The Jekyll Revelation

by Robert Masello

  Without further hesitation, I took to the winding stairs, an alarmed Woggin scampering at my heels, around and around, then down the main staircase of the hotel, past a drowsing night porter, through the swinging doors of the dining room, and into the kitchen. But what to grab? A cleaver lay on a cutting board, and a black iron skillet on a stove. Stuffing the handkerchief into the pocket of my robe, I armed myself with both and made for the cellar stairs.

  Here, the white plaster walls gave way to rough grey stone, the oak-planked floors to damp cement. The cold, wet air filled my lungs, and I gasped for a full breath. Woggin barked in shock when, with one shoe, I knocked him backwards—no sense in endangering him, too—before throwing open the door to the back of the hotel and slamming it shut behind me.

  The stag was no longer unaware of the menace. Its head was up, nostrils flaring, brown eyes wild and wide. From the border of the trees, the wolf I had seen before—and christened Lord Grey—emerged with head low and ears pricked high. The stag backed up, lowering its own horns in preparation for battle.

  I wondered that it did not flee, before noting that the wolf’s two black henchmen had come, too, and were lurking in the shadows on either side.

  If I had come to give warning, I was too late. If I had come to wage war, I was not well equipped.

  Still, I had dealt with wolves before, in the canyons of the American West, and a show of noise and bravado almost always put them off their game; they knew enough to fear man and to run off in search of easier prey. Banging the blunt edge of the cleaver against the iron skillet, I shouted and made a racket, and though they certainly took note of me, these wolves did not retreat. The deer was the most affected, now unsure what posed the greater danger, its panicked eyes swivelling from the human with the clanging pan to the wolves slowly encircling it. It snorted, its breath fogging in the air, and pawed at the slippery, snowy ground.

  ‘Get out of here,’ I shouted at Lord Grey. ‘Get out!’

  How I had come to feel myself the determined ally of the doomed stag might have been unclear even to me—I was certainly familiar with the ways of the natural world, sanguinary and dispassionate as they were—but the mismatch of the single, unsuspecting deer against a trio of marauders stirred in me a spirit of fair play. Even at school, my sympathies had always lain with the underdog.

  So when one of the black wolves made a sudden feint at the hindquarters of the stag, I banged the pan loudly, and when that proved no deterrent, stepped close enough to swing the cleaver in front of its nose.

  The wolf backed up, but the other henchman took advantage of the opportunity to make its own attack. I heard the stag bellow in pain, and when I turned, I saw that it had been expertly hamstrung, blood running down its buckling leg. It was struggling to stay upright, even to run, but the deep snow made it well-nigh impossible to find any footing.

  I swung the cleaver in the other direction, and so was completely unprepared when Lord Grey launched himself like an arrow at the stag’s head, clamping his jaws around the animal’s snout and holding fast even as the frenzied stag shook him from side to side. Nothing, it was plain, was going to loosen that deadly grip, even as the wolf was whipped back and forth above the forgotten salt lick.

  Windows in the hotel were opening now, gas lamps coming on as the guests awoke to the commotion.

  I thought I heard Fanny’s voice, terrified, shouting my name.

  Then, I was struck from behind—a black wolf hurtling against my shoulders, its hot, foul breath scorching my cheek and knocking me to the ground. I rolled to one side, just in time to crown it with a blow of the iron skillet. The cleaver had fallen from my hand, and my fingers scrambled in the snow to find it. The wolf, stunned, snapped at my hand, and just as my fingers grasped the handle of the blade, it pounced on my chest with the weight of an anchor. I tried to lift the cleaver, but the strength had utterly left my body. The wolf’s fangs rent my dressing gown and tore at the sinews of my shoulder. I was certain that the next moment would be my last, when a shotgun blast split the night and the wolf flew off me as if hit by a cannonball.

  There were howls and shrieks, and another blast, and before I could even assess my own situation, I caught sight of Dr Rüedi, shotgun cradled in the crook of his arm, crunching across the clearing.

