Love Among the Particles

by Norman Lock

  “He butchered the poor girl on her wedding night,” Phelps reminds us, who need no reminding.

  “He out-Hyded Hyde himself!” says Roebling. “His savagery was worse even than the Ripper’s.”

  “We know everything but why,” I say, recalling that the murderer had offered no defense—was, by the time of his apprehension and trial, incapable of reason and coherent utterance, so entirely given over was his nature to the bestial.

  “I can hear him howling still inside his cage,” muses Roebling, eyes caught by the barbed light winking on the clock’s brass bezel.

  Drayton was each day conveyed to and from London’s Central Criminal Court in an iron cage, where I am told he raged continuously through the two weeks’ proceedings against him.

  “His motives are not entirely obscure,” the secretary is saying. “After his sentencing, I spent some hours sitting just the other side of his cage. He had been given morphine and was lucid. That is how I came to know his story.”

  “I can’t picture you in the cells,” I tell him, “or think what brought you there.”

  “I went as deputy for Lord M—,” the secretary replies, drawing me aside and speaking low. “He could not very well have gone himself, could he?”

  “But I do not see why he should have concerned himself at all in the matter!” I nearly shout in my impatience, despising this unnecessary mystery as I would a woman who insists on undressing in the dark.

  “We were hoping to discover the whereabouts of the notebook,” he says with an insinuation made more emphatic by a hand upon my sleeve. “Jekyll’s,” he adds in answer to my look of incomprehension. “Do you know?”

  “How should I?” I bristle.

  “I’ve heard that you’ve acquired some curiosities in the course of your research into people’s Gothic inclinations.” Abruptly, his manner relaxes. He turns to Phelps and Roebling. “Like anyone, we are all curious about evil. Are we not, gentlemen?”

  He unties a marbled portfolio and draws out a copy of The Illustrated Police Budget, whose headline shrieks in seventy-two-point Copperplate:FIEND SLAUGHTERS JEKYLL HEIR DURING WEDDING NIGHT:

  HEART TORN FROM BODY FOUND IN NEARBY MEWS

  With more reserve, an edition of Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper announces:

  FREDERICK DRAYTON TO HANG FOR UNSPEAKABLE ACTS

  “He wanted to make a spectacle of himself and profit by it,” the secretary concludes drily, like a magistrate at an inquest. “But he could not control his metamorphoses any more than Jekyll could.”

  “That bit about the cigar ash was a lie, then?” Roebling asks.

  Before the secretary can respond, Phelps says, “I heard that, the moment before he was dropped, he cursed Hyde.” As he speaks, he is impelled to touch with his finger the word unspeakable in the black headline.

  “What did poor Hyde have to do with it?” Roebling replies angrily. “He’s banged up for life in Broadmoor!”

  “He should be let out!” I cry, seized for a reason I cannot put into words by sympathy for Hyde in his winter—I, who am ordinarily indifferent to the miseries and ill use of others.

  The secretary’s voice is like the crack of ice in a river’s sudden thaw. “You must not think to let Hyde loose! You do not know what he is. Not even Lord M—guessed what Hyde …” He raises his hands, then lowers them, abjectly, like a naturalist who has been asked to classify something unclassifiable. He opens the rosewood box and lifts a third cylinder from its velvet bed, a cylinder sent to Lord M—“in confidence” by the superintendent of Broadmoor. The cylinder lodged in the machine, Hyde’s voice again leaps out into the room. While it apostrophized him, Frederick Drayton never heard this last recording. (What quality is in that voice to make the heart stand still, to fill its chambers with snow?) Now we all listen.

