‘So who’s ready for a snowball fight?’ Lloyd asked, emerging from his room as he wrapped a long scarf—my best cashmere, I noted, given to me the previous Christmas by my mother—around his throat. But only Woggin took him up on the offer, racing to the door in expectation of going out and, with any luck, finishing off that gentleman’s trouser hem.
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA
Present Day
Dusk was falling by the time Rafe finished checking for any other traps, assessing the drought damage to the native flora, and taking measurements at the lake—water level, purity, signs of life. That last item was increasingly rare. Although it was hard to believe, locals told him that the lake had once been stocked with bass; personally, he had never seen one there. Frogs, turtles, even a deadly cottonmouth or two, but no fish. A short pier, maybe fifteen feet long, that had once stood above the shore and allowed fishermen to dangle their lines over the railing was now rickety and abandoned. An old rowboat lay upside down on the dry, cracked soil beneath it.
The fire road down the east side of the mountain gave the jeep another workout, rattling the chassis and coating the windshield with so much dust even the wipers choked. A couple of the scratches on Rafe’s legs were going to need a swab of antiseptic and a dab of something cool and soothing; poison sumac was as common as ants around here.
Once the fire road debouched onto the main thoroughfare of Topanga, he took a right and was driving toward the tiny town center when a horde of motorcycles, like a swarm of hornets, zipped and zoomed around both sides of his jeep. The riders wore blue denim jackets—Rafe wondered if a motorcycle gang was allowed to call itself a gang if they didn’t—emblazoned with a patch that showed the logo of a floating ghost above the name Spiritz. Even the bikers who frequented Topanga had to have a metaphysical spin.
But then, that was what kept Topanga Topanga. It had always had a reputation as a haven for hippies and weirdos, oddballs and outcasts, rock ’n’ rollers and stoners. The residents still played it up, since what else did they have to offer the tourist trade other than the natural beauty—now threatened by the persistent lack of rain—surrounding them?
The town center was no more than a couple of dozen storefronts—a Mexican restaurant and bar called La Raza, where the Spiritz had already parked their bikes helter-skelter; a general store called, in typical canyon fashion, the Genuine Store; a gas station with one pump; a hardware store, a vegan café, and a real estate outpost that Rafe had never known to be open. When he got close to the Cornucopia, with its hand-painted wooden sign showing a horn of plenty stuffed with grapes and flowers and berries, he slowed down, waited for a semi to rumble past on the opposite side of the two-lane highway, then crossed over and parked between the store and the rented trailer he lived in out back. A three-legged mutt named Trip—short for Tripod—scooted over to greet him.
“Hello, boy,” Rafe said, extending a hand, which the dog inspected for some sign of a treat before settling for a pat on the head. “How was your day?”
Ever since he was a boy, Rafe had talked to animals—his little sister, Lucy, had called him Dr. Dolittle after seeing the movie of the same name.
“Trip had a good day,” he heard from around the corner of the store. “He actually caught a squirrel.”
Miranda. He found her, unsurprisingly, behind an easel, painting a watercolor of the sunset. The sky had turned a deep, almost purple, blue in preparation for going black altogether. Nights in the canyon were nothing like nights in Los Angeles, where the ambient glow of the city lights kept everything crepuscular until dawn. Here, the dark meant something.
She was wearing green flip-flops and a vintage dress, long and flowery and faded, with her long blond hair tied sloppily in a knot on top of her head.
“You know how they say even a stopped clock is right twice a day?” she said, her eyes still appraising the picture. “Well, even a three-legged dog can catch a squirrel once in a while.”
The painting was good. Hers always were. Rafe sometimes wondered why she wasn’t working in the city, displaying her pictures at some fancy gallery, instead of burying herself out here in the boonies. And, as usual, he found himself wondering what to say to her next.
“That’s good,” he finally came up with, nodding at the painting.
“You think so?”
“I do.”
“Then you can have it. I don’t think I can sell it, anyway. It doesn’t have a unicorn in it,” she said, laughing. The walls of the Cornucopia were covered with her original artwork, but the only ones that sold, she said, were the New Agey ones of fantastical beasts and rainbows and maidens. “You can take it off the easel when it’s dry. Give it an hour or so.”
