The Jekyll Revelation Page 13

  ‘Me?’ Fanny said.

  ‘I believe it was directed at Louis.’

  ‘Why in the world would she shout such a thing at my husband? Much less hurl that awful thing through the window!” Reaching for it, she said, ‘Throw it back out, right now.’

  But I kept hold of it. Whatever torture had already been inflicted on Lord Grey, I could not undo, but I could keep any further indignities from occurring. The whistle of the train blasted the air and echoed around the valley. As gently as if I were diapering a baby, I wrapped the rags around the head again and, to Fanny’s open-mouthed astonishment, petted the skull.

  ‘Louis, have you lost your mind?’

  The woman, I could only assume, had been Yannick’s wife. And the boy, his son? The one who was to wear a coat made of the wolf’s skin?

  ‘Now I have seen everything,’ Fanny said, slumping back in her seat.

  And though I said nothing to correct her, I knew, to my own sorrow, that she had not. The world, I have learned, always has something more in store.

  TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA

  Present Day

  Rafe had been running late all day, which was no surprise, given his alcohol intake with Miranda the night before.

  After retiring to his trailer, he’d heard Laszlo coming home on his Vespa and, glancing out his window, watched Miranda steer him away from the yard and back toward the house. The old clothes from the trunk, he saw, had been pinned on the clothesline.

  But by the time he left the next morning, the clothes were gone, except for a pocket watch that he spotted glinting in the morning sun. It must have fallen out of a pocket. The watch and its chain were tarnished silver, and when he was able to get the spring to work, it opened to reveal an antique, though crushed, face, and on the inside of the dented lid the initials SLO, elaborately etched under the manufacturer’s name, Asprey Ltd. He had no idea if it was worth anything, especially in this dilapidated state, but until he knew, mentioning it to Seth and Alfie would probably be a big mistake.

  He stuck it in his backpack, which he threw into his jeep, along with the radio tracking equipment and all his camping supplies. He was planning on a two- or three-day jaunt, tracking the coyote pack before his grant was cut or the animals disappeared altogether. At the last minute, he remembered to take the sealed strongbox.

  At the Kanan Road firehouse, one of the firefighters took one look at it and whistled. “How the hell old is this thing?”

  “Maybe a hundred, hundred and fifty years?”

  The firefighter shook it gently. “Is that the sound of money?” he said with a smile.

  When Rafe shrugged, he produced a slim and pliable pick, and after two or three attempts and a lot of wriggling, he was able to release the lock. “Want me to keep going?” he said, and when Rafe said, “Be my guest,” he lifted the rusty lid.

  Inside, its edges worn and ragged, was a worn leather book.

  “Sorry, pal—no dough.”

  Rafe was relieved; it was one less headache. If everything in the trunk amounted to nothing much, he could hand it all over—the pocket watch included—to Seth and Alfie, with his blessing, and without the bother of filing any report or paperwork at the field office downtown.

  “What is that stuff?” the firefighter said, running one finger over the finely mottled surface. The book had no title printed on its cover, and was made of a pale-green skin.

  “Shagreen.”

  “Sha-what?”

  “Shagreen,” Rafe said. “Sharkskin. The little bumps are calcified papillae.”

  Now he looked even more puzzled.

  “Scales,” Rafe explained. “They’re placoid scales, probably from a baby shark.” Part of his training as an environmental scientist had been spent at the aquarium in Monterey.

  “Huh.”

  “Yeah.” Rafe didn’t know much about the value of old books, but he sensed that this one had been expensively produced.

  Opening it, however, he was surprised to see no printed text, but instead page after page after page of fragile, crinkly paper, densely covered in a loose scrawl of black ink.

  “Does it say who killed Kennedy?” the firefighter joked.

  Rafe would have been hard pressed to say what it said—the writing was faint, and so idiosyncratic it was hard to decipher at first glance. But what he could make out were some dates, and they were all from the late nineteenth century. Apart from any monetary value it might possess, maybe this thing would prove to be of some historical importance—though how, and why, it wound up in a locked trunk filled with a bunch of old clothes, then dumped in a lake in Topanga Canyon, was likely to be even harder to explain.

