The Jekyll Revelation

by Robert Masello

  ‘Fanny, what can I do?’ I implored, still clutching her hand, which had turned to ice. ‘What can I do?’

  But she could not stop the howls of pain, slumping from the chair and deliquescing onto the rough planks of the verandah. Her cries came so unceasingly that I feared for her breath. All I could think to do was to race upstairs to my medicine cabinet, prepare a syringe of morphine, and hurtle back down again, by which time Malaki had come to her side. As he held an arm steady, I injected the drug, and in no more than a minute or two, she had slipped into a stupor.

  Carefully, we carried her up the stairs to the bedroom, where we laid her on the bed, her eyes vague and unfocussed, her tongue lolling from the corner of her mouth. Much as I had dreaded the paroxysm of grief, this preternatural stillness I found equally disquieting. It was as if she were voluntarily departing the shores of life. I stayed by her bedside for the next several hours, stroking her hands and arms, occasionally whispering some words of comfort or endearment. Once or twice, I was rewarded with a yes, or a sigh to indicate agreement, but by the dead of night, she had escaped into a sleep forty fathoms deep. The trade winds that blew through the wide-open spaces of the house, billowing out the tapas, had chilled me to the bone, and I felt a coughing fit arising from my chest. Not wanting to disturb her slumbers, I gently disengaged and went to my study for my robe and a glass of whiskey.

  I dropped into my chair, a handkerchief pressed to my lips to muffle the eruption of coughs, and reached for the cut-glass decanter, glimmering in the moonlight. But my fingers encountered something brittle, dangling from its top, and when, puzzled, I lit the oil lamp to get a better look, I saw a strand of bleached shells draped like a necklace around its stopper.

  TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA

  Present Day

  There was just one more thing Rafe needed to do before saying good-bye to the canyon.

  The day before, he’d been officially relieved of his duties by a plainly pleased Ellen Latham. By then, she’d heard reports of everything from meth labs in the hills to motorcycle gangs and missing coyotes. “I can’t see that there’s anything left for you to accomplish there,” she said, requesting that he surrender his badge and his gun on the spot—man, was he glad he had retrieved the weapon—and handing him instead a bunch of termination forms to fill out and return at his leisure. He’d stood in the concrete plaza outside, feeling everything from mild shock to a sneaking sense of relief. He’d been waiting for this shoe to drop for so long, it was strangely comforting to have gotten it over with. What he would do next wasn’t clear, but he wouldn’t miss the bureaucracy of the Land Management office. That was for sure.

  Driving home, he was just glad that she’d forgotten to requisition the purple Land Rover. Or maybe she just didn’t care.

  This morning, he’d awakened on top of his trailer with the sun in his eyes and a bee buzzing around his nose. Leaving his khakis in the closet, he put on a pair of jeans and sneakers, drove to the trailhead, and hiked into the canyon. No antenna this time, or heavy backpack. Just a canteen slung over one shoulder and, tucked into his pants pocket, something that he meant to return to where it belonged.

  The air was fresh and sweet and scented with the wild chaparral. Grouse scurried into the brush, lizards darted, and insects buzzed. Whatever problems there were in the world—and there were plenty—they were nowhere in sight. Not here, not now. Even the land was starting to show signs of rejuvenation. Already, sprigs of grass and clumps of mushrooms were popping up among the coastal sage. Sparrows and white-throated swifts flitted overhead. It was paradise . . . even if it had once harbored something terrible.

  He crested the hill, and saw just below him the lake. A light breeze stirred the water, and the sunshine gave its pale-green surface a silvery sheen. To think that here, in this unlikely place, a dreadful secret had long been buried. A secret that no one else would ever know . . . or believe. There was just one piece of proof left, and striding down to the bank, he took it out of his pocket. Though dented and dull, the gold watchcase still glittered in the morning light. Rafe popped it open and looked one last time at the initials—SLO. Samuel Lloyd Osbourne. His last claim to fame.

