The Jekyll Revelation Page 2

  He was right.

  As soon as he bent over and parted the branches, he was met by a pair of yellow eyes, horizontal and unblinking. The animal was on its side, panting softly, dragging one paw across the bars, over and over, hoping for escape, but in all other ways resigned to its fate. How long, Rafe wondered, had the bobcat been in there? He could see a blue plastic water bucket, entirely drained, and the bait—strips of beef jerky—still littering the ground in front of the cage and on the floor inside it.

  But how was he to release it, and could he get it done in time? He could only surmise that Seth and Alfie had gone first to check their more remote traps, and would even now be on their way to this one to claim their prize. It was one of the little-known, but more controversial, aspects of the forestry service’s land management programs. Bobcat trapping was legal in California—and Rafe had been required to recognize that inconvenient fact, among many others, when he was sworn in—but that didn’t mean it was right.

  Which meant, in his view, he didn’t have to honor it.

  Creeping closer, he studied the upper latch on the cage; it was a simple trigger device, and all he had to do was raise it.

  But there was no telling what the animal would do. The bobcat had raised his head now and bared his fangs. But it was waiting. With limited reserves of energy, it was husbanding whatever strength it had left for the fight it knew was about to come. Animals were smart that way, much smarter than they were commonly given credit for. People always liked to say that only human beings understood the concept of death; Rafe always wanted to make them come with him on his patrols and spend some time with these supposedly dull-witted creatures.

  Especially at times like this, when the animals were prepared to fight like hell to preserve the life that they were barely supposed to understand they had.

  Off in the distance, Rafe heard a whistle. It might have been Seth signaling Alfie to come that way. Maybe they’d had some luck with another trap.

  It was now or never.

  He knelt down and stared into the animal’s eyes, but all he elicited was a snarl. The bobcat’s lips were cracked and dry and dripped none of the saliva they would normally have done. Still, he held its gaze for several seconds more.

  “I’m going to let you go,” he said in a deliberate and even tone. “I’m going to open this cage, and you are going to run for it. Do you get it?” He was trying to establish some kind of connection, something to calm the animal a little bit.

  The cat scrunched down, its powerful shoulders hunching, and snarled again, revealing worn and broken teeth. It was not a youngster.

  “Don’t give me that,” Rafe said. “Just get going. And under no circumstances tell anyone I did this.”

  When he went to the back of the cage, intending to reach forward and raise the gate from behind, the animal squirmed around to keep him in view.

  “Wrong way. What did I tell you? Wrong way.”

  There was another whistle, and then a voice, closer than before. It was Alfie, calling out, “Nope, not a damn thing.”

  “One more to check,” Seth replied. “One more and we quit for the day.”

  Rafe whipped out his canteen, unscrewed the lid, and poured the remaining water through the top bars of the cage and into the bobcat’s startled face. It was enough to confuse the animal.

  “Now!” he said, softly but urgently, dropping the canteen and yanking the gate up with one hand, and with the other tilting the trap from the back.

  The bobcat all but tumbled out of the cage, the blue bucket rolling after him, and scrambled for its footing. Depleted as it was, it found its feet, and with one look back—was it defiance, or gratitude?—sprinted off in a lopsided gait, its tail flicking, and vanished into the brush. Its coat was the dun color of the soil, and it was no sooner out of sight than Rafe saw Seth coming into view.

  Seth saw him, too.

  “What the . . . ?”

  Rafe straightened, wiping the dirt from his uniform, and pretended to be studying the trap.

  “You know you have to check these at least every other day,” he said. “No animal can be left inside one for more than forty-eight hours.”

  “I know the rules,” Seth said, the end of his long gray beard plastered to the top of his sweat-stained T-shirt. “I don’t need you to tell me the rules, Salazar.”

  “Maybe you do.”

  Alfie plodded into the clearing now, an empty canvas sack draped over his back, and stopped when he saw Rafe. He looked at Seth to find out what was up.

  “You want me to show you my license?” Seth said to Rafe. “Again? I can take four bobcats this year, one bear, two deer, and as many damn critters as I can trap.”

