The Jekyll Revelation

by Robert Masello

  “I got it back down,” he said.

  “What was in it? Anything?”

  “Nothing of any value.” He’d still have to convince Seth and Alfie of that.

  “Too bad. I thought we could have gotten famous or something.”

  “No such luck,” he said, avoiding meeting her eye.

  On the way up the road, she told him all about her recuperation and physical therapy—and then inquired about Diego and Frida and the rest of the coyote pack.

  “That’s where we’re headed,” he said. “I found the den. But we’ll have to be very careful approaching it.” For more reasons, he thought, than he had yet let on. Driving as far into the canyon as he could go—several of the slopes were so steep he saw Heidi clutching the sides of her seat like she was on a roller coaster—he finally parked at the top of a crest, and from there they trekked into the wilderness. By the time they got to Mr. and Mrs. Pothead’s little homestead, he had warned her of what to expect, so she wasn’t so surprised when they came upon the pair of them, naked except for shorts and sunhats, tending to their vegetable patch. Rafe performed the introductions—Mrs. Pothead not even bothering to cover her slack but prodigious breasts—and asked if they’d seen any sign of the coyotes.

  “Found some paw prints out back,” Mr. Pothead said. “Are they big fellas?”

  “Not especially.”

  Mr. Pothead scratched his chin stubble. “These were big.”

  “Mind if I see them?”

  “They’re gone. I had to till that soil. Spinach.”

  “It’s full of antioxidants,” Mrs. Pothead said.

  No matter how crazy they were, Rafe thought, everybody in California was a health nut.

  “You keepin’ your eyes open?” Mr. Pothead asked.

  “Yes,” Rafe replied. “I am.”

  Mr. Pothead nodded sagely.

  “You’re referring to the guys carting supplies up into the canyon, a mile or two from here?” Rafe said.

  “I’m not sayin’ anything more. I mind my own business, just like the government ought to do.”

  “No offense,” Mrs. Pothead put in, bobbing her head at Heidi’s uniform and badge.

  “None taken,” Heidi replied.

  It was lucky he’d prepared her for them, but he had not mentioned the intruders on their supply run.

  When Mrs. Pothead offered to brew some of her homemade tea, which Rafe knew from experience tasted like moldy bark, he knew it was time to move on. Once they were out of earshot, Heidi followed up on the guys with supplies and said, “Were these the two dudes you told me about the first time, the bobcat trappers?”

  “Yes. But they might be up to something new, maybe with the help of some others.” The Spiritz, but that could wait. “Just do whatever I tell you to if we run into any of them.”

  Heidi grew silent, then said, “That’s why you have the gun today.”

  He didn’t answer, but checked the coordinates flashing on his cell phone screen and saw that they were close to the den. Cresting the next ridge, he came upon the jojoba bush where he’d hidden—he knew it was the same one because the cigarette butt was still lying under its branches—and looked around until he’d located a fallen log with an opening behind it. Coyotes liked their dens concealed behind logs and foliage—most of the time, they actually appropriated dens that had been dug out and abandoned by foxes, skunks, or badgers—but they also liked to pick places from which they could survey a wide area. There was a good chance, even now, that Diego or Frida was observing them anxiously from a distance. Venturing down the slope toward the fallen log that provided cover for the den, Rafe remained on guard, and instructed Heidi to follow in his footsteps as closely as she could. She didn’t need to be told twice.

  Crouching down to peer over the log, Rafe saw an opening no more than a foot and half high and about as wide, and used his phone to snap a few close shots.

  “They can get in and out of something that small?” Heidi whispered as Rafe crouched down and used his phone to snap a few close shots.

  “Uh-huh. And there could be a tunnel twenty feet long, leading to the main chamber.”

  “Where the cubs are?”

