry. Shallow breathing. Shuk, shuk, shuk.
And then it opened, and the legion of spiders inside her began to emerge, one after another, born scuttling into the light.
Stefan’s shriek faded to a gasp. He felt crawling on his chest, beneath his arms, about his groin… and then, at the opening of his mouth, legs skittering about his lower lip, searching for his tongue, reaching down his throat, into his -
“Only you can send them away, you know. Only you can stop it.”
In that instant, both Gretchen and her arachnid brood flinched as if burned by flame and fell away. Not fully – the bed sheets remained black with the spiders’ seething mass – but enough for Stefan to turn his head in search of the source of that unfamiliar, rasping voice, his eyes wide with panic. Standing in the doorway was an old man in a green cloak, small and slight, snow-haired, his skin grey and weathered, his eyes narrowed to tiny buttonholes. The man was smiling, and holding something out towards him. Something… peculiar. To Stefan’s amazement, he saw that it was a pair of gloves, seemingly woven from gold and silver silk. The realisation spurred something in him other than the fear that had overwhelmed him up until that point – it roused anger.
He reared up, scattering tarantulas in all directions, his expression livid. “Gloves?” he shrieked. “Gloves? Is that supposed to be fucking funny?” He raised his arms, brandishing his bandaged stumps. “Look at me! Look! How the cunting motherfuck am I supposed to wear fucking gloves?”
The old man nodded slightly, uncowed in the face of this apoplexy. He moved forward then, with an awkward gait, and placed the silk gloves on the bed, seemingly oblivious to the spiders that were collecting there, just as he paid no heed to the faceless thing alongside him that was once nurse Gretchen. He then took one of the gloves and began to pull it over Stefan’s right stump.
Stefan made to pull his arm away, but the old man gripped his desecrated wrist and held him firm with surprising strength. He snapped the glove tight. For a moment, Stefan just stared towards his hand, uncomprehending. His… hand. He wriggled his fingers in the golden gloves. Clenched. And when the old man slid the other glove onto his left stump, Stefan flexed that hand too.
“Jesus Christ,” he whispered, tears beginning to roll down his cheeks. “Oh, God. Oh, please. This is sick. This isn’t right. This - ”
“Send them away, Stefan,” the old man said, softly. “The fear will begin to grow again, quickly – it will feed them, and it will suffocate you. You will die, unless you send these nightmares back where they came from…”
Stefan frowned, unable to tear his gaze from his new appendages. Then, when he turned his hands over to gaze upon his palms, he saw that the silk was stitched with a series of intricate runes. As he watched, the runes began to shift with a gentle sigh, like tall grasses whispering in the breeze. It was as if they were… speaking to him? Somehow, he was able to translate the runes into words – words of a language that had not been uttered on this world in a geological age, and which were difficult for a human tongue to control, but which it was imperative to speak. For when he uttered those words, the spiders screamed.
Stefan closed his eyes, as if that would block out the terrible, alien shrieking. The runes were etched into his mind, and even there they continued to dance. He spoke them slowly, carefully, over and again. A mantra. An enchantment. Raw, ancient magic.
He fancied that he could feel the beast that was once Gretchen reaching for him, hands hooked into claws. The female body had vanished entirely now, replaced by a misshapen frame swathed in fetid cloth, with pustulous skin emitting malodorous ooze. This creature had a name, the runes whispered. Tatterdemalion. Lord of Nightmares made flesh. It did not belong here. Send it away.
Stefan grimaced. The Tatterdemalion snarled, looming ever closer.…
“Get the fuck out of my face you stinking, cabbage-faced ratcunt!”
The world shuddered, and was fleetingly dark with blood and scum…but when Stefan opened his eyes a moment later, the nightmares were gone. No more spiders. No more creature. And no more Gretchen; poor, poor Gretchen. But his hands? His hands remained, inside the gloves. Yet only inside – somehow, instinctively, he knew this. Without them, he could never be whole. The realisation was bittersweet.
He turned his head and stared at the old man. He wouldn’t know it until he next caught sight of his reflection, but what he had just experienced had caused his dark hair to turn white at the temples, and for his brown eyes to fracture with a glister of silver, as if he had suddenly aged twenty years in as many minutes. The old man smiled, as if in recognition, and nodded.
“Well done, my friend,” he breathed. “Well done. You are the fourth and final disciple. Perhaps the strongest of them all, for the ancient magic speaks through you. And thus, though the edges of this world scorch and curl as the darkness rides, so there shall be resistance…
“…and the Earth shall have Defenders.”
next issue: Doctor Stefan Strang is the first of The Defenders. Who shall be the second – and will she survive the murderous intentions of Morganna Le Fay’s goblinkind? Don’t miss “Rehabilitation”!
author’s notes
It’s amazing, really (although sadly predictable). Somehow, they blew it.
