The Jekyll Revelation Page 16

  At home, he fell onto the bed in a stupor before she could properly grill him on what was going on between him and the Spiritz; she hadn’t wanted to do it at the restaurant for fear of being overheard.

  But she didn’t want him in the bed with his dirty jeans and boots—new though they were. She had just changed the sheets. In fact, now that she thought about it, she’d changed them the day before, too. It was like she just couldn’t banish the smell, the sight, the sound, of that one terrible night fast enough or thoroughly enough.

  The boots hit the floor, and then she had to unbuckle his belt and reach under him to wriggle the jeans down. At some point, eyes still closed, he roused himself to laugh and mumble “Go for it” as she wrestled them past his ankles. A bunch of stuff fell out of the pockets, scattering around the floor. Coins, keys, a couple of joints, the free peppermints that sat in a bowl by the door of La Raza.

  One of the mints rolled under the bed.

  “Shit,” she mumbled. If she didn’t get it now, the ants would.

  She tossed the pants onto the wicker chair in the corner, then bent down and groped under the bed. Her palm was quickly coated with dust, but no hard candy. She reached farther and found something, but it wasn’t the candy. It was hard and sharp, and drawing it out from under the bed, she saw that it was one of her kitchen knives. The one she used to cut up stuff for her salads. It took her several astonished seconds before she remembered the clattering sound she’d heard that night, right after she’d kicked out at Laszlo and he’d crashed up against the blinds. When it had seemed he was almost in a trance.

  “So,” he said, still lying there in his socks and underwear, “you gonna do me, or what?”

  10 April, 1885

  So lost was I in the work at hand, my pen flying across the foolscap pages at such a gallop, that I did not hear the jangling of the doorbell. The feverish pace had not abated for the better part of the month—the whole household tiptoeing about so as not to disrupt the madness of invention—when I could not help but hear the voice of Henley, raised in indignation, booming in the foyer below.

  ‘I’ll see the man’, Henley bellowed, ‘or damn well know the reason why.’

  ‘I’ve told you before,’ Fanny remonstrated, ‘and I’ll tell you again. Louis cannot be disturbed.’

  ‘I’ll hear it then from his own lips.’

  ‘You’ve heard it from mine, and that will have to suffice.’

  Before the damn thing came to blows, I threw open my study door and called down the stairs, ‘Come up, Henley!’

  ‘Louis, you said you were not to be distracted for anything,’ Fanny cried.

  ‘Well, now I have been, so let it be!’

  There was a low exchange of words between them, the rustling of paper, and then the unmistakable sound of Henley stumping up the stairs on his wooden leg. I had just time enough to straighten my dressing gown and throw a lock of hair from my forehead before he appeared with a parcel under one arm and the crutch under the other.

  ‘Good God, man, you look a sight,’ he said, lumbering past me and into the room, ‘and have you never heard of the salutary effects of fresh air?’

  He dumped the tattered box atop the pile of manuscript pages teetering on the desk, and then yanked the curtains aside and opened the window. ‘It’s a fine day outside,’ he said, ‘and you ought at least to look at it.’

  Blinking from the sunlight, I shrank back. Henley brushed some crumpled and rejected pages from the seat of the leather armchair and plopped down into it.

  ‘What on earth have you been up to?’ he said. ‘I’ve stopped by several times on my way from the office, sent notes around, and never got past your Cerberus at the door.’

  ‘I have been working,’ I said, barely able to contain my exuberance, ‘and I think it is the thing that will make my name.’

  ‘Working on what?’

  ‘A story.’

  ‘A short story? Something I could run in the magazine?’

  ‘No, it is longer than that.’

  ‘A novel then?’

  ‘Shorter.’

  ‘Come to the point,’ he said, out of patience.

  ‘It is something my Brownies brought me, the best gift they have ever made.’

  ‘You and your damn Brownies. Talk to Conan Doyle about nonsense like that. Talk sense to me. What’s it called?’

  ‘I’m calling it, “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.”’

