The Jekyll Revelation

by Robert Masello

  Smiling shyly and proffering her cheek, she awaited the chaste peck of a love-struck schoolboy, but received instead two hands turning her shoulders so that her lips were in play, and an embrace as fumbling as it was ardent. Lloyd kissed her full on the mouth, and even Desmond looked shocked.

  Miss Wooldridge put a hand to his chest and pushed him away, flustered.

  And in Lloyd’s cheeks, the colour rose again, but was it the heat of embarrassment or the flush of conquest?

  ‘Lloyd!’ I said. ‘That’s quite enough.’

  But he looked as if he had not even heard me.

  Miss Wooldridge rapidly quit the scene, marching up the steps of the hotel.

  ‘“Gather the Rose of love, whilst yet is time,”’ Symonds recited. ‘Spenser.’

  But I was not amused. Davos was a small world, and the Belvédère even smaller, and I did not want my stay there to be made any more uncomfortable than the medical procedures were bound to make it, anyway. Unless I could find some other means of occupying the boy’s mind, however, I believed that it would be.

  4 November, 1881

  Herr Hauptmann stopped on the corkscrew stair long enough for the shaking to subside.

  ‘It is quite safe,’ he assured me, as I clung to the railing with both hands. ‘But I shall not spare to have Yannick come to make it more stronger.’

  ‘I would be grateful for that.’

  ‘Aber natürlich. We would not want one of our most notorious guests to be an accident.’

  Overlooking the unintentional slander of my good name, I continued up the winding iron stair until I found myself in a room that resembled nothing so much as a tree house I had enjoyed in my youth. It was tight and spare, with wide wooden planks for a floor, rafters that grazed the top of my head, a sloping roof, and the overwhelming, but pleasing, odour of old wood and varnish. Tucked as it was at the top of the clock tower, the room commanded a view, through a pair of small mullioned windows, of both the front of the hotel, with its snowy pathways and toboggan run, and the back, where I had glimpsed the wolves at the salt lick.

  ‘We have taken the liberties of placing the desk and chair where your wife instructed.’

  Leave it to Fanny to have found and furnished just the sort of study I would need in order to finish the book I was writing, a tale of buccaneers and buried treasure. The desk was already outfitted with paper and pen, oil lamp and blotter. She had even had them place a bookcase with several of my reference volumes within easy reach of my chair, to the seat of which, she had added a feather pillow. How they had managed to wrestle all these things up that precarious stairway eluded me, but I could well imagine Fanny overseeing the task and brooking no dissent.

  ‘I will leave you to your labour,’ Hauptmann said, bowing himself back to the staircase.

  After a quick turn about the premises, I sat down at my chair, dipped pen in ink—she had even thought to sharpen the nib—and set to work. In almost no time at all, I was back on the high seas, transported there on the wings of imagination, and did not even remember stopping to light the lamp or replenish the inkwell. It has been a great and fortunate gift of mine, this ability to transcend my immediate surroundings and live among my own creations. Perhaps—no, assuredly—it is the method which I, like many another lad of frail constitution, has employed to leave the confines of his sickbed or hospital ward and travel the world. My mind was always carrying me off to exotic ports of call, to faraway lands where slave girls told stories to stay alive, where fatherless boys stowed away on pirate ships, and wild creatures roamed jungle isles. Nestled in the arms of my nanny and protector, the much-beloved Alison Cunningham, I would look out over the chimney pots of Edinburgh, blue in the moonlight, and imagine myself instead basking in the hot sunlight of a tropical clime. At times Cummy, or so I called her, would ask me, ‘And where are you now, Louis?’ knowing that I had left the shelter of her rocking arms and gone somewhere that the cold and damp did not affect me, where my coughing had been quelled. Seldom could I put a name to the place.

