Hyde

by Daniel Levine

  I have observed, he wrote, that when I wore the semblance of Edward Hyde, none could come near to me at first without a visible misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take it, was because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil. Pure evil! Me! His protestations were becoming pathetically transparent: It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty. I was the devil, I was that child of Hell—not only hellish but inorganic. I was despised and friendless. He had to say such things, I told myself, he had to invert everything against me, insist that it was I alone who’d destroyed us. He had to delude himself before he could die. And it wouldn’t be long. The stoppered bottle was draining day by day like an hourglass. I did not know him anymore, this paranoid, muttering, desperate wretch who had stopped shaving and trimming his nails, who kept the long mirror swiveled around to face the wall so he could not catch sight of himself, who wept, curled up on the table at night like a man in the straw of his execution cell, moon-barred and cold. The powers of Hyde, he wrote, seem to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyll. And the hate that now divides them is equal on each side. Hate? I did not hate him. I pitied him. For his own incurable sake, I wished him dead. I wished us all dead. With a broken heart I pushed the last dose of the powder into my blighted arm at dawn. Coughing, shivering, Jekyll shuffled to his desk and scratched out the final page of his confession. Father’s fountain pen was nearly dry, and his scrawl grew fainter and fainter as he coaxed out the last of its black blood:

  Will Hyde die upon the scaffold? or will he find courage to release himself at the last moment? God knows; I am careless; this is my true hour of death, and what is to follow concerns another than myself. Here then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.

  I stand over the desk, over the white envelope propped against the bell-glass lamp. Do you see? Jekyll, you lunatic, do you see? I have not destroyed it, I have not touched it. I have left it absolutely intact, your precious manifesto, your revised will and testament, with Utterson’s name in my place. I have not laid a single foul finger upon it. Utterson will see through all your lies and it will have been for nothing that you deluded yourself and maligned me, who never wanted anything but to serve you, to protect you!

  My hand feels fuzzy at my side, weighted with blood. And yet, strangely enough, I find that my hand is rising, magnetised, toward the envelope. I try briefly to resist before my fingers close around the thick paper, and I wince, half expecting it to sear my flesh like something baptised. But it lifts freely from the desk in my hand, the buckled pages crackling lightly inside. I lick my lips, heart hammering. Then I turn the envelope around to the flap at the back.

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

  The inky spiders scrabble back and forth and up and down over the boundaries, intersecting and crawling over one another; I drop it on the desk, stagger back a step. Impossible. Impossible! Yet I am grinning uncontrollably even as I shake my head in denial, a grin like a rictus of recognition. He’s been here all along. Watching, waiting. Hide and Seek, Hide and Seek. The Hanged Man and the Devil, together at the end. I stumble into the table behind me, bumping my hip, which shoots a white flare of pain up my side. I spin around to the gathering blue dark in the windows. So dark! Where’s the day gone? I hobble round the table and gape out at the sky, burning royal blue with a fingernail cut of moon on its back shredded across with cloud. How is it nighttime already? Why haven’t they come for me?

  On cue, I hear something and go rigid: distinctive metal squeak across the courtyard. The conservatory door. Now the crunch of gravel. I duck down and smash my face to the glass and catch the pair of tall shadows walking toward me, one behind the other, before they disappear from my view. I stand up, the whole cabinet rippling with my pulse. It’s here. Thank God, they’re here. My hand slides into my pocket, gropes around. I plunge into my other pocket. Empty. The phial, it was—it was just here. My eyes peel wide. The cyanide. He took it. Seek. He’s hidden it. My escape. From downstairs comes the woof of air and clang of the surgery-block door, then the pair of footsteps clumping over the theatre boards. I stand paralysed by the windows. There is silence as they pause at the foot of the stairs. Then they start to climb: a scuffling echoing stamp up the bowed old steps. The crack beneath the door flickers with an unstable candle flame.

  A rapping on the door frame. Sir? Poole says, his voice muffled. Sir? Dr. Jekyll?

