Stephen!
The clouds swept by, distant and untouched.
His mind was tired, his body battered . . .
. . . Stephen . . .
“Stephen!”
Dr. Strange awoke back in his body. Clea was bending over him. “Stephen! Oh, thank the powers! You’re back!”
“Yes,” he whispered, conscious that his voice was weak.
“Stephen, I was worried, you were gone so long!”
“It’s all right,” he said, smiling weakly. He put his hand on hers, looking up at her as she bent over him. “It’s Nightmare, Clea. He’s behind it all.”
“Nightmare!”
“The dream dimension. I don’t know what he is up to . . . or rather, he’s up to the same old thing—invading this dimension—but I don’t know how he hopes to accomplish this.”
Strange looked across at the sleeping Billie Joe Jacks and his wife. He made a small gesture and the evangelist blinked and awoke. “Hey?” He looked around and, seeing his wife, smiled automatically. He stared at Strange. “Well?”
“I’m not certain, Reverend Jacks,” Strange said, rising from his chair. His physical body felt weak; probably sympathetic reaction to the immense drain on his energy when in astral projection. “There are dark forces at work here.”
“Oh, nonsense,” Jacks said, making a disparaging gesture. “That’s hokum.”
Alicia, his wife, put a hand on his arm. “Billie Joe, I know Doctor Strange. He wouldn’t fool around about a thing like this.”
The minister looked at his wife in frank amazement. “Alicia, I would never have thought it of you. This man is a charlatan. Look at all this nonsense,” he said, gesturing around at the ancient books and the other paraphernalia. “Show biz, my dear. Look at the way he dresses—show biz; impress the gullible. No Christian would be caught by all this. No, now let me finish. I shouldn’t have come here. You shouldn’t have consulted this . . .” He shot a look at Strange. “. . . This charlatan.”
“Reverend Jacks,” Clea began, but the minister cut her off.
“I don’t want any mention made of my visit here. I’d be a laughing stock. There’s nothing wrong with me. I’ve just been having a little trouble sleeping, that’s all. A temporary condition caused by my commitment to the Lord.” He stood up and reached down for his wife. “Come, Alicia. We have work to do, work we have neglected for this . . . this nonsense.”
“Billie Joe—”
“Shush.” He looked at Strange. “Send me your bill. I shall pay it, only because my wife foolishly made this appointment, but I want no more said about this. Understood?”
“Of course,” Strange said. He made a slight bow, but his eyes glittered.
“Stephen, I—” Jacks cut his wife off with a noise of annoyance, as he took her arm. Wong appeared and escorted them out. Clea looked at Strange, who seemed to be far away.
“What do we do now?”
Strange did not reply. Clea knew better than to intrude. After a few moments Strange broke his silence and walked back to his chair. “You look tired,” Clea said. Strange nodded. “I’ll have Wong make us something to eat.”
Strange nodded absently. His mind was juggling all the many strange elements of this puzzling case. What was Nightmare’s plan? The purpose was clear, but the means were still uncertain.
Wong brought food and Strange ate without tasting what he was putting into his body. Fuel, just fuel. When Clea suggested he go to sleep and rest, Stephen Strange felt a sudden pang of distant fear.
. . . Sleep . . .
. . . perchance to dream . . .
. . . to dream was to lie vulnerable . . .
To be vulnerable was to be defeated, to die.
What had Pushkin said? “Better the illusions that exalt us than ten thousand truths.” Could that be true? Not in the terror world of nightmares.
Tennessee Williams had written, “A persistent dream has meaning, and is sometimes fulfilled.”
Strange stood up and walked to his wall of books. He sought for and selected a volume and opened it to the words of Dr. Michel Jouvey, a famous brain specialist.
“When people dream during the slumbering process,” he read, “they are really not quite asleep nor yet fully awake but in a third dimensional category. Dreaming occurs in all mammals, and to some extent in birds, but not at all in reptiles. Cats spend about twenty to twenty-five percent of their ten-minute catnaps in this dream state, which is about the same percentage that human beings do during their periods of sleep.”
Strange closed the book and replaced it on the shelf. A fifth to a quarter of the time humans were vulnerable. They opened portals to the dream dimension and, in essence, invited Nightmare in. But there must be other conditions to be met, or Nightmare would have invaded earlier, with greater success.