  Cylinder No. 3: 10 December 1900—4:30 in the Afternoon

  HYDE: You cannot know all that I have lost—what liberty has been mine in being Hyde! What ecstasy and release! To give way without thought or misgiving to the most amazing impulse! To be incapable of the slightest misgiving. To be incapable of any thought that would check the natural propensity to the exercise of power. Having neither ordinary scruples nor a self-censuring faculty, nor any fear of consequences—acknowledging only his insistent need and contemptuous of any moral imperative that might frustrate its immediate satisfaction. This was Hyde—his glory and achievement. You have yet to discover, Frederick, the perfection of such a state, how harmonious a condition, and how much in keeping with a sovereign nature! Hyde was not the beast they made him out to be—no, but a god, or an angel faithful to his own untrammeled self, with nothing to bind him to circumstances or the provisional universe. To have given way to everything that might afford him pleasure, to have yielded nothing of himself, to have been above all laws and sacred prohibitions—this was Hyde! I say you cannot, Frederick, know what it was like to assume his being. But you will. I know you, sir, and see how willingly you lean away from the common center toward a larger self. Your hunger for celebrity (which is the wish for power over other men, as it hopes to enthrall their imaginations to one’s own)—that is your nature and, as you must know, the instrument of others’ inevitable destruction. It is Hyde who sees Drayton removing Jekyll’s notebook from its lair and yielding precipitately to the seduction of a formula that will make him singular, extraordinary—which is to say, monstrous. Hyde sees Drayton now in Jekyll’s house, captivated by Jekyll’s niece, whom I did not mention (a lovely young woman by all reports)—now circling around her, now seducing her, and soon—in one form of Hyde—destroying her, as he must, as he must. Hyde sees Drayton becoming Hyde, perpetrating his crimes, perpetuating him—extending the line. And Hyde, now grown invisible, will sing—in his winter—his favorite air from Alexander’s Feast, on the occasion of Drayton’s marriage to Jekyll’s niece, followed by her quick obliteration:Revenge, revenge, Timotheus cries,

  See the furies arise,

  See the snakes that they rear,

  How they hiss in their hair,

  And the sparkles that flash from their eyes!

  I, Edward Hyde, swear to it!

  7.

  Late afternoon, the sun fallen already behind the trees. The pale winter light stops at the window of Hyde’s cell, unfettering shadows from beneath bed and table. The water in the washbowl, black. Hyde at the window, looking with curious intensity at the field beyond the stone walls, where, here and there, stalks stick up stiffly through the snow. The light going, he leans his forehead against an ice-cold pane and shuts his eyes on the world without.

  “Edward Hyde,” I say; and in spite of the pains I have taken to rehearse, my voice betrays unease.

  He turns; and I seem to hear in that supple movement a commotion that makes me think of the Minotaur, or perhaps of a machine, the single-minded music of its whirring gears.

  “Sir, I am at your service,” Hyde replies, suavely, as if the distance traveled from the depths of contemplation to the present moment were no further than the six steps that separate us. This distance between us he closes as he walks toward me. I offer him my hand; he does not take it.

  “I doubt you know me, Mr. Hyde. I am a writer, of tales. I wish to write of you—your duress: a serial for The London Magazine and, later, a novel. I’ve already begun it.” I ignore the silent probing gaze, the glint of teeth, the roaring in my ears issuing from a rapidly accelerating heart. Opening my portmanteau, I show him a manuscript. “It will be—I promise you—a sensation!”

  He continues to regard me in silence. Suddenly, although his manner seems benevolent, I am afraid. Do I not see a man, not unlike myself, standing on the gallows’ little stage? This is but a momentary impression, which Hyde’s smile and the assurance of Lord M—’s patronage conspire to dissipate. “You will want,” he says, “Jekyll’s formula …”

  “You know it, then?” Astonished, I nearly shout at him.

  Imperturbable, Hyde replies, “I know everything that Jekyll knew.”


  “And you will tell me all of it?”

  “It will be my pleasure,” says Hyde.

  “And the impurity of the mixture?”

  Hyde smiles again, leans close, whispering something into my ear.

  The Captain Is Sleeping

  1.

  The engineers have not been seen for days. I stand outside the engine room, their freshly laundered sheets folded in my arms, and listen to them weep. I wonder at their anguish, at its depths, and shudder at the sound they make on the other side of the iron door.