  ‘Jetzt stoppen!’ he shouted at the wolves. ‘Stoppen!’

  The smell of hot blood permeated the air, the writhing of the dying stag sent tremors through the ground, and then, a final shot abruptly ended even those. All I could hear was the doctor, talking to the wolves like a stern schoolmaster lecturing his unruly students, and under his voice, the strangely comforting sound of the snow crystals crackling in my ears.

  TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA

  Present Day

  There seemed to be no end to the stack of official forms in duplicate and triplicate, stamped in red or yellow, that Ellen Latham’s long, lacquered fingernails were riffling through. How many crimes and misdemeanors, Rafe wondered, could he possibly have committed since his last departmental review?

  “We’ll be lucky, you know, if Heidi Graff’s family doesn’t bring a civil suit against us,” she said without looking up.

  “But she’s going to be all right, right?”

  “Yes, but that’s beside the point. You were responsible for her welfare in the field that day.”

  “There are rattlesnakes out there,” Rafe said, “and sometimes they act like rattlesnakes.” What he wanted to add was something to the effect that Latham might know this if she ever left the air-conditioned office in a downtown Los Angeles skyscraper where she shuffled papers all day and second-guessed the rangers and researchers who worked on the front lines. If she’d ever had to go out and protect the wildlife and do whatever was necessary to preserve the environment in the face of withering budget cuts and a total lack of cooperation from Mother Nature, she’d have a better idea of what she was asking.

  But he bit his tongue, as a lifetime of dealing with bureaucrats had taught him to do.

  “Is she still in the hospital?” he asked.

  “No, she’s been released. She’s back home with her parents.”

  “Would it be okay if I paid her a visit?”

  Latham sat back in her ergonomically designed chair and gave him a level look. “No, it would not be okay. Our in-house counsel advises no further contact until we’re sure she’s not going to sue.” She pulled another paper from her pile, this one a familiar pale green that he knew was used for environmental science evaluations. Weren’t computers supposed to make all this paperwork obsolete?

  “Why don’t we have a current field report on your coyote migration research?” She said it as if she were asking for something that had all the importance of an odometer reading.

  “Because I’m having to readjust the stats based on a smaller sample of animals.”

  Latham looked blank.

  “Pedro got shot.”

  “Who’s Pedro?”

  He’d forgotten that only he knew the coyotes by the names he had given them. “The youngest of the pack.”

  “You name them?” she said drily. There it was again, Rafe noted—coyotes were considered one step above vermin, even by people who ought to know better. More than once he’d thought that that was why he felt such a kinship with the maligned creatures. He’d been treated like that as a kid, and the courage, ingenuity, and resilience that the species displayed, in the face of encroaching civilization and all the barbarous means that had been used to exterminate them, made him want to come to their defense all the more.

  “Any idea who shot him? Was it someone with a state license?”

  If he knew who’d done it, he’d have settled the matter himself. “I have my suspicions.” Seth and Alfie. “But that’s all I have.”

  “Right. Fine. Have that report on my desk by Friday, latest. And make sure it’s comprehensive and up-to-date. Turn in anything you’ve got, even if it’s incomplete at that time.”

  Ala
rm bells went off in his head. “Why the rush?”

  “In case you haven’t been reading the papers, there’s a drought on, and a lot of the funding we had for collateral matters is now being redirected to water management and conservation programs.”

  “So what are you saying? My grant is being curtailed?”

  “Your grant is under review.”

  Rafe had been an environmental scientist long enough to know what that meant. Every time there was a crisis of any kind—a drought, a fire, an infestation of some foreign flora or fauna—the long-term studies and fundamental research that might have averted the crisis in the first place were abruptly abandoned. Ecology only moved forward in fits and starts, like an old car with a balky stick shift.

  Latham’s phone rang, and she picked it up and started talking to someone about a lunch reservation. Rafe, sensing an opportunity to escape before any more bad news hit him, snatched his backpack up off the floor—he’d retrieved it but had to leave the trunk until he could contrive a means of dragging it out to his jeep single-handedly—but he was too slow on the uptake. Latham lifted one finger to delay him. Damn.

