Hyde

by Daniel Levine

  Downstairs, I found on the kitchen table a lukewarm chop on a plate, like an offering. I sat down and devoured it, eyes roaming in disbelief around the dreary room. No more bodies in the fountain, no more letters—and a veal chop for breakfast. It seemed too good to be true. Could I trust it? Could I let myself believe it was over, that the curse had simply vanished in my absence? All day I waited in a state of high anticipation, certain that something would happen—some response to my homecoming. Yet by the next morning, there had been nothing still, no clack of the letterbox, no birds in the stone basin. The weather was sunny and clear. I could not believe it. I wouldn’t be allowed to escape so easily, to resume a life of careless freedom. No, I was chary as I strolled through the old streets of Soho, alert to people’s expressions, eying the windows, ready for anything. I passed a newspaper stand and made myself stop and read at last the date below the black header. It was early June.

  Behind my own thoughts, I could feel Jekyll’s flow, closer now than before, like a running murmur. We had been away for over a month, our longest absence from Big House yet. Poole was bound to be concerned. Jekyll had said nothing before he’d left. Poole would have to be assured of Jekyll’s well-being. Yet how could we return to Big House now, when everything was going so suspiciously, ominously well on my end?

  That afternoon I hardly recognised Leicester Square. The pavement was crowded with pedestrians, couples linking elbows, and the central park was busy with parasols and toppers and people milling about the salt-white statue of old Shakespeare at its heart. Nervously I sidled through them, perspiring in my black winter suit. Perhaps, I thought absently (and with insane optimism), it was time to order a summer wardrobe. I wiped my streaming cheek with my sleeve as I paused below Big House’s front door, which was gleaming black, as if newly painted. I swallowed and pressed the button. I could hear the distant chiming from inside, then clicking footsteps.

  The sun hung behind me, and when the door opened, it blared full on Poole’s face, which could not quite conceal its eagerness and worry. Mr. Hyde, he said, with something expectant, almost welcoming, in his tone. Do come in. He moved aside, and I stepped up into the cool, dim hall. You are aware that Dr. Jekyll is not presently at home? I am. I have a message from him. I kept my eyes averted. I wanted badly to remove my topper and drag my hands through my damp, tangled hair. But I didn’t dare, even with the beard, reveal myself completely to Poole’s inspection. My eye caught the cabinetry opposite the hearth: the pebbled-glass panels, a row of murky jars displayed within. John Hunter’s specimens. Jekyll has been travelling, I heard myself say. We’ve been travelling together. I had to return to this side of town, take care of some business. He asked me to tell you that he’s well, that there is no cause for concern. Poole’s gaze was like a fierce circlet of sunlight reflected onto my cheek. Travelling where? he demanded, and then added courteously: If I may ask? East End, mostly. But all round London, really. A research expedition, Jekyll calls it. Do you have any notion when he’ll return? Hard to say, hard to say, I replied breezily, beginning to enjoy taunting him. I snuck a glance at the man, nursing a smirk. Didn’t tell you he was leaving, did he? Isn’t that Jekyll for you?

  His eyes held mine, the whites so clear and sharp, they were almost blue in the gloom. Then his gaze faltered and flicked to the left, down the length of the entrance hall. In the far illumined doorway to the main hall stood a female figure, obviously eavesdropping; she froze as we stared at her. Thank you, Lizzie, Poole called to her, that will be all. With a start she came to life; she dipped her head, curtseyed, and hurried on. Poole continued to regard the bright empty portal, his jawline stiff. Will you be returning to the doctor, he asked tightly, when your business is attended to? My tongue came unstuck from my palate with a wet click. Perhaps. Then perhaps you will tell him, Poole said, and then he stopped and flicked his eyes back to me. Did I detect a flash of uncertainty behind the serene façade? He cleared his throat. Perhaps you’ll tell him he is eagerly awaited at home. I should hope so. Is that all? He did not look away. Yes, that is all. Unless you have something further to add to your enlightening report?

  Something rose in my gullet—a bubble of laughter. I clamped my lips against it, mutely shook my head.

