Make it look natural.
We lay awake as morning paled the room.
After breakfast the next morning, Jekyll went to Maw’s. We had been here the previous summer, after returning from our trip north to see Father in the hospital, and then to see Pent Manor, that final time. The old tiny chemist’s shop was cluttered with bottles and jars and tiers of shelving, a sharp, vinegary tang to the atmosphere. Maw himself came clumping from the back to greet Jekyll, taking his hand in his knurled, knowing grip, worn smooth and strong as wood. His watery eyes, bespectacled and magnified, swam over Jekyll’s face. You are thin, Dr. Jekyll, he crooned, you are working too hard.
Jekyll ordered four powders and a tincture, all in small, precise amounts. Maw edged around behind the counter and squinted at the labels of the bottles crowding the shelves. He eased down each one he wanted, scooped a measure of its contents onto a silver scale, then tipped the powder into a brown-paper sachet. At last he put all the sachets into a thick brown envelope and handed it over the counter to Jekyll as though it contained a precious, seditious manuscript. You have rats, Dr. Jekyll? he asked with a sly lift of his eyebrow. Jekyll chuckled grimly. With a vengeance.
At home Jekyll went straight back to the cabinet. He separated the powders into two round-bottomed flasks partially filled with colourless liquid. He arranged a Bunsen burner beneath each flask, each connected to a condenser, the delicate lip suspended just above a graduated glass to catch the distillate drip of the vapourised powders. The two distillations he combined in a phial, and then he dropped in three beads of the tincture. He stoppered it with a rubber plug and turned the phial upside down several times, then held it to the light from the window. The fluid was perfectly clear, slightly more viscous than water. Once the solution was administered, the heart would stop pumping blood within ten seconds, and within twenty seconds the body would be dead. I marvelled at the crystalline serum. All at once, it was no longer hypothetical. We could kill him. Draw the serum into a hypodermic, wait for him at Luce’s front gate, stick the needle in his neck, and walk away. Old man dies. Happens every day. Who would suspect different? Luce? What proof would he have?
The next morning at breakfast the doorbell rang, and Poole entered a moment later with an envelope, which he set at Jekyll’s elbow. Jekyll pretended to ignore it for a few minutes. Finally he wiped his mouth and slit the envelope’s throat with his yolky knife. The note was brief:
Friday, 2 October
Midnight
Midnight! How dramatic. But the street would be deserted at midnight. All we had to do was catch Carew approaching the house and take care of him outside. Once he entered Luce’s house, everything became far too complicated. Jekyll would have to get there early, watch for Carew’s arrival, then try to appear as if he were arriving at the same time. A handshake at the gate, then the needle in the neck. All in the timing.
We worked it over and over on the long walks Jekyll took in those last days of September. Restless, exhilarating days, the leaves flattening in swooping gusts of wind. I yearned to be out in the body and the billowing smoky air. But I did not expect release. I understood that my way back to the world was through Carew; it was as if he were blocking the entrance. He had made it impossible for me to continue with my life. He had spied on me, taunted and tormented me. He had taken Jeannie, taken Ghyll, and would take over Jekyll’s life as well. The rationale was the easy part. But the doing. Sticking the needle into his neck, pressing the plunger, marking him as little as possible. Could we perform such a cold-blooded act? Carew might be wearing an overcoat with the collar turned up. He might be stronger than anticipated; he might put up a struggle, escape. Or he might wait inside Luce’s house from early evening. What then? Could Jekyll kill him inside, in private, claim Carew had suffered some sort of sudden illness? It would be fishy; they would conduct a careful autopsy, with such a high-profile corpse. No, it had to happen outside the house. Over and over we turned it, the plan, as Jekyll stalked the city, building up his legs and heart and appetite.
At mealtime he cleared his plate. He found a heavy crate in the surgical theatre and lifted it rhythmically above his head, carried it up and down the stairs. In his drawers he stood before his dressing room mirror, examining his scrawny shanks, his concave abdomen and emaciated chest, tensing the sinewy muscles. He combed his fingers through his silvered hair, from the well-seasoned temples to the glittering strands strung through the long forelock. Twice a day he climbed to the cabinet and removed the glass phial of lucid fluid from the press, held it up to the light to check for change, impurity. From A drawer he took down another Milward box, this one with a single syringe embedded in purple velvet, and with his left fingers through the loops, he practised, holding it behind his back or in his coat pocket and then whipping it out and into an imaginary jugular. Five seconds, that was all it would take. Five crucial seconds, and then we could walk away, free. We deserved our freedom. We had to win. It was justice.
