Dr. Phibes

by William Goldstein

  DR. PHIBES

  was dead, charred to ashes in a flaming car crash the day after his wife died on the operating table.

  Or was he?

  For something that used to be Dr. Phibes was still alive, blood-thirsty for revenge and insanely killing . . . killing . . . killing . . . killing . . . killing . . . KILLING!

  Also by William Goldstein

  Dr. Phibes in the Begining

  Dr. Phibes Rises Again!

  DR. PHIBES

  William Goldstein

  Based on the screenplay by

  James Whiton and William Goldstein

  Premier Digital Publishing - Los Angeles

  for Dr. Phibes

  Premier Digital Publishing

  www.PremierDigitalPublishing.com

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  eISBN 978-1-937624-61-3

  Copyright © 1971 by American International Productions (Eng.) Limited

  DR. PHIBES

  Chapter 1

  FIRST the pain stopped. It went away. It came back. It exploded.

  A siren rang somewhere or should have. Wheels seemed to be racing, rubber whipsawing the asphalt. There was a safety kit in the tonneau cover; could he get to it? But it was locked in the car; where was the car?

  The siren should be closer now, its undulant shrill more or less urgent in the violet air. Violet was the color of twilight, always the best time of day. He liked to meet Victoria at Burks for cocktails on Tuesdays and Fridays, her days in town; he tried to get his desk cleared by 4:45 so he could beat the going-home rush. By five the cabs and buses were frozen motionless and the noise along Pell Street elevated out of normal range of civility. Burks was a seaport, its burnished paneling and tile floor providing sufficient reminder that man could still design his days with just the right level of comfort. During March and April, and again in late fall, the light prismed from blue through several stages of violet to purple through the leaded glass windows. The logs in the grating popped as the resin drops surfaced and burnt. Victoria’s gloves glowed in the firelight and she was very beautiful then. Yes, Victoria was very beautiful then.

  A wave of pain came back again. Sharper this time. Almost as the last wave was receding the pain was on him again—and again, this time before he could take a breath. Then twice in quick succession, like a tuning fork. And once again, as if from memory. Then it came rapidly, sharp and hard.

  He wanted to run, dodge off that bloody road; somehow he had to get into the ditch. It was coming again—he could predict it in the memory of the previous pain. Where was the ditch?

  He’d left Berne at one: to make Calais by dark he’d have to push. At the time that didn’t bother him, partly because he knew the road even though he’d been on it less than half-a-dozen times and partly because his car—an Hispano Suiza roadster—was precision tuned. He traveled eight months out of the year and lived, as it were, by timetable. Rail service was still tenuous after the war, so he’d gotten into the habit of keeping a speed-rated motor car close at hand. The Hispano Suiza was the third he’d bought for that purpose, and its eighty miles per hour cruising speed was something of an assurance. The wooden steering wheel imparted a firm enough sense of the road to allow him to negotiate 45-degree turns in third gear.

  Three quarters of the way down the road he picked up a river—at first little more than a small stream—crisscrossing back and forth over it in a series of trestled bridges. On the straightaways the road ran parallel to the stream, which is why he knew the ditch was there.

  His head felt like a steel mask cabled by zones of stress. When the pain came—and by now his perception was heightened in the twilight air—he’d be ready for it. As soon as he got to the ditch he would wash himself in the cold water. He thought now how good that would feel, and swallowed as if from some terrible thirst at the imagined touch of water. Then it came again.

  Faster now. It was coming faster. Like an alarm bell it rattled and scraped against the layers of his face. The pain now assumed a third dimension. Its edge seared and cut the zones of his featured mask, crosscutting equanimity and surprise, patience and presumption. His very composure wavered, then crumbled in slow motion.

  Then he dissolved in a vast implosion of pain. The last reserves of his composure evaporated at impact as the new pain billowed into him, like some Byzantine globe.

  Now it knew no bounds; the yellow-orange globe bounced, clanged and rolled about the reaches of his skull, hurtling pieces of his memory past him so fast he started to remember, to forget, in an alternate dazzling switch of pain.

