The Jekyll Revelation

by Robert Masello

  The night was silent once more.

  Woggin dropped his paws to the floor and, much subdued, resumed his vigil at the hearth. What had the wolves heard and to what had they responded? I thought perhaps Dr Rüedi would have the answer, but when I mentioned the nocturnal visitors to him now, he did not look up from the observations he was jotting in his notebook. ‘The Alpine wolf has been exterminated in Switzerland.’

  ‘Not from what I saw.’

  ‘It is possible that a few have miraculously survived the organized slaughter.’ It was plain where his sympathies lay.

  ‘Three at least.’

  ‘You have nothing to fear from them, regardless. They hunt only at night.’

  ‘These were not hunting. They seemed to have been summoned.’

  Snapping the notebook shut, as if to close this irrelevant topic, he plucked the pince-nez from his face and said, ‘While you are here at the clinic, you will observe a daily regimen, to which I will admit no departure.’

  As I am not a man fond of rules and regulations—what writer, or artist, of any sort is?—my natural inclination was to bridle, but as I pulled on my shirt, I stifled it.

  ‘Your lungs are much damaged—the lower left lobe in particular—and your pulmonary capacity is, as a result, severely diminished.’

  Nothing unexpected there.

  ‘First, you will embark upon a strictly administered diet, accompanied by a series of treatments designed to clear away the malady. Once that is done, we shall undertake the necessary procedures to reconstruct your constitution along more salubrious lines.’

  ‘Of what are these treatments and procedures to consist?’

  Shaking his head, he said, ‘I know that you are a literary man, Mr Stevenson—I have even gone so far as to read a number of your stories in preparation for your convalescence here—and I realize that you have made something of a name for yourself in the greater world beyond these mountains.’

  Although his words should have been a compliment, he uttered them in a tone that suggested nothing of the sort—it was as if I had committed an indiscretion he was willing to overlook, for now.

  ‘As such, you are no doubt accustomed to asking questions and living by your own lights, but here that is not encouraged. Indeed, it is forbidden. I cannot cure what I cannot control.’

  ‘I seldom cede authority over myself.’ Though I could imagine, even as I spoke, Fanny’s rejoinder if she had overheard that.

  ‘Yet you will, and you must. Else, there is no purpose to your stay here.’

  In the uneasy pause that followed, the deal was struck. I was to bend to his will, and he was to heal my ravaged body.

  Was this a great bargain, I wondered as I left the examination, or had I made a deal with the devil?

  TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA

  Present Day

  Rafe awoke to the buzzing of a bee around his nose. He waved it off, then opened his eyes to another cloudless blue sky. Rain was only a distant memory.

  On nights as hot as the last, he didn’t even bother to sleep in the trailer. He’d toss his sleeping bag up top and lie under the moon and stars in nothing but boxer shorts and a Nirvana T-shirt. Truth be told, he liked it better that way. He’d never been fond of confined spaces—the memory of too many foster homes and state facilities, with locked doors and fluorescent lights and communal showers that stank of Lysol, haunted him—and given any choice, he’d always opt for freedom and the open air.

  Climbing down, he went inside to take a shower, in a stall so tiny he had to keep his elbows cocked into his sides; make some strong black coffee; and put on a fresh uniform of khaki shorts and short-sleeved shirt, along with all the other gear—canteen, flashlight, compass, sunblock, epinephrine syringe. Normally, he carried a flare gun, in case he had to signal a helicopter where to pick up an injured hiker, but in this kind of drought, he’d never risk shooting off a flare and starting a fire.

  The night before, he’d waited until he was sure Miranda and Laszlo were eating in—he could hear the wok sizzling—before ambling across the road to La Raza. It wasn’t that the place was especially good. It was simply there. And since the Spiritz were occupying the bar, harassing the cute bartender and making a lot of noise, Rafe went outside to the wooden picnic tables, where strings of lights shaped like bright red chili peppers dangled over the patio. Before he could order, Amalia, the waitress, said, “Two cheese burritos, rice and black beans, and a Dos Equis. I get anything wrong?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked surprised.