  I cannot breathe.

  Dr. Jekyll? Mr. Utterson is here to see you, sir.

  I shut my eyes.

  Dr. Jekyll! Poole calls like a threat, and suddenly I bellow out: I can’t see him!

  It rings in the air as I hunch, amazed. It half sounded like Jekyll, in fact. In the awful quiet I watch the flickering crack of the door, waiting for the axe blow to fall. Then Poole says, Thank you, sir, very good. The scuffling footsteps descend; the crack grows dark again as they cross the theatre floor and I listen to the crunch-crunch-crunch over the courtyard.

  I didn’t fool them, of course. I heard that triumphant note in Poole’s voice. They are in Big House now, planning their attack. The storming of the cabinet! Where is the phial? I need the cyanide, I can’t let them take me out of here alive. I can’t have this go on! Seek! There is only that smothered silence, the devil with a hand clapped over his mouth, containing his mirth. He wants to see me dragged out of here alive, publically exposed and punished. It’s what he’s wanted all along. What Jekyll has wanted, in his secret heart, all along. To be found out. Stripped naked. Mortified. Scourged clean. Oh God, what’s he done with the phial? I must know where it is, the knowledge is in my head! Where would I hide it? At Jekyll’s desk, I wrench out the lower drawer, pull up the false bottom. The space is empty. I paw through the papers in the upper drawer and slam it shut. At the glazed press, I yank out each drawer in turn—nothing, nothing—I scan the shelves, fumble through a rack of clattering glass phials, all of which are empty. I scamper to the wardrobe, fling open the doors. Am I to keep repeating everything over and over in a hellish cycle? I pull out the wardrobe drawer and angrily run it shut again. I stand panting at the wooden back of the oval mirror, facing the wall, and I take hold of the top and spin the glass back around. Bearded, pallid, starved, mad-eyed, I stare at the nerve jerking in the veiny cave of the socket. My head buzzes with a sound of stumbling flies. I reach out to touch the glass, the tapping spot beneath my skin. Then my gaze clicks down, to the wall behind the mirror frame. The black leather violin case, leaning behind the wardrobe. Yes. Recognition leaps from my groin. Yes. I reach behind the mirror and grasp the thing by its head and slide it out, with a twang of strings from inside. My eyelid’s twitching faster, and that spike is piercing my oculus as I throw the case up onto the table, unsnap the clasps, draw the lid open.

  The instrument is shattered. As if it had been held by its throat and smashed, the lacquered bronze body is crumpled inward, the face splintered, revealing the coarse, unvarnished innards. The ebony fingerboard juts awry, a compound fracture, and the tailpiece is broken free; the strings are coiled in a twanging farrago. The neck is snapped like a bird’s and the scrolled peg box is twisted to the side. The wooden wreck lies in its blue velvet deathbed. I brush the knotted strings, touching off a rough resonance as my fingers slide toward the top and stop at the flap to the compartment where the resin is stored. Oh, please. Oh, Jekyll. I pull open the flap. Nestled sideward in the niche is the phial, still filled with my salvation.

  I press it to my lips, gulping out a sob of laughter. Spearing pain in my eyeball—oh, he is livid!—but I squinch the eyelid shut and hobble to the windows. I push the middle one open and thrust my head out into the rushing blue-black ni
ght. Flecks of rain spittle my face, racks of clouds race across the sickle moon. I want to scream in victorious defiance—I win! I win! But there is a sound, and I draw back. Footsteps over the gravel, moving fast and nimble. A slim shadow slides over the rear wall and vanishes into the alleyway. I catch a gleam of copper before it disappears. Bradshaw. I pull my head inside, clutching the phial as tight as I can without breaking the glass. Very clever, John, cutting off the Castle Street door, the rear escape. Except I won’t be using that door, will I. I take the rubber plug of the phial between my knuckle and thumb.

