CHAPTER 47

Louis awoke early. No new dream. But the old one wouldn’t go away. It chilled him to remember it.

He could see them quite clearly. Two gentlemen pass through a wooden door and enter a damp courtyard. They know a man who lives in the house that faces the open court. When they glance up, they see a vexed-looking man who sits by a half-open window on the second floor. “Dr. Jekyll!” one of the men calls out to the fellow. “Do come down and have a walk with us. You could use the fresh air. You don’t look so well.” The man won’t come down. And then a terrifying expression overtakes the doctor’s face. He closes the window and moves away from it, but in that moment, both of the men on the ground understand they have glimpsed something—a transformation, inutterably horrifying.

The second part of the dream was vivid. A small man runs through the streets. His pants drag. His clothes are too big for him. He has a hideous, somehow malformed face and corded, hairy hands. A policeman chases after him, shouting, “Stop!” The man disappears into an old doorway off the street. Runs through a courtyard and up some stairs, past a surgical theater, and into a doctor’s laboratory. He is frantic. He pours white salts from a glass saucer into a beaker half full of red liquid. He drinks it and his face appears to melt, change hue, then reshape itself with different features. His body grows large, into a different man’s body. He is transformed. He is a whole and respectable figure. At the door, the policeman is pounding …

Louis scoured his brain for a few more scrapings of the dream. Nothing. The Brownies had left just those bits: the agonized Dr. Jekyll at the window, and later, the hideous Edward Hyde taking the potion.

The evening before, Louis had come up to the bedroom, itching to pound more walls, but his fist was aflame from the first punch. Instead, he fell into the bed to stew over his wife’s remarks.

How galling that Fanny considered herself his ultimate critic. Thomas Stevenson was partly to blame for that. Long ago, he had said to Louis, “You really shouldn’t publish anything that Fanny has not approved first.” She had taken that endorsement far too seriously. Louis blamed himself, too, for he’d brought her along, invited her to collaborate on story collections and playwriting with him and Henley. Recently, Henley had said, “I can only collaborate with one Stevenson at a time.”

Long ago, before he met Fanny, he had made up his mind that marrying another writer would be a mistake. A family could tolerate only one. Well, Fanny had been an aspiring writer before he knew her. Any qualms Louis might have felt about a life with her had inevitably passed. Their time together had become one long conversation—contentious sometimes, yes—yet she had opened his mind in many ways. And Fanny’s mind was keen; she had a wonderful way of seeing things that was all hers. Sometimes her thoughts were so original that they took Louis aback. But she was more intuitive about human nature than skilled in literary nuance. He wanted to say to her, I love you, I owe my life to you. But my writing comes first, even before you. Because I am my writing. And when you meddle in my work, you muck with my soul.

Louis looked at the pile of paper on his lap. Earlier, he had felt so exhausted that he could not even contemplate rereading the story for errors. He had hoped to sleep tonight and read the next day with a fresh brain. There were at least thirty thousand words there.

Before he laid his head down, it hit him. Goddammit, she’s right. As it stood, the Jekyll and Hyde story was merely a penny dreadful horror. The tale should be written as a stronger allegory. It held within it a germ of truth about the “other” in every man, a truth so powerful it could make any reader of the story flinch with recognition of his own weaker self.

After he had tossed the manuscript into the fireplace, he tried to sleep, but the new story would not let him rest. Louis sat up, mapping out the direction of the next version on his board. As soon as his note taking ended, his pen was writing a new version of the story. Ideas, whole paragraphs sparked around his brain; he abbreviated words to capture them on paper before another bolt hit him.

NEXT TO THE bed, a tray with food and medicine appeared. Someone, Fanny or Valentine or maybe even Lloyd, had delivered it during the day, and now Louis fell upon it with gusto. He kept his pen moving as he ate, noting down, a horror that is knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; and man is not truly one, but truly two.

After a while, the food in his belly—or perhaps the morphine—made him dog-tired, and he fell asleep sitting up with his tray on his lap. When he awoke, it was black outside and raining. The house was silent. He picked up his pen, put it between his third and fourth fingers to alleviate the pain in his hand, and continued writing. The words did not stop. Morning came. Eggs on a plate arrived, warm and fragrant. He nodded to Fanny as she set the tray on his bedside table, but shook his head to signal no conversation. She had buttered a roll for him. He dipped it in the dish of jam with his left hand and ate it like a starving man while his right hand rushed across the paper.

He tried to imagine how it would feel to have one’s body begin to change of its own volition. He remembered what it was like as a boy to emerge from a nightmare brought on by fever, seeing the clothes he had hung on a door hook take on ghastly shapes like the fearsome bodies of monsters. Jekyll must see himself in the mirror that way—ghoulishly transformed. Louis reflected on how his own body could turn upon him; in the space of a few minutes, he could become a sick, pathetic thing utterly unlike his well self.

The sun came into the window, patterned the room, went away. The night passed as the previous one had and the next one would, with Louis upright in bed, his hand cramped with pain as he wrote and wrote. In the late afternoon of the next day, he let his arm fall next to the bed; the pen slipped out of his hand.

He had been writing straight, with almost no breaks, for six days: three days on the first draft, three days on the second, for a total of over sixty thousand words.

When Fanny entered the room with another tray of food, she found her husband standing at his mirror, touching his cheeks with both hands.

“What is it?” she asked him.

“I was so emairsed,” he said, “I half-expected to see Hyde’s face.”

She eyed him cautiously, then saw the fat stack of pages he’d written. He rubbed his eyes. “I will read tonight,” he said.