Jek/Hyde

by Amy Ross

  “You hit Tom,” I say, remembering Puloma’s face when she told me. She wasn’t just upset, she was baffled. It was so out of character for the Jek we both knew.

  Jek looks down at his hands, clenching and unclenching them. “It was just one punch,” he says, his voice low and tight, “but I wanted so much more. I could have kept beating him all night.” He looks up at me. “I knew I was losing control. Hyde was changing me—making me want things, making me do things I would never have considered before. I had to get away before I did real damage. I transformed myself into Hyde and went to the city to hide out for a while. I thought it would help ease some of the pressure, but I’d kept him caged too long. When he came out, he came out roaring.”

  I look away, images flashing through my mind. That strange club. Hyde, alone in that room with me... My body is rocked by a horrified shudder at how things might have gone.

  “I don’t understand,” I say weakly. “Hyde had everything he wanted then. Why would he ever change back to you?”

  “He was running out of drugs and money,” Jek explains. “He’d been running up illegal debts, and the managers of The Glass Horse were threatening him. He knew his only way out of trouble was to disappear for a while. That’s why he promised you Jek would be back by the following night.”

  I close my eyes and try not to think about the next part, but it forces its way into my mind. “That night,” I say slowly. “Hyde never told you what I wanted, or what I’d asked for. You knew because you were there. You were him.”

  Jek drops his head a little, as if conceding the point. “When I turned back to myself,” he says, “I was furious that you had chosen him over me. But at the same time, I felt like...” He takes my hand in his and I open my eyes. “Like you were the only person who truly understood me. Us. It was amazing, given how hard I’d tried to hide everything from you. But somehow you seemed to get it. You promised over and over again that you wouldn’t judge me for my secrets, and I never believed I could trust you. But it was true. You weren’t afraid of Hyde or disgusted with him, any more than you were with me. You accepted us both. You wanted us both.”

  He drops my hand and sits down again, a pained expression on his face.

  “You have no idea,” he says, “how close I came to telling you everything that night. But something held me back. The look in your eyes... I didn’t want to lose that. I knew I would tell you eventually, but just for that one night, I wanted us to be Jek and Lulu, like old times, without the baggage of Hyde.”

  I cross the room and sit down across from him.

  “Then it happened again,” I fill in, understanding now. “You woke up in the middle of the night, in my bed, as Hyde.”

  He nods silently. I can’t help it: I put a hand over my mouth, feeling suddenly queasy at the thought of going to bed with one man and waking up with another in my arms. What would I have done if I had woken up like that?

  “When I couldn’t find my emergency vial, I ran off,” says Jek, continuing the story. “I went straight to the trailer and ransacked the whole place looking for another vial, but there was nothing. It was getting light, I couldn’t go back to my house. Tom had padlocked the side door, and my family wasn’t about to let Hyde in the front. I decided to bike out to the grain elevator to lie low for a while. I thought maybe I could wait out the day there and think of a way to sneak back into my lab after dark. On the way I ran into Danvers Carew.”

  “Don’t.” I stop him, holding up one hand. “I can’t. I already saw his body. I can’t listen to you describe what happened.”

  Jek nods slightly and hangs his head.

  “When it was over, I kept on to the grain elevator. I didn’t know what else to do. I was covered in blood, there was a witness... My only hope was to make Hyde disappear. I got the idea to text Lane pretending to be Jek. I asked him to break into my house, into the locked cabinet, and bring me another vial of the drug. I don’t know how crazy I must have sounded, but Lane...well, you know Lane. He’d do anything for a friend.”

  “But what about when he got there with the stuff? He must have seen you.”

  “I tried to avoid that. I hid in the shadows when he arrived, and texted him to just leave the drug on the floor and go—I was hoping he’d assume I wasn’t there yet. But he was suspicious. He started peering around the space inside the grain elevator, calling me to come out and talk to him. I kept silent and eventually he seemed to give up. He put the vial on the floor near the entrance and left.

