Midnight on Murder Mountain!

Iron Man is flying across the state of Pennsylvania on a storm night. When a bolt of lighting strikes a nearby tree and causes a car to wipe out, Iron Man goes down to help the passengers. They are a young couple named Keith and Carry and their pet cat, Zero. Iron Man tells them to hang tight while he gets help.

Flying into a nearby town and changing out of his armor, Tony Stark rents a car so he can rescue the stranded couple. With torrential rains making driving conditions difficult, Tony decides that they should stay in a hotel for the night until the storm passes. Unfortunately, the only hotel with a vacancy is the ominously named Murder Mountain Lodge.

They are greeted by the owner who is unimpressed with the fact that these customers have arrived with an animal, but agrees to rent them some rooms for the night when Tony agrees to pay for any damage caused by Zero. While Keith and Carry are given a room on the main floor, Tony is brought to his room upstairs by a massive ape of a man. When Tony inquires about the hotel’s peculiar name, the man handling his bags claims to know nothing about it.

Later that evening, Tony wakes up to the sound of Keith and Carrie screaming. When he tries to leave his room he discovers the door is locked from the outside and someone has placed a steel shutter on his window. Changing into Iron Man, Tony smashes through the metal shutter and looks around the property. Spotting a light on in the basement, he smashes in through the window and finds a sophisticated laboratory and the proprietor — Professor Kurarkill — and her assistant, named Quasar are attempting to experiment on the couple. Iron Man tries to battle Quasar who is incredibly strong and quickly knocks out Iron Man.

When the Avenger wakes up he finds himself in some kind of stasis chamber with Keith and Carrie. Keith tells Iron Man what they learned from Kurarkill. Apparently, she was a brilliant geneticist that was forced out of the scientific community for her bizarre experiments. Forced to work independently she found ways to transform people into other animals and that Quasar was once an ape himself before he was transformed into a human by the mad scientist. When one of her fellow scientists tried to protest Kurarkill’s insane experiments she too was transformed into some kind of animal as punishment.

That when Professor Kurarkill and Quasar return to the lab and reveal their intention to experiment on the three prisoners as well. Luckily, Zero has managed to sneak into the lab and begins rubbing up against Quasar’s leg. When the brute shoos the cat away it then runs into the stasis field and the static electricity that it generated from rubbing up against Quasar shorts out the device, freeing Iron Man and the others. This time, Iron Man is able to defeat Quasar in a one-on-one slugfest. Meanwhile, Zero the cat has been chewing on some wires in the lab. When the Professor attempts to unleash her wild apes upon Iron Man and his new friends, the wrecked wires actually cause the door inside Kurarkill’s lab to open and she is swarmed by frenzied apes that bludgeon her to death.

In the aftermath of the battle, Carrie can’t help but find Zero’s actions quite peculiar, almost as though the cat seemed to know exactly what it was doing.

Recurring Characters

Iron Man

Continuity Notes

1. Chronologically, this story takes place between the events of Iron Man #74 between pages 6 & 7.