I've got a monster in my closet / Someone's underneath my bed / The wind is knocking at my window / I'd kill it but it's already dead

Nestled above the emerald tree tops sat a solemn figure. Below his crossed legs and locked knees, the pebble freckled sandy Earth disappeared. Between clenched lips, long drags of sky were sucked in and calmly filtered through his nostrils.

Birds in the nearby bamboo towers were used to the curious old monk's rituals. The sherbet-colored shrike with mango hooked bill cut and twisted at the bamboo rinds, stripping away fleshy strings. Disinterested in him, they committed to their trivial avian functions.

Today was different. There was a guarded curiosity. The menagerie pranced musical chairs around the monk, stumbling from tree to tree to a soundtrack of hoops and clicks. The trees tremored with their intense, drunken blather. The mood maddened.

The monk's mind, transparent, clear as summer sky polluted with milky white clouds, swirled with sable storms; the empty blue turned oil black. The gathering of mangy creatures erupted, the canopy torn apart by shards of inky black feathers. His eyes ripped open, whites arrested in spindly red fear, his concentration shattered. Hamir plummeted, his fragment destiny racing up to greet him.

A dying flicker of Stephen Strange rippled through the spiritual plane.

For Mature Readers Only

# 3
August, '06

Strange Tales Presents

Doctor Strange

Bottles Marked "Poison"
Part 2
Written by Mike Rasbury

Wong's right cheek cracked under the heel of a roundhouse; he skidded across the cobblestone floor and rolled up beside Strange's porcelain pale body. The blow was only a series of many he had collected: a splintered left wrist, a sternum bruised in three places, and crucifix slashes across his chest. The spiritual attainment of the K'un L'un horde cloaked them like armor; they were invincible against his considerable talents. He would soon join his friend the sorcerer. It felt poetically just to die at his side.

Wong glanced into the soulless, coal black eyes dead in his friend's head and resigned himself to doom. Before the mystical Asian land could claim a second soul, a trickle of white light dripped across the nothingness pupils. Where there had been only death now lived a faint specter, an ethereal spark. From where only dead souls brave to tread, a sliver of Stephen Strange was still tethered to this world. Wong smiled.

Shadow drew tighter upon him, but the manservant rolled into the light; a foot crashed errantly into the jigsaw walkway, bruising the Earth. Wong tucked his shin into the back of his would-be executioner's knee, and the K'un L'un attacker crumbled backward to the ground.

Wong rolled back on his shoulder blades, tucked his thighs to his chest, and pushed up to his feet. He searched feverishly through the thrashing horde of angry citizens for Danny Rand, K'un L'un's chosen champion.

A flare of bright cerise flashed through a huddle of four men and two women. It was Rand , his hand aglow with his chi-fueled "Iron Fist." Rib bones crackled and splintered under a blow from his charged palm, dense as a sledgehammer. If he needed to stave through the vexed militia, then the time for negotiation was over. The "foreigners" unleashed upon them a mortal enemy in Chiantang the dragon, destroyed a massive chunk of the mystical alien city, and murdered the city's head monk; they had to die, and so did the traitor Rand.

"Rand!" Wong called out.

Rand snared a downward fist strike aimed toward his neck in his burning pink hand and squeezed. The hand disappeared in the formidable vice grip, the attacker dropped to the floor in excruciating pain, and Rand tossed away the mangled refuse.

"I'm a little busy, Wong; what can I do for you?" The martial arts master didn't even turn away from his next opponent, a female locked in a bastardized crane style, which meant rapid-fire handstrikes.

"We need to get Stephen out of here. Can you create some daylight?"

Another K'un L'un citizen blitzed Wong, this time with a straight punch looking to land squarely in the nose. Wong narrowly evaded, sweeping his left leg parallel behind his right; the jab sailed emptily through air in front of Wong's chest. The sorcerer's servant then snatched the assailant's wrist in his left hand and snapped his shoulder into the back of his opponent's elbow, blistering it.

Rand staggered back from successive spear-like snaps from the rigid crane style. While they were no match for his Iron Fist, the K'un L'un physiology, a chemistry of alien lineage and spiritual perfection, could tear through his human center with ease. The crane female lunged underhanded for Rand 's throat, a miscalculation. Rand ripped off rapid bursts of short kicks to her gut, and, when she finally keeled, he dropped the Iron Fist guillotine down on the back of her head.

"If you can keep them off him, I'll thin the crowd."

Wong nodded affirmative, an idle gesture that went ignored by Rand . He trudged back through the thinning crowd, surrounding him and Rand, toward Strange's prone figure. He knelt beside his friend and propped a cold lifeless arm over his shoulder.

