Chapter 9
It was the 7th of January, just a week ago; I got an envelope from my Henry Jekyll. It contained a registered letter which surprised me. We hardly communicated with each other and I wondered what the letter could possibly say. I had seen the man, dined with him, indeed, the night before; and I could imagine nothing in our intercourse that should justify formality of registration. It went as:
Dear Lanyon,
You are a person who has always been close to my heart. Our friendship is very old and there was never any decrement in my affection for you. I would’ve given up my life to save your honour. My friend, my honour, my life depend on you; don’t disappoint me tonight, for I will be lost. You might wonder after reading this that I will ask something dishounourable. You are the judge for what I am about to ask from you.
“I want you to come straight to my place where you will find my butler Poole at the door; he has his orders. He will be accompanied by a locksmith. Then I want you to get into my cabinet alone by forcing the door. Once you are inside, open the glazed press; and pull out the fourth drawer from the top with all its contents standing as they were, You are most likely to find some powders, a phial, and a fragile binded book. I pleade you to pull out this drawer and take it as it is to the Cavendish square.”
“That is what I need you to do initially: You should be back, if you set out at once on the receipt of this, long before midnight; but I will leave you that amount of margin, not only in the fear of one of those obstacles that can neither be prevented nor foreseen, but because an hour when your servants are in bed is to be preferred for what will then remain to do. At midnight, then, I have to ask you to be alone in your consulting room, to admit with your own hand into the house a man who will present himself in my name, and to place in his hands the drawer that you will have brought with you from my cabinet. Then you will have played your part and earned my gratitude completely. Five minutes afterwards, if you insist upon an explanation, you will have understood that these arrangements are of capital importance; and that by the neglect of one of them, fantastic as they must appear, you might have charged your conscience with my death or the shipwreck of my reason.
I believe I am confident enough that you would honour my appeal and be of service, I have a fear you might not. Picture me to be lying distressed in a strange place, and by your service all my sorrows would vanish at once. I need your help Lanyon, don’t fail me.
Your Friend,
H.J
P.S. I had already sealed this up when a fresh terror struck upon my soul.There is a chance that the post office authorities might fail me and you don’t receive this letter by morning. If so happens, I request you to run our arrangement in course of that day and do expect my messenger to come again on the same time as before. If he doesn’t show up, you must know that Henry Jekyll is no more.
Upon the reading of this letter, I made sure my colleague was insane; but till that was proved beyond the possibility of doubt, I felt bound to do as he requested. The less I understood of this farrago, the less I was in a position to judge of its importance; and an appeal so worded could not be set aside without a grave responsibility, I had to honour our friendship by doing as he wanted me to. I hopped into the cab and headed straight for Jekyll’s place where the butler, accompanied by the locksmith, awaited my arrival. We entered doctor’s cabinet after struggling with the lock for hours. The glazed press marked with letter ‘E’ was open; I pulled out the door as I was instructed and returned to Cavendish square.
I examined its contents. There were powders which appeared to have been manufactured by Jekyll himself. One of the contained white crystalline salt. The phial contained a foul smelling liquor coloured blood-red. I found the paper book as Jekyll had mentioned. The book had entries for a series of dates which covered many years, but the entries had ceased nearly and year ago. Some remarks for a particular date repeaed themselves in several articles: ‘double’ occurred a coupled of times, and also the words, total failure!!!
I could not see a single clue with these several hundered articles in this book.
Here were a phial of some salt, and the record of a series of experiments that had led (like too many of Jekyll’s investigations) to no end of practical usefulness. Why did he want the presence of these articles in my house?
Why was my house the only place his messenger could go to? I figured out this case had crossed the levels of sanity, out of fear I loaded my gun for self defence and dismissed all my accomplices and servants.
At midhnight, the messenger knocked on the door. I reached for the door and saw a short man standing infront of me.
“Are you here from Dr. Jekyll’s?” I asked.
He told me “yes” by a constrained gesture; and when I had bidden him enter, he did not obey me without a searching backward glance into the darkness of the square. There was a policeman not far off, advancing with his bull’s eye open; and at the sight, I thought my visitor started and made greater haste.
