Doc Stalwart #252

 

Homesick

Adapted from The Mighty Doc Stalwart #252 (March 1984)

By Dr. Mike Desing

The depth finder dinged.

      “We’ve reached 750 feet,” Mikah reported, looking up from the console.

      Behind him, the mighty Doc Stalwart was pulling the sleeve of his wetsuit over his huge bicep. He was, of course, smiling, “Great. You should see the reef soon.” Mikah was surprised that they made wetsuits that fit men who were nearly seven feet tall and built like a bull. It was probably custom-made.

      The Beetle’s headlights blared, but at this depth, their light was cut to maybe 30 yards. Its grey carapace crawled through the dark waters of the South Atlantic. As it did, huge fish with bulbous eyes floated by, expressing little interest in this inedible invader to their realm.

      A sparkling silvery reef came into view rising from the dark floor, “I didn’t think coral reefs could grow this far underwater.”

      “They can’t,” Doc said as he set a mask atop his forehead, “That’s not coral; it’s a nest.”

      Mikah’s stomach contracted. Doc came forward and peered out the window. He whistled in appreciation. The reef, or what looked like a reef at least, was quite impressive, spreading the full range of available light, maybe a hundred feet in all directions.

      At the back of the hold, the thin, dark girl named Zirah balanced on one foot, the other curled up and pushing into her inner thigh. It was called tree. It looked uncomfortable. She had been that way for an hour.

      “Say, Zir,” Doc said striding towards her, “Let me borrow one of your swords. That nest is kind of thick…” Mikah had realized some time ago that Doc would not walk anywhere. He would stride.

      Zirah’s eyes flashed open. She might have huffed.

      “Oh, it’ll be FINE,” Doc said, “I won’t let anything happen to it. Promise.”

      “You can buy her a new one if anything happens,” Mikah suggested, trying to help negotiate.

      Doc crinkled his nose, “Not likely. It’s forged from ore that came from the base of eternity, so it might be hard to track down a replacement...”

      “Oh.”

      Zirah appeared to contemplate for a moment, then produced the sword. Doc took it and nodded, “Thanks. You’re the best!”

      She switched feet and returned to her meditative state.

      From its cage, the imp Jynx made a hissing sound. Its tail started twitching.

      “We’re close,” Doc muttered, striding now towards Jynx’s cage on the near wall, “I need you to sniff it out, okay, Jynxie?” Doc opened a drawer near Jynx’s cage, producing a hunk of bloody meat. Something was moving on it. It may have been tiny bugs. Mikah decided not to examine too closely.

      The beating of the tail against the cage became more intense.

      Doc strode to the main panel at the pilot’s seat. Mikah still did not know the function of half of the hundreds of buttons, switches, levers, and sliders that made up the chaotic assembly of controls. Doc flipped two switches near the middle of the console, activated a button in the lower right corner, and turned a knob towards the left, completing this in rapid succession.

      The engines shifted into a hum, as the lights in the cabin faded to a dull blue. Forward motion stopped. Mikah felt the vibration of the lower bay door opening, experiencing the familiar pangs of oncoming panic. Seawater was splashing up into the hold.

      “No worries,” Doc said, “as long as the Beetle stays steady, you have a bubble of air in here. So long as you don’t turn her sideways, you’ll be fine,” he winked. Because quick death by intense pressurized drowning was a hoot.

      Doc had removed Jynx from its cage, and now stood near the edge, the deep sea splashing at his feet. He pulled the mask into place. It covered his whole head, with an oxygen tank that sat on his chest, resting beneath his chin. Jynx still chewed the last of the reward meat.

      “What about… um… gear?” Mikah gestured towards the storage units along the side. Surely there was something in there for deep-sea exploration.

      Doc smiled, his voice coming out in a mechanic echo through the mask’s ventilator, “I’m impervious to pressure like this. I have been on dives to two-thousand feet without it bothering me much, and I can hold my breath for at least ten hours. This has a reserve of six hours of oxygen… and Jynxie here breathes by absorbing hydrogen through his carapace, so water’s no problem for him. And he’s been able to withstand the crushing gravity of Venus. We should be good.”

      Mikah was kind of nodding. But his mouth was hanging open, too.

      Doc tapped his goggles, “...these have a transmitter. You can watch what we’re doing, and I can communicate with you while we’re down there. I expect that cutting through the outside of the nest might take as much as an hour, and then we’ll be in its lair. That’s when things might get a little hairy.”

      “What is it, exactly?”

      “A Kraken. But not to worry. It’s only a little one.”

***

Thirty minutes had passed. Zirah was still in her pose, motionless at the back of the ship. Mikah was seated at the controls, eyes fixed to the screen. He had been watching as Doc and the 2’ imp dove to the edge of the reef, searching along its face for a few minutes. Soon, Jynx began to sniff at a spot, trying to dig at it with his claws. Doc eased him aside and began hacking with the sword.

