Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Seek

  I bounded up the stairs to the study and took in the ghastly tableau of four men splattered with blood and bodily matter. One was the stocky man I now know to be Baxter, sporting on his forehead a red mark (where, I later learned, Mr. Utterson had belted him with his cane); the second was Dr. Jekyll, who had collapsed onto an armchair with his hand over his heart; the third was Poole, standing in the middle of the room wielding in his hands a bloody axe; and lastly there was Mr. Utterson himself, twisted grotesquely on the floor.

  The state of his body, in particular the damage inflicted—for there was a divot in his chest the size of an axe-head—indicated immediately that the life of the unhappy Mr. Gabriel Utterson had come to an end.

  Still I struggled to accept it, for as much as I had lost all faith in my employer, I had never seriously contemplated his passing. There was, moreover, the dreadful expression on his face that I knew would haunt me long afterwards—a chilling look of fury and pain, beyond all powers of description.

  For a while we all stood dumbstruck in that room, and if anyone said a word I was not in a state to hear it; and then, coming to my senses, I discovered that others had flooded in, among them officers of the police; and there was a whirl of movement as Utterson’s body was covered with a shroud and others blotted blood from their clothes; and we were all transported somehow—I do not even remember how—to a police station, where we sat together awaiting questioning.

  And it was here that Dr. Jekyll conversed with me for the first time in years. His voice croaked and his lips quivered as he spoke, but he was as sympathetic as he had ever been, remembering my name, even enquiring about my father, and apologising profusely for his part in drawing me into this terrible drama. He admitted that, as shocked as he was to find Utterson capable of such violent passions (not to mention such feats of twisted imagination), he had in his Cambridge days known a very different fellow—a ‘high spirited boy’ who was demonstrative, pugnacious, adventurous and greatly fond of pranks and whimsies. He said that the transformation, when it came, was as sudden as it was comprehensive; and though it was difficult to assign to it a single explanation, he suspected it had something to do with a romantic misadventure and a horrific night in a graveyard (neither of which he cared to discuss in any detail). It was clear, in any event, that this ‘boisterous’ Utterson had been lying dormant beneath the lawyer’s leathery hide for years, needing only the shock of an unexpected development to regain command; and Jekyll’s greatest regret now, he said, was that he had not diagnosed the extent of his friend’s illness while he was still in a position to rescue him.

  And I was tremendously moved by all this, and if I had any doubts about the doctor’s identity they evaporated completely. For I could see that he spoke sincerely, with a tear glistening in his eye, and I further recognised in his noble face an integrity that I knew to be the stamp of trustworthy men. So, even in my shaken state, I was able to assure him that Utterson’s mysterious ‘transitions of personality’ had troubled us for some time; and I went on to inform him of the man’s absurd theories, his impulsive trip to Edinburgh, and even the fanciful letters he had left in my possession—letters that proved of such interest to Jekyll that he asked if he might examine them in person, before I should submit them to the police, in order to satisfy his medical interest.

  ‘What feverish children we become when our dreams are disrupted,’ he said—a sad epitaph, I thought, but no less accurate; and again I could not help but feel great pity for the man, that when he should have been celebrating his return he was instead deep in mourning (not just for Mr. Utterson, his most faithful friend, but for others in his circle who by unhappy chance had also gone to God shortly after welcoming him home).

  Inspector Newcomen, too, was deeply perturbed when he questioned me, for while he had observed Mr. Utterson’s descent into madness from the start, he admitted that he could not fully account for it, and had always held out hopes for the lawyer’s recovery. So he urged me to write down everything I remembered as soon as I felt able—for, as he said, ‘There are still many questions that need to be answered.’

  Last night I was unable to sleep; and today I was given leave by Mr. Slaughter to collect my thoughts; and I spent much time walking the streets of London, beneath a sun so exuberant that the beasts in the city’s menageries were trumpeting and hooting festively; and occasionally a tear wetted my cheek; and finally, when my hands had ceased trembling, I turned home.

  And now, deep into the evening, as I prepare to lay down my pen, I see through the window a darkly caped gentleman alight from a cab outside my door—Dr. Jekyll, I believe, though it is difficult to be certain through the fog. But I cannot conclude this statement without observing, with deep sadness, that while we live in an age of unprecedented advancement, of steamships, locomotives and electric clocks, and of explorers penetrating heretofore unmapped regions of the world, the greatest mysteries, and indeed the greatest perils, remain hidden within the dungeons of the human imagination. For while our minds are unquestionably capable of wondrous and profound things, they also harbour a weakness for envy, jealousy, misapprehension, delusion, sensation, rationalisation, credulousness, outlandish whimsies, for distorting the motives of friends and attributing to others the powers of the devil—all of which I witnessed at first-hand during the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Utterson.

  Acknowledgments

  Ariel Moy; Carl Harrison-Ford; Stephen Clarke; Holly Roberts; Rod Morrison and Roy Chen at Xoum; Campbell Brown, Alison McBride and Megan Duff at Black & White; and David Forrer at Inkwell.