The Story of Lanyon and Henry

She watches me every night, always ensuring that I go to bed before her. Is she trying to protect herself? Does she hope that, with her husband asleep, she will be safe from Hyde?

17 August 1893

I dream—

The boy is young. Thin. Clad in dirty rags.

I try to turn away, but I can't.

He is crying. Screaming.

I cry, too.

He stretches his arms across a man's body. Shielding it. Embracing it.

Blood seeps from the man's mouth. He is dying, perhaps already dead, but still the boy protects him.

The child wails as if his world had come to an end. I whisper to him to get up, to run.

To save himself.

I yell, scream, wave my hands. He doesn't hear me.

The Polo Player arrives on his horse. Gleaming. Beautiful.

As he gallops by the bloody tableau of broken boy and dying man, he leans down. With an elegant swoop of his sword, flying in an arc like an especially graceful off-side polo swing, he sends the ball flying down the field.

The Polo Player canters away. Good chukker, governor.

*

I have begun reviewing my laboratory journals from Cambridge and Bedford, hoping to retrace the steps I took to create the fiend. And, perhaps, to find some clue to halting his return.

In their pages, I am again confronted by the man I became in Afghanistan. On the battlefield, I saw acts of unimaginable heroism and unforgivable brutality committed by combatants on both sides. I learned that my childish faith in the wisdom of the church and the myth of English superiority were little more than comforting lies. All of us—English, Indian, Afghan, Russian—were hosts to both angels and demons, the potential for good and evil tangled within all of us.

I became a doctor to bring order to the world, but in Afghanistan, my virtuous dreams drifted apart like a puff of dust in a hurricane, churned into nothingness by the relentless grind of blood and bone. I was no herald of British civilization, no beacon of virtue. I was a tired, filthy seamstress, sewing together grim futures from tattered flesh.

And what of my dreams? What of the future I had hoped to sew together for myself?

I had always imagined that I would one day be a husband and father, a practicing doctor and a pillar of the community. But that future now seemed both too small and too vast for the thing that I had become. In the surgery, Jekyll the idealist—the man who loved humanity and saw his brothers as vessels of God—gave way to Jekyll the surgeon, whose unsympathetic eyes saw his patients as little more than tattered bags of meat that needed to be sliced and sewn into new configurations.

By the time I returned to England, I was Tiresias, cut off from the common thread of mankind by the horrors I had witnessed and committed. I could never rejoin the blind mass of humanity, never again fit into the path I had once laid for myself. It was time to abandon my old dreams and seek new ones.

If order and justice were to prevail, I realized, the very nature of mankind would need to change. We would need to untangle our angels and demons and tame each of them. I resolved to build a door—a sequestration—between these two sides of every man. A Jacob's Ladder that would allow man strength he needed to fight his way to heaven and the virtue necessary to face God eye-to-eye and demand satisfaction.

My theology was questionable, but my goal was clear: God or evolution had taken mankind to this point. I wanted to take it further, to give humanity the power to control its destiny. And If I had to conquer God to do it, let the battle commence.

Out of that simple idea, Edward Hyde was born.

20 August 1893

Hyde is stirring. I feel him just below the surface, staring out of my eyes and measuring my world.

I feel him waiting to be born again.

In the meantime, I scour my notes in search of an answer to the mystery of his resurgence—and, perhaps, a clue to how to defeat him.

When I returned to England after the war, I poured myself into my new quest with the same fervor that I had once brought to the classroom and the surgery. The first step, I determined, was to split the psyche, to sever the bonds linking the angel and the demon, so that either could be called forth at will. To this end, I dosed my subjects with mercury and cocaine, elements that would induce delirium and a sort of controlled madness. It was devastating for those men, but by fracturing the personality, I hoped to rearrange the remaining shards in configurations of my choosing.

Having effected the necessary psychic fracture, my next step was to force the body to evolve accordingly, rebuilding itself to fit the needs of its disparate masters. To this end, I utilized the body's natural tendency to adapt to new stimuli. A body in distress will seek a way to protect itself, so I determined that I would inflict pain, to force the body to align itself with its stronger, more aggressive nature. Conversely, to bring forth the more passive, gentle side of the psyche, I would induce comfort, and so convince the body that it no longer needed to be prepared for battle.