  Hanging up, she said, “I got this weird alert from the Malibu police department last week.”

  “About what?”

  “Have you heard anything about a crystal meth lab up in the canyons?”

  He thought of Mr. and Mrs. Pothead, the pale, harmless hippies who’d recently smuggled him the baggie at La Raza, but meth was definitely not their thing.

  “What exactly did it say?”

  “There’s a motorcycle gang—”

  “The Spiritz,” he interjected, relieved to see the focus move in this direction.

  “—and drugs appear to be one of their main sources of revenue.”

  “Could be.”

  “Keep an eye out on your patrols for anything that might look like an operation of that sort. That’s all we’d need right now.”

  Although this was the first he’d heard of it, he didn’t doubt it was possible—was that why the Spiritz seemed to be around so much more of late?—but if giving up a few low-life bikers was all it would take to keep him looking like a team player, it was a small price to pay—especially if he could keep the harmless Potheads out of anybody’s crosshairs at the same time.

  Leaving the office, he got lost in the maze of cubicles, and a secretary had to guide him back to the right elevator bank. In his brown uniform and boots, backpack slung over his shoulder, he felt like a total rube. At the lobby desk, he returned his temporary ID badge to the security guard, then stepped outside onto a wide plaza, where office workers were unwrapping sandwiches from cellophane and eating them, perched on low concrete walls surrounding a dry fountain. Exhaust fumes from passing traffic filled the air. A bus was honking its horn, a jackhammer was ripping open a seam in the street. He couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there.

  8 December, 1881

  The pain. The pain was what brought me around.

  I remembered Dr Rüedi and the night porter carrying me, my bony arms slung around their shoulders, back into the hotel, down a long, twisting corridor of rough-hewn rock, past iron doors and flickering gas lamps, then into a blazingly white and bright room. My eyes were swimming in my head, but still I took in the glass-fronted cabinets of surgical instruments and the high table draped like a catafalque, onto which I was laid.

  I remembered Fanny’s voice, remonstrating and hysterical, and Lloyd—what was he doing up at this hour? I wondered in my delirium—helping to remove my bloody and torn dressing gown. I remember him watching intently as the doctor raised a blue cotton cloth towards a mirrored light—a lighthouse, here, in a cellar of all places—and doused it with a sweet-smelling liquid.

  ‘What are you going to do with that?’ Lloyd asked.

  ‘Hold him steady.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Ether.’

  The cloth was pressed to my mouth, and I do not remember much after that. When I came around again, it could have been a minute, or a day, later. I was lying on a hard cot in a small underground cell. There was a searing pain in my shoulder, and I recalled the wolf biting me there, but this pain extended all the way to my shoulder blades. Indeed, it seemed to have its origin there. I wanted to call out for help—my throat was so parched, I’d have sold my soul for a draught of cold water—but for some reason I was labouring under the impression that I was a prisoner in the dungeons of a castle and that if I were to give myself away, I’d be shackled, or, worse, put to the rack. Feeling myself a character in one of my own adventure stories, I rose from the bed, wearing a white woollen gown, and moved stealthily towards the door. The flagstones were like ice under my bare feet.

  In the hall, a nurse—one of those who ordinarily made up my sun bed—was asleep and snoring, a striped blanket lying across her ample lap.

  Tiptoeing past, I crept around the corner, stopping to lift one foot, and then the other, to rub some warmth into them.

  In the low light of a single lamp, I saw a line of several doors, no more than waist high, with barred grates. The rattling of a chain came from one of them, though I could not tell which.

  Crouching, I peered through the bars of the first, but the light was so dim it took several seconds before I could make out a sight so shocking that, even if I weren’t so scantily dressed, would still have sent a shiver down my spine.

  A black wolf, presumably one of those which had attacked me, hung upside down from a rafter, its throat cut and a bucket below it, now quite full of blood.

  Had this been done as some sort of revenge? Despite what damage the wolf had done me, I would never have demanded such ghastly retribution.