  As if he were skipping a stone, Rafe cocked his arm back and shot the watch at the lake, where it took one, two, three leaps before sinking to the bottom. That was where it belonged, along with everything else that had ever belonged to its long-forgotten owner.

  Once the ripples had stopped, Rafe turned to go, but not before something else caught his eye. On the opposite shore, he thought he saw some movement—an animal, head down, cautiously approaching the water. He raised a hand to block out some of the sun. It came down to the waterline and bowed its head to drink. Rafe didn’t move a muscle. From here, he could tell it wasn’t his beloved Diego or Frida; they were both smaller. It looked like either the biggest coyote he’d ever seen in these parts . . . or a wolf.

  A big gray one.

  Although wolves generally met their water requirements through eating the flesh of their prey—most of the meat was water—in warmer weather like this, and in conditions where prey was scarce, they were known to drink for thermoregulation. When this one had finished lapping at the water, it raised its head and looked straight at him. Its ears went up, though one was bent, and then, unperturbed, it turned away and loped off to the south.

  “Hey, stranger,” Rafe said softly. “Welcome to Topanga.”

  5 December, 1894

  Vailima

  Indistinguishable, don’t you think?

  My handwriting, and Louis’s?

  If I had not admitted to my imposture just now, wouldn’t you have thought it was still Louis making this entry? How fortunate that over the years I spent many an hour mastering his distinctive scrawl—so useful when forging bank cheques or IOUs.

  I had never expected, however, to employ it to this purpose . . . setting the record straight in the final pages of this, his private diary.

  True, I enjoyed toying with him in other ways. I thought looping the shells around his whiskey decanter, for instance, was a deliciously sly means of announcing my return to Vailima. Given the man’s weak constitution, I didn’t want to give him a seizure by simply showing up at the house.

  Not that I should have given it so much concern. Louis cared not a whit about me! Once I’d been plunged into the storm-tossed ocean, he assumed me dead, and no doubt wished it so. These pages, which I have just read, make that plain. Such a want of faith on his part! Using the torn sail to bind myself to the broken mast, I rode it all the way to the shores of Savai’i, where some natives plucked me from the beach and transported me in one of their alias back to Apia. As they consider me the son of the great Tusitala, they could not have been more obliging.

  But I knew my welcome home would be problematic, to say the least. Louis had tumbled to the truth—only someone as blinded by proximity as he was could have taken so long to do so—and even gone so far as to share the news of his discovery in a letter to his old chum, Henley. I know this for a fact because, as it was a frequent custom of mine, I had purloined the letter from the postal basket.

  It wasn’t until the next night that I allowed him to see me. He was in the kitchen with my mother. Poor woman, she looked like she had died a thousand deaths; how comforting it was to know how much she might mourn my real loss one day, should some strange accident befall me. I was sorry she’d been put through this ordeal, but consoled myself with knowing how much greater her joy would now be at my salvation.

  As for Louis, slicing a pile of taro roots on the cutting board, he looked distracted. I was standing silently just outside on the verandah, concealed in the dark. The kitchen was well lit by several oil lamps. I could understand the consternation on his face, and, frankly, revelled in it. Who would argue that the anguish of others is not in some way delightful to apprehend? He was trying to draw my mother out, hovering over her like a benevolent stork, but she was having none of it. Good for her.

 
Timing my entrance was critical. I waited until he had put the carving knife down and raised a glass of his precious Irish whiskey to his lips before I stepped close enough to the open window to be seen. Even before I’d uttered my opening line—‘What are we having for dinner?’—Louis saw me take shape there, like a ghost in one of his bogey tales, dropped the glass, and clapped his hands like cymbals to the sides of his head. Down he went, in a jumble of bony elbows and knees, groaning as if his head had been split with an axe, and Fanny had no sooner taken that in than she saw me. She was torn between screaming in horror and shouting in joy!