  In that case, I wish you good day, Mr. Hyde.

  Back at Ghyll I found Mrs. Deaker on the drawing-room sofa, drinking sherry. I sidled in, plucked a glass from the sideboard, and eased down onto the other end of the sofa. She sat upright, staring ahead. After a moment she lifted the crystal decanter from the floor and without quite looking at me poured a ruby splash into my outstretched glass. I settled back and we watched the light in the front windows fade to a dusk that suffused the baroque old room and made it beautiful once again, as it must have been many years ago when that noble happy family had lived here. What had happened to them? What had befallen this place? I swung my head to Mrs. Deaker and realised how dark it had become. I could see her profile like a marble effigy, a silver glint round the rim of her glass. I wanted to ask her something, something terribly important, yet I couldn’t remember what it was. The question welled up in me and I cracked my lips to speak. Ssshh, she said.

  I dreamt I was back in the entrance hall. I was staring at the pebbled-glass cabinetry, at the jars of Hunter’s pickled specimens which moved and writhed in the murky liquid like captive eels, and meanwhile I was trying to explain to Poole what Jekyll was up to. But all my features—lips, nose, ears, cheeks—felt rubbery and unattached, liable to slough off at any second and reveal to Poole what was underneath. Not Jekyll, but someone I didn’t know, slimy and nascent beneath the leprous rind of my face. My teeth were wobbling as I spoke, and I was covering my mouth to keep from spitting them out, and when I woke I was holding my nose in place.

  I was still in the drawing room, sprawled on the sofa. I could not remember falling asleep here. Dry-mouthed, head thudding, I pulled tentatively at my earlobe, making sure it was firmly affixed, then pushed on my teeth with my tongue. My hand felt tacky and smelt odd, and I found, stuck to the webbing of my thumb, a long, dark, curly hair. I pulled it free and shook the sticky thing away and scrambled from the room, hurrying across the shadowy hall and out the front door.

  I paced the lanes, muddled and nauseated as if hungover, though I couldn’t remember drinking anything aside from the sherry. Gradually the sun rose and the streets became thronged with my neighbours. I could smell my rough, sour armpits and crotch. Something was about to happen, I could feel it: this tremulous quality to the atmosphere. That old tic was tapping in my eyelid again, like inscrutable Morse code. I downed a scalding pint of coffee at a stall and made for home.

  A man was leaning against the fence of my house as I approached, lounging with his arms crossed and one boot propped on the iron rail. Nondescript, bearded, looking off the other way. I stopped before him and glared until he swiveled his head and gave me a calm, insolent once-over. He glanced over his shoulder at my house, showing a hint of canine tooth. Then he pushed off the fence and sauntered down the road. I stood watching him recede, a fuzzy roar in my ears. I shut my eyes, squeezed them tight, and gripped the square-cut iron railing as if for balance, the stones under my feet feeling loose, like my teeth in their sockets in that dream. Then I opened my eyes. The twitch in my lower lid had stopped. I could hear a carriage horse clopping nearby. Everything was fine. I exhaled, tossed my head, then turned into the courtyard. At the fountain I paused to peer inside—empty, again—but at the sagging front steps I stopped short.

  A white square was sticking crookedly from the letterbox.

  I mounted the porch as if it were a gallows. I pinched the envelope and pulled it from the brass trap. The barbed, spiky stitching across its face: Mr. Hyde. The cheap granular texture of the paper. I turned the envelope over. The front door was cautiously opened. Mrs. Deaker beheld me, surprised. Master, she said, I thought—did you? Her narrowed eyes fell to the envelope in my hand. I heard the letterbox not a minute ago, she said.

/>   I looked down at the envelope too, then turned and squinted at the fence where that man had been standing. Had he been waiting for me, like a lookout? Should I—? I took a bewildered step forward, stopped, and looked at the envelope again. I stuck my thumb into its throat and ripped it open:

  hide, says seek, and hidey hides

  and thinks the play is done

  but i’ve been counting, one two three,

  now ready or not, here I come!

