Dr. Phibes in The Beginning Read online

  THE CRASH

  He could hear the scraping. Hurried, insistent, like rats gnawing at a table leg. They sounded like they were in the next room and there were more sounds now. Metal slipping along metal and crackling, like when you're trying to start a fire and the tinder finally catches.

  ROOM #4

  The small yellow tag beneath the number read Irgendein Unbekannter (identity unknown). It is a reminder to the Clinic staff that no one knows who is in Room #4.

  THE HOMECOMING

  The crystal ball glowered red when Phibes passed underneath on his way to join Vulnavia. She was at one of the tables with a bottle of Veuve Cliquot and two tulip glasses chilling in the ice bucket.

  RUCKUS

  A fearsome stillness settled over #5 Maldine Square. The ballroom gathered dust. The Wizards laid down their instruments and sat listlessly on the bandstand. The crystal ball faded.

  THE FIRST DEATH GEOMETRY

  Phibes was in the observatory on the morning of The Taube's funeral. He watched with amusement as the procession marched through the Square with a solemnity befitting a great public figure - which The Taube certainly was.

  THE VELOCITY ROOM

  It had taken him a week to get a grip, to regain some composure after the paroxysm that had boiled up from under his skin. And nearly ran away with him, Anton Phibes. He should be familiar to us by now and, except for the time distortion, he fits right in to modern-day New York City…

  WHERE TO SHINE THE LIGHT OF JUSTICE?

  The Inspector was wrong in his choices but he was right in his theory. Everyone missed the connection except that canny high school student, Willow Weeps, who enterprisingly has patched the story together. SALIGIA, is the medieval mnemonic for the Seven Deadly Sins.

  … and the deaths keep coming.

  Bizarre, inventive, and with no apparent reason.

  WILLIAM GOLDSTEIN

  Dr. Phibes

  IN THE BEGINNING

  ALSO BY

  WILLIAM GOLDSTEIN

  Dr. Phibes

  Dr. Phibes Rises Again!

  Dr. Phibes

  IN THE BEGINNING

  WILLIAM GOLDSTEIN

  Premier Digital Publishing - Los Angeles

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2010 by William Goldstein

  Forward by Damon Goldstein copyright © 2011

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this manuscript may be reproduced, distributed, transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.

  Premier Digital Publishing

  www.PremierDigitalPublishing.com

  Follow us on Twitter @PDigitalPub

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  eISBN: 978-1-937624-67-5

  ISBN-13: 978-1463721206

  Book design by Damon J.A. Goldstein

  Cover design by Damon J.A. Goldstein

  Art direction by Damon J.A. Goldstein

  Phibes Forever Icon and book plate design by Damon J.A. Goldstein

  Copyright © by Damon J.A. Goldstein

  Formulaic Hypotitheñai

  From The Dr. Anton Phibes Manifestos

  -circa 1929

  Forward

  HE’S BACK! – Dr. Phibes Phans – UNITE! This is the story you’ve all been waiting for and why you continue to show such strong loyalty.

  ‘Dr. Phibes – In The Beginning©’ tells the origins of the phantom-phantastic and exactly how he became who he is, of the enigmatic Vulnavia and those wonderful and wondrous ‘Clockwork Wizards©’, and what the good doctor is doing right now, as well as providing a crucial clue as to where he will appear next.

  Now for the first time discover how accomplished concert pianist and British foreign service officer of HMDS, Anton Phibes, is transformed into an abominable Dr. Phibes via his grief-induced obsession to mete out retribution to all who have taken Lady Phibes from him. Beware! to all who attempt to stand in his way or dare to try to divert him from his ‘forevermission’: the total revivification of his beloved Victoria.

  Travel back through time with the creator and author of both ‘Dr. Phibes’ and ‘Dr. Phibes Rises Again!’, and co-writer of the horror cult classic film ‘The Abominable Dr. Phibes’, to the beginning - circa 1919 - and be witness to how the War to End All Wars, the SS Northumbria, and the treacherous roadways of the Swiss Alps, turn the life of a newlywed couple inside out and abrade their blissfully joined Eden-skin from their souls to reveal a love story that spans forever and back again, and stretches the spiral fabric of our DNA to it's very tearing point.

  ‘Dr. Phibes – In The Beginning©’ is simultaneously and stunningly both a classic love story that has been tempered by horrific tragedy as well as a classic horror story borne from that ultimate of all human emotions – Love.

  - Damon Goldstein

  Dr. Phibes

  IN THE BEGINNING

  WILLIAM GOLDSTEIN

  Premier Digital Publishing - Los Angeles

  Dr. Phibes – In The Beginning

  By William Goldstein

  PROLOGUE

  London and New York, world capitals at the beginning of the 21st century just as they were at the beginning to the 20th, are studded with banks, museums, and universities and their rivers, the Thames and the Hudson, feed and are fed into by global traffic. To their credit, each city honors their kids and their trees. Raw, bustling, non-stop, live in New York or London and you have to run to catch-up!

  In all of their busyness, both cities possessed islands of calm where one could find, in Blaise Pascal's word, ‘solitude’. London's Green Belt and Manhattan's Central Park offered relief from the bustle.