  The exultation was deep, but momentary, superseded by the need to immediately tend to her supine husband. Malaki was summoned to help carry him upstairs—oh, what a pleasure it was to see the surprise on that one’s face, too!—while another houseboy was dispatched to town to fetch a doctor. Louis did indeed look gravely ill, and despite the many injuries he had done me, I felt a pang of conscience. It is simply my nature.

  He lay still, eyes staring, unable to speak, while my mother attempted to revive him by rubbing brandy into his skeletal arms. When Malaki tried to remove his boots, I warned him not to do so: ‘Louis once told me he hoped to die with his boots on.’ My mother flashed an impatient look, perhaps at my lack of diplomacy, but honestly, the outcome was clear. As soon as the doctor arrived—the ship’s surgeon from HMS Wallaroo, anchored in the harbour—he confirmed my importunate diagnosis.

  ‘I fear he has had a cerebral haemorrhage’, he said, ‘brought on, perhaps, by some sudden shock to the system.’

  Another pang.

  ‘But they can come on out of nowhere, too,’ he added, ‘like a comet streaking across the night sky.’

  I remember the comet remark because it recalled a line from Louis’s morbid poem ‘Requiem’: ‘Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie.’ Louis had spent a good deal of time studying the heavens, either out on that verandah, or up among the snowy peaks of Davos. (In London, it was hopeless—the fog and chimney smoke were thick enough to obscure even the lamp posts.) My mother often remarked that the man lived with his head in the clouds.

  ‘But what do we do now?’ she said. ‘How do we help him?’

  The doctor looked quite baffled and had nothing more to suggest than keeping a close watch and answering any need he might find it possible to express. Small chance of that. The light in his bulging dark eyes was already flickering like a candle caught in a draft, his long face going slack. Whether he registered my presence at all, I cannot say.

  Over the next hour or so, several of the native servants crept into the room and sat cross-legged in a circle around the bed; under their breath they hummed some mournful island dirge. At some unnoticed point, between one shallow breath and another, Louis shuffled off this mortal coil. My mother remained beside him on the bed, while Malaki crumpled forward in a heap on the floor. Stepping round the mourners, I went into the study, and using the combination to the safe that I had divined with ease (Louis always used some iteration of his birthday, forty-four years earlier), I opened it and removed the flasks from Dr Rüedi. Using my unique penmanship skills to impersonate Louis, I would urge the good doctor to find some way to manufacture, and send, more, but the prospects of success were dubious. Henceforth, conservation would have to be my watchword.

  That, and discretion. I have grown too bold and incautious, I will admit, a change that I attribute in part to the powerful effects of the elixir, and in part to the predilections of my own character. From what secret source these impulses arise remains a mystery to me. But governable, they are not. All I can do is indulge them in as clever and masterful a manner as practicable. My success in that respect has been indisputable. Apart from Louis—and even he kept his own counsel—no one has publicly accused me of a worse impropriety than booting that dullard Randolph Desmond down some steps. The brilliantly executed crimes of Jack the Ripper have been laid at a dozen doorsteps, but none of them mine. Nor will they be—not so long as I am alive to be called to account for them.

  No, I mean to keep this journal, and my souvenirs, intact and unknown. They shall travel with me wherever I go (at this moment, my native California is again striking my fancy), and when, many years from now, my end draws near, I shall consign them to some appropriate grave. An unmarked spot where, in the fullness of time, posterity shall rediscover—and perhaps reassess—them. I leave that to Fate. Like Thomas De Quincey, I contend that there is an artistry in any pursuit—be it literature, or murder—and as someone who expects to rank high in the annals of both, I wish to be assured one day of the proper recognition. I’ve earned my laurels, and what’s fair is fair. On that much, I believe, as reasonable people, we can all agree. Can we not?

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  As someone who writes books in which history and fiction get all tangled up, I’m often asked how I go about it, what the rules are, and occasionally why I do things this way at all.

