Jek/Hyde

by Amy Ross

  “You’re hooked on it, too, aren’t you? Is that what brought you back here? Your own supply went dry?”

  “Please,” he says in a more desperate tone. “Please, I need it.”

  “I don’t give a shit about you. For the last time, where is Jek? What have you done to him?”

  He reaches out again. “Give it to me and you’ll know soon enough.”

  “No. Tell me first.”

  Hyde makes another swipe for it, but I slip out of the way just in time. “Don’t test me,” I say. “I will smash this right now.”

  That threat seems to shake him. He lowers his hands, and the tension goes out of his body.

  “Lulu,” he pleads, his voice cracking. “You don’t know what you’re doing. That vial...it’s not just some drug. It’s my masterwork.”

  I drop my hand and stare at him. “What are you talking about?”

  He takes a long, shaky breath. “I tried to tell you before,” he continues, “but I knew you wouldn’t understand. It’s a world-changing discovery, more than any other drug I developed. But the trial is dead. The experiment can’t be repeated.”

  I shake my head, confused. “I don’t—”

  “That’s the last of it. The last of the original batch. There’s an ingredient that I’ll never be able to track down. I was using a genetically modified biopesticide from your cousin’s store, and the reaction produced something beyond all my theorizing. I thought...I thought I had discovered some revolutionary new process. But a couple of weeks ago, I started to run low. I went back to the store and bought more, but this new batch didn’t work. It was inert, totally useless. I ordered from every supplier I could find, but it was no good. Finally I went back to Manuel, demanding to know where the original batch had come from. But he told me...” Hyde stops and takes another slow breath. “He told me it was the first batch that had some mutation. And now it’s gone.”

  “No,” I say. “That wasn’t you. Jek spoke to Manuel.”

  Hyde keeps talking, his voice so low I can barely catch the words. “My supplies got lower and lower, until I had used the very last of it. That’s when I remembered the vial in my jacket. I left it in your room after the night we spent together.”

  “Stop it,” I insist, but a cool pulse of dread thuds inside me. “You’re lying—you were never at my house.”

  He takes a step toward me, slowly this time, not threatening but beseeching. He goes down on his knees and puts his hand out.

  “The vial,” he says. “Please. Give it to me, and you’ll understand everything.”

  I look into his black eyes and see the torment and desperation there. If I scream now, Hyde will have nothing to lose, and he might attack me. But it won’t take long for Puloma to arrive and to get help. It’s my best bet for saving myself, and ensuring the capture of a murderer. It’s the right choice. But my own curiosity is gnawing at me, too. There’s something real to what he’s saying—I feel it deep inside me. If either Hyde or I is killed in the next few minutes, I’ll never find out what it is, never get the answer to this mystery.

  I look down at him trembling before me, and I can’t help but feel a twinge of pity for this pathetic creature. Against my better judgment—almost against my own will—some force takes hold of me and I reach out to him. I open my fingers around the vial and press it into his hand.

  The relief in his eyes is instantaneous but only momentarily. In a whirl of movement, he twists toward the lab bench and fumbles around until his fingers find a hypodermic syringe. He pops off the protective cap and inserts the needle directly into the vial, emptying it of its strange green liquid. Then he yanks his T-shirt off over his head and throws himself down on the couch, tugging the waist of the pajamas down and feeling for the perfect spot just over his hip bone. He hesitates a moment with the needle poised and takes a few deep, fortifying breaths. Then he gives me one last, burning look before closing his eyes and pushing the needle under his skin.

  CHAPTER 22

  The bright green liquid disappears into firm flesh as Hyde applies steady pressure to the plunger. For a moment, he just lies there with his eyes closed, his chest heaving. Then a spasm flickers across his face. It’s followed by another one, much more severe, and he bites his lip against a cry. He is shuddering and panting, muscles twitching all through his lean torso. Then his body twists and he curls into a moaning ball in the corner of the couch. The muscles across his back bunch and release under a sheen of sweat. His fingers are knotted up in anguish, his hair plastered to his forehead. He grabs a worn cushion and bites into it, muffling a pathetic whimper.