  “Looks like you came up short,” Rafe said, glancing at the empty bag.

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “What’d he do?” Alfie asked, taking in the blue bucket on the ground and the open gate. “Did he mess with the cage?”

  Seth just glared.

  “Did he?” Alfie repeated, anger rising in his voice.

  Rafe picked up his empty canteen, screwed the lid back into place, and then took his sunglasses from his breast pocket and slipped them on. Even from a few yards away, he could smell the stink coming off Seth as he walked past him, then out of the clearing, and he knew, without turning around, that they were watching him go. He also knew that, much as he would have liked to keep an eye on them, it would be a mistake to turn around. Instead, he said over his shoulder, “Stay hydrated, boys.” He headed toward the fire road, the binoculars swinging against his chest. “It’s more important than you think.”

  28 October, 1881

  I begin this journal in high, if somewhat desperate, hopes. I mean to make it a record of my deliverance. If it becomes something other than that, it shall have served as my epitaph. A bookmark . . . or a bookend.

  The story can begin in no other spot than the coach making its slow and arduous process up the Alpine slope to the town of Davos, where I am to winter.

  Riding in the rocking carriage beside me were my wife, Fanny, my stepson, Lloyd, and Woggin, a black-and-white Skye terrier as badly behaved as a dog can be. From the time we arrived in the Swiss canton of Graubünden, Fanny herself has not been well, her dark features made even darker by the altitude. At such a height as this, sixteen hundred metres above sea level, she wears a perpetual scowl and complains of headaches and shortness of breath. In her native California, she says she lived in arid lands hot as Hades and flat as a griddle.

  As for Lloyd, he is as restless as any young man of fifteen might be at finding himself abruptly cut off from his school friends and familiar surroundings. Only Woggin remains unchanged, standing on his hind legs and hanging his head out the window, barking at any cow or sheep or goat that has the gall to stray from its paddock and come close to the road.

  The road itself, smooth but narrowly cut, might just as well be called the Via Dolorosa of Switzerland, as most of those who travel it are, like me, invalids clinging to their last hope of a cure. Men and women, and even children, whose lungs, like mine, have haemorrhaged time and again, whose handkerchiefs bear the indelible scarlet stains of their disease, whose frames are racked by coughing fits and night sweats, and whose days are as numbered as the pages of any book. Many are the times when I have unexpectedly come upon a glimpse of myself in a mirror and seen not the bold adventurer I envision, but a walking skeleton, a pale stooping wraith with bulging brown eyes and drooping moustache. No Scottish laird here, no swashbuckling hero like those my imagination creates. I am a virtual ghost of a man, haunting the world while still alive.

  I could not have come to a more suitable spot for ghosts.

  The air is calm and altogether without odour—no scent of heather or bog-plant, no salty ocean mist—only a frigid stillness that makes the breath crackle and the skin grow numb. If I do not remember to keep my ears safely tucked under this fur hat (Fanny says it makes me look as if a muskrat has taken up residence
on my head), I may lose them both to frostbite.

  Nor, apart from the rumbling of the coach and Woggin’s racket, is there any noise. It is as if all of life has been suspended. Even the crows do not caw, but silently stand vigil on fence posts and pine branches. (How is it that even these pines lend no aroma to the air?) A wolfskin hangs by its tail from a post in the pasture—as a warning, no doubt, to his pack.

  But it is the light, the light, that most dampens the spirit. It is as bright and clear as the chimes at midnight—its putative healing powers rest upon just such qualities—and yet it is cold and unforgiving, white and plain, sapping the colour and vitality from all that it touches. Fanny, looking out at the snowy landscape from her window, said, ‘It’s as if they’ve stretched a shroud over everything.’

  ‘They might just as well do it,’ Lloyd snorted. ‘No one comes here except to die.’

  ‘Lloyd!’ his mother remonstrated, and even he seemed to realize, though too late, the full import of his words. His cheeks, already rosy from the cold, reddened further.

