by Matt Ferraz
It was still dark when I opened my eyes. Something wasn’t right. I heard human voices in the distance; one of them was Jerry. It was hard to tell about the other one. They were discussing something; though I couldn’t hear what they were talking about, I could tell the voices were getting nearer. As they did, I realized that the other man had a soft, calm voice that inspired trust and confidence, and recognized it as Dr Jekyll’s voice.
“I’m glad that you appreciate the wellbeing of my Jack, doctor,” I heard Jerry saying by the stable door. “Horses aren’t machines. They need care and they need their rest like everyone else.”
“I understand that,” said Dr Jekyll.
“I’m not usually at home at this hour,” continued Jerry, opening the door. “Tonight you got lucky. This is the first time I’ve come home before my shift was over. Jack isn’t as tired as he usually is.”
“This won’t take long,” said Dr Jekyll. “And don’t forget to thank Edward later on.”
“He must have one hell of a set of eyes to see what he saw,” said Jerry, undoing the lock at the stall door. “It was dark and foggy out there.”
“Edward can see things nobody else can,” said Dr Jekyll.
Jerry opened the gate, and both men came in. Dr Jekyll was dressed in the same outfit he had been wearing earlier that evening and carried a leather satchel. My master was carrying a lamp that cast flickering shadows over the walls of the stall.
“He is a beauty,” said Dr Jekyll, looking at me. “Edward has always had good taste in horses.”
Jerry caressed my face with his left hand, the other holding the lamp. “Jack is the best horse there’s ever been.”
Dr Jekyll walked closer and stood right by the lamp. His shadow on the wall was huge. The sight of it made me nervous and I neighed at him. “Easy there, boy,” said Jekyll.
“Easy, Jack!” Jerry tried to calm me down. “He’s usually so calm around veterinarians! By the way, Dr Jekyll, I mistook you for a physician.”
“I take care of both animals and humans,” said the man in front of me, staring me in the eyes. I whinnied more urgently. There was something strange in his eyes. Although he continued to talk in the same soft manner, the person I saw behind those eyes wasn’t Dr Jekyll, but the man he had been before. Hyde.
“Don’t embarrass me, Jack,” said Jerry, hanging the lamp on a nail on the wall. “You’re very lucky. Dr Jekyll came to look after you. His friend, the one we picked up, noticed a spot in your eye and told his friend here. Dr Jekyll is a horse doctor, and he offered his services for free.”
Dr Jekyll smiled at me. “It could be nothing,” he said. “But I’ve seen too many good horses go blind because of little things like that. You wouldn’t want to lose your good friend Jack, would you, Mr Barker?”
“Of course not!” replied my master. “Do you have everything you need, doctor?” he asked.
“This light is a bit dim,” said Dr Jekyll. “Would you mind fetching me another lantern? And some hot water.”
“Of course!” said Jerry. “Don’t worry about me; I could walk there with my eyes closed. For heaven’s sake, Jack, stop that! This man means no harm!”
I didn’t know what to do, except to make a lot of noise and kick at the walls. Dr Jekyll opened his satchel and pulled out a syringe. “I can give him a little something to calm him down,” he said.
He was talking to Jerry, but the way he looked into my eyes it was clear he knew I could understand his words. So I mellowed. If I was going to be alone with him, I didn’t want to be drugged.
“See how smart he is?” asked Jerry. “Now hold on, the two of you. I’m going to get what you asked for.”
He went on his way, leaving the two of us alone. Dr Jekyll was still looking at me.
“Talking to a horse isn’t the strangest thing I’ve done in my life,” he said. “I’ve learned a lot since Edward came into my life. You see, Jack, sometimes I’m all Edward; sometimes I’m part Edward. But I’m never all Henry Jekyll anymore. I know you can see that now. You fascinate me. I know a thing or two about being an animal.”
My legs were shaking, and I noticed Jekyll was reaching for his satchel again. He pulled out a small corked flask, half filled with a purple liquid. “This isn’t always necessary anymore,” he said. “When I started with the transformations, I had to take a dose every time I wanted to free myself. About a month ago, it started to happen by itself. You were the first creature that witnessed my transition. I thought I owed it to you to show you the other side of it.”
