Everything felt precarious, as if the structure of our lives had been built up too high and was starting to sway. Yet Jekyll’s veins fizzed with zest the next morning as he drew on his velvet smoking jacket and jogged downstairs and crossed the courtyard. He wrenched open the surgery-block door, and again something exploded into frantic flapping in the glass cupola high overhead. The silver tray with decanters of water and wine sat upon its step, halfway up the stairwell. Jekyll lifted the tray and carried it up to the cabinet, set it down on the table, and locked it inside.
The newspaper was still warm from Poole’s ironing when Jekyll sat down for breakfast. As Poole poured his tea, Jekyll frowned, bending close to read some small print, then flipped the page. I say, Poole, I’ve been thinking about getting some of the old gang together for supper, the way we used to. This Friday, perhaps. Would you feel up to it? Jekyll lifted his teacup and glanced into Poole’s eyes with a hint of challenge. I’m confident we could manage it, sir. Good. Then it’s settled.
Jekyll wrote out the invitations himself that afternoon. Utterson, Lanyon, three other names I dimly knew. I was awestruck by his attitude. Poole and Utterson were conspiring, and he was going to throw a party? Yet the five invitations appeared, one by one, conjured out of Father’s fountain pen. Afterward Jekyll reclined in his chair, holding a card Carew had sent several days before. Requesting the pleasure of another reception, read its sinuous line, any night of your convenience. Jekyll wagged the card by its corner.
I didn’t think Jekyll should be seeing anyone just now. We had been careless. We needed to be scaling back, securing everything before moving on—certainly not inviting the inquisitive likes of Carew into the house yet again. Jekyll could feel me twisting as he gazed out the window, tapping his knee with one finger. That tic of a smile was tugging at the edge of his lips.
Responses to his invitations all flew back the next afternoon. Five yeas to dinner Friday night. Carew simply wrote, Wednesday evening it is.
This time he requested a tour. You know, Carew said in the main hall, my grandfather visited this house once, a hundred years ago. He was an amateur naturalist, this young unknown Irishman. He just knocked on the door and John Hunter answered it, the great surgeon himself. My grandfather loved to talk about the giraffe in the main hall—do you know where it stood?
Jekyll led him through the ground floor, indicating all the details he had preserved from the olden days. At the dining room, Carew paused and said, And through here? The conservatory. After a moment Jekyll lifted his hand and said, Please, after you. Carew went down the two steps, and Jekyll stood in the doorway above him. In the unlit room we could see through the glass into the misty courtyard, the limestone block hulking in the northeast corner. Oh, how splendid, Carew said, the old surgical theatre. Except if I’m not mistaken there was a glass arcade connecting it to the main house, an exhibition wing? The former owner tore it down. The whole block is on the verge of collapse, in fact; I’ve been trying to rescue it. I would show you, but it’s havoc in there, with the construction. Jekyll touched the switch and the gaslight rose, and the glass wall turned into amber mirror. Ah, Carew said, how disappointing. Have any of Hunter’s preparations survived? A few. Though the majority were carted off after he died. Debts and so forth. A pity, Carew said, gazing down the length of the greenhouse room. He nodded at the wicker chairs and hanging plants at the far end. Do you mind if we sit a moment? I rather like it here.
