Chapter 1
“This is West 4th Street- Washington Square…” The automatic voice called as his train slowed to a stop and the doors opened. In his daze, he nearly missed the stop, jumping off just as the doors began to close. Peter took a deep breath as he watched the train roll away before he climbed the stairs up to the street and slowly walked down the sidewalk.
He didn’t spend a lot of time in this part of the city. Contrary to popular belief, a lot of New Yorkers don’t and even more so most people his age don’t. His new SHIELD acquaintance, Agent Riley, grew up a few miles away from him in another part of Queens and told Peter how as a little kid, he associated the wall of skyscrapers in the distance with the Emerald City from the Wizard of Oz, something that went a little over Peter’s head as he hadn’t seen that before.
What time he had spent around here was spent swinging from rooftop to rooftop. Walking around down here was odd to him.
“This is it…” Peter said to himself. He stood across the street from his destination. The ornate doors seeming foreboding to what was inside. And yet, people walked past it like it was just another door. Was there something special about him that he could see it and they couldn’t? Maybe it knew he needed help. It had been over a week since he’d saved the train… and it hadn’t stopped.
The dreams hadn’t stopped. He hadn’t stopped.
Peter walked up to the large doors and knocked. Within an instant, he was suddenly standing in a library.
“Hello Peter, what can I do for you?” Dr. Stephen Strange asked.
The older man was sitting nearby on a large chair, reading. His roommate/ fellow master of the Mystic arts, Wong, was nearby eating a tuna melt.
“Hey… Doc… I’m… I’ve been having really weird dreams. They don’t seem to want to go away.” Peter said.
Strange shook his head and chuckled a little.
“When it comes to medicine, I’m a surgeon, Peter, not psychiatrist.”
“Yeah, I know, but… The thing is, I’m dreaming of things that happened in the other world.” Peter said. “Things that will happen.”
Strange closed his book and put it down on his lap.
“Peter, I do know this; dreams are simply how your subconscious processes information. Your mind is probably still bothered by what that Racoon fellow told you about the other world. That’s often what happens in dreams, drawing on our fears and our anxieties. Last week I dreamt I was performing surgery naked.”
Peter looked at him, his eyes slightly widened, his head slanted.
“Don’t be too shocked, that one’s actually quite common.” Strange said. “Twice this year I dreamt I was still in med school and was about to fail an important test. These sorts of dreams happen to everyone once in a while. But if you feel like you needed to talk to me about it… I think, given the circumstances, you deserve to be heard out. So, what did you see?”
“I’m in the woods most of the time. There was another me, telling me how I failed… how he was dead.”
“You, telling you how you died or…?”
Peter shook his head. “No, Mr. Stark. How he died that day. That it was all my fault.”
Strange sat up. Peter saw the look in his eyes. He knew.
“That…” Strange said, putting his book down “That was the one.”
“The one?” Peter asked “The one time we’d win? Stark had to die?”
“Yes… I admit I never took into account the stones doing something like this so, I guess you could call this Fourteen Million and two…, but yes. I saw Stark snapping his fingers with the stones on his armor, turning Thanos into dust and causing Stark to die.”
Peter processed what Strange was saying.
“When did you start getting these dreams?” Strange asked
“It started a few weeks after it all happened. Nick Fury came to me, offered me protection against Stark trying something after he took all my Spider-man gear back. After I saved that subway train,”
“Nice job on that, by the way, I’m impressed.” Strange added in.
“Thanks, anyway, after I saved the train, I told the other me to go away, and he did... but then, I started seeing him in other dreams, just, wandering around. He’d appear randomly. He’d say things… Try to get to me.”
“This sounds like quite the nightmare…” Strange said, before he heard a choking, wheezing sound coming from across the room. Wong started banging his left hand on the table while his right was around his throat.
Strange ran over and gave Wong the Heimlich maneuver, as his friend spat out part his sandwich.
“Wong, seriously, chew…”
“No…” Wong huffed “I know what’s after Parker.” After catching his breath, Wong got up and ran across the room.
“Where is it… where is it…” he muttered as searched the shelves.
He let out an “Ah HA!” and pulled an ancient, heavy looking book off a shelf. He ran back to the two with the massive tome, slamming it down in from of them.
“The research in this book goes all the way back to the first sorcerer, Agamotto himself.” Wong said to the two as he brushed the dust off before opening the book and quickly flipped through it, muttering the entire time, until he found what he was looking for.
“There, that’s him… That’s what’s after you.”
“What? What is it?” Peter asked.
“You said it yourself” Wong said looking directly at Strange “Nightmare…”
The Peter and Strange looked at the page. They saw a drawing of a figure on an ethereal looking horse. They couldn’t see a face, just two eyes in shadows.
“This is one of the only images we have of him, drawn by someone who survived an encounter with him, at least with his sanity intact.”
“So you’re telling me ‘Nightmare’ is a thing?” Strange asked. “A being? What, like a demon?”
“In a literal sense, not really. In his interpersonal skills, you might say so. From what little we know about him; he comes from another plain of existence.” Wong explained “His is a world where thought can be made real. He feeds off negative emotions, by bringing people to him, in their sleep. Like a reverse of our astral projections… Those aren’t dreams Peter is having. It’s essentially all real, it’s just not in our reality.”
Wang looked over at Peter.
“Do you feel dead tired mentally the next day? Like you couldn’t focus if your life depended on it, but you feel like you could run a mile without stopping? Your body feels physically fine?”
Peter nodded. “Yeah… how did you know that part?”
“It’s because you’re not actually asleep. At least your mind isn’t, your soul, your consciousness, whatever you want to call it. It’s wide awake in his world.”
“So…” Peter said, panicking slightly, remembering what Wong had just said about where the drawing came from “What do I do?”
“We get him to leave you alone, one way or another.” Wong said. “Nightmare can’t exist in our reality. Our existence is too limited for a being like him. We’d have to face him on his terms and on his turf.”
“I think I know where this is going.” Strange said “And I have a good idea that she’s not going to like it…”