The Jekyll Revelation

by Robert Masello

  ‘Blast it, Poole! Haven’t I told you I cannot be interrupted for anything?’

  ‘It’s Mr Utterson, sir, and he says it cannot wait!’

  ‘Wait it will! Wait it shall have to!’

  He took a swallow from the smoking glass, grimaced at the taste, then hurled the glass at the fireplace, where it shattered into a thousand pieces. A woman yelped at the explosion, a titter ran through the audience, and the play sailed on.

  TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA

  Present Day

  “But why?” Heidi said, surveying the rusty canister, the rotting cub, the disturbed entrance to the den. “What could they get out of it?”

  Rafe could think of several things. Wanton, useless slaughter was right up Seth and Alfie’s alley, for starters. So was the chance to make a buck with a fresh pelt, even if it was only a coyote cub. Finally, there was always the chance that they knew Rafe had been tracking and studying this pack. Maybe it was revenge for the loss of the trunk.

  As Heidi wandered off in search of other tunnels, Rafe used his boot heel to scrape dirt over the body of the dead cub. It just seemed wrong to leave the little critter so exposed like that. Then, he gave the canister a good, swift kick, hard enough that it actually lifted into the air and toppled end over end down the hillside until it came to rest, with an unexpected clank, on something hard. Something that definitely wasn’t dirt.

  Rafe followed it down, and saw, half covered with weeds and grit, a concrete slab, maybe thirty or forty feet long. A tangle of wires and rusted metal—once an antenna, it would appear—was bolted to it, and he realized that the slab was actually the roof of a low building, buried like a pillbox or a bunker in the slope of the hill.

  “What the heck is that?” Heidi said, coming down the hill sideways.

  Judging from its position and the contraption on the roof, Rafe could hazard a guess. “It’s probably an old conning station.”

  “A what?”

  “During the Second World War, there were radar installations built along the coastline here, to give warning in case of a Japanese attack.” This was the first one he’d ever come across, though, and as he made a slow reconnaissance around its perimeter—the whole thing was about the size of a three-car garage—he noticed that the windows, narrow and only inches above the dirt line, were all blocked with tinfoil, and the ground around the bunker was even more arid and discolored than it had been higher up the hillside. As if the soil had been poisoned. The entryway was simply a few steps of cracked concrete, leading down to a sheet-metal door of more recent vintage. It still had a gleam to its surface, and a sturdy lock with a loose chain hanging down. Putting his ear closer to the door, Rafe could hear music playing softly inside. Some rock band he didn’t recognize.

  Heidi came up behind him, but he held up a hand to stop her. “Stand back, and stay there.”

  “But I’m supposed to—”

  “Just do it.”

  Pushing the door open as gently as he could, he peered into the interior, expecting it to be pitch black, but what he got instead was a glaring white brightness. A generator hummed somewhere below one of the dozen counters, all of which were covered with beakers and boxes and plastic bottles with tubes sticking out of their tops. A guy who looked like he was ready to go deep-sea diving, in a face mask, goggles, headphones, and blue scrubs, was bobbing his head to the music while counting out pills. He had no idea Rafe was there, nor did the other guy, stretched out asleep on a dilapidated sofa, with a fuzzy black face mask over his eyes and a denim jacket that said Spiritz draped across his chest. Rafe had seen him around La Raza—his name was Axel something, and he ran the gang.

  It looked like that tip to the Land Management administrator had been right. He felt like he had just stumbled into the center of the spider’s web, but what did he do about it now? He was wondering if the wisest course of action right now wasn’t to simply back out again before they’d even noticed he was there.

  The lab tech scratched his butt through the scrubs, then bent down to pick up something that had rolled off the counter. He paused halfway up, and then, as if not sure of what he was seeing, made a swipe at his goggles with his gloved hand.

  Too late now, Rafe thought.

  “Hey, Axel,” the techie said.

  “What?” Axel grumbled, eye mask still in place.

  “Wake up, Axel.”

  “Why? Did you fuck up again?”

  “Somebody did.”