Finally turning toward him and glancing at his bare legs, she said, “What happened to you? You fall in the briar patch?”
Embarrassed, Rafe said, “A job hazard.” He always felt vaguely embarrassed around Miranda.
“Come on into the store. I’ve got something for that. All natural.”
She padded across what had once been the lawn, her sandals flapping, then through the screen door, with Trip hopping up the steps behind her.
Inside, the store was crammed with shelves displaying everything from crystals to incense sticks, handmade jewelry to homemade jam, while the walls were covered—every inch—with Miranda’s paintings, some of them ornately framed and hung, others just sheets of paper haphazardly thumbtacked to posts and door frames. Slipping behind the counter with its antique cash register, she picked up a little round bottle of something called All Organic Soothe It. She unscrewed the lid and held it under his nose; it smelled like fresh lemons.
“Smells good, doesn’t it?”
“It does.”
“It feels even better.” And before he knew it, she had come around the counter and knelt in front of him, slathering lotion up and down, from his knees to the top of his hiking boots. Rafe felt his whole body go on alert, but this was so Miranda. She did everything on impulse, and half the time seemed unconscious of, or oblivious to, the effect it might have on other people. He really didn’t think she was trying to flick his switch; she was just taking care of a problem.
“Would there be any way,” she said, “you could pay your rent a little early this month? With the drought and all, not so many tourists are coming to the canyon.”
“Sure.”
His legs were tingling—and not just from the unguent—when the wind chime hanging near the door tinkled and Miranda’s boyfriend, Laszlo, slouched in. A look crossed his face that suggested he wasn’t pleased to find Miranda rubbing lotion into Rafe’s calves, but he was too cool to say anything about it.
“I’m hungry,” he said instead.
“It’s too hot to cook.”
“Want to go to La Raza?”
They were talking like Rafe wasn’t even there, which he wished he wasn’t.
“The Spiritz are there,” Laszlo added.
“So what?”
“Just thought you’d want to know in advance.”
“Good. Now I know. Maybe I’ll cook after all.”
She straightened and slapped the bottle of Soothe It into Rafe’s hand.
“What do I owe you?” he asked.
“It’s on the house.”
“The hell it is,” Laszlo said, snatching the bottle away and looking for a price tag. “How much is this, Miranda?”
“I said it was on the house.”
He went behind the counter, found another bottle, and read the price off it. “It’s six bucks.”
“I’ll add it to the rent check,” Rafe said, eager to get out from between them.
Laszlo tossed him the bottle, a little harder than was warranted, and Rafe slipped out of the store, Miranda’s dog hobbling after him. Even Trip could tell a squabble was brewing.
Opening the door to his trailer, which had been baking in the hot sun all day, was like opening the door of an oven. He stepped back as a gust of hot air washed over him.
He’d have to give it a few minutes before it became habitable. Trip plopped on the dirt at his feet.
The lights went on in the apartment above the Cornucopia, where Miranda and Laszlo lived, and he could hear a few more words about the dinner plan before their air conditioner kicked on with a roar. He stood in the pitch dark, smelling of lemons, looking up at their windows until Laszlo appeared in silhouette and yanked the blind down.
28 October, 1881—Midnight
The Belvédère’s dining room was, despite the best efforts of several chandeliers and wall sconces, a gloomy affair. Most of the tables were already occupied, the invalids bent low over their soup bowls, their companions keeping a close eye on their progress. At every elbow stood a tall glass, drained or not, of milk. Goat’s milk, it was flavoured with honey and salt, and served as an essential part of Dr Rüedi’s cure.
From the far end of the room, Randolph Desmond, in an immaculately cut suit, stood and waved a napkin.
As we made our way to his table, I could feel all eyes upon us. In places such as this—close and hermetic worlds where stimulation is so hard to come by—any new and novel element is a welcome intrusion. Our party made for more speculation than usual: Fanny rustling along in her full skirts, Lloyd sauntering behind with a mask of insouciance meant to conceal his discomfort, while I brought up the rear, looking, as Henley had once joked, like a scarecrow who’d escaped a field somewhere. Woggin, fortunately, had been left to his own devices with a bag of soup bones sent up to the room by the obliging Herr Hauptmann.
