Hyde

by Daniel Levine

  Jekyll blinked, surprised. Lanyon lifted a tearing baleful eye. D’you think I’m a child, Harry? That I’m a child sitting obliviously by while the big people talk? That’s why you wrote me, isn’t it, and not John, because you think I don’t know anything. You thought I’d just do as you asked, none the wiser, is that it? Well?

  More or less.

  Lanyon slumped back in his seat with satisfaction. That’s what you’ve been shooting in your arm, then? That—that junk? How does it work? You shoot that junk into your arm and what—you become this, this other person? This Mr. Hyde? Yes, Jekyll said, that’s how it works. Except I don’t really become him. I am him. You are him, Lanyon repeated. I’ve known you all my life and I’ve never seen you—act like that, talk like that. It was like—someone else, someone deformed, and horrible. Yet he is me, Jekyll said. I created him, from my own mind. A long time ago, when I was a boy, I needed him. I needed someone to protect me, and so I created him inside my head. That isn’t—Lanyon began, and paused. Possible? It’s very possible, Hastie. The conditions must be right. There must be a powerful need. But where there is need, and the urgency to survive, anything is possible. I have told you this before. It is nature. When threatened, we either die or evolve. I evolved.

  Lanyon shook his head incredulously. Nature? You’re going to make this about evolution? That old rubbish? That’s your explanation? So your father beat you, Harry, is that it? You think my father didn’t beat me? You think you’re the only one with a bastard for an old man?

  Jekyll sighed and for a moment examined the burn blisters on the right thumb and fingertips, which were swollen tight with fluid. In the end, Hastie, it does not make any difference if you understand what I’m telling you, or if you believe me. I promised only to explain. My father did not beat me. He hardly touched me, in fact. He would take me by the scruff of the neck, sometimes, or by the hair . . . Once or twice he chopped all my hair off. But he didn’t have to use his hands. I obeyed him. I had no choice. It was like school. He was teaching me what he thought I needed to learn. He collected spiders, all around the old manor. He would make me lie still on the floor while he shook them onto me. I wasn’t allowed to shut my eyes . . . Then there was a maid, a servant girl. Alice. He would tell me what he wanted me to do. To her, to myself. He forced me to drink whisky. Injected cocaine into my arm. He made me crawl into a tiny cupboard in his study, drunk and racing. Curled up in the dark, for hours and hours, while he played his violin. It was all part of his education, you see. It’s taken me many years to realise it, but he wasn’t trying to torture me. Not out of meanness. My father knew what the world was like. Indifferent to suffering. A pitiless competition. He believed he was shaping me into something unusually resilient, something extraordinary. He was deranged, of course. But in his way, he succeeded.

  Jekyll looked at Lanyon and gave him a small smile.

  Lanyon stared back. And is that what you were doing to that poor young man in Paris? Making him into something extraordinary, Harry?

  Jekyll’s smile went cold. Lanyon gave his own, humourless. You think I don’t know about that either. You really think I don’t know a thing. I’m a doctor, in case you’ve forgotten, I know other doctors, we have doctor conversations. People talk; I don’t know if you realise that. You were experimenting on that Frenchman, weren’t you. Whatever you’re doing to yourself with that stuff, you were doing to him. Trying to make him—evolve, like you say. Because that is nature, isn’t it, Harry?

  No, Jekyll said. His lips were numb. That was not natural. No, Lanyon echoed, it wasn’t. You were shooting that junk into his arm, weren’t you. The same stuff you’re giving yourself. Not exactly. The core is the same, the powder at the core. The rest is—it must be individualised. Each mind is distinct— Details, Lanyon interrupted. Details. You were experimenting on him with drugs, and he killed himself because of it. Because he could not take it. Isn’t that right. Yes, Jekyll said, his painful fingers clenched in a fist, his eyes beginning to sting. You’re right. He hanged himself. All those voices in his head, all those yearnings pulling him apart, turning on each other, in the end. The demon, he started terrorising the child. Ripping up his things, leaving his nasty paintings in places around the room only Pierre would find. And there was Emile in between, trying to hold the centre together. It was extraordinary. Except Emile didn’t want to be extraordinary, he just wanted them gone. He wanted to be cured. He thought I could cure him. But there isn’t any cure. You can’t just cut it out. It’s too deep for that. It’s in the system. You can only marvel at it, its ruinous multiplicity. I had to see. I couldn’t stop. He asked me to stop, and—and I couldn’t stop.

  Jekyll’s face contorted; he pressed a whitened knuckle to his lips. Lanyon was nodding, a triumphant glint in his blurry gaze. For shame, he said with vehemence. For shame, Doctor.

  Because you are so blameless, Hastie?

  Lanyon cocked his head as if perplexed. He was slumped in his chair, holding the drink on his desk. I’m sorry? For what am I to blame? Eh? I want to hear you say it, Harry, what am I to blame for? You couldn’t treat her on your own. You wanted to believe you could, but you couldn’t. She needed a proper doctor, she needed care, and you denied her those things, because you did not want to see that she was sick. Lanyon’s face was darkening to a livid bruise. How dare you? How dare you judge me, how dare you say anything to me about treatment and care? Lanyon slammed his whisky glass on the desk. How dare you! he shouted, a vein forking under his eye. What care? What proper doctor? You? I should’ve let you treat her? Are you out of your mind? Keeping Winnie away from you was the best thing I could’ve possibly done for her!

  It didn’t have to be me. I told you that from the beginning. I could have recommended any psychiatrist in Europe. But you didn’t want to hear it. You didn’t want to acknowledge her illness, you wanted to pretend that she was merely unhappy. You were content to lock her in the bedroom when she was in one of her moods, as you would put it. One of her moods. That is what she told me, at any rate, when she came to see me. Jekyll paused. Lanyon pressed his spittled lips together. You know she came to see me; I know that she told you. I can see it in your face. But perhaps she didn’t tell you everything that she told me. That you locked her up in her bedroom when she misbehaved. That was your treatment. Far more effective, I’m sure, than a professional could have provided. That’s a lie! Lanyon shouted. That is a lie, goddamn you, I did not lock her up for misbehaviour, I—I confined her to her room so she wouldn’t make a spectacle of herself, diminish herself. She would say things when she was—when she was—she would weep and say unimaginable things, make ridiculous accusations, in front of Collins, the staff. I would find her on the drawing-room sofa with the maid, clutching the girl by the wrist and saying the most astounding things. I just wanted to show her you cannot just—you cannot just give in to yourself! You cannot just indulge in every whim and emotion, you have to—you have to—Lanyon had risen from his chair and stood trembling over the desk, grasping the edge. What should I have done? Tell me! Send her away to live in a hospital like a lunatic? Send my own wife away from me?

  His voice cracked and he looked off, streaming tears. To hell with you, he croaked. He took a step from the desk and stumbled, fell to his knees. Jekyll sighed, shut his aching eyes. He rose and went around the desk, gripped Lanyon under the armpit, and hauled him up. All right, all right. Lanyon was limp, Jekyll guided him over to the leather sofa by the fire and eased him down. Lanyon dropped his head back and peered up, the firelight flickering over his wet cheek and the veiny hollow under his eye. Jekyll turned and crossed to the cabinets, where he poured a glass of water and added two brownish drops of morphia from a bottle he plucked from the collection. He carried it back and took Lanyon’s hand, curled the fingers round the glass. Drink, Hastie, he said, guiding the glass toward Lanyon’s lips. Lanyon jerked his hand away, sloshing the cocktail. He squinted into the glass and sniffed, then raised it and pointed a finger. It all would’v
e ended just the same, he said, slurring. Jekyll stood over him. Perhaps. Now drink. Lanyon held the wavering glass another moment, then tipped its contents back at a swallow. His hand slumped to the sofa, the fingers released, and the glass rolled off to the white fur rug. He sat blinking into his lap. A minute later his chin dropped to his chest, his flaxen hair hanging. Jekyll lifted him under the knees and laid him on the sofa, arranged a cushion under his head. Lanyon’s crimson face gradually relaxed, and a light snore began to whisper from his lips.

  At the laboratory table Jekyll packed everything back into E drawer and wrapped it up in the sheet. He took it under his arm and crossed to the door. Hand on the knob, he turned and looked back at his friend, sleeping deep and calm as a child.

  Good night, Hastie, he murmured.

  Goodbye.

  Day Four, Sunrise

  I bolt awake with a scream, embracing myself. I am in the chair by the windows, a blaze of orange light in my eyes. I shut them, quaking. Just a dream, then. Just a dream: Tied to the cabinet floor with ropes run through iron hooks in the boards, all my limbs spread. Poole and Utterson and Lanyon above me, and Lanyon holding the axe. He lifted it high and chopped down on my elbow; I rolled away spurting from the cross-section of arm and bone. Utterson took the axe and whacked through my knee. I felt the heavy steel bite into the floor, and blood fanned from the stump in a fine high-pressure spray—I can still hear that whunk of the axe head.

  I climb aching from the chair and stamp my dead foot as it needles into sensation again. That axe, that axe. Is the dream a prophecy, a message? What am I meant to do—go down there and find it? Will that stop them? Of course it won’t stop them. So what am I doing? I am limping across the cabinet and sneaking back the bolt of the door and drawing it open. The sunrise behind me slices down the steps and the railing and meets the impenetrable blackness of the theatre beyond. I draw the door wider and my shadow rears down the rough brick wall. My palms are damp. I wipe them on my trousers and then steal down in my stockings to the middle step, the twelfth step, and stop.

  This is madness. I have been safe all this time; why test the boundary line? Because of a dream? And yet at the same time I know that the spell of protection—whatever has been keeping me and the cabinet secure—is weakening, eroding. Poole himself broke bravely through it last night when he knocked on the door. There is no more refuge for me, no more asylum. Today all that ends. I lower my foot onto the thirteenth stair, easing my weight into its hair-raising creak. I wait, and my shadow self waits, reflected beneath my feet, in that sinister inverse world below where he is me. I take the fourteenth step, the fifteenth. At last I touch the floorboards of the theatre. I wriggle my toes, allowing my pupils to dilate to the darkness. The glass cupola high overhead filters a snowfall of light onto the dissection table, cluttered with crates and clustered bottles. I shuffle toward it, crackling over the packing straw strewn across the floor, until I can lay my hand on the startlingly cool marble. A smooth runnel grooves along the edge as a drain. I can see my exhalations chilling in the air. I hunker down and peek underneath the table, pat around with my hands. My fingers close over a wooden slat, splintered like a stake. I toss it aside and make out a slim suggestive shape propped against the farther edge. I hurry over and pick it up—a cold, heavy rod of iron. The jimmy bar, with its clawed hook at one end. Jekyll was using it to pry the crates open before smashing them apart. I heft it in one hand, comforted by its balance. Beneath the stairwell are the rings of wooden benches where students once sat to watch the horror show. I take a step toward them and then swivel around, cocking the jimmy bar, certain I heard something from there. I edge around to the other side of the table, not wanting to turn my back on the mob of shadows in the theatre depths. Then my eye falls on something, a shape, just beyond the circumference of light.

  An optical trick: it looks like a person sitting in a chair. It does not move, and neither do I. I inch closer, squinting. It looks like a man sitting there; I can see a head atop the shoulders. What the hell is that thing? I take another step toward it. Then it moves, there’s a sudden scratch and sizzling flare, a leap of yellow light. A match. A face and widened eyes hover behind the swaying flame—it’s Poole. It’s Poole! I stand rooted to the spot. The flame whiffs out, and pitch-darkness rushes into the void. A croak escapes my throat. Then panic storms like a horde of bats in my chest and I break free and run, bashing into the table and reeling off toward the stairs, clumping up and kicking the under steps and tripping, scrambling to the top. I reach for the open door and the glaring daybreak, and then I am in the cabinet, throwing myself against the door and slithering to the floor.

  I breathe in hitching gulps, a shrill ringing in my ears, as if from an explosion. I swallow and try to listen, pressing my face to the wood. At last I hear something—crunching—footsteps over the gravel. I crawl to the windows and press my cheek to the glass. Poole is crossing the courtyard back to Big House. I watch him enter the conservatory and then I slump against the lower wall.

  So this is it. All at once, this is it. Poole saw me. He knows it is me up here and not Jekyll, once and for all. It’s over, it’s done. God! Was he down there the whole night long, just sitting in that chair? What is his secret, soundless way in? Will I even hear them coming, or will they simply appear out of the air at the bottom of the stairs? I try to climb to my feet and cry out, my hip and right foot shrieking pain. I grab my ankle as if to choke off the throb. I can’t even wiggle the big toe, the pulsing mass. I must have broken it in my mad scramble up here. I grip the arm of the chair and groan up into it from the floor. I had to go looking for that ludicrous axe, didn’t I? I just had to go down there where the man was waiting for me! Well, he won’t wait anymore. He’ll go to Utterson for certain now, and within an hour or maybe two, they’ll be at the cabinet door together, banging away. I have to ready myself. I push up from the chair and hobble around the table to the glazed press, where I pull out E drawer and gaze lovingly, gratefully at the glass phial of cyanide lying on its side. Hello, pretty. I hold it in my palm again, loosely curling my fingers over it and feeling the solace kindle through my arm. My escape. My smouldering hole in the world, with me at its scorching centre. Whatever is coming, I will have this. I bring the phial to my lips and kiss the warmed, silky glass, then slip it into my pocket.

  With the last of the coals snapping, I sit in the chair I’ve dragged before the stove, holding the crook of my left arm. The vein is aching now, in rhythm with my pulsing toe. Tentatively I cuff the sleeve and stare at the gouged and pockmarked arm, the black weeping pustule in the cleft. The vein is dark and hard as piano wire under the skin, obviously infected. Under ordinary circumstances, I bet they’d amputate the arm from the elbow down. An appalling sight. There was no need to do this, to keep testing all those powders, when it was obvious even to me that none were going to work. But Jekyll kept pushing, demanding I sample every one. Mystifying business, the powder. Jekyll knew we were down to our last brick of the stuff. He had removed the silver-wrapped rectangular cake from H drawer and transferred the white crumbly brick to the empty bottle the night he returned home from Lanyon’s consulting room. And yet he waited over a month—well into February—before even attempting to order more of it from Maw’s. We were burning through the supply—I was taking four, sometimes five, injections a day by that point to bring him back into the body. And yet it didn’t seem to occur to him that we were running dangerously low on the last of the stock. Though it must have occurred to him. Perhaps he knew it didn’t matter, that nothing else would work. So why did he make me do this to my arm?

  Remember it. Concentrate; take your mind off the pain.

  From Lanyon’s house that night, Jekyll went home, up to the cabinet. The red-baize door hung open. The lock on the glazed press had been broken. Jekyll slid E drawer into its empty slot, and then slept on the table. Woke at dawn; stood wrapped in his overcoat by the red-stained windows. He crossed to the cabinet door and turned back the bolt, and it
slid open with its well-oiled snick. That locksmith had picked it cleanly. Jekyll went through the theatre and crunched out into the frosted gravel courtyard. Big House soared against the flushing daybreak. We would have to leave it, of course. We had no choice now. After Lizzie, after Lanyon, we could not stay. We would go to Liverpool and wait for 25 January and then leave England, possibly forever. Jekyll dragged the back of his hand across his eyes. Then he took a step toward the house, and it struck: the house flashed white, and the sky turned that odious greenish black and the earth lurched and spun upside down. Waving our arms to grab at something to keep from plunging into all that immensity, we groaned in the suck of gravity, before the world flipped upright. I staggered forward and fell to the stones, which bit into my knee and my palm. I stared at my hand, the skin indented and a white chunk of pepper-flecked gravel sticking to it. I gaped at the house, the crimson sky. Then scrabbled to my feet and loped back to the surgery block, the cabinet, and E drawer.

  I was eager to give the body back to him—to make certain that I could still disappear inside it and hide. By the end of that first day of confinement, however, I had taken three or four injections to bring Jekyll back. He couldn’t hold on to the body for more than a few straight hours. As if he were clenching a constant muscle with his conscious mind, clasping the body to him. When his concentration slipped, the floor would lurch in a sickening spin and pitch me out, queasy and increasingly desperate. Poole knocked on the cabinet door that evening, and Jekyll spoke to him through a two-inch crack, bracing the bottom edge with his foot. Poole, he said with a moan, I’ve—I’ve made myself rather sick. You can’t help me, I’m afraid. No one can help me, except by leaving me in peace so I can work on—on a cure. I’m trying to fix what I’ve done, to make myself better—but you must let me work, you mustn’t disturb me, however long it takes. Is that clear? Poole’s eyes glimmered through the crack. I have to close this door now, Jekyll said. I’m sorry, Poole. Please just let me be.