Eight years back the powers that be at Marvel brainstormed the idea of the Ultimate line, re-imagining their most popular characters and concepts from scratch for a modern audience and jettisoning all the suffocating continuity accumulated during the previous four decades. It should have revolutionised the company and their approach to comics. Maybe it did, for a while; the Spider-Man and X-Men titles, whilst varying wildly in quality from entertaining to execrable, have racked up significant 80-100 issue runs with consistently high sales, so they must be doing something right. A shame then that the third of the big three titles, The Ultimates, took it upon itself not only to squander the opportunity for a first class Ultimate Avengers series but also to piss the concept of Ultimate Defenders up the wall by using them as a (not very funny) throwaway joke.
Well done, Mark Millar. You can fuck off now.
Neither incarnation of The Defenders – the classic one with Doctor Strange, The Hulk, Namor and The Silver Surfer, or the one with Doctor Strange and An Ever-Changing Selection Of Other Characters – has ever really been treated with respect. It’s a shame, because the idea of a non-team of protagonists who are typically loners coming together to face down a world-shattering threat is as terrific a concept now as it was back in the 70s. When that threat is supernatural or otherworldly in origin, and the characters in question are similarly aligned to the darker, grimmer side of the Marvel milieu, well, all the better. Midnight Sons? Marvel Knights? That’s The Defenders under another name, pure and simple.
I’ve wanted to write an Ultimate Defenders series – a real one – since I read Millar’s silent fart of an effort. I wanted to make it dark. I wanted to make it nasty. I wanted to blend horror, fantasy and a vague dash of erotica in one surreal mix. And I knew, instantly, which four heroes I wanted to use (as well as which villains to throw into the melting pot). You’ve already met Stefan Strang. He got the gloves. Who was gifted with the sword, the crucifix and the ring, as so tantalizingly mentioned? Well, you’ll just have to wait and see. There’s one thing I promise, however: these Defenders are the real deal.
And if they ever have the good fortune to happen upon Mark Millar on some lonely moor one dark and rainy night, maybe they’ll roast him on a spit, sentence his soul to eternal damnation and then kick his fucking head in. You know. Just to prove a point.
If you’d like to give feedback on this series, positive or critical, please don’t hesitate to drop a line to [email protected]
For those interested, a list of my fanfiction can be found at http://meriadesfiction.livejournal.com
Thanks for reading!
- Meriades Rai
Disembarking at Stuttgart Airport, the man instructed the driver of a taxi to take him to the Robert Bosch hospital where he would find his fourth and final unsuspecting quarry. As he travelled, he patted absently at the pocket of the olive green cloak he wore wrapped about his frail shoulders. The pocket was almost empty now, where it had been full not so long ago. He had already made gifts of the sword, the crucifix and the ring; now just the gloves remained. The old man allowed himself a brief smile, but he didn’t dare tempt fate by thinking his mission a success. There was still so much that could go wrong.
The taxi deposited the old man at the hospital and he made his way, slowly and with the use of a gnarled cane, into the reception foyer, where he approached a pretty young woman seated behind the desk.
“Please,” the fellow said in German, his voice little more than a whisper. “I wonder if you could direct me to where I might find a patient of yours? His name is Stefan Strang – and I understand he was recently involved in a terrible accident…”
MARVEL 2000 PRESENTS
"MANIFESTATION"
Written by Meriades Rai
The darkness came to Karloff Amadeus Mordo in his dreams, as it had for a number of his ancestors in centuries past. From that moment on it was as if a fuse had been lit, and a gentle ticking from the shadows began to count down towards the end of the world, a consummation in fire and sorrow and blood.
It happened when Mordo was living in London, working as a successful finance executive, with a young English wife and two beautiful daughters. He had been born forty years ago in the township of Curtea de Arges in the southern Carpathians of Romania, but had fled that country a decade before and had rarely looked back. The night of the visitation he and his wife made love, quietly so as not to awaken the children but with no less passion. It was as he slipped into peaceful languor with his beloved curled against him, her naked skin still deliciously hot, that Mordo suddenly recognised a presence on the edge of his consciousness.
He hadn’t expected the calling, of course, this night or any other; the darkness hadn’t troubled his father, nor his grandfather, and Mordo had long since concluded that all those terrible stories related to him as a child had been nothing more than particularly grim fairy tales. He didn’t believe in his legacy until it came a-crawling, all fingers and tongues upon the skin of his sleep. Then he heard the voice, and it commanded him in whispers.