  “I’ll start with a side of guacamole.”

  “Is that for your legs?” she asked, glancing down at all the scratches and cuts.

  “That’s what the Dos Equis is for. Make it two, in fact.”

  Only a couple of other tables were occupied. At one, a father with a gray ponytail and a tie-dyed shirt that said Keep on Truckin’ was sitting with a kid who looked a lot like him, only thirty years younger. Rafe wanted to tell the old man that Keep on truckin’ was, to the best of his knowledge, just an expression, and that it was okay to stop now. At a table on the other side, a family of Midwestern tourists—blond, sunburned, with a guidebook and a map spread out between their plates—were sneaking furtive glances all around, no doubt taking in the local color. It was nice to see a map, Rafe thought; as part of his training, he’d had to learn to read them carefully and thoroughly, but who really used them anymore, when you could just pull out your cell phone and ask Google to figure out where you were and how to get to the next stop? He wondered if the sightseers had had a chance to visit the Cornucopia and buy one of Miranda’s paintings—which reminded him that he had forgotten to retrieve the watercolor she’d left for him on the easel.

  He’d get it on the way back.

  What she saw in Laszlo eluded him. Sipping his beer and dipping his chips in the homemade guac, he mulled it over for the millionth time. Sure, the guy was sort of good-looking, in a vulpine way, and from what Rafe could gather, she’d picked him up at an ashram or something, where he’d convinced her that Topanga was the ticket to the alternative lifestyle. He must be a very good salesman.

  “His ancestors once lived off the land in these canyons,” she’d told Rafe.

  “Too bad they didn’t buy any.”

  “They were run off.”

  He didn’t ask by whom; the whole story was probably phony. As far as Rafe could tell, that was the key: Miranda felt responsible for Laszlo the same way she felt responsible for Trip, a dog she’d found run over by the side of the road. People were forever abandoning their unwanted pets in the canyon, rationalizing that they’d go off and live a wild and natural life. What they led, as Rafe had seen over and over, was a short and terrified existence until a car, or the coyotes, got them.

  The same coyotes whose habits and travels were the subject of his ongoing research.

  Before he finished his meal, the couple he called Mr. and Mrs. Pothead slipped in. Both were in their late thirties and, despite the hot sun up in the canyon where they lived entirely off the grid, looked and moved like a pair of ghosts. They went toward the last table in back, as far from everyone else as possible, but as they passed Rafe, Mr. Pothead nodded his head and almost imperceptibly dropped a baggie onto the bench beside his thigh. Rafe knew perfectly well what it was—he stuck it in his pocket as unobtrusively as he could—and why he’d been given it. More than once, Rafe had passed by the little cannabis patch they were growing up in the hills, but he had never turned them in to anybody. Live and let live, he’d always believed—live being the operative word.

  Not that he wasn’t aware of nature’s often bloody ways. Red in tooth and claw, as Tennyson, one of his childhood favorites, had put it. At most of the group homes where Rafe had been briefly parked, there’d been bookcases, usually stocked with moldering copies of other old classics—Kipling, Dickens, Conrad, Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson—donated when somebody died. No one but Rafe ever wanted to read them, but he did, vora
ciously. Others tried to escape incarceration by climbing walls and breaking windows, but he fled his sagging cot and metal footlocker on a sea of words. Even then, he knew that linoleum floors and concrete walls were no way to live.

  This morning, he was heading off with his aerial antenna to do some triangulating on the coyotes’ present positions. The animals were in constant motion, migrating wherever the food supply led, and digging their dens wherever the spirit moved them. The problem was, they kept bumping up against freeways and garbage receptacles, and had gradually lost more and more of their fear of humans. It used to be, coyotes would slink away at the first sight of a human. Then it got to the point where, if confronted by a hollering and rock-throwing human, they’d simply stand their ground and wait it out.

  At what point would they decide to stop waiting?