  The answer would have to wait awhile. He had planned to be well up into the canyon trails by now, so he slipped the journal into his backpack, threw the box into the back of his jeep, and drove on. At one of the more remote and hidden access roads, he turned into the wilderness, drove as far as he could go, and when the road gave out, parked and locked the jeep up in the shelter of some trees.

  Toting his gear on his back—counting the nylon pup tent, it must have weighed thirty or forty pounds—he marched into the canyon. He hadn’t gone more than a half mile before he came across a tiny, ramshackle house almost entirely hidden by trees and brush. With a sloping tin roof, a crooked chimney, and a Dutch door hanging by one hinge, it was something out of a fairy tale. The witch’s house, most likely.

  But the woman whose eyes he spotted checking him out from the open portion of the door wasn’t a witch. It was Mrs. Pothead, as she was known not only to Rafe but to every ranger and firefighter in the region. She and her husband were the classic living-off-the-grid couple, doing without electricity, making their own clothes, drawing their own water from a well, raising their own fruits and vegetables. By all rights, they should have been rousted out long ago, but nobody had the heart to. They were completely harmless, a couple of misfits who, as it happened, also served a purpose. They owned a cell phone, and though they had to walk a piece to get within range of any tower, they were what Rafe and the others who knew about them considered an early-warning system. If a lightning strike started a blaze deep in the canyon, Mr. and Mrs. Pothead could be trusted to call it in pronto. If a hiker got hopelessly lost in their area, they could be notified to keep an eye out for him.

  In return, Rafe turned a blind eye to the other crops—the cash crops—growing out back in their wild and scraggly garden patch. Two or three times a month, when they made a run down into town, they converted some of their top-quality weed into just enough money to buy seeds and sodas and plant food, after which they treated themselves to a plate of tamales at La Raza before burrowing back into the brush again.

  “It’s just me—Rafe!” he called out, in case she hadn’t determined that yet.

  “Hi, Rafe,” he heard from off to his left, and only now noticed Mr. Pothead, thin as a rail and still as a statue, standing between two trees with a hoe in hand. He looked like that guy from the painting—American Gothic?—the one holding a pitchfork.

  “Hey,” Rafe said.

  “What brings you up here?” Mr. Pothead said, in a soft voice that sounded unaccustomed to use.

  “Tracking my coyotes.”

  Mr. Pothead nodded.

  “You see them lately?”

  “Always see coyotes,” he said, pronouncing it “ki-oats.” “Yours any different?”

  “Got tracking collars on ’em.”

  He shook his head, then called out, “Sarah, you see any coyotes with collars on?”

  She laughed, a little hysterically, and Rafe wondered, as he often had, just how strange a relationship these two had.

  “I guess not,” Mr. Pothead said. “You wanna come in for a cup of tea?”

  “Thanks, but I’ve got to keep moving. You take care now.”

  “You, too, ’specially if you’re going that way.”

  “Which way?”

  He lifted his chin toward the east, where Rafe was heade
d.

  “Why?”

  “I mind my own business,” Mr. Pothead said. “I’m just sayin’, keep a lookout.”

  He could feel their eyes on him as he set off again—he was probably the only person they’d seen up there in months—and he wondered what in particular he should be keeping a lookout for. Once he was well out of their sight and had found a good clear spot to begin his triangulations, he raised his antenna and looked for a signal from the coyotes’ radio collars. When he’d found it—he was picking up the transmission from Diego, the leader of the pack—he recorded it and moved on, trekking several more miles before looking to get a second reading on his GPS. But he knew it might not be easy. The drought had changed everything. Coyotes were territorial, and under normal conditions, with an abundant supply of food and water, a pack like this could stake out a fairly small area and stick to it, finding everything they’d need within its parameters; in California’s verdant coastal range, that meant they could usually make do with an area comprising one to three square miles.