  Another spasm overtakes him, and he rolls over, his back arching, his eyes squeezed shut. The trembling worsens until his whole body is quaking and writhing. He moans and runs his hands over his skin.

  It’s obvious he is no physical threat to me in his current state, but somehow I’m transfixed by his movements and I can’t break the trance long enough to go for help. Whatever my disgust with Hyde, I can’t feel anything but pity for him in this condition.

  With a choked-back cry, he seizes violently once more and finally I’m spurred into action—not to run away or call Puloma, but to throw myself across his body and pin his arms to his side to keep him from hurting himself. I half expect him to throw me off or turn on me in a snarling rage, but he only shifts restlessly, leaning into the pressure and making whining, fevered noises.

  Still leaning heavily on him, I raise one hand to stroke his face and smooth out the restless tension in his muscles. His damp skin has taken on a deep rosy flush. It starts on his chest and throat, then spreads up to his cheeks and down to his belly. I expect it to fade as his body relaxes into exhaustion, but the flush only gets worryingly darker and deeper, tinting the flesh of his torso, his face and then even his arms and hands. When he opens his eyes, the pupils are fully dilated, his lips are swollen from being bitten and chewed, and his hair is so damp with sweat that it looks a shade darker. More than a shade.

  I let go of him and move back. Something is happening to Hyde.

  He looks different. His hair is longer, the loose brown curls forming darker, more defined ringlets. And when I take a breath, Hyde’s bright, citrus blossom smell is fading, or rather shifting into the warm, homey smell of lightly burnt chemicals.

  “No,” I whisper to myself. “It’s impossible.”

  Hyde’s nose is broader and flatter now, and when he opens his eyes again, they are not black but amber brown. And familiar. Eyes I’ve known since childhood.

  “Lu,” he says, but it’s not Hyde’s throaty rasp. He reaches up a hand to touch my cheek. “You stayed.”

  I look down at him, my eyes searching his face for some explanation of what I’ve just seen.

  “I’m dreaming,” I say.

  He is utterly spent, his chest heaving but his tightened muscles beginning to relax.

  “Jek,” I breathe.

  He nods.

  “Who are you? What are you?”

  With some effort, he pushes himself into a more upright position. His breath has evened out now, and he’s looking at me intently through those familiar eyes. Everything about him, every feature of his face, every line and sinew of his body, I’ve had memorized for so long. But he feels like a stranger.

  “Tell me,” I say. “Tell me what the hell just happened.”

  “I can’t,” he says, his voice still a little rough. “I mean, I don’t completely understand it myself. What you said before, about drugs, about addiction...you weren’t far off. Except this isn’t an ordinary drug.”

  I stand up and grab on to the back of a chair, not trusting my knees for support. “You developed it,” I say. “This was your masterpiece? The one you were working on all summer.”

  Jek nods. “One drug to affect body and mind. Why not? They aren’t as separate as we
used to believe. Hormones govern every aspect of your body—your thoughts and emotions, your personality, but also your muscular development, your growth, your shape and size. It’s all biochemistry. Why treat them separately?”

  “But your skin,” I say. “Your hair, your eyes. Hyde doesn’t look a thing like you.”

  Jek smiles weakly. “I spent ages on research, developing theories to explain this effect. But it wasn’t until Manuel told me about the mutated pesticide that I realized there was a factor I hadn’t taken into account. If I had more time, more supplies, maybe I could eventually isolate the mutation, the catalyst behind this reaction. But I don’t have the resources.”

  “So it was you, then, all along?” I say, my voice trembling. “You who raped Natalie and paid her off. You who threw those orgy parties. You who beat Danny Carew to death with your bike lock.”