  The clock tower study was unusually well insulated and warm, not merely from the heat of the hotel below rising up, but because it had been meticulously built so as to ensure that the mechanism of the mighty clock remained dry and functioning. The hum of its many parts was a constant refrain, but rather than being an impediment to my work, it provided a soothing sound, steady as the waterfall in Rogie, or the distant susurration of the ocean waves that crash along the coast of the Isle of Erraid. The Merry Men is what the local inhabitants call the breakers, though merry they are not. More sailors have been sent to the bottom of the sea by their power and malevolence than by all the cannonballs e’er shot.

  Bowls of barley soup, with hunks of fresh brown bread, found their way to the foot of the staircase, accompanied, of course, by a glass of cold milk from the Belvédère’s own herd. Seldom would I even hear the footfall of the servant dispatched to leave the tray or recover it later, so deeply was I absorbed in the task before me. My essays and reviews and stories had begun to make my name, but fortune still lagged far behind, and though my father has never denied a request for assistance, I was loath to ask him for anything more than the regular stipend with which he has supplied me.

  I asked Fanny for some idea of what additional cost this garret had come to, but she brushed the question aside.

  ‘Don’t bother your head with that, Louis. They are glad to do it.’

  ‘The hotel? Or my family?’

  ‘You have brought glory to both, and if you simply bend your thoughts to your book, you will bring even more. They shall all be well rewarded.’

  From my perch, I could keep a God-like eye upon all the doings of the hotel. When standing before the rear window, I could observe the staff restocking the smokehouse and taking short respites from their toil, lighting a pipe or darning a skirt, walking in the thick woods that bordered the grounds, and even—on more than one occasion—when the shadows of the mountains grew long and the stars were just twinkling into sight, pursuing some more amorous sport. For all the gloom cast by the hotel’s convalescents, there was, here among the servants and nurses, a spirit of life, unquenchable and impatient.

  It was a spirit I envied. My condition had continued in precipitous decline, despite the most valiant efforts by Dr Rüedi and the sanitarium’s staff. My diet was under constant adjustment, with certain drink and viands reduced or eliminated, and others increased. My temperature was taken every hour on the hour, but remained stubbornly high. And my breathing, never easy, had become more laboured and draining. Nights were the most trying.

  On one night, when lying flat in bed had proved impossible, I had stealthily returned to my garret to work on the tale that had been taking shape in my mind, the seafaring adventure of a one-legged ship’s cook. The figure was loosely modelled on my oldest and dearest friend, William Henley, who had lost his own leg to a cancer of the bone; he would be amused, or so I hoped, to have provided such inspiration.

  But as I paused to replenish my pen, I happened to witness something that had all the earmarks of subterfuge—a trait sure to quicken the pulse of any writer. I heard voices at the back of the hotel, near the cellar stairs—voices that were muffled, meant to go unheard. And as they were speaking German, I would have been at a loss regardless. But then Yannick, the handyman who had bolstered the corkscrew stairs, and two other servants lumbered into view on snowshoes, lugging first one bundle, and then another, up the steps from the cellar. The bundles were large and plainly heavy, and it took at least two men to manage each one. They shifted the bundles onto waiting toboggans, where they were bound fast with ropes and then dragged around the west wing of the hotel. Once the sleds escaped my view, I crossed the tower and, standing beside the great whirring clock, rubbed the front window clean with my handkerchief—stained with old blood—and waited for them to reemerge around the corner of the wide verandah.

  The three men tugged the loaded sleds to the embarkation point of the toboggan
run. Fast and exhilarating during the daylight hours, the toboggan run posed an even more formidable challenge for anyone at night, and I could hardly believe they were planning to try it. In the valley far below, a single bright light shone at the top of the church steeple, as if to provide some beacon to navigate by. I was reminded, inevitably, of the many lighthouses my family had built to help guide sailors safely to port.

  Yannick, a strong fellow built like an ox, directed the other two men onto the sleds, where each of them lifted one end of a bundle, and then settled it onto their laps once they had seated themselves. It was then that it became clear, as it should have done much sooner, that the sacks, wrapped as tight as mummies, contained bodies.