  Roderick ‘Roddy’ Ambrose sought solitude of a different sort – within the confines of his limousine. He owns a fleet of them, black, sleek and soundproof machines that slice through traffic with shark-like stealth. Roddy, you see, is a man about town who, when he goes out on the town, likes to take his entourage with him.

  Tonight's caravan has two new additions: black-on-black SUV's, one in front and the other in back. Why does this band of revelers merit protection? Because Roddy Ambrose doesn’t come from old money. His wealth was rapidly accumulated, and not always on the up-and-up.

  After a late supper at a tapas house in the mid-fifties, Roddy and his friends motored down to the East Village. Roddy has more than once made bail for the doorman of the most exclusive ‘Members Only’ club in the area and they would have no trouble getting into the midnight show.

  Roddy's companions this evening are young professionals who, unlike their host, must work for a living. Few of them are more than a paycheck away from insolvency and so they have taken to cadging a whiff of the ‘Good Life’ whenever they can. They snorkel champagne instead of Chablis and hit up the shrimp in deference to the crudités.

  Greed is good!

  When seated at the club, they're dismayed to learn that no alcohol is served after midnight: Perrier will have to do. Moments later Roddy's driver appears and, moving with great efficiency about the group, distributes silver flasks to everyone from the black attaché case slung over his shoulder.

  The group left the club before the last set ended. It was a weekday night, the band was flat, and they were glad to be going home. After dropping off his guests, Roddy and his three companions are enjoying Perrier and finger sandwiches, the preferred fare in this fitness-conscious era. Each of his lady friends possesses the ideal height-to-weight ratio and his limo provides them all th
e comforts of home, a very lush domain to be sure.

  He's especially proud of his sound system – a custom-designed Bang & Olafsun original that offers opera-house quality acoustics inside and absolute quiet on the outside.

  Presently, the lights dim on this tete-a-tete and the small talk fuses into sighs and the slip of pillowslips. Later, having dropped off his ladies, Roddy savors the evening with a final bottle of Perrier. The languor of love hangs heavily inside the limo. He smiles contentedly and lies back on the pillows while the music rises to engulf him. And rises and rises…and RISES, until with G-FORCE, it shakes skin from bones and bones from bones, leaving a properly jellied Roderick Ambrose moving swiftly and silently about town, his two guardian SUV's fore and aft ever watchful and ever ready to fend off danger.

  ***

  Valor Pretorius never shied away from a crime scene. He visited the site even if he wasn’t assigned to the case. Details mattered to Detective Inspector Pretorius (Acting) because, he believed, they would lead him to know the ‘Criminal Mind.’

  Pretorius had seen it all in his 32 years…until this case. The victim was literally splashed against the back seat of the limo. The door locks to the rear compartment were in good working order and there were no signs of forced entry or struggle, which meant that Roddy Ambrose was immobilized before he could protect himself. When the crime lab couldn’t locate the problem, the company techs were called in.

  Their analysis confirmed that the system's amplification range had been increased a thousand-fold – to just under the sound proofing's limit but strong enough to break glass – or bones, in Roddy Ambrose’ case. The crime was deliberate and well thought out. Why go to such lengths – turning this playboy into a mess of porridge – just to put him down?

  Why indeed?!

  Pretorious would have to travel across the Atlantic and the better part of a century back in time – to Paris, 1919 – before he could even begin to attempt an answer.

  BOOK ONE

  True love.

  Is there anything better? And is there anything worse than losing it?

  Yes!

  Losing it permanently. Forever. Never having that love again!

  Take a middle-aged man, a bachelor of more than average accomplishment, a busy man so to speak and look at his daily schedule. His calendar. His diary (if he keeps one).First off you will see places, dates, and names. And if he's a traveling man, they will have an exotic ring: Osaka, Tangiers, Odessa, and Livorno. But this man's workaday world - and our man does indeed travel - is no mere travelogue. For we are talking about a real person. A real fictional person. (Non-fictional people can be found in the libraries of the social sciences).

  So ours is a busy man who travels. Is he a salesman? A journalist? A vagabond?

  A look at his diary over the past several years reveals a preponderance of world capitals. No need to list them here except to say that ninety years ago from the time of this writing our man - our real fictional man - was lodged on the third floor of the Hotel Majestic.

  The entire hotel had been taken over by the British Delegation to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, along with four other hotels near the Arc de Triomphe that were required to house its 400 members. David Lloyd George stayed elsewhere with his mistress.

  Our man was in the British Foreign Service. The Paris Peace Conference was his most important assignment to date. The Great War (as it was called) had ended the previous November and now, in the spring of 1919, the victors had gathered to secure what more than a few of them expected to be The Peace, the peace that quite rightly followed the ‘War to End All Wars’.

  None of the four main players believed this treacle, none except the American president, Woodrow Wilson, who's 14 Points were for the most part ignored by his three counterparts. Georges Clemenceau, David Lloyd George, and Vittorio Orlando knew why they were in Paris in the spring of 1919 - to divide the spoils of war just as the victors have done since the very beginnings of warfare.

