The Jekyll Revelation

by Robert Masello

  It is here, after wandering the world, and in particular the South Pacific, that Fanny and I have fetched up and built, over these past six years, a comfortable and secluded life for ourselves, high atop the slopes of Mount Vaea, overlooking the harbour of Apia far below. By day we watch the trading vessels come and go, and gaze off at the hazy blue splendour of the mountains of Atua to the east. At night we sleep to the booming of the surf and the rustle of the broad flat leaves of the banyan trees outside the verandah.

  It has been a long and oftentimes hazardous journey to this lofty haven.

  Although we knew that Lloyd—Samuel Smith to all aboard—was below deck much of the time, we made the voyage to Boston Harbor without attempting any contact. It was best, I thought, to keep up the masquerade, lest any connection later be made by Inspector Abberline. Truth be told, I enjoyed the respite. Even Fanny seemed reconciled to it, or at least incapable of altering it, as she spent most of the ten-day passage sick from the pitching of the ship and the wretched food served up by the galley.

  Still, the moment we disembarked, she eagerly scanned the other passengers coming ashore, waiting to catch her first glimpse of her errant son. But even after the flood had abated and the last stragglers had ambled down the gangway with their rucksacks, she had not seen him. Grabbing a ship’s mate by the elbow, she said, ‘Is that all of them?’

  Glancing back, and seeing only porters climbing up the plank and no one else coming down, he said, ‘Looks that way, ma’am.’

  ‘Lloyd Osb—I mean, Samuel Smith. Do you know him?’

  ‘Sammy? Sure I do,’ he said, brightening up. ‘The young doctor, come back to finish his studies at Harvard? Told some fine stories about the ladies of London,’ he said, laughing, then catching himself. ‘Though nothing too, well, improper, you might say.’

  It surprised me not one whit that Lloyd had lacked the sense to keep a low profile, or that he had once again concocted an identity for himself. What did surprise me, however, was that he had indeed gone missing. Fanny bustled back aboard, and only after the first mate himself had given her a guided tour of the empty berths above and below, did she grasp that Lloyd had somehow slipped ashore before we had done so ourselves, and was now making his own way through the streets of Boston. Snow was falling from a leaden sky, and a cold wind was blowing, and I wondered how he hoped to fend for himself. Then it dawned on me.

  ‘You gave him money?’ I said to Fanny, and she replied, ‘Some, before we left.’ Turning on me, she said, ‘The boy had to have something to call his own. And it’s not so much he can live on it long.’ I dreaded asking how much of our travel account she had shared with him before setting sail.

  We stayed in Boston for a week, Fanny hoping that Lloyd would turn up any day, but he did not. After an article about our arrival had appeared in the “Boston Globe,” and I had given an interview about my impressions of the city, she received a brief letter from Samuel Smith at our hotel—saying he was off on his own now ‘to make my fortune or be made a fool’, and declaring that ‘though Louis has done me wrong, I forgive him—tell him so.’ It cost me the better part of an hour to defend myself against that calumny.

  Making stops in Chicago and Denver and Salt Lake City—at all of which I was able to offer impromptu lectures and earn generous honorariums—we journeyed westward, finally arriving in San Francisco, where we booked a private schooner, the “Casco”—seventy tons, ninety-five feet long, white sails and decks, polished brass, and a cockpit fitted out with cushioned seats surrounding the wheel and compass, as if one were in a drawing room on dry land. Like the Flying Dutchman forever fleeing before the gale, we crisscrossed the islands and atolls and archipelagos of the South Pacific, searching for the place we might call home. The place where the long arm of the law might never again reach out to interrogate me about certain events in London. The place where my lungs might function untroubled. The warm and humid climate proved a boon to my health, and although we were reconciled to our exile from England, we knew that we must choose somewhere that provided one more thing in addition—a sufficient link to the civilized world that I could continue in my career. In all this vast region, there are only four such places that afford fast mail-ship service—Papeete and Honolulu, which are already poisoned by the tide of French and Americans; Suva in Fiji, where the Melanesians have earned a rather unsavoury reputation for themselves; and finally, Apia in Samoa. If all goes well, a letter or manuscript can arrive in London in a month’s time, a telegram in only a week—and the Polynesians are a friendly, if feckless, race. Furthermore, there are no malaria-bearing mosquitoes anywhere on the island. No snakes, either, for that matter. Did Saint Patrick sojourn here?