  “By this time I was in such a panic to turn myself into Jek, I dashed forward and grabbed up the vial as soon as he was outside. But Lane hadn’t gone very far. He must have seen me from where he was, or heard me and come back. In any case, when he returned, he found me on my knees, a syringe already sunk into my skin.

  “He was shocked, of course. Kept asking me where Jek was, why I was using his phone. When I didn’t answer, he became more aggressive. He grabbed me, and I grappled with him, trying to get him off me by shoving him up against those rusty old pieces of machinery. In fact—” Jek pauses and looks away guiltily “—as Hyde, I had every intention of killing him. Now that he had seen me, it seemed like the only way to keep my secret.

  “Hyde is stronger than I am, but more important is how vicious he is. He never loses a physical fight, just because he is willing to be far more brutal than a normal person. He’s completely unrestrained by human morality or decency. Lane fought hard, but soon enough I started to get the better of him. I had him in a choke hold, when suddenly the strength went out of me. The drug was taking effect, and, well, you saw what it does to me. When the change comes, I feel like I’m being ripped apart. I was bent over with pain, and I had to let him go.

  “Lane was pretty confused when he saw me crumple to the ground like that. He actually asked if I was all right—me, a guy who had just been trying to kill him. All I could think was that he was going to see my transformation, and my secret would be out. My thoughts in that moment were strange, confused. A part of me was fixated on murdering him to protect my secret as long as possible. But another part felt a sense of relief, almost, at the idea of this double life finally being over. I tried to warn him about what he was about to see, told him to get away, but he was transfixed. The transformation had begun, and I could see on his face that he had no idea how to make sense of what was happening.

  “I had watched myself change dozens of times, seen all the effects in a mirror. But I had never seen myself through someone else’s eyes before. I watched the horror and revulsion dawn in his expression as he encountered something so far beyond his imagination.

  “Then it was over. I looked down at my hands and saw that I was Jek again. I took a step toward Lane, thinking I might somehow explain myself, but it was too late. Even in the body of his old friend, I was nothing but a monster to him. He was pale, drenched in sweat, and his jaw worked but what came out was meaningless babble. Again, I considered finishing him off, but it was clear that he was in no state to share my secret. To be on the safe side, I told him that if he ever told anyone what he’d seen, I’d kill him, just like I killed Carew.”

  “Jesus Christ, Jek,” I say, feeling sickened. “Lane is your best friend.”

  I can hardly imagine what Lane must have thought, must have felt after seeing the transformation. For me, at least I’d had my suspicions, so when I finally encountered the truth, it was almost a relief to know I wasn’t completely crazy. But Lane had no idea there was anything strange about Jek’s relationship with Hyde. He would have been completely unprepared. It’s no wonder to me that he freaked out.

  Jek doesn’t bother to defend himself. He just keeps on with his story.

  “For a few hours,” he says, “I thought I had everything under control. The cops bought my story, and Lane wasn’t talking. Then you came by with Hyde’s phone.”

  I nod to myself, seeing it
all too clearly now. “I was so confused when I hacked in and didn’t find a single message between you. But of course there weren’t any. You shared a body. Why would you need to text?”

  Jek closes his eyes and represses a shiver. Now that the shock of seeing his transformation has worn off, I realize how sickly he looks. His eyes are glassy, his skin gray and he’s growing shiny with sweat. It’s almost as if Hyde has been bleeding him of his vitality to boost his own.

  “You were so close to the truth,” he says quietly, as if it costs him some effort. “Only hours earlier I had promised myself I would tell you everything in the morning, but things were different now. Hyde was a wanted man. Even worse, you’d seen for yourself what he was capable of. Any sympathy you’d had for him was gone.”

  “You pushed me away with that story of drug addiction. You tried to fix it yourself by doing all those good deeds.”

  “It didn’t work,” says Jek dully. “No matter what I tried, the spontaneous transformations kept happening. Anytime I let my mind wander. I had to use more and more of the drug just to return to myself each time.”