  Now the creak of the conservatory door again, and two sets of footsteps crunching over the gravel. I don’t bother to peer down this time: Poole will carry the axe, and Utterson will wield something else, a poker, the jimmy bar I dropped. I work the rubber plug from the glass lip with a faint celebratory pop, lift it to my nostrils, and sniff: acidic tickle in my sinus, that sweet smell of almonds. It will burn as it goes down, scorch and smoke and suffocate as it sears through this world and opens up the blackness beyond. Am I ready? Am I ready for extinction? How is it possible that everything will keep on running after I’m reduced to nothing—all those lives out there continuing unchanged? Surely she will feel it, wherever she is. Surely out of all those oblivious people, Jeannie will register the impact of my absence like—like some minuscule yet necessary element removed from the air. She will stop what she is doing and look up, with that adorable, quizzical furrow between her brows, and she will turn to her sister or whoever is there beside her and say—what will she say? What will be my eulogy?

  The surgery door downstairs woofs open, and now they clump back across the floorboards to the steps. The stamping climb, the door crack filling again with that trembling yellow light. A pause.

  Rapping on the door frame. Harry! Utterson shouts. Harry, open the door! I demand to see you!

  I shut my other eye, squeeze against the spiking pain. Rhythmic, as if he is throwing himself up against the wall of me, stabbing with a shard of light again and again, trying to get out, to get into the body and stop me from ending everything. He is not ready. He hasn’t finished with his game. My terrible story could yet go on.

  Harry! Utterson shouts. Open this door or we will smash it down! Do you hear me? We will break down this bloody door, I promise you!

  For a last second, with my eyes closed, I can almost hear them, that other mutiny from years and years ago. Carlton and all the men pounding at the door of Father’s study as we clasp our knees inside the chokey, listening to the muffled sounds of our deliverance, our father bellowing from far away, Hen-ryyy! Hen-ryyy!

  I cover the lip of the phial with my thumb and suck in a breath to roar: John! No mercy, John! No mercy! Bring on the axe! A second of undulant silence, then a crashing whunk that makes the door jump in its frame. Yes! It’s the axe! The axe! It’s happening exactly as I knew it would. There was never any escaping it. It was written. Another bash against the door as the axe bites it, a squeaking crack as Poole tears it loose and winds back and whacks it into the wood: the door rebounds and a chip splinters out near the knob. Yes, that’s it, clever Poole. He’s going for the lock, he’ll chop through the lock and the door will spring inward and I will hold the phial grandly up toward them, like one of Jekyll’s toasts. Utterson is shouting behind the door, and it sounds like my name with each blow of the axe—Hyde! Hyde!—like there are innocent people down in the theatre and he is waving his arm wildly, telling them to run, to escape. A white sliver of wood splinters outward again near the lock, and I lift the shaking phial into the air, half blinded by the frantic stabbing pain. Seek! Devil! You lose, do you see? You lose! Ready or not, here I come! No more hiding!

  To its end!

  Introduction

  to The Strange Case of

  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

  The inspiration for The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde famously came to Robert Louis Stevenson in a dream. According to his wife, when she woke him from what seemed to be a dreadful nightmare, he snapped, “Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.”1

  This was in 1885; Stevenson was thirty-five years old. He had written a substantial number of stories, poems, essays, and plays, including his second-most-enduring novella, Treasure Island. He was weeks away from publishing a novel he had been laboring over for several years, which was, he imagined, to be his masterpiece—the melodramatic Prince Otto, which almost no one has heard of today. It is tempting, in fact, to speculate that Stevenson’s impressive corpus of witty, elegant prose would be all but unknown to most modern readers if not for that dream in which, by the writer’s description, “one man was being pressed into a cabinet, when he swallowed a drug and changed into another being.”