Strange thought of what he had once read, but could not remember the author. “The permanent temptation of life is to confuse dreams with reality. The permanent defeat of life comes when dreams are surrendered to reality.” And Ralph Waldo Emerson had written, “We wake from one dream into another dream.” Joseph Heller had written, “Dreams are merciless: they come upon you when you’re asleep.”
They were all vulnerable. Sooner or later, everyone had to sleep—perchance to dream.
Dr. Stephen Strange turned and strode off to bed.
“Master?”
“Yes, Wong?” Strange turned with a slight frown, reluctantly lifting his eyes from a large book.
“A Miss Hartley to see you, sir.”
“I don’t know any Miss Hartley. Please tell her I am very busy.” His gaze dropped again to the arcane formulas of Pournellian logic.
“Why, Doctor, what a blow to my ego!”
At the sound of the melodious voice, Strange looked up. A beautiful woman stood in the doorway. Even the phlegmatic Wong seemed mesmerized by her beauty. She stepped into the room with a charming smile. “I thought everyone would know Michele Hartley! How perfectly delightful to discover someone who is not a fan!” She put her purse on the table and walked around the room looking at various objects, knowing it gave Strange a chance to look her over.
What Stephen Strange saw was quite, quite gorgeous. He was not so unworldly as not to recognize the highest achievements of the arts of dressmaking, makeup, and possibly even plastic surgery.
“Thank you, Wong,” he said.
The servant withdrew, but at a slower rate than usual.
“Is this anyone I know?” Michele asked, touching a gold-banded skull with a delicate finger. “A producer, perhaps?” She smiled over her shoulder at Strange.
“That was Alantripi, an Atlantean sage.”
“I thought Atlantis was a myth,” she smiled, turning toward him. Her perfume was faint, but persistent.
“Many do,” Strange said. “May I ask what has brought you here?”
“You have, Stephen Strange.” She stepped up to him, touched the Eye of Agamotto lightly, smiling, then walked away. She ran a fingertip across the roughened cover of a metal-edged leather box carved with ancient symbols. “I thought perhaps we should meet, you and I.”
“And you are . . . ?”
“Michele Hartley.”
“I hope you will forgive me, but the name does not . . .”
“They said you might not know who I was.” She stopped and faced him squarely. “I am what they call a superstar. I could have sent my representatives here instead—my agent, my business manager, perhaps even a studio vice-president—but I thought your status deserved my presence.” She shrugged, smiled, and made a little moue with her mouth. “It seems I am not quite as famous as I thought. Please don’t tell the people at Variety or the Reporter. I’ve gotten one Sour Apple Award already—I don’t want another.”
“Miss Hartley—”
“Ms., please, Doctor.” She walked around the table, looking at the wooden globe with its faded maps of an ancient Earth. She stopped by a pedestal that held a silver-embossed statue of the goddess Astarte. “Doctor Strange, I have a proposition to make to you—a business proposition.” She smiled again, briefly. Her perfume was lovely.
“You and I, Doctor Strange, could be the biggest thing in films since, since Tracy and Hepburn, Gable and Lombard, Laurel and Hardy, Travolta and—”
“Ms. Hartley!”
She stopped and smiled softly. “Yes, Doctor?”
“Are you proposing that you and I act in a . . . a what?”
“A movie, Doc—the cine-mah; the flicks. Ten million three is the budget, Universal will distribute. I can get Goldman to do the script, Orson has expressed interest in directing, and—”
“Miss Hartley!”
“Ms.”
“Ms. Hartley, I am not an actor. I—”
“I know that, but we can send you to Lee Strasberg for a few weeks. You have presence, Doc—star quality. Anyone can see that. Merlin will be the biggest—”
“Merlin?”
She looked at him, then laughed. “Of course! I forgot! I’m sorry. No wonder I have a business manager! Merlin the magician, you know? Court of King Arthur, that whole thing?”
“I am acquainted with the mage in question.” He looked at her closely. “You are not presuming to do some sort of film about the . . . no!” He glared at her.