  ‘The Strange Case of what?’

  ‘No, not “the”—simply Strange Case.’

  Plainly, he didn’t like that. ‘We’ll worry about the title later. You’re terrible at titles. Let’s not forget that if you’d had your way, “Treasure Island” would be called “The Sea Cook.” I fixed that one, I’ll fix this. So what’s the damn thing about?’

  Ah, how to explain it. It is a story so protean in nature that to describe it is to see it change its shape before one’s very eyes, a story so singular in conception that I marvel no one—even the master Poe, whose ‘William Wilson’ had touched upon the fringe of its garment—has ever composed anything like it. There are depths to it that even I, its creator, cannot plumb, nor do I wish to, for fear of robbing it of some of its mysterious potency.

  And of course, at its core lies the one secret that could never be revealed—that the fundament of the thing is true.

  In brief, I sketched out the tale—a London doctor, of late middle age and impeccable reputation, who discovers, in the course of his medical experiments, an unholy concoction through which he is metamorphosed into an abject creature of the basest appetites and desires. A creature that terrorizes the town, and eventually the doctor himself when he realizes that he is no longer, to borrow the phrases from Henley’s own famous poem, the master of his fate or the captain of his soul. The power that this Jekyll has unleashed spirals out of his own control, and in the end, the good doctor is consumed—subsumed, one might say—by the monstrous thing to which he has given birth.

  ‘Ah, so it is a doppelgänger story!’

  ‘No, not that! This thing—Mr Hyde—is not the spitting image of the man, but a foul distillation of all that is vile and repressed and hidden in the human soul.’

  ‘So, then, he is a slave to some sexual depravity?’ Henley said, still grasping at the conceit.

  ‘No, not that either! You know how I feel about that! That a man’s lust for a woman should be considered a sin is the most absurd of all the bourgeois notions, and those who inveigh against it the most fiercely are as thwarted as they are hypocritical. No, my Mr Hyde is no simple voluptuary; he bears in his countenance—in his loathsome features and stunted posture—all the outward marks of human cruelty and pure evil.’

  Even saying it, I was reminded of that vision in the mirror above my desk. And subsequent visions, more horrible than that. My eyes inadvertently flicked to the cheval glass that I had ordered Chandler to bring to my study, so that I could observe in its full-length glass the complete effects of the unbidden transformations.

  For unbidden they are, and all the more terrifying for that. As my illness has returned and I have attempted to ward it off with the last of Dr Rüedi’s elixir, the choice has become more harrowing each time. To renounce it is to surrender to the consumption, but to imbibe it is to undergo, at the peril of my very soul, a transformation so radical that simply to behold it threatens the sanity.

  No one, not even Fanny, has any notion of what transpires in the confines of my study on those nights when the change occurs.

  ‘Has anyone else read this story yet?’ Henley, ever the editor, asked.

  ‘Fanny and Lloyd.’

  ‘And they’ve told no one else?’

  ‘I’m sure not. Indeed, Fanny hated it,’ I said, gesturing at the fireplace where the last ashes of many pages still lay. Sally had been banned from cleaning the room until further notice.

  ‘You burned it?’

  ‘She felt that I had missed the point of my own tale, that it was an
allegory, and I had made a mere sensation out of something that should have been my masterpiece.’

  ‘And you listened to her?’

  ‘I rewrote it,’ I said, indicating the stack of pages that lay beneath the package Henley had carried upstairs. ‘It is once again well in hand. But what have you brought me?’

  ‘Damned if I know,’ he said. ‘Your wife shoved it under my arm and said if I was going to ruin your work, the least I could do was deliver your mail.’

  For the first time, I looked more closely at the box, much damaged and loosely bound up again with twine, and at the postal marks. Switzerland, and France, and a stamp from the local delivery service. My heart leapt in my chest as I tore at the string and the scraps of brown paper still clinging to the sides of the box.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ Henley said, ‘it’s the latest Paris fashion.’