Mordo loved his family with all his heart. Thus, he wept uncontrollably as he butchered them.
He took a serrated kitchen knife and sawed through his wife’s tender throat whilst she slept, a show of contrition and loyalty that the darkness had requested. In similar fashion he then dispatched his girls, six-year-old twins with coal-black hair and sequin eyes, although their sacrifice was not mandatory; Mordo simply knew that their lives would be bitter and empty without their mother, as his would be, and he wished to spare them that pain. There was, he discovered, so much blood even in the body of a child.
He dismembered the corpses and disposed of the pieces in shoeboxes and plastic bags, buried far and wide in woodland where they would not be unearthed for some significant time, if at all. Then, desolate, he quickly settled his affairs, packed a few belongings – essentials only, nothing to remind him of his beautiful life, now lost – and returned to the ancient castle on the outskirts of Curtea de Arges where he had been spat out of his own parent’s womb in a stone courtyard in the freezing depths of winter. Here, in accordance to the ancestral legacy, Mordo began to prepare for the Manifestation, the first in this world for over three hundred years.
The castle had been built in the 9th Century and had been maintained for over a thousand years by generations of the Mordo clan. Of course, since it had been bequeathed to Karloff it had been abandoned and fallen into disrepair, not least the Great Hall; here, the walls and flagstones were splintered with ivy, and once-glorious tapestries now hung heavy with filth. Mordo had neglected his duties all these years. He had been seduced by the shining lights and the merriment of a brighter, more civilized world beyond the cloying shadows of the mountains and the wild, black forests. He had thought he could be free. But no man can be free when his soul belongs to the dark.
Mordo had almost forgotten the pervading sense of death and sorrow that lingered in this place. He stood beneath the balcony at the far end of the Hall where his mother, naked and in the grip of dementia, had hurled herself to her death when he was only four years old, and again he wept. He fancied that the stone beneath his feet was still stained with her blood, even after thirty years. Certainly the memories were suddenly as fresh as they had ever been. But time was of the essence, and there was little opportunity for reminiscence.
Mordo hired a dozen men, paying them to abduct young girls from as far afield as the Czech Republic and Serbia rather than arouse suspicion among the locals. No one asked questions, for trafficking sex slaves was commonplace in Eastern Europe. Even so, once they’d delivered their cargo in the backs of lorries Mordo slaughtered these hirelings and burned the remains, mindful that the only cure for loose tongues was to remove them at the root before they could inflict harm. He then interned the terrified girls in the dungeons in the bowels of the castle, from where he would remove them one at a time and take them to the summit of the tallest tower. Here he chained them to the walls and proceeded to strip away their flesh with knives heated in a brazier, working meticulously so as to keep the skins as whole as he was able, and to ensure that the victims were alive throughout, enhancing the potency of the sacrifice. Day and night, those poor wretches who remained in the dungeons awaiting their turn in line could only listen to the distant, godless screams that echoed down to them from above, wondering if any brave soul would come to save them.
None did.
For three weeks, Mordo laboured tirelessly. After incinerating any unwanted remains – bones and internal organs – on a pyre, he stitched together over five hundred strips of dried and salted flesh into a carpet to cover the floor of the Great Hall. He then took the many buckets of blood he had collected and daubed the walls, painstakingly, so that not a single stone was left untouched. The stench was overpowering, but he persevered. Eventually, all was ready. Mordo positioned black candles at the five points of a star engraved into the sheet of skin underfoot. He lit them, placed the palm of his right hand to each flame until the flesh roasted and dripped and he was insensible with pain, then anointed the pentacle with his molten skin, stood back and waited. Within the hour, the Manifestation began.
At first, there was a faint soughing in the air, like wind passing through the branches of trees; then, the shadows shifted and thickened and rose. The candle flames flickered, but were not extinguished. The soughing became louder. Now it was interspersed with a wet hissing, like a thousand tongues probing between lips. Weeping. Cracking. The ragged gasps of suffocation. Then, finally, a chorus of brisk sucking, the sound of axe-blades cleaving through succulent flesh.
The darkness congealed. The air was hot, and permeated with the scent of rot and sex and fear. And then, one by one but in quick succession, the five members of the Cabal materialized before Mordo’s eyes. For the briefest second he witnessed something like their true form, and if his recent experiences had not already rendered him insane then his mind would have snapped and shrivelled in shrieking terror. Thankfully each wraith instinctively appropriated a more human countenance, although in all cases they continued to radiate some unique sense of horror.
