Dr. Phibes Vulnavia's Secret Read online

  She is ashamed, he thought, ashamed at what had become of her. She knew ‐ her distress now meant that Vulnavia knew of her formerly pleasing looks.

  ‘Pleasing’ is too mild a word to describe this tall and graceful creature whose opalescent skin gave off its own light. Vulnavia’s eyes, so warm and trusting, warmed up to you in spontaneous happiness. ‘She walks in beauty like the night’ ….

  Her back was a mass of welts. Had they beaten her? He put away the thought. There was no time to pursue it now. He had to get her ready because there was much to be done!

  The washcloth was too harsh for her skin so he changed over to a sponge, kneading and puffing the Ivory soap ball to get a big pillow of suds, which he then applied to her shoulders ‐ still sloped demurely despite her prison punishments ‐ to let it roll down her back with the lightest of scrubbing powered by gravity.

  Vulnavia stopped shivering after awhile, allowing Phibes to take stock of things. The worst of the damage ‐ from the acid coursing down upon her from that overhead plastic helix in the basement surgical suite at Maldine Square ‐ lay around her head and neck. Her shoulders and back, other than some spot scarring in the lower arch just above her pelvis, was clear.

  Vulnavia was perfect below the waist and as soon as Phibes sponged away the hospital grime, her skin, albeit a few shades lighter, still had the surface tension that is the sign of good health.

  Phibes liked what he saw, was encouraged by it. He was certain that he could restore Vulnavia to her original state ‐ to the way she was when he first breathed life into her. Back then, he needed someone to help him get through the day because the pain was more than he could handle ‐ and growing worse!

  He would be gone before the year was out and it was already October! Using the science of the era, the burgeoning new field of sub‐cellular chemistry, and that 19th century prototype computer, the Difference Engine, he had built her in just over 15 months.

  Limber, luminous, strong, Vulnavia quickly mastered the household routines becoming, for all intents and purposes, the lady of the house.

  He would make her so again. Knowing that he also knew something else, something upon which once accomplished, his whole world would turn.

  Only and ever he wanted his wife back. But how eluded him because seasoned reason told him that this was impossible. The dead do not return.

  Or do they? For months he and Victoria had dazzled the society pages, were spotted at La Couple on Paris’ Left Bank and the Kit Kat Club in London’s West End and a score of other toney hangouts. Hot Jazz. They danced two as one. The crowds loved it. Seamless and not a drop of perspiration to be seen. The rotating crystal ball shooting its rainbows from above. Veuve Cliquot chilling in the ice buckets and the tulip glasses ready for the toasts wherever ‘Tony and Vicky’ went.

  Muskrat Ramble…St. James Infirmary…Clarinet Marmalade…the black onyx floor so deep and black enough you could see your future.

  I can see us, our happiness, she whispered to him one night. His knees shook. This diplomat with his ineffable reserve shook like a sophomore on his first date.

  SUB‐CELLULAR CHEMISTRY

  The penmanship was awful but the language density gave it a momentum that kept you digging. There was an idea in there: you could not let go until you grabbed it.

  Alexander Maximov. He met the man while he was still in the service ‐ at a jazz joint on 63rd St. on Chicago’s south side. Now the Club Alexandria wasn’t what you think. Headliners played there ‐ Ella, Bessie, Lady Day played there, and the paying customers paid plenty to see them.

  Class acts really pulled! Bud Freeman was at the Alexandria that weekend. Phibes had caught him at the London Palladium and paid his respects between shows. Like a lot of jazz musicians, Freeman was better known on the Continent than he was in the States.

  They were catching up after the first set when a party of five piled into the two empty tables next to his: three scruffy young people, bad hair on the girl plus an older obviously married couple, the wife’s argyle sweater not really hiding her many softness’s.

  The husband was loud but accurate in his speech, very partisan, very specific, and even on a night out with his students. Before that night was out Anton Phibes and Alexander Maximov had hammered out a friendship that prevailed ‐ on a grand scale ‐ over time and distance.

