Hyde

by Daniel Levine

  hidey hide, holy hole

  kiss the girls, make them go

  but when the boys come to play

  hidey hide will run away

  I paced the upstairs landing until I heard Mrs. Deaker’s footsteps cross the hall below and the front door close. I scurried downstairs and immediately tried the door to her room off the kitchen. Locked. I stuck my house key into the keyhole and screwed it around, but it wouldn’t catch. I scoured the kitchen, yanking open drawers and cupboards, and was at last rewarded with a twisted scrap of charred paper that had been used to light the stove. Upon peeling it open I discovered the remains of an old grocery list, presumably from when the girls had been here: lamb, turnips, potatoes, bread . . . Upstairs, I laid it on top of the second letter for comparison, to confirm what I could already see. The writing did not match. The grocery list was composed in a refined, flowing hand with a finesse to the loops. The letter was exactly the opposite: crabbed, spiky stitches of ink.

  Lightly I ran my fingers over the lines, as Jekyll had done. Opposite. Could the woman have written the letter with her opposite hand, her left hand? The calligraphy leant in opposing directions, the grocery list to the left, and the letter to the right. Was this meant to be some kind of disguise? If so, it was pretty transparent. Who else could have written these lines? Kiss the girls, make them go? It was even more apparent than the hide-and-seek reference. What was her game? And what did she mean, when the boys come to play?

  It was just a piece of nursery rhyme. Yet there was a prophetic certainty to that word when, which proved itself that very afternoon. I was wandering the lanes when seemingly out of thin air a gang of dirty urchins descended upon me and scrabbled through my pockets with a hundred coordinated hands. Before I could swat them off, the mob dissolved all together. Disheveled and plundered, I stood in the middle of the road. I had wet my trousers in a spurt of surprise. People were looking at me. They had paused, these witnesses, in their passing business, an elaborate tableau of street life now frozen in place, all eyes upon me: complicit, amused, suppressing their smirks. For a second I was convinced they had all assembled at this spot, like an audience, to revel in my humiliation. Then time clicked back into place and the bustle continued around me, and I pulled my hat brim low and slunk away with their silent laughter burning the rims of my ears.

  A day or two later, a bird dropped its filth on my shoulder, a runny green-and-white splatter. There was no one around to witness this time. The lane was nearly empty. Yet that made it all the more astounding. The bird had chosen me as its target. I remembered the stoop of the Castle Street door, encrusted in droppings. The door itself carved with those symbols, like a witch’s curse . . .

  Something was happening to me, something terrible and yet also sly and grand, for which the help of numerous small elements seemed to have been enlisted. It was almost flattering. To be selected and persecuted with such care. But how far would it go? That night I lay awake in my bed, wide-eyed, racing with insomnia, while below my verandah that tabby beggar yowled out its lonesome meow. Over and over came the plaintive mewl, as if the animal were trying to pronounce some word of warning I would never understand. I crushed my pillow to my ears, but the sound was in my head now, a maddening imitation, until at last I leapt out of bed and strode onto the balcony and roared like a crazed king, Silence! Silence!

  The echo rippled off over the rooftops. I wiped my lips, panting. The yowling began again from below.

  here kitty kitty

  here hidey hide

  kittys hiding, what a pity

  where the pretty flower died

  I’d returned from my rambles several days later to find the third letter stuck through the brass trap. I pulled it free and ripped it open there on the portico. Then I turned and stared at the stone fountain in the centre of the courtyard. On numb legs I clumped down the steps.

  The cat had been dead a day or two. I had caught a certain scent as I entered the yard, a sweet, rancid odour. It lay on its side in the dried leaves, teeth bared, dirty fur matted to its ribs. The eyes were closed, or gone; a line of black ants explored the sunken lids. Had the animal just—died? Was that what I’d been hearing the other night, its death cries? Or had Mrs. Deaker—?

  In the entrance hall, I could hear sounds from the kitchen. The old woman was frying an egg at the stove. I watched her from the doorway until she glanced over with a gratifying little gasp. Her letter was crumpled in my pocket; I could hear it crackle as I stepped into the room, affecting nonchalance. Have you noticed any funny smells, Mrs. Deaker—coming from the courtyard, that is? Funny smells? she said. No, I don’t believe so. But then I don’t have much sense of smell these days. Her acting was perfect, innocent, bemused. She scraped the spatula under her egg and flipped it; the grease sizzled and spat. What does it smell of, Master?