  The rattling sounded again, and this wolf, dead as a doornail, was plainly not the cause.

  Moving to the next cell, I peered in again, and was greeted by a rush of wind through the grate, the screeching and snap of a chain, and a pair of infuriated eyes only inches from my own. Lord Grey, a leather strap lashed around his muzzle, had charged at the bars and been restrained by a rusty chain bolted to the back wall of the cell. One of his ears stood erect, the other drooped raggedly, grazed perhaps by the shotgun pellets. That his life had been so far spared was as mysterious to me as the slaughter of his henchman.

  ‘What are you doing out here?’ the nurse said, bustling up behind me. ‘You should have told me you were awake.’

  Lord Grey struggled to break the muzzle and howl, but it was no use.

  The nurse threw the blanket around my shoulders and steered me away from the cell. ‘The doctor wished to be notified as soon as you awoke.’

  ‘What are you doing with these wolves?’

  ‘That’s the doctor’s business, not yours,’ she said, drawing me back down the hall.

  ‘But I want to know!’

  ‘Have no fear, they will not be bothering you ever again.’

  ‘I have no fear of that at all.’

  ‘Of course you do not, Mr Stevenson, of course you do not.’

  Urging me back onto the cot, she said, ‘I will just go and get the doctor now.’ She tucked the sheet and blanket in so tightly that I might just as well have been clapped in irons. ‘And no more excursions for you.’

  The pain, which had trebled already, made such a feat as impossible as it was unwanted.

  TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA

  Present Day

  By the time Rafe got through all the rush-hour traffic and back to the canyon, he felt like he’d been pummeled by crowds and cars and commotion all day long, and all he wanted was to lie on top of his trailer, look at the stars, and feel the evening breeze.

  Ducking a bedsheet drying on the clothesline, Trip came hopping across the backyard and rolled over so Rafe could give him the desired belly rub. In her apartment above the store, Miranda was saying, “With what? There’s nothing left in the checking account.”

  Rafe couldn’t make out Laszlo’s answer, but he’d heard these squabbles enough times before to know
how they generally turned out. Miranda would be lucky if it didn’t escalate beyond words.

  He left the door to the trailer wide open and went straight to the minifridge for a cold beer. He popped the top, then flopped onto his narrow foldaway bed, which was as always neatly made, the white sheet and yellow blanket smooth. Everything else in the cramped interior was equally organized and tidy. A lifetime of being displaced from one foster home to another—or living with a mother who was (as he had learned from years of listening to social workers’ jargon) “decompensating” from the desertion of her husband—had left him with a powerful need for order and cleanliness. The women he’d dated over the years—nobody for very long—had invariably been surprised that a rugged single guy, much less one who spent his time out in the wilderness, was such a neat freak. “I thought you’d live like a mountain man,” one of them had said, vaguely disappointed. “Turns out you’re OCD.”

  Although Rafe wouldn’t go that far, she wasn’t completely off.

  Cleanliness was what he appreciated about the group home where his sister, Lucy, lived. Run by a former nun named Evangelina, the place functioned like a military operation, with more house rules than a casino and strictly enforced policies about personal space and belongings. But he knew Lucy was safe there, and cared for. After he’d left the Land Management office downtown, he’d driven over to the house to check up on her and drop off the monthly check, which came to half of his already meager salary.

  The house was a fairly forlorn-looking thing, the color of a pink flamingo, in an area of Mar Vista that used to be cheap but was now getting gentrified, along with what sometimes seemed to Rafe like the whole damn world. Even Topanga had its share of five-million-dollar homes now.

  He parked his jeep in the driveway, the concrete riven with cracks and stained with oil, and went around back where he could hear laughter and voices and a tinny radio playing rap. Evangelina had set up a bocce court, but since nobody seemed to know how to play, the residents—there were always around eight of them, disabled teens and young adults in a revolving cast—simply used it like a kind of bowling alley. Evangelina was bent over a dying plant, watering it from a can, and when she saw him coming, she said, “It’s used dishwater.”