  They drank a lot of beer that night ‐ those big, 2‐liter bottles of Canadian Ace that were the mainstay of Chicago’s working classes well into the second half of the 20th century. A product of Al Capone’s Cicero brewery, this clear greenish lager with its clean taste gave the lie to its sordid beginnings.

  Max ‐ his wife called him that ‐ kept up a steady chatter about the music. Tonight’s playing wasn’t up to snuff but Bud Freeman on any night was miles ahead of whatever else was out there.

  His wife doted on him; as well she should because Alexander Maximov was headed for a Nobel Prize. Even here with all the noise in the club you could see it in the way the man carried himself. He punched his fists when he spoke and that crest of hair on his noggin, blacker than coal, shook and shuddered all through his phrasings. Most of what he said that night was lost but one phrase stood out: one into many.

  One into many. The theme ran through Max’s letters. Phibes appreciated it. The man was enthusiastic about his work, his black mop bobbing and weaving like a boxer going for the KO.

  The younger a cell is, the more ways it can change, Max said in one of his letters, his language now much less tentative than in the beginning. Back then, his ideas were so far out in left field that no one paid him any attention. He was butting heads with the accepted wisdom and continued to pay the price, in the snubs and backbiting from his colleagues throughout most of his career.

  But his research projects were so well crafted that he finally prevailed against his detractors ‐ a grudging crusty respect that clings to the shoes of genius like rock salt.

  Not that Alexander Maximov cared. He got on with his work no matter which way the wind was blowing outside his lab.

  SKIN

  It wasn’t much of a decision, minor and certainly nothing to dwell on. Vulnavia’s skin had to be replaced. The damage to her head and neck was too great.

  The choice ‐ and there was a choice ‐ was between the original gutta percha or real human skin.

  Real vs. artificial. Alexander Maximov’s later letters quickened in tempo over the earlier ones. Short jerky sentences and stubby paragraphs were his nods to good grammar. It was a never‐ending sparring contest. A nice turn of phrase mattered little to this man of fastly forming notions. Like a poet rushing to his summation, Maximov had to put out his ideas lest he lose them.

  A volcano can’t forever keep in its lava. Sooner or later it must erupt.

  Pluripotent. The word showed up a lot in Max’s letters. Cells grow and multiply and in multiplying, can grow into many different kinds of tissues.

  One into many. Following this thread would lead you to the notion that you could produce any kind of tissue ‐ bone, muscle, and gut ‐ once you had the Pluripotent cell in hand. Maximov had already shown how it was done with blood cells (to the great wrath of his colleagues).

  Using induced Pluripotent stem cells derived from some patches of skin from near his collarbone, where it was quite smooth, he grew them in Petri dishes into sub‐q, dermis and epidermis, the three elements of the human façade.

  Harvesting sheets of each layer, he applied them to small ‐ very small ‐ sections of Vulnavia’s exposed burn areas.

  She never winced. Being mute, she never moaned, but the pain was in her eyes, flickering like fires in the forest. These postage‐stamp sized plots of Vulnavia’s anatomy endured the procedure. After four months of his steady applications and her enduring them, she had healed. Her new skin was quite supple, quite real.

  She walks in beauty like the night

  HARRY TROUT ON THE BEACH

  Trout, Trout, you got mail! The deskman tapped on the door wi
th a fingernail that looked like he’d been scraping out his skillet all morning.

  Mail, Mr. Trout! Harry Trout had stopped waiting on his mail since just after Boxing Day and here it was January and the ice plant tucked in under the dunes was starting to bloom thanks to the warm‐up. But the surf was still greasy from the winter storms.

  A few volunteers were out this morning cleaning the beach of its rotting seaweed, its cigarette butts and the cracked‐open crab shells, the meat mostly torn out of them with the few remaining shreds attracting swarms of sand flies ravenous for their breakfast.

  The cleaners had a good haul today ‐ it was the Monday after the Holiday weekend and their sacks were full, the army‐issue green canvas showing the darker wet stains from the trash.

  Where they took this stuff nobody knew?

  Margate was a cheap vacation spot, one of the cheapest on the Kent coast. It catered to aging civil servants, those too worn‐out or too stingy to afford anything better.