  He began to chuckle at the kaleidoscope. The images came into view in a jerky mechanical fashion, hung suspended before a white-sheet backdrop, only to be pulled from sight. The whole show resembled a billboard display tunneled out on sledges by hidden puppeteers.

  Then it came again: a rash, brass, glazed, laminated, round, pendulous onion globe in his catcraw skull head clamped by cutting agony.

  And again it came, and he went dark.

  The car stuck forty-five degrees out of a hedgerow up the road about thirty yards. The road was banked quite properly at that point, and the car had gone off it riding a clean tangent, rolling twice before it came to rest in the brambles. Absence of speed marks indicated the driver’s intention of negotiating the turn—a wish precluded by his machine’s velocity. The roadster evidenced very little damage and, save for the fact that it was upside down, looked intact and full of race.

  Measured about it was a pronounced silence that seems to go with motoring accidents. One sensed that the outraged metal was gathering new reserves of strength to get under way again. Both car doors were open, their leather-pouched armrests lending an air of finality to the car’s circumstances. Willows cast ink-blot shadows on the matted meadow above; otherwise the car was clear, flawless and streaked clean by the sun.

  Boulders had halted the forward movement of the car and sent a rippling, jarring metallic reaction through the vehicle, which tore deeply into the radiator grill and cowl, sent the doors flying open and would have, had he still been at the wheel, killed the driver.

  One half-hour after the sun had passed the meridian, a new noise could be heard. A thin metallic clicking, low in frequency, but sturdy enough to indicate a great tension, gradually building in volume to become part of the beeswarm buzz above the hedgerow. The Hispano-Suiza, of glass, rubber, leather and metal craftsmanship but still a machine, was, like all materials under stress, beginning to react to the unnatural strains placed upon it by the crash.

  In the collision the twin granite boulders had gouged a glaring jagged “V” in the car’s cowl after it had struck them head-on at fifty miles per hour. The sportscar hadn’t traveled very far prior to the collision point, being whipped off the road, as it were, by its own downhill velocity acting now in concert with the forces that rapidly assumed control when the driver was thrown free at the target point. Of course, with no one to observe him, one could only surmise what happened to the driver as he was ejected from the car. At a fifty-mile-per-hour rate of speed he would have first run and then, the forces of his propulsion overtaking him, rolled or slid the rest of the way downhill to a point somewhat below but inside the tangent described by his vehicle. That the car, in fact, slid downhill was verified by the absence of skid marks. The Hispano Suiza had turned over twice, landing finally, its windshield flattened and cowl to the ground, and then, acting as a two-ton sledge, slid the remaining twenty yards into the hedgerow. In its rush it’d torn off everything in its path leaving a crudely mowed strip from the edge of the road down the hillside behind.

  Now it lay upended, its wheels no longer spinning, doors agape and belly to the sky. Dead in its t
racks there was something terribly incongruous about the car’s new position, its walnut interiors, leather upholstery and chromium-plated dashboard offset by the brambles and gouged turf in a doubly awkward composition. The car did not, could not, would not work again but yet it was not still.

  In fact it was clicking, uncreasing, translating the horrific strains imposed upon it by the collision. From the front bumper, along the cowl, fenders, frame, to the trunk and hindmost bumper guards, the toughened steel that had contained the Hispano Suiza through countless accelerations and decelerations, that had weathered storm and sun-baked straightaway alike, was now, if ever so microscopically, metallurgically reacting. At first these groans and clicks were masked by the beeswarm. But as the sun descended further past the meridian and the hedgerow’s animal population had either fled the slaughter or been decimated, the creasing and surging of the fine Italian steel rose and fell in marked juxaposition to the beeswarm.

  In part the car frame had been damaged sufficiently in the crash to crack: the Hispano Suiza was literally breaking open. And it was this sound of fracturing metal that added a new measure of audibility to the air above the hedgerow.