They arranged themselves in the creaky wicker chairs. Jekyll brushed something from his knee and said, I dropped by the library and was pleased to find several issues of your psychical society’s journal. I was particularly intrigued by the case of the Gorley sisters. Yes, of course, Carew said, Agatha and Maggie. Did you have the opportunity to examine them yourself? I did, in fact, though unofficially, for it was after our report had been published. Which was unfortunate, I suppose, as my visit yielded a rather curious result. Jekyll lifted his eyebrows. You see, Carew began, the report in the journal focused primarily on the sisters’ transmission of visual images from one room to another. Maggie was the artist; she would sit in the drawing room while Agatha in the parlour would be instructed to communicate an image with her mind, which Maggie would sketch. There were some striking instances of accuracy, as you read. The omnibus prompt, for instance, resulted in a fairly indisputable rendering of an omnibus in Maggie’s sketchbook. But I wanted to increase the distance between the sisters. I wondered if their telepathic ability, if that’s indeed what it was, had a range. And I also wanted to see if the immediate atmosphere, the house itself, was somehow a facilitating factor. The sisters had grown up in the house; it was intimately familiar to them. So I prepared a number of experiments that involved removing Agatha from the house. I took her into the garden, then for a stroll around the block, and finally for a cab ride, and this is where I had my curious result. As we rode along I read a poem to her, the same poem, several times. Browning, “My Last Duchess.” Meanwhile, back at the house, Maggie was with my assistant. I’d told her not to draw but to speak aloud whatever came to her mind while I was out with her sister. My assistant would write it down. When I returned, I read the transcript. There was nothing seemingly related to the poem in what she’d said. Much of it was random imagery, things you might plausibly see on the street. I looked up and saw Maggie watching me. And then this confused look came over her, and she said, Curtain? Like a question, softly. Curtain?
Carew paused, relishing the moment. Have you read the poem “My Last Duchess”? he asked. It’s a monologue, an Italian duke is showing us a portrait of his late wife, up on the wall. And he keeps the portrait behind a curtain. No one is allowed to draw it back except he. Curtain.
Jekyll watched him, waiting. Carew smiled. Very curious, is it not? I puzzle over it still. I spent two additional days with the sisters, and no other result approached it. But for that singular instant, I tell you, it seemed as though the idea itself had leapt across the air, from one mind to another. He paused. You find the incident suspicious. Every such incident is suspicious, Jekyll said. So Maggie Gorley duped me? She somehow discovered what poem I’d read to her sister? Is that what you believe? I suppose I just believe it’s in our nature to deceive and to be taken in by deception when we desire to believe. I’ve seen too often the amazing lengths people will go to to deceive their believers. I’ve seen it too, Carew said. I’ve exposed more frauds than anyone, I assure you. But I won’t say that what the frauds pretend to conjure is false. I won’t dismiss the principle, you see, in the face of false evidence. Evidence of what? What are you trying to believe?
Carew sat back in his chair and looked off across the room. You speak of human nature. I think of it often too. I think of the human animal. This hairless primate, walking around on two feet and wearing its elaborate costume as it goes about the business of survival. We deceive each other, oh yes. Cheat, torture, kill each other, deliberately, occasionally with pleasure. Other animals live in fear and awe of us. What makes us so special? The mind. The grotesque power of the human mind. Carew turned to look at Jekyll, his eyes bright as glass. It is a ruinous mutation, this excessive intelligence. It has fooled us into imagining that we are above nature, that nature is subservient to our demands. And this arrogance will destroy us, unquestionably, unless we can learn its purpose. You see, perhaps the human mind is something more than simply the workings of a brain, of overadapted muscle matter. Perhaps it is part of something else, some larger, universal consciousness to which we are all connected. We are all one fluid mind, and have only to realise it . . . I suppose I am trying to believe in that.
The individual mind as part of an interconnected network. It’s an appealing idea. Do you imagine we shall come to this realisation collectively, as a species? It would take time, Carew said. A great deal of time. I’m not speaking of my lifetime, or any lifetime. But I can still make my contribution. If there is one person out there who can indisputably tap into this network, as you say, this flow of t
houghts and experiences, then I would like to find that person. It would be a start, would it not? Jekyll shrugged. Toward what end? Another way of living, surviving? We live the way we live. We don’t change? We don’t progress? We progress, certainly. But do we change? The way we talk, the way we dress, the way we move about, yes. But does the nature of us change? Can it?
Carew shook his head. I confess, I’m surprised. From you of all people, Doctor, such cynical certainty. We are what we are. Evolution stops with us, is that it? Jekyll didn’t reply for a long, careful moment. I can say only what I said to you last time we spoke. The notion of the mind being something more, having mobility, permanence, beyond the brain matter. It’s unnecessary to my work. The mind’s function is complex enough on its own, and these additional theories—they are simply redundant. Redundant, Carew repeated. It’s redundant to even consider the possibility that people afflicted with, say, a dissociative disorder may be acting and speaking under the influence of minds beyond their own? How do you dismiss such a consideration? How did you dismiss it in the case of Mr. Verlaine, one man with three distinct personalities, all apparently inhabiting his head? I want to understand this. Truly, I do.
