Chapter 1: Apparition

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

~T.S. Eliot, from "The Waste Land"

Christchurch, New Zealand

The reports came from an old school building. There had been a recent spate of posts on social media and websites devoted to haunted houses and urban legends. Students here reported eerie feelings, sensations of a presence, strange shapes seen from corners of eyes in empty rooms. The kinds of things no one would take seriously.

No one except a couple of sorcerers sworn to guard the Earth from supernatural threats.

Dr. Strange and Wong stepped into the darkened room, raised hands surrounded by disks of light.

"If it's still here, we're going to have to draw it out," Strange said. "Ready?"

"Ready," Wong replied.

Strange spread his hands, and a pale light with a play of colors reminiscent of an oil slick on the surface of a puddle glowed between them.

Spells were not unlike surgeries: you needed the right tools, a knowledge of what you had to do, and the precision to pull it off. In the case of magic, the tools were incantations (spoken out loud, shouted, or even just thought, depending on the spell and the skill of the caster), objects of power, and gesture to direct that power. All these tools simply gave access to manipulate the fabric of reality, to reach under the surface of the universe.

And, just like in surgery, if you had those tools but didn't know what you were doing, the results could be catastrophic. Just like in surgery, you had to stitch up the cuts you made to reach the problem. You had to close the doors you opened. If you didn't close those doors, bad things could come out of them.

Not every supernatural threat they faced was conscious. Some were the magical equivalents of a toxin or a contagion. It didn't take Strange long to realize this wasn't one of those. This was aware. It was cunning.

It was stalking.

Thinking a string of words unpronounceable with human vocal apparatus, Strange reached a tangle of sorcery into the dark, into the floor. He grasped the entity.

"Here it comes."

He drew it into the open.

"That's...close your eyes!" Wong shouted.

But Strange had already seen it. If black could glow, he would describe it as a glowing black creature. It looked insectlike, or more like an isopod, about the size of a football. Then it turned toward him, growing and changing into an amorphous shape.

With some power of its own, it dissolved and coalesced, pulling loose from Strange's enchantment, and flew toward him. He put up a shield, but the being's eyes had already locked onto his eyes, and something passed between them.

The darkness blinked.

He was in the hall of a medical school. Only the emergency lights were on, and those were flickering. An old woman lurched toward him. She looked human, but her hands were huge; each of her thin, knobby fingers was easily two feet long.

"Sith zneam ngithun ron ud uy," she said solemnly, her voice becoming higher pitched with each syllable, ending slightly above what a human voice was capable of.

She reached for his head with her enormous hand. He tried to defend himself, but when he reached for magic he found none.

He was now in an operating room, but it was the most unsanitary, unwholesome room he'd ever been in. Blood stains blotched the bare concrete floor, the surgical instruments were antiques and covered in rust. Somewhere, something was dripping. Millions of insects clung to the walls and ceiling. They didn't move, but they disappeared and reappeared in time with his heartbeat, and every time they reappeared they were in new positions.

Dr. Strange looked at the face of the man on the operating table. It was his own face.

This wasn't real. Of course it couldn't be real. But it felt real. Every detail was vivid, every smell, sound, even the dampness of the air, the weight of the scalpel in his hand, the texture of the floor under his feet...everything seemed real.

Someone or something was behind him, moving slowly, examining him. He couldn't see or hear it, but knew it was there, coming closer.

And then the reality around him flickered out. He was back in the dark, musty room in the old school, Wong in front of him wrangling with the nightmare creature with threads of magic.

Strange was disoriented for a moment. Where had he just been? Was it real? Was this real?

He shook it off. He had to act, had to trust his own mind and reason. He joined in Wong's attack, opening a portal that he quickly moved to swallow the creature. The portal went to a dimension where the laws of physics precluded any form of magic, where a being made of magic would simply cease to exist.

When the portal closed, Wong opened his eyes. For several seconds they remained still, on alert, until their senses assured them the power was gone.

"Are you alright?" Wong asked.

"I'm fine. What was that?" Strange asked.

"In the old records, they're called 'mind lice'. They've been recorded for hundreds of years, especially on ships at sea. We don't know much more about them, because those who encounter them tend to go insane."

"Charming," Strange said. "So we have records of these things in the library?"

"Yes."

"Let's go."

Doctor Strange floated in the library, open books orbiting around him.

Wong hadn't been exaggerating about how little they knew of the so-called mind lice. Most mentions of them came from the ravings of patients in old asylums or modern psychiatric hospitals.

He levitated his laptop into the swirl of research material and started searching medical databases for cases of sudden-onset psychological breakdowns without known explanations. Combining those cases with the old reports in the Sanctum Sanctorum's records, patterns began to emerge.

"The source is somewhere in the southern hemisphere," he announced when Wong walked toward him between the rows of bookshelves. "The earliest reports of the mind lice were from a whaling ship off the coast of Antarctica in 1874. Since then they've been attacking further and further north, moving over land and ocean indiscriminately. The latest reports are from as far north as Australia and Brazil. They're spreading. And I don't think this is a random attack. I think it's a coordinated invasion."

"What makes you think that?"

"When that thing was in my head, during my hallucination, I felt a connection to something else. Something bigger."

"How can you be so sure that wasn't part of the hallucination?"

"I'm not 'so sure,' it's just a feeling. But whether these things were sent by another entity, or whether they're invading our Earth from some crack in reality, we have to find where they're coming from and deal with it."

"I found something that might help with that." Wong handed him a stack of paper.

Strange skimmed the headers and frowned. "This is a field report from an Avengers' mission, from seven years ago." It didn't surprise him that they had records from the Avengers; the sorcerers of the Sanctum Sanctorum rutinely hacked crime-fighting organizations all over the world watching for reports of the weird, looking for threats that would take magic to combat.

"From when Iron Man and Vision investigated an abandoned HYDRA base in Antarctica," Wong said. "Read the last paragraph on page six."

Strange's frown deepened as he read. "He didn't know what he was seeing. He dismissed it as some kind of unknown atmospheric mirage." He skimmed the next couple of pages. "He didn't make a note of the coordinates."

"I know. And unfortunately we can't ask him about it. Dead men tell no tales."

"True. But this is the best lead we have for the source of this threat." He stroked his chin, thinking deeply for several seconds. "There is someone he might have told more to than he put in the official report. Maybe it's time to dig her up."