  With a grunt, Axel shoved the mask up onto his forehead and rubbed his eyes. He looked at Rafe, and then at something just behind Rafe’s shoulder—Heidi must have disobeyed him enough to be seen in the doorway—and said, “Well, if it isn’t Dudley Do-Right.”

  Rafe wasn’t sure what to say, but noticed Axel taking in the gun slung on his belt.

  “Are you really this stupid?” Axel said, slowly swinging his feet off the sofa. “Coming in here? And with your little girlfriend yet?”

  “I’m not his girlfriend,” Heidi declared. “We’re with the Land Management department.”

  Rafe would have given a million bucks to have her out of there just now, or at least as much simply to have her keep quiet.

  Axel laughed and said, “Oh, yeah, I’m really sorry about that. Didn’t mean to piss you off, little lady.”

  The techie had removed his goggles and hood—Rafe recognized him now as one of the other Spiritz he’d seen around La Raza—and was trying to unobtrusively move farther back into the lab.

  “Stay where you are,” Rafe said, and the man stopped, though Rafe wondered what he could have done if he hadn’t. Using a gun in a meth lab would only serve to blow them all sky-high—a blunt fact of which they were all, except perhaps Heidi, undoubtedly aware.

  “What do you want?” Axel asked, stretching his arms out on the back of the sofa. “This is already getting boring.”

  “Who killed the coyote pups?”

  “Who what?” Turning to the techie, Axel said, “Hey, Roy—you know what the hell he’s talking about?”

  “Yeah. It was those dumb fucks you hired to haul shit. They did it. I told you not to use them, Axel.”

  “Yeah, well, remind me to run all my decisions by you in future.” Returning his attention to Rafe, he said, “So, what do you want me to do about it now? Pay you? What’s a baby coyote go for these days?”

  It was strange, Rafe thought, how they had all implicitly agreed to waltz around the much greater, and deadlier, topic surrounding them—the lab counters covered with everything from crumpled pseudoephedrine packets to acetone jugs, all the random paraphernalia required to manufacture methamphetamine.

  “There’s no price on them at all. But gassing them is a state offense.”

  Axel laughed again, and pulled out a wad of bills. “Go ahead—fine me.” He dug into his pocket and threw a few hundreds onto the grimy cement floor. “And then get out.”

  Although Rafe pointedly ignored the bills, Heidi murmured, “Do you think that constitutes a bribe to a state official?”

  Axel slapped his knee with delight. “Where did you get her?”

  “We’re going,” Rafe said, deliberately backing into her to move her toward the door. “You two just stay where you are.”

  He could see the rapid calculations going on behind Axel’s eyes now that his secret lair had been discovered, and by a park ranger, no less.

  Rafe kept them both in his line of vision. Roy repeatedly glanced at Axel, as if awaiting instructions to do something, but Axel simply watched Rafe and Heidi retreat, without budging from the couch.

  Once they were up the stairs, Rafe told Heidi to run back toward the jeep.

  “I won’t be able to find it!”

  “Then just run that way,” he said, pointing back toward the Potheads’ farm. “I’ll catch up to you.”

  “But what about—”

  “For once, will you do what I tell you to?”

  Heidi swallowed hard and took off, while Rafe unsnapped the holster o
n his Smith & Wesson nine millimeter and waited. It wasn’t long before Roy came scrambling out with a shotgun, the goggles still dangling around his neck, followed by Axel on his cell phone.

  “Fuck this phone,” Axel cursed, shaking it. The reception this deep into the canyon was virtually nil.

  “What do you want me to do?” Roy shouted nervously. “He’s right here, just standing here.”

  Axel looked up. “What do you think, Officer? Do you think we should discuss this . . . situation?” He shoved the useless phone into the back pocket of his jeans. “And I don’t mean the coyotes.”

  “I’m not an officer,” Rafe said, stalling for time. The farther Heidi could get away, the better. “I’m an environmental scientist.”

  Axel’s expression didn’t change a bit. He had thick, dirty brown hair that had been sculpted close to his skull from years under a motorcycle helmet.

  “I’m not a cop,” Rafe repeated.