  “Until you ran out,” I say, completing the story at last. “The only vial left was the one you’d lost in my room. Your last chance to return to your original body.”

  Jek looks at me with inflamed, bloodshot eyes. I stare back, my mind a whirl of emotions. I still can’t believe it. Every horrible thing he’s done, every lie he’s lived. But I also see the torment he has endured written so clearly on his face.

  “So what happens now?” I ask at last. “If you’re out of your supply, what will you do once this dose wears off and Hyde starts to take over again?”

  Jek takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, his eyes staring at nothing. When he looks up at me again, his gaze is steady and determined.

  “Hyde wanted that vial today because he thought disguising himself as me was his only chance to get out of this prison,” he explains. “He believed that, as Jek, I’d take the risk of leaving here, and then he could transform back to Hyde. He can’t imagine that not everyone is as afraid of self-destruction as he is.”

  I watch his face closely, trying to make sense of his words, but they won’t fit together right. “I don’t understand,” I say at last. “What are you saying?”

  Jek doesn’t look away. “Hyde is extremely volatile,” he says firmly. “His personality is governed by desire, anger and fear. He’s terrified of the police, and that fear keeps him in the shadows. But if his desire or anger ever become stronger than his fear, there’d be no stopping him. He’d kill anyone who stood in his way, without hesitation—my mom, my stepbrothers. You. I can’t let that happen.”

  I stare at him, willing his words to rearrange themselves and mean something different, but I can tell that he has been thinking this over for a long time.

  “You can’t mean it,” I say, shaking my head. “I won’t let you end your own life to stop him.”

  Jek closes his eyes. His face is tense and lined like someone much older, and for a moment, I can see the toll that living two lives has taken on him.

  “Lu, you don’t understand. The Jek you knew is as good as dead now—in a few minutes, I’ll turn back to Hyde, and you’ll never see me again. If I do this now, though—at least I can take the monster with me when I go.”

  “Jek, no,” I say, forcing my voice steady. “We can buy you some time, there has to be a way. If we can stabilize this, you could continue your research. We could talk to your mom, she could help. With the resources of London Chem, she could perform a genetic analysis. Maybe she could reverse engineer the chemical reaction and recreate the mutated strain from the other batch. Then we could get rid of Hyde for good, and you can go back to just being yourself.”

  Even though his time is slipping away, Jek doesn’t answer me right away. He looks down at me with a softness in his eyes, and touches a hand to my face.

  “Lu,” he says at last, “there’s something you have to understand. Me and Hyde...there’s no difference anymore. When I started this experiment, Hyde felt like a completely different person from me, doing things I would never have dreamed of, things that disgusted me. But the longer this has gone on, the more of him there is in me. His violence, his lusts...they’ve become mine, too. In fact, maybe I was kidding myself all along that we were so different. On some level, everything Hyde wanted, everything he did—those things all started inside of me. That’s why Hyde had to have you. He was only acknowledging the feelings I’d been too cowardly to admit.”

  I try to respond to this, but I can’t manage more than a strangled sob.

  “There’s something evil inside of me,” he continues. “Maybe the experiment created it, or maybe it was always there...but now that it’s been unleashed, there’s only one way to stop it forever.”

  “No,” I say, half choking. “No, Jek—”

  “I feel it coming on,” he says, moving away from me. “I don’t have much time left. I have to do it now, or I’ll have wasted this chance.”

  Jek stands up and crosses to the glass cabinet. Sweat is beading on his forehead, and his muscles are already straining with the effort of controlling the transformation. He opens the cabinet and pulls out a squat bottle with some kind of white crystalline powder inside.

  “What is that?” I say, though a part of me already knows. “What are you doing?”

  “Sodium cyanide,” he says. “I started keeping it around about a month ago, as a last-ditch solution to my problem.”

  I rush across the room toward him, but he slips away from me, putting the lab bench between us. “No,” I sob, reaching across for the bottle. “Stop, you don’t have to do this.”

