THE MANTICORE

“She did what?”

“She canceled her contract. The new book's not going to be ready.”

“Two days ago she told me everything was good to go. We'll go with whatever she's got.”

“No—you don't understand. She's destroyed the entire book.”

“Oh, no! We own this new character of hers. It's our property. Chimera Comics owns the rights to The Blue Krait, The D-Men, and The Black Locust. Standard work-for-hire contract. Her brain children are all part of the Chimera Stable.”

“Do you remember that big production you made to get her on board, you wined and dined the hell out of her. But actually getting her to sign the contract completely slipped your mind.”

“Wasn't there a new contract?”

“Which you never read, but I finally did. She retains complete creative control.”

“That means she's going to go straight to Image or Dark Horse. Oh, hell no!”

“Oh, hell yes. But she's not going to another company. She's getting out of comics entirely—and she's taking her stuff with her. Doesn't ever want it reprinted.”

“You mean...”

“Yeah—we can't even reprint the first appearance of the Blue Krait from Descent Into Suspense # 1. She's the only one with the legal right to use the character. Even if we could—who could match her talent?”

“If we can't find something to print in Issue 83, we are officially screwed.”

“Maybe not. There's a fellow I've been talking to. Got an idea for a strip called The Fury of Fenrir...”

With a great cry of rage and frustration, Stephanie Greerson hurled the ink bottle at the concrete wall. It left a stain like a smashed, ebon spider.

She looked at the torn and ravaged artwork by her feet. The work of the last six months. All gone.

“How many damn years have I been trying to get something new and unique—and I finally get it—and then this happens? Hell!”

She was not unaware of the irony. All she really wanted to do in her life was to create the world's greatest comic book superhero, something that would stand out like a bright beacon in the midst of all mundane, mediocre, woke horse-shit that had been muddying up the waters of real creativity.

Twenty years she'd been striving after this dream, ever since Grandpa showed her his comic collection when she was seven. She had read all the issues of The Amazing Spider-Man, all thirty-eight of them, plus the two annuals. Steve Ditko had drawn them and there was just something special about his art. He didn't so much draw, as sculpt, his characters on the page.

Just what was it about Spider-Man that had grabbed her more than any of the other characters? In a lot of ways he was an ordinary high-school kid, kind of a scrawny geek. Bit of an outcast. Then he gets bit by a radioactive spider and starts developing spider powers. But he didn't just set out to be a hero. No, not at all. But because he failed to stop a criminal when he had the chance, his beloved uncle Ben gets killed and tragically too late, he realized that 'With great power comes great responsibility.'

The first day she read Amazing Adult Fantasy #15, she started teaching herself to draw. She learned to write comics reading those early issues published thirty-six years before she was even born.

When she was twenty-one she'd lucked out, getting in on the ground floor of new publisher, Chimera Comics. They featured her creation, The Blue Krait in the very first issue of Descent Into Suspense.

But though the book was a smash and the Blue Krait was featured for thirty-six issues, what was he but Spider-Man bitten by a radioactive viper, instead of a spider? Oh, yes, add to that gaining powers from seven specific snake deities like the Gorgon, the Midgard Serpent and Quetzalcoatl.

D-Men were just the X-Men with a supernatural element, and the Black Locust was straight out of the Book of Revelation, Chapter 9!

She'd made Chimera Comics a best seller every month. But for some reason, she always felt she was cheating the customers. Was it really the very best she could do? And could she ever, ever be truly original? She wasn't a perfectionist—she just wanted to create something that wasn't, on some level, derivative.

Even though she'd been inspired by Spider-Man, she'd never really created a character that really expressed true heroism, a character that was truly her own. She'd tried multiple times, and had never quite gotten it.

And that's when The Manticore hit her. She'd seen it, heard it in a dream. A plaintive voice, calling her out of the mists of oblivion. Help me. Please help me.

Over several nights the dreams became stronger and whatever was calling her grew less and less vague.

She saw a humanoid figure. Tall, with a lion-like face. A great mane of hair burst from its head like the Sun's corona. Armor of some unrecognizable metal. And the hands—the fingers were sharpened like stilettos and poison dripped from their tips.

There was a battlefield. The Sun scorching the land. There were twelve other figures, nearly identical to the first. The one in her dream turned the pleading eyes of a lion to her. Take the armor. Take the armor before another seizes it.

And the dream ended with a disembodied voice crying at her—SA SEKHM SAHU!

She had her character! The lion-like qualities, the hands that struck like a scorpion. They brought to her mind the beast that Medieval bestiaries called the Manticore. Lion's body, face of a man, and the spiny tail of a scorpion.