  I contribute letters and essays from exotic ports-of-call for several publications, most notably the “New York Sun,” which deposits twenty pounds to my accounts in London and two hundred dollars to my bank in San Francisco for each one. In Hawaii, I came across a local legend that, in a few days of sustained work, I managed to turn into a popular and much-translated tale. ‘The Bottle Imp’, it is called, and it tells the story of a demon that would give its owner anything he desired in return for his soul. Once it was produced in the Samoan language in a sort of cartoon form, it answered many questions that had perplexed the minds of the locals. Seeing the grand house that I have built, on more than three hundred acres, filled with mahogany furniture imported from Sydney, Oriental rugs on the floors, and a liquor cabinet well stocked with Irish whiskey and French cognac in crystal decanters, the natives had wondered how a man who sits about in his pajamas all day, scribbling, could accumulate such riches. Now they knew. I had sold my soul to a bottle imp! From that day forward, I have been known on the island (and, to some small extent, feared there) as Tusitala, or ‘teller of tales’. Some of the islanders can occasionally be found snooping about the house, trying to find the magic bottle.

  It was only a matter of time, I always suspected, before the prodigal stepson would reappear. Letters came to his mother from far-flung spots, filled with stories of high promise and imminent success, though never failing to appeal in the end for additional funds. One afternoon, as I sat at my desk in the library, the trade winds sifting through the open room, I saw a lone figure in a straw sun hat, a battered brown suitcase clutched in one hand, ambling up the path to the house. He stopped to catch his breath and put his bag down—it was a long climb—and his head went back to take in the peacock blue of the house, the red roof, the native tapas floating in the wide windows like tapestries. He trudged on, and soon I heard a cry of joy from below. Before descending, I left Fanny a few minutes to revel in the unexpected reunion.

  ‘Look who’s come home!’ she exclaimed, though it was hard to imagine how this eyrie, which he had never before seen, could be considered his home.

  Odd as it may seem, I, too, was glad to see Lloyd—a singular reaction, I know, in a man once shot at—but I could not fail to recall the boy he had once been, hunched over the rudimentary map we had drawn of Treasure Island, or gambolling with the late Woggin in the snow of Davos. (The dog’s humble grave lies beneath a tree outside my study window.) Nor could I forget my role in the terrible changes that had overtaken him. We shook hands in a manly fashion, and then under Fanny’s approving eye, embraced. In my heart, I have always felt a powerful urge towards forgiveness, coupled with the conviction that time can alter anyone, for good or ill. I was prepared to believe that the Lloyd I knew, serial impostor and unwanted suitor, was a new and different man.

  He certainly looked it.

  His hair had turned darker, his frame had filled out even more, and his face bore the telltale lines of battle. There was a deep furrow in his brow, a droop to the corner of his lip, a faint scar on one cheek. He wore the loose white shirt and dungarees common to most travellers in these regions, along with a necklace of shells whose clacketing I would come to know well. He was given spacious quarters in an upstairs corner of the house, and readily made himself at home there (some skills
are never lost), sleeping late into the day, helping himself to the liquor cabinet, and mysteriously disappearing whenever the prospect of plantation work arose. Nights he spent carousing in the harbour bars, which were always packed with the usual assortment of beachcombers, seamen, and native girls. Because the German government had designs upon monopolizing the Samoan trade, there was a heavily Teutonic contingent along the waterfront, most of them in the employ of the so-called Long Handle firm—Deutsche Handels und Plantagen Gesellschaft der Südsee Inseln zu Hamburg—backed by Bismarck himself. Beer hall songs, more commonly heard in the streets of Heidelberg, often rang out across the piers and customs houses, sometimes carrying, if the wind was just right, all the way up to Vailima.

  Indeed, I had caught a snatch of a tune one night while relaxing on the verandah with a glass of whiskey and a cigar, admiring how the moonlight lent the jungle surrounding the house a silvery sheen. Insects chittered, the occasional monkey howled, the banyan leaves flapped like elephant ears in the night breeze. All was right with the world . . . until, like a thunderclap, all went wrong.