  “No,” he says fiercely, his eyes bright. “It wasn’t me, I swear. Hyde is...he’s more than a disguise. He’s someone else completely. Maybe at first, he felt like a part of me I’d always wanted to let loose, but I can’t accept that his actions are mine. I can’t think back on any of the things he did and see myself in them.”

  I shake my head. “I know what I just saw, but...none of this makes any sense.”

  “Then let me explain it,” Jek begs. “I don’t have much time, but you deserve that much.”

  I watch him closely, considering my options. I know I should go get Puloma, but something stops me. I’ve waited so long for the truth. I need to hear it now. I take a deep breath, then motion for him to go on.

  “Last summer,” he begins. “I was working on some new psychoactive drugs. I came across a paper by Wilhelm Von Hoyrich theorizing that certain chemicals might alter genetics ex post facto to produce a different gene expression. He proposed a mechanism by which a chemical could work through a strand of DNA, reversing the form of chiral molecules to their enantiomers. It was genius. The most exciting theory I’d seen in ages. My mom said the guy was a crank and that it would never work in lab conditions, but I wanted to test it out. I had to work with the materials I had available, and I ran into a lot of dead ends, but by fall I’d had a breakthrough with some compounds I isolated from London Chem’s new RNAi biopesticide.”

  “Jesus,” I breathe, sitting down heavily in the chair across from him.

  “I tested it on a few plants and the results were... I couldn’t believe it, Lu. I watched a monocot flower turn into a dicot before my eyes. It should have been impossible! No matter how many times I worked through the chemical equations, I couldn’t make sense of it. Nothing in my research suggested a mechanism for this change.”

  Across from me, Jek’s eyes are wide, and there’s something oddly familiar in his expression. He’s excited. I used to love that look—the raw enthusiasm Jek would radiate as an experiment started to bear fruit. Now it just scares me. As much pain and death as he has caused, Jek still can’t help being enthralled by the science.

  “You should have stopped there,” I tell him. “Jek, you had no idea what you were dealing with. You should have gotten help.”

  “But it was working,” he exclaims. He stands and starts pacing, just like the old days when he’d explain to me whatever brilliant new project he was working on. “Don’t you see? The science was...the science was there, I just couldn’t see it yet. And I knew I would, if I just looked harder. If I studied the process more closely.”

  “So you decided to try it on yourself?” I ask, horrified that Jek would take such a risk.

  “I had to see, Lulu! I was up against a brick wall—I needed more data. I didn’t want to go public with it until I understood it completely. Besides, the human genome is so much more complex than a plant’s. I didn’t really believe it would work.”

  “But it did.”

  “Better than I could have dreamed,” he says, his face lighting up at the memory. “That first time it hurt so much I thought I was dying. I’m pretty sure I passed out for a few minutes. But when I came to and looked in the bathroom mirror, there was a stranger looking back at me. This was more than a disguise—there wasn’t one feature in my face that I recognized.”

  I realize then that I’m staring at his face as he talks—at that familiar face—and I have to look away. I feel unmoored, dizzy with all the thoughts crowding my brain as my memories realign themselves with this new information.

  “The chemical compound was unstable,” Jek continues, “which produced a strange effect. It made Hyde’s features slightly indistinct—slippery, almost, as if they hadn’t quite fixed themselves in place.” I cover my mouth, remembering the uncanny feeling I got whenever I looked at him, and the difficulty everyone had describing him. “No one ever seemed to register it consciously, but it made it harder for people to remember his face. That suited my purposes just fine.”

  “Your purposes...” I whisper, half to myself. “You started going to the city, putting Hyde to work. You thought you could keep him away from your real life, here in London. But Chicago wasn’t far enough. Hyde ran into Hailee there, while he was dealing your drugs, and she recognized them. That’s why she told me you were in business together.”

  Jek isn’t pacing anymore. He stands there, watching me warily, the excitement of a few minutes ago sapped away.

