Dr. Phibes Rises Again Read online

  IF DR. PHIBES TURNED YOUR BLOOD TO ICE,

  YOU WON’T WANT TO MISS THE TERRIFYING SEQUEL—

  DR. PHIBES RISES AGAIN!

  “Dr. Phibes, that bizarre evil genius, is back with all his old diabolic deviltry.” —Variety

  Here is just one of the ways Phibes disposes of his enemies in this spellbinding book:

  Shavers fled for his life through the corridors from which he had come. The eagle followed unerringly —swooping, screeching, extending its greedy talons.

  Shavers knew he was doomed. The great bird swooped, missed, then dived again. This time the talons gripped the cloth, then flesh and bone, crushing the bone.

  The bloody talons now held human flesh. The eagle fed ravenously . . .

  Dr. Phibes Rises Again

  IT WILL KEEP YOU SHUDDERING TO THE LAST PAGE!

  Also by William Goldstein

  Dr. Phibes

  Dr. Phibes in the Begining

  DR. PHIBES RISES AGAIN

  William Goldstein

  Premier Digital Publishing - Los Angeles

  Premier Digital Publishing

  www.PremierDigitalPublishing.com

  Follow us on Twitter @PDigitalPub

  Follow us on Facebook: Premier Digital Publishing

  eISBN 978-1-937624-62-0

  Copyright © 1972 by American Internation Productions (Eng.) Limited

  “Ere the ancient bone to ancient skeletons lie,

  Our fates can catch and scratch the sky. . . .”

  Ninth Canto

  “ELEGY OF ELEMENT”

  Anton Phibes

  CHAPTER 1

  It was hot. Awfully hot. The Sun Disk tested the air as it had for the last two hundred days. Certainly the sky must crack.

  The streets caught the heat and multiplied it between baked walls. Sand drifts, sent in by an occasional desert wind, had long since added their sheen to the dusty walkways. What little commerce remained ground the sand further into the dust, so that the streets themselves glistened like the walls of a brick oven. It was a deceptive warmth, for at night the air hung low and cold in this bend of the river. And the townspeople—artisans, traders, and farmers—shivered anxiously now in the autumn of one more drought. Across the river the limestone cliffs caught their cries and made them into echoes. Tomorrow there would be fewer to wail.

  But drought was among the least of Amarna's problems in that difficult year. The city, which had risen a half-century earlier to challenge, then surpass, the splendor of Thebes, now also knew starvation, isolation, and the darker fruits of decay. Bakers brought out their loaves but once a week, vendors piled their fruits atop pebbles to conceal the meagerness of the harvest, and the farmers, despairing of ever seeing the rain again, surrendered more and more of their homesteads to dust, finally fleeing singly, then in tattered groups, to the once great city. There they joined thousands of other survivors of that dust-swept season to seek alms in the limestone and diorite temples of Aton. This mass of outcast faithful could hardly have surmised that alms would not be forthcoming. And even if they had, their hunger and zeal would have blinded them to the Sun God's disfavor.

  The few priests who remained thought different. Their revenues had long since been cut off by the Imperial Court. What little they collected toward the maintenance of the ornate complex of temples, shrines, and funerary edifices came from local citizens. It was not enough. For them, a remnant of the dedicated, who, either because of age or convictions, had elected to continue their service to the Aton, it was continually painful to watch the daily decay of his sacred establishment. They talked about it as they passed along the corridors, their voices subdued under the weight of stone, and remembered a better time, when faith was strong and its rewards most provident.

  The very oldest remembered the beginning. Even before it was settled, Amarna beckoned to the traveler, situated, as it was, almost at the center point of the empire. Three hundred miles north from Thebes as the Nile flowed, the limestone cliffs flanking the river's east bank edged backward in a stately semi-circle, enclosing a lush ampitheatre of rich bottom land that offered infinite possibility, infinite reward. The site drew favorable comment from the warrior king Thutmose IV, but he was too busy with campaigns in Asia to encourage much development. It fell to his grandson, Amenhotep IV, to furnish Amarna with a grandeur commensurate with its setting.