      The coral, or whatever it was, shattered in crystalline pieces that floated, creating a fog of dust and debris that obscured vision terribly. Whenever the view would clear, Mikah could see a thick web of interlacing silvery material that twisted like broad, gem-like vines.

      The whole time, Doc was singing pieces of songs from his youth. For a while, he’d whistled I Want to Hold Your Hand. Then he’d moved on to Last Train to Clarksville. He’d just begun an early Rolling Stones song that Mikah couldn’t remember the name of, when he stopped.

      “There we be.”

      At this point, the fog of debris hung quite thick. There was no more of the coral in the way. Instead, a dull green light pulsed in the distance.

      Something was down there.

      Doc clicked his tongue like he was calling a dog to head out for a game of catch, “C’mon girl...”

      The debris parted, for only an instant, but it was long enough. Mikah caught sight of it.

      The Kraken was a truly monstrous thing. It was part squid. Yes, definitely part squid. But it had a carapace that resembled the imp Jynx. It had a maw that looked like it was more suited to a huge insect than some undersea force of unhinged nature. And it had eyes.

      Oh, dear goodness, it had eyes.

      Those eyes, red and hate-filled, had seen things beyond human comprehension. They had peeked under the rocks at the base of the world. They had gazed into the heart of death itself. It was looking at Doc, for sure. But it was also looking into, and through, and even beyond Doc as well. It was looking into the soul of everything, including the young mutant who was a hundred yards away in an explorer craft that floated just beyond the walls of its nest.

      It might have been reading his thoughts. Mikah had to tell himself to breathe again.

      “She’s a little bigger than I expected,” Doc said. His voice was steady.

      In one move, the Kraken spread its tentacles and then retracted them. This gave it propulsion to drive at Doc Stalwart. It closed half the distance between itself and Doc, maybe 200’, in half of a heartbeat.

      And then it suddenly stopped. The dull sound of chains, muted by 800 feet of water pressure, arrested its assault.

      It let out something like a scream, writhing against the chains that held it in place. Beyond it, at the far end of this cavernous place, Mikah could see the source of the light. A deep pit that cut into the lowest place in the lair radiated a green illumination.

      Something far deeper, and even far darker, waited beyond this nest.

      ‘Okay, Jynx, go have a look,” Doc suggested. The silvery blade had flashed in front of the visor, and Mikah knew that Doc must have sheathed the sword on his back. To the far left of the screen, he saw Jynx swim in an arc around and beyond the creature, diving towards the green glowing abyss. The Kraken didn’t seem to care, keeping its hateful eyes fixed on Doc Stalwart.

      Doc was having a conversation with a monster incapable of speech, “okay, kracky, let’s see how two fists of justice feel on your face…”

      And suddenly the Kraken, at the far end of its chains’ lengths, was getting closer. No. Check that. Doc was swimming towards it.

      It might have hissed. Its mouth opened, and the waters around it seemed to churn. Its tentacles flailed, revealing hundreds of spiked protrusions, some a foot long, covering them. A purple, inky ichor flowed around it, which Mikah assumed was some sort of poison.

      Doc punched it in the jaw.

      Two massive teeth, each the length of Doc’s arm, popped from its mouth and hung in the water for a second before their weight pulled them towards the floor of the lair, maybe 50’ below. They would soon join a veritable landscape of bones, rotting carcasses, and sprawling piles of debris that covered the full expanse of the floor here, and which had been covered over in some sort of undersea lichen.

      “This thing’s been chained here for maybe three millennia,” Doc mused as he landed another haymaker, this one on a part of its anatomy that might have been a shoulder. One of the tentacles went limp, “Atlantean Sorcerers bound it here for their safety, but its energy is starting to pollute the region. Have to deal with it once and for all…”

      He landed an uppercut that forced its huge maw closed, snapping its head back. The thing was at least ten times Doc’s size. Doc seemed not to notice.

      “I mean, we don’t really need an ocean full of sharks that have been suffused with dark ethereal magic, now do we?”

      Mikah assumed this was a rhetorical question.

      The Kraken had wrapped a tentacle around Doc, pinning his arms to his sides.

      Doc kept talking. “The Atlanteans thought the thing wanted to conquer their realm. Seems a reasonable conclusion. I mean, LOOK at it. It just screams evil intent.”

      He pushed his elbows out, and the tentacle stretched beyond its unnatural length. Mikah was sure that he heard the sound of muscle tearing. The Kraken responded in rage as much as pain. It seemed that all merged into one unifying emotion: hatred. Everything this creature experienced was just a shade of hate.

      Throughout the fight, which had now lasted maybe fifteen seconds, Doc had stolen a glance towards the green hole every few breaths. On the third such glance, after Doc had delivered a gut punch to what must have been part of a gut, Jynx emerged from the hole.

      He was covered with a phosphorescent green slime. And he was smiling.