Desmond had already ordered escargots for everyone, and instructed the waiter to fill our glasses from the bottle of rich, dark Valtellina wine. Even Lloyd’s glass was filled, and his mother, not wishing to embarrass him, let it pass. Miss Wooldridge alone did not imbibe; which I took to be an indication of the restricted diet she might be obliged to follow by the ruling deity of the place. When I asked if Dr Rüedi was anywhere to be found in the dining room, Desmond scoffed and said, ‘He’s not a man for pleasantries or social occasions. You’ll find that out soon enough. Do you see him tomorrow?’
‘Yes, I’ve an appointment first thing in the morning.’
‘It won’t be first thing for the good doctor. He’ll have been up for hours. Rumour has it that the man never sleeps.’
‘And what else’, Fanny asked, ‘does rumour report?’
Desmond, refilling the glasses and gesturing to the waiter to bring another bottle, said, ‘That he keeps a menagerie of wild beasts in the cellars, where he performs secret experiments. On especially still nights, and if the wind is right, they say you can hear the howling.’
‘Louis,’ Fanny said, ‘it sounds like there might be something worthy of a story there. The shilling shocker you’ve been searching for.’
‘Not to mention’, he added, ‘he keeps lunatics in the attic, bound in chains.’
‘Ah, so he is our own Mr Rochester?’
Desmond appeared puzzled, and Fanny quickly elucidated for him. ‘In the book “Jane Eyre.” By Charlotte Brontë. Rochester keeps his mad wife under lock and key.’
‘Ah yes, of course. I do not read as much as I should.’
‘I do give him books,’ Miss Wooldridge put in, ‘but I generally spot them, weeks later, gathering dust under a whiskey decanter on his sideboard.’
‘Where they are much appreciated,’ he said, patting the back of her hand.
Even upon closer inspection, whatever ailed Miss Wooldridge was not immediately apparent. She was fair and thin, but had no cough nor other respiratory impediment that I could detect. Still, there was something unwell about her—a downcast look in her eye, a tendency to lay a protective hand across her abdomen, a nervous disposition. Although I knew the clinic was renowned for its treatment of consumptives, she did not strike me as one. No, she had been escorted here by Randolph Desmond—who appeared to be in the perfect bloom of health—for some other remedy.
Even then, I could hazard a guess.
Out of courtesy, Desmond never asked after my own reasons for coming to the clinic, but then, the cause of that was not obscure. One look at my gaunt cheeks or fallen shoulders, I knew, would suffice. Dinner passed pleasantly, with several more courses—including veal with mushrooms and cream, served, like everything in Switzerland, on a heaping bed of rösti—and I know that Fanny was won over by Desmond’s determined inclusion of her son. ‘Have you ever tobogganned?’ Desmond asked, and when Lloyd said he had certainly been on a hurley, Desmond replied, ‘A hurley is to a toboggan as a mule is to a thoroughbred. Tomorrow I’ll prove it to you.’
‘Will you be coming, too?’ Lloyd eagerly inquired of Miss Wooldridge, the wine having gone to his head, but she smiled and said, ‘We shall have to see what Dr Rüedi says.’
I had the impression that Dr Rüedi was the oracle to be consulted, by one and all, on every decision, however trivial. We were the subjects, I surmised, in a kingdom of his invention, or, perhaps more to the point, unsuspecting prisoners of his own bastille.
29 October, 1881
‘Fill your lungs as deeply as you can,’ Dr Rüedi said, laying the end of the auscultation device, called by its practitioners a stethoscope, to the hollow of my bare chest, ‘and hold it in.’
He bent his head low, and I could not help but be reminded, by the thick wave of pommaded brown hair that crowned it, of a coxcomb. There was something of the rooster in his demeanour, too—head held haughtily high and a strut to his walk. His every gesture was quick and certain, his hands darting from instrument to instrument, bottle to bottle, making tiny notes in a concise script in a journal half the size of any that I might employ. All in all, I found his attitude to be as cold as the end of the stethoscope, a revelation that was perversely comforting; surely, a man as remote and charmless as this must be very good indeed at his profession, or else he would long since have had to find some other sort of employment. Of bedside manner, he had none.