  “Possibly.” But it was late in the year for that, and after six or eight weeks, the cubs would be ready to get out in the open. Coyotes were smart—one of the many reasons he admired them—and made sure their burrows had more than one escape route. They were hygienic, too, removing food scraps and bones, and changing one den for another as soon as it became infested with fleas or some other parasitic nuisance. In documenting their habitat and habits, Rafe hoped to do whatever he could to persuade the Land Management office to lay off their draconian policies—sometimes he wondered if the bureaucrats in Los Angeles and Sacramento had any feeling whatsoever for the native wildlife—and stop the wanton slaughter, and once he’d done that, to make some inroads with the public at large. The animals had been here first, and even when they came into conflict with humans, it was only because they were doing their best to survive in a world that kept encroaching on their territory and limiting their options.

  “They’re bound to have other tunnels around this immediate vicinity,” Rafe said, “so why don’t you do a circuit and see if you find anything?”

  Bending lower to turn his flashlight into the darkened burrow, Rafe was disturbed by the slight, but telltale, odor of smoke. He saw no cigarette butts on the ground around the hole, but what he suspected—and feared—was that someone had tried to smoke out the coyotes. It was often done—sometimes because they were considered a threat in some way, and other times because some sonofabitch still thought he could get a few bucks for a pelt. Once, he’d come across some teenagers shooting BB guns at a lame coyote for the sheer fun of it. If he’d had his own gun with him that day, he’d have been sorely tempted to give them a taste of their own medicine.

  He dictated some notes into his cell phone, noting the absence of prints or scat around this entrance, and looked up only when he heard Heidi, maybe thirty yards off, saying, in a somber tone, “Rafe—I think you’ll want to see this.”

  She’d found another tunnel, higher up the hill, and at this one he detected the faint trace of something stronger than mere smoke—maybe tear gas. There were plenty of tracks here, and even what looked like boot heels. Worse, about a dozen feet away was the body of a scrawny cub, not much bigger than a squirrel, curled up under a dead bush. An empty canister of something lay in the dirt nearby. The cub had probably been the runt of the litter. Though the maggots were already working away, it didn’t look like it had been lying there very long.

  Rafe saw red. Looking in all directions, he saw no sign of Diego or Frida, or any of the others in the pack, watching.

  “Who would do this?” Heidi said, and when he didn’t answer, she added, “I guess it’s not that hard to figure out, huh?”

  No, he thought, it wasn’t. Not hard at all.

  31 August, 1888

  ‘Who would challenge the man who gave us the terrifying Mr Hyde?’

  Although it has been well over two years since Henley spoke those words as we left the offices of the “Observer,” I remember them as if they had been uttered only yesterday.

  But oh, what a tempest has swirled between that day and this. My little story has swept across the world, catching the fancy of the public everywhere from Dublin to Chicago. Indeed, the United States has embraced the tale like no other land—Scribner’s informs me that close to a quarter of a million copies, if that is to be believed, have sold there—and to take advantage of the groundswell, Fanny and I and, of course, Lloyd, having long since abandoned any course of study, departed from the Royal Albert Docks on the SS Ludgate Hill in late August. Henry James had sent a crate of champagne to our cabin to celebrate the voyage, but if we had laboured under the impression that this was to be a luxurious cruise, we were quickly disabused of it. When the ship put in at Le Havre, it took on a consignment of French horses and, to our astonishment, a mena
gerie of great apes and monkeys destined for North American zoos. A sorrier lot of creatures, I could not imagine.

  What should have been a tranquil late-summer crossing became instead an arduous voyage through storm-tossed seas and against powerful, walloping headwinds. Fanny and Lloyd took to their beds, seasick, but for reasons inexplicable even to me, I found my sea legs and kept them under me. I would stride the decks and cargo hold in all weather, doing what I could to calm the panic-stricken horses and provide some welcome jibes to the captive apes. No one can look these animals in the face and not feel the strongest and most eerie sense of kinship. In their eyes, there is a melancholy yearning to understand, an almost palpable desire to express some thought or sensation, hindered only by the natural want of means to do so. Time and again, they reached their hairy arms through the iron bars of their uncleaned cages—so small the animals could barely turn in place—and though the crew had warned me to stay clear, I allowed their fingers to touch my own. I was, perhaps inevitably, reminded of the Sistine Chapel, and the fresco of the Almighty reaching out to channel life to the finger of the firstborn man, but I could transfer no such blessing. I could only signal a knowing complicity in our situation—passengers on a dangerous ocean journey—which would end for me in a comfortable bed in a hotel suite, but for these unhappy prisoners, only in another cage, a cage from which they would never escape.