As he struggled to heft both bodies to a stand with his busted midsection, the air around him shifted, slightly, unnoticeably. Trained at the nerve endings on the finest, most delicate hairs on his neck, Wong twitched at the soft pitch in convection; the ruffle of air around him warmed only a degree, but he understood its message. He wasn't going anywhere.

Wong turned to stare directly into mirror-like opaline eyes reflecting back at him. Unlike other denizens of K'un L'un, this woman's modestly muscular figure was cloaked in a dirty yellow sash outfit, her conical skull was scraped roughly of all its hair, and her forehead sparkled coldly with icy blue crystals drawn into a unique glyph. She was a monk.

Her ability to stealthily flank him was impressive and a harbinger of her talents. He should have been dead already, slain before he was even aware she existed. The fact that he still drew in breaths was a testament to his own formidable--yet inferior--training.

"I can assume I am in the presence of another monk, then?" Her voice was subtle and deceptive like a tropical breeze: calm and soothingly warm but hiding behind it a maelstrom.

Wong nodded.

"Then, why would you shoulder a man whom chaos trails like an enamored child?"

Wong's left side sagged under Strange's weight. "Chicken or the egg?"

He smirked; of all the things that Stephen Strange could have instilled in him during their time together, the thing that stuck was a trivial English anecdote. He supposed that was all part of Stephen's "charm;" for all the power he held as the Earth's Sorcerer Supreme, he was still very much just a man. Arrogant, egotistical, fragile and weak--all just as much one as the others. Wong had hated him for that once. Where Stephen had once refused to bring Imei back to life, Wong was prepared to give his own life to return Strange back to his.

"He is no longer the man he once was; surely, you know that. It is best that he die here, now, before he damns all existence in his foolhardy quest."

Elsewhere, the foolhardy quest continued.

Strange's wooden heels clacked dully across rusty copper tiles greased with rainbow zeal; the characterless clonk echoed through a maze of agoraphobic pillars painted in roasted red pepper. Lined at the feet of the thatched pillars were several unnerved sentries of ceramic skin; they struck a pose similar to the lotus: legs-crossed, locked at the knee; hands open and resting on the knees, palms-up. In the terra-cotta fists, blood red flames whispered faint light into an absent breeze.

At the far end of the dim hallway dotted with the smaller kaolin apostles under candle twilight, six larger idols dripped from the darkness. With each forward step Strange took, layers of shadow rinsed away; the baked orange skin flaked away in pallid old wrinkles. From earthen bodies bloomed vibrant robes in hues of the sun and myopic clay stares moistened, glistening like mirrors. Humanness had been brushed over their sedimentary artifices.

When Strange took his final stride toward the crescent arranged individuals, he realized that the transformation he witnessed was still incomplete. Organic as the six were, they were still absent of vitality. Sure as their chests could now compress with stale breaths and their eyes could twitch at flecks of dust prisoner in the air, they were certainly not alive.

Strange sucked in the startling realization as the central figure regarded him with an open hand as if to take a seat. Strange did so, his feeble hands numb as they trembled into fists. He considered them with what he had hoped would be a glance, but he could only stare. His hands were sallow, an ashen grey, marked by inert black veins. Meanwhile, the crushed velvet cufflinks, an obsidian black, and ornate maize gold folded over a sea of blood red suffocated his view. Like watching one of the first color pictures, splotched by distortion, certain hues were exaggerated while others appeared meek, lost in the background.

The central figure animated once more, shouting foreign words into the infinite blackness behind him; his aged and craggy voice rippled emptily back to them.

The sitting figure to the left of center sat slightly forward. "You were expecting us?"

"I'd expect that's my question to ask; after all, I am the guest," Strange chuckled.

"We are not here for bemusement, nor do we relish yours," a feminine voice from right of center admonished.

"My apologies."

The central figure nodded solemnly but remained silent.

Short moments later, a gaunt old man with ripples of sun-stained bronze skin dangling from his exposed belly eclipsed Strange's left shoulder. On his stubby and thick rice-field fingers balanced a saucer and bowl of jade. He tapped Strange on the shoulder before thrusting the hot bowl of green translucent liquid in Strange's face. Strange grabbed the saucer with his left hand and steadied the bowl with his right pointer finger and thumb; he bowed his head in thanks.

The elderly workman bobbed his furrowed bald head and smiled a toothless smile before he hobbled back through the wall of darkness, a fading apparition. Strange watched curiously before turning his attention back to the conclave of six.

"We're aware of your efforts," added a fourth voice to the conversation. "And, the destructive arrogance you've displayed will not be tolerated."

