Thanks to Robert Louis Stevenson for inspiring this one. One definition of a classic is there’s always something new you can bring to it.
• • •
This is my suicide note.
It’s all Jekyll’s doing, feeble prig that he is; his infernal decency has begun to engulf me, just when I thought my logic was bringing him round. Sometime as I slept coiled inside him, he smuggled in a conscience.
Monstrous vandalism, that, like throwing paint on a Greek statue. (Inspired mischief: Is the British Museum open at this hour?) I was unique among my fellow Homo sapiens, a man thoroughly without scruple, a pure thing.
Jekyll’s greatest creation, surpassing God.
The poison—tincture of arsenic and strychnine, with a dash of potassium cyanide, a most lethal postprandial libation—awaits me in a measured beaker, looking quite benign in comparison with the elixir of my release, glowing and foaming bilious green as it does when the powder is introduced, like sulfur dissolved in essence of mad dog.
Soon the world will know the truth: that Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde are one and the same, saint and sinner, philanthropist and murderer, saver and taker of lives.
But I’m Hyde yet. If the pang becomes unendurable, I’ll anesthetize it with gin.
How well I remember my birth, unlike those born of woman: my creator writhing in agony while I tore myself from his insides in impatient rage; my face in the cheval-glass, all ridges and bone and swollen eyeballs, dripping with amniotic fluid like a child just delivered. All babies are ugly at the start, red and wrinkled, their faces distended with wrath. No one had consulted them on the matter of their birth, or warned them what to expect when they still had the chance to strangle themselves with their umbilical cords. All mankind is born angry.
Just how Jekyll came to christen me Edward Hyde is a mystery. “Edward” is easy: An uncle of that name died in an asylum for the criminally insane, after chopping up his wife and four children with a hatchet. I am his direct descendant. “Hyde” is enigmatic: Am I the sordid thing that crawls beneath the hide of all humanity, or the dreaded thing from which all humanity must hide?
Or he may simply have come upon the inspiration sitting on a bench in Hyde Park. The damn absent-minded scientist is easily distracted by the course of his thoughts. Just because we share the same knowledge and memories does not mean we can follow the circumlocution of a highly educated mind.
It’s my mind, too, don’t forget. I benefit from Jekyll’s many years of study and practise, without having had to fidget in the lecture-hall, the laboratory, and the dissection room, redolent of ammonia, formaldehyde, and raw human flesh; although I revel in that last sense-memory. The extinction of life is the essence of art. I slew a man in Hampstead for dipping snuff. Filthy habit; but he died well. I ate his heart.
Henry—for I am certainly close enough to him to address him by his Christian name—has never appreciated his good fortune: In this third decade of the reign of good Queen Victoria, to sample the exquisite pleasures of the London demimonde—more extensive in their delicious variety than in all of Sodom—while maintaining one’s respectable reputation, must surely be the dream of any man with blood in his veins.
I gave him that gift; but to what end? Loathed, hunted, held in deepest contempt by the man who bore me, and now consigned to execution by that same revered practitioner. I would throttle him with my bare hands if it wouldn’t serve his purpose as well as the poison.
O, but to experience just once more the abandon of Limehouse, Spitalfields, the music-halls where ribald comedies play out onstage while even greater entertainment takes place in the boxes above, swaddled in curtains; opium dens, brothels, cockfights in Soho, bear-baiting in the Isle of Dogs. I lost a good deal of Henry’s fortune on a grizzly named Lord Bartholomew, but made it back on a mastiff they called Geronimo; then blew it on a virgin in a Greenwich bordello who turned out not to be as advertised. I strangled the madam to death with one of her own elbow-length gloves. I despise misrepresentation.
Nothing came of that, as no one cares about such creatures; but as happens in the course of things, something far more trivial set events against me.
It wasn’t the boy at the West India docks, for I paid him handsomely in return for his silence; nor even the vagabond I doused with coal-oil and touched off with a match in Soho. They didn’t even make the Telegraph. An anarchist bombing in the Underground drove them square off the columns.
I wonder just how one goes about constructing a bomb? Black powder is easily obtained, fuses and timers even more so; and books on the subject are available in certain places with which I’m familiar. I should like to blow up the Tower, at a peak time when all the tourists are filing past the crowned jewels, the blood and entrails of the innocent commingling with the baubles of the privileged few. But I suppose that’s an impossible dream now.
No, it was a trifling affair that undid me, scarcely worth including in one’s memoirs. A filthy little girl in pinafores ran square into me on my way home from a public-house, long after the hour when such creatures should be in bed. I stomped her, of course. There happened to be witnesses present—busybodies, who ought to mind to their own affairs—and I was forced by sheer numbers to retreat to Henry’s laboratory and scribble out a cheque for some petty amount in the way of repairs—contusions and abrasions, that’s all the thing was about. Given time, I’d have put the little baggage in crutches for life. But everything can be bought off, even indignation. The worst consequence was I’d been identified in connection with my dear benefactor.