  After the man in the first toboggan nodded his assent, Yannick bent low, and pushing the sled hard, sent it whistling down the run towards the village. Straightening, he went to the second sled, where he paused, rubbing his heavy jaw as if something had just come into his mind. Words were exchanged, and crouching down, Yannick tugged at the cloth until he was able to insert one of his paws and fish about inside. When he withdrew his hand, he held some items that glittered in the moonlight before he stuffed them into his pocket. The other man objected, but Yannick gave him a clout on the ear that knocked his fur hat off and shut his mouth, then dispatched the second sled with a hard shove to the man’s back—so hard that he lost his own balance and rolled onto his side, cursing and spitting the snow from his lips.

  When he got to his feet again and turned back towards the hotel, I stepped away from the window, not wishing to be seen. My suspicions were confirmed the next morning when, lingering over my breakfast longer than usual—‘Louis, should you be drinking quite so much coffee?’ Fanny inquired, before quitting the dining room—I noted the absence of two of the guests who had, of late, looked particularly unwell. One, an Italian dowager always adorned with an ornate silver crucifix and awash in eau de cologne, had already missed several meals; the other, a young Spaniard not much older than my stepson, had excused himself after a coughing fit so uncontrollable, he had fled the room in shame.

  Both were gone now, their customary chairs empty, their napkins neatly folded and untouched, their milk glasses unfilled. Others, too, had surely noticed their absence, but nothing was said. It did not need to be. Invalids arrived at the Belvédère every day, some with one foot already planted in the grave, and even the renowned Dr Rüedi could not perform miracles. But how best to insulate the survivors from the stark reality that might well await them, too, if not by this clandestine means? Secretly, everyone knew what had occurred, though no one wished to dwell upon it. Had they, however, ever guessed the method of their fellows’ disposal? Had any of them awakened in the dead of night to witness these silent sled rides—and wondered when their own turn might come to depart the mountain in like manner?

  I had witnessed it; I had so wondered. Like weeds persistently o’ertaking a garden, these thoughts would never again be completely extirpated from my mind.

  TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA

  Present Day

  For the first ten or fifteen minutes of the ride, Rafe kept his thoughts to himself, while Heidi burbled on about everything she planned to do for the environment, not just in California, but worldwide. It sounded like she was going to solve the problem of global warming single-handedly.

  “According to a study by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, the melting of the polar ice caps is going to raise the sea level as much as two feet in some places,” she declared. “Say good-bye to Melanesia.”

  Rafe wasn’t entirely sure where that was. Was it American Samoa and places like that?

  “And the warming temperatures are going to cause a mass die-off of many different fishes. Just look at what’s happened right here to the delta smelt.”

  Because of the rising temperatures of the Sacramento River water, the smelt had all but gone extinct in California. For Rafe, that was an issue that struck closer to home, and she was dead right about it. The Chinook salmon were hanging on by a thread, too. They needed to reach their traditional spawning grounds, the cooler waters of the McCloud River and other Sacramento tributaries to the north, but the construction of the Shasta Dam and hydropower plant, not to mention the concrete buttresses of the smaller Keswick Dam, had made it impossible. Now the fish made their redds, or nests, in the shallow gravel beds downstream, and then hovered listlessly there until they—and later, their emerging fry—died. Rafe had seen it himself on a solitary trek he had taken. Sitting on the banks, he’d watched the bodies of the dead fish floating by, belly up, and wondered just how many bears were going to go hungry up north now, and what other repercussions, less obvious but just as destructive, would follow. The natural world was a tightly integrated web, and every time humans messed with it, there were as many unintended consequences as there were intentional. But that was a lesson nobody ever seemed to learn.

  Maybe it was a good thing that eager young people like Heidi here were ready to take up the challenge. Although he wasn’t really that much older than she was, he was already becoming way too cynical.

  “I’ve been reading your field reports,” she said, “and they’re really interesting. You’ve got three coyotes now wearing radio collars?”

