Chapter 5: Dread
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
...
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
~William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"
Long Beach, California
When Wanda's first attempt at an explanation was muddled nearly to the point of incoherence, Wong insisted they talk about it over breakfast.
The waterfront park was nearly deserted but for a few passing joggers and dog walkers so early on a weekday morning. The picnic table where the trio of incognito superheroes sat with their coffee and pastries was safely out of the way. A row of shops and a pretty lighthouse on a hill framed their view of the harbor. A couple of docked cruise ships were visible further off, fully lit by the freshly risen sun. It was a calming scene, but Wanda didn't seem to feel it.
She'd eaten a few bites of her danish, after compulsively tearing them into small pieces, but she hadn't touched her latte.
"Okay," she finally said between deep breaths. "What I was trying to explain is that the creature I saw in Dr. Mills' mind...I have not actually seen it before, but I have seen pictures of creatures like it. But not on this Earth. Not our Earth."
"Yeah, we get that," Strange said. "What can you tell us about them?"
"The Earth where I saw them...it is very close to ours, if that makes sense. What I mean is it's like ours. It's not like there's really directions there where you can say this one's less distance to ours than that one."
"The multiverse is more like trees," Strange said. "Different timelines branch off from the trunk of the tree; the ones that branch off more recently can be thought of as closer to ours. Except there are millions of different trees occupying the same space. That doesn't matter, just tell us about the creatures."
"The most different thing about that Earth from ours is the religions. Every religion celebrates the defeat of what they call the Devil, and its banishment from the world, which happened about two hundred years ago. When the Devil was loose in the world, almost everyone went crazy. People destroyed, killed, ran wild for no reason. The Devil fed on their madness, or maybe it was that it fed on their sanity, and that drove them mad. I'm not clear on a lot of things. But there were some people who were immune to it. They made a secret plan. They found the largest form the Devil had, the one all others came from, and they opened a magical gate that the Devil fell through, saving their world. Some of their religions teach that this Devil will someday return, and they prepare their followers to fight it again. They have pictures of devils in their holy buildings. The devils have different shapes, but they look like the things Dr. Mills saw."
Her hands were shaking so badly she had to give up tearing the remnants of her danish into smaller and smaller pieces.
"So you think they banished it from their world to ours?" Strange asked.
She nodded.
"You said some people were immune to it," Wong said. "Do you know what made them immune?"
"No. The religions don't agree on it; some think the most worthy or the strongest willed could resist the insanity, some think it was genetic."
"So they believed all the devils eminated from a central source, and once that was defeated the others disappeared?" Strange asked.
"That is how the stories went."
"And in that world, the Devil's influence spread all over the globe?"
She nodded. "It ruled the world for years. The madness destroyed nearly everything. Arsons, murders, starvations, cannibalism, suicides... From the way the religions of that world talk about it, it was hell on Earth. Most people died."
Strange stood abruptly and started pacing.
After a couple of minutes, Wong asked him, "Any ideas how we can find the source?"
"We'll just have to keep talking to witnesses." He looked at Wanda, obviously still agitated. "We're still going to need you. I've got a lot of reading to do. Let's get back to the Sanctum."