The incident worked on Henry. I wonder if that precious conscience of his is at all diminished by sharing some of it with me. In any event he laid off the drug that led to my delivery for months.
Guv’nor, have you ever spent months in confinement, separated by iron bars from your true nature? Well, the Jekyll in me—curse the prude—hopes you never will.
I’d have none of it. When first he made my acquaintance, I was nearly a dwarf, stunted by decades of repression. Now, having feasted on the septet of sins, I stood close to his height. I’d grown too strong to remain incarcerated by anything so juvenile as temperance.
But attaining liberty was no small challenge. Henry was a man to keep vigil. As long as I was in his thoughts, I might as well have been in chains.
Well, even a genius needs to sleep; or relax his guard and slip into a daydream. And Edward Hyde has no need of rest. Evil feeds upon itself, like a mushroom growing in the dark.
I sprang forth as he sat on a public bench, ruminating; a dim silly memory of his mother giving him a biscuit for some darling act of sweetness on his part. I might have vomited if I hadn’t been waiting for just that moment. He had time, in the instant before the transformation was complete, to register shock and horror: He’d fallen into his repose a man erect and clean-shaven, nails pared, an exemplar of civilisation, and awoke bent and hirsute, a brute from an age of savagery and stone, where men took their pleasures with club and spear.
I was as a wild horse unbridled; a lion, rather, suddenly released from its cage. I charged across the heath, coattails flying, swinging my stick to open a path through the strolling sluggards standing between me and the orgies I craved. How well I remember their faces changing from annoyance to fear when they looked upon mine, black with engorged blood and white with gnashing teeth.
Storming across a revoltingly charming footbridge, I came upon a stranger, immaculately attired for the evening, with snow-white whiskers. He tipped his hat and bade me good evening.
Had he said nothing and stepped aside, he might have been spared. The mere kindness of his diction drove me to fury. I bludgeoned him to death.
How he pleaded for mercy! How he mewled when the gold knob of Jekyll’s stick broke his skull. When the blood spurted from his lips, I’d have gladly shattered every bone in his body. But by then he was inexorably dead; his eyes stared sightless at what I have to own was a sky sprinkled beautifully with stars.
I am an unfortunate man.
The fellow I’d killed was a member of Parliament, one Sir Danvers Carew, and to put the fine point upon it happened to be popular with both the voters and the press. He was a generous donor to charities; of all things for a politician to be.
And I’d been seen.
By a fool housemaid, mooning in a window, who’d observed me well enough in the gaslight to provide an accurate description for Scotland Yard.
So I went underground, into the safe house of the body of Dr. Henry Jekyll.
Understand, my memories were his. He was fully aware of what I’d done, and of his own complicity in keeping it secret. O, I know my Henry, better than he knows himself. He would never condone my conduct, but neither would he expose it, lest it reflect upon himself. I ask you, who is the hypocrite here?
I blended the ingredients of the elixir from memory and crawled back under his skin. The old agony was now nearly gone. Hyde slid into Jekyll, and Jekyll into Hyde, as easily as a button passing through a worn eyelet.
And like that button it slid out just as easily, and at the most inopportune times; but we were both unaware of that as yet.
I lay doggo for a while, as who would not? Safe in the carapace of the good Henry Jekyll, setting the broken bones and draining the pus of the poor, pooh-poohing their gratitude whilst reveling in it; pretending there had never been little naughty Eddie inside noble Hank since Cain slew Abel. No man had ever invented a better place of concealment. I was the luckiest scoundrel ever born—had I been born.
Was it a mistake to leave the broken half of Henry’s own stick at the scene of the murder of Sir Danvers Carew? Or did I want to implicate him?
Does anyone care? I hate the man. I would never have existed but for him.
I am back inside him now, but we can both feel the restorative wearing off. My accursed strength is the culprit. He fears to leave the laboratory lest the most wanted criminal in London should suddenly appear in the middle of Piccadilly.
He blames the impurity in the original powder, which can’t be duplicated, for his inability to maintain his original identity. What he doesn’t understand—which I do, as his Greater Understanding—is he prefers to remain Edward Hyde. I’m younger, to begin with, having appeared late in his awakening, and I have delicacies yet to taste, virgins to deflower, innocents to sully, purses to pinch, banks to rob, dogs to kick, and kittens to drown. We could own the Empire, would we just put decency aside. All he must do to banish me to limbo is confess his humanity.
This he will never do.
The beaker stands, in appearance no more prepossessing than a pint of beer in a friendly pub. Peace awaits upon the consumption. He reaches for it.
But before he can grasp it, his hand is covered with coarse hair and ropy veins. It’s the hand of a murderer. It closes into a fist and draws away.
Not yet, Henry. Not just yet.
A gentleman keeps his appointments.
I have an assignation in Whitechapel, with a comely piece named Mary Kelly, a delectable flame-haired daughter of Erin, and available for a shilling. She’s far more fetching than the others I’ve encountered in that neighbourhood. I’m unable to use my name now; events beyond the control of us both have forced me to be circumspect.
She knows me only as Jack.