Dr. Phibes

by William Goldstein

  Sergeant Tom Schenley had been selected to work with Harry Trout. Schenley’s steadiness, his reserve, his unobtrusiveness were supposed to be “levelling” influences on Trout. At the time of their visit to Dunwoody’s apartment, the two men had worked together for three months; it was not yet known who had affected the other more.

  The inside of Dunwoody’s place was clean without being ostentatious about it, attesting to the understanding care of Elihu Ross, a gentleman’s gentleman who’d been with the building over twenty years, serving under three different masters during that period. The furniture was old and, although not cheaply made, was well worn; since it had not yet been dusted, it was somewhat musky this May morning. White antimacassars on the sofa and chairs and the bright linen draperies accentuated the quietness of the downstairs rooms. Over-all the air was pungent with the thick sweetness that comes from large amounts of new blood.

  Schenley and Trout paced evenly along the black and white tiles, their heels clicking garishly in the hallway.

  “Bats you say?” Trout wrinkled his nose. “They’re not local hereabouts. What the hell are they doing loose in London this time of year?”

  The two men reached the staircase and paused at the heavily burnished post. “From the smell of it, I’d say they’d been feasting, sir.” Schenley tapped his nose with a finger and nodded upstairs, “It’s up there.”

  The men went up shoulder to shoulder, their shoes muffled by the black rubber runner. The muted sounds of an investigation in progress could be heard on the second landing. Trout spoke in a measured, clipped tone, “When’d the call come in, Tom?”

  “About 9:30 this morning, sir. A fellow named Ross, the valet here, called. Gaithers took it, said the man was near hysterical on the telephone; that he thought he’d gone off his head. Gaithers sent two men out right away to get the valet under control. When they got here, they found the deceased and called in the laboratory people.” Schenley glanced at his watch. “They should be finishing, sir,” said Tom.

  “Good, I hate having to walk around people.” Trout looked about the second landing, a spare narrow hallway with two doors leading off, one of which was partially open. Schenley nodded toward the open doorway. As they brushed past a vase of pussywillows, Trout recalled a nursery couplet, something about birds and bees singing in the spring. He gritted his teeth, then followed Schenley into the room.

  Dr. Dunwoody’s bedroom looked plainer, smaller in the daylight than it had at night. It was indeed a small room, being hardly twelve feet across, a size necessitated by the over-all narrowness of the house.

  The room was nearly filled by an outsize bed. Its only other furnishings consisted of a tall “silent butler” at the foot of the bed, a nighttable and a breakfast tray; the last item having been brought in by the valet.

  Dunwoody’s coat, shirt and trousers of the evening before hung on the wooden butler, rumpled, out of place in the daylight. Trout was amused at the two balled red socks that lay tossed at the “butler’s” feet.

  “The old goat must’ve been somewhat irregular,” he thought. “And there’s something else: he was wearing suspenders and a belt. Now that’s a sport for you!”

  Trout scanned the room slowly, noting the closed windows, the simple lock on the door, the ornate gas mantle chandelier. Then, his notations completed, he permitted himself to look at the bed.

  Under ordinary circumstances that item could hardly be avoided in the narrow austere room: the sheer bulk and festooned coverlets dominated, even dwarfed the area. Now, however, its white expanse displayed such a surgical, such a bloodthirsty chaos that only a man accustomed to viewing life and death in its grossest violence could view that bed with equanimity.

  Trout’s report read like a pathologist’s summary:

  Albert Dunwoody did not die quickly but lingered in deepening coma interspersed with fits of wakefulness. The bats (three hundred and eighty seven were counted in the room) had descended on him while he lay asleep. The first attack appears to have been so severe that, although he did wake up, he was too shocked and too weakened to pull the covers over himself. That would have been enough to save his life, for the bats were tiny, only three-to-five inches in length, and could not have torn through the bedding. But from that first onslaught, Dunwoody’s ability to defend himself diminished. He did manage to dispatch a few of his attackers but this was more as a result of his rolling atop them as they fed on his flanks than from any offensive blows with his fists.

