Mr. Utterson and Jericho Horn

THE POTION EXPLODED in Utterson’s innards; his head ignited, his vision blurred; he convulsed, he struggled to breathe, he reached for his throat, he felt bile erupt; his eyes rolled, blood roared around his body, and his skin heated like a hot plate.

‘Sir! Sir!’ he heard Poole cry.

For a moment Utterson was convinced he was dying; he even wondered if he had just partaken of the same poison that had killed Mr. Hyde. And he recognised that this would be a just punishment for his folly, for being such a deluded, reckless, whimsical fool; so he surrendered; and the floor peeled away beneath him; and he collapsed onto a chaise longue; and his limbs slackened, and his body went limp; and his heart stilled; and he gave himself over to God.

There was blackness; and even more blackness.

But then something remarkable happened. As though in a dream Utterson saw his own body twitching and buckling; he saw Poole bending over him; he felt his whole body rearranging, he heard his bones grinding and bending, his muscles tighten and swell, his hair bristling like a wolf’s, his bowels filling with foam, his knuckles cracking, his teeth sawing into his lips, and he tasted blood like an elixir in his throat.

‘Great God!’ exclaimed Poole, recoiling.

And Utterson, exulting, understood that he was not dead after all; he had reshaped himself; he had unleashed a demon within; and years of respectability had been torn away like a veil.

‘Sir!’

This transformation, for Utterson, should have been enough. His intention, when mixing the potion, had been only to prove a possibility to both the butler and himself. But now, like Dr. Jekyll before him, he found himself intoxicated by a sense of freedom, of overwhelming recklessness—for all the walls of London were lined up before him, and they were crying out to be smashed.

He was no longer the angel Gabriel. He was Jericho Horn.

He snapped his eyes open and sprang to his feet, feeling stronger, leaner, sinewy, as taut as a coiled spring.

‘You must sit!’ Poole tried.

‘Stand back, you ingrate!’

The voice, both guttural and forceful, rent the air like shrapnel; and only belatedly did Utterson realise, with surprise and delight, that it was his own.

‘Sir—’

Utterson slammed the butler in the chest so hard that Poole toppled, grappling at the curtains before hitting the floor; and Utterson threw back his head and laughed.

‘I should have done so years ago!’ he cried, and spat hatefully at Poole before bustling out the door.

He capered down the stairs, seized his hat and cobra-headed cane—the hat slipped down around his temples, the cane felt like a truncheon—and tore open the door with wickedness in his heart and vengeance in his soul.

Heading up the street he found his tremendous energy and myriad thoughts could barely be contained in one body; so he jerked and jolted and snarled and chuckled; he loped and hunched and sprang and twisted from one side of the street to the other; he banged off lampposts and thumped off walls.

Passers-by shrank back and shielded themselves, for Utterson was like a ball of lightning in the shape of a man. ‘Good evening, ladies,’ he snarled, doffing his hat. ‘And say how’d-you-do to Jericho Horn!’

As he approached the Thames his mind filled with the sound of bells and horns and sawing cellos, so that he imagined he was about to come upon some infernal orchestra, but then he understood he was not smelling the river but hearing it, because all his senses had been rearranged, and now smell had sound and sound had smell and colour had feeling—truly he had been born anew!

He did not pause for a single moment; he never faltered in his locomotive pace; he was an instrument of his bestial instincts; he charged headlong through bustling boulevards, curling streets and twisting lanes; he terrified rats and cats and cockroaches; he hissed in excitement as people around him dived for safety; and all the while the gas lights squealed, the air licked his face, colours reeked, the flagstones dazzled beneath his feet.

Finally he found himself outside the Jekyll home, where there were no lights in the windows; he hammered with the knocker and pounded the wood to no avail; he spun around and snarled at a cluster of curious onlookers—they wilted and ran—then rounded the corner to the dissecting rooms’ entrance, where he found the knife-boy Eddie returning home with a bag of booty.

‘Recognise me, do you?’

And when the scoundrel failed to respond Utterson seized him by the collar and flung him onto the cobbles, locking his hands around his throat and digging thumbnails through flesh.

‘Where now is your master?’

Eddie squirmed and gasped as his eyeballs bulged; he struggled to say something, and Mr. Horn loosened his hands.

‘Where is your master, I say?’

‘At … at the theatre!’

‘A surgical theatre?’

‘A theatre … in the West End!’

‘Which one?’

‘D-don’t’—Eddie sucked desperately at air—‘don’t know!’

Horn tossed the man aside and made off, shuffling, scrambling, gaining speed, his elbows pumping, his feet barely touching the ground; he giggled and cawed and hacked and hummed; and overheard lightning boomed and thunder flashed and oh, his senses reeled with the glory of it all, for inside him and out there was a tremendous storm.

In the theatre district the lights were sizzling as the crowds swarmed onto the streets amid a chaos of cabs and carriages; there were dowagers and stately gentlemen, men in court suits and gleaming top hats, ladies in plumes and furs and rustling silks.