The first of the five was a man, tall and spindle thin, wrapped in a black waxen shroud, his jagged bones clearly visible beneath a layer of translucent skin. He was entirely bald and there were no eyes in his empty sockets, just shadow. His arms were impossibly long, trailing almost to the floor, and his fingers longer still, culminating in claws as wicked as razors. He moved spasmodically, like a child’s wooden puppet. When he smiled, he revealed a pair of sharp, crooked fangs that protruded from the centre of his upper jaw, surrounded by a haphazard cluster of smaller teeth.
“Welcome,” intoned Mordo, in a dialect that was a blend of old Carpathian and an inhuman tongue that was far more ancient. “The darkness accepts Varnae, King of the Nosferatu and the Seven Realms of Night.”
To the right of the thin man there was a woman, far shorter than her companion and more full-bodied, voluptuous even, clad in swathes and skirts of brightly coloured cloth stitched with fragments of mirror. The woman’s hair was raven black and fell in gentle waves to the curve of her hips. A white mask, the kind that extended from a hand-held pole, fully obscured her face; it was featureless, save for two black eye-slits in the shape of inverted teardrops. Featureless, that is, until it grew an impossible smile – wide and scarlet and wet.
“Welcome,” said Mordo. “The darkness accepts Morganna le Fay, WitchQueen of the Faerie Realms.”
The next member of the circle was another man, although this was perhaps not immediately obvious. He was hunched and misshapen, his body twitching and shifting without pause beneath a cloak of fetid sackcloth. His face was wrapped in strips of filthy linen; what little of his flesh that could be seen was red and scabrous, weeping pus and infected blood. He radiated a stench of utter decay, like meat and intestines left to rot in the summer sun. As he stood there, it became apparent that the movement of his cloak was caused by an infestation of maggots and lice.
“Welcome,” said Mordo. “The darkness accepts The Tatterdemalion, Lord of Nightmares.”
The fourth affiliate was most definitely female. Her body was slender and supple, and scarcely clad in a gauze of sheer, black nylon that clung to her like a second skin. Her flesh was dark, a scorched copper-red; her hair was russet threaded with gold, and fell about her shoulders in what must have been hundreds of intricately woven braids. Her breasts were thrust high and firm, her legs long and slick and culminating in cloven hooves. Her eyes were the colour of smoking coals. She danced in the shadows now, slow and wanton, her body moving like some forbidden music, radiating the musk of lust. At the juncture of her thighs, her nylon-sheathed sex throbbed like a second heart.
“Welcome,” Mordo breathed. “The darkness accepts Satana Blackheart, Priestess of the Hellbound Islands of Pain, Desire and Regret.”
And, finally, there was the last of them. A man, slight and elegant, dressed in a robe of indigo silk trimmed with black. There was little that was remarkable about him, save for one thing – he possessed no head. In its place there was a shifting whorl of smoke and flame and ghostly light, flecked with tiny slivers of what looked like black glass. There were no recognisable features – no eyes, no mouth – and yet, for any who gazed upon this individual, there was no doubting that he was staring back in turn. And, if one listened hard enough, they might hear the echo of distant drums.
“Welcome,” Mordo whispered. “The darkness accepts Dormammu, Emperor of The Eternal Dread.”
For a moment, none of them spoke. The shadows pulsed. The light of the candles guttered and spat. And then, slowly, four turned to face one.
Dormammu.
“You commanded the Manifestation?” rasped Varnae, in the same ancient tongue as that used by Mordo. “I did not give permission.”
“Nor I,” murmured Morganna le Fay, although the red smile on her mask did not flicker as she spoke. Her voice was as soft as the wings of a butterfly, beating fitfully as it succumbed to formaldehyde. “There are more appropriate ways to instigate an audience with us, as you well know.”
Dormammu turned in the direction of the WitchQueen, the conflagration between his shoulders shimmering. When his disembodied voice came – deep and fierce, with the resonance of a hammer pounding rock – the very air around them all seemed to crackle. “When a threat arises that would imperil each of us and our fiefdoms, I have no desire to indulge in protocol,” he declared. “There has been a rift…”
Dormammu’s crown of fire flickered, and the shadows seemed to deepen about him.
“He is free,” he hissed. “Escaped from the chamber of hooks and now abroad here, the Junction of Worlds… our feeding grounds. He means to gather a new coven against us. Four haunted souls, to be woven and stitched into the tapestry of our destruction. Four disciples. Four defenders.”
The five members of the Cabal seethed as one, swaying like corn beneath a bloodstained summer sun.