  Undoubtedly, Dunwoody tried to shout for help. When found, his mouth was open and contorted. But the bats had torn his throat, probably in the first wave. His throat gorged and pharynx scissored, the victim’s voice was stilled in the last few hours of life. Although his esophagus was clogged with blood, Dr. Dunwoody did not die of suffocation, as might be construed from the evidence. Rather it was shock, of a prolonged and cumulative nature, that killed him. As noted earlier, the victim did not die immediately but lay in a twilight state of animation for a few hours before he finally succumbed. It appears that this penultimate period of existence contained a particularly bizarre sequence of events.

  Bats are not carnivorous by nature. But like any other animal, they can be driven to eat anything by long periods of enforced starvation. The bats that entered Dunwoody’s room were voracious beyond containment. They stormed the victim in a rush that must certainly have appeared to be a vengeful cloud; however, it should be considered that they attacked to feed, not to kill. After they’d torn and gouged enough chunks of flesh and bits of blood, they retired to the curtains and eaves about the windows, momentarily sated. A few stragglers who had not gotten their fill stayed behind to gouge and feed at the victim’s now exposed trunk.

  Dunwoody’s body was covered by an unnumbered mass of teeth marks. In addition to his ripped throat, there were long slashes on his skin where the flesh had been torn out, down to the bone. These gross wounds, some half dozen in all, appeared to have occurred as follows:

  The victim fainted after the first onslaught. The stragglers feeding on his skin must have caused new islands of pain. These stinging bites were enough to bring him out of the faint—only to view with horrific realization that he was being fed upon. He writhed and lashed out in an effort to get rid of his tormentors. His wounds, although at this point not major, would bleed anew: the musk of these new freshets of blood drew the bats a second time. Like a cloud, they descended from the draperies striking at exposed and already weakened segments of Dunwoody’s flesh.

  This process was repeated five or six times, with the victim falling into a deeper and deeper faint after each sortie. An hour of this was about all that he could bear, the resultant coma at least providing numbed relief. Even then he was not able to lie still, his torn nerves causing him to jerk about. These were his most pitiable gestures; for even in his condition, he attracted the violent bats. Each rolling heave of his body, blind and insensate as he was, brought new clouds of the bloodied animals flocking to his wounds. At times literally covered by the furry beasts, he would roll and wallow in an agonized dumb show, the blood running from his wounds, filtering through the clusters of bats that hung on him like grapes.

  Alternatively he would emerge from the coma—and the shock of what he saw and felt during these brief flights of consciousness eventually, and all too slowly, killed him.

  Trout was able to transcribe his report almost directly from the notes he made that morning. He recalled being both disgusted and enthralled when first viewing the evidence; disgusted at having been relegated to such a patently crazy case and enthralled, even excited, at the prospect of digging into a case that was so far removed from the ordinary. He wrote clinically, quickly and well, and, as was his habit, spoke little in the process.

  Schenley was somewhat less taciturn. He questioned the laboratory technicians about fingerprints, bits of clothing and other clues: their search had turned up nothing. Then, taking note of the breakfast cart, its pair of poached eggs staring up lugubriously
from two squares of soggy toast, he asked one of the policemen in attendance to summon Ross, the valet. Then he busied himself aiding the other patrolman to sweep up the gorged and by now drowsing bats.

  This was accomplished by the simple expediency of tapping the draperies, onto which the animals had clustered, with a broom handle and then sweeping the droppings into large burlap bags. The bats apparently did not like to be thus disturbed and thrashed and squealed about in a somewhat glutted fashion once inside the bags.

  “No! No-o-o!!” a man’s thin shriek shattered the room’s grim composure.

  “Now, now, it’ll be all right. The Sergeant just wants a word with you.” The patrolman half-pulled, half ushered the valet, Elihu Ross, into the room. Ross was a spare, gray man, still in morning uniform. He huddled against the bedroom door, loathe to enter.

  “Mr. Ross, is it?” Schenley said.