  First off, let me say that I do it because the real characters I find—Benvenuto Cellini and Count Cagliostro in The Medusa Amulet, Rasputin and the Russian royal family in The Romanov Cross, Florence Nightingale in Blood and Ice, Einstein in The Einstein Prophecy—are so much richer and better than any I could ever have imagined, it seems crazy not to just pick them up and use them.

  Also, I’m something of a history buff. I love reading it, which means that when I’m researching one of my novels, I get to sit around and read lots of biographies and historical texts and tell myself I’m working. I am, but it’s fun, too.

  You might also have heard that old line about truth being stranger than fiction—I’m here to tell you it’s true. My storytelling abilities pale in comparison to true events and twists of fate. The Jekyll Revelation came about, in fact, because of something I happened to read in a book about Victorian London. It was while the stage play of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was playing in the West End that Jack the Ripper first struck, and official suspicion briefly fell on Robert Louis Stevenson and on the actor who played the dual title role. That started the wheels turning, and led, in the fullness of time, to this very book.

  But here comes the caveat. Don’t treat everything I say as gospel. When someone at a reading asks me if everything in my book is true (and someone always does), I reply that ninety percent of the historical stuff is correct; I do my best to keep it so. But I also bend events and chronologies and even family relationships all the time in order to better and more sleekly service the story I’m trying to tell. In other words, if you can enjoy the book, and it sends you back to reading the primary historical sources, then that’s great. However, do not, under any circumstances, write your term paper based on facts you find in one of my novels. I just might have made them up—or dispatched my little Brownies to do it.

  Now that’s a good example of everything I’ve just been saying. I was delighted to discover, while reading Stevenson’s letters, that when he closed his eyes at night, he believed that a troop of tiny imaginary creatures—his Brownies, he called them—went to work, coming up with stories and ideas and plots for his work, and that when he woke up in the morning, if they’d done their job, he’d be able to go straight to his desk and start writing. These Brownies are mentioned throughout this book, as is his friendship with the poet and editor W. E. Henley. Robert Louis Stevenson and Henley, the model for the one-legged pirate Long John Silver in Treasure Island, were indeed the best of friends—until they were not. In later years, a feud broke out, and though I do not get into that in this book, Stevenson died, to his immense regret, with it unmended.

  If you want to learn more about the life of Robert Louis Stevenson, I can highly recommend Frank McLynn’s eponymous biography of the author (published by Random House), and for more information on Jack the Ripper, I’d suggest a beautifully illustrated volume entitled Jack the Ripper—CSI: Whitechapel, by the noted Ripperologists (yes, that’s a real term) Paul Begg and John Bennett (André Deutsch/Carlton Publishing Grou
p). For those of you with a more academic bent, there’s a harrowing look at the London of this era in a book entitled East End 1888 by W. J. Fishman, published by the Temple University Press in Philadelphia. All these books, and others too numerous to mention, were indispensable to me. To all their authors, I send my gratitude.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It has become standard operating procedure among authors to thank their agents, but in this instance it is especially meaningful. I had struggled for some time with the idea of writing a book about Robert Louis Stevenson, and even taken a couple of stabs at it, before throwing in the towel. But Cynthia Manson insisted I give it one more shot, and for better or worse, you hold the results in your hand. I am forever in her debt.

  I also wish to thank my assiduous editor, Caitlin Alexander, and my publisher, Jason Kirk, at 47North; even when he was bugging me about the deadlines that I kept missing, he managed to keep a lid on his panic, and as a consequence, on mine.

  Although I take the blame for any mistakes in the book, I do want to acknowledge my cousin Robert J. Masiello (yes, he spells the family name differently; my father abbreviated it) of bucolic Roseland, New Jersey, for his help with all things mechanical—from firearms to motorcycles. My thanks, too, to my nephew, the rugged outdoorsman and environmental scientist Daniel “Hawkeye” Masello, for his help with wilderness and camping matters, and to Hannah Hoch, of Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, for addressing questions about teenage life and the current music scene.