  The steel gas tank split slowly but truly. It lay tucked hard against the rear bumper, efficiently fitted by hasps at the rear of the frame. Its flat shape was evenly placed on both sides of the axle. It carried 22 gallons of the standard benzine mixtures in vogue at the time for high performance motors. Mountain driving required a relatively high rate of fuel consumption, such that the tank was at half capacity after the car had traveled a scant sixty miles.

  But the tank, if it was half empty, was also half full. It lay flat, steel face to the sun; very quickly the fuel was aboil, the trapped air inside the tank becoming charged with benzine fumes. As the pressure inside the tank built up, the tensile strength of the light gauge steel was exceeded, with the result that the tank, overheated and already weakened by the compacted strain of the crash, popped.

  Benzine fumes now streamed out, mixing with the pollen, giving it a sickly sweet cast. The beeswarm by now had expended the limit of its fury and had turned its attention to the buckwheat. Their buzzing had quieted sufficiently, so that, had there been someone to listen, he now could have heard the car breaking up.

  The fuel tank was split open by a hairline crack that ran jaggedly along its midline. Although the danger of the benzine reaching its flashpoint inside the tank was over, the fuel was now boiling freely in the afternoon heat. As the fumes rose upward in the tank, they condensed against the cooler outer surface of the crack. Soon a stream of benzine was trickling down the face of the tank where it paused to collect in drops at the lower edge before it spattered on the drive shaft below. There the first few drops evaporated, but soon the process was producing enough condensed benzine so that the flow was continuous. The drops of fuel became a trickle, then a steady stream which seeped down the drive shaft to the gear box and thence to the motor housings.

  Of course the ignition had not been turned off. It was only a matter of seconds when the benzine, in all its volatility, reached the magneto. The explosion in the next instant erupted and flashed up the benzine stream where it ignited the remaining eight gallons still locked in the fuel tank. The explosion blew off the back half of the car and sent a shrapnel storm of fiery metal and blazing benzine jets into the hedgerow with such force that the brambles were incinerated for a radius of thirty feet about the wreckage.

  The ensuing fire was still smouldering six hours later when it was discovered by a milk wagon driver. The local constable who inspected the site just after sunset, reported nothing but bits of twisted metal in the ashen residue. “Both car and driver were incinerated in the fierce heat provided by the burning fuel,” he concluded in his report.

  The driver had lain in shock fifty yards down the road where he’d half slid, half-fallen after the accident. The benzine explosion blew him into the ditch. The water collected there from melting snow, literally saving him from death by dehydration. He was to remain in the ditch another day and a night before he made his way across the fields. His name was Anton Phibes.

  Two weeks later, some boys from a hamlet at the base of the hill found the Hispano Suiza’s walnut steering wheel in a strawberry patch two hundred feet uphill from the fire-scored hedgerow. Miraculously it was unmarked.

  Chapter 2

  “HAVE some more Chateau d’Yquem, Albert,” Lady Palo-fox urged, “its oh-nine, your favorite year. And it was the absolute last bottle the vintner had on his shelves. I literally had to bribe Mr. Swarthout to get him to sell it to me.”

  Albert Dunwoody half muttered through his mustache. He quickly plugged his mouth with a spoonful of thick turtle bisque and, glowering across a dinner table heaped with food, inhaled the tarragon-and-caramel-scented liquid in palliation of his frayed sensibilities. Rising up like a volcano was a ham of herculean dimensions, its clove-studded sides angrily aglow against the patrician white Irish linen tablecloth that was, even at this early stage of the banquet, displaying the smears and laverings of two dozen hungry guests at its perimeter.

  Dunwoody’s thick neck prevented his viewing the guests at either side, except, of course, that he had noticed a lady with outsize powdered breasts being ushered to a seat three or four chairs to the right. He would have to look her up after supper. For the moment he’d have to content himself with acknowledging his hostess who sat diagonally across from him just beyond the watercress salad which, lamentably, was reposing in a low crystal bowl. He leered at Lady Palafox who even yet was appraising him through a pair of rhine-stone-encrusted spectacles.