  This young man was an enigma even before he assumed the throne. He was tall, with elongated—even languid— features, and ungainly hands. Unlike his father and grandfather, he enjoyed neither the hunt nor the other martial arts that were supposed to be the mark of any young prince and, although the Egyptian land army was the best the world had seen up to that date, he made little use of that exceptional instrument. Amenhotep was not interested in conquest.

  The prince fit well into court life. His dealings with the multitudes of functionaries were correct enough to keep palace affairs moving with unusual efficiency. The obligatory statutes to Amon were completed with equal dispatch. Couriers from Kush, Nubia, Canaan, and the lands beyond the Euphrates who came to Thebes in great numbers during those years were greeted by the future king with the proper mix of fact and diplomacy that makes for favorable foreign relations. But it was in the spiritual pursuits that the royal heir showed his earliest prowess.

  His father, Amenhotep III, was a vigorous ruler who, with his wife, Tiy, built extensively in Egypt, Nubia, and the Sudan. He graced the capital with an enormous palace to serve as a showcase for his familial embellishments. He further startled the citizens by causing a large pleasure lake over a mile in circumference to be built close by. And, by way of public honor to his wife, he had an opulent barge built for the great lady so that the royal couple could enjoy the lake together in full view of the Theban populace. The king was no mere show-off, however. Other pharaohs before him revered the spiritual precepts that formed the backbone of the ancient culture. But Amenhotep III placed special emphasis on Ma'at, or “truth,” taking for two of his names Nab-Ma'at Re (“The Lord of Truth is Re”) and Kha-em-Ma'at (“He who makes appearance in truth”). To show the sincerity of his affection for Ma'at, the king conducted the exemplary affairs of his court life in full view of courtiers and visitors alike. In sum, the old king was a straightforward man; in the farthest reaches of his own simple faith he could not have been prepared for the extravagant and finally explosive wanderings of his son.

  But he did appoint the young prince co-regent. Amenhotep IV assumed the throne and a portion of its burdens soon after he married Nefertiti, his piquant and equally powerful sister. Once enthroned, the new king demonstrated the courtly skills he had practiced as a prince, and was able to counter the inertia of the civil servants and the avarice of the priests because of his experience. The young couple further added to their popularity by living even more openly than their parents and, in fact, were subjects of much gossip, since the king was in the habit of hugging and fondling his queen in the presence of courtiers.

  It was in the sixth year of his reign that Amenhotep IV first showed the independence of thought that later marked him as a seer, and still later as a heretic. He declared a jubilee celebrating not Amon, the local deity who was preeminent among all the gods, but rather Aton, the naked disk of the sun itself, an element previously obscure in the Egyptian spiritual outlook. He further astonished Thebes by declaring that he and his god had been ruling for the same length of time. The populace loved the festivities, while the priesthood grumbled. These minions, steeped in the severe orthodoxy of Amon, whose name had been ascendant above all other gods since the Twelfth Dynasty, looked with something less than favor upon such public adulation for a deity not of their own temple. Its implications in loss of power and pr
estige were not in the least attractive.

  The grumbling mounted with each of Amenhotep's new pronouncements. The priests at Thebes sought and soon received commiseration from their brothers at Karnak. “Who was this upstart,” they asked, “who shared his faith with an obscenity?” An attempt was made to speak to the young man through his wife, but Nefertiti was as resolute as her sire. She invited the delegation of elders to leave her chamber without offering them the customary bowl of fruits.

  They next approached the guardian of the royal household and this man, whose courtly mien belied a penchant for secured opulence, lent the petitioners a much more willing ear. At their second meeting, to which he had brought some more officials of the royal household as well as the general director for building, Assamemnes (for that was that worthy's name), he spoke openly of his displeasure with the king and his ways. To the priests this stream of invective was as welcome as a miracle spontaneously produced from a shrine, and if a conspiracy wasn't hatched on the spot, these men, each a loyal public servant, at least had the makings of one in their grasp.