  But in these parched conditions, they might have to roam over as much as fifteen square miles in search of adequate resources. Omnivores of the first order, coyotes could—and would—eat anything from nuts and berries to rodents and insects, along with carrion they came across in the course of their extensive travels. Even when wary farmers left guard dogs to protect their flocks of sheep and goats and calves, the coyotes got around them; sometimes, the dogs themselves became prey. In Rafe’s experience, a coyote would try eating anything at least once.

  Except, maybe, a wolf.

  He hadn’t forgotten the print he’d seen on the trail, days before. Reading tracks wasn’t an exact science; the soil didn’t provide perfect impressions. But he couldn’t forget the chill he’d gotten when he’d studied and measured the print he’d seen. He knew he had a good eye for these things, and if he was right, then he’d made a significant discovery. If he shot off his mouth too soon, however, and was later discredited, he could give the bureaucracy one more reason to defund his research.

  By the time he reached the next crest, the sun was dropping toward the horizon and the shadows of the trees were lengthening. For now, it was time to set up camp while there was still some light in the sky and he could see what he was doing. He pitched the solo tent and debated which of his canned rations to have for dinner, cold; in view of the drought conditions, lighting a fire to heat anything up was way too risky. Sitting on a log, digging his spoon into the mac and cheese, he gazed up at the stars and wondered, as he pretty much always did, how there could be so damn many of them. When you were in Los Angeles, or any city for that matter, you could see a few. When you were out in the backyard of the store in Topanga, you could see a lot more. But when you ventured into the wilderness, miles from any city and its ambient glare, the sky seemed to take on an altogether new dimension. The stars were strewn everywhere overhead, twinkling so brightly it was as if they were in motion. Rafe remembered many a night, growing up, when he’d stare out the window of some temporary refuge and take comfort in the sight of the moon and the few stars that he could discern. Instead of making him feel insignificant, or his problems no big deal, they made him feel a part of something bigger and more beautiful than he could ever comprehend. He just wanted to be out among them.

  And now he was. Alone, in the mountains . . . with just his thoughts, which kept turning to Miranda. What would have happened, after all that wine and the candlelight and the ice cream, if Seth and Alfie hadn’t shown up at the door? What could happen, so long as she was shacked up with Laszlo?

  To distract himself, he crawled into the tent, and by the light of the Coleman lantern, took the antique journal out of his backpack and flipped through it. Some of the pages were more legible than others, but the nineteenth-century dates and exotic headings alone—Davos and London and Samoa—were enough to transport his imagination in the same way that gazing at the stars had once done. All those years ago, in all those places Rafe had never been, a man—and he just assumed that it was a man—had sat hunched over this book, with its then-blank pages, and written the story of . . . what? His life? His adventures? His philosophy?

  Plainly, there was only one way to find out.

  Turning to the first page, and slowly deciphering the distinctive scrawl, he began to read. A coach was traveling up a snowy road in Switzerland, with a dog named Woggin, of all things, hanging his head out the open window . . .

  PART II

  22 February, 1885

  40 Cavendish Square, London

  As God is my witness, I had never expected, nor wished, to open this journal again. It was to be a volume whose story closed on the Continent.

  But stories have not only a will of their own, but a secret wellspring, too. My own come to me as dreams, cobbled together by an army of what I have dubbed my Brownies, those anarchic spirits whom I willfully muster, every night, as my little boat sets sail upon the sea of sleep. Their task is to bring me a tale of derring-do, of intrigue or adventure, a shilling shocker to capture the imagination of the public and make my name, and fortune. When I awake, I do so slowly, taking care not to shake my head or address the events of the coming day lest I disturb whatever strange cargo they have brought me. I sift through the remaining impressions, the images and incidents and ideas, as if they were dry goods piled in bins, and if my Brownies have done their job, there is invariably something to reward my search.

  Symonds, to whom I have confided my secret, tells me that smoking opium has an equivalent effect, and that many of his most penetrating aperçus have come to him while reclining on a silken divan in the darkest dens of Whitechapel. ‘What Dr Rüedi prescribes is medicine for the body,’ he says, ‘but opium is the balm for the soul.’ Although he has encouraged me to join him on one of his ‘mystic excursions’, I have so far declined the honour. ‘What need do I have of Oriental powders’, I told him, ‘when I have my obedient Brownies?’