  The top flaps of the box looked as if they had already been torn open, but inside, the contents were still snugly wrapped in thick towels bearing the Belvédère imprint. They were not the Valtellina bottles I had expected, though, and as quickly as my heart had risen in my chest, it now began to plummet.

  The towels held metal flasks, firmly shut and engraved with the two-headed face of the Roman god Janus.

  Was this a joke of some kind? A rebuke?

  A letter in a pale blue envelope lay below the flasks, and paying no heed to Henley, I ripped through the sealing wax that closed it and read:

  ‘Dear Mr R. L. Stevenson, The medication that you have requested will be, after this shipment, in very limited supply. As I have attempted to explain, its means of production is extraordinarily difficult and the reservoir from its source highly attenuated.’

  Lord Grey’s severed head hurtling through the train window sprang to mind.

  ‘Furthermore, I was not at all confident that, given the vagaries of intercontinental transfer, glass bottles would make the journey unbroken.’

  There, he was most certainly correct.

  ‘In consequence, as a means of transporting it safely, and without arousing any undue notice from inspectors through whose hands it might pass, I have secreted it in the flasks enclosed. What more likely goods could an author have ordered from abroad?’

  It was unlike the doctor to make such a sly aside, but the next sentence suggested why he had.

  ‘I hope that, despite your urgent requests for this aid, your respiratory health continues, and that, should the occasion arise in the course of your professional interviews and public notice, you will not fail to mention that it was at my facility where you received your most critical and essential care.’ It was signed, in his precisely neat hand, ‘Carl Rüedi, Doctor and Director of the Belvédère Hotel and Health Clinic, Davos, Switzerland.’

  ‘A love letter? If it is,’ Henley said, looking in disgust at the incinerated pages in the grate, ‘you’ll want to add that to the pyre Fanny instigated.’

  Folding up the letter and thrusting it into the pocket of my dressing gown, I said, ‘It’s simply some supplies.’

  ‘Looks like brandy flasks to me.’

  ‘It’s of a very high quality.’

  ‘Since when did London, of all places, run out of decent brandy?’ he said, picking up a flask and beginning to unscrew its cap. ‘I’ll be the judge of it.’

  ‘No!’ I protested, perhaps too vehemently, and whisked the flask from his hand.

  ‘Good God, man, get a hold of yourself. It can’t be all that precious.’

  The look on my face must have said otherwise.

  ‘Can it?’ he said, before letting the matter drop.

  TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA

  Present Day

  Before Rafe could get out of his jeep, Evangelina came bustling out of the house and said, “Can you keep your sister overnight?”

  “Sure,” Rafe said, although he wasn’t really prepared for that. He’d just swung by to drop off the check, and to take Lucy out for the day. “Is something wrong?”

  “She had kind of a blow-up last night with her new roomie.”

  “What about?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Never does. Things just need to cool down.”

  Rafe was quickly reorganizing his schedule in his head. He’d planned to drive Lucy to the Malibu Pier—she liked to feed the seagulls and watch the people fishing—then take her for an early dinner at her favorite restaurant, the Reel Inn, where she could sit at one of the outdoor tables and eat clam chowder out of a bread bowl. If everything had gone according to plan, he’d have had her back at the group home, happy but pooped, just in time to turn in. Lucy liked schedules, too—he knew she looked forward all week to their outings—but the prospect of spending a whole night away from the home, and at his trailer yet, would thrill her beyond measure.

  The hard part would be convincing her that she had to go back to Evangelina’s the next day.

  Predictably, Lucy whooped with joy when she got the news, and with Evangelina’s help, packed a toothbrush and change of clothes for the overnight. On the way out of the house, Rafe noticed the skinny roommate sulking in a corner of the living room. “She going to be okay?” Rafe murmured to Evangelina.

  “She’ll be fine. I’m going to shuffle some of them around to different rooms.”

  Tough as Evangelina was, she was an angel in Rafe’s book; he didn’t know what he would have done if he hadn’t found her.

  “Can we go to the pier?” Lucy said, buckling herself into the passenger seat. “Look—I brought some old crackers to throw to the birds!”

