The Jekyll Revelation Page 15

  The voices came closer, but slowly; the talkers were tired, and slogging along as if they were dragging something on the ground. Rafe stayed perfectly still, relying on the fading light and the tangle of jojoba brush to keep him concealed.

  “I’m too old for this shit,” one of the men said. “Next time I’m gonna tell Axel to get somebody else.”

  The voice was familiar. It was Alfie’s.

  “I want to be there when you do,” the other one said. Seth.

  “You don’t think I’ve got the guts?”

  “Oh, you’ve got the guts. I’ll see ’em coming out the hole where he stabs you.”

  They were passing right by the jojoba now—wearing sweaty T-shirts and red bandanas around their brows, dragging what looked like a big flat snowshoe covered with a net. Under the net were white plastic jugs and a slew of cardboard boxes.

  “Hang on,” Seth said. “I need a break.”

  Not even daring to lift his head another inch, Rafe waited and heard the sound of a match being struck, then smelled the cigarette smoke.

  “You set fire to the canyon and I’ll kill you myself,” Alfie said.

  “Who gives a shit.”

  It was all Rafe could do not to leap up and brain the bastard. But he held on to his temper, and his mounting curiosity.

  Seth exhaled, a plume of smoke wafting over Rafe’s head. “Why’d he have to put it so fucking far in?”

  “Yeah, you be sure to ask him that, too.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “No, fuck you.”

  Seth chuckled at the wit of the exchange, and after a few more drags on the cigarette, tossed the butt over the bush. It landed on the dirt, just inches from Rafe’s nose.

  And then they were trudging off again, dragging the load like sled dogs.

  When he was sure they had to be at least twenty or thirty yards away, he dared to lift his head higher, but to his surprise, he saw nothing. He raised his eyes higher, and still saw no sign of them. They had been moving so slowly, it seemed impossible they’d disappeared so fast. He stood up as the sun, a fiery ball, sank below the horizon, and by the time he’d followed in their tracks to the top of the ridge, the shadows had grown so long the only way he could have picked them out would have been if they were wearing neon.

  But at least he knew now what Mr. Pothead had been warning him about.

  3 March, 1885

  Lloyd, as I have since discovered, was not on a school break at all, but had been sent down, in all but body. After he had enjoyed his brief sojourn in Margate with Randolph Desmond, he was allowed to return to the Bedford School only long enough to wind up his affairs there, make certain amends to the masters he had wronged, and, with funds of an uncertain origin (I suspected his mother), pay restitution where it was warranted. When it comes to gambling and drink, he is apparently following close in his father’s footsteps.

  But if I had expected him to come home with his tail between his legs, I was quickly disabused of that notion. Far from evincing disgrace, Lloyd, at nineteen now, displays nothing but confidence. He feels that school has become an obstacle to what he has suddenly perceived to be his true calling.

  ‘I’m an author!’ he declared, only minutes after Chandler had carried his bags up to his room. Standing before the fire, legs spread like Lord Byron straddling the Hellespont, he said it as if it were the most obvious thing in the world and he expected Fanny and me to applaud.

  ‘An author?’ his mother said. ‘Have you written something?’

  ‘Not yet,’ he admitted, ‘but I will. Now that I no longer have those silly schoolboy chores to attend to, I can do what I was destined to do.’

  Perhaps noting the perplexity on my face, he said, ‘Surely, you didn’t think that all of those hours I spent watching you at your desk, or helping you to map out the geography of Treasure Island, or listening to you read your stories aloud in the parlour, were idle time for me. I was learning my craft. I’ve seen how you do it, Louis, and it’s what I’m going to do, too.’

  There was no denying that the boy had watched me like a hawk, noting, it seemed, everything from the stroke of my pen to the blotting of each page, but where to start with him now? For the better part of an hour, his mother and I attempted to explain the rigours of such a life, the preparation (which he had already abandoned) that would be required, the devotion (which I doubted he could show) that it would demand. For every query, he had a ready retort, and by midnight, I could no longer keep up the barrage. Excusing myself, I went to my study, locked the doors, and then, with the key I kept on my watch fob, unlocked the cabinet in which I kept the last bottle of the purported Valtellina.