She started drawing right away—drawing and writing. The dream exploded in her brain and she didn't sleep for three nights, yet she was not tired.

She conceived of an ancient battle, thousands of years ago in some forgotten age. The Gods created organic war-machines—killing machines of near infinite power. But, though it was won hundreds of thousands of years ago, the war was not yet over. One of the machines had survived and it was seeking help—lest the others return to threaten the world again! Her hero was the one chosen to man that Manticore machine!

She let them know at Chimera that she had a new strip in the works. She liked to work ahead and had finished The Black Locust months ago. The last installment would run in #82 of Descent Into Suspense. She'd already laid the ground work of the Manticore story during those three incredible days. All that's left was drawing and dialoguing, inking and coloring. She worked damn fast and used no shortcuts.

She had always let the folks at Chimera know what she was planning, but for some reason she didn't feel comfortable about sharing anything about the new character. Probably nothing more than caution. There were others unscrupulous enough to steal and copyright her work if she wasn't vigilant. It was probably nothing more than that, still, she wondered. She'd never been that tight-lipped before. It would add to her mystique, in any case.

She met her brother at the back entrance of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was 3:00 in the morning. She could see the obelisk of Cleopatra's Needle in the distance, illuminated by the flood lights.

The door opened and Naphtali rushed her inside. He'd been there for hours. He'd barely been able bridle his excitement. He'd found something, she was sure of that. The question was—what was it? He was generally always on an even keel. There was something almost disturbing about his enthusiasm.

“Steph—you know how long I've been studying ancient Egypt—”

“Long enough to get yourself a few doctorate degrees in Egyptology, and keys to the Met's sub-basement.”

“Try sub-sub-sub-basement. What's fueled my interest in Egypt is I'm convinced the Gods of Egypt were real—”

“How'd that go over in academia?”

“I'm not stupid enough to tell anybody. Loose throats sink solar boats. But I've found the proof I'm looking for. This thing must have been here since the days of the Dodworth building.”

“That's where they housed the Museum's collection first, right?”

“Right. Museum opened in 1870. No records, though. I found the sub-basement almost purely by accident. You're not going to believe what I found in it. Mind you, when I say Gods, I'm not talking about deities in the normal sense.”

“I know—more like a Chariots of the Gods kind of thing. Alien super powers.”

“Right, Steph. But not from outer space, but outer time. They came from long ago.”

The freight elevator took them down to the sub-basement. A stair led to the sub-sub basement, but the path to the sub-sub-sub-basement was like spelunking Devil's Hole Cave in Death Valley.

There was something decidedly unsettling about the surroundings. Light from Naphtali's LED flashlight flickered suggestively on the antique cement walls. She saw mallets and sledgehammers leaning against the wall. Broken pieces of brick and cement still clung to the bolted steel door they'd once hid. Naphtali set his shoulder to the door and it shrieked piercingly as Naph struggled hard to force it open. The sound was as nerve-wracking as fingernails on a chalkboard.

The sarcophagus was nine feet long and made of a brilliant blue-green metal. On the far side she could see what looked like copper servo-units. They looked like old brass and steel work from the mid-nineteenth century.

“If it weren't for someone engineering those motors, there's no way I could have opened this thing. It weighs several tons. They rigged the machinery to open it and once they saw what was inside, they ran and tried to brick it all up. This is the reason why.”

He manipulated a series of levers. There was a hiss as the water in the tanks slowly turned to steam. There was a low growling and grinding of gears. The sarcophagus lid slowly lifted until it was ninety degrees perpendicular to the coffin proper. Inside was a humanoid figure nearly eight and a half feet tall.

The features were too perfect to be human. There was a distinct, lionish cast to the face, but the leonine aspect was so pure it suggested what a lion of the Savannah might one day look after a million years of evolution, when it had outstripped the human. It looked as if it had been carved of silver.

The head rested on a pillow of strange weave and stranger cloth. The light of the flash made the golden mane glitter like diamonds.

For several seconds she could not force herself to breathe. The figure before her was the spitting image of the figure from her dreams! This was what she had seen—The Manticore. This was what she had based her comic on. It was no dream. It was uncannily real!

“Have you shared what you're working on with anybody but me?”

“No. Just you. Not sure why but it just didn't feel right to do so. I'm not usually secretive about my stuff, Naph. This just felt different, though.”

“Good idea you didn't. If you got Manticore published, people could start making the connection with that—and the real thing, here. And that I cannot have.”

“What does that matter? And what do you mean, you can't have that? This is my story, Naph. And I am going to publish it. I mean, this thing is amazing, but it's just some kind of Egyptian idol, or something. Who cares if it looks like the Manticore?”