  I eyed the cunning old witch, almost convinced by her performance. Could she have caught and killed a feral cat with her bare hands? Yet who else knew about the flower, its resting place in the fountain? She had to be writing these letters—even if she was merely a pawn in the complex design, she had to know something! I took another step forward. Listen. My voice had gone husky. Listen to me. You know they couldn’t have stayed here. You know that. You must know we couldn’t have just kept them.

  She had gone still, was not looking at me. And why is that?

  Because. Because of—of what I am.

  Now she turned, holding the twisted spatula, and fixed me with her cold accusing eyes. And what are you, Master?

  I’m—I’m, I stammered, wanting suddenly, alarmingly, to confess, to tell the woman everything, everything. What sweet, forbidden relief it would be! But I clenched my jaw against it, crushed the urge into anger. I would not reveal myself to this ill-meaning hag. What’ve you been saying to people? I demanded.

  A wry smile brushed her lips. She turned back to the stove. I don’t need to tell anyone anything about you, Master.

  For a second I had a vision of myself striding up and grabbing her hand and pressing it to the frying pan: the hiss of searing flesh. I flinched from the sound and stepped back toward the door with a ghastly little laugh. You’re right, old girl. No smell out there at all.

  In the morning, I donned my leather gloves and went down to the courtyard, planning to drag out the cat and dispose of it. I could smell it as I approached, riper than before. Holding a gloved hand over my mouth, I peeked over the rim of the fountain at the corpse, blue around the lips and tongue. But it was not alone. A small, grey-brown shape lay in the dried leaves alongside it. I blinked, not trusting my eyes, certain I was hallucinating the thing. It was a bird, a swallow, dead. I looked around and found a stick on the cobblestones and tentatively extended it into the fountain to poke the bird, but I drew back before I touched it. I craned my neck up at the pale morning sky. It was like the bird had just dropped dead from the air, a tiny Icarus.

  The next day brought another bird, and the day after that another. Exhilarated with horror, I watched the grey-brown shapes accumulate around the rotting cat, which a mix of superstition and curiosity forbade me to remove, or even touch. The birds appeared unharmed, simply limp and dead, as if struck down in flight. Or as if they had come to my fountain specifically to die. I knuckled my eyes and peered closer, hoping the brown bodies would resolve into harmless leaves. From the drawing-room window I watched the yard and the fountain, hoping I might actually see one tumbling from the sky. Once I did see a bird alight on the stone angel’s head and hop down to the fountain rim to peck around. Breathless, I waited for it to keel over. But it flitted off. I went out to examine the rim, to see if anything was sprinkled there, crumbs, rat poison . . . From the window of a bare front room on the second floor I also watched Mrs. Deaker’s movements to and from the house. But she never so much as glanced at the fountain, never once peeped inside on her way past.

  Was I actually cursed? One day I passed a doorway with a sign above it. Tarot, the sign read, and below the word a
symbol I recognised at once: a triangle with a staring eye inside. The glyph had been carved into the blistered wood of the Castle Street door. I climbed the flight of rackety steps to a garret reeking of incense. The tarot witch had wild white hair and cataract-covered eyes. She sat me down at a table. Her cards were gilt-edged, well worn, bearing faded, unsettling pictures. She laid the first three down on a velvet cloth between us. What’s that one? I asked, pointing at the middle card, a man dangling upside down from a tree, arms tied around his chest. She touched the picture with her long curving fingernail. The Hanged Man, she croaked. And that one? I pointed at the card to its right, a robed and bearded figure holding a scepter or a bubbling glass phial in the air. The Magician, the witch replied, and then she moved her claw to the card on the left, a horned beast with goatish legs crouched upon a golden throne. The Devil. She paused, beholding the display with her milky, blinded eyes. From the slanted attic ceiling hung a family of peculiar scarecrow figures made of bundled twigs and twine, slowly revolving amidst the rising wraiths of incense. Voodoo. The word appeared in my head, though I did not know what it meant. I looked down at the three cards, my throat dry. Which am I? The witch made a clucking sound with her tongue and laid two more cards below the line of three. All, she murmured, all is you.