  ‘That is precisely why you need the pipe,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t know a thing about obedience; no true artist should. The unruly impulse is the one to indulge. What is it Wilde wrote in that Dorian Gray book? “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.”’

  Tempting as the offer was, and much as I agreed with what he said in theory, in practice my constitution remained so precarious, my lungs so fragile, that I feared taking any step whose outcome was too uncertain. The distillation, secreted in the bottles of Valtellina, I husbanded carefully against the day it ran out. That day could not be indefinitely postponed. Since leaving the Belvédère, I had suffered several setbacks, sudden onslaughts of pulmonary distress as severe as any I have known. On one morning, Fanny swears that she found me as cold and stiff as a marble slab—‘Anyone else would have given up and called for the undertaker’—and that it was only her immediate ministrations, her vigourous rubbing, and scalding bath, that brought me back to this world. ‘You English would have packed it in,’ she said, ‘but Americans don’t give up so easy.’

  ‘Scots,’ I corrected her.

  ‘Have it your way, Louis.’

  The house we have taken, on Cavendish Square, is cold, drafty, and grander than I believe we need; for all her democratic and egalitarian ideals, Fanny is at heart a snob, and to her, a fashionable London address is de rigueur. The furnishings are as gloomy and cumbersome as the house—a Georgian manse with a stately façade and a red-brick wall surrounding a small, scrubby garden at the back—and it requires at the very least a housemaid, a cook, and a butler to run it. In that, we have been fortunate, finding a family, the Chandlers, who can apportion all such duties among themselves. Mr Chandler, a veteran of the Royal Fusiliers, is prepared to undertake any task, from cleaning the coalscuttle to decanting the brandy, while his wife tends to all things that belong to the kitchen and infernal regions of the house. Their daughter, Sally, a plump young creature of sixteen summers, is as lazy as they are industrious, but if reminded enough times, will eventually focus h
er efforts sufficiently to finish polishing the silver or dusting the library shelves. On one occasion, I discovered her there, still as a statue, her dust rags tucked under an arm, the other holding open a book.

  ‘You may read anything here that you wish,’ I said, and she was so startled she dropped the book, then, stooping to pick it up, dropped the rags, then, straightening, dropped the book again. I laughed, though she did not share in my amusement. ‘Just try not to bruise them.’

  She scuttled out of the room, head down and blushing furiously, before I could explain that, as an author, I prized nothing so much as readers. When I saw what she had been perusing—a new novel, “Far from the Madding Crowd,” inscribed to me by Thomas Hardy—I was even more impressed. That she could read at all was commendable—that she would make such a good selection was even more so. When Fanny and I had paid a call on him at Max Gate outside Dorchester, Hardy was as flustered as a guinea hen, but gracious and welcoming. When I told Henley about the visit, he declared, ‘The man may be the critics’ darling, but I’ll take one of your boisterous yarns over one of his yawners any time!’

  The London air is thick with Japanism. The opening of the Japanese Village in Knightsbridge has become all the rage, and a clever new musical production, called “The Mikado,” has been filling the Savoy Theatre every night. It was always Henley’s wish, and remains so, that we write something for the theatre together. There is something about the sight of the nobs with their tickets in hand, pouring in through the open doors of the gaily lighted house, that thrills him to the core, though I suspect it is more about the money than it is the artistic acclaim. We have tried our hand already, and probably shall again (over Fanny’s objections), but the stage remains a prize we cannot capture. Messieurs Gilbert and Sullivan have nothing to fear from us at present.

  Nor do the Japanese. By virtue of his current position as editor of “The National Observer,” Henley was able to procure several much-coveted tickets to the formal tea ceremony, held each afternoon at the exhibition. ‘I could have wished for better company than him,’ Fanny said, ‘but you can’t look a gift horse in the mouth.’