  Their discussion turned to dismay when Amenhotep caused to be published, as part of the sacred literature of the state, the “Hymn to Aton.” Its first two lines were particularly painful: “When thou settlest in the Western horizon/The land is in darkness like death.” The hymn went on to extoll the singularity and strength of the Sun Disk, leaving quite literally no room in heaven or earth for Amon, Osiris, Re, or any of the other multitudinous deities whose temples flourished across the land. With one full-throated sweep, Aton's hymn cast them out, replacing their ancient and privileged dogmas with a new teaching that spoke of truth, of the unity of men, of the power and accessibility of the king.

  Aton's hymn was immediately successful. The king's popularity rose; the clergy seethed. They were soon joined by the more powerful civil servants of Assamemnes’ rank who had begun to have misgivings about a king who emphasized—it seemed at every turn—that he was the source of all truth. The spare, gawky youth had grown into a ruler whose awkward and ugly physique could be countenanced on the royal throne. They could not, however, forgive Amenhotep's rough handling of the power prerogatives once exclusively theirs. By way of retaliation the priests of Osiris’ temple at Karnak consecrated a hymn to their own favorite deity. The verse ran to one hundred stanzas, with emendations. The massive work recorded the passage of most of Egypt's famous and lesser lights. It detailed their achievements and, in somewhat more obscure terms, their efforts beyond the pale. Appropriately the hymn's subtheme was moral, affirming Osiris’ hand in all of this subject's progress.

  News of the work was received with proper solemnity by Amon's acolytes. The temple, which had grown into a hotbed of intrigue, even provided couriers to assist with its publicizing. In the meantime the Osiris brotherhood busied itself with recording their accomplishment on papyrus. The resultant scroll occupied almost the entire volume of one of the temple's larger workrooms and required a team of twenty men to transport it to the shrine on the floor above for consecration. Even in this home of Osiris the ceremony was notably turgid, and as soon as the chief priest's last fetid words passed from his lips, the twenty bearers struggled anew to their task, sweating and groaning down the long corridors until they finally managed to restore the monstrous papyrus to the room of its birth. There it stayed like a fecund immortal onion, its strophes compressing each other in the darkness and, although the “Hymn of Osiris” was often quoted (and often misquoted), the priests who had generated that elephantine paean steadfastly refused to let it venture forth from its musty hiding place.

  While the priests were going through their clerical ablutions, Assamemnes was pursuing other avenues toward the same objective: namely clipping the young Pharaoh's wings. His movements, as befitted a man of such girth, were ponderous, but his results came within a hair of being infinitely more successful.

  In his official capacity as Director of Building, Assamemnes was obliged to spend a great deal of time travelling to the many sites—Karnak and Abydos were favorites—where the royal household was creating monuments to the national grandeur. It had become his habit to visit only the major works, leaving the smaller shrines to his many assistants. Assamemnes was a notorious carouser and womanizer and found life at court, with the excitement of Thebes close at hand, much more to his taste. However, as his disgruntlement grew, it occurred to his wine-bent mind that great profit might be derived if he were to gain the confidences of the many couriers whose business it was to maintain the flow of information to and from the capital.

  He expanded his itineraries in detail, temporarily relinquishing the company of several ladies of the harem for what he correctly judged to be a more provident course. This burden of celibacy was a heavy one for the General Director, and many an evening found him groping to the wineshop in some dusty backwater town. There he would drink, fighting at once to wash the dust of his travels from his parched throat and to retain the name of the petty functionary he was courting for the moment. Often the wine would win, reducing the wheezing Assamemnes to a sleeping giant, his bulk cast across the table to the embarrassment of the rustics who, out of deference to his station, were afraid to disturb their important guest. At other times he was able to hang on to the thread of liquid conversation long enough to gain the halting confidence of his drinking companion. Invariably these messengers were honored, if not a bit startled, by the attention of so important a man. But the bonds of civil service are strong and durable, and most of his cronies proved quite willing to talk about their duties, seeing some possible reward or commendation for their work developing from their newfound contact.