  Stepping out of the trailer, he was just climbing into his government-issue jeep—a hundred and ten thousand miles on it but still going—when a Volvo station wagon pulled in, pretty much blocking his exit. A customer, he thought—maybe Miranda would ring up an early sale today.

  But instead, a girl—not more than twenty-one or twenty-two—got out in a uniform just like his, only with the wide-brimmed hat smartly positioned on her head. She waved like she knew him and walked over to the jeep.

  “Hey, Rafe.”

  “Hey.” Did he know her?

  “We met last year, at the land management conference in Anaheim. Heidi Graff. I’m your shadow.”

  “You’re my what?”

  “Didn’t you get the e-mail? I’m supposed to shadow you. I’m still in my training rotation.”

  Rafe was bad about that; he checked his e-mails only every few days, claiming to his superiors that Internet connections in Topanga were spotty.

  “Today?” he said. “Now?”

  “Uh-huh.” Her eyes flicked to the passenger seat where he’d stashed the antenna. “Tracking? That’s great. I’ve never done it. Be right back.”

  She grabbed a backpack—brand-new, with shiny leather straps—from her car, and after gently depositing the antenna in back, tossed her pack in after it, and buckled in up front.

  Rafe, nonplussed, just sat there in the driver’s seat.

  “You forget something?” she asked.

  “Nope.”

  She waited, then said, “Your seat belt?”

  He buckled it.

  “Good,” she said, now looking straight ahead and tucking a wisp of light brown hair under the brim of her hat. “I’m excited.”

  He put the car in gear, and pulled it around her Volvo. This day had just taken a brutal turn for the worse.

  “By the way,” she said, glancing at his scratches, one of which had turned purple overnight, “what happened to your legs?”

  29 October, 1881

  ‘Please place your shoulders between these,’ the nurse said. Lying back on the chaise longue, I allowed myself to be cradled between two bags of sand, which she expertly tucked around me. Plainly, they were meant to discourage any movement. As if that were not impediment enough, she then swaddled the rest of my body in a scratchy striped blanket, all the way down to the toes of the warm woollen socks that had also been prescribed by the good doctor. Finally, she plumped up a pillow shaped like a fat sausage and filled with buckwheat shells, and wedged it under my neck, so that my face was angled upward towards the bright sun. I quickly understood why, despite their failing health, so many of my fellow invalids had complexions the colour of burnished gold. We were baked like biscuits in the Alpine sun each day.

  ‘I daresay you’ll get used to it,’ the recumbent man beside me observed. Turning my head carefully so as not to displace the neck pillow, and opening my eyes narrowly lest the sun blind me, I saw a long face with a lush brown beard flattened atop the hem of his own blanket.

  ‘John Addington Symonds,’ he said. But before I could make my own introduction, he added, ‘Your arrival, Mr Stevenson, has been the talk of the Belvédère.’

  ‘Good talk, I hope.’

  ‘Talk. Up here, you’ll discover, everything has to be turned over this way and that a dozen times in search of something titillating.’

  ‘Ah, but there I must have fallen short.’

  ‘You would be surprised what provides fodder for the dinner table conversations. You have a dog, yes?’

  ‘Woggin.’

  ‘The very same. Portrayed in various accounts as a vicious mastiff, the size of a lion, that has attacked, among others, Mr Desmond.’

  I had to laugh.

  Symonds smiled, though his lips were hidden by the bushy moustache that joined with his beard to conceal fully half his face.

  ‘But I know you, too,’ I said, ‘or perhaps I should say I know your work. I have read, and thoroughly enjoyed, some of your essays on the Italian Renaissance, though I cannot claim any great acquaintance with the artworks you so intimately discuss.’

  ‘Then that we will remedy,’ he said. ‘Every other week, I give a lecture in the grand salon on some topic or other. Last week it was Leonardo’s inventive genius.’

  ‘And this?’

  ‘I have not yet decided, though I am leaning towards the poetic expressions of Michelangelo. Please come, and bring your wife, Fanny, and stepson, Lloyd.’