  The boardwalk hotels were passable, their three‐star rating denoting fried eggs & meat for breakfast with a hard biscuit and the community jam pot to pass around.

  The clientele here, decked out in two‐year‐old finery, were mostly older couples, the gent bravely sporting a straw boater for show and clasping his broad‐beamed wife about the waist ‐ not all the way in many cases.

  Harry Trout, formerly Inspector Trout of Scotland Yard, did not have his accommodations on the boardwalk. Rather he lived in the flats ‐ scraped out hutments scattered amongst the dunes. Built on the fly during the war to house the new recruits, these ‘boxes’ of 8, 10, 12 tiny roomettes were propped up on palettes to keep them above the high tide line.

  They were scarcely larger than a penitent’s cell in a monastery and similarly furnished ‐ a fold‐up metal cot and a deal table whose ancient china washbasin more often than not was free of cracks in tribute to the quartermaster’s prudence.

  The cot’s mattress was never thicker than 2” and the floor, always damp, always sagged.

  Harry Trout was not in his room this morning. He was within earshot, near enough to hear the deskman’s voice but not caring to respond because he still had some sleeping to do.

  And because he had stopped caring months ago.

  He went back to sleep. The mail would have to wait; first he had to sleep off his bender. The Café Napole was the last building down the line before the board‐ups, those casualties of the winter storms whose owners had given up on what they once thought to be part of England’s ‘fastest growing vacation destination’.

  Café Napole, with its faded but still perky green and pink façade, is a tribute to these two‐decade old enthusiasms. The morning had passed. It is two o’clock now on a day that has not seen much sunshine and Harry Trout is eating lunch. It is his only meal of the day, a recently acquired habit that fits quite naturally into his current calendar. Because, you see, Harry has just gotten up after spending the night in the gondola tethered to the busted pier that stretches out from the boardwalk in front of the café. And he will probably repair there at dusk with his aperitif ‐ a threepenny bottle of Madeira.

  Drinking makes you hungry and Harry was wolfing down his pasta fazool as if the bowl had no bottom, fitfully pulling chunks from his stick of bread and wrapping them around a butter patty to stretch the soup. Sometimes the owner’s wife poured him a second helping when she thought that the hubby was not looking.

  Harry patted her plump hands whenever she did this, much to her delight. Her eyes brightened and her up‐curled lip (with its hint of moustache) was the full extent of the former Detective Inspector’s immersion in the Margate social scene.

  What had brought him thus? Why Dr. Phibes, of course! After riding a string of investigations, some of them rather complex, to apprehension and conviction, Harry Trout was put up for Inspector while he was still in his 20’s. He was passed over according local custom, a slight that he took hard and was heard to use the word ‘mistake’ on occasion when referring to his ‘setback’.

  But instead of brooding, Trout bore even deeper into his work, quickly bringing justice to a gang of hoodlums who had been robbing lorry drivers down by the London docks for years. And he bought a new suit ‐ not just any suit but a charcoal grey construct from one of the best‐ bespoke gentleman’s outfitters on Savile Row.

  Do clothes make the man? Well, they made Harry Trout Inspector on the eve of his greatest case, a case that would forever define his career at the Yard; and a case that triggered his downfall.

  When a Harley Street internist was found in his bedroom covered by bats ‐ and quite dead ‐ it was deemed an accident, albeit a fatal one, that befell one of the quirkier members of the medical profession. Who else but a doctor would keep bats for pets?

  But when others of his profession started succumbing to even stranger animal assailants ‐ frogs, rats, locusts ‐ a pattern that Harry Trout was the first to call biblical…the first to link those strangely‐murdered (and disparate) doctors to a single killer…the first to see that this group had one thing in common…a young woman who died in their hands in the surgical amphitheatre of London’s fashionable St. Thomas’ Hospital.

  Here the investigation stalled on the question of motive. The patient, a young lady named Victoria Regina Phibes, lived an outwardly happy life with her husband of less than two years, Anton Phibes.