  Albert Dunwoody, M.D. F.R.C.S., Chief of Gastroenterology at London’s Guy’s Hospital, was in high demand among his clients as a dinner and bridge guest and all-round “extra man.” His girth and manner bespoke a fortune which was rumored to be in excess of 100,000 pounds. In fact he had less than a quarter of that on deposit at his bank, much of his estate having gone toward the upkeep of a succession of young Swedish secretaries. Two disastrous mining ventures in East Africa had corroded the remainder of his cash reserves and now he was reduced to living on the income from a practice in which he’d long ago lost interest. As it were, Dunwoody’s patients were all middle-aged wives of bankers, industrialists and other new money types whose saccharine diets and love-dry lives provided little more than chronic indigestion and an occasional gallstone to tax his professional ability.

  Lecher that he was, he loathed having to cater to hordes of mooning wives, corseted widows and long-since ripened spinsters, but he also knew that continuation of his lifestyle depended on dancing to these ladies’ tunes.

  It was much worse after dinner. Lady Palafox insisted on doing a recitation: some interminable sixteenth-century piece about a parrot peppered with so many hard consonants that her false teeth clicked in audible agony. She was a thin whippet of a woman, with cadaverous features and a tall onyx-dyed coiffure. She wore a deep V-necked lavender evening dress that exhibited a full half-yard of long decolletage. “A bloody skeleton,” he sulked as the lady’s ribs rose accordion-like to the poet’s meter.

  The other guests—a dozen couples whose names could be read in the society columns in any of the London weeklies—reclined in the cavernous parlor in attitudes more akin to post-prandial fixation than attention to the lady’s dramatic offering. The Skewes-Coxes (Sir Harold wiped his low brows repeatedly with an outsize handkerchief) were in steel. Solly Gildenstern and his creepy Austrian wife anchored one end of a large settee. In press circles he was rumored to be a “comer.” Lady Elspeth Gay had made a name for herself in the National Health Service; her husband stood by the mantelpiece smoking a disgusting black cigar.

  Dunwoody sloshed some brandy and let his eyes probe the reaches of the large room; anything to block out that damned verse. Now he probed for the lady with the talcumed busts. As soon as the ordeal was ended, he’d bring her a glass of sherry. Then, if could be, divert the husband. . . .

  Finally, �
�Speak Parrot” ended, as it’d begun, in a rage of “k’s” and “g’s” that rattled the sedate room air with unnatural violence. Dunwoody earlier had tried winking and leering at the object of his attentions. With awkward rapidity he grew anxious, aroused, then, decidedly unrequited.

  Lady Palafox’s concluding barrage brought him to the edge of his seat, the abrasion of her skewered passion tightening his own. Yes, the old leonine swell had returned to his loins. Could he get up from the safety of his seat? But he had to get close to the lady. They’d meet for lunch tomorrow at Lupsons, and then perhaps a discrete interlude at his apartment. Should he supply flowers or perhaps a little something in jade or opal? No, that wouldn’t do: no need to arouse the husband this early in the game. It would have to be lunch for the time being and nothing more. Well, nothing except the extensions of their own felicity.

  His heavy loins quickly sobered him. The others were stirring about and if he was to snare his prize, he’d have to make his move now before the bridge game.

  He shoved his hand into his coat and embarked down the long parlor, thumbs stuck out dead ahead like a resolute explorer. The other guests were rising up out of their chairs now, still dumbstruck by the verse torrent. They seemed loathe to cross the broad expanse of the floor outright but rather sallied along the narrow spaces between chairs and tables in a sort of dumb ballet. So much had been said so monotonously for so long a time, that there was little conversation.

  Dunwoody nodded as he brushed past the first few couples. His flagged coat lapels had attracted little attention. So far, so good. He’d advanced about a third of the way when he saw something that crumbled his spirit. The lady, who’d been sitting alone throughout the recitation, was apparently about to be gathered up by her husband.