  Ross, distracted, looked up, catching sight of his erstwhile master in the process. He blanched and, pushing his hands to his anguished face, pleaded to be taken away. “I can’t look at the master again . . . those things . . . those awful creatures . . . they were all over . . . let me get away from here . . . aaagh, it was horrible!” He moaned and slumped against the patrolman.

  Trout waved him out: “Well, d’you think he could have done it?”

  Schenley glanced at Trout, puzzled. “Did what, sir?”

  “Did in our doctor friend here.” Trout gestured with his pencil. “Hey, that’s no way to remove him. At least cover up the remains, in the name of common decency.” The technicians put down the stretcher which contained Dunwoody’s rather garish corpse long enough to restore its modesty with a sheet. Then they conveyed their white-shrouded burden out the door.

  Trout and Schenley were now alone in the room.

  “You know, Tom, what a butler does best?” Trout continued with a hint of a smirk.

  “I dunno, sir. A messy scene, this, but it looks quite like an accident to me. The victim was probably a hobbyist of sorts. What d’you call it: an aviarist. Yes, that’s it. An aviarist!”

  “But where are the cages, Tom? All pets need their cages. Now you didn’t see any downstairs and neither did I. The little buzzards must have come from somewhere.” Trout rolled his eyes about the room in mock search. “Aha, there we are!”

  Waverly followed his chief’s gaze up toward the skylight.

  “That’s where they came in,” Trout now concluded, a hint of triumph in his voice. “And they didn’t just fly in.”

  “No, the skylight’s closed,” offered Schenley.

  “Closed, opened, and closed, Mr. Schenley. The bats were brought here by someone and put into this room via that skylight to carry out an objective for which they’d been prepared in advance.”

  Schenley was puzzled. “You are suggesting this was planned, sir? But bats? In London? At this time of year? Why and who would want to do something like that? And for what reason!”

  Trout again looked at the skylight, this time somewhat archly. “I suspect the murderer will develop that information for us, Mr Schenley. Let’s get it from him!”

  Chapter 4

  THE man sitting at the dressing table was thoroughly preoccupied with his work. The table was large and oval-shaped; in front of it was a large mirror framed by lights, the kind of mirror actors use to perfect the exact shadings of their makeup.

  The man rubbed the area where his nose was supposed to be, applying an adhesive with a small buffing brush. Then he selected a nose, a slightly hooked one, and placed it on his face with practiced skill, using a pair of tweezers. He drew on a mouth with a few well-placed brush strokes. During the process the man kept looking at himself to measure the effect. He tweezed, brushed and shaped each portion of the makeup, dabbling in the creams and powder boxes on the table.

  He spent a lot of time with his hair which was thin and lay close to his head. The hair was of very fine texture, the kind one sees on dolls sold at the better shops. It was streaked with gray which required considerable dabbing of a thick dye. He was quite vain, rinsing and brushing the dyed portion several times before he was satisfied.

  When he had finished, he towelled off the excess liquid and gave a flourish to his hair with a brush. Then he looked closely at himself for the over-all effect.

  His face was oval, somewhat elongated. His skin was mauve white. His eyes, large and filled with despair, dominated. His mouth evidenced a permanent smile. He wore a tuxedo topped by an immaculate white cravat. He appeared to be readying for a special event. From somewhere in the house a waltz could be heard and the man paused for a moment, listening.

  He finished his work with a flourish, dabbing, touching and patting the final elements of his makeup. Then, his serene smile a question mark in the mirror’s reflection, he backed softly away from the dressing table and arose. He picked up a brocaded dressing gown and hung it in a closet.

  The gown was deep wine silk, padded, and very heavy to ward off the cold. Thin black stripings ran up and down the sleeves; at the cuffs, the gown was piped and fluted in marvelous arabesques that represented, on close inspection, the letter “P.” This same letter was repeated in raised gold calligraphy on a pair of onyx cufflinks that protruded below the cuffs.

  The man was small, condensed in stature, almost frail. His hands were pale and opalescent, their delicateness counterbalancing the ferocity of his eyes. He looked terribly weary and old beyond his years. He held his head to one side, preoccupied by his thoughts.