“We must hunt now, as we did before,” Dormammu breathed. “And when we find them… whoever these wretched defenders prove to be… they will perish screaming, in fire and blood and pain.”
# # # # # # # # # #
The nurse’s name was Gretchen and she was just his type – cropped, ash-blonde hair, sparkling blue eyes, and an athletic figure with plenty of half-moon curves. Not so long ago, he would have charmed her breath away. But not any more. Not since the accident. Lovely Gretchen was all sultry smiles whenever she leaned in close to straighten his sheets and fluff his pillows, but that just made everything worse. She wasn’t flirting with him. She pitied him.
It was enough to make Stefan Strang wish that he’d never been dragged from what remained of his car before the gas tank had ignited. There was only one release from this nightmare – and that was death.
“Ah, Doctor Strang… good morning. Did you sleep well?”
A man’s voice, speaking in German. As Gretchen padded away to tend to another patient, her pert rump moving suggestively in her starched white uniform, Stefan glowered at the fellow who was lurking at the foot of his bed like a baleful troll, clipboard in hand. Doctor Matthias Kramer was a short, portly fellow, balding, with more than one chin and spectacles that didn’t suit him. A brother in the medical profession, although nowhere near as celebrated and successful as Stefan, who was one of the foremost brain surgeons on the planet. At least, he had been before the accident. Now he was just another nobody, drifting amongst the wreckage.
Apparently, Stefan had met Kramer a year ago at a conference in Paris. He had even spoken to him at length about the merits and pitfalls of some pioneering new interventional cardiology technique. Upon meeting again in less convivial circumstances a few days ago Stefan hadn’t remembered a word of their conversation. In fact, he hadn’t recalled Kramer at all. Why would he? One didn’t tend to recall fat and balding and ordinary, after all; only a man like Stefan, tall and elegant, with black hair and olive skin and dark, hypnotic eyes the colour of decadence, was likely to be memorable over time.
“I told you,” Stefan rasped, his voice reduced to a gravelly whisper by the injuries he had sustained to his throat and chest, injuries that would never fully heal. Unlike Kramer he spoke in English. “Don’t call me Doctor any more. There’s hardly any point, is there?”
Kramer smiled, briefly. “You earned your title, Stefan,” he murmured, dropping the German. “All those years at the best medical schools, and your training throughout Europe, Africa, the United States…”
“But none of that’s any use to me any more, is it? Is it? Isn’t that part of the rehabilitation program here? To get me to accept what fucking happened to me?”
Kramer continued to smile, and began to check off items on his clipchart. If he was making any attempt to conceal his schadenfreude he was failing. Stefan glared at him hatefully, bile rising in his throat. So patronising, so false…
…so much like him. Doctor Kramer was taking a measure of delight from this situation because Stefan was and had always been a sly, objectionable, recalcitrant bastard. Almost as much of a bastard as karma.
Stefan closed his eyes, and felt his misery overwhelm him. His face was swarthy, his jaw itching. He needed a shave, he needed a bath. He needed a cigarette. And he needed… he needed…
Lying there in the hospital bed, he opened his eyes and lifted his arms from beside him. He stared at the bandaged stumps at the end of both wrists, where his hands had once been before the accident. Before the amputation. Karma and then some. Tears welled, and he felt his lower lip begin to tremble. He needed his hands back. Good Christ, he needed his motherfucking hands back.
“You have a visitor,” said Kramer.
Stefan glanced across at him, blinking. “What?” he breathed. His heart skipped. “Clea…?”
Kramer’s eyes narrowed. “No,” he said, slowly. “No, I’m afraid we still haven’t been able to track down your mysterious Miss Belsamo – any more than the police have, as a matter of interest. This is a gentleman. An elderly fellow. He arrived here about half an hour ago and asked for you by name, although he steadfastly refused to give us his own in return. Very persistent. He’s become most agitated waiting for you to awaken. Normally we’d have sent him away, but he seems so frail we were afraid he’d have a heart attack on the front steps. Will you speak to him?”
Stefan said nothing for a moment or two. His face was itching. His stumps were… twitching. It was driving him insane.
“No,” he whispered bitterly, laying his head back against his pillow. “Get rid of him. I need a bath.”
Kramer sighed. “Whatever you say, Stefan. Although I don’t know how the old goat will take the news…”
# # # # # # # # # #
The accident occurred on a winding mountain road between Goppingen and Augsburg, some fifty kilometres southeast of Stuttgart. The ascent was steep, the road narrow and full of treacherous switchbacks, but the driver of the silver Porsche 911 Carrera 4S convertible was a slave to speed, and a sense of danger. It was a beautiful late summer evening, the setting sun haemorrhaging scarlet beyond the dark skyline of the Swabian Alps. The air was cool. Tchaikovsy’s Romeo and Juliet was erupting from the disc player like an epiphany, grand and rousing. Overhead, the universe sparkled in the gathering twilight.