  Upon our arrival at the harbour of New York, I was met by a jostling mob, with reporters from the “Times” and the “Tribune” and the “Sun,” note pads and pencils in hand, shouting questions over the heads of the hundreds vying for autographs or simply hoping to catch a glimpse of the story’s fabled author. That I was not a fearsome-looking creature, in a black cape and a top hat and brandishing a deadly cane, was a great disappointment to many of them, I think.

  ‘At the very least,’ Fanny said, ‘you should give the photographers a frightening scowl.’

  For the next day or two, I gave them what I could, though I am, in my normal guise, more akin to the respectable Dr Henry Jekyll than I am to the dreaded Mr Hyde. When I could offer no more, I absconded for the peace and refuge of a seaside town called Newport, in the state of Rhode Island. America is a fine place for eating and drinking, and for the kindness of its people, but this raw dose of popularity was more debilitating than the transatlantic crossing had been. I longed for the quiet of my study, and to return to my work, but the fever ignited by “Jekyll and Hyde” was inescapable there, and now it has infected London, too, rekindled by the debut of the play based upon the book.

  Adapted by an American named Thomas Russell Sullivan—a man whom I have never had the pleasure of meeting—it has become the sensation of the New York and Boston stage, and has finally bivouacked in my own neck of the woods. Although I do receive a small and erratic royalty from its adaptation, Henley has been beside himself—‘We lost our chance, Louis, it was sitting in the palm of our hands and we might have made a fortune!’ He evicted his usual reviewer from the “Observer”’s box at the Lyceum Theatre in order to invite me to join him there for the opening night.

  ‘Fanny will be delighted,’ I said.

  ‘Are you sure she’ll be up to it?’ Henley said. ‘I’ve been told that Richard Mansfield’s portrayal of Mr Hyde is so shocking that ladies have fainted dead away at the transformation scenes.’

  His concern for Fanny’s welfare was as patently insincere as it was transparent. ‘Have you ever known Fanny to shrink from anything?’

  Defeated, he agreed to meet us at the theatre, where the manager—‘a great friend of mine, Irishman by the name of Stoker, anxious to make your acquaintance’—would show us to the proper box.

  It was a stiflingly hot night when Fanny and I stepped into a hired carriage and left for the theatre district. All month long London had sweltered, the air as hot and still as an oven, horses keeling over dead in Trafalgar Square. The houses being intolerable, the stoops and steps of every building played host to the tenants, who fanned themselves with newspaper sheets and pressed wet cloths to their foreheads. The horse plodded down the dark cobblestoned streets toward the electric lights, only recently implemented, of the West End, where the proud columns and grand portico of the Lyceum Theatre, recalling a Greek temple, stood on Wellington Street, just off the Strand. The marquee announced the play and the celebrated actor who had gained such international renown in the title role. In preparation for the debut, trick photographs, in which Mansfield was portrayed as the respectable Dr Jekyll, but o’ershadowed by a hideous Mr Hyde, had been plastered in the windows of tobacconist shops for weeks, and the very air crackled with excitement.

  ‘Oh, how Lloyd would have loved this,’ Fanny said, as the carriage drew close. ‘What could be so much more interesting than this in Paris?’

  ‘The Folies Bergère,’ I replied. Lloyd and Randolph Desmond had embarked, to the best of my knowledge, on the boat train the week before.

  Much as I might have hoped to pass unnoticed into the lobby, we had no sooner stepped out of the cab than a flock of pressmen descended upon us, so forcibly that a toothless woman in a blue crêpe bonnet, selling wilted flowers from a basket, was forced up against me.

  ‘A carnation for that suit, sir?’ she said, and out of a natural instinct, I was fishing in my pocket for a coin to aid the crone, but Fanny shooed her away with her fan. The woman was instantly swallowed up in the mêlée, and the carnation, I could not help but note, was crushed under the heels of the jostling journalists.

  ‘Have you seen the play in the States?’ one reporter shouted.