  Malaki, my head houseboy, came racing up the jungle path from the harbour, crying out for me, and though I moved to hush him lest he wake Fanny and everyone else in the house, he insisted that I take my gun and follow him back down the mountain. The blood on his pareu made the case more imperative, and by the time I had loaded my rifle and come back outside, he was waiting with my horse saddled. I offered him a hand up to ride behind me on the horse, but he shook his head. Not only would it be a breach of decorum, but he believed, and rightly so, that he could keep pace on foot as well as my horse would be able to pick its way down the zigzagging trail.

  When we got down to the beach and I had dismounted, he led the way, with a torch held aloft, along the waterfront. It was very late, and even the German sailors of the Long Handle firm had ended their revelries.

  We followed the footprints in the sand for several hundred yards. One pair, small and dainty, most probably belonged to a barefoot girl, the other to a man in hobnail boots.

  ‘Here, Tusitala, here!’ Malaki urged as we approached a tide pool. Lowering the torch, he said ‘See,’ and see I did.

  I remember confusing the long black hair for seaweed, the pink hibiscus blossom for a sand crab—my eyes again refusing to accept what lay before them. It was a girl—I’d seen her selling woven baskets to tourists—

  And she was lying in the water, her face down. ‘Quickly,’ I said, ‘we must get her out.’ But Malaki would not touch her or help. I soon saw why. Once I had dragged her body above the tideline and turned her over, I saw that her throat had been cut, and her dress sliced open from top to bottom. Someone had gone at her with a knife, slashing and ripping in a frenzy of bloodlust.

  My mind reeled, as well as my body, transporting me back to the Whitechapel mortuary and the remains of Annie Chapman, to the squalid quarters at 13 Miller’s Court, to the fog-bound streets of London and the Swiss assassin, Josef. But fast upon those reflections came another, nipping at their heels—a thought that was suddenly as inescapable as it was horrific.

  Closing up the torn halves of her dress and leaving Malaki to watch over the corpse, I traced the footprints of the hobnail boots, seldom worn in these climes, towards the customs house, mounted on caissons, its decks cluttered with casks of copra and coffee beans. I climbed the stairs and, inside, heard the grunts of a struggling beast. I unslung the rifle from my back and, looking through the quarter-panes of the window, saw the figure of a man, with hunched shoulders and bandy legs, shimmying open the cash drawer. Cocking the rifle, I positioned myself outside the warped wooden door, only to have it flung open so violently that I fell back, the gun exploding in an orange blast of smoke and fire as I toppled over the railing and down onto the sand. The culprit leapt down beside me, his boots nearly thumping on my chest, and then, before I could recover my breath or senses, he escaped into the labyrinth of docks and empty stalls.

  How long I lay there, stunned, I do not know, but Malaki, having heard the gunshot, hurried to my side and urged me to my feet. ‘We must go, Master! We must go!’ And with his strong arm around my waist, he guided me back to the horse.

  ‘But the girl,’ I said, and he shook his head.

  ‘It is the work of the imp,’ he said. ‘Maybe you can get him back in the bottle!’ He slapped the horse on the rump and sent me on my way.

  The imp. If only it had been so . . .

  The horse knew its way back, which was just as well, as my head was filled to bursting with other thoughts and fears. Conclusions that were all but impossible to deny crowded my mind. What course of action could I possibly take? What could I prove—and was I willing to prove it, knowing that I would be sending one man to the gallows and his mother into a despair from which she would never recover? Was I prepared to admit, to myself and the world, that I had carried this thing, like a contagion, from one continent to another? Or to accept that all I had done in my career, all my work and toil, would be forever after eclipsed by this one awful and overarching calamity of my life?

  At Vailima, I stabled the horse and surveyed the house for any sign of wakefulness, but there was none. The lights were out; all was quiet. I knew where I needed to go, and mounted the staircase to the second floor with my heart pounding. Did I hope to find Lloyd fast asleep, unsullied with blood, snoring from too much drink? Even then, I did harbour such a hope—quickly dashed when I parted the curtain and saw the bed unoccupied. Still, my mind searched for some way out, some answer that would be more acceptable than the one I knew. I lit the oil lamp and looked about the room. Only once or twice had I ever ventured in here, and Lloyd had made loud complaint about the intrusion on his privacy.