  ‘You do know a good deal already, don’t you?’

  ‘As I suggested, gossip is the most valuable currency there is up here. You will soon be trading in it yourself.’

  ‘I doubt I’ll have time to glean much. I have a new book in hand, and I hope to spend my time working on it.’

  ‘That, like everything up here, will largely depend upon Dr Rüedi. He is the unchallenged despot of this realm.’

  ‘So he told me himself, in no uncertain terms, this morning. And in perfect English, I might add. Isn’t he Swiss?’

  ‘Yes, but he studied medicine for years in America. In the city of Philadelphia.’

  ‘That would explain the faint whiff of an American accent I detected.’

  ‘It would also explain his willingness to break with orthodoxy on such issues as care for the consumptive. He cares nothing for received wisdom. For better or for worse, he’s a man who goes his own way.’

  ‘As do I.’

  ‘Which means you will either get along like a house afire—’

  ‘Or wind up drawing pistols at dawn.’

  Before we could utter another word, we were interrupted by a celestial visitor from on high—a snowball, perfectly round and aimed with precision, striking my chest and exploding like a lady’s overloaded powder puff.

  ‘A direct hit!’ I heard Lloyd shout. ‘A direct hit!’

  ‘You are the best gunner in the fleet!’ Desmond congratulated him.

  They were standing at the top of the toboggan run, with Miss Wooldridge wrapped in a fur coat, its collar turned up around her porcelain cheeks, her hands buried in a matching muff.

  ‘Ah, I see that, despite the canine imbroglio, you are on cordial terms with our Mr Desmond and his . . . ward,’ Symonds said, with an emphasis on the last.

  ‘Watch me go!’ Lloyd shouted, turning his toboggan to face downhill. ‘I’m the fastest one.’

  ‘Beginner’s luck,’ Desmond chided.

  ‘Is she really his ward?’ I asked Symonds sotto voce.

  ‘If, by that, you are asking if he takes care of her, yes. If you are asking by what means he is compensated for such services, you may draw your own conclusions.’

  ‘Can we coax you into a run?’ Desmond called out to me.

  ‘By no means may you do that,’ replied the nurse who had tucked me in. Hands on her hips, she had assumed her battle position. ‘And if another snowball is thrown, I shall have no choice but to inform Dr Rüedi.’

  ‘Oh no, not that!’ Desmond cried, laughing. ‘Anything but that!’

  Lloyd had dragged his toboggan to the starting line, and though he appeared impatient for the contest to resume, his eyes were riveted to Miss Wooldridge.

  ‘
Shall we make a wager?’ Desmond said to him.

  ‘You bet!’ Lloyd replied, using one of the common colloquial American expressions I found so charming. ‘What’ll it be?’

  ‘What would you like?’

  Even from the terrace, I could see Lloyd’s cheeks flush red, as the words he wanted to say stuck somehow in his throat.

  ‘Well?’ Desmond said.

  ‘If you win, I’ll black your boots.’

  ‘Fair enough. And if you do?’

  ‘I get a kiss from Miss Wooldridge.’

  Desmond laughed and looked to his companion. ‘It appears you have been drawn into this unseemly wager, Constance. Do you consent to the terms?’

  Taking it in good spirit, Miss Wooldridge said she would abide by its conditions.

  And then the race was on. Each of them climbed onto his sled, and at the word Go! from Miss Wooldridge, they shoved off from the crest of the run and went hurtling down the hill. From my lounge chair, I could not see the whole journey—they were lost from sight after twenty or thirty yards—but when they returned, minutes later, a jubilant Lloyd dragged his toboggan behind him like Achilles taunting Troy with the body of Hector.

  Desmond, feigning great shame at being beaten by a mere stripling, trudged behind him. ‘I demand a rematch.’

  ‘Not before I have had my winnings!’ Lloyd cried, and in a fashion bolder than I would have credited him, dropped the rope of his sled and strode to where Miss Wooldridge stood.