For Stefan Strang, life was wonderful. But not for much longer.
He didn’t hear the purr of his car cell phone over the noise of the music, but he saw its blinking light. The miniature screen displayed the caller ID. Stefan smiled. He switched off the stereo and held the cell to his ear.
“Hey, lover,” he murmured in Italian rather than German or English, his tone intimate. “You change your mind about tonight? Because I’m only an hour away, and I can - ”
“Doctor Strange?”
Stefan flinched at the voice on the other end of the cell. It wasn’t that the speaker had got his name wrong – almost everyone did, after all – but rather that he was unexpectedly male.
“Who is this?”
“My name, Doctor,” the unfamiliar voice snarled, “Is Guiseppe Balsamo. I trust you know who I am – after all, you’ve been fucking my wife’s brains out in a château in Lausanne three times a week for the past six months.”
Stefan’s eyes shot wide and dark, and his right hand gripped the wheel whilst his left pressed the cell to his ear. “Oh, Christ,” he breathed. “Fuck. Listen. I’m sorry, I… I think there may have been some misunderstanding here. You see - ”
“Don’t insult my intelligence with more lies, Doctor. I’ve heard far too many of those already, from the faithless slut I married.”
Stefan licked his lips, his heart hammering in his chest. “Clea,” he hissed. “Is she…?”
“You sound concerned, my friend,” the voice hissed. “Did she tell you what kind of man I was? That she was afraid of me, of what I’d do if I ever found out about you and her rutting in your little love nest like filthy pigs? Well, she was right to be.”
“Now, listen. If you’ve fucking done anything to - ”
“I hope you both said your goodbyes at the end of your last sordid liaison, Doctor. As far as my wife’s concerned, she’ll not get another chance. For anything.”
The line clicked, then went dead. Stefan’s face was deathly pale, his brow reamed with sweat. He was close to hyperventilating. The Porsche swayed, from one side of the narrow road to the other, but he didn’t really notice. Fuck. Fuck. His mind was awhirl. He knew that he needed to call the police. If even half of what Clea Balsamo had told him about her sadistic shit of a husband was true, then –
Stefan never even saw the other car, save for a sudden flash of headlights in the split second before impact. The Porsche was hogging the centre of the road. There was no avoiding the oncoming vehicle. There was no time to scream. There was a violent, ungodly crunch of splintering metal, followed by the screech of rubber and the shatter of glass. The world bucked and twisted and snapped. There was pain. There was blood. The world turned upside down, once, then again. Metal splintered like kindling, shards and flecks lacerating his skin, especially about his wrists and forearms. So much blood.
When the rescue team pulled Stefan from the wreckage they were relieved – he, at least, was a survivor, compared to the four fatalities incurred from the other car. It was just too late to save his hands…
# # # # # # # # # #
Stefan jolted, and let out a half-cry. His eyes flew open, and his began gulping for breath. Beside him, nurse Gretchen glanced down in concern, frozen in the act of pouring her patient a glass of ice water from a pitcher.
“Hey,” she said, gently. “Doctor Strang? Please, be calm. You were dreaming. It was only a dream.”
Stefan fought against his panic. “The accident,” he rasped. “God, the pain…”
Gretchen rested the back of her hand against his forehead, and sighed. “You’re feverish again. These nightmares are getting worse, not better. I need to get Doctor Kramer. Unless, of course… I can help.”
There was something about the tone of her voice that made Stefan look up, his breath catching in his throat. Suddenly, there was a sense of anticipation in the air, an electric charge. Gretchen was smiling, but no longer with kindness. Instead, her red lips were curled with mischief, and her blue eyes glinted with something like hunger. She cocked her head to one side, then raised her hands to the neck of her tunic. She undid her top button, revealing the barest swell of her bosom. Then, slowly, her fingers moved down and settled on the next button. And then, more slowly still, the next…
“Gretchen?” Stefan said, weakly, unable to tear his gaze away. “Listen, not that I don’t appreciate this, but I’m thinking now probably isn’t the best - ”
“But I’ve been such a good little girl,” the nurse replied, with that mocking pout. “How long are you going to keep me waiting for what I want?”