  ‘It’s bad enough that the damn place has no proper doors,’ he’d said, ‘but if I cannot trust everyone to stay out, I shall have to move down into Apia.’

  There was little chance of that—Lloyd enjoyed his status, and his comforts, at Vailima far too much to trade them for a waterfront room above a brothel. His slippers lay beside the bed, his books on the night table, his brush and comb and mirror on the dresser. I opened the drawers, rummaged through his clothes, unsure of what I was even looking for. Then, I was reminded of the armoire in his room at Cavendish Square, and how he had hung the satchel sideways behind his clothes. In this armoire, too, I found the satchel, similarly concealed, and opened it once more.

  On this occasion, however, the assortment of oddities assumed a newfound, and long-denied, clarity. The mind is a curious thing, able to suppress whatever it must, for some time. But observing the contents, I knew that the last redoubt had been breached.

  The brass rings.

  Polly Nichols, the first of the Ripper’s victims, had worn such rings.

  The torn envelope. A scrap, no doubt its mate, had been found in Annie Chapman’s purse.

  The rusty key.

  The killer who left Mary Jane Kelly’s room had locked the door behind him, and the key was never found.

  Was there a similar connection for the amber comb with the broken teeth? Had it belonged to Elizabeth Stride?

  Or the loose buttons at the bottom of the bag? Were they torn from the dress of Catherine Eddowes?

  Souvenirs, all?

  And what of the folded paper I found there now, a paper that I did not remember from before?

  I opened it and saw that it was the bill from the Aldgate Arms. I had not seen it in years. Was he so sentimental about his tenancy there that he had found it among my papers and made off with it? Studying it by the flickering light of the lamp, I noted only one thing that had escaped my attention before. The date on which the room had been taken.

  It was on the thirty-first of August. In 1888.

  The date rang a bell because it was the night of the London premiere of “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.” Lloyd had not attended because he was off in Paris at the Folies Bergère with his erstwhile friend Randolph Desmond. Or so Fanny and I had
been led to believe.

  It was also the night that Jack the Ripper had claimed his first victim.

  The bill still in my hand, I sat down on the edge of the bed. It was as if I had just suffered the coup de grâce. The Ripper had not struck even once since my family and I had boarded the boat to Boston. Henley’s letters had kept me informed on that score, and on the rest of the London news. ‘The bastard seems to have vanished into thin air,’ Henley wrote, ‘and we can only hope that he is roasting in some peculiarly hot corner of Hell.’

  How could I ever tell him—though Henley would be the one to whom I must reveal it—that Jack had materialized again, six years later and ten thousand miles away?

  And that I had been his author, in both a fictional and actual sense? I had proved to be the real Dr Jekyll—and what I had conjured was a genuine Mr Hyde.

  30 November, 1894

  Lloyd did not come home that night. Or the next. Or the next.

  When word of the murder got around the island, suspicion fell everywhere—on the German sailors who got drunk and rowdy in the harbour bars, on the local pimps and publicans who used the native girls as bait and chum, on the crew of a French trawler that had upped anchor and left at the first crack of dawn for an unknown destination—but none fell on Tusitala or his household. I was considered above reproach, a cross between a mighty chieftain and a shaman. If anything, I was expected to employ my occult powers to sort it out.

  Malaki, I believe, assumed that I had promptly done that very thing by recapturing the imp and sealing him up again in his bottle.

  Fanny, however, was beside herself, not because she suspected her son of any such crime—she was quite capable of watching him shoot someone before her very eyes and blaming only the bullet—but because she feared the murderer might have done some harm to her son, too. It wasn’t unlike Lloyd to miss the occasional night at Vailima—he was a man of robust vices—but several in a row became cause for concern, especially as there had been a mighty storm uprooting trees and blowing the roof off many of the native huts. Fanny wanted to send Malaki down to Apia to ask around, but I warned her that doing so might have unintended consequences. She gave me a long look, but took my advice, held her tongue, and waited.