Daredevil (1964 series) #208

Having just finished up a busy night of crimefighting, Daredevil wants nothing more than to head to sleep. However, a young girl gets his attention, claiming her mother is in trouble! Through his tiredness, the snow, and the distance, Daredevil can’t accurately hear her heartbeat and he ends up following the girl to a specific building. Once inside the building, the door slams shut and some shelves behind the girl open up to reveal a long tunnel! Now close enough to hear her heartbeat, Daredevil finally realizes the girl isn’t real, merely a lifelike robot, and throws her just before she explodes! Now trapped in the building, Daredevil makes his way down the tunnel, being forced ever forward by doors slamming behind him to impede his way back. He reaches the end of the hallway and narrowly dodges a rain of darts, with one managing to tag him. He discovers the dart was laced with a hallucinogen, causing him to completely lose sense of his surroundings.

A trapdoor opens beneath Daredevil, dropping him into a pit of quicksand! He manages to crawl his way out, all the while wondering who is behind this. He’s offered no respite as he is then flung into the far wall lined with spikes! Daredevil manages to contort in midair so that he only gets grazed by some of the spikes, and is forced to remove his gloves which are now slippery from the mud. The spike wall rotates, dropping Daredevil into another room that looks like a fancy mansion. He’s presented with three doors, and only one is the right one. Daredevil uses his billy club to test the traps in the first two doors, narrowing down the door he must go through. He enters into a tall, thin room with a camera watching him at the top. Blades begin to protrude from the walls, prompting Daredevil to quickly scurry up them and latch his billy club onto the camera at the top. He swings himself and is able to kick through the wall, landing in a backstage tunnel full of cables and machinery.

Daredevil smashes up the cables as best he can, hoping to blind whoever is behind this. Daredevil makes his way into a narrower tunnel and is met with a horde of snakes! He creates sparks with two of the wires in the tunnel, driving the snakes away. Daredevil then finds a hatch that leads him out onto the roof of the enormous complex, acres and acres of patchwork mansion, all modified into one large deathtrap! Daredevil is then forced to dodge lasers that spring up from the roof, and he ends up falling through a skylight and back into the death trap mansion! The floor opens up beneath him, revealing an empty room with a dying shark. Daredevil realizes that when he messed with the power lines earlier, it must have prevented the water from filling the room. He swims through the tunnel the water was meant to come from, coming out exhausted.

Daredevil is then assaulted with a fear gas that makes him experience countless fears such as suffocation, fire, and loss. Though tired and worn down, Daredevil refuses to give in and is able to regain his mind by remembering Stick’s teachings. He walks down one last hallway and into the main room of the mansion. A painting slides back, revealing a video screen, and the one behind all this! A video plays of an old woman who introduces herself as Elizabeth Dawes Sterling, to be played on the event of her death! Turns out, she was the mother of Death-Stalker (who died fighting Daredevil in DD #158), and this entire mansion deathtrap was to get revenge on Daredevil for, as she sees it, killing her son! Daredevil looks for a way out before the video ends, and is able to shimmy up the chimney and out of the house just before it explodes! Exhausted, Matt makes it to the Black Widow’s apartment for a shower and a change of clothes, realizing he needs to be in court in 45 minutes. Matt makes it to court on time, relieved that the worst night of his life seems to be over. However, in the crowd behind him sit two more of Sterling’s little girl robots, promising that things aren’t quite over! To be continued!