Reading over my notes, I cringe at the crudeness of my first efforts. Cocaine and mercury to break the psyche. Strychnine to induce pain, laudanum to bring comfort. Testing quantities and dosages. Murdering scores of laboratory rats before coming to the conclusion that whatever angels and demons determine the behavior of rodents, they are inscrutable to the minds of men. Experimenting on volunteers—including many destitute veterans of the war—before discovering that, even among humans, the balance between angel and demon might not always be equal.

Some men, in fact, seem to be born without an angel at all.

I do not fault Cambridge University for its decision to quietly expel me. In my frenzied exploration of the frontiers of man's psyche, I acceded far too much to the demands of my own demons and inflicted permanent harm on many of my test subjects. Some, I fear, will never again see the outside of a prison or asylum.

When I left Cambridge, I was adrift. No longer a doctor, no longer a lecturer, no longer employed, I had become a casualty of my own ambition. When Colonel Lanyon offered me a position at Bedford College, I jumped at the opportunity. I might not heal the world or transform man's nature, I thought, but in the classroom, I could do some small good. I could be useful.

1 September 1893

I dream. The eyes I see through are mine, yet not me.

I awaken to the night, and the city calls to me.

I feel its hunger. Its anger. Its passion.

I smell its need, bursting like an overripe fruit. Sticky sweet, aching to be consumed.

My sweet sparrow is the tastiest morsel. It has been far too long since I have fed.

She accompanies me through shadowed streets and darkened rooms where the sweet perfume of opium battles with the stench of unwashed bodies.

Her eyes are wide. Fearful. Hungry?

I don't own her yet. Not completely.

In a shadowy room, candlelight dances on the walls and her eyes flash anger at me. She pushes her way out. I follow. She is yelling. I grab her. She stiffens, then her lips meet mine and she melts.

Her resistance is crumbling. Soon she will be mine.

*

My eyes open and I enter the world thrashing. It's my bed, and Lanyon is asleep beside me.

My heart is pounding.

Hyde is back, and he is staking his claim.

*

Lanyon has taken to spending long hours in her conservatory on the third floor, ensconced among her plants and potions. I am reminded of the events of eight years ago; this time, however, it is Lanyon who is avoiding me.

Even so, we continue to occupy the same bedchamber. After finding the bites and bruises on her body, I determined that I needed to separate myself from her, in order to protect her from the fiend that resides within me. I attempted to move into one of the guest rooms, only to be met with furious anger. Facing the potential end of our union—and dodging the Wedgewood crockery that she hurled at my head—I acceded to her demands to remain in our bedchamber. But I am confounded: Why is she determined to occupy the same bed as me? Is she lonely? Guilty? Afraid to let me out of her sight after the sun sets?

*

At Bedford those many years ago, Lanyon was a balm to my injured soul. In her, I had the novel experience of conversing with my intellectual equal—like me, she dreamt of extending the limits of human potential, but her ambitions lay in transforming the body's ability to heal itself. She imagined herself a modern day Prometheus, giving mankind the power of the gods, making it the master of its own evolution.

In retrospect, it seems inevitable that our passionate discourse would inflame a more carnal excitement, but at the time, I was dismayed by my body's instinctual response to her. I attempted to convince myself that our bond was entirely intellectual, but I increasingly found myself captivated by the gentle nip of her waist as it flowed into her hips. Her pale rose complexion. Her scent. The way her grey eyes widened when she was surprised.

I, who had fashioned myself a sort of scientific monk, destined to a life of solitary exploration, now found myself craving the very thing I had forsworn—a shared life of passion in the arms of a beloved wife.

I was torn between the logical scientist seeking to exorcise the ghosts of the past and the feral degenerate who clamored to loose his passions upon Lanyon. The doctor held sway, but the chains I had constructed to hold my baser side in place—decorum, respectability, self-sacrifice, control—strained and pulled and began to weaken.