Jekyll exhaled a steadying breath. He had known it was coming back around to this, of course; even I had been waiting for it. He regarded the sideboard against the wall, the cut-glass decanter of sherry. Then he stood and went over to it. He poured the pale red sherry into two tiny glasses, carried them back, and gave one to Carew. One hand in his pocket and the other holding his glass, Jekyll stood next to the wicker chair pretending to admire the dangling vines and spade-shaped leaves of the hanging plant. I don’t believe that evolution stops with us. Out in the world, humans are evolving as we speak. What does it require for a thing to evolve? Unique, often harsh conditions, and the urgency to survive. Physiological mutation can take generations to develop. But a psychological mutation, an evolution of the mind. That can happen over the course of a childhood. While the mind is still shaping itself, still adapting.
Jekyll looked down into his glass, its ruby facets. He lifted it and let the vinegary sherry run to his lips. Then he drew the dram into his mouth, and swallowed. I had never seen him do this. The burn of alcohol rose to his eyes. Carew below murmured, Your health. Jekyll took Carew’s empty glass and returned to the sideboard. Emile’s mother, he said, lifting the glass stopper, died when he was ten years old. For the ten years following her death, Emile lived with his father without disturbance. The lapses into the child personality I would come to know as Pierre did not begin until he was twenty. That is, not until Monsieur Verlaine remarried and his new wife moved into the house. Jekyll handed one of the sherries to Carew, then lowered himself into the creaky chair. The mind works sometimes in life as it does in a dream. It makes substitutions, places emotion and meaning upon a substitute object. Monsieur Verlaine’s second wife was young and attractive, but otherwise different from his first wife, Emile’s mother. Yet in Emile’s mind, as it happens in a dream, here was his mother again, resurrected, or reincarnated, if you like. And there was a violent reaction. Parts of his mind, regions of memory Emile had locked away, burst open. For almost ten years Emile had trained himself to live in the front of his mind, the part that amassed new experience, absorbed itself with art, society. He had managed to lock away everything he didn’t want to remember, about his mother, his childhood. But suddenly, it was as though his mother had returned to live in the house again. And the memories returned as well.
Jekyll’s face was already warm with the wine. He turned his fresh glass by the stem. Emile’s mother, Carew said. She traumatised him, you are saying. Jekyll nodded. That’s a good word. Traumatised. Carew waited. What did she do, exactly?
Much of it seemed to be sexual in nature. She had sewn a sort of chastity belt–like contraption that she made him wear under his clothes, very tight and painful. She would wash him in the bath and hold his head under the water, insert soapy fingers into his rectum to clean him there. The boy’s father, Monsieur Verlaine, remained oblivious to what was happening, from what I could determine. The mother held the boy in fear of some horrifying threat, and the boy never spoke of it to his father. Instead, he developed alternative means of defending himself. Pierre, as the personality would come to call itself, was one of those adaptations.
What was his function? Carew asked. Jekyll turned the crystal stem between his fingers, the liquid winking. A thirst at the root of his tongue, a heady recklessness. His function was to bear the pain. The discomfort, the humiliation, to bear it when it became unbearable. He was a whipping boy. He took the punishment for the prince. Emile forced him to the front of the experience, as a buffer. And then he locked him away, for almost a decade. Until their mother returned, so it seemed. When Pierre returned too.
And the other, Carew said. He returned as well, did he not? L’inconnu. That is what you called him?
I didn’t call him that. That was the hospital board’s silly invention, and the papers picked it up. L’inconnu. No, I—I didn’t really have a name for him. He never gave himself one, nor did Emile. But he was created. The same way as Pierre. As an adaptation. Yes and no. I think he developed over the years. Accumulated. Like a dark pearl. Or a tumour. Pierre was different; he had been trapped in stasis as a child. But the other had matured in the back of Emile’s mind. Waiting, it seemed to me in retrospect, for the perfect moment to emerge.