  “What is the matter?” I say through the door. I dare not shout. If I raise my voice so as to be heard, I am sure I will faint. My nerves have been tightly strung, like piano wire, ever since the ship began to act queerly. “What is the matter, men?” I try again, my lips close to the door, whispering into my cupped hands, having made of them a megaphone.

  As if in answer, their keening grows more plaintive—the burden of its grief heavier to bear. I turn away.

  “Oh, engineers, what is your sorrow?” I cry into the sheets, which smell pleasantly of soap and steam.

  Few know of the engineers’ sequestration or that of the captain, who shut himself away in his cabin three days ago. I reported both circumstances to the ship’s doctor, as I ought. The doctor, whose fastidious whiskers remind me of Dickens’s, was denied admission to the captain by the captain’s mother, who sits impassively in front of the cabin door “like a veritable Gorgon,” and knits.

  “The captain is asleep,” she says—that, and no more.

  The doctor, who studied in Heidelberg under a brilliant, if controversial, specialist in diseases of the mind, believes that the captain suffers from an acute nervous disorder, characterized by willed sleep and general suspension of animation.

  “But what of the engineers?” I asked after he advanced his theory. But he merely shrugged and snipped, with a tiny scissors, a rogue whisker, which was causing his nose to snuffle. “What of their weeping?” I asked.

  Snip.

  “Unremitting grief may be symptomatic of a disintegrating mind,” the doctor declared into the mirror, in which my own face, with its usual look of bewilderment, appeared. “However, I know of no instances in the literature where eight men simultaneously shared in the disintegration.”

  Snip.

  “Especially men in the Corps of Engineers.”

  Snip.

  The engineers are weeping, the captain is sleeping, and the ship seems to fidget in sympathy, or restlessness, or fear, out on the middle of the North Atlantic.

  I am the ship’s steward. There is little that passes belowdecks that escapes me. Is it any wonder I am afraid?

  2.

  Last night, after a genial performance by the Light Orchestra Society players, the doctor lowered a young woman into the engine room. Her name is Daphne, she dances in the chorus, and I love her madly. I had objected that the dumbwaiter was never intended as a conveyance, no matter how slight the passenger; that the condition of the rope was unknown; that the pulley creaked alarmingly; and that the good conduct of the engineers could not be relied upon in their present mood. The doctor could think of no other way to assess the situation.

  “The situation,” he said, “is becoming more dangerous with each passing day. If for no other reason than the safety of all aboard, we must risk it,” he said. “And then there is our mission.”

  Our ship, the Minos, was laying a transatlantic cable.

  “Our mission is of incalculable importance, Simon. We are embarked upon a great adventure.”

  I reminded him that, as ship’s steward, I had only a negligible role in the adventure: that I saw to the sheets, the pillowcases, tidied the cabins, and brought the members of the syndicate their whiskey and sodas.

  “And clean up after those who can’t hold their liquor in a beam sea.”

  The doctor reproached me for my lack of imagination. Infuriated, he would have struck me if McCutcheon, the cartoonist from one of the American papers, had not entered the infirmary.

  “I need something for my nerves,” said McCutcheon. “I’m feeling on edge. My nerves are …” He left his sentence in midair, punctuating it, as it were, with a tear that suddenly coursed down his cheek.

  The doctor and I looked at each other. His face registered the barest trace of alarm. From the involuntary displacement of my cheekbones, mine must have, too. The doctor poured some white powder into a paper, twisted it, and handed the “screw” to McCutcheon.

  “Thanks, Doc,” the cartoonist said with undisguised self-pity.

  “I begin to be afraid,” the doctor said anxiously as he went to find Daphne and offer her an expanded role in our history.

  Daphne agreed. The doctor commended her bravery and commitment to scientific progress, better understanding between nations, et cetera. She folded herself inside the dumbwaiter. I listened to it creak and bang during its slow descent.

  “A mere girl—scarcely more than a child!” said the doctor, wanting to shame me.

  I hated him and hoped one night he would be carried overboard. In the meantime, I’ll short-sheet him when I make up his berth, I promised myself. Tomorrow he will retire into a straitjacket—may he rot there!

