Chapter 4: Intimations
Into my heart on air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
...
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
~A. E. Housman, "A Shropshire Lad XL"
San Diego, California
It was disorienting. Wanda had been avoiding people for so long—hiding out, deliberately living and dressing as a vagrant so people would ignore her. Now she was walking through the halls of a hospital following behind two sorcerers, avoiding the eyes of doctors, nurses, and patients they passed. It was hard for her to believe she looked presentable. She kept glancing down at her outfit to remind herself she didn't look like some homeless crazy Doctor Strange was committing.
She felt acutely out of place.
Doctor Strange and Wong had magically altered their appearances. They walked down the hospital hallway dressed as doctors. No one gave them a second glance.
Strange opened a door like he knew exactly where he was going.
They found themselves in a private room. The patient was sitting at a table scribbling on a paper, but when he saw them he jumped up and backed against the wall, spilling pens and papers on the floor.
Strange ignored him and took a folder from the foot of the bed. He pretended to look through it.
"Doctor Baldwin Mills, thirty-five years old, marine biologist. Ten months ago, he and five colleagues were found drifting in a life raft in the Southern Ocean after their research vessel went silent. All of them exhibited extreme psychological abnormalities, including irrational and sometimes violent behavior. Two of the survivors have already died, either by suicide or just the recklessness brought on by their psychological states. Doctor Mills here hasn't spoken since being found, though he's prone to fits of screaming and graphorrhea." He nodded toward the pages and pages on the table.
Wanda picked one up; it was packed with strings of words that seemed to make no sense, but were written in a tight, frantic cursive that gave the impression he was trying to communicate something urgent.
"So? Are you going to do your thing or not?" Strange asked.
Wanda looked up at the patient, Baldwin Mills. He looked terrified and confused, like a wounded animal at a vet.
"I'm not going to hurt you." She moved toward him slowly, hand outstretched.
He stared at her.
It had been so long since she'd looked into another person's mind. Since joining the Avengers, she'd only done it with Vision. It had been easy with him; he'd been willing, even eager to let her into his mind. No one else had ever trusted her like that. It was a necessarily intrusive process, and with an unwilling subject it could be extremely unpleasant for both of them.
Her fingers twitched, connecting her to the level of reality that was pure Mind.
Eyes widening at the tendrils of red light that wove through the air toward his face, Dr. Mills opened his mouth to scream, but couldn't get it out before she was in.
She couldn't read thoughts—her powers had never been that sensitive—but she could pick up on emotional states and vibes of personality.
His mind was more chaotic than anyone she'd ever encountered before. He was terrified, but it seemed to be a kind of constant existential terror he had lived with for so long it had become a permanent state.
She treaded deeper, into memories, images.
The ocean, silver and gray. The research vessel rose and fell, tilting so much with each wave it almost felt like it would tip over. There was something in the sky besides the clouds.
"What is that? What is that thing?"
The sky was blue, streaked with high clouds that moved impossibly fast.
The screen showed footage from the submersible, the dark ocean lit by a powerful light directly in front of the camera. The thing the camera illuminated was not a squid, not a whale, not a shark, not a jellyfish.
"The radio's still out. We've got to get back. Got to warn..."
A tiny inlet of a nameless island to wait out the storm. Penguins on the stony beach, albatrosses in the crags huddled against the wind. Freezing rain coated the ship in ice. It was already there, already with them. Electricity out. Dark. Why was it dark? It was summer. Something at the window, something at the door. Had to get off the ship. It was frozen, bound in ice to the rocks, too little time to break out. It came. The emergency raft! The raft! Carry across the ice. What is that thing? Behind them. It was in the raft with them, sitting there, looking at them. The water was death. The thing was patient. Glow... The glow... The swirling lines, glowing against their eyes like an afterimage of staring at lights, an insectine face. It was hungry.
It was familiar.
It isn't real, Wanda inserted the impression in Dr. Mills' mind. It was a hallucination, a trick of the light on the ocean.
His mind flickered with the possibility, but rejected it, as it had been considered and rejected thousands of times.
It's too late...
She tried something different. She created a scene in his mind, a warm meadow, sunshine gleaming on flowers and grass, surrounded by steady, protective trees. She showed Dr. Mills himself, lying on the grass in the meadow, safe and sound.
But the image faded away, morphing back into the boat trapped in ice as something surrounded it. Not because it couldn't just destroy them, but because it wanted them to suffer, to fear, to belong to it.
Wanda extricated herself from Dr. Mills' mind. He turned his head to stare at her as she took a step back.
"I'm sorry," she said to him. Of course she couldn't bring his mind peace; she had none to give.
As the full implications of what she'd seen crashed over her, she sank to the floor and wrapped her arms around herself.
If only it were Vision's arms. If only he were here. He wouldn't necessarily know what to do any more than she did, but if he were beside her she wouldn't feel so entirely hopeless.
"What did you see?" Dr. Strange demanded.
"I saw what happened to their boat," she answered unsteadily. "And I saw what attacked them. I know what it is. Or...rather...I should say...I know where it came from."
Strange and Wong glanced at each other, then back at her sharply.
"What?"