History
Douglas Royce and Sara Wolfe were good friends.[1] Royce owned (or leased) an apartment in the Dakota Apartments, a cooperative apartment building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. On the few times that Sara visited Doug there, she always felt that the building was sort of creepy.[2]
At some point, Douglas Royce went to Wisconsin where he rented a lodge so that he could do some writing. As part of his research, he acquired a number of Indian totems. He also heard about some cattle mutilations that had been occurring in the area. One night, Royce was visited by Hannibal King, a detective who had been hired to investigate the mutilations, but the only thing he could tell King was that it wasn't something that the local Indians had ever done.
The next night, while out walking, Royce found a freshly-killed cow in a pasture. Seconds later, King arrived and assumed that Royce was the killer. Royce denied any responsibility and pointed out that, since the carcass was still warm, the time that King was wasting with him was allowing the "real sickos" to get away. Royce's innocence was proven when the real killers, a brother-and-sister team of American Indians, attacked them with knives, having left the fresh carcass as bait. However, King proved to be too strong for the woman and Royce managed to get a good hit on her brother, so the two self-proclaimed "Children of the Night" used their powers and vanished without a trace. With the killers gone, King revealed that he was a vampire to Royce and the two of them worked together to locate the lair of the brother-and-sister team but the only things there were the parchments and mystical equipment that the pair had left behind in their hurry to leave.[3]
Since the cattle mutilations had been stopped, King went on to other cases but Royce had become intrigued with the whole affair and believed that the Children of the Night had come from some Indian reservation to the north. He continued to investigate and kept in touch with King. Eventually, Royce sent an urgent cable to King in England that stated that he was on to something and warned King to "Beware of the Darkholders."[3]
After returning to New York City, Royce was in a very nervous state but wouldn't tell Sara why.[3]
One Friday night, Royce went out on a date with Sara to Hell's Bells, a bar just north of Greenwich Village. While Royce sat at the bar and drank, Sara danced on the dance floor and bumped into her old friend and next-door neighbor, Dr. Stephen Strange, and his date, Clea. While the three of them got a table and talked, Royce continued to drink until he was accosted by the brother, now dressed in a suit. Royce lashed out, punching the man and knocking him to the floor, and then ran out the front door only to find the woman waiting for him. The sister told Royce that they were grateful for the merry chase he had led them for these past months because the more difficult a hunt was, the better they liked it, but that the hunt was now over. Once the brother joined them on the street, the siblings used black magical lightning to kill Royce, reducing his body to ashes. The scream Royce made as he died attracted the attention of those inside the bar and Strange’s psychic senses detected an intense concentration of malevolent, alien energy that indicated that Royce had been killed by magical means. Strange allowed everyone to believe that Royce had been killed by a freak bolt of lightning but investigated it himself. Within a few hours, Strange and Clea confronted the killers in their lair in Inwood Park and discovered that they were non-humanoid demons (Eye Killers). Despite their power, Strange managed to defeat them by casting a spell that banished them from Earth but only for a time.[1]
Months later, Sara Wolfe received a letter, supposedly from the attorney who was handling Royce's estate, asking her to meet him at Royce's apartment after dark. Sara spoke of it to Strange who picked up some odd vibrations from the letter and offered to join her. That night, at the Dakota Apartments, Sara and Strange met with Hannibal King who was posing as attorney named "Henry Kagle" but Strange soon realized that he was a vampire and the two fought until Strange realized that "Kagle" was a very different vampire from those he had met. Once the fight was over, Kagle identified himself as Hannibal King, a private detective who was also a vampire, and that he had come to believe that Royce's death was connected his current case: the resurrection of Dracula.[2] King then explained how he had first met Royce and how he believed that Royce's death was connected to the death of Rachel van Helsing who had been killed in England by a bearded Dracula. As King mentioned receiving Royce's cable warning of the Darkholders, he, Strange and Sara were attacked by the Children of the Night, now in the form of giant semi-humanoid hawks, who had been released from their other-dimensional prison only minutes earlier by the Darkholders. To prevent any innocents (like Sara) from being harmed by their battle, Strange transported himself, King and the two attackers to another dimension where the hawks were soon restrained. However, when King used his hypnotic gaze to compel the brother to talk, he triggered a failsafe that caused them both to disintegrate before they could even begin to reveal anything that might endanger the master plan.[3]See Also
- 2 appearance(s) of Douglas Royce (Earth-616)
- 2 mention(s) of Douglas Royce (Earth-616)
- 2 mention(s) in handbook(s) of Douglas Royce (Earth-616)
- 1 image(s) of Douglas Royce (Earth-616)