He wanted an audience. To announce himself. The board gave him an opportunity. They wanted to interview Emile. From the beginning I’d made it clear that I alone would treat Emile, but now the board was insisting upon an interview. So I took two of the doctors, Queneau and Petit, to meet with Emile in his room. They questioned him about his comfort, his perceived progress. Then they began to ask about Pierre, and I could see something shift in Emile’s manner. He became fidgety, bouncing his knees, scratching his arms. His facial muscles were behaving oddly. I could see Queneau and Petit exchanging glances. At last they nodded and stood up, and Petit put out his hand for Emile to shake. That’s what he was waiting for. I watched Emile take his hand, and a convulsion ran through him, like he was going to sick up. Then Emile was biting into the back of Petit’s hand. Tearing at it, shaking his head, growling. Petit was shrieking, Queneau hollering bloody murder. I stepped up and smacked Emile on the back of the head. He looked up at once. It wasn’t Emile anymore, and it wasn’t Pierre. There was blood all over his mouth, his teeth. He was grinning. His eyes had changed, the colour, the pupils had constricted to black points. He said, Doctor. In English, in this rasping whisper, Doctor. Then the door banged open and the orderlies rushed in, and I watched this creature go scampering around the room like an ape, making them chase him, hooting and laughing as he crashed about. Somehow he got out the door; they cornered him down the hall. Got him in a straitjacket and hauled him up to the fourth floor. High security. The violent and deranged. They had him in a padded room, still in the jacket, hours later when they finally let me up to see him.
The board blamed you for the attack, of course? They held me responsible. And I was responsible; he was my patient. But Queneau and Petit were acting as if I’d led them into an ambush. I had to put the matter in perspective for them. A third distinct personality. The case had just expanded by another dimension. No other hospital in France was treating such a case. Prestige, publicity—I had to frame it in such terms. And Petit’s hand was not deeply injured. It was a provocation, not a true attack. The personality wanted our attention; we couldn’t simply lock him up on high security. At last they let me up to see him. By then, of course, there was just Emile, confused and frightened. He had no awareness of what had happened? He claimed to have none. It was a blank. Suddenly he was in a padded cell, just like that. I had to leave him there overnight. Early in the morning, however, an orderly came down to fetch me. He was asking for me. Not Emile. The other.
He was hunkered down in the corner of the cell when I came in. He seemed smaller, skinnier than
Emile. Like an animal kept in a cage. Hungry, calculating, watching me. I had brought a needle, a sedative, in case. But he stayed there in the corner. He wanted to talk. He knew who I was, who Emile was. He knew about Pierre, he knew why they were in the hospital. He knew I wanted to study him. And he was willing to cooperate. But he wanted things in exchange. Off the fourth floor, for starters, back in Emile’s room. Later it was other things. When I was able to oblige him, he would tell me about Emile’s mother, about what she had done to them. He had the clearest recollection, I soon learned, this unknown other. He had stored the memories, all those years, away from Emile’s conscious mind. All that horror, all that rage and disgust for the father, so willfully oblivious. It had to go somewhere. So rage turns inward. If it can’t be inflicted on others, it afflicts the self. A malignancy. Pierre was created as a whipping boy, but this other held the lash, and Emile was caught helpless in between.
Mortification of the flesh, Carew mused. A kind of self-flagellation. So you are saying that L’inconnu’s function was—for Emile to punish himself?
Jekyll was staring into the jewel of wine in his glass, wide-eyed, mesmerised. Punish himself, he repeated softly.
For what? Carew asked.
Jekyll ran his tongue along his lower lip. His mouth felt very dry. He carefully set his full glass on the wicker table. For pretending, perhaps. All that time. Pretending to be a normal person. I don’t know. A trace of impatience had entered his voice. He touched his temple, where a thumping had begun. You’ll forgive me. It’s been a long day.
Carew was silent, gazing at the dark reflective bank of glass, the invisible courtyard beyond. Of course, he said. It’s late. You’ve been most accommodating. Thank you.
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