  A member of the British Foreign Service, he was in Switzerland when news of her hospitalization reached him by cable. He was killed in a car crash as he was rushing home to be with her.

  It was on Trout’s initiative that he and his partner visited the Phibes crypt at Highgate Cemetery, after braving increasingly stiffer resistance from their superiors.

  Harry Trout, formerly known as a ‘pusher’ by the rank and file, now took on the moniker; ‘ghost pusher’ for his discovery that both Phibes’ and his wife’s caskets were empty!

  HIS FINEST MOMENT

  Looking back now it was Harry Trout’s finest moment. The discovery of the empty caskets put him squarely on the trail of the killer, a killer who moved like quicksilver and always stayed steps ahead of the Yard.

  At the height of the investigation, Detective Inspector Trout had two dozen of the Yard’s finest under his command. This would have swelled the head of a lesser man but Harry Trout had long since shed his rookie bravado and molted into the laconic sleuth of penny dreadful fame.

  He was in fact a good detective but readers of DR. PHIBES, the first book in the Phibes Saga, know that it never was a contest between him and Anton Phibes. That lesson came down especially hard on Trout’s assault team when they swarmed into #5 Maldine Square certain of their collar, only to be met by the axe‐swinging Vulnavia. The mansion was reduced to a shambles in the ensuing melee but their room‐by‐room search came up empty.

  Phibes was gone…if he had ever been there in the first place! He will return, the Yarders grumbled as the badly burned Vulnavia is hustled off to hospital. Trout’s request to stay on the case was granted but his team was disbanded and his desk was moved to a corner of the large assembly room.

  Guards were posted at the padlocked and boarded‐up #5 Maldine Sq. but these were removed after a few months for budgetary reasons. The Square, once the darling of the dailies, returned to normal, ‘normal’ being absentee landlords, fading facades, the seldom‐calling postman ‐ in all, a site for traffic to pass by without stopping.

  Trout, the ’pusher of ghosts’, had lost his push. His case with its signature murders tied together by the Book of Exodus’ G’Tach, literally fell of its own weight because the one and only suspect in the case was dead…before his victims met their various ends.

  Ghost Pusher indeed! He went downhill fast, quickly wearing out his welcome at the Yard. And when his re‐assignment came up ‐ to shore patrol duty at Margate, where bootleggers were running freely ‐ he cleared out his desk and left. No exit interview was offered nor asked for, and there were few ‘goodbyes’.

/>   THE DIVA

  Sophie is almost human but she may not want to be! Sophie has a vision of being born. Where did that come from? What will she do with the rest of her life? There seemed to be memories inside her head. She didn’t know what memories were but they were there anyway. Not that any of this mattered because she was thrown in with a bunch of musicians. THE CLOCKWORK WIZARDS was scrolled across the drum in golden sable letters. No time for reflection so she sang. It came naturally because she was their chantoozie…their diva…their headliner.

  Sophie loved the spotlight. It felt so natural. Cold light on a hot stage warmed her shoulders and glowed up the rocks on her wrists. When she palmed the mike, the beads on her dress shook. She liked that, liked it even more when she squared off with the song ‐ just her and the mike and the song.

  There were thousands out there, out in the pitch‐black. She had them in the palm of her hand when she planted her feet and warbled, the beads all jittery along the hemline, little clicks that made her knees warm.

  But this was no concert and there were no crowds. She knew that when the lights came up she’d see that same tiny dance floor with that same crystal ball overhead spinning ever so slowly. And that elegant couple sipping champagne in the corner.

  The band tensed up every time the lights came on. Sophie thought she could smell sweat, pretty normal because maybe the music was good and maybe it wasn’t.

  Where was the applause? The audience didn’t show up tonight nor any other night, just that same elegant couple drinking champagne in the corner.

  Even when Sophie belted her pipes out, the only applause came from those two at the table. The onyx floor was very shiny over in their corner. After a few bars the man got up like he always did, bowed to the pretty lady sitting opposite and, pulling the champagne bottle out of the bucket, topped off their two tulip glasses. The champagne bucket was sweating.