I found myself coveting her with a hunger that grew with every day. An addiction that neither alcohol nor intellectual analysis nor long hours in the laboratory could slake. As my hunger grew swollen and bloated, I knew that my resolve was destined to fail.

To protect Lanyon, I distanced myself from her. I lingered at the College late into the night; at Cavendish Square, I exiled myself to the laboratory. But absence only made my passions more acute. Deprived of the flesh-and-blood Lanyon, my imagination played tricks upon me. I imagined her weaknesses less significant, her virtues more pronounced. I found myself fantasizing futures that I knew were not meant to be.

In desperation, I latched upon a plan: What if I could find a way to loose the demon of my earthy desires, far from the vulnerable woman I had promised to protect? With my passions exhausted, I could return to our safe, Apollonian relationship, free from the inexorable pull of the beast that I felt whenever I looked at her.

I delved back into my research from Cambridge, but this time with a difference: My test subject was now going to be myself.

8 September 1893

My sweet sparrow surprised me!

When I awaken, she has already assumed the position: On her knees, hands clasped behind her back.

She hungrily consumes my sex. I smile, recalling her reticence of just a few months ago. A reticence long gone.

I believe she desires it even more than I. When I release in her gullet, she sucks harder, as if she would draw my very soul out through my root. I have to tug her hair to force her to disengage, and she laps up my leavings as if afraid to spill a drop.

She hides her hunger behind averted eyes, but I can smell it on her. Taste it on her flesh. She is musky with need.

Her resistance is the seasoning.

Head down, she follows me through the city. She sits where I tell her to sit, stands where I tell her to stand. Not a word is spoken as I knead her breasts through her gown in a crowded pub. Her cheeks flush, ashamed at being put on display. But her body betrays her and my nostrils twitch at her scent.

Her nipples are hard jewels. I squeeze them in my fingers.

Beneath the table, I find her swollen cunny. She bites her lip, trying to hide her excitement as I stroke her to a cataclysm. She cries out in sweet surrender.

My demands increase, yet still she resists me. When I press the issue, her eyes flash and I feel the point of a knife on my thigh. I clutch her arm harder and a spot of blood rises on my trousers. I release her.

Joy! Rapture! She is not yet broken. The game continues!

I seize her hair and lead her to the door. She cries and grimaces, and the smell of her arousal grows stronger. Outside, it is but a moment's work to force her to the wall of the alley. To hoist her skirt.

She clutches the wall. She is a swamp, her quim overflowing.

I plunge into her. Hard. She hisses. Moans.

I bite her neck. Mark her as mine.

She grunts as I ram my root into her. Pushes back. When I finally release, I feel her shudder. She spasms and clutches the wall harder.

She knows she is almost mine.

She knows this night is but the beginning of another assault.

She knows that this wall will also crumble.

*

When I awake, I still feel Hyde's elation, his joy at his ownership of her.

I feel my own despair as I grow even closer to losing Lanyon.

Am I going mad?

*

At Cambridge, I recorded every detail of my experiments, from the dosages I administered to the ravages that my subjects suffered. Every twinge and cramp, moan and scream went into my ledger. Yet, even with all this data, I was completely unprepared for the agony I felt when I began experimenting on myself.

I began by shattering my psyche. Night after night, I administered ever-increasing dosages of my minerals and compounds, clenching my teeth as the long-buried monsters of my past came to the fore. I had grown accustomed to nocturnal visits from the spectres of Afghanistan, but I now felt fresh terror at the phantoms that plagued me as I untangled the threads of the man I had become.

The human mind is designed to see the world through one set of eyes, to process it through a single set of morals. Yet as my soul broke into shards, I found the forces within me—the cool-minded doctor and the hot-tempered adventurer—sparring for control.

One night, the doctor stepped aside.

Shoulders weighted by a lifetime of rules and religion shrugged, transforming into a body lightened by a total absence of moral strictures. Eyes that measured every decision, calculated its moral cost and reward, squared off against eyes that saw life as a lighthearted stroll through a garden of pleasures.