  She arranged a dozen cards in the shape of an H, pronouncing each one’s name in her sibilant accent. The last card was placed at the bottom left, closest to me, and displayed a tall white monolith against a black churning sky. Flames poured from the single window at the top, where a body was framed, arms outspread in rapture. Other people stood on the rocky ground below looking upward, one holding a torch. The witch let out a whispery sigh at the sight of it, caressing the edge with her raptor’s nail. The Tower. Her smoked-glass eyes moved up to me. Chaos, she crooned. Transformation. I clasped my hands under the table to keep from grabbing her fragile claw. When? I demanded. How? Her lips drew back, revealing smooth, toothless gums. The Hanged Man must wait, she said. Her nail moved to a card on the other side and tapped twice: a gold compass in a blue sky. Wheel of Fortune, she whispered. The hooked fingernail lifted and began to circle in the air, stirring the smoke into a spiral. You will see.

  I stood up, frightened. I had to stoop to avoid the low ceiling. One of the voodoo scarecrows dangled near my face, arms and legs stiffly extended, its head an empty circle with a twine cross within. I dug a coin from my pocket and tossed it down on the velvet. The witch was smiling, pink and toothless, nodding her frazzled luminescent head. Beware the Fool, she purred.

  Beware the fool? I did not need Jekyll’s sneering disdain to know it was just mystic babble. Yet for days I could not get those pictures out of my head. I could not help feeling that in the configuration of cards, the witch had seen my destiny plotted out, past and future, one as ineluctable as the other. In my dreams I laid the cards out across the floor in fiendishly complex patterns that I had to stand on a chair to see, for there were hundreds of them, and millions of possible permutations, and I would wake with a suffocated cry. Sometimes I’d find scratches across my chest and throat, as if I’d clawed myself with my raggedy nails in the midst of these night terrors.

  The weather turned. For days rain sputtered from the gutters, and the whole house smelt of mouldy furniture. Claustrophobic, I paced the many rooms, remembering those afternoons of hide-and-seek silence, the unbreathable pressure of the air. I was scrounging loudly in the barren kitchen one day, hoping more to draw Mrs. Deaker out of hiding than to find anything edible, when I stopped before the sink and hunkered down again by the drain cupboard door. It was swollen shut; I had to tug the black knob before it popped open with a squeak. The hanging loop of pipe, the steel bucket and scrub brush, the tarry reek of carbolic. What was I looking for? I squatted there at a loss, my mind a blank. Then I blinked and jerked back to myself. I had heard something: a metallic clack. I rose and walked from the kitchen, down the corridor to the entrance hall. The day had darkened; the hall was deep in gloom. I turned to the front door and saw the envelope sticking through the letterbox, a square of whiteness.

  hide hide hide hide hide hide hide hide hide hide hide hide hide hide hide hide hide hide hide hide hide hide hide hide hide hide hide hide hide hide hide hide hide hide hide hide

  I almost dropped the paper in shock. The word was scribbled spiky and hectic, breaking down at the bottom into illegible marks that in one place had ripped through the page, like a peeling flap of skin. An insectile tickle raced over my hands, as if the paper were covered in beetles and spiders, and I hurried with it into the drawing room and dropped it onto the cold grate. I tried to strike a match and snapped it in half; I scratched another alight, touched the flame to the page. It curled and buckled as it burned, collapsing into ash.

  In the hall I snatched my hat and stick and then plunged into the lashing rain. I hastened past the fountain without looking; I did not want to think of those bloated, floating corpses inside. I sloshed through the runnel gushing down the road and ten minutes later pushed into the Pig and Gibbet.