  The waltz music could be heard again. It was Strauss, a song for graduation balls, tea times or afternoon soirees, certainly sweeter times than this.

  The music was filtering along a hall that, despite its elegance and decorum, cried out for people. The carpeting in the hall was grand, a thick robust rose; gold urns atop Corinthian pedestals decorated the ochre walls with ferns and palm fronds. Paintings in gold and rosewood frames soared to the ceiling. A family appeared to be depicted here; hard-eyed men and furtive, voluptuous women, dressed in the styles of centuries ago. At the far end, above double doors, towered the family patriarch—a tall warrior standing at full height in the distinctive armour of Cromwell’s Ironsides. His portrait was framed by a gilt construction thicker and more elaborate than that of the others; centered on its base the letter “P” stood out in fine script.

  The man in the tuxedo walked down the hallway without looking at his ancestors. He followed the music to its source, pushing open the double doors of the room from which the sounds came.

  There, in a ballroom of crystal and gilt opulence, a cluster of musicians, their hair slicked down and their mustaches trim in music-hall fashion, serenaded on a little dais. They were very intent on their music which now poured forth in full glory, inviting and supple. The man crossed the glass floor in quickening paces. He was alone in the ball room; surprisingly, there were no other guests.

  But wait—suddenly he was met by a startlingly beautiful young woman whose white ball gown was accentuated by raven hair spread over her shoulders. The man paused in front of her, bowed, straightened and looked at her intently. Then he flicked his hand to the base of her neck, and swept her out onto the floor.

  They danced well together: he moving in great strong sweeps, she following his lead with exotic, almost stiff, deliberation. Still no one else appeared. The two seemed perfectly matched and equally perfectly alone above the glass squares. His hands and feet kept excellent time to the beat, his patent leather shoes marking the waltz patterns on the shining surface.

  A long swirl brought the couple closer to the dais where the musicians could be seen more distinctly. The players postured stiffly, instruments held at fixed angles, feet keeping time in unison, eyes beady, smiles fixed in plastic teeth under brush moustaches. Could it be? Indeed, yes, they were mannequins. A mechanical orchestra! How novel, how utterly correct for this man to install such realism in his home: a formal ballroom with an appropriately dressed orchestra, high mirror-lined walls that provided inf
inite reflection for a trio of crystal chandeliers, the brilliant glass floor that stretched to all corners of the horizon.

  The music ended and the couple glided to a small cabaret table placed against one wall. A single red rose rising from a fluted glass vase was its only decoration; two bentwood chairs stood around it. He held one for the girl to be seated, then plucked a champagne bottle from a waiting ice bucket, popped the cork and poured two tall glasses. He offered one to the lady; they toasted and drank, she brushing the glass to her lips, he pouring the entire tumbler into a small aperture in his throat.

  She remained unruffled by this startling gesture, continuing to sip her wine and look at her escort with deep, yet rather glazed eyes. He sat placidly, unmoved by her beauty, the silence, or the multimirrored reflections. His desperate eyes were elated now, their excitement hiding the despair about him.

  A different kind of party, signifying the advent of May, was in process on tailored grounds somewhere near the great city of London. A tall Maypole had been hoisted on a little hillock and two concentric circles of young men and women were moving in opposite directions around it. Each of the dancers carried a long colored streamer, the other end of which was attached to the top of the Maypole; they were making their way through a series of nursery songs in fitful fashion, their singing broken by bursts of laughter. Other couples, mostly in their 20’s and 30’s, stood before the yews and boxwood. Small tables dotted the lawn. Seated at these were couples engaged in the more serious pursuits that come natural to a warm spring evening. Other couples were clustered along the sweeping balustraded stairway that led into the main building. The stairway—consisting of some 150 steps in all—provided a focal point to the formal gardens which spread out in all directions at the base of the stately home.

  The whole place was an island not ten minutes from the Thames and Central London. Linking the two worlds was a macadam driveway that looped into the grounds from the main road. Hidden most of the way by trees, the driveway circled gently up to the house and then out again.