Jekyll removed the cork and drank the contents of the flask at once. He started shaking and held on to the door of the stall, as if in an effort to stay visible to me. I saw his transformation. His face melted into a grotesque form, his legs and shoulders growing smaller and narrower – and, as if by magic, Mr Edward Hyde was in front of me.
My reaction might have frustrated him, because I was so terrified that I could barely move. It doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a horse; there’s little you can do when you see something like that happening in front of your eyes.
“Isn’t this much better?” said Mr Hyde, in that wet and sluggish voice. “Henry couldn’t resist bringing me here, right? He does what I tell him to do, that old fart. And I wanted to see you again, my beauty! Because I like you, and I’m going to take you with me.”
Mr Hyde took a slow, deliberate step towards me, eyes on mine. I moved back so as not to be touched by him, but he already had his hand on my neck. “Easy, junior!” he said. “You don’t want me to be here when your owner arrives, do you? No, you don’t. Because he’ll try to stop me, and I won’t be stopped.”
I knew what he meant. He was one of those men who hurt other men. He was the reason why they were afraid of going out in the dark and the fog. Mr Hyde was evil in the flesh, and he wouldn’t hesitate to murder Jerry and his entire family if he needed to.
“You understand, don’t you?” he said. “Yes, you do! You’re different, junior. You’re not like the other horses. I could see that from the beginning. You know what I would do if you decided to make a scene. Let’s go then, shall we?”
Mr Hyde walked out of the stall. To his satisfaction, I followed him without needing orders. Jerry’s saddle was there, as well as an old whip my master never had to use with me. Hyde saddled me with some difficulty. It also took some effort for him to mount, as he was clearly not used to it, but he finally did it.
“This is going to be the ride of your life, junior,” he said, grabbing my mane.
Every muscle in my body told me to use my strength and throw that man to the ground. Even if he didn’t die, it would incapacitate him for a few minutes until my master arrived. Whether Jerry found Dr Jekyll or Mr Hyde lying there, it wouldn’t make much of a difference, since it would be clear the man had been trying to steal me.
I felt him caressing my mane. No. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t harm a human being on purpose. He was on my back, riding me, and I had to follow my nature. And I couldn’t just stand there, either. It would be too dangerous for Jerry when he came back.
“What do you say, junior?” asked Mr Hyde,
So I started trotting. We went out into the night, Mr Hyde whipping me just for fun. I thought of the despair Jerry would feel, arriving at the stable and not finding me. He was the gentlest man I’d ever met, but he was not my master anymore. Mr Hyde was. He would take me wherever he wanted to go, and that could mean the edge of a cliff or a glue factory. I was a toy in his hands, and he wasn’t afraid of the consequences.
Sure, Jerry had Dr Jekyll’s name and address, and he could call up the police. That possibility didn’t seem to bother Mr Hyde, though. He was friends with a wealthy man, and even a horse can understand how powerful that is. Jerry was a poor cabbie, but even his favourite horse could be replaced with the right amount of money. He wouldn’t be happy with that, but he had to work and couldn’t afford to mess with rich people.
Mr Hyde took me up the road, through th
e fog, and I noticed we were moving away from the big buildings. He didn’t fit the saddle well, and almost fell from it a couple of times. That didn’t seem to bother him, and he seemed to laugh during the entire ride.
“Now that’s a good horse!” he yelled. “We are going places, junior! Special places!”
It was a nice change to go out without blinkers. This way I could see everything and didn’t have to guess as to what was happening around me. We rode for more than an hour before he made his first stop, in front of a dirty old pub. We were in a bad part of London, a place Jerry always avoided, no matter how much clients were willing to pay. When we stopped, Mr Hyde asked a boy to watch me. “I need to have a word with a friend of mine,” he said to me, and turned to the boy. “Take good care of him, if you value your life.”