  He holds the bottle out of my reach and uncaps it. “Please, Lu,” he says, “don’t make this worse. I’ve known this moment was coming for a while now. Ever since I realized I couldn’t control the transformations, I’ve had the idea in the back of my mind. Believe me, I’ve done nothing but try to think of an alternative for the past month. I tried everything I could think of to avoid this step, and my delay cost Carew his life. If I let Hyde take over again, who knows what evil he might do next?”

  I make another lunge for him, but he tips the substance down his throat before I can stop him. For a moment, he’s perfectly still, and I can only stare at him, frozen in horror. Then he reaches for the lab bench and leans heavily on it, his breathing fast and shallow. Before my eyes, his face pales even further, and I can almost convince myself that I’m watching him transform again, back into Hyde or maybe some other impossible creature. But I know that’s not the case when Jek lurches to the floor and begins scrabbling at his neck, his breathing choked and labored.

  I rush over to him and pull his head into my lap.

  “No,” I say, my voice shaking. “I can tell your mom everything right now. She can fix this. We’ll take you to the hospital, pump your stomach.”

  But Jek shakes his head, his eyes wild and pleading, his breath coming in great gasps. He grabs my hand and squeezes it painfully hard. “Please,” he chokes out, his voice thick and constricted. “Just stay with me.”

  And I do. I sit with him through it all, holding his hand and wiping sweat from his forehead and squeezing him tight through the convulsions.

  Once he is gone, I call Puloma and let her see the body. I let her believe the story she has already told herself: that Jek was depressed, had recently turned suicidal, that he’d already taken the cyanide before I came in, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

  She’s devastated, of course, but at least she has a story that makes sense. I know I’d never convince her of the truth, in all its insanity. If she had come in and found her son missing and a known murderer dead on his couch, the mystery of it would have been ten times worse.

  CHAPTER 23

  Jek was buried about six months ago in
the cemetery outside town. Since his death, Lane’s mental health has improved steadily, though he still can’t stand anyone to mention Jek near him. He has no interest in returning to London, but he’s been catching up with his schoolwork while living in the psych ward, and Hailee says he’s planning to go away to college next year.

  Puloma left Tom about a month after the funeral, and left her job at London Chem, too. She went back east to stay with her parents for a while, and I haven’t heard much from her since.

  Camila surprised everyone by joining the military after graduation. Some of the family were pretty upset, but I’m happy for her that she figured a way out of this town.

  The investigation into Danvers Carew’s murder remains open. Inspector Newcomen and the London police force have long since given up claiming any promising leads, but officially Hyde is still considered dangerous and at large.

  As for the rest of London... I want to say that it has changed since Jek died, but I don’t think it has much, for most people. For a while all anyone could talk about was Danny’s murder and Jek’s presumed suicide, and the mysterious drifter everyone agrees was responsible for both.

  It kills me that everyone in town thinks Jek’s death was a suicide, since as far as I’m concerned, it wasn’t that at all. What I witnessed was no act of desperation or despair, but a brave and noble sacrifice to serve a greater good. If nothing else, I wish I could grant Jek the honor of publicly recognizing that. But I’m the only one who knows the real story, and so it’s up to me to carry on his memory.

  Meanwhile, everything else has pretty much gone back to normal: the scientists at London Chem are still patenting new products and processes, and still ignoring the protesters picketing on their front lawn. The laborers who work every day with the London Chem products are still suffering from the strange sickness that no one wants to talk about. And the kegger circuit still rages while parents look the other way.

  It feels different for me, though. Like I’m different. For a while after the funeral I felt split in two, like Jek had infected me somehow with his strange condition. Part of me was locked in by mourning, only going through the motions of normal teenage life while immersed in the grief of losing my best friend. Meanwhile, another part observed and analyzed, endlessly replaying the past few months in my head, frantically searching the minutiae of my life for details that would help me make sense of what happened.