  “I get that,” Axel agreed. “I know who you are. You’re that poor broke asshole who chases coyotes—dead ones at that—and lives in a shitty trailer out behind a bullshit store.”

  Rafe let it stand. Just let him keep talking.

  “That is what you are, my friend.”

  “The girl,” Roy interjected impatiently. “You want me to go after the girl?”

  Rafe’s hand moved now toward the handle of the sidearm, and Axel noticed it.

  “Don’t wet yourself,” Axel told his anxious confederate. Then, to Rafe, he said, “So what do you think? Are we going to be able to get a handle on this situation?”

  “Meaning what?” The sun was slipping below the horizon in a fiery ball.

  “Meaning, are you going to be able to shut her up, for one thing? She just might be so dumb she doesn’t even know what she saw—and if you were to fuck her, and for all I know you already are, maybe you could get her to go along with anything you say.”

  “She’s not your problem.”

  “That’s right. She’s just an itty-bitty part of it. You’re my problem. And that’s what I need to fix.”

  “I could still catch her,” Roy insisted.

  “What do they pay scientists these days?” Axel asked, ignoring Roy altogether.

  “Enough.”

  “To do what? Buy a bean burrito at La Raza? You could make some money—serious money, by your not-so-serious standards.”

  Could Rafe convince him he was bribable, after all? Never much of an actor, he was grateful for the failing light. He felt like he had to play along, even as he felt Axel was playing a part, too. Neither one of them wanted the situation to come to a head right here, right now—not with trigger-happy Roy champing at the bit, or Heidi running loose in the canyon—but neither of them could work out the details of another plan fast enough.

  “It’s getting dark,” Axel said, casually taking a pack of cigarettes out of the front pocket of his jacket. “If you don’t find her fast, she’s going to have to sleep all alone in the woods tonight.” He glanced at Roy, then, significantly, back at Rafe. “And that would not be safe. I can guarantee you that.”

  Rafe felt that some deal was still lying on the table—in return for his silence, Heidi’s life, and his own.

  “And all things considered, everything you just saw,” Axel said, tilting his head toward the lab, “is history. Gone. Poof. By the time you got back here, there’d be nothing left to find and no one to arrest. That right, Roy?”

  Roy was shifting back and forth on his feet like a racehorse still in the gate, the shotgun in his hands.

  “You got that?” Axel repeated, and Roy gave his grudging assent.

  Rafe nodded, too, and moved his hand away from his gun. Then, he backed away, slowly.

  Roy muttered something to Axel, who said “Shut the fuck up” and took a long drag on his cigarette. “I said no, just go inside and start packing up your shit.”

  By now, Rafe was moving out of earshot. Roy flipped him the bird, then stomped back down the steps as he’d been ordered. The last thing Rafe saw, before he finally got below the crest of the hill and felt it was safe to turn around and run after Heidi, was Axel, his stubby legs planted wide, staring off at the setting sun, probably planning where to set up his next base of operations.

  2 September, 1888

  For the past two days, all of London has been in the grip of fear.

  But not, would it were so, because of the debut of the play.

  True, the audience at the Lyceum was caught up in the drama, and even I, the author of the tale, found myself immersed. The performance of Richard Mansfield in the title role was a prodigious achievement. His transformation from the eminent Dr Jekyll to the malevolent Mr Hyde was something that seemed to defy the very eyes. After imbibing the concoction—a plot device for which several critics took me to task in the reviews of my novel—everything about him, from his posture to his physiognomy, altered in both radical and subtle ways. His shoulders became stooped, his legs bandied, the hair on his head appeared electrified, and in his eyes—and that is where the subtlety showed—a bottomless black pool yawned.

  Henley glanced at me for my approval, and my pallor no doubt spoke to the efficacy of the actor’s work. But Henley could not guess—no one could—how deeply the performance affected me, how close to the quick it cut. When Mansfield’s clothes hung from his frame like wet washing on the line, it reminded me of my own dressing gown, dragging on the floor on that first fateful night in my study. When his twisted hands reached out as if to throttle someone, it reminded me of how my own hands had become gnarled and hairy and dusky of hue. When his eyes lost their human lustre and became those of a pitiless beast, I saw my own, staring back at me in horror in the mirror above my desk. It was as if the man had somehow witnessed the very metamorphosis I had undergone and subsequently utilized in my art—and which he now employed in his. Like me, he shared in the revelation that beneath a man’s respectable exterior lurked a darker and more sinister side, aching to break its chains.