  Assamemnes was a master of survival in a world of public administration that was capable of reducing a less watchful man to a cipher. He played to their vanity, spoke affably, if a bit blandly, and revealed everything but his purpose in the process.

  His rewards were quick in coming. Soon many of the couriers whom he had so assiduously courted made a point of visiting his offices in the palace whenever they were in town. On his home ground Assamemnes took pains to be discreet: he couldn't risk being accused of insubordination. He met his visitors in his formal offices in audiences attended by the appropriate number of secretaries. If Assamemnes was excited by these interludes he never showed it. His speech, rapid and circular in the extreme, was as far removed from the eager probing of gossip as possible. But the Director General of Buildings did glean a number of tempting bits of information about his master, all of which he judiciously filed away for future use. Among these confidences was the news, related by its bearer in the most animated terms, of a new installation at Amarna. The object in question was a stela, and the courier spent the best part of an hour describing its design in detail.

  So moved was Assamemnes by this disclosure that he resolved to confide his information to the priests at the Temple of Amon that the stela was to be dedicated to their archrival. He waited for the appropriate time. But, as it turned out later, the General Director was, in his ponderous fashion, too late by a day to affect the momentous events which followed.

  It was at that time that the king, who was then in his twelfth year of reign, announced that he was changing his, regal name to Akhenaton, to reflect the true faith of his office, and to further honor the prominence of this new faith in the land, he proclaimed that the capital of Egypt would henceforth be positioned at Amarna.

  The move to Amarna was quiet; it was also emphatic. The strange, gawky youth, who had cut his teeth on palace intrigues, now showed that he had learned well the uses of men and power. With great finesse Akhenaton bound the junior civil servants to his cause by promising them wealth and position in the new government. His conquest of the priests was equally decisive. News of the Amarna shrines had throttled Thebes for months. Akhenaton merely let the gossip run its course, allowing it to become known that men of high faith and moral precepts were needed to guide Amarna's spiritual growth. Several hundred priests and neophytes were in
Akhenaton's train in the first great move northward.

  Also in that train were young nobles who had become excited at the prospects of new glories. Money, power, prestige—all seemed to glitter with the mention of Amarna. These men had shown drive and ability at Thebes, but the rigid traditions of their class placed a solid, stolid bulk of landed princelings between them and any opportunity of reward. These parvenus were ready to take as much as they could get.

  Throughout the final preparations the grumbling, the jockeying for position, the confidences and the betrayals kept the comings and goings at the palace at a fever pitch. Those who had decided early to make the move tried to improve their position. Those who were sitting on the fence alternatively listened to the ones staying behind or worried if they were to be invited at all. The older potentates, like Assamemnes, fumed and plotted, but they could do nothing to stop the royal decision. Some enterprising vendors were even selling travel kits, complete with maps of building sites of the new city.

  Akhenaton was greatly excited by these preparations and ordered his secretaries to help wherever they could. The complexity of the move's logistics soon became sufficiently apparent so that a coordinating office was set up to handle the mountain of details requisite to packing, grouping and transporting an army composed of some twenty thousand persons. The king's last official act before faking leave of the old palace was to order the erection of a colossal stone portrait of the royal couple. Significantly Akhenaton chose Karnak, the traditional site for such commemoration. Even more significantly, the king ordered that the bust of the queen should be the same size as his own. Previously the Pharaohs had portrayed their wives on a much smaller scale, placing them at their feet or standing in the background. It was Akhenaton's way of honoring Nefertiti for her dedication.