He listened now for fully a minute, until, no longer able to hold my breath, I exhaled in a gust—the exhalation followed by a racking cough that necessitated a handkerchief to the mouth to catch any droplets of blood or phlegm that might have accompanied it.
‘Let me see that,’ the doctor said, as soon as I had finished wiping my lips, and then, like some ancient priest seeking augury in the entrails of an eviscerated bird, raised a magnifying glass to study the cloth more closely.
‘A minor emission’—was his verdict—‘but how often does this occur?’
‘Last night, three or four times.’
‘That is to be expected. You are going to need several weeks simply to acclimate yourself to the mountain air.’
Several weeks. There was not only the cost to be dealt with, but the prospect of many more nights like the one that I had just endured. To spare Fanny the worst of it, I had retired to the sitting room, where, wrapped in two shawls and a woollen blanket, I had huddled in an armchair with a spittoon between my slippered feet and Woggin, ever the faithful companion, lying on the cold hearth, head atop his paws and sleepy eyes fixed on me.
‘And how do you like it here, Woggin?’ I had asked. ‘Were the soup bones to your liking?’ Though they have not the capacity to reply, I refuse to believe that our pets have no comprehension.
‘And what was it about Mr Desmond that you took such exception to? You know that we are going to have to buy him a new pair of pants now.’
Woggin looked untroubled, his tail giving one tired thump.
‘I should find a way to make you work off the debt.’
His ears pricked up, as if at the injustice, and then his head went up, too, on alert to something I had not heard. Bounding off the hearth, he ran to the window and stood up, his front paws on the sill, staring out at the night.
‘What is it?’ I asked, getting up from the chair and, swaddled in my blanket, stepping close to the glass.
Woggin was vibrating like a tuning fork that had just been struck, and though I placed a hand on the back of h
is head to calm him, he seemed not even to notice.
I leaned close to the glass, but because of the glow from the gas lamp in the room, I could see little beyond my own reflection. I extinguished the light, and returning to the window, I could see a salt lick, like a silver anvil, sitting squarely in the middle of a snowy field. The ground around it had been trampled down to the dirt by the hoofs and paws of a thousand wilderness creatures. Beyond the field, a thick forest of green-needled trees marched, like Great Birnam Wood upon the high hill of Dunsinane, towards the back of the hotel.
From that thicket, I heard a lone cry, long and low and melodious.
Woggin growled.
The wolf cry came again, this time echoed by a second from some other and less distant quarter. Then a third.
Woggin barked, and I hastened to quiet him, lest he wake up Fanny and Lloyd, or some other recuperating guest of the clinic.
But Woggin could scarcely be contained, his short tail stiff and shaking as the howls came closer. There is something in the cry of a wolf at night, its mournful cadence and hungry undertone, that awakens in the soul of man an atavistic memory . . . and fear. One can barely hear their cry without feeling a corresponding chill and a desire to kindle a blazing fire, or arm oneself with club or rock or rifle. What did it inspire, I wondered, in Woggin? The will to do battle, to protect his master at all costs . . . or to join forces and run free with a savage and ungoverned pack?
Slinking close to the ground, a grey wolf emerged from the cover of the trees, its powerful shoulders hunched, its long and narrow snout—narrower than those of the wolves I had commonly seen on the North American continent—sniffing at the ground. On either side behind it, two black wolves crept out, too, for all the world like henchmen guarding their lord and master. Their ears were pricked up, their heads turning back and forth to survey the open ground for any threat, or quarry. The grey wolf approached the salt lick and lapped at it, while its companions kept watch. When it was done, they took their turn. But just as I expected them to retreat again into the woods, their sovereign, Lord Grey, raised his eyes to the window and stared, with the intensity of a judge who has donned the black cap of condemnation. For several seconds, our mutual gaze remained unwavering, and I felt a form of communication I had never experienced before with any other creature, not even with Woggin. Whatever the message might have been was unclear as yet, but I had no doubt some link had been forged. Before I could think of what next to do, the wolves suddenly turned their attention in one direction, as if responding to a call only they and Woggin, who whined piteously, could hear, and trotted around the corner of the hotel, out of my sight.
The Jekyll Revelation Page 3