These particulars struck me, I confess, disagreeably; and as I followed him into the bright light of the consulting room, I kept my hand ready on my weapon. Here, at last, I had a chance of clearly seeing him. I had never set eyes on him before, so much was certain. He was small, as I have said; I was struck besides with the shocking expression of his face, with his remarkable combination of great muscular activity and great apparent debility of constitution, and—last but not least—with the odd, subjective disturbance caused by his neighbourhood. This bore some resemblance to incipient rigour, and was accompanied by a marked sinking of the pulse. At the time, I set it down to some idiosyncratic, personal distaste, and merely wondered at the acuteness of the symptoms; but I have since had reason to believe the cause to lie much deeper in the nature of man, and to turn on some nobler hinge than the principle of hatred.
This person (who had thus, from the first moment of his entrance, struck in me what I can only, describe as a disgustful curiosity) was dressed in a fashion that would have made an ordinary person laughable; his clothes, that is to say, although they were of rich and sober fabric, were enormously too large for him in every measurement—the trousers hanging on his legs and rolled up to keep them from the ground, the waist of the coat below his haunches, and the collar sprawling wide upon his shoulders. Strange to relate, this ludicrous accoutrement was far from moving me to laughter. Rather, as there was something abnormal and misbegotten in the very essence of the creature that now faced me—something seizing, surprising and revolting— this fresh disparity seemed but to fit in with and to reinforce it; so that to my interest in the man’s nature and character, there was added a curiosity as to his origin, his life, his fortune and status in the world.
He looked very excited and a shocking expression covered his face.
“Do you have it with you?” he asked me restlessly.
“You can have a seat first. I would like to have the pleasure to get aquainted with you,” I said as I settled on my customary seat as an example and with as fair an imitation of my ordinary manner to a patient, as the lateness of the hour, the nature of my preoccupations, and the horror I had of my visitor, would suffer me to muster.
“Sir, I apologise for the lack of politeness in my impatient voice,” he returned, “but I am here on orders from you colleague, Dr. Jekyll, on an important business, and I am here for the drawer.”
Before he completed, I revealed the drawer to my visitor, “Here it is, sir.”
He grabbed it as soon as he saw it, and he behaved ghastly that striked a certain fear inside me.
“Put yourself together, sir,” I said.
He gave me a dull smile, and quicly uncovered the drawer. He took a huge sigh of relief as he saw the contents of the drawer. He then asked for a graduated glass from me.
When I gave him the glass, he added few minims of the red liquor in the phial and added one of the powders to it. The mixture, which was at first of a reddish hue, began, in proportion as the crystals melted, to brighten in colour, to effervesce audibly, and to throw off small fumes of vapour. The solution then turned dark purple in few seconds and further to greenish blue, setting out thick fumes and effervescense. My visitor, who had watched these metamorphoses with a keen eye, smiled, set down the glass upon the table, and then turned and looked upon me with an air of scrutiny.
“Now,” he said, “do you seek more answers? Do aspire to be wiser tonight? Or you would just allow me to take this glass and leave peacefully? I will do as you decide so think before you do so. You would either be left here as you were before, or you would witness something you have never witnessed before in your life!”
“Sir,” I replied calmly, “you will perhaps not wonder that I hear you with no very strong impression of belief; but now I do not wish to cease before I see the end to this.”
“Lanyon, do not forget your vows, for whatever follows shall never leave this room,” replied my visitor.
He emptied the contents of the glass in a single sip. He gave out a cry, a moan, he clenced his fists and the clutched at the table holding it tightly, his eyes infected; I stared him with horror; he started to grow taller; his facial features started to change. And after a few minutes I could not bear that sight any more and I covered my eyes to block that sight.
“O Lord!” I panted and screamed with horror, as to my utter amazement, there stood before my eyes, a pale and fainting, Henry Jekyll!
I could not reveal what he shared with me in the following hour. I saw something I could not believe once it was over; but it happened for real. I witnessed it with my own eyes. I have a limited nmber of days left, for that memory haunts me, leaves my sleepless nights in horror. My life is shaken to its roots; sleep has left me; the deadliest terror sits by me at all hours of the day and night; and I feel that my days are numbered, and that I must die; and yet I shall die incredulous. As for the moral turpitude that man unveiled to me, even with tears of penitence, I can not, even in memory, dwell on it without a start of horror. I want to say one thing to you, Utterson, Mr. Hyde, the person who is said to be the murderer of Carew is no one but Jekyll himself according to his oqn confession.
HASTIE LANYON