  I braced myself for an explosion, a white evaporating flash. I waited, shoulders hunched, the letter crackling in my hands. I peeked upward: the world was still here. People were passing obliviously back and forth beyond the fence. I seemed to hear laughter, aquiver in the air. I swung around to Mrs. Deaker, who was regarding me with guarded curiosity, as if I were some unpredictable lunatic on her doorstep. I thrust the letter at her. After a hesitation, she accepted it. She brought it toward her face to read, then lowered it and looked at me, confused, disconcerted, almost fearful. Her rimpled lips pursed, as if she were about to ask a question. I plucked the letter from her fingers. She was not pretending. Oh no, I could see quite clearly now, as if a film had fallen from my eyes. This was no performance. She had not written any of the letters. She was innocent.

  Innocent! What did that even mean? Who was guilty, then—that lone man lounging against my fence? He was, if anything, a mere scout, watching for my arrival so the messenger could deliver the letter at the perfect moment. Yet surely he wasn’t the true letter writer either; he was just a messenger, another pawn!

  Part of me was feverishly relieved. It wouldn’t be long now. I had known it was not finished. I’d known it would start again, and now it had, it was coming—ready or not, here I come! In preparation I made another inspection of the house, checking the bare floors and the windows and the rear cellar door. The heavy chest was still pushed against it, but when I tried the rusted knob, to my surprise, the rear door opened. I was certain I had left it locked; it had always been locked. Had Mrs. Deaker been down here?

  The next day I left the house early and looped around the block to position myself inside a recess across the road from Ghyll, with a view of the gate and the fountain and the front door. All morning and all afternoon I stood there, nervous and bored and needing to urinate, watching the bodies bumbling back and forth and thinking of Utterson staking out the Castle Street door night after night, patient, imperturbable. The next day I tried watching the rear cellar door in the alley out back, and the day after that . . .

  But soon I gave it up; the tedium was too nerve-racking. My tormentor was too cunning to strike while I was watching. I had to be cunning too, then—I had to feign laxity, heedlessness. I tried frequenting some of my old haunts again, not the Pig, of course, but the Toad, the Gullet—and, once, even the Black Shop Pub, where Cornelius Luce had led me to Carew that night, ages ago. The bar was again packed with Irishmen, and I stood at the balustrade with a glass of black beer, staring at the table where Carew had sat with his back to me. I retraced his route up that steep spindly lane, climbed those steps to the top where he’d stood and shouted my name: Mr. Hyde! The echo of his triumphant cry returned to me. Could Carew be connected to all this? I scanned the lane below, the shadows where I’d pressed myself, and I scanned the rooflines above, almost hoping to see a figure up there, framed like an archangel against the shifting sky. But there was no one.

  June was passing. An intricate machinery within Ghyll was winching tighter click by click, a palpable tautening that even Mrs. Deaker perceived. One evening I slumped at the kitchen table slugging glumly from a bottle of cheap hock while behind me the old lady puttered at the stove, fixing her supper. The homey sounds of sizzle and scrape comforted me; a lull had settled over my mind. I plonked the bottle down on the table and hit the edge, and the bottle toppled off and struck the stone floor a second later with a sharp crack. Mrs. Deaker screamed: a chicken squawk of surprise. I spun around in my chair, my blood like ice water, and she goggled at me with a hand dramatically at her breast. We both looked down at the broken bottle and the spill of crimson wine. She let out a fluttery laugh, and I chuckled awkwardly. But that note of terror hung in the air. Neither of us moved as the puddle bled across the flagstone. That confessional urge was taking hold of me again, the desire to break myself open like that bottle and bleed out my secret. This old woman I had invited into my life, into my chaos, as a kind of witness—she had questions for me too, I could tell, seething in her withered heart. So why could we not speak? I stared at the spotted hand upon her chest, its silky livered skin. I wanted to feel it on my brow. As if she sensed this, her hand moved to the stove, where she drew a dishrag from the handle of the door. She offered it to me, like a grey, ragged flag of truce.