The central figure nodded.

From the opposite end of the hall arose a clatter, docile at first, like a chorus of fluttering wings. With each passing moment, it grew closer, stronger until the copper tiles arched up and crashed down like dominos. They chased after Strange, sucking everything around him down into the growing divide.

It waits for the midnight hour to come / To torture me for all the wrong I've done / It just sits there and stares at me / Won't let me get any sleep

Strange awoke the next morning in his Sanctum. Alone and beguiled, but alive. The trinkets Lesser Cloak, Eye of Agamotto, Crystal of Kadavus, and Links of Bondage strewn about beside him on the wooden floor. The night previous, he warred for his life and nearly lost, and he would have had these arcane ornaments not been marched out to die in his place.

A last ditch effort to thwart the "shadow-thing," the Sorcerer Supreme and former surgeon combined his expertise for a "transplant:" as shadow-thing killed off Strange's physical manifestation, the sorcerer's soul had been cut into pieces and transferred into the mystical tools shadow-thing used against him.

The eyes in Strange's head rolled back into a pupil-less stare, lungs caved and shriveled like raisins in the sun, and his weakened liver burst, splashing his insides with bile. His body was dead. The corpse went limp in shadow-thing's grasp. The indistinct monster laughed derisively; the entire mansion rumbled in chorus.

Glorious in victory, shadow-thing didn't notice as the purple cloak draped around his shoulders began to constrict. Cuffs fashioned from mystical cloth spun around the thing's shadowy appendages. Before it could counteract, it was too late; its own shadowy tendrils had been dragged tightly over its neck. The throat that once shook in triumph now trembled in failure.

He had killed it, but he still didn't know what it was. It was unlike anything he'd ever combated; it was no demon, no spirit, and no monster. It was foreign but warmly familiar. It knew the Sorcerer Supreme just as intimately as he himself did. Then, there was the dying cry of The Ancient One.

That was an impossibility; Strange's mystical mentor had been dead a very long time. If the Ancient One had buried himself deep inside Strange's body, he would have felt a shimmer, a remnant of the former Sorcerer Supreme. It was an impossibility, but Strange just couldn't shake the notion. It was too familiar, and powerful, like he had battled himself.

His hand wobbled frantically like a dying fish over a diamond-crop of sable chest hair as he felt for the cowardly murmur from his restarted heart. The connection between soul and body was not a light switch; it couldn't simply be switched on and off. There would be long-lasting side-effects; the return of his ineffective hands was obviously one. There was no estimating what others might be.

His face twisted into a bullish grimace as he struggled to a sit. Pain from his ruined insides climbed up his body and into his head; it throbbed violently, death being such a painful thing to come back from. Finding himself nude still, he fetched the Cloak of Levitation; for modesty's sake only, he assured himself.

However, each time the ambulatory sorcerer stumbled a step toward the kitchen and each time he tried to drop his teapot to the floor when preparing a Hindu tea remedy for pain, the cloak played dutiful nurse.

Moments later, the black marble tea pot--given to him from a Chinese acupuncturist during his stay in a Tibetan monastery--whirred loudly over an open fire pit; a belly full of gurgling water huffed angrily into the air as thick white clouds of steam.

The cloak stretched a velvet arm across the kitchen and pulled the hanging teapot from the brochette and poured its steaming contents into Strange's cup. The unique herbal remedy wadded into the bottom of the cup like stringy clumps of black tobacco was sucked up into a whirlpool sea of burning water. The clear cup slowly soured a thick, dirty brown like molasses.

Strange took a stool at the cerulean marble island and dutifully sipped down the peppermint flavored tonic. As the liquid blaze trickled down his throat into his stomach, it ignited a rapture; the purple bruises over his wounded spleen, liver, and lungs slowly faded to pink; the numbness in his extremities filled with an tingling itch as his heart finally pushed blood to them, the constant thunder rumbling in his head cleared to a slight overcast, and the tremor in his pinky extended out from the cup weakened to a twitch. The pain clung to him no more than a common cold.

After Strange sucked down the final grainy sip full of herbal sand, the cloak eased him from the kitchen on mental command. Down innumerable chessboard tiled hallways, the dazed sorcerer was dragged into the bowel of his mansion; as hallways opened up into others, the former collapsed to be rebuilt elsewhere.

The final door was a thin wall of pristine glass split in two, each half having a silver knocker. The cloak shifted Strange inside his red curtain throne and clicked one of the knockers against the glass twice. After the second tap, the glass doors melted away as water splashed across the floor, trickled through the network of tiles, and swirled down a brass drain at the far end of the hall. Man and living vestment stepped through.