Through all this Horn drove like a spear, gorging on his own distaste, thrilling at his revulsion; but everywhere his eyes darted he saw no sign of the claimant, nothing at all, until an odour invaded his nostrils and struck a switch in his brain; and then his nose, his eyes, his ears—all his senses in concert—told him he had picked up the stink of the impostor.

And there he was, the loathsome villain, made up like a Prussian horse guard, emerging from the Gaiety Theatre arm-in-arm with the widow Spratling—the duplicitous wench!—who in crimson bombazine looked as cheap as a cabbage-leaf cigar.

Horn felt his heart crashing, his brows bending; he heard the widow’s lust like a mule driver’s cry; and he drank of his own hatred as of a long-fermented wine.

Lightning snaked across the sky; rain slashed at the streets; the claimant and the widow ducked down a dimly lighted alley; and Horn himself hurtled after them, his blood so hot it was steaming through his skin. Halfway down, with water roiling and gurgling in the drainpipes, the claimant wheeled around with a look of reproach.

‘Do I know you, sir?’

‘You might know this!’ cried Horn, and brought his cane flashing down on the man’s nose; there was a crack of cartilage and a burst of blood. Horn struck again and again and again and again, a rain of bone-crunching blows, and the widow howled like a harpy.

Finally the impostor was on the floor of the alleyway, his life gushing into twinkling puddles and bloody Nora was pressed back against the bricks, with thunder growling, as Horn thrust his head into her face.

‘Be I Gabriel now,’ he cackled, ‘or be I Lucifer?’

Then he lunged forward and tore the dress from her shoulders, so that her pink skin gleamed in the gaslight, and he seized her throat and stared into her eyes, fully prepared to take her like a tomcat.

But suddenly there was a whistle blast and he whirled around to see four constables flooding into the alley, and with one final grope at the fainting Nora he shot down the alley into Surrey Street and skittered down the darkest pathways to the embankment, taking many twists and turns until he had melted into the night.

The storm by now was fading but icy rain still cut through his clothes; he was heading swiftly to Gaunt Street with his bones grinding and rearranging, his muscles deflating, so that he sensed he was transforming back into the respectable lawyer of Bedford Row. And with that conviction a great shame seized him, and with every step he could scarce credit what diabolical powers had taken dominion of him. He shrank from the light and wept into the rain, filled not with desire but disgrace, and yearning for the consoling familiarity of his hearth.

At Gaunt Street, unable to find his key, he pounded on the door until Poole appeared and then Utterson dived into the hall where he stood dripping and bedraggled.

‘I … I …’ But he could not speak.

He raced up the stairway to his business room and sprawled across the chaise longue and sobbed into his hands until the darkness once more overcame him. And when he opened his eyes he found his butler standing over him with a searching look on his face.

‘I smote him, Poole!’ he exclaimed.

‘You smote … who?’

‘The impostor! The man calling himself Jekyll!’

‘Faith!’ Poole said. ‘When?’

‘Just now. But twenty minutes ago.’

‘Twenty minutes ago!’

‘In an alley off the Strand. Oh, why did you not obey me, Poole? When I ordered you not to allow me to leave this room?’

The butler was taken aback. ‘But sir—’

‘Oh, I know, Poole, it’s my fault, of course it is! It’s mine, for taking that infernal potion!’

‘But sir—’

‘None of this would have happened but for that formula. It ruined Jekyll and it has ruined me! What am I to do now, with blood on my hands?’

‘But sir …’ Poole licked his lips. ‘I assure you, sir, you have not killed anyone.’

‘But I did, Poole, you were not there to see!’

‘But you did not, sir, I know it for certain.’

‘You cannot know it, Poole.’

‘But I can,’ the butler insisted. ‘Because you have not left this room, sir. After you drank from the glass you fell upon the sofa, twisting and shuddering, and drifting in and out of sleep.’

Utterson squinted incredulously. ‘What?’

‘Sir, I promise you—you have been here in this room for at least an hour.’

Utterson shook his head. ‘You lie … you must be lying!’

‘Sir, I give you my bible-word.’

‘But I was in the streets … I saw it all … I felt it all.’

‘You tossed and moaned, sir, and you cried out, but you did not leave this room.’

Utterson prodded his shirtfront, which was damp. ‘Then what about this rain on my clothes?’

‘It is not rain, sir, but perspiration.’

‘Perspiration!’

‘You were very worked up, sir, and frothing at the mouth, as well.’

‘Ahhh!’ said Utterson, seeing for the first time that it might well be true. ‘You mean I have not ventured out at all?’

‘Not at all, sir.’

‘Then I am not a killer after all?’

‘Not that I know of, sir.’

‘And the potion did not transform me?’

‘It only made you writhe and sweat, sir.’

But now Utterson was faced with a prospect just as disagreeable as that of being a murderer—the appalling possibility that Jekyll’s formula had never transformed anyone, and Jekyll was not Hyde.

Again shame and fear flooded over him.

‘It was the impure salt!’ he exclaimed.

‘Sir?’

‘The impure salt! Clearly the potion needs the impure salt!’

He stared at Poole, daring him to disagree. But Poole’s expression, it seemed to him, had transformed from patronising pity into withering disdain.

Utterson bolted for the door.