“Hey, wait a sec, Doc! It’s all in public domain. Guy probably wasn’t even real. That was fifteen hundred years ago, maybe more. No conflict.”
“Merlin! The subject of a motion picture?”
“Sure, it’s a natural. You’d play Merlin, of course. Say, the special-effects guys will flip out over you! I’m going to play Guinevere, the queen, and we are talking to—get this—Richard Burton about playing King Arthur. Camelot, you know? He did it on Broadway. Marvelous, marvelous, especially now that he’s off the juice. Getting to the right age, too.”
“Ms. Hartley, you had better go.”
“Listen, Doctor Strange, we haven’t gotten to the best part yet. You and I will have two nude scenes, one where you come by this little idyllic stream and Sir Modred attempts to—”
“Nude scenes?”
“Sure. They even have them in PG pictures now. Discreet, of course, but my public expects it. There’ll be one where you summon up the forces of white magic to fight the black magic of Modred, who—”
“Modred was not a magician!”
“And I’ll have at least one with Richard, I mean, King Arthur. But don’t you worry, they will be tastefully done. All my nude scenes are.”
“Ms. Hartley, I—”
“You’ll want to know if you, well, can handle a thing like that. Men are far more shy than women, I’ve found.” Without a moment’s hesitation, she reached up, touched a button at each shoulder and the pink dress slid to the floor like pink champagne going downhill. She wore nothing beneath it.
“What do you think?” She posed with hands on hips, then pirouetted around to give him a back view, looking at him over her shoulder. “Doc? Still pretty good, huh?”
“Ms. Hartley . . . I think you had better go.”
She turned around and stepped close to him. Her perfume was even stronger, mixed with another subtle odor. She put her hands on his chest, to either side of the Eye of Agamotto. “Stephen . . . ?”
His expression hardened. “Ms. Hartley, please put on your clothes, and—”
“Stephen!” It was Clea, standing in the doorway with an expression of surprise and hatred.
“Clea, I . . . this is Ms. Michele Hartley. She, uh, came to talk to me about doing a movie about Merlin. You know, Merlin? King Arthur, Excalibur, Morgan le Fey, the Round Table?”
“Is that why she is naked?”
“I’m not naked, Miss, I’m nude.” To Stephen she whispered, “Is she somebody?”
“She is Clea,” he whispered, then stopped himself and continued in a normal voice. “She is Clea, daughter of Umar, and is my student and . . . uh . . . friend.”
Michele looked around Strange at Clea and flashed her a bright smile. “Do you mind? We’re rehearsing.”
“Rehearsing for what? Caligula and Nero stopped giving parties some time ago.”
“Clever, clever. Stephen, tell her to go away. We’re talking business.”
“Uh, Clea, if you’ll assist Miss, uh, Ms. Hartley, I’ll be in the, uh, in the other room.”
“Oh, Stephen!” the actress said quickly. “Now if I’ve gone too far, just say so. I just didn’t think anyone as far out as you, would be, uh, straight. I’ll get dressed.”
Strange walked out, not looking at Clea, who watched the voluptuous actress dress. Her expression had become faintly angry, but mostly blank.
“You and Doc Strange live here together, huh?” Michele said, pulling the dress up over her hips and lifting the straps. “Very nice. He’s a touch square, but hey, that’s not all bad. You ever thought of being an actress? Great figure, you know; oh, of course you know—a girl always knows. That hair, though, that’s a bit far out. The cameras and lights will make you white, know what I mean?”
Clea did not respond and Michele finished doing up her straps. “Well, there.” She took a script from her purse and put it on the table. “Here’s the suggested script. Ask him to make notes, will you? Things he likes, things he doesn’t? And maybe, well, I’ve heard . . . I mean, if he could mark places where he might supply the special effects. I mean, well, I’ve heard the doctor could, um, do things, you know?”
“Did you bring a coat?”
“No.”
The two women glared at each other, then Michele started for the door.
“He isn’t coming back, is he?”
Clea shook her head.
“Well, okay. I’ll . . . I’ll call back, all right?”
“This way, Ms. Hartley.”
They left, and a few moments later Clea returned. She picked up the script and read the name across the cover. She walked over and tossed the thick wad of stapled paper into the fireplace. It caught slowly and burned smokily for some time.