The sparse room was painted burnt orange, the floors were carpeted in thin white pillows, and a dainty clap echoed through the room from a waterfall in the corner. Lined across the outside of the room on shelves at various heights were bonsai trees at different states of upkeep. It was the Meditation Room.

Strange set his bare feet down to the padded floor and stretched his toes into the firm fleshed pillows. The cloak watched his movements precisely like a careful mother, but the sorcerer waved him off. At the center of the room, Strange found a canoe-shaped incense cradle. With a short rap of air from his gut, the incense sizzled and began to burn; fine strings of black smoke floated toward the ceiling.

Strange perched cross-legged on the padded floor and shut his eyes. The cloak retired to a post outside the room where he would remain for months.

Pages from the calendar ripped away around Stephen Strange, stored away in heavy meditation without food or sleep. For the first month, the sorcerer tried endlessly to find council in The Vishanti, the fickle triad of mystical entities that bestowed the Sorcerer Supreme with the majority of his power. Only emptiness waited for him there.

In the months following, Strange reached out to another. The technique he used was <em>deva-yoga</em>, and it was taught to him by a former friend in another lifetime. A discipline of Tantra, deva-yoga, or "deity yoga," uses deep meditation to visualize Buddhas, bodhisattvas, and the realms that hold them. The hope is that by visualizing those whom have achieved Awakening, the meditator is more able to manifest those same qualities en route to their own Awakening. Maddened, if the Vishanti refused to enlighten him, Strange would seek it out himself.

In his first month of deva-yoga, Strange saw nothing, only blackness. The week following, he saw a hallway: muddy brown tiles and massive orange pillars blanketed in shadow. With each step he took closer, the darkness faded.

There was a door at the end of the hallway, he realized, but standing between him and the door was a small lion-footed stool. Atop the stool sat two ghosts, still life. Try as he might, he could not distinguish them. Another day, another step forward until finally the haunts revealed themselves; placed on the stool was a twist-top glass bottle with a label marked "Twenty-year Malt Scotch," beside it a snifter.

Strange understood the challenge. As his friend lead him down the path of deva-yoga, he explained that it could not simply deliver enlightenment to those on an opposite path; instead, it would expose the "dissatisfactory" in life that kept the meditator from achieving Awakening.

Alcoholism was a dissatisfactory that Strange had struggled with on and off since his hands were taken from him. The bottle dulled the pain, the sadness, and the anger. In his numbness, he didn't have to confront his new startling truth: he wasn't the world's premier surgeon any longer, he wasn't important, he was just another pitiful every-man. Even when Strange ascended to Sorcerer Supreme, the booze stayed. It didn't matter if he had been sober for years, he still struggled to suppress the urges.

Strange lifted the scotch and admired the label for a moment. It was the good stuff. He could taste it on his tongue, he could feel the smooth burn go down his throat, and it made him sick. He tossed the bottle to the floor, glass tears raining across the floor. The door creaked open, and he stepped through.

One after another, he entered a new hallway, faced another challenge: materialism, anger, delusion, and even his disbelief in "no-self"; that nothing was permanent, not his mind, body, soul, and not even his supremeness. Months passed between each door, the next door harder to open than the previous, but Strange backed down from none and emerged victorious.

One last hallway stood before him and Awakening. It was much darker than all the others; his eyes couldn't pierce through much. All he saw was the tiled floor, the red pillars, like in the other hallways, and then several sitting figures lining his path. The rest was black.

Strange lifted his right foot to take a step forward, but, before it came down against the floor, his ear began to tickle. The itch was faint but forewarning. Strange pulled his foot back. The itch grew; it took a sound, a voice.

"You are not ready yet," it warned in a familiar tone.

It was the voice of his old friend from lives past.

It was the voice of Wong.

A year later, Strange's eyes ripped open wide; he was alone in the Meditation Room, disconnected from answers. A chilling tear circled down his cheek.

Three hooked claws found flesh in Wong's shoulder as he protected Strange's inanimate body with it. Fists twined to triplet blades; the female monk struck again, stabbing Wong just above his kidney. When she pulled the blades free, it unleashed a floodgate of crimson, and Wong sunk to his knees.

The monk halted her attack. "You do not need to die. There is no dishonor in forfeiting him."

Wong glanced up at her through watery eyes, his blurred sight projecting three of everything. The wavering ghosts shimmered in a flake of sunlight; a flare of bright white washed over him with absent heat. Numbness hunted warmth out his wounds, it spilling around him in a sea of blood.