  All that day, I had felt my energy flagging, and for the past week, my handkerchiefs had been spackled with tiny crimson droplets. To keep Fanny from knowing, I had rinsed them thoroughly before dispatching them to Mrs Chandler to be properly bleached and laundered downstairs. But as my last entreaty to Dr Rüedi had not yet had a reply, I took the smallest draught possible. The liquid had coagulated over time, and where it had once been the colour of rose, it was now a thick ruby-red, almost a paste, and carried the bouquet of rotting fruit. Once I had choked it down, I sat at my desk and quickly penned another missive to Davos, reiterating the dwindling of my supply, and sealed the envelope for Chandler to post first thing in the morning.

  When I went to bed, the lamp was out in the bedroom, but I knew that Fanny was awake. As I slipped between the cold sheets in my nightshirt, she said, ‘The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.’

  ‘Why, did Sam fancy himself a writer, too?’

  ‘Never wrote a thing, apart from IOUs. But he sure as shootin’ gambled and drank and whored around.’

  ‘When was the last time you heard from him?’

  ‘Not for two, maybe three, years now. He was in a town called Bakersfield, in California, but he could be dead, for all I know.’

  Despite the dismissal, I could detect in her voice a small, but persistent, concern for the man.

  ‘Now it looks like Lloyd is going to head off into the wild blue yonder, too,’ she concluded. The bed frame squeaked as she turned towards me in the dark. ‘Did he ever show you anything he wrote?’

  ‘Once or twice, a snatch of a story or poem.’

  ‘Were they any good?’

  ‘He was only a child.”

  ‘Louis, I’m asking you, were they any good?’

  If ever a man was put in an untenable spot, it was this—how to sum up, to a mother, a son’s potential? ‘It’s too early to tell. My own juvenilia would not have promised much.’

  ‘That’s not an answer,’ she said. ‘Or maybe it is.’

  In the darkness, I could feel her turn away and draw the blankets up to her chin. There was no moonlight filtering through the curtains tonight, and the only sound was the slow and lonely clip-clop of a horse’s hoofs as it drew a hansom cab. I lay in the bed, trying not to disturb Fanny by stirring about, but I was restless. The taste of the serum was still on my lips, and I was sorry I hadn’t thought to bring a carafe of cold water to the bed stand.

  Instead, I tried to will myself to sleep, and closing my eyes to the pitch darkness, summoned my Brownies. They were some time in coming, but when they did, I gave them their marching orders, as was customary, and then set them loose. For weeks, I had been casting about for a new plot, a story that could capture my own imagination and ignite a fire of quick composition; that shilling shocker Fanny is forever nattering on about, which will for once and always settle our financial issues. “Treasure Island” has been an undoubted success, but I sold it cheap, and the money from it has run through our hands like water. (At least there will be no more bills for room and board at the Bedford School to contend with.) And a slim volume of poems—‘A Child’s Garden of Verses’—has recently made a happy and profitable impression on the public, but poems have a more limited appeal. What I needed was a rollicking tale, a story so original in its conception, so violent in its telling, t
hat it would create a great clamour in the press and among the public.

  The room was icy-cold, the window sashes being unevenly sealed, and so I was reluctant to get out of bed, even to appease the growing thirst I felt, or the aching in my limbs. Though still in that twilight sleep where I did so much of my best imagining, I was aware of a nervous impulse in my legs—a desire to stretch them loose and run—and a nagging hoarseness in my throat. Was it a premonition of yet another respiratory ailment? That, I could not abide. I needed to husband all my strength to write. I felt an anxiety, not only from fear of another decline, but over my missing Brownies. Where had they gone? Even if I had opened my eyes, it would have been too dark to see the clock, but I thought I had heard the bell strike two in the All Souls Church steeple, and I wondered how much longer I could endure this gnawing thirst and pent-up energy. I was on the very point of rousing myself when to my mind came a sudden flood of unconnected images, so surprising and vivid that I lay back, perfectly still on the pillows, to receive them. I saw two gentlemen looking up at a window at night—a window like my own—and remarking on something or someone hidden within. In a separate image, I saw another man, small and swift and odious in some undetermined way, charging through the gas-lit streets, wielding a cane as if it were a cudgel, coming around a corner and colliding with a child so hard he trampled her underfoot, without so much as looking back. And then I saw that man in a private cabinet, behind a red baize door (identical to the door of my study), drinking from a flask that smoked as if it were on fire, and clutching at his own throat . . .