You might not understand why I stood as he told me to, instead of trying to get rid of the boy and run away. That’s something you might have done in my place. However, despite the pain in my heart at having left Jerry behind, there was little I could do. Even if I could kick the boy and escape, I didn’t know my way back home. My best chances were to be a good horse and do what Mr Hyde told me to do.
It didn’t take much time for him to run out of the pub, laughing that awful laugh of his. He had a bottle of booze with him and a stain of blood on his coat. “Don’t worry, he’ll be good in a week!” he yelled to the people inside the pub, who shouted something awful back at him. To my surprise, Mr Hyde had brought a treat for me: a cube of sugar that he put in front of my mouth. “You see, I’m not that bad after all!”
After I was finished with the sugar and he paid the boy, hauled himself into the saddle and we rode into the fog. Mr Hyde quit using the whip, and I started thinking that this might not be that bad after all. We made two or three other stops, and after each one there was a new bloodstain on his shirt. He didn’t hurt me anymore, though, and always had some sugar for me.
We ended up in an abandoned park, on the edge of town. Mr Hyde jumped down from my back and picked up his satchel. “The night is hot, isn’t it, junior?” he said, sitting down on the grass. “Too hot. We had our fun. I must get back to Jekyll now. I hate this part of the evening, but it always comes to this.”
The fog hadn’t followed us here, and I could see his face under the light of the full moon. Mr Hyde wore a sad expression that looked strange on his deformed face. He opened his satchel, and there was another flask of potion inside it. It seemed to glow as he held it in the palm of his hand. He didn’t want to drink it, I could tell.
“The night is still young, huh?” he said to me. “You don’t care for what I do out there, do you, junior? It gets repetitive after some time. You wreck, you murder, you rape – and then what? Go back to good old Dr Jekyll, with his medical practice and his charity. Everything is normal again.”
I raised a front hoof and lowered it to the ground.
“You understand?” asked Mr Hyde. “Your mind is simple. None of this matters to you, does it? Jekyll always said there’s a rotten half for every bad apple. I’m his rotten side, junior. I wonder if…” Mr Hyde stopped there, and his expression changed. “I think I could…no, this dose is too small. I’ll tell you what, junior, we are taking a ride to my lab. But I can’t go like this. Wait a second.”
With that, he drank the contents of the flask. The transformation didn’t impress me anymore. In less than a minute, Dr Jekyll sat in front of me. He stood up and looked around. “Where the hell am I?” he asked, and then noticed me. “Oh, you’re still there. We have to go back now. Edward says he wants to test the formula on you. We’ve never tested on a horse before. A few rats, and…well, we’ll see.”
He mounted with elegance and rode me back in town, following the signs by the road. Dr Jekyll knew how to guide me better than his other half, and didn’t say a word on our way back into London. Soon I started to recognize the streets, especially when we passed in front of the places Mr Hyde had visited.
Was he going to hand me back to Jerry? I hoped so. I was starting to despise Dr Jekyll more than I did Mr Hyde. The latter was an awful man, the kind of man who did evil just for the fun of it. He did it because he had no other choice, because that was his sheer nature. What about Dr Jekyll? What excuse did he have?
We made a quick stop at the pub where I had first taken them earlier that evening. Dr Jekyll was in and out in a few minutes, and his satchel seemed heavier on his way out. “I wish I could prepare you a dose right here,” he said, swinging his leg over my back. “I wasn’t expecting to return to my lab anymore, but your dose needs to be huge.” With those words, we made our way back to Kensington.
This time, we stopped at the back of his house, where we had been supposed to meet Mr Hyde earlier that evening. I could see the big house from over the fence, and wondered if this was going to be my new home. It had never crossed my mind that he would be taking me inside his own home. It was no place to keep a horse – and by that point I was about to accept him as my new master. That meant he would need a stable, with hay and oats and everything else that a horse requires.
Dr Jekyll took a long key from his pocket and opened the back gate, pulling me in. There was no stable there. What was he planning to do with me?
After locking the gate behind him, Dr Jekyll led me to a small building, separate from the main house.
