Hyde

by Daniel Levine

  A large bed took up all the space in the box of a room. Yellowed, rumpled sheets; an oniony stink on the air. A greasy undergarment was slung over the bedrail, and from the missing drawer of the bureau, a shirtsleeve lolled like a pale tongue. I crossed the front room to the other door, twisted the knob, and let it swing inward. A low double bed, a bookshelf, a school desk with a crippled leg. I approached the neatly made bed. An impression upon the pillow and coverpane; I bent and sniffed and caught a faded trace of them, that warm bready odour, overlaid by Da’s gamy scent. A doll was slumped against the wall, forlorn, and I tentatively picked it up. A strange fabric thing, floppy, with rough, loose stuffing. It must have had hair and a face once, but now the head was bare except for a few nubs of yarn along the scalp, the face blank but for a single brown-button eye. It gazed up at me, lopsided and somehow hopeful, and it occurred to me rather oddly that the orphaned thing was naked and that between its legs ran a small seam. I brought it to my face, pressed my nose to its navel, and saw Jeannie standing in my bedroom again with a hand on her belly, looking down. I made a stifled, moaning sound into the fabric. I lowered the doll and thrust it back onto the bed. Then I turned and hurried over grainy boards of the front room to the door, hanging open on its hinges. I pulled it shut behind me and found Jeannie’s da on the landing.

  He looked ill, stubbled and sallow. He had shaved off his moustache; for a second I hardly recognised him. His head quivered as he gaped at me, clutching a paper sack to his chest. L-listen, he stammered, they’re not—they haven’t . . . I thought . . . His grizzled chin trembled, and his eyes filled. They’re not with you, then? I had to look away. No. I pitched past him down the stairs as he cried brokenly after me, Then where? Then where? I blundered out into the blinding day.

  In the drawing room at Ghyll, sunlight fell through the front window, dancing with dust motes. The flower basked on its table. I turned the pot to make it look up at me; its rich brown face was lifted and slightly cocked, questioning. My thumb and forefinger plucked a petal from its golden crown. The petal fluttered down when I let it go, and I took the flower’s whole head in my hand. I felt its neck pop and split and its face crumble like earth. I pulverised it between my fingers, then yanked it loose from the pot by its stalk with a shower of sod, dropped it to the carpet, and ground the veiny roots under the toe of my boot. I lifted my foot and stomped down on the mash, again, again, finally smearing it under my heel. A sob hitched from my throat; crouching, I scooped up the remains. Cupping the mangled stalk and broken petals and sod, I hurried outside and dumped it all into the dead stone fountain atop some dried brittle leaves. My palms were stained yellow, brown in the cracks and under my fingernails. Whimpering, I scrubbed my hands on my trousers, averting my gaze from the stone angel posed atop the fountain, its decaying face and open mouth. A shadow was casting over the yard, and I stared up at the sky as a cloud eclipsed the sun, turning black at heart and blazing at its silvered edges. I cringed, expecting some kind of celestial rebuke: a torrent of rain, spike of lightning. I almost yearned for it, a swift punishment. I let my eyes close. Get it over with! Then sunshine flooded the yard.

  By the next day I felt rather better. A convalescent relief, as if I had purged myself after a horrible binge. I had done the right thing, sending the girls away from me. Maybe they would even return home. After all, Jeannie’s story had been a lie. Their da had not tried to sell them into slavery. I had looked into his eyes. Jeannie had simply run away, as she would have run from me if I hadn’t chased her off first.

  But her imprint upon the house was hard to erase. I stripped off my black satin bedclothes and carried them to a laundry, but the squashy feather pillow she’d liked to use had to be hurled off the verandah—it would not give up her scent. In the kitchen, scrounging for a loaf of bread I’d bought that had apparently vanished, I came across a teacup Jeannie had dinged with her plate one morning at breakfast, producing a chip in the rim, a pointy flaw that I now fingered bitterly. Yet quickly I put it back on the draining board, almost blushing, for I felt myself being watched by some sardonic spy suppressing a snicker. I turned and, indeed, there was Mrs. Deaker in the doorway, head tilted, gazing at me as if I were a huge scavenging rodent. Her silver hair was pinned up, her eyes clear and cold. Master is—hungry? she said, mockingly servile. Try the second drawer from the bottom. Go on, she encouraged when I hesitated. I eased the drawer open and regarded the shriveled turd inside. An apple, brown and soft. She chuckled, but when I looked up again, the doorway was empty.