  “You got braver, then,” I continue, my voice growing stronger. “You started going to parties here. You even told your mom about him. But Hyde got into trouble and you had to use your own money to cover it up.”

  Jek sits down abruptly and leans toward me, his eyes appealing. “What happened with Natalie Martinez...” Jek lets out a breath. “I woke up feeling sick over it. Worst of all was that he got away with it—I hated him for that. But Hyde never did anything like it again. Not out of altruism or anything, just because he’s terrified of the cops. Getting locked up in jail is the worst thing he can imagine.”

  I stand and walk toward a window. I can’t stand to look at Jek right now, while I’m trying to make the boy I thought I knew fit into this strange new story. All I can handle now is facts.

  “The trailer,” I say. “The new phone. You were trying to give him a separate identity, so the police wouldn’t trace him to you.”

  “Not just the police,” says Jek from behind me. “You. From the beginning, you had all these questions about Hyde and how I knew him. No one else really cared. I thought if I could keep him separate from my regular life—moving in different circles, living across town—you’d let it go. I even got him his own bank account.”

  “But I couldn’t let it go,” I murmur to myself, and I feel my lips curve into a bitter smile. How much trauma might I have spared myself if I had dropped it? If I had accepted Jek’s explanations and left him to his secrets. Would I be better off without this awful knowledge?

  I hear Jek’s voice again, closer this time.

  “I tried to warn you away from him. But the harder I tried, the more curious you got. And Hyde got curious about you. Of course he did—it’s his nature. Hyde helps himself to all the things I can’t even admit I want.”

  I turn around at last and face him.

  “And did you?” I let myself look into his eyes, still not knowing if I can trust what I see there. “Want me?”

  Jek looks at me seriously, his eyes shining.

  “Lulu,” he says, his voice cracking. “You have no idea. When Hyde started to pursue you, it drove me crazy. I made myself sick, worrying what he might do to you. What he was capable of.” He reaches out and I feel his tentative touch on my arm. I can’t help but flinch away. Jek swallows and sets his jaw. “I did the only thing I could, under the circumstances. The night we kissed, I got rid of him.”

  “For a while,” I say, my voice hard. “Then you brought him back.”

  Jek shakes his head. “It’s not that simple. Elements of the experiment were...unpredictab
le. There were variables beyond my control.”

  “Variables?” I repeat, amazed at his scientific remove.

  “Transforming into Hyde had always been painful,” he explains carefully, “but in the beginning, changing back to myself was easy. Then slowly, without my really noticing, it started to shift. It got easier and easier to slip into Hyde, until it was about the same going either way. Then it was the transformation back to myself that became difficult. A couple of times, it didn’t work at all and I needed to give myself a double dose of the drug. It should have worried me, but I didn’t want to think about what it meant.”

  Jek moves back to his chair and sits down. His hands are clasped in front of his mouth, his forehead creased with thought. When he speaks, his voice is heavy with the ugly memory.

  “One day I woke up in my bedroom and felt disoriented for some reason. It was as if the colors were off, and the light was coming from the wrong direction. I reached for my phone to check the time, and that’s when I saw it. My hands were Hyde’s.” He looks up at me, reading my face for understanding. “I had transformed into him while I was sleeping. Without the drug.”

  I can’t help my sharp inhale of breath at the thought. As furious as I am with him, a part of me can only imagine how terrifying it must have been to wake up like that.

  “I panicked, of course,” says Jek, running one shaking hand through his hair. “What if my mom called me, or one of the kids came looking for me? What would I do? I fixed myself a double dose of the drug and that got me back to normal. And I marked it in my lab notes as a fluke. After that, I started carrying a vial of the drug with me, as insurance, but I didn’t dwell on it. Instead, I focused on you and tried to put Hyde behind me. But he kept slipping back in.”

  Against my will, my mind takes me back through my memories of this time. Jek taking me on dates, holding my hand. Then that day at the butterfly pavilion, when he became so forceful I hardly recognized him. And that night...