  It was then that I must have cried out in my sleep.

  ‘Louis!’ Fanny was groping for my shoulders in the dark. ‘Louis! Wake up! You’re having a nightmare!’

  I was furious. ‘You shouldn’t have awakened me! I was dreaming a fine bogey tale!’

  ‘You were waking the whole house!’

  I threw off the blankets and put my feet to the cold floor, searching for my slippers.

  ‘Louis, stay in bed! You’ll catch your death!’

  But nothing was going to stop me from recording the impressions the Brownies had bestowed. There was the making of a great tale in it—of that I was sure. Once the slippers were on and I’d thrown the belt around my flannel robe, I scuffed out of the room, brushing my hand up and down the bedroom door just to find the handle, and hurried down the hall to my study.

  Twice I banged into the furniture, though Lord knows I should have been able to navigate this familiar geography without a thought. For the life of me, I felt I could not fully straighten up, either; my robe was sweeping the floor. I must have grown stiff in the bed, too, for every bone in my body ached, and every joint felt as if it had been given a wicked twist.

  My desk, however, I knew in every particular, and in a matter of seconds I had found a matchstick and lit the oil lamp by which I worked at night. It flared a pale green before turning to white, but, in that sickly burst of light, I saw myself—or what should have been myself—in the mirror above the desk. In horror, I leapt back, away from the gnarled, grimacing face that glimmered in the glass. The black hair was mine, the hollow cheeks, the drooping moustache—but the mad gleam in the bulging eyes was not, the cruel curl to the lip was not, the hunched shoulders were not. My fingers rose to touch my face, but even they felt foreign—their tips were blunt and coarse, their nails long and jagged. The back of my hand, normally a fragile alabaster, was dusky and spotted. I slumped down into my chair, afraid to look any longer, afraid that my wits had forever slipped their moorings.

  It was not until the tolling of the next hour from the bells of All Souls that I even dared to move a muscle or limb. When at last I arose enough from the chair to see into the mirror, the reflection, though murky, was reassuringly my own, flickering in the light from the sputtering lamp. With a sigh of relief—no man had ever entertained a more hellish hallucination—I sat down again, but my hands—now white and smooth once more—were so numb that I could barely hold the paper or the pen. My fingers trembling, I wrote just long enough to leave some account of what the Brownies had brought me, and to limn the dreadful creature I had dreamt in the glass. The name for such a monstrosity, a man whose company no one would ever willingly seek, came instantly to my mind. Mr Hyde.

  TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA

  Present Day

  “Another round,” Laszlo said, slapping his hand on the top of the picnic table so firmly Miranda jumped.

  “On the rocks, with salt?” the waitress asked.

  “The works,” Laszlo said. “I’m buying.”

  For days now, Laszlo had been trying to get back into her good graces, but for him to pick up a check, even at a place as cheap as La Raza, was downright shocking. He considered it a mark of honor to grift his way through any situation. But the stunt in the bedroom with the old clothes had been beyond the pale, and he was working hard to make up for lost ground.

  “Not for me,” Miranda said before the waitress left.

  “I thought this was a party,” Laszlo said.

  “Nobody told me,” Miranda replied. “What are we celebrating?”

  He took a second, then offered up exultantly, “The new moon.”

  More like a blue moon, she thought, given that he had offered to pay. But she’d noticed he was wearing new boots, too much of some unfamiliar cologne, and he’d even taken his Vespa to a car wash. She just hoped he wasn’t swiping the money from the till at the Cornucopia.