That was Utterson’s word: justice. He and Lanyon dropped by unexpectedly on that Thursday evening of 1 October, inviting themselves to dinner. The meal was interminable. Jekyll’s appetite had vanished. He was acting weaker than he truly felt, as if he were still in the midst of convalescence. Yet he had to attend the conversation and put in the occasional comment, for Lanyon was watching him soberly beneath his ruddy good cheer and chatter. By dessert I had stopped listening and began to pay attention again only when I realised the talk had turned to W. T. Stead and his Maiden Tribute campaign. Lanyon was saying it was outlandish, the notion of pressing charges against the man. He was the reason they were conducting investigations to begin with; he’d brought the issue into the open. My goodness, Lanyon exclaimed, have we lost all perspective? The man deserves praise, not prison! Utterson, stirring his coffee, gave an exasperated sigh and set down his spoon. Hastie, the man purchased a thirteen-year-old girl. Without consent of the father, and by misleading the mother. He had her examined and certified by a midwife and then drugged with chloroform and arranged in a bed in a strange room. He entered that room; she woke; she was frightened. He deserves praise, you say. Perhaps. But if he serves a spell in prison, well, in my mind that is justice.
Lanyon opened his mouth to protest, then flicked his eyes at Jekyll. Something in his watchfulness made Lanyon pause and then look down at his custard, blushing. There was silence. Utterson lifted his droll, mournful gaze up to Jekyll. And I heard, like an echo, the clinking rims of their glasses, their toast:
To its end, Harry. To its end.
Friday morning, a matrix of frost rimed the bedroom windows. Jekyll stood in a trance as clouds raced across the sun and shadows swung through the room. By dinner, this dreamy calm had dissolved. Jekyll managed to swallow an overboiled Brussels sprout and then ran upstairs to his bathroom and released a burning watery torrent from the bowels. His stomach was rippling as he later paced the cabinet, round and round the laboratory table. By ten o’clock I was growing concerned. Jekyll was trying to draw the clear serum from the phial but the needle tip was wavering and wouldn’t punch smoothly through the rubber plug. Easy, easy, I soothed, and the needle sank through and sucked the serum into its glass barrel, to the full white line. Jekyll fit a rubber nipple over the tip, then he set the syringe back into its velvet bed. He shut his eyes. His pocket watch ticked its tiny heartbeat.
We had to leave. The plan was to arrive at Luce’s no later than eleven o’clock. Jekyll was shaking his head, beginning to breathe strangely. I can’t. He moaned aloud. I can’t. I pressed myself forward in the mind, frightened now, but angry and impatient too. We didn’t have any choice; there wasn’t another way, unless Jekyll wanted simply to surrender, mix up the other injection and trot it along to Luce’s to become Carew’s laboratory rat. It had to be done. Jekyll shook his head faster, moaned again. I can’t. He panted. You do it.
You do it. I didn’t waste a second. I yanked him around to E drawer and watched the hands go to work, suddenly competent, pouring
the red liquor and tipping in the powder and plunging the hypodermic through the plug. Jekyll stripped. I could almost see our breath as he gripped the chilly tourniquet in his teeth. I teetered on the brink, wheeling my arms, and when the steel slid into the bruise, I leapt into the sickening whipping free fall and hit the body and the floor with a bark.
I sprang to my feet and staggered dead-legged into the table, sending the Erlenmeyer spinning away to the edge—it dropped off and bounced with an improbable bong. I laughed. The air tickled my lungs. I laughed harder, scratching my chest and raking my fingers through my hair. From the wardrobe I pulled out my clothes and shuddered at the luscious feel of the fabric, my old familiar costume, its welcoming odour. I took down my pale grey bowler from the high shelf. It had never really felt like my hat. But gravely I set it on my head and swiveled it down to the groove of my brow. Last, I removed my stick from the wardrobe, curled my hand around its always warm, willing knob. I stared at my face in the mirror, hairless and gaunt, eyes aglow like sapphires through the shadow of the brim. I plucked up the loaded syringe, dropped it into my overcoat pocket. Then I clattered down the back stairs and plunged onto Castle Street.