  ‘I didn’t mean to say that—’

  ‘Never mind what you meant to say,’ Fanny cut him off. ‘Louis, how much farther do you think it is?’

  ‘Not much,’ I replied. Indeed, I had just spotted, over Woggin’s upright ears, the business district of the town—a congeries of small shops and cafés, with cobblestoned streets and crooked chimneys—through which the carriage was about to pass. Fanny’s spirits seemed to momentarily lift; any opportunity to spend money and converse with strangers cheered her immensely. (Her American compatriots, I had noted, interested her the least, however; she treated them like lovers who had once spurned her.)

  Though all of the establishments we passed displayed signs in German, and some in French, too, English is also everywhere present. There is, I have been told, a substantial and ever-changing community of English invalids to whom Davos has become a regular haven, and the town has accommodated itself to their tastes. One restaurant has hung a wooden placard advertising Cornish pasties over its door, and even I was buoyed by the sight of Scottish plaids adorning the window of a dry goods store. I marked those of the Campbell and the Mackenzie clans, clapped together in a way that their true owners would have most vigourously protested.

  No sooner had we entered the town than we were back on the winding road to the Hotel Belvédère. Fanny, whose back was to the coachman, settled into her seat, Lloyd slumped down, eyes closed, and I alone kept watch. We were deep in the valley, the road rising between jagged peaks on all sides, when I first caught a glimpse of the great grey mausoleum that was the Belvédère. It was a brooding hulk, glowering down on the tiny town, and as we approached, I saw trails like trenches chopped through the snow, and on them several figures so thoroughly wrapped in beaver coats and woollen hats, gloves, and scarves and leather boots that one could hardly distinguish man from woman. All of them moved slowly, looking up from the ice and snow as we passed by.

  As the coach rumbled under the porte cochère, Woggin fell silent—a notable event in itself—and Lloyd, awakening, stretched his limbs. An attendant lowered the steps and opened the door, and the dog shot out like a cannonball, making for the nearest elderberry bush. Fanny lifted her heavy skirt, took the porter’s hand, and descended with a loud sigh. It had been a long journey, one of many, I reflected, that I had enforced upon the family as a result of my ill-health. From the South of France to San Francisco, Canada to Colorado, I had sought the one place where I might be healed of my affliction. Here, at the Hotel Belvédère, the most renowned pulmonologist of his day, Dr Carl Rüedi, had established his clinic, and so here I had come, armed as always with hope, but prepared as always for disappointment.

  The bags were being taken down from the carriage when a young couple emerged from the great double doors—a handsome aristocrat with a frail but beautiful red-haired woman clinging to his arm. What it was that aroused Woggin’s ire I do not know, but regardless, he made straight for the man’s trousers, fixing his teeth in the cuff, growling and ripping at the fabric.

  The porter attempted to intervene, aiming a swift kick at the dog, but that I would not abide. I shoved him aside, shouting, ‘Woggin! Stop!’

  The aristocrat, to give him his due, seemed more amused than irked, trying in vain to shake the dog off, and saying, ‘There, boy! That’s enough!’ His companion, however, looked terrified.

  With some luck, I was able to grab Woggin by the scruff of his neck, give him a rough shake, and shame him into submission.

  ‘I am so sorry to give you such a scare,’ Fanny was saying, stroking the young woman’s arm, and I, too, joined in the apology.

  The man looked at me rather fixedly—I am, I will admit, not the most ordinary-looking fellow—but then said, ‘Are you not the author, Robert Louis Stevenson?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘I had the pleasure of hearing you speak at a Crystal Palace exhibition. You made an eloquent appeal for keeping the gas lamps in London.’ Removing his leather glove and extending his hand, he said, ‘Allow me—I am Randolph Desmond, and this is Miss Constance Wooldridge.’ Taking in our entire party and completing the introductions, he said, ‘I see that you have just arrived.’

  ‘That we have.’

  ‘No doubt you wish to get settled; it’s not an easy journey. But if you are not too tired from your travels, perhaps I can persuade you to join us tonight for dinner? I would consider it a great honour.’