  I stood dripping inside the door, my heart welling with relief. I had not been to the Pig in a fortnight at least. I’d been avoiding my regular haunts. Nothing had changed, of course: the half a dozen regulars were stooped on their stools; Vic mumbled over his daily rag. My old seat at the far end was even empty. I squelched down the length of the bar and clambered onto my stool. Vic did not look over at me. No one did, in fact. There was an unpleasant tension to the silence. I wiped my face, drummed my fingers on the bar, then worked a sovereign from my sodden pocket and snapped it onto the blackwood plank with a loud clack that made me flinch along with the old men down the line nursing their sudsy bitters. I cleared my throat. Vic. He fetched a heavy sigh, flipped his paper over. My skin was shrinking. I slid off my stool and sloshed to where Vic leant against the back counter. I said his name again. He lowered the rag and lifted his weak, sullen eyes, trapped in that porcine mask. His gaze was almost cool, aloof, yet I could see fear glinting at the edges. He licked his pulpy lips. Go on, he said. Go on with you.

  Droplets of water were tapping from my coat to the floorboards. A thin creaking came from my open mouth. Vic’s hand, I saw, was inching downward to the shelf below the bar where he kept a wooden axe handle—fer emergencies, he’d told me once. You’ve got some bollocks, Vic said now, coming in here again. I told you last time, didn’t I, we don’t need yer business, Mr. Hyde. His voice was getting louder, gaining confidence. Everyone was watching; I could feel the eyes. Last time? I could not speak. Vic’s pudgy hand closed around the axe handle. He did not draw it out, he just gripped it. What did I tell you? Vic said, emboldened, eyes flicking to his audience. Eh? Didn’t I tell you we don’t need nothing you’ve got? I fell back a step and threw a desperate glance down the bar. Indeed, all the old phlegmy eyes were fast upon me, eager with malice, more alive than I’d ever seen them. Lips peeling back from their tarnished teeth, nostrils distended, eyes swimming in rheumy venom, like people suffering from some bloodthirsty plague. I stepped back from them in dismay. The Pig was infected too. Vic had drawn out the handle now, a sleek club of blond wood, the heavy end laid in his palm. I had seen it somewhere before, not just here, but elsewhere. My lower eyelid was starting to twitch. I had the sense that something was opening behind me, that doorway again, widening into an unknown dimension. I did not turn round. Pressing my eyelid to contain its rapid pulse, I scuffled backward to the door.

  Up the rear stairwell of the surgery block I stumbled. I lurched into the cabinet, dropping my keys. The room whirled; I could not stand, so I crawled across the floor to the glazed press and groped for the box and the tourniquet. Slumped against the bench, I wrapped the tubing around my arm and took up the syringe, but I was too drunk to see it straight. The barrel and beaded needle split into two syringes, and I could not tell which was real until I squinched one eye shut. The wavering needle veered toward my forearm until it touched the skin, and I sank it in and hit the plunger and fli
pped gratefully back into blackness.

  Morning. Jekyll woke sprawled on the cabinet floor. Piercing headache. Shielding his eyes, he sat up, surveyed the bright, horrid world. The rear door was ajar. A pool of vomit glistened on the boards by the stove. He was still wearing my wet clothes, with sick stains on the shirt front and cuffs. Safe inside, I stared blearily out, unable to remember even how I’d returned here. The rain had stopped. A white, soundless haze suffused the windows.

  Jekyll climbed carefully to his feet, as if standing up in a boat. He poured a glass of water, then removed from the press a small bottle. He dipped a glass pipette into it and drew up a portion of brown nectar. Drop, drop, drop; he tapped it into the water glass, each droplet exploding into amber curlicues. He swirled the cocktail and drank it.

  He stripped off my clothes, dressed in his own. He snipped the rusty beard growth and shaved to the grain. He used my shirt to mop up the vomit. The morphia was taking effect, his actions acquiring a dreamy steadiness, the pain and nausea ebbing away. He seemed to move through a rich, silky medium as he smoothed his hair before the mirror, gave the room a final review, and then descended the front stairs and went through the theatre. The gravel yard was steaming, the conservatory greenhouse humid. But the dining room was cool. Jekyll sat in his place at the table, blissfully numbed. Poole entered with a polished silver urn and did not see his master until he’d set it on the sideboard and turned. Goodness, he said, straightening, Dr. Jekyll, forgive me, I was not aware you had returned. I’ll have your breakfast straightaway. Jekyll waved a hand, a kingly, languid pardon. Just tea, Poole, he murmured with elastic lips, tea and toast would be lovely.