After splitting the doctor from the bohemian, my next step was forcing my body to variously align itself with each of these forces. And that was where my physical pain began.

The poisons were precisely chosen and carefully measured, designed to inflict the greatest amount of torture without causing permanent injury. Intellectually, I knew what I was going to experience—I'd seen my test subjects suffering. Heard their screams. I thought myself prepared.

I was foolish.

It felt like every organ of my body was simultaneously stretching and tearing. My muscles pulled in on themselves and my stomach tightened until I thought it would burst.

I was clasped in the flaming grip of a demon. I panted out shallow breaths as my skin burned.

It was a moment.

It was a lifetime.

My muscles strained as if they would tear themselves from my bones.

When pain is too great, the mind will shut down, forcing the body into unconsciousness to protect itself. But my mind refused to grant me release. I felt a beast awaken within, felt him eat the pain and grow stronger. Stretch himself within my brain until it seemed that he would burst forth from my eye sockets. I clasped my hands to my head, desperately trying to keep it from exploding. I gasped, feeling my lungs crushed as if by an alien hand.

I screamed, my throat tearing with the wail of an infant, born anew.

I cried, searing acid tears pushing forth between my fingers.

It was a moment.

It

was

a

lifetime!

And, finally, it was over.

When my eyes opened, it was as if I was seeing the world for the first time. My vision was crisp, singular. I felt easy. Smooth.

Oddly, I was reminded of Afghanistan. Of the clarity of the surgery.

I was divorced from the weight of dusty morals and antiquated rules and admonitions; I understood how the world worked.

I hiccupped a laugh and felt the glee burst forth from my lips.

I was light.

I was air.

I was myself, yet I was also another.

I laughed again and our giggle became a victorious crow. I bounded to my feet, delighted at our strength. If I leapt, we could have touched the moon.

Our heart thundered. Strong and passionate, pumping rich blood and desire through our body. Distantly, the Jekyll part of me wondered if our heart was spurred to greater strength by a need to overcome the poisons within our body. The other me felt that thought and laughed, reveling in the sensation and caring not where it came from. All he knew was that he had a strong heart. A beast's heart. A heart hungry enough to eat all the world.

Our nose twitched at the smells pouring in through the open window. All the filthy, ripe, living flesh of London, begging to be tasted. Dressing himself in our coat and hat, he made his way to the door and out into the hungry night. The Jekyll part of us closed his eyes and faded into something like unconsciousness.

*

When I awakened, I was alone in my head and once again in command of my body. My memories of the prior night were vague and scattered. Images of drinking halls and opium dens. Vague impressions of deepest pleasure, of unimaginable lightness.

I recalled the expressions of distaste my alter ego encountered on the faces of our fellow travelers of the night. It seemed there was something instinctually repugnant about him, and so he found himself relegated to the lowest classes of drinking establishments, where there were men and women whose consumption of whiskey and opium dulled the repulsion that they might have experienced at his dissolute form. Together with his new companions, the changeling who had seized my body feasted on the dankest delights that the city had to offer.

I had occasionally imagined a life of unrestrained lust, but the moral strictures of my childhood stipulated that such joys were forbidden; such impulses were to be met with stoic refusal.

My alter ego had no such compunctions.

Over the following days, I would awaken with hazy memories of frenzied, violent couplings with companions who charged little more than a pennyful of whiskey. Once, when my doppleganger flipped up one of their dresses, he discovered that his companion was not equipped with the traditional female equipment, but rather sported the appurtenance of a male. Without hesitation, he entered her nether aperture for a brutal joining that—by her oaths and moans—appeared to be enjoyed by all.

But sex was far from my second self's only pleasure; he seemed to revel in every sensation, delight in each experience as if it was his first. In the society he sought out, passions ran high and restraints were few. A glance at the wrong maiden—or the wrong young swain—could quickly lead to the exchange of harsh words, followed by blows. My double often found himself exchanging fists, a pastime that rivaled fornication in his pantheon of delights. Some assailants later became his boon companions. Others, I think, found their way into the Thames, never to return. The memories are vague...

*