  Not having had time to gather our bags, much less our thoughts, I turned to Fanny for guidance. ‘Yes, of course,’ she said, her eyes quickly taking in the expensive clothes and refined appearance of the couple. ‘We would be delighted, and we will, of course, replace your pants.’

  ‘No one’s ever promised me that before!’ he said with a laugh.

  As for Lloyd, he could not have fastened his gaze more intently upon one of the butterflies he delighted in pinning to a board than he did upon the alluring Miss Wooldridge.

  ‘Where’s Woggin got to?’ I asked, but from the sound of a serving tray crashing to the lobby floor and a cry of alarm, I surmised that he had made our arrival known.

  We were escorted to our rooms by the hotel manager, a fussy little man in a cropped jacket with red felt piping. ‘If there is to be anything else that your needs require,’ said Herr Hauptmann in his laboured English, ‘then I am assured you shall not ask.’

  ‘Indeed we won’t,’ Lloyd replied, sneaking a sly glance at his mother.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ Fanny said, tactfully declining to return it. ‘We shall certainly let you know if we need anything.’

  Clicking his heels and bowing stiffly from the waist, Herr Hauptmann retired, leaving us to inspect our accommodations unsupervised.

  ‘Oh, it’s very grand, don’t you think?’ Fanny swept from the generous parlour into one of the two adjoining bedrooms, then out and into the other. ‘I think you and I should sleep in here, Louis.’

  ‘So do I,’ Lloyd said, tossing his bags through the open doorway of the room opposite. ‘This one’s got a view of the toboggan run.’

  Woggin, nose to the floor and black tail twitching, raced from one end of the suite to the other, making sure no other dog, or—heaven forfend—a cat, was present, and determining where precisely to stake his own territorial claim.

  The rooms were indeed well-appointed and commodious—plainly, we had been given one of the most choice compartments in the entire Hotel Belvédère—with wide windows opening onto towering evergreens and firs, and beyond them snow-capped mountain peaks. The sitting room boasted a marble fireplace with brass andirons, surmounted by porcelain vases painted in a floral motif; between them on the mantelpiece stood a wooden cuckoo clock, ornately carved and ticking quietly.

  What I did not see, however, was a place to put a proper desk. There was a small, round table where Fanny might sit and write her correspondence, but nowhere that I could tuck myself away undisturbed. I do not like to be observed while writing any
more than I wish to be distracted by anything of great beauty or distinction. John Keats said his ideal was to seat himself facing a whitewashed wall and nothing more, and I do see his point—for the mind to paint its own extravagant pictures, the canvas before it has to be blank.

  Fanny, intuiting my thoughts as she so often did, stopped and said, ‘But where will you work?’ And receiving no answer, said, ‘We shall have to take an additional room.’

  Aware of the bill we would be accumulating even now, and dreading the prospect of appealing yet again to my father for funds, I said, ‘Surely, I will be able to find some secluded spot out of the way of the other guests.’

  ‘Nonsense. I will take it up with Herr Hauptmann. There must be something available.’

  ‘But the cost of another room,’ I began, as Fanny brushed the objection aside.

  ‘Leave it to me, Louis,’ she said, and so I resolved to do just that. When practical matters have to be addressed, plans made and battles won, a man can have no greater ally than a wife such as Fanny. A born Yankee, brash and opinionated, with a dash of Indian blood in her veins, she is not someone easily put off. One night, when I was on the way to his London club with Henry James, he grudgingly admitted to me that if he had ever been of a mind to marry, he’d have wished for just such a lioness of his own.

  ‘But you recognize, of course, that they can’t be tamed.’

  ‘I do,’ he replied, feigning great regret, ‘and thus I am fated to remain a melancholy bachelor.’

  A bachelor, yes, but melancholy, I think not. Some men, such as myself, are predisposed to marry—without Fanny, the buffetings of life could swamp my little coracle at any moment—but others, of equally strong inclination, are not. To my knowledge, no experiment has yet been devised to measure the happiness, or wisdom, of the opposing states.