  She seemed to be daring me to give her the sack. She had stopped cooking my breakfast and no longer cleaned or did chores from what I could tell. She just lived in my house, wandering the rooms like the ghost of someone I’d accidentally killed. Yet I refused to give her the satisfaction, to validate this pose as the poor old victim by evicting her—even though I was beginning to suspect the old witch of gossip, of spreading rumours about me. For I could swear that the locals were looking at me oddly, observing me askance on the street. When I’d first moved into Ghyll, months before, I had received some attention, speculative assessment. There he goes, I’d imagined them murmuring to each other, took that old house on Ghyll Road, the whole lot. But now the local gazes felt different, less curious, edged with menace. It was not overt; I didn’t often catch anyone actually glaring at me. The sliding eyes of a woman with a baby on her hip, the way that pair of charwomen in kerchiefs both shifted their heads away from my glance at the very same moment. Little things in which I could detect an unmistakably hostile glint. And there persisted still that sense of something or someone spying on me while repressing a snort of laughter.

  I stopped before a pawnshop window one day, my attention snagged by a set of painted wooden dolls. They had been designed to nest one inside the other, all fitting within the largest oblong doll, but in the window they were arrayed in a line, ten or so, all wearing kerchiefs like Russian peasants, arranged from the largest to the smallest, which was the size of a bullet. The display unsettled me. This one dummy with so many replicas stored inside. I thought of Emile Verlaine. That third, unknown entity, L’inconnu. Jekyll said Emile had no awareness of the others. But could he sense their autonomous desires? Was three the limit or could the multiplicity go on and on, like these dolls with their cryptic, replicated smiles?

  I glanced uneasily over my shoulder. Strange. The light had changed. The shadows had grown. A chestnut vendor who had been stationed on the far corner was gone. How long had I been standing here?

  I had noticed this effect before. As if the clock had skipped ahead with a soundless click. Those lapses I had experienced, when I had jumped from one present moment to another with no sense of how I had arrived. I had assumed that Jekyll was the cause of such lapses, that he was reaching into the body, directing its animation. Except this time I had not moved from the pawnshop window. It was like instantaneous transportation into the future with a blankness in between. As if Jekyll had taken control of the body and gone for a stroll and then returned to the exact same place and posture I had occupied before.

  As I stood there frowning at the street, the door of the neighbouring shop opened and a corpulent man with fiery red hair waddled out. I glanced at him; our eyes met, and I recognised him. The agent from the leasing office who had found Ghyll for me. He looked at me once and then quickly again and broke into an awkward smile, nodding at me. Before he could move on, I leant over and extended my hand. This gesture I’d seen men perform every day, this emblem of civilisation, I had made only once, with this very man, after I’d signed the contract. Naked and white and raw at the knuckles, my hand hovered between us. The fat man stared at it for a slowed-down second, so drawn out that I could observe the glisten of copper splinters on his flabby cheek, a droplet of sweat standing from his wispy orange muttonchop. Then his eyes jerked up and he let out a queasy, twittering laugh and cried, Ah, yes, Mr. Hyde! Very good!

  My hand faltered. The man nodded again, jowls wobbling, showing me
his small, childlike teeth as he backed away. Then he turned and hastened down the lane.

  My name had rolled off his tongue so readily. It had been months since I’d seen him last. Was it just his special talent, remembering names? Or did he have some reason to remember mine? And why would he not take my hand? By the time I veered into Ghyll’s courtyard it was nearing dusk, and the drawing-room window mirrored the violet streak of sky. Yet behind the stained glass a figure seemed to be standing, motionless, gazing out. I lifted my hand. The shape did not respond.

  The air in the entrance hall felt electrically charged. I crossed to the drawing room and peered round the door frame. No one stood at the windows. I stepped in and looked at the wingback against the wall where Mrs. Deaker liked to sit and surprise me, but the chair was empty. My eye moved again to the window, then fell to the round table beneath it, where the flowerpot had sat. Something lay upon it now, a ring of silver, a whiteness. A tarnished silver plate with a white envelope on it. And scratched in a cramped, spiky line of ink across its face was my name:

  Mr. Hyde

  Never in my months of residence here had I received a single letter. I reached for the envelope, hesitated, then snatched it up. With my thumb I tore open its seam and drew out a square inch of crudely folded paper. It was folded five or six times; I almost ripped it in my impatient fumbling before finally turning the page right-side up:

  you be hide and I play seek

  tho I know where you’ve hid, you see,

  so I play hide and you play hide

  and see who’s found out first!

  I read it again. But it made no more sense the second time. Was this a threat? A warning? The writing itself, awkward chicken scratch, looked bizarrely familiar. Could it be—? Could it be from Jeannie? For a pathetic second, hope surged in my breast. Then it fled, leaving me flustered, and with a stifled chortling in my ears. I narrowed my eyes and whirled around and found Mrs. Deaker in the doorway, watching me. I lifted the paper, resisting the urge to clear my throat. When did this come? Mrs. Deaker shrugged. Perhaps an hour ago. Slipped into the letterbox. The letterbox? I repeated dumbly. Indeed, the old lady said. It is a letter, is it not, Master? I pray it isn’t bad news.