The night! It smelt of burning leaves, and the sky was a royal black embedded with scattered stars. Fresh air whisked into my clothes as I stumbled south, slapping the stone wall now and then for the ringing smack of life against my palm. Everything was impossibly vivid. The cobbles under the lamps looked like worn lumps of gold, and the stones in the shadows like greasy pewter. A riotous band of leaves tumbled down the lane and through my legs. We were going to kill a man. Suddenly that seemed incidental, merely an excuse to be outside and alive on such an exquisite evening. I was barely watching where I was going, the mind a rainbow blaze of colour and texture and scent. Only on crossing Regent Street did it register that we had reached St. James’s Square, that we still had a job to do. I hurried across the expanse of crunchy frosted grass, fingering the syringe in my pocket and wondering what time it could be. At the far end of the square I darted up King Street and moved under the lee of Luce’s gigantic brick house looming to my right. I struck the spears of wrought-iron fence wrapping the mansion’s perimetre and turned the corner onto Dury Street.
And there he was. In his tall topper, Carew was striding up the pavement from the other direction, toward the gateposts between us. My momentum carried me a few steps, but when he raised his head and saw me, we both came to a halt. The timing was perfect. I was not surprised. My hand was in my pocket, lightly touching the glass barrel. Carew stood twenty paces away, rigid. He knew it was not Jekyll. He knew my hunched, steaming silhouette. I slipped my fingers through the steel loops and began to approach, showing no urgency or malice, and as he watched me, he slowly lifted a splayed hand like a warning. Mr. Hyde! he called out. Not like before, when he stood above me in triumph. Now the cry broke at the end, which turned it into a question. Mr. Hyde, we had an agreement, Carew cried, Jekyll and I had an agreement! I kept approaching. He seemed shackled to the spot. Hand raised, he glanced at the barren street behind him and then cried out, Jekyll! Jekyll, can you hear me? Are you in there? Control yourself and stop this! I have a gun! His voice was shrill, and he groped with his other hand in his overcoat pocket. His eyes shone like a cat’s. I kept coming, in a kind of trance. Carew was tugging frantically at something trapped in his pocket. I have a gun! he shouted again. Don’t be a fool, I tell you I’m armed! He looked down at his pocket and then up again, mouth agape, eyes wild and spellbound, as he watched me close the last steps.
A delayed epiphany: Beware the fool, I whispered.
The brass cleat of my stick cracked his right ear, pitching him into the fence. He bounced off and staggered but remained upright. In my hand, the oaken stick quivered up the shaft with the ring of his skull. I stared down its wooden sheen, my arm growing weirdly warm, then up at Carew. His legs buckled; he fell to one knee, gripping the fence. I lifted the stick in both hands and as if it were an axe chopped it down on his wrist. With a snap, his hand flew open and he shrieked like a fox, falling onto his back. His hat toppled off and his gorgeous white hair fanned the walk, splashed with a streak of black that dribbled from his ear and along his jawline. He clutched his arm, the hand jutting off at an upsetting angle, the fingers hooked. He rolled his head from side to side. Wait, he said thickly. Wait, please, please wait. A queasy despair seized me—there was so much of him left, so much life still to break. With a groan I raised the stick above my head and shut my eyes. The blow made a hollow whunk on his chest and I felt a rib crack like a twig underfoot, a sickly gratifying sensation. I hit him three or four more times in the torso with a wood-chopping swing, then stepped up and punted the ribs he’d left exposed to cover his head with his arms. He rolled onto his side, coughing. I kicked him desperately in the back. How much more? The feel of his frail breakable bones vibrated in my palms like the stick itself was abuzz. Carew was rolling onto his front, clawing at the pavement and scraping his boots. He was trying to get up, I realised with a squeamish thrill. I wound back the stick and then paused, aghast, watching him writhe like a limbless wretch I’d once seen worming along in the gutter. Up on one elbow, broken hand dangling, Carew turned a crazed yet comprehending eye to me. The other eye blinked uncontrollably. His black-matted hair stuck to his cheek. His mouth opened and closed. A hoarse whine came out, like something was wrong with his voice box. I looked at my stick, tapering to its brass cleat, and with dreadful clarity watched myself take hold of the slimmer end in both hands and wind the heavy knob over my shoulder like the head of a golf club. Carew seemed to be trying to say my name. I shut my eyes and swung for his face—a splintering crack and the weight of the stick disappeared as something boomeranged off into the dark and then, seconds later, clattered to the stones and rolled fast with a rattle before coming to rest.
I stared at the stick. It had snapped. I held less than half, a jagged stake. Then I looked down at Carew.