  “Two.”

  “Oh, I thought I read three.”

  “We lost one.” He didn’t tell her that he’d found it peppered with buckshot.

  “Okay, two now. And they’re moving south-southeast?”

  “Like everything else,” he said, taking the turnoff to the fire road. A rusty chain with a padlock stretched across the entrance. “Can you get that?” he said, fishing the key from the Velcro strip on the sun visor and handing it to her.

  Eager to take on any task, Heidi leaped out of the jeep, removed the chain, and waited for Rafe to drive a few yards past it. Locking up again, she climbed into the jeep, stuck the key back where it belonged, and looked at him as if expecting a letter grade.

  “Good work,” he said, and she all but bounced in her seat.

  Just before they reached the top of the ridge, he pulled over, noting that there was no sign today of Seth and Alfie—not that they might not be skulking somewhere else in the canyon, killing or capturing anything they could get their hands on. It might be a good idea, he thought, to say something about them to Heidi. Forewarned is forearmed.

  “Just in case we come across a couple of bumpkins,” he began, then gave her a thumbnail sketch of each. “They’re bad news, all around.”

  “You think they’re really dangerous?”

  “To wildlife, no question. To us? Let’s just say I hope we never find out.” After retrieving the antenna and receiver from the backseat, he took a GPS monitor out of the glove compartment and handed it to Heidi, then led her toward the crest of the trail. From their vantage point, the mountains rolled around on three sides, spliced by deep, dark ravines. To the west, the hazy blue of the Pacific Ocean merged seamlessly into the blue of the summer sky.

  “You know how this works?” he asked.

  “The coyote collars transmit an intermittent signal?”

  “Right. And once we pick one up, we plot it along a line on our GPS.”

  “And then we track it?”

  “I wish it were that easy.” He held the antenna aloft, feeling, as he always did, like a desperate farmer holding a divining rod. “One signal gives us only one line, and the animal could be anywhere on it.”

  “Oh, so I get it—we need two.”

  “Three. We need to triangulate if we expect to get a fixed position on their movements.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “By moving around a lot ourselves, to widely separated locations, and taking a reading each time.”

  The receiver he had clipped to his belt beeped, and a green light flashed on and off.

  “Contact,” he said. “Check the GPS. You see that pulsating spot?”

  “I do.”

  “Hit ‘Record Coordinates.’”r />
  She did.

  “Now we just have to do it two more times and we’ll know where she is.”

  “How do you know it’s a she?”

  “Every signal has its own frequency, and the monitor recognizes them. That one’s from Frida.”

  “They have names?”

  “Sure. She’s the alpha female of the pack—the mom—and Diego is the alpha male.”

  “Wait—like Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo?”

  “Don’t tell.” In the reception area of one of the state foster facilities, there’d been a big Diego Rivera mural that had captivated him as a boy, and he’d been a big fan of both artists ever since. In some way he could not have expressed, he felt even then that they were his people.

  Rafe led the way down the hillside, keeping an eye out for rattlesnakes, which made it a practice to lie, coiled in the sun, beside the trail. He didn’t want to have to explain losing a trainee to his superiors at the land management offices.

  When they arrived at the lake, nothing much had changed since his encounter with the trapped bobcat, though the water level might have dropped another inch. The pier was still rotting, the rowboat was still upside down, the mountain bike was still baking on the new shoreline, and that old trunk, the one he’d noticed before, was still poking its nose out of the brackish pool.

  “It stinks here,” Heidi said, holding her nose.

  “That’ll happen when it never rains.”

  From force of habit, Rafe checked the bush where the trap had been hidden, but nothing was there, not even a desiccated jerky strip. Nothing edible lasted long in the wilderness.

  “What’s that out there?” he heard Heidi call.

  “Out where?”

  “In the lake. It looks like a big old trunk or something.”

  “It is.”

  “Don’t you think we ought to check it out?”