The monk grabbed Strange's body, now soiled in his friend's fleeting vitality, and dragged him back through the crowd of K'un L'unies toward the monastery.

At first I was scared when I looked in his eyes / Now that I know him I'm not that surprised / I'm just waiting on the sun to rise / Oh how I wish that old sun would rise

Massive jaws behind him destroyed the outside sunlight, leaving the Sorcerer alone with darkness in the mouth of Chiantang. The insides of the beast pulsed like a chorus of maddened steel drums. Strange tickled his finger and thumb with saliva as to pull apart pages of a book. He snapped his moist fingers and drew from them a torch's flame. Faint light washed the ingress.

Massive alleys of purples and blues gurgled with blood over the moth-eaten mouth of Chiantang. A worn leathery tongue, lost of its sandpaper luster, licked wildly under toe, hoping to usher Strange to the back of his throat. The Cloak pinning the arcane master just above the saliva oasis, he tracked down the inside of the cheek.

Strange dragged his free hand across the coral flesh wall, in search of something. The pulp shuddered under the touch, and the insides of the beast began to pant. The pace of drums quickened. The finger highlighted every volume of invisible hieroglyphs scribed into the mouth cavity. Every passing line brought the student closer upon answers. Then, with a prick of the fingernail sinking into the slobbery flesh, it was found; a spore of blood dripped down to a quivering tongue.

Strange's eyes fluttered shut; his body paused. It was the lifeline. Slowly, clear fluid too thick for sweat and too pristine for blood pulled from his pores. Blots mated with others, and their children did the same. Before long, a chrysalis enveloped the sorcerer. The chrysalis drowned away the original Stephen Strange and formed around him a false-twin, an ethereal copy.

The New Strange rose up from its throne, built on the former, and crossed to the beast's wound. It glowed an angelic warmth; a white star-burst framed in burning blue. He unleashed a wicked tongue, planing across dagger-like fangs. The New Strange clamped down over the wound. Fangs tugged at the thick thatch of flesh until it tore away exposing the lifeline. The beast wanted to scream.

The New Strange let unstitched patches of denim flesh dribble down his face as he then turned his attention to the throne. Wretched fingers dug in just below the rib cage and pulled. Strands of tight skin stretched sickly across an under-impression of bone, popped, and tore like stressed rubber bands; the cavity ripped in two. The New Strange dismissed loose threads of skin like cobwebs, and he excavated the chest, in search of life.

Just below the pectoral laid a stillborn heart, an expired fruit of life. The New Strange plucked it.

The preparations had been readied for the surgeon. Now, two could become one.

"Trading the soul of a dragon for Awakening instead of your own?"

"And, in your foolishness, you assumed that we could outwitted." The voice cut through the infinite dark divide directly into Strange's head. "But, that has always been your greatest dissatisfactory, Stephen. Your arrogance."

Stephen fell mute. His muscles were numb. He could only listen.

"You have traveled a long journey to be in our presence. And yet, you must travel back empty handed."

"No matter how powerful, Stephen, you are only human, nothing more and no better. Remember that," a fourth voice complimented.

Strange recognized them: the six in the conclave.

"Until you do, everything you hold dear will be lost. Your hands, what few friends you have left, and, of course, your Supremacy given to another." A fifth voice.

"But, you knew that already, didn't you, Stephen? Your arrogance allowed you to betray <em> them</em> . And they found another to carry the mantle."

I used to wonder why he looked familiar / And the I realized it was a mirror / And now it is plain to see, / The whole time the monster was me

Excerpts from "Boogie Monster" by Gnarls Barkley.

You know, I'm not sure what to say at the end of this one. I feel that SOMETHING needs to be said, but I think that, for the most part, it speaks for itself, and, if I say too much, it might just undercut the impact of the story.

Either way, there's a lot of jumping back and forth in this one, the shadow-thing sequence is a follow-up to issue one, and the Chiantang sequence is a follow-up to issue two. Both were needed in this issue, not only because there was no real conclusion given to them beforehand, but because it really does help set up the rest of this issue and the future. At worst, they help explain just how Stephen keeps not-dying. He's a tricky one, that guy.

However, I did do what I promised...I answered what I can see as ALL my dangling plot threads from two very cryptic pervious issues. Now, I may not have neon blinking signs pointing you to the answers, but they're there. May take a few reads, may even take too many reads, but, by the end , I think it speaks for itself.

Oh, and that's not to say that THIS issue won't have its fair share of dangling plot threads to trim up later.

Mike Rasbury
061906

Next Issue: To cope with the aftermath, Stephen Strange consults another infamous Doctor with a background in black magic!