She unlaced the final button, then slowly drew her tunic apart, revealing an expanse of smooth flesh. She wasn’t wearing a chemise, or a brassiere. Her breasts spilled free, her nipples hardening at contact with the cool air. Stefan’s jaw sagged; he wanted to object again, but he was mute with astonishment. He was also, exasperatingly but predictably, hardening with arousal. Gretchen teased the fingers of one hand beneath the waistband of her white skirt and gently circled her hips, her eyes never leaving his. Stefan was transfixed – until he spied a hint of movement from the corner of his vision. Reluctantly he glanced away from the angel at his side, down to the foot of the bed…
…and his heart spasmed.
There was a spider crawling over the hill in the sheets made by his slightly raised knees, starkly black against the white linen. A big fucking spider. The biggest he’d ever seen. A tarantula. It was the size of a small dog. Christ, he could see his own stricken expression reflected in its eyes.
“Jesus fuck,” Stefan croaked, discovering to his horror that he was unable to move. He was paralysed. His head was swimming. The tarantula continued to crawl towards him. Slow. Its step was hypnotic. It clambered over the lump of his distended groin, and the sensation made him feel physically ill. And then, appearing over the mound of his knees… there came another. And a second later, a third. And, even worse, there was now movement beneath the sheet as well.
“Gretchen,” Stefan whispered, his voice almost tearful. “Gretchen? What’s happening? Please, I don’t… I can’t…”
He looked back at the nurse, who had now discarded her tunic and was feeling her own breasts, her head thrown back in ecstasy, her eyes closed, a low moan rising in the back of her throat. As Stefan watched, she began to pinch and pluck at her nipples, making them harder, rougher, redder. Then she started to wriggle her fingers. Slowly. Like spider’s legs.
Gretchen stepped back from the bed. Her skin was rippling, about her ribs and stomach. Like the sheets. There was something moving beneath her skin. The flesh of her breasts was undulating. And her throat. She brought her head forward once more, her mouth slit wide with a dark smile. And then… and then, with a hiss, her eyes simply vanished, sinking back into her face like it was quicksand, followed by her nose.
Stefan screamed. Gretchen’s mouth twitched, then detached and turned sideways, so that it now split her face vertically, from chin to crown. It wasn’t a mouth any longer, although it still had painted lips. It was a vulva. It trembled, and sucked, wet and hungry. Shallow breathing. Shuk, shuk, shuk.
And then it opened, and the legion of spiders inside her began to emerge, one after another, born scuttling into the light.
Stefan’s shriek faded to a gasp. He felt crawling on his chest, beneath his arms, about his groin… and then, at the opening of his mouth, legs skittering about his lower lip, searching for his tongue, reaching down his throat, into his -
“Only you can send them away, you know. Only you can stop it.”
In that instant, both Gretchen and her arachnid brood flinched as if burned by flame and fell away. Not fully – the bed sheets remained black with the spiders’ seething mass – but enough for Stefan to turn his head in search of the source of that unfamiliar, rasping voice, his eyes wide with panic. Standing in the doorway was an old man in a green cloak, small and slight, snow-haired, his skin grey and weathered, his eyes narrowed to tiny buttonholes. The man was smiling, and holding something out towards him. Something… peculiar. To Stefan’s amazement, he saw that it was a pair of gloves, seemingly woven from gold and silver silk. The realisation spurred something in him other than the fear that had overwhelmed him up until that point – it roused anger.
He reared up, scattering tarantulas in all directions, his expression livid. “Gloves?” he shrieked. “Gloves? Is that supposed to be fucking funny?” He raised his arms, brandishing his bandaged stumps. “Look at me! Look! How the cunting motherfuck am I supposed to wear fucking gloves?”
The old man nodded slightly, uncowed in the face of this apoplexy. He moved forward then, with an awkward gait, and placed the silk gloves on the bed, seemingly oblivious to the spiders that were collecting there, just as he paid no heed to the faceless thing alongside him that was once nurse Gretchen. He then took one of the gloves and began to pull it over Stefan’s right stump.
Stefan made to pull his arm away, but the old man gripped his desecrated wrist and held him firm with surprising strength. He snapped the glove tight. For a moment, Stefan just stared towards his hand, uncomprehending. His… hand. He wriggled his fingers in the golden gloves. Clenched. And when the old man slid the other glove onto his left stump, Stefan flexed that hand too.