  The last days of June it stormed: lashing rain and spasms of lightning followed by tumbling, buckling thunder. It cheered me up immensely, the electrifying violence of it. I ventured onto my verandah and clutched the rail as if it were the prow of a ship in tempestuous seas and whooped and dared the lightning to strike me, dared the gods to wrench the whole terrace from its flimsy moorings and whisk it away like a chariot of Hades. I hoped the storm would last for weeks and weeks, a biblical flood washing clean my trivial concerns—all trivial concerns everywhere! Ready or not, I screamed into the swooping wind, here I come! But after several days, it drizzled out. The streets steamed under the misted sun, strewn with tidal patterns of leaves and debris, roof shingles, mangled umbrellas, sodden paper, the wreckage of a baby pram. People emerged, peering at the sky. The sun sharpened to a crisp blaze, and all at once, without any warning, it was July. Summertime in Soho, the roads choked with bustle; food sellers on every corner calling out their wares, flavoured ices, grilled meats, boiled eggs; a festival for out-of-towners, ladies with lacy parasols and men in cream suits. I pushed my way through the cattle of tourists, annoyed by the world’s hearty continuance. I hardly recognised my seedy old Soho, bright and gay as a seaside resort. All the production seemed suspiciously theatrical, a grand-scale diversion to confound me. Absolutely anything could happen in a crowd, after all. Someone could steal the hat right off your head.

  For a few steps I did not even feel it was gone. Disoriented, knocked about by passing traffic, I was aware at first only of the heightened brightness, the air moving over my ears. Then, with a spike of panic, I clapped a hand to my head and discovered it bare. My topper! I swiveled around, elbowed my way back a few paces. It wasn’t on the stones under the trampling feet. It wasn’t on anyone’s head. I halted, heart gone cold. This was 6 July.

  What street was this? I could not get my bearings, could not remember where I’d been going. The sun seemed hotter and higher in the sky than it had been just seconds ago. Bareheaded and exposed to the blinding glare, I groped along until I came to a corner I knew and then set a hasty course for Ghyll. This had been no theft or prank; it was too precise, too deliberate. And, damn it, I had liked that hat, it screwed perfectly to the groove of my brow. Addled by the direct sun I laboured up Ghyll Road, which was so busy with overflow from the main streets that I could not see my front gate until I had nearly reached it. I dragged a sleeve across my eyes and then stopped in my tracks.

  My hat hung on the wooden gatepost as if by a hook.

  But not a hook. The topper was nailed into the wood through the brim. A fat rusty iron nail. The nail would not budge, was buried too deep. I glanced over my shoulder at the moving herd, then worked the brim of my hat over the nail head. That is when I saw the newspaper behind it, pinned to the post through the nail as well. The Pall Mall Gazette. I half expected my fingers to pass through the apparition. But the news sheet was shockingly solid and grainy. I ripped it free.

  Up in my bedroom, I shut one eye and peered through the neat hole punched in my hat brim. Then I threw the ruined topper on my bed and turned to the newspaper, which had a jagged tear just above its headline:

  THE MAIDEN TRIBUTE OF MODERN BABYLON

  WE BID YOU BE OF H
OPE

  The Report of our Secret Commission will be read today with a shuddering horror that will thrill throughout the world. After this awful picture of the crimes at present committed as it were under the very aegis of the law has been fully unfolded before the eyes of the public, we need not doubt that the House of Commons will find time to raise the age during which English girls are protected from expiable wrong.

  I read faster and faster. English girls, the sale of English girls, the sale and purchase and violation of children, the procuration of virgins. Soon I was just scanning the crossheads in capitals scattered throughout the article: The Violation of Virgins, Virgins Willing and Unwilling, Buying Girls at the East End, Strapping Girls Down, The London Slave Market, A Child of Thirteen Bought for £5. Practically the whole paper was given over to the hysterical article. Hectically I tore through the pages, hands smeared in ink, scouring the lines almost instinctively for, yes, my name, convinced at any moment it would leap out from the columns of dense type. What in hell was this? What was this Secret Commission? Why had this been nailed to my gate? I looked up, flushed, my face seized with a petrified smile as I listened to the walloping silence of the house. Then I read the thing over from the beginning.