  Anton Phibes was added to the British delegation at the very last minute. The person he replaced gave birth one month early and had to remain behind in London for her confinement. Phibes had served in Vienna and in Budapest. His acquaintance with an up-and-coming young Turkish colonel was another positive.

  Three years earlier Kemal Ataturk had bested the Dominion forces at Gallipoli, a feat that’d gained him the respect (if not the admiration) of his former enemies. Now, with the vanquished Ottoman Empire collapsing around him, it was Ataturk who single-handedly had collected the fractured remnants and was welding them together into a nation fit to take her place in the family of nations:

  Turkey!

  Womanizer, pragmatist, patriot, Ataturk intended to accomplish this feat by removing religion from the political

  equation in his homeland.

  Phibes had been dispatched to Istanbul as an observer in May. He liked to swim. And as soon as he settled into his lodgings, he liked to go to the embassy pool to swim a few laps before engaging his hosts.

  Cleans the grit and clears the mind, he would say. But the local British Embassy, shuttered in 1914, had not yet re-opened and so he headed down to the shore of the Bosporus. The water, purple green in the early afternoon sun, looked clean enough. The sailboats scudding up and down the Straits belied its strategic significance of just a few months past.

  The narrow shell-littered beach was sparsely populated on this surprisingly warm May day. Phibes had scrambled down most of the adjoining cliff when he heard shrieks of laughter. And there, some fifty yards up the beach, was a cluster of bathers, mostly young women dressed skimpily - attire that made a clean break with the long-sleeved pinafores, baggy trousers and floppy hats that were de rigueur for that era.

  These ladies were quite sleek, even beautiful, their hair tossed by the breezes in puffs of gold and auburn and sable. Come along, they called to Phibes. Here!

  He angled down to the base of the slope and headed toward them. When he got closer he spotted two or three young men in their midst. One of the men, taller than the rest, held himself in the taut posture of the military. His bright blue eyes were brighter than the sunbeams poking through the clouds. Phibes marked him as someone who could not be ignored. And when the man gestured toward him, Phibes returned the greeting.

  That is how he met Kemal Ataturk.

  The man's fame - notoriety - had preceded him. By 1917 the Gallipoli debacle was old news. And Anton Phibes, who was serving on the Western Front at the time, had long since drawn his own conclusions about that lost battle. The attackers were doomed from the start by the unfavorable terrain of the landing site. Feckless leadership and a pallid strategy compounded the error. And so the Turks retained their hold on the high ground despite being pounded by the 15” guns of Queen Elizabeth and her sister battleships and the ferocity of the beach assault.

  It came close to going the other way. After nineteen hours of intense fighting, the defense was starting to crack and the men were running away in twos and threes. Many more might have turned tail had not reserves been close at hand “under the command of an officer of outstanding ability and determination” (credit to John Keegan)

  That man was Kemal Ataturk. Heeding their cries that they were out of ammunition, he ordered the fleeing men to fix bayonets and to lie down, ordering his men who were now arriving on the scene to do the same. When the attackers followed suit, he ordered his troops to charge them.

  That was the turning point of the Gallipoli Campaign.

  Individual bravery counted for little on the Western Front where machineguns, accurate at two miles, made short work of hero and coward alike. At war's outbreak two years earlier, British boys had hurried to enlist with their clubs. The London Chums, the Arsenal Pals, and the Boys of Derry kicked their soccer balls across the early No Man's Land to the whine of bagpipes.

  Regimental Corporal Phibes reported to his regiment at the outbreak of hostilities. The Iniskillings had fought at Waterloo. And as part of Picton‘s Corps,
had held their ground all during that first morning under a fierce artillery assault by the French gunners, the best in the world at the time.

  It was in that tradition that Corporal Phibes made sure that every man in his squad was battle-ready. Their weapons were freshly cleaned and oiled; they were quartered near the cook. And they carried only the essentials into battle.

  They fought hard, methodically. But by the fall of 1918, the squad was down to half muster with replacements coming in slowly or not at all. There was some talk of ‘peace talks’ but no one paid any attention. 1919 was just a few weeks away. Would there be a spring offensive?

  And then suddenly it was over. It was mid-November and when they got up that morning it was a day just like every other day on the line. So cold you had to stomp your feet to loosen up. The duckboards squished around under your boots, splashing the puddles of dirty water underneath. Men kept coming out of the side trenches, their greatcoats slick with dirt, to add to the crowding.

  Mess was up ahead but no one was hurrying. The war was over - or would be by 11 o’clock on this 11th day of the 11th month in the year 1918.

  Later they’d call it Armistice Day but not today. The guns had stopped but still, no one was hurrying. Slick greatcoats, their boots sloshing along, fog tufting past the wire and bunching up where it was colder above the shell pits yonder, no one was hurrying.

  The night crew was moving too, falling in with the day crew. Coffee up ahead served with crullers by the Gray Ladies and then hail to muster. Speeches from the CO then a few words with friends. Names and addresses and then on your way, all except that guy up on the parapet. The one who wasn’t coming down.