“Jesus Christ,” he whispered, tears beginning to roll down his cheeks. “Oh, God. Oh, please. This is sick. This isn’t right. This - ”
“Send them away, Stefan,” the old man said, softly. “The fear will begin to grow again, quickly – it will feed them, and it will suffocate you. You will die, unless you send these nightmares back where they came from…”
Stefan frowned, unable to tear his gaze from his new appendages. Then, when he turned his hands over to gaze upon his palms, he saw that the silk was stitched with a series of intricate runes. As he watched, the runes began to shift with a gentle sigh, like tall grasses whispering in the breeze. It was as if they were… speaking to him? Somehow, he was able to translate the runes into words – words of a language that had not been uttered on this world in a geological age, and which were difficult for a human tongue to control, but which it was imperative to speak. For when he uttered those words, the spiders screamed.
Stefan closed his eyes, as if that would block out the terrible, alien shrieking. The runes were etched into his mind, and even there they continued to dance. He spoke them slowly, carefully, over and again. A mantra. An enchantment. Raw, ancient magic.
He fancied that he could feel the beast that was once Gretchen reaching for him, hands hooked into claws. The female body had vanished entirely now, replaced by a misshapen frame swathed in fetid cloth, with pustulous skin emitting malodorous ooze. This creature had a name, the runes whispered. Tatterdemalion. Lord of Nightmares made flesh. It did not belong here. Send it away.
Stefan grimaced. The Tatterdemalion snarled, looming ever closer.…
“Get the fuck out of my face you stinking, cabbage-faced ratcunt!”
The world shuddered, and was fleetingly dark with blood and scum…but when Stefan opened his eyes a moment later, the nightmares were gone. No more spiders. No more creature. And no more Gretchen; poor, poor Gretchen. But his hands? His hands remained, inside the gloves. Yet only inside – somehow, instinctively, he knew this. Without them, he could never be whole. The realisation was bittersweet.
He turned his head and stared at the old man. He wouldn’t know it until he next caught sight of his reflection, but what he had just experienced had caused his dark hair to turn white at the temples, and for his brown eyes to fracture with a glister of silver, as if he had suddenly aged twenty years in as many minutes. The old man smiled, as if in recognition, and nodded.
“Well done, my friend,” he breathed. “Well done. You are the fourth and final disciple. Perhaps the strongest of them all, for the ancient magic speaks through you. And thus, though the edges of this world scorch and curl as the darkness rides, so there shall be resistance…
“…and the Earth shall have Defenders.”
next issue: Doctor Stefan Strang is the first of The Defenders. Who shall be the second – and will she survive the murderous intentions of Morganna Le Fay’s goblinkind? Don’t miss “Rehabilitation”!
author’s notes
It’s amazing, really (although sadly predictable). Somehow, they blew it.
Eight years back the powers that be at Marvel brainstormed the idea of the Ultimate line, re-imagining their most popular characters and concepts from scratch for a modern audience and jettisoning all the suffocating continuity accumulated during the previous four decades. It should have revolutionised the company and their approach to comics. Maybe it did, for a while; the Spider-Man and X-Men titles, whilst varying wildly in quality from entertaining to execrable, have racked up significant 80-100 issue runs with consistently high sales, so they must be doing something right. A shame then that the third of the big three titles, The Ultimates, took it upon itself not only to squander the opportunity for a first class Ultimate Avengers series but also to piss the concept of Ultimate Defenders up the wall by using them as a (not very funny) throwaway joke.
Well done, Mark Millar. You can fuck off now.
Neither incarnation of The Defenders – the classic one with Doctor Strange, The Hulk, Namor and The Silver Surfer, or the one with Doctor Strange and An Ever-Changing Selection Of Other Characters – has ever really been treated with respect. It’s a shame, because the idea of a non-team of protagonists who are typically loners coming together to face down a world-shattering threat is as terrific a concept now as it was back in the 70s. When that threat is supernatural or otherworldly in origin, and the characters in question are similarly aligned to the darker, grimmer side of the Marvel milieu, well, all the better. Midnight Sons? Marvel Knights? That’s The Defenders under another name, pure and simple.
I’ve wanted to write an Ultimate Defenders series – a real one – since I read Millar’s silent fart of an effort. I wanted to make it dark. I wanted to make it nasty. I wanted to blend horror, fantasy and a vague dash of erotica in one surreal mix. And I knew, instantly, which four heroes I wanted to use (as well as which villains to throw into the melting pot). You’ve already met Stefan Strang. He got the gloves. Who was gifted with the sword, the crucifix and the ring, as so tantalizingly mentioned? Well, you’ll just have to wait and see. There’s one thing I promise, however: these Defenders are the real deal.
And if they ever have the good fortune to happen upon Mark Millar on some lonely moor one dark and rainy night, maybe they’ll roast him on a spit, sentence his soul to eternal damnation and then kick his fucking head in. You know. Just to prove a point.
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Thanks for reading!
- Meriades Rai