  Daphne returned from the engine room, trembling.

  “What is happening down there?” the doctor cried. “Simon, get the gin.”

  I poured out a tumbler of the good Bombay, then helped Daphne into a chair. The cleats of the doctor’s shoes could be heard tapping on the galley floor, the hanging pots and ladles chiming companionably. We were alone in the galley—Daphne, the doctor, and I—the cook and his gang of kitchen roughs having gone to the casino to squander their week’s pay.

  The gin proved itself sovereign against hysteria. (In my experience, it is always so.) Having regained her composure, Daphne was now dabbing at her eyes with a napkin.

  “Tell us, girl, what it was that you saw!” the doctor demanded pitilessly, so that I hated him for Daphne’s sake.

  “It was a scene from hell,” she said without the least affectation.

  The doctor stopped his pacing and looked at her searchingly.

  “They are lying in their bunks, their faces in their pillows, crying, while all about them black particles of soot tumble in the hellish light. From time to time, a hiss of steam drowns their lamentations.”

  The doctor was silent a moment. I gently took the tumbler from Daphne’s hand, allowing mine to fall chastely onto her pert breast.

  I washed the tumbler in the sink, while the doctor posed a momentous question: “Then who—for Christ’s sake—is stoking the boilers?”

  “A dwarf, I think,” Daphne replied. “Naked, and black with coal dust, and incredibly hairy.”

  “A dwarf?” the doctor repeated wonderingly.

  “Unless it was a monkey,” she said.

  3.

  Later, I walked Dolores to her cabin. For reasons I cannot explain, we came out onto one of the ship’s upper decks. We stopped at the rail and yielded to the charm of happenstance. We are young, after all, and susceptible to the prodding of the invisible. We wondered first at the sky—carbon, ermine, black as any sky I have ever seen in my voyages—black as a tropic night is black in spite of its crowding stars. This is not a night one finds in the North Atlantic, I thought to myself, where purity of darkness yields to a sullen, secretive gloom. And the air—so suave and flowery as we leaned over the rail to watch the shining fish.

  “Poisson,” said Dolores, “is French for fish.”

  I asked her to repeat the word.

  “Fish.”

  “Tell me it in French!” I begged.

  “But why?”

  “In saying it, your lips look as if they were about to kiss,” I said.

  She smiled and looked at the moon, which was round and gold as a coin.

  “I don’t understand what is happening,” I said.

  She misunderstood my confusion, thinking I meant kisses. “Would you like to kiss
me?” she asked. “In this moonlight?”

  I forgot about the weather, which was wrong for this latitude, and the fish, which ought to have been swimming elsewhere, and kissed her. I am young, and questions of travel are better left to old men.

  The Light Orchestra Society players rhapsodized. I took Dolores in my arms and danced. The gay music, which I had assumed to originate in the ship’s ballroom, seemed to be coming from the ocean itself. Straining my eyes, I saw, in the distance, the white hulls of the lifeboats—each occupied by a section of the orchestra. But I was intoxicated by moonlight and the scent of Dolores’s hair and could have been mistaken.

  4.

  Waking this morning, I remember the night—the kissing and the ship’s apparent dislocation in space. I swing out of my hammock and land on the ice-cold floor. The room is freezing; the portlight, frosted over. A pale wintry light leaves what looks like frost upon the floor. I dress quickly, putting on a sweater and wool cap, before going to the infirmary.

  “Dr. Gordon, last night the ship was not where it was supposed to be,” I say. “The night reminded me of the Seychelles, or Zanzibar.”

  “As to that,” he says, “we have no idea where the ship is.”

  I cock my head as if listening to the shoaling of distant waves.

  “The sextant is missing. And the charts.”

  “What does the navigator say?” I ask.

  “He also is missing.”

  The doctor fastens a tourniquet around his arm and injects himself.

  “It is beyond my power to explain, beyond understanding, beyond anything I have yet to encounter in this world.”

  “I hoped it might be love,” I say.

  “What does love have to do with it?”