      The thought that something could actually make Jynx happy was almost as unnerving as a 40’ long Kraken. It was close.

      “All righty, then,” Doc answered to a question no one had asked.

      He drew the sword. The Kraken moved back a bit, seeming to position itself for a battle to the death with this invader from the mortal world.

      Then Doc dove. He slipped past the creature, using the broad side of the blade to beat aside a tentacle that tried to wrap itself around his ankle. Soon, he was beyond the creature, and had gripped the chain that bound it here. This close, Mikah could make out the intricate detail of the chain. Each link was as wide as his own thighs (which he had to admit were pretty thin by thigh standards) and was covered in eldritch runes. Hundreds, no thousands, of unique runes covered the length of each link. And there were at least a hundred such links making up this great chain.

      Doc used his left hand to steady the chain, and the right to draw back the sword. The Kraken was rushing at him now. He swung, landing a direct strike. A purple sort of lightning arced from the spot, pushing the Kraken back and shorting out the viewer, turning the screen black.

      “Whew,” Doc said after a moment, coughing. Even Doc was impressed.

      The screen blipped twice and then came back to life. The Kraken was at the full distance of the chain, upside down, its dark eyes seeming to shake off the grogginess. Doc’s hand fumbled for the chain again.

      “Atlantean magic packs a wallop!”

      The chain was chipped – but not broken. It glowed with red energy. Some of the runes along the damaged link were moving, disturbed from their ancient slumber. They seemed angry.

      Doc took another great swing with the sword, and this one cut through. He had positioned the link’s opening away from himself and the Kraken, so its energy arced out, away from them both, carving a scar into a chunk of the reef a few hundred feet away. Doc let go of the sword, allowing it to drop as he held the chain in both hands, propping his elbows against its edge as he pulled outward from the gap he’d just cut.

      The Kraken dove at him, and Doc spun sideways, kicking at its open maw to keep from being swallowed. The view on the screen shifted quickly. Mikah could just barely register what he was looking at before it changed: first Doc’s legs pushing into a split to force open the maw of the creature, then upwards to his two hands that were pulling at the chain. Doc issued a savage yell, drawing reserves of strength from somewhere deep within himself, reserves he was rarely called upon to draw from. The chain succumbed to his mighty grip, Doc bending it apart at a ninety-degree angle. He pried it loose; a length was still affixed to the Kraken, but the rest fell into a coil on the floor of the lair, where it terminated at a great anchor.

      Doc had pushed the Kraken away, and it now swam a feverish circuit, circumnavigating the full breadth of its lair in seconds. This was the furthest it had traveled in over three-thousand years, and it seemed relieved to be free, or at least as relieved as it was capable of feeling. It returned to its starting place, contemplating something with evil intent.

      “Now GIT!” Doc commanded, pointing towards the green hole. The Kraken rose to its full height, likely weighing its options. It could challenge Doc one more time. It could try to escape its nest, tearing through its walls and into the vast sea beyond. Or it could do what it ultimately did, diving into the green hole and back to its other-dimensional home.

      “And stay gone!” Doc yelled for good measure.

***

Zirah had come out of her pose just in time for Doc and Jynx to re-emerge through the gap in the bottom of the Beetle. It was only once Doc had activated the door and sealed the ship again that Mikah felt his pulse return to normal. Jynx, who had dived below Doc and prevented the sword from being lost in the heap at the bottom of the Kraken’s lair, had returned the blade to Zirah’s possession. She scrutinized the edge, making sure that it had not been nicked in the destruction of the arcane chain. Seeming satisfied, she returned it to its place at her hip and she moved to her next pose, a handstand that used only one hand.

      Doc pulled off the wetsuit, which was now covered in silver-dollar sized punctures. He appeared unaffected. He wiped the purple poison from his skin with a towel. This burned several holes in the towel, reducing it to tatters. Doc had brought the twisted hunk of Atlantean chain with him, and it was now sitting at Mikah’s feet. “Have a read. Let’s see if my suspicions are right…”

      Mikah bent to one knee. He rested his left palm on the broken link, which was larger than it had looked on the screen, and probably weighed half a ton. A flash of images came to mind. A minor god of the seas, whose name he could not fathom, hammering this link on a mystical forge. Seven Atlantean sorcerers imbibing it with their oldest magic. Their fear of this monster, and their inability to destroy it, driving them to desperation. The runes coming to life, their only purpose to imprison. And the will of an immortal entity, striving… striving always for one thing.

      And now, Mikah knew, “the Atlanteans had been all wrong. The young Kraken they found didn’t come here to conquer us. It just got lost, wandering through a tunnel that crossed between worlds. They didn’t know what to do with it, but they knew it was immortal, and capable of great evil. So they just chained it up. That means… the whole time it was chained down there… brooding in hate… allowing its nest to grow… polluting the waters with dark magic…”

      Doc nodded and said, “It was just homesick.”