He lay on his back with his head in the street, his limbs twitching. I stepped up and peered at his face. I almost recoiled, then forced myself to look. The nose and upper teeth were crushed in, but the lower teeth were intact and the jaw moved as he gurgled on the black glistening oil that seemed to well up from his throat. One eye was punctured, leaking down the cheek.
I tore my gaze up to the street, expecting to see jumping lanterns and people running toward me. But there was no one. I wanted to drop the end of my stick but instead gripped it tighter. I stepped over Carew’s spasming legs to his other side, where the eye was open and unbroken, examining the sky. There was a dark fecal odour as I hunkered down and poked his overcoat pocket with the splintered stake. My hand reached for his pocket and slipped inside, and I winced, certain I’d find a wriggling mass of insects in there. Instead I felt a cold heavy thing, and I eased out the revolver, gleaming like lubricated lead. I hefted it in my palm, turning the snub barrel around and peering, mesmerised, down the hole. Then I jerked to my senses and stood up, thrusting the revolver in my own coat pocket.
The stick. I had to find the other half of my stick, it was—it was—I couldn’t even think of the word evidence. I wheeled around in the middle of the street like a drunk, lunging at stick-shaped shadows between the cobblestones. I pricked up my ears, walleyed, certain I had heard a sound, a snicker of mockery. Yet there was nothing. Carew had stopped kicking and twitching, and I stumbled a few steps toward him. Should I check his pulse? Was there something else I was supposed to do? Just go! a voice rang in my head, and I reeled around and pitched off down the lane.
I don’t remember the route I took. I don’t remember deciding to go back to Ghyll. Only when I drew to a halt across the road from my house, saw it deep in its crevice and framed against the ragged stars, did I realise where I was and what I was supposed to do. They would come looking for me here. They would search the house.
The entrance hall smelt stale, had a hint of putridity, like rotting fruit. I almost expected the floor to be
sticky, a tacky layer of slime. I ascended the stairs to my bedroom. Gripping the stake like a knife, I tipped the door open. I stepped inside. It seemed almost exactly as I had left it when I’d gone down to let the inspectors in: the rumpled bed, the verandah doors ajar. I could even see the sheet of newspaper I’d left lying on the floor by the bedpost. Yet I did not trust it. It all seemed too carefully arranged, as if this were not my house but a perfect full-scale replica, down to the last impossible detail. Warily I crossed the room, wondering where to start. At the antique desk with the curlicued legs, I opened the slender letter drawer, regarded the two envelopes stored inside, my tormentor’s riddling poems. I ran the drawer shut, opened the larger file drawer next to it, and flinched in surprise.
A big, battered, wood-handled hammer lay inside.
A few thick, mismatching nails rolled alongside it. I blinked, then reached in and lifted out the hammer by the scarred handle. It was very heavy, the huge dented claw and head; I hefted it, mystified. This was not mine. I set it down on the desk and opened the middle file drawer. It was packed with newspapers, like a rubbish bin that had been stamped down by a foot. Pall Mall Gazettes. Except I hadn’t kept the copies in here, I’d—what had I done with them? I slammed the drawer shut and yanked out the bottom one, too hard, ripping it free of the slot and sending it crashing to the floor. Treasure spilt out. Coins, a heavy landslide of them, mixed with crumpled banknotes. I plucked a note out: blue, foreign. The coins rolled unevenly over the floor. I dropped the bill, wiped my hand on my trousers. I turned and swept the room with my eyes, a hysterical giggle bubbling on my lips. To the wardrobe I scurried and flung the doors wide. I plunged in with both hands and pulled out my folded clothes and found myself clutching a brown-paper sack. It made a tinny jingling. I stuffed my hand in and brought out a fistful of rings and trinkets; a silver-link chain dangled from my fingers. I rummaged further, hurling clothes over my shoulder, and emerged with another paper sack, something soft inside. I shook it onto the floor. Coils and tresses of hair tumbled out, of all colours, yellow and chestnut and brown and black, like a motley animal. I backed away in terror. Why did all this seem so nastily familiar? What dream was this? I threw open the sideboard. A large parcel was jammed against the rear. I pulled it out and tore at the butcher’s twine and brown paper. A flash of iridescent green inside. An emerald waistcoat. The emerald waistcoat. I held it up before me like a fantastic dragon skin. In the wrapping was more clothing, folded as if from the laundry: a loud yellow checkered jacket that looked disturbingly familiar; a nightshirt from which fell a white frilly article. I hooked up this thing with my stake: a pair of girl’s drawers stained crimson brown along the under seam.
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