  Not that there was much to steal. The week before, a bus carrying a high school band from Corvallis had pulled in and the kids had swarmed all over the store, buying candles and crystals and beaded headbands, but other than that, there’d been very little business. It was lucky she had the rent from Rafe, insubstantial as it was.

  The waitress put the fresh margarita down in front of Laszlo, but before she could take away the old glass, he licked the rim for any remaining salt.

  What was she doing here, Miranda wondered, with a guy like this?

  “I’ve been thinking,” Laszlo said.

  Never a good development.

  “Why don’t we set up like an outdoor area to sell some other kinds of stuff? Bigger stuff.”

  “Like what?”

  “Lawn stuff. Chairs, tables, benches. These outdoor heaters,” he said, gesturing at the glowing stanchions around the open deck of the restaurant. The night had grown cold.

  “And where do you propose we put this outdoor market?”

  “Out back, to the side of the store.”

  Precisely where the trailer sat. Now she got it. “Oh, so you think I should evict Rafe and sell the trailer?”

  Dipping a chip into the salsa bowl, he said, “It’s got nothing to do with Salazar.”

  As far as Miranda was concerned, it had everything to do with him.

  “We could just make a lot more money using that space for something else.”

  She never failed to notice that when he referred to her store, it was always we and our business.

  “He can always find some other place to squat.”

  Miranda was already wondering if he had. There’d been no sign of him for the past couple of days—Tripod generally barked like crazy the minute his jeep pulled in. Not that that was entirely unusual. He sometimes went off on field trips, tracking his coyote pack, and there was no real reason for him to keep her posted. It’s not like they were an item or anything.

  “While we’re at it, why not sell the store, too?” she said facetiously.

  But Laszlo didn’t take it that way. “You’d do that?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I could definitely get behind that if we did. Sell the store, the trailer, then take the money and head south. I hear a lot about San Miguel de Allende. It’s got a lot going on.”

  Maybe the road really was in his blood, as he often claimed. Like a lot about Laszlo, the absolute truth was up for grabs. “Who’s talking to you about San Miguel de Allende?”

  He didn’t
answer that, but then, it wouldn’t have mattered if he did, because four or five of the Spiritz tore into the parking area in front of the restaurant, their mufflers roaring, tires spitting gravel every which way. God, what a throwback, she thought. These guys had seen too many movies.

  When they got off their bikes, pretending not to notice all the commotion they’d caused, and tromped into the restaurant, their leader, Axel somebody, broke off and strode toward the outdoor deck. To her surprise, he headed straight for their table, where Laszlo sat up like a student about to be singled out by the teacher.

  “Laz,” Axel said, plunking his helmet onto the tabletop and slouching into a chair. He was built like a bulldog, and wearing a denim jacket with a pro-life button on the lapel. “Muriel.”

  “Miranda.”

  “My mistake.”

  What on earth was he doing at their table? He’d been in the store exactly once, to buy a lighter.

  “I got something for you,” he said to Laszlo. “You got something for me?”

  “Here? Now?”

  “No, not here. Not now. Tomorrow.” He glanced at the margarita and said, “That still cold?”

  “Yes,” Laszlo said, pushing it toward him so quickly it sloshed over the side of the glass. “Help yourself.”

  Which he did, draining what was left of it in one long gulp. Then, getting up, he took a long unabashed look at Miranda’s breasts and, touching the brim of an imaginary hat, said, “Miriam.”

  “Miranda.”

  “My mistake.” Smirking, he headed into the restaurant.

  Laszlo looked like some kid who’d just gotten an autograph from his idol.

  But Miranda had the awful feeling that she’d just found out not only who had been talking about San Miguel de Allende, but whose money was indirectly paying for their drinks. How, she wasn’t sure, and she was even less sure that she wanted to know.

  Laszlo ordered a refill, and they ate the rest of their meal listening to the raucous laughter and shouts of the bikers inside. When the check came, Miranda had to remind Laszlo that he was treating.