  “That sounds like a great idea.”

  “And dinner, too?”

  “What, you think we’re not going to eat?”

  “And then I get to sleep in the trailer tonight?”

  “You bet.” Which meant that he’d be on the floor, or, if the weather stayed this warm, up on the roof, contemplating the stars from atop his sleeping bag.

  At the pier, an old fisherman let Lucy hold the fishing pole for a while, and then, when they actually got a bite, instructed her on how to reel it in. Less than a foot long, the fish came up wriggling and fighting, and when the fisherman tossed it in the bucket and clamped the lid down, Rafe could see a moment of regret cross his sister’s face. She was sorry she’d done it. He also caught a fleeting glimpse of the girl she’d been, a lonely eleven-year-old who’d already seen her share of trouble and didn’t want to see any more—much less cause any. He wondered, as he often did, what kind of a woman she’d have grown up to be if it hadn’t been for those precious minutes on the bottom of the swimming pool.

  At the restaurant, they ordered their food off the wooden board mounted behind the counter, and because the guy recognized Lucy from their previous outings, he threw in lots of extra croutons—“I’m a crouton guy myself,” he said, “can’t get enough of ’em”—and they ate at a table outside, overlooking Pacific Coast Highway.

  “Rafe,” Lucy said, spooning the hot chowder out of the bowl, “is that store going to be open?”

  “The Cornucopia?”

  “What’s that mean again? I know you told me last time, but I forgot.”

  “It’s a horn of plenty. It just means there’s lots of different stuff in there.”

  “That’s what I like about it.”

  “If it’s not open, I can probably get it to open,” he said. “I’ve got some pull with the owner.”

  “That blond lady?”

  “Right.” He knew Lucy had mixed feelings about Miranda. On the one hand, she was a potential rival for his attention—Rafe deliberately tried not to pay too much attention to Miranda on those rare occasions when the three of them were together—but on the other, somewhere in Lucy’s heart, he suspected she harbored some hope that he and Miranda might get married someday, and provide a home where Lucy, too, could come and live with them. As if she’d been tuned in to that very thought, she said, “I hate living with that new girl.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s ugly, and boring. All she
wants to talk about is her boyfriend, and I don’t even think she has one.”

  “I think it will all be okay by the time you get back tomorrow. Evangelina is making some changes in the room assignments.”

  Lucy frowned, concerned that he had missed her greater point, though Rafe, of course, had not. On the way back across the parking lot, she clutched his hand so hard he said, “That’s some grip you’ve got there, kid.”

  All along the twisting road up into the canyon, Lucy had swayed back and forth at each turn, exaggerating the motion and laughing when Rafe pretended to have lost control of the wheel. It made him happy to see her laugh, reminding him that there were still some things, however small, that he could do to bring some joy into her life.

  The store was not only open when they got there, but positively bustling. Four or five cars had pulled up outside, and there was a gaggle of teenage girls inside, gathering up love beads and bottles of scented body lotion. Lucy hung back, torn between wanting to join in their fun and knowing, from bitter experience, that it would not go well. Miranda, stuck making change behind the counter, waved hello and shrugged, as if to say, Don’t ask me where they all came from.

  “Can I buy stuff?” Lucy asked, and Rafe said, “Knock yourself out.”

  He looked around for the dreaded Laszlo, but given that there was actually work to be done at the store, didn’t expect to see him. Laszlo’s income, such as it was, was mysterious and, unless Rafe missed his guess, illicit. But Rafe wasn’t a cop, and he wasn’t about to become one. Despite the fact that the Land Management office had issued him a handgun for his protection in the wild, he kept it locked in the portable safe in his trailer.

  “Whew,” Miranda said when the commotion had died down. “I think I just made the rent this month.”

  “You own the place.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Where’d Lucy go?”

  They found her in the back of the store, marveling at several of Miranda’s paintings. “Hi, Lucy.”

  “Hi,” Lucy said, without really looking at her.