  She gave me a wintry smile and withdrew from the doorway. I gaped after her. Could she have written it? I examined the queer poem again, the cheap foolscap crackling in my hands. You be hide and I play seek. Hide and seek. Of course. Of course it was her! Who else could it be? Was it a coincidence the letter had been left where her precious flowerpot once sat?

  I crossed the room and went into the entrance hall, refolding the paper and thrusting it into my pocket. At the front door I hunkered down, pushed my hand through the letterbox, lifting the brass trap, and peered through the slot at the portico and the purpling courtyard and the black iron spears of the fence and beyond that the cobbled road. I had never liked this letterbox. I had been leery of it back when I was inspecting the house for security. It was a peephole, a chink in my fortress. Should I nail it shut? I withdrew my hand. The trap dropped with a clack, and I squatted there in the dark, certain the old witch must be watching me, gloating in the depths of the corridor. I rose and opened the front door, as if simply checking the weather, and stepped out onto the portico. I did not want to be in this house. I wanted to be elsewhere, anywhere but here. And with a sudden pang of amazement I remembered the Castle Street door.

  The cabinet! How long had we been away? Weeks, it seemed. I had almost forgotten about it, as a dreamer forgets his bed, and his body slumbering in it. The prospect now opened before me like an avenue of retreat. I cast a glance back into the entrance hall, the coagulating shadows. Then I drew the door shut behind me.

  Ten minutes later I stood below the Castle Street door, panting from my hasty pace. A lamp shed its light across the pitted face of the surgery block and the cement stoop, which, I saw now, was spattered with crusted bird droppings. The door too had suffered in my absence. People had been carving into the wood, as lovers inscribe their initials—except these marks were strange, indecipherable hieroglyphs. There was one that resembled an open eye inside a triangle, slashed vertically through. By the knob, little bits of paint were chipped away, stab marks. Welcome home. Key in hand, I climbed the steps, droppings crunching like chalk underfoot.

  Jekyll exited the Castle Street door, carrying a battered leather travelling satchel he had removed from the wardrobe after dressing himself. He picked his way down the soiled steps and walked south on Castle to the corner, where he turned toward Leicester Square. His keys clanked in his pocket, but when he reached Big House, he rang the doorbell, and Poole ushered him in. How excellent to see you again, sir. I trust you had a pleasant holiday?

  Jekyll strolled past him into the main hall. Pleasant? You might say it was pleasant, yes. Good for you, sir. You are looking very well.

  This was a lie. His clean-shaven face was ashen, bruised under the eyes. His clothes smelt faintly of mould, which didn’t mask the body’s sour, garlicky odour. Thank you. All the same, I think I’ll have a bath.

  At breakfast the following morning I stared through him in shock at the date on the freshly ironed paper. It was 1 April 1885. We had been away nearly a month. Upstairs, we found a collection of letters and calling cards arranged on the desk in order of their arrival. Jekyll stood over the green leather blotter, two fingers at the desk edge, scanning the array, while I braced myself, almost expecting to see the crabbed, spiky handwriting leap out. But there was nothing of interest. Except for the last calling card. Danvers X. Carew, MP. Jekyll tapped it twice, then withdrew from his pocket the square of crudely folded paper which he had removed from my own pocket last night. He unfolded the coarse, brittle foolscap and gently smoothed it flat on the blotter. His lips moved as he read again the four lines of spidery ink scratch: you be hide and I play seek, tho I know where you’ve hid, you see, so I play hide and you play hide, and see who’s found out first!

  Jekyll’s pulse was light and quick. Found out first, he repeated in a whisper. That line disturbed me too. Found out about what? What did she mean, I know where you’ve hid? Jekyll’s thoughts whirred, a vast machine beyond the membrane of my cell. Yet I could feel his anticipation, his fear, and something more obscure, a kind of pride. He was going to send me back soon. This letter was merely the beginning. And Jekyll didn’t intend to hide from it. He reached out and ran his fingertips over the spiky script indenting the page as if it were written in a Braille only he could read. At last he folded the letter, slid open a desk drawer, and dropped it inside.

  By the following evening I was in the body again. Nowhere to go but home. Holding my breath, I clicked my key into Ghyll’s front door and let it creak inward. The stage was just as I had left it, shadows pooling at the edges of the entrance hall. A rapt expectancy crackled in the air as I crossed the boards to the drawing-room doorway and peered round the frame at the table under the window. It was empty.

  I awoke the next morning frantically brushing at my face. I’d had a dream, nastily vivid: spiders and centipedes spilling out of a book onto my hands. I scrambled out of bed and wrapped myself in my gown, then stole down the stairs, feeling queerly like a child on Christmas morning, hopeful and apprehensive. On the last step I stopped. An envelope was trapped in the letterbox, as I had somehow known it would be. Back in my bedroom, I struggled to pierce the slit with my newly manicured thumbnail but my hands were shaking. I eviscerated the envelope and dropped it to the floor. The letter was folded into a square as before. Four crooked lines of ink stamped the page: