Hyde

by Daniel Levine

  A cure. It was a clever excuse and provided us time. Yet for weeks, Jekyll did nothing, certainly nothing by way of curing us. It wasn’t until February that he finally wrote to Maw’s for more powder. He passed the days pacing, muttering, mentally thickening the membrane that divided us, and when I pressed to this permeable barrier to try to hear his thoughts he would jerk his head, as if away from a fly. On the desk he kept a collection of books, and one leather volume in particular he pored over constantly, running his raggedy fingernail along the dense print, tapping and nodding vigourously. The Descent of Man, by Charles Darwin. There was one underlined passage that Jekyll returned to again and again: The inquirer would next come to the important point whether man tends to increase at so rapid a rate as to lead to occasional severe struggles for existence; and consequently to beneficial variations, whether in body or mind, being preserved, and injurious ones eliminated. Do the races or species of men, whichever term may be applied, encroach on and replace one another, so that some finally become extinct?

  I wanted to understand this—variation, extinction. It was crucial. But Jekyll had sealed me off and would just read his book, using Utterson’s folded note to mark his place. Utterson had sent two notes. This bookmark was the second. His first letter arrived about a week into our confinement. Poole set it on the dinner tray, which he was by then leaving on the stairs. Utterson had been to see Lanyon. Our friend is badly changed, he wrote. He looks ruined. He is drinking again, very heavily. I know that you are involved, that you know the cause of this. Yesterday I called at your house and was told that you aren’t seeing anyone. What has happened? Harry, for God’s sake, what is happening?

  The second letter came a week later, and this was the one Jekyll used for a bookmark. There was only one line, across the middle of the page: Hastie is dead.

  Jekyll would unfold it often and gaze at the words. There was something mesmerising about them, a kind of perfect truth. Anytime we read them, those words, they were true, and always would be. The line of ink swam with a kind of power. Hastie is dead.

  Day after day, it was the same, except worse, pitching into the body and quelling the nausea, possessing the body and not wanting it. This was the worst part: I could feel no pleasure in physical existence anymore, no animal joy in having the body. It was just this aching, foul-smelling encumbrance. The instant I had control of it, Jekyll withdrew to the outer reaches beyond the barrier, and it was lonely and cold and frightening. For it felt like existence was being imposed upon me. Like I was being ejected helplessly into the body and the world for some specially prepared punishment. Which, of course, I was.

  Jekyll waited until the last brick of the powder in the stoppered bottle was almost half gone, then he wrote to Maw’s. He was reading his Darwin book, that passage again, murmuring to himself the phrase encroach on and replace. He rose and went to the glazed press and opened E drawer, lifted out the bottle of powder, and tilted its remaining contents. He made a contemplative ticking sound with his tongue as he regarded all that was left of the six foil bricks he had shipped back from Paris. He carried the bottle to his writing desk and set it on the edge of the blotter, then sat and squared a sheet of paper and at last dashed off the letter to Maw’s that he should have written months before. It came out oddly cryptic. In March of 1883, he wrote, he had ordered a large quantity of a certain salt compound, of which he now wished a new supply. Would Messrs. Maw please send him a testable sample of the salt compound to be sure it is of the same efficacy?

  Jekyll crept down and set the letter on the stairs, and that evening there was a brown envelope included on the dinner tray. From the envelope, he slid a brown-paper sachet and a note of compliments from Maw. Jekyll tipped the white powder from the sachet into the silver spoon until it was full, and then he overturned the spoon into a glass of the crimson liquor, which at once began to froth and boil. When it fizzled out, Jekyll held it to the light and frowned. I could see for myself: the colour did not look exactly right. The fluid was pale green and transparent—yet, while I couldn’t say if it was too light or too dark, it seemed a shade off. Jekyll sucked the serum into a syringe, which he set in the Milward box in the upper groove pointing left. Then he prepared the other needle with the old powder in the stoppered bottle. The two syringes lay in their beds pointing in opposite directions, and for a while Jekyll scrutinised the glass barrels, comparing their colour.

  He had fallen asleep, his head on his arms, at the table, and I banged awake, almost tipping backward off the bench. I fisted my gummy eyes and saw the open Milward box. I rolled up Jekyll’s hanging sleeve and reached for the syringe pointing left, loaded with the compliments of Messrs. Maw. I had been working the curling vein that branched off the main and wrapped around the forearm, and now I flexed it up and slid the needle in and pressed the plunger.

  I sat there as the stuff flowed through the arm. I wiggled my fingers, then eased the steel from the vein. My heart thudded dully. Nothing was happening. I was not surprised. I had known it would not work. That subtle contrast in colour: this new compound from Maw’s was different from the old. I waited for Jekyll to react, to tell me what to do. Yet from within, there was only inscrutable silence, a palpable muteness. What else was there to do? I took up the other needle and punched it into the abscess and pressed the plunger.

  Early the next morning, Jekyll wrote again to Maw’s. The sample, he said, did not achieve the same effect as the original stock. Thus it is quite useless to my present purpose. It is the old, original stock I require, not merely the same compound but the same exact stock from which my supply was taken. I cannot exaggerate the importance of this. Anything other than the old is worthless to me.

  A reply from Maw’s arrived with lunch. The original stock, it explained, had been depleted almost entirely by Jekyll’s first order. The sample compound he had been sent was chemically identical to the original. There is no formulaic difference between them. Perhaps the failure in efficacy resides, with all due respect, in some other factor. We have included another sample of the same compound for your examination.

  Jekyll picked up the brown-paper sachet by its edge.

  Some other factor, he whispered.

  All at once I could see the inevitable end. We were going to run out of the powder—there was no more of it to be had—and I would be left alone. The original supply was the powder Jekyll had used on Emile Verlaine to release L’inconnu, this precise, unique compound. It was the key Jekyll had used to unlock his own mind, and now no other key would fit. A dead boy’s medicine, we had been taking. Emile, who had hanged himself. From the wrought-iron bars of his window, with a bedsheet, in his pajamas, face purple and eyes bulging, his bare toes dangling inches from the floor.

  That night Jekyll cooked up the cyanide. Into a clear corrosive acid, he mixed a dab of dark blue unguent, and then fired the cobalt froth over the Bunsen in a round-bottomed flask attached at the top to a condenser. The colourless, lethal distillate dripped into a glass, infusing the cabinet with the pleasant scent of almonds. Jekyll poured the poison into a glass phial, plugged it, and held it to the light, turning it, as if to check for imperfection.

  But it is perfect. From my pocket I remove the phial again and hold the glass column as tightly as I dare. My amulet, my cure.

  Jekyll was sitting on the windowsill a day or two later, the middle window pushed open to let in some air. The courtyard lay dank with mist that seemed to swirl in through the alleyway leading out to Castle Street. The effect was oddly hypnotic and calming, the mist oozing from the bottleneck. Then, without warning, two men walked through the alley into the yard. Jekyll started, half rising from the sill. The man in the tall topper saw the movement and looked up at the windows. It was Utterson. Harry! he called out before Jekyll could duck down. He strolled across the gravel and the other man followed slightly behind. Harry! he called up again with a forced cheerfulness, and then he seemed to truly see his friend and stopped.

  Jekyll was still attempting t
o shave every few days. But his hair was long and matted, and he had been wearing the same clothes for over a month. Utterson’s expression faltered as he glanced down from the window and along the limestone wall to the splashed gravel at the bottom. Jekyll had been pouring the chamber pot out the window onto the stones below. Utterson appeared to take this in before yanking his gaze upward again. The other man, wearing a grey bowler at a rakish tilt, was standing at his side looking up at the windows as well. Harry, Utterson said, you—you seem unwell. Jekyll gave a hollow laugh. I’m low, John. I’m very low. Perhaps a little air would do you good, Utterson called, a little exercise! Whip up the circulation a bit. It’s quite pleasant out, despite appearances. What do you say, Harry? A little stroll with Enfield and me. You remember my cousin, by the way, Richard Enfield?

  Enfield. From under the cocked grey bowler he peered steadily up at us, and his mild, insolent face clicked at last into place. Enfield. His grip on my collar, the speck of spittle hitting my cheek as he snarled, One hundred pounds.

  You—you are very good, John, Jekyll stammered, I’d like to, but—it’s not possible, I’m afraid, I’m not well at the moment. Well, Utterson said, well, perhaps we might stand here and chat from where we are? Would that be agreeable to you, my friend? But the sky was black and the rooflines white, and I had the sudden presentiment of standing on a gallows above an eager crowd of uplifted faces. Jekyll twisted from the windows. The cabinet rolled and the floor disappeared, and for a sick second I pitched into free fall, clawing at my throat as if swinging from the rope, kicking to a roar of applause. Then the room rose to meet me with a smash, and I found myself on the floor. Seasick, I shut my eyes and heard the sound of footsteps crunching across the courtyard, fading into the alleyway.

  Soon I was regularly taking two injections to bring Jekyll back to the body. I watched him draw up a list of all the chemists in London and begin to send out his missives, each with his maniacally specific instructions on the formulation of the powder, the precise percentages of the compound. Each sample arrived in its tiny sachet with its maker’s compliments, and each was drawn into a syringe and set into the box for the laboratory rat to test. We both knew none of it would work. Only our own rapidly diminishing supply could bring him back. I could have tried to resist his experiments. But I was too tired and ill and frightened to fight him. These were Jekyll’s final, futile moves against the inevitable—his extinction. I could not refuse him that. For when the last dose was gone, I would replace him, as Darwin had said. Jekyll would be no more.

  Sometimes in the dead of night I’d jerk awake in the body. Left arm pounding down to my fingertips, I would pace around the table, to put off the needle. When I paced quickly I found I could keep just ahead of the terrorising notions that trailed behind like an evil odour, waiting to catch up and envelop me in nauseous dread. All night sometimes I would patrol the long perimetre of the table, until dear morning began to grain the cabinet in pink-grey dust, and I could at last face the prospect of creeping back into our decomposing head. I was on the final turns of my haunted march one such early dawn when I passed Jekyll’s writing desk and noticed that his precious leather-bound Darwin had been left lying open. One page stood up like a stray hair. I came to a halt and found myself extending a hand to lay upon the open page. As if direct skin contact might help me to understand its awful concepts. On the blotter alongside the book lay Father’s fountain pen, a gleam along its polished wood, and I picked it up and unscrewed the cap, and with my fingertip I touched the needle-pointed nib: like a flash I saw Father punch his wasted throat, and for a horrific second there was no blood, just a black startling hole, before he punched again and the two bright red geysers hissed at high pressure and he spastically blinked, eying us still—I jerked my head, breathing fast. Then I bent over the book and scratched the nib across the page, puncturing the paper on the last furious stroke. I drew back and stared at the black, spiky scrawl:

  Jekyll

  please!

  Slowly I looked to the pen in my hand, my left hand.

  I knew this spidery scribble by heart.

  You be hide and I play seek.

  The witch’s tarot cards: the Magician, the Hanged Man, the Devil.

  All is you.

  I was nodding, a choking suffocation in my throat, as if I were about to scream or laugh or both. I released the pen, which rolled from my fingers onto the blotter, and I backed away, clamping a hand to my mouth. I looked down at my feet, half expecting to find the floor like a pane of glass and the shadow world reflected upside down below, my own demonic double stemming from my soles, his pupils dilated and black above his hand clapped to his own mouth, mocking my horror. Hide and Seek.

  Mrs. Deaker had been right.

  You’ve done this to yourself, Mr. Hyde.

  Later that morning, Jekyll stood over the desk. He had waited hours to approach the Darwin book. As if he did not know what I’d done to it, or did not care. But his heart was slamming as he stared at the open page. He reached out, and with his fingertips traced the ink indentations, as he had done to that first letter, as if reading Braille.

  He had known, all along. He had been able to read what I couldn’t. He had said it to Utterson: Hyde is fracturing. He’d known we were not alone.

  Jekyll

  please!

  Please? What did I think he could do? He had wanted this to happen. Wanted to watch it happen. There isn’t any cure, he’d said. It’s in the system. You can only marvel at it, its ruinous multiplicity.

  Jekyll’s eyes were blurring. He reached out and slapped the book shut. He almost turned away but then seized the volume from the desk and carried it over to the chamber pot in the far corner by Father’s portrait. He dropped the book into the pot, then turned and unbuckled his trousers, hunkered down, and strained out a dry painful curl of movement. He stood and looked woozily down at the soiled book. Father was watching from the wall. Jekyll buckled his trousers and then looked up and met Father’s imprisoned stare. He drew in a breath, as if on the brink of shouting something, then stepped up and gripped the gnarled wooden frame in both hands. He leant his face toward Father until their foreheads nearly touched, their eyes an inch apart, and with a groan, Jekyll stepped back, wrenching the picture from the wall—a tug, then a snap of wire, and he staggered backward with the heavy thing. He lifted it over his head and smacked it down on the table with a splintering crack. He smacked it down again, the frame snapping and canvas buckling; he threw it to the floor and stamped, stamped, roaring something I couldn’t understand, spittle flying from our lips as we jumped up and down like an ape, grinding our heel into Father’s face and feeling the canvas shred apart as we grated it into the floorboards. We snatched up the broken sagging thing and dragged it to the stove, began ripping it apart and feeding the pieces to the coals, wadding up the canvas and stuffing it into the hell and watching the paint blister and hiss. I dragged a hand across my mouth, then stared at my hand. A sliver of wood was embedded in the meat of my palm, like a mark of stigmata.

  Jekyll would write later that I’d done this on my own. That I played apelike tricks, scrawling blasphemies on the pages of my books, destroying the portrait of my father. And by the time he wrote those words, he seemed to fully believe that this version of events was the truth. He had to believe it. He was going to die. And it seemed he did not want to face what he had done. He did not want to know the truth anymore, and he didn’t want anyone else to know it either. He began to write his Full Statement of the Case when there were perhaps ten doses left in the bottle. He managed to make them last for a week. He started the document in the middle of the night, after pacing around the table for hours as if working himself up to it. At last he sat down at his desk, squared a sheet of clean paper before him, and carefully unscrewed the cap of Father’s fountain pen.

  I was born in the year 1835, he began, to a large fortune, endowed besides with excellent parts, inclined by nature to industry, fond of the respect of the wise and g
ood amongst my fellowmen, and thus, as might have been supposed, with every guarantee of an honourable and distinguished future. I watched as this peculiar confession grew over the page in this roundabout, concealing style, admitting nothing, confessing to nothing except an imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. After three hours hunched over the desk he glanced up, ears pricked. He drew the lower desk drawer open and removed a dusty sheaf of forgotten files, inserted his finger into a sly hole in the bare wood, and lifted out the false bottom. In the coffin of space underneath, he stored the crumpled, inky pages and then fit the false bottom back into place and put the portfolio in the drawer again. I could hardly believe it. He was hiding it from me. Was he demented? Did he actually think I couldn’t read every word he had written? Yet the bizarre ritual continued over the course of that final week. Discreetly he would remove the false bottom and extract the expanding pile of pages and scribble away for several hours before tucking the document back into its hiding place. It was our story, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness. If each, he wrote, could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable. And yet it was all abstruse and misleading nonsense. There was nothing of Father or the childhood. Nothing of his work on Emile Verlaine. Nothing of the letters, the newspapers, Carew, Mr. Seek, any of it. There was nothing even of the syringes. According to his confession we drank the magic serum—compounded the elements, watched them boil and smoke together in the glass, and when the ebullition had subsided, with a strong glow of courage, drank off the potion.