  Perhaps that was why I felt the shudder that descended my spine, and could barely suppress the cough that erupted. Fanny, concerned, took my hand, and whispered, ‘Louis, is it too much? Should we go?’

  Shaking my head, I said I simply needed a breath of air, and stepped out of the box, and into the empty hall. There, I took the handkerchief from the breast pocket of my tailcoat and pressed it to my lips—it came away tinged with russet—and leaned with one hand against the wall. The craving for the magical elixir, for so I think of it now, was as powerful as it had ever been, though at the same time I dreaded its after-effects. This tug of war has become alarmingly familiar.

  ‘Was the box too warm?’

  I turned my head to see Stoker coming down the corridor.

  ‘No, no, it was fine,’ I said, collecting myself.

  ‘What’s it like, then, to see your creation transformed, shifted from a page to a proscenium?’

  ‘Strange,’ I replied, keeping my voice, like Stoker’s, low. ‘It’s as if you were seeing a lady with whom you were once in love, now strolling on the arm of another man.’

  Stoker chuckled, then quickly muffled the sound.

  ‘The liberties with my story, I will admit, rankle.’ The American playwright had introduced a romance for Dr Jekyll. ‘But as someone who has written the occasional play myself, I can understand why they were taken.’

  ‘The ladies do love their romance, and if they are to persuade their husbands to escort them to the theatre, they must have it.’

  For several minutes, we engaged in a discussion of the relative merits of the various forms of writing, and I soon gathered that Stoker, despite his long employment at the Lyceum, had his sights set more upon the printed page. We shared an interest in the macabre—he had read my short stories ‘Thrawn Janet’ and ‘The Body Snatcher’, and complimented me on them—and confessed to a desire to add something of consequence to that canon one day. ‘But are you, may I ask, a true believer in things of an occult na
ture,’ he said, ‘or do you merely use them for dramatic effect?’

  It was a fair question, and one that I had been asked before. ‘I believe only in things I can apprehend with my own imperfect senses,’ I answered, ‘though their very imperfection suggests I keep an open mind.’

  ‘The answer of a diplomat.’

  ‘Of a writer, with no wish to insult his readers. My aim was simply to write a bogey tale they would not soon forget.’

  ‘Well, if I should ever stumble upon my own great bogey tale, I shall send you an autographed copy of the first edition.’

  ‘Yes, do that,’ I said. ‘I enjoy reading them even more than writing them.’

  Stoker checked his pocket watch, said, ‘We should be dropping the curtain soon,’ and marched off to continue on his rounds. I slipped back into the box in time to see the play conclude—at least it remained faithful to my ending—and to observe the many curtain calls for its acting troupe. Saved for last was Mansfield, who returned to the stage like a man who had just traversed the Sahara on his hands and knees. He looked as if he could barely remain upright, and acknowledged the applause—the audience leaping to its feet, amid cries of Bravo! and Huzzah!—with a bobbing of his head and the touch of his fingers to his brow in salute.

  ‘If that doesn’t send the book sales flying,’ Fanny said, ‘nothing will!’

  ‘I think I can promise you a rave’, Henley said, ‘in the next issue of the “National Observer.”’

  Taking the same back-stairs route out of the theatre that we had taken on the way in, we were soon outside, where the heat of the day had only slightly abated. Cabs and carriages were jockeying for place, the horses snorting and pawing at the pavement, the theatre-goers fanning themselves with their programmes, the ladies lifting the hair from the back of their damp necks. I was searching in vain for the carriage we had hired for the night—they all looked alike in the garish glow of the electric lights—when I saw Stoker yet again, ploughing through the crowd with what turned out to be the prime minister in his wake.

  ‘Excuse me, Mr Stevenson, but Lord Salisbury wished to express his regards.’