  ‘Have you met Mr Mansfield?’ cried another.

  ‘What are you writing next?’

  I could barely mumble a reply to one question before being peppered with a dozen more, and was relieved when a strong hand took my elbow and a voice in my ear said, ‘I’m Bram Stoker, the manager here, and I’ll take you through the side door.’

  Fanny and I were ushered away from the main steps, around a low railing, and into the bowels of the Lyceum. Stoker, a pugnacious-looking fellow with close-set eyes and a thick Irish brogue, laughed once we were inside and said, ‘I had expected a crowd, but not a rugby scrum.’

  ‘I’ve encountered worse,’ I said, thinking back to the docks in Manhattan.

  ‘A pleasure to meet you,’ he said. ‘I told Henley that I am a great admirer of your work.’

  ‘And so he reported. Haven’t I read your own stories in the “London Society”?’

  ‘You might well have done. But nothing so impressive as this.’

  With that, he guided us up some back stairs that opened directly into a private box overlooking the stage. Henley, already ensconced there, with his crutch propped against his chair, nodded to Fanny—who returned a nod just as curtly—and then said, ‘Ah, so you two scribes have met now.’

  ‘We have,’ Stoker said. ‘But if you’ll excuse me, I have to attend to Mr Mansfield. He requires someone to guard him from any intrusion whatsoever in the minutes before the curtain is to rise.’

  ‘Pull your chairs up to the railing,’ Henley said. ‘You’ll get a better view of the whole stage that way.’

  Leaving room for Fanny’s voluminous skirts—not her usual attire, but something she trots out for special occasions such as this—required a bit of shifting about in the close quarters of the box, but once we were settled, with me in the middle to maintain the peace, I looked out over the auditorium below, where hundreds of people were still milling in the aisles and finding their seats, all dressed to the nines, chattering away and waving to each other in anticipation of the spectacle to come. Prominently positioned at the door leading to the lobby were two husky young ushers and a nurse who was equipped, I was told, with smelling salts and compresses to assist any lady who might be overcome with horror. Henry Irving, who owns the theatre and often appears in its productions, is a master of such theatrical flourishes.

  ‘They’re all out tonight,’ Henley said, ‘the society ladies, the swel
ls, even what passes for statesmen in our day.’ He indicated the box directly opposite ours. A portly man in a black tailcoat, with the face of a basset hound, was holding a chair for his wife as she adjusted her own dress. ‘If the prime minister’s here, can the Queen be far behind? Or a knighthood?’

  ‘Heaven forfend.’

  ‘I don’t see what would be wrong with that,’ Fanny said, perhaps already fancying herself ‘Lady Stevenson’.

  Before the curtain opened, Stoker stepped out from the wings to settle the audience, introduced himself, and warned that ‘the play we are about to present—never seen on this side of the Atlantic—is not for the faint of heart or those easily given to morbid fancy.’

  A delightful chill ran through the theatre.

  ‘For anyone overtaken by fear or apprehension at what is about to unfold, please be aware that help is available from one of the Nightingale nurses, whom you will see at the rear of the auditorium.’

  Heads swivelled.

  ‘Finally, allow me to introduce our esteemed guests tonight. Lord Salisbury,’ he said, bowing toward the prime minister’s box, and then, once the applause had died down, turning again, ‘and the author of the book upon which tonight’s entertainment is based—I give you Mr Robert Louis Stevenson.’

  For this, I was not prepared, and when all heads turned again, and applause rippled through the room, I had to be urged to stand by a firm jab in the ribs from my wife’s fan. Even Salisbury was clapping.

  ‘What did I say?’ Henley exulted. ‘A title, for sure!’

  As soon as I had taken my seat again, Stoker left the stage, the house lights dimmed, and the curtain—maroon velvet with a fringe of golden tassels—parted to reveal a gloomy laboratory where a dishevelled Mansfield, in shirtsleeves, was labouring over a counter of vials and beakers. He lifted one and swirled the greenish liquid inside, a wisp of smoke rising from its lip, and, just as he was about to drink, there was a loud rapping off-stage and a man’s voice crying, ‘Dr Jekyll! You have a visitor!’