It felt wrong stepping inside that building. It hadn’t been made to accommodate a horse, and I felt awkward and out of place. Dr Jekyll pulled a switch next to a wall, and the whole place brightened up with electrical light. I could tell it was his place of work. It smelled like Mr Hyde. I walked slowly, trying not to stumble into the glass flasks with strange fluids around me.
“That’s a good boy,” said Dr Jekyll, giving me some more sugar. “Stay right here. This is going to take a little while.” He then proceeded to prepare more of the potion, using some of the stuff he had plucked from his satchel.
The building was almost as large as Jerry’s stable. There were some cages near the walls, but they were all empty. What had Dr Jekyll done to the animals in there? What was he going to do with me?
“This batch is special, you see?” he said to me as he worked. “That’s why I carry it around with me. Some strange impurity got in these salts, and it’s that impurity that makes the potion work. I can’t specify what it is, and I can’t replicate it. That’s why I need to keep this case in a safe place for Edward. I can’t be Edward forever.”
I realized now that the transformation had to do with the liquid that he, and later Mr Hyde, had ingested. Changing back and forth was painful, but he kept using it. I couldn’t tell why. There were two different men living in one body. He must have tested it on the animals that once occupied those cages, before using it himself.
“They’re all gone,” said Dr Jekyll, as if he’d read my thoughts. His eyes didn’t move from his work as he talked to me. “Animals are different than humans. The idea of my experiment was never to bring out the evil in man. That was a collateral effect. What I wanted to do was to connect people with their human side. That’s why experimenting with animals never worked. They didn’t need to force that connection.”
He took a tube with bubbling red liquid and poured it into a big decanter half filled with green fluid. The bubbles descended to the bottom of the decanter and then foamed to the top, turning purple.
Dr Jekyll smiled. “Then I started to think about whether you could connect an animal to his own human nature,” he went on. “If we have an animal inside us, why wouldn’t animals have a little bit of man in their nature? It might sound stupid at first, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it, especially when I was Edward. What is it that makes man what he is?”
The decanter stopped foaming, and Dr Jekyll started to look for something in the satchel. “That question is beyond science,” he said as he looked. “It’s something for philosophers to ponder in a dark room. After a while, I quit looking for the answer. I knew that if it was to come, it would be a
result of intuition, not rational thought. And intuition is Edward’s area, not mine.”
He found his syringe, the same one he had had with him in the stable. It was far too big to be used on a human. It was for horses. “I’ve always had a fascination for the mind of the beast,” he continued. “It’s clean and pure. Your instinct is your only master, you have no moral code and still you exist in harmony. If animals were stupid, you would destroy all of your resources in little time. A wolf kills and eats one sheep, but he knows that if he kills all sheep, there won’t be any left the next time he’s hungry. So he lets the others live.”
“Edward is my wild side,” he said, filling the syringe with the liquid in the decanter. “He’s not a monster, nor my evil double. He’s the bridge between me and my ancestors, from a time where we weren’t bound by social norms and could do whatever we wanted to do. But he’s still out of balance. You saw what he’s capable of doing in a single night. My experiment is not complete. I needed a special animal to make the journey the other way around, and I think I’ve found one tonight.”
Dr Jekyll cracked his knuckles “The animals in the cages were worthless,” he said. “They didn’t have a spark of human consciousness in them. Edward could see this, and he told me that one day he hoped to look into an animal’s eyes and see that spark. That’s why he liked you so much.”
He locked the lab door and came closer to me. I stepped back. Something fell to the ground with the sound of shattering glass. Dr Jekyll offered me another sugar cube, but that wasn’t enough anymore. I kept walking backwards, and at every step something fell and broke.
“Don’t ruin my laboratory!” he yelled.
Ruining the laboratory sounded like a great idea, so I did just that. Almost everything there was made of glass, so I kicked and reared and bolted around the room as Dr Jekyll ran after me, the syringe in his hand. I figured that if I made a big mess, he would let me go. He was calling me awful names now, and his voice was getting sore and raspy. When I stopped to look at him, he wasn’t there anymore. Hyde was.