“This isn't an idol, Stephanie—”

“How come you only call me Stephanie when you're trying to get your way?—What are you doing!”

He caught her hand in a savage grip and before she knew what he was about, he had forced her palm flat against the manticore's face.

What she felt was almost a current of electricity—gentler, but also far more powerful.

“That thing's alive, Stephanie. There's some thing in there. I couldn't believe what I was seeing when I read your book. Did you seriously think you were just making this shit up? Those Gods were some kind of super-race. This was one of the fighting machines they made—maybe the last one. But I need access to her. I need you to open the Door.”

“I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Door?” She turned to look in her brother's mad eyes. There was something there she had never seen before.

No. She had seen it before. She had just not recognized it because it was something...he had kept so well hidden.

In all his thirty years, Naphtali had had a lot of reversals, yet she had never once seen him react very strongly, or even lose his temper. Sometimes it seemed like his eyes were smoldering but he had always turned away so she was never sure what exactly it was she was seeing.

“Get...off...me!” Stephanie Greerson was strong and she had never backed down from a fight—They'd wrestled before, especially when they were kids. Naphtali's name meant wrestling, but he had never really been a match for her.

Not this time! It was with a maniac's strength he held her down. She finally understood exactly what that meant! He'd forced her face down on the manticore's chest. Her cheek was smashed up against it. She could barely move.

“Get her to open the Door. She won't let me in. I've tried it. Don't you understand? I'm doing this for you, too!”

“For me!”

“Don't tell me you don't want revenge for some of the shit they've put you through. I can do that. I can payback for both of us.”

“How? With this dead mummy, or idol, or whatever the hell it is?”

“Not dead. Feel it. She came to you in a dream—that's what you said. Get her to unlock the keys and nothing will ever hurt either of us again.”

How had she never put this all together before? Sure she'd been hurt. Sure she'd had a lot bad things happen to her. That's what life was all about. You get up, dust yourself off and try again.

But, holy hell—Naphtali had never gotten over any of it! He'd been holding grudges for...how long now?

The dream—it had given her the greatest story idea she'd ever gotten. But...what if it wasn't a dream? What if Naphtali had been waiting all his life, like a man who runs for President—just so he can get his hands on the Nuclear Football?

No—this was just too insane!

But then why did this mummy thing look exactly like the Manticore in her story, the thing in her dream?

She winced. It felt like he was breaking her arm!

“I won't stop at anything, Stephanie, not even to save your life. Do you even know who this is? She's Sekhmet, most powerful of the Gods and monsters of Egypt. She nearly destroyed the human race once. She led me here, and you're going to open that Door for me. You know I'll do it—whatever it takes.”

He would, too.

“You do that, and you'll never get...that Door open. You know that.”

He let up the pressure. “Don't betray me. I'm doing this for you, too.”

She closed her eyes. Whatever this thing was it wasn't just some dead idol. There was power here! She felt her consciousness fading from the concrete room around her. There was something—someone here. It felt like she was being bathed in liquid, flaming gold. She felt all anxiety go out of her.

You've come at last. I have waited more than five-hundred thousand years. I could fight no longer. And the others—they too are waking. I have not the strength to beat them. You must help me!

It was the voice of a woman who had endured untold amounts of suffering. She had never felt a need of such abysmal depth before. She knew somehow she must help her. There was no question of saying no.

Your brother nearly overpowered me, so weak have I become. When you say SA SEKHEM SAHU, your spirit shall depart your flesh and this body shall become your armor. And none shall defeat you. Take the flail of power—the power of Sekhmet shall burn out your brother's life. He has done much evil.

“No. He is weaker than I ever imagined. But not evil. I will spare his life.”

There are others who begin to waken. You must prepare for them. You must be ready. I will be here with you—but I can do no more than teach you. But all you have seen, now, and in your dream, must ever remain secret. None must ever know. None must ever suspect.

And Stehanie Greerson realized the thing that she must do. And knowing what she must do, she hated it, and an anguish filled her heart.

But she remembered Spider-Man. Just a comic book character, but he had paid dearly for making the wrong choice in his life. Those things were coming. They would destroy the world as they had nearly destroyed it five hundred thousand years ago. And she now had the power to stand in their way.

What is better—to dream about being a hero, and play with paper dolls? Or to actually become that hero—no matter the sacrifice she must make? No—there was no other possible choice. Six months of creative effort on the greatest story she would ever tell.

Naphtali was right about one thing—she definitely couldn't publish the book now. It would give away all her secrets. No one must ever know.

But she smiled—why just write and draw a comic book hero, when she could actually become one?

SA SEKHEM SAHU!