  Sitting up in bed, chain-smoking in his usual fashion, he dashed out a draft in three days and then read it aloud to his stepson and wife. Fanny Stevenson criticized it heavily, insisting that he was missing an opportunity for a “great moral allegory” (in her words). The wounded Stevenson petulantly threw the manuscript into the fire and then submitted to his wife’s advice and banged out a second version in just three more days. Like a man possessed—like Jekyll himself scribbling out his desperate Statement of the Case­—Stevenson composed the most famous moral parable of modern life in under a week. “Practically it came to me as a gift.”

  Dreams span universal across human consciousness, evoking the primal fantasies and neuroses that define our peculiar species. Jekyll and Hyde’s extraordinary success can be linked not so much to its clever artistry as to its conjuration of our most nightmarish fascination: the horror of self-transformation. Horror not at changing from I into Other, but at changing from I into something repulsive and alien that the unfortunate transformer must admit is also I. Just as Gregor Samsa reluctantly begins to enjoy clambering on sticky insect legs about his walls and ceiling, Jekyll concedes to feeling the “leap of welcome” at the sight of his base, hidden self. Stevenson has truly tapped into the timeless dilemma of human self-awareness. Here is “me,” walking around, wearing my clothes, speaking words, interacting with society. Yet somewhere inside this civilized shell is another me, watching and evaluating all this posturing, harboring thoughts that are often directly contrary to what is being externally expressed. Is this the real me or yet another construction? And why are the impulses of this other me so frequently—gratifyingly—inappropriate, misanthropic, and, indeed, self-destructive?

  The moral allegory Fanny Stevenson was pushing for is very clear: Jekyll is good, Hyde is bad. Victorian sensibilities did not care for shades of grey; sympathy for the devil wasn’t culturally popular, the way it is today. Yet Stevenson was hardly the stuffy Victorian, and despite his characters’ insistence on Hyde’s unredeemed depravity, there are little hints of a nuanced human being in Hyde’s artfully appointed rooms, the tea things laid out in the cabinet at the end. More important, if you look beyond the biased emphasis on Jekyll’s goodness, you will see the actions of a calculating, self-loathing egomaniac who makes conspicuous mention of his secret to his lawyer and butler, who lies to his friends, who places poor Hastie Lanyon in a position from which he can’t recover, and who leaves himself no choice but suicide in the end. Jekyll is no more a saint than Hyde is pure evil. The story is a veil masquerading as truth, stiffened into a simplified metaphor of human duality. But the dream lives behind it, complex and primeval, the untold tale of the inner man, the sociopath, the other I.

  I must have brushed that dream myself. One morning several years ago I woke on my stomach and found myself staring at my own hand, and I suddenly remembered the scene in Jekyll and Hyde when Hyde awakes unexpectedly in Jekyll’s bed, having transformed overnight, and recognizes first his “lean, corded, knuckly” hand. I had been searching for a project and all at once here it was—a gift: Hyde.

  There have been many Jekyll and Hyde retellings over the years—stage plays, films, television series, musicals starring David Hasselhoff. My interest was not in reconfigurin
g the premise but in returning to the original, exploring the inconsistencies of character and crafting a convincing psychological model to explain Jekyll’s plunge into self-annihilation. The original, too, is a murder mystery; why does Hyde kill Sir Danvers Carew? The story says it is coincidence. Yet the murder is witnessed by a maid in an upstairs window who recognizes Hyde, “who had once visited her master.” Who is this master, and why should Hyde visit him? Questions yearn for their answers. For nearly 130 years Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has remained immovably on the fickle (and often unfair) shelves of classical literature, an endurance no doubt due to these suggestive ripples in its surface, the tantalizing hints of an underworld calling out for discovery.

  If the plot points of Stevenson’s story were graphed on one sheet of tracing paper and the points of my own version graphed on another, it is my hope that the two, held together to the light, would overlap in a harmonious, albeit rocky, landscape. I am deeply indebted to Robert Louis Stevenson, romantic, bohemian, adventurer, consummate stylist, and fellow soul, for the use of his haunting yarn and his fantastic dream, which belongs, in the end, to us all.