The Gentleman Doctor

Disclaimer: The League of Extraordinary Gentleman and all characters herein are property of their creators and used without permission.

THE GENTLEMAN DOCTOR
By DragonWolf

Chapter IV
Hyde

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He pored over everything he could find on the psychology of good versus evil, searching for some way that they could be affected and changed. Anything that was made of parts, he concluded, could somehow conceivably be separated. He only needed to discover how. He even began to speak of his research with his colleague and old friend, Dr. Hastie Lanyon. Once, Damon and Pythias themselves could have been no closer than Henry Jekyll and Hastie Lanyon. Like Utterson, he and Henry’s friendship went back to their days as young schoolboys, and it had endured into adulthood. It was with him that Jekyll confided his speculation that the two halves of human nature could be somehow split.

But this concept, he found, was far too radical and unorthodox for Lanyon. The other doctor could not suffer such ideas, ideas that dared to venture outside the narrow, limited worldview the doctor had made for himself. He dismissed them as fancy, called them “unscientific balderdash.” The two men grew apart, and Lanyon never came out and said it, but Jekyll soon saw that the doctor thought he was mad.

Jekyll could not bear to further alienate his friend, and so refrained from sharing any more of his experimentation. But no amount of disparagement could turn him from that line of inquiry. The thought obsessed him, the hope that there might be a way that he could draw the evil from him and expel it.

He sought it desperately; all mind and soul were bent on it. He all but lived in the dark of his laboratory. A man less brilliant, and less desperate than he, could never have endured it. He spent months upon months among his chemicals and notebooks, until finally, at long last, he had it. He had found it, he was sure of it; all his research and experiments supported his conclusion. He had at last discovered the formula that could separate man’s good from evil.

All that remained was to test it. The thought gripped him with dread, for he had no subject but himself. Despite his confidence in what he had found, he knew he was putting his life at great risk. He stared at in torturous indecision, fear and hope warring within him. But his heart twisted to think he could be so close to salvation and yet did not dare to take it. This could be his savior from that inexorable darkness. At last, at last, he might be free.

It took every ounce of courage he could summon, but Jekyll drank.

The chemicals burned smartly as they went down, and almost instantaneously brought great pain with it. There were other sensations as well, ones of stirring, shifting, twisting. This went on for what felt like hours, until at last the tremors ceased.

The pain was completely gone now. Everything seemed somehow strange. Firstly he noticed his clothing had become too big for him. Though he was standing, he seemed to be considerably closer to the ground. Strangest of all, he felt different; younger, freer, somehow lighter, unburdened by care of any kind. No more were the demons of his repressions hounding him within.

He could not see himself them, because he had not yet brought the full-length mirror into his laboratory. His shape was now no longer the tall, well-formed, and mild-featured one of Henry Jekyll. He was smaller and rougher now, almost troglodytic, bristling with coarse hair. There was some air of deformity to him, not a physical one, but some dark suggestions that people would spot at once. His nature had been separated all right; his dark side had been torn out and given a form of its own. His potion had worked.

He gave the creature a name, for he was the part of Jekyll’s nature that had before been hidden.

Edward Hyde.

With Hyde, such freedom as Jekyll had never known in his life was opened up to him. Every sin Jekyll could not commit without wrenching pangs of guilt, Hyde did with a shameless vigor. His were such debaucheries as would scar the soul of any decent gentleman, and yet he only delighted in them. What Hyde wished to do, he did, what he wanted, he took, free from any compunction. And in the distant part of his mind that was still Henry Jekyll, he exulted in it.

People withdrew instinctively from Hyde's presence, as if sensing there was something gravely wrong with him. But what cared Hyde? He needed no one and feared no one’s judgment. He drank till he was senseless or maddened, he fought with the violence of an arctic storm, he fell on the harlots with such fire as though they were every woman Jekyll had ever wanted and dared not seek.

There was no need to dissociate his deeds from the name of Henry Jekyll, for in the form of Edward Hyde, he was not Henry Jekyll. There were even no more physical debilitations to endure— as soon as he reverted to his true self, he was as whole and healthful as ever. Indeed, Jekyll was now in better condition than he had been in a long time. He had suffered from various lasting ill turns; old injuries, lingering chemical effects, even the intermittent symptoms of syphilis. The first time he had changed back into Jekyll, these complaints vanished entirely.

And so Hyde became one more secret vice for him, one more dishonorable indulgence from which he could not turn away. He still had those base urges, those desires to do terrible things, but a spell as Hyde sated that need. More than that, though, it gave him a different feeling than he had never experienced in his life. He had a… a presence as Hyde, a stronger bearing than he’d ever had as Jekyll.

As Hyde, he was no longer marginalized. He was no longer ignored. For the first time in his life, he felt like something more than an overlooked shadow.

He should have known it was not to last.

The knowledge of what had truly happened soon began to wear on him. True, his potion had worked, but it had not done what he had wished it to do. His aim had been to purge the evil from his heart, not give it a form of its own. His urges were still there— indeed, they were made shaped and solid in Hyde. This, though, was not what truly began to unsettle him.

What terrified him was that Hyde was growing.

Upon his conception, Edward had been a smaller, younger man than he. The doctor speculated that was because Hyde represented the evil in him, which was less developed and less dominant than his good. But now, gone was that short, dark figure with some indefinable suggestion of deformity— devoid of goodness, yet still with something of civilized man in him. Now he was a towering colossus of bestial, uncontrollable evil. With each transformation, Edward was growing greater and stronger, becoming less and less human, and more and more a monster. And with it, his deeds were growing worse. He fed off the city’s great suffering, just as he fed off Jekyll’s. His crudity increased to match his beastliness, and Jekyll came to hate his monstrous alter ego— almost as deeply as he hated himself.

Jekyll took again to hiding in his laboratory to think in solitude; refuge it was, perhaps the one place in the world he truly felt he belonged. He took up his cello and absently began to play; it was Claude Debussy’s Sonata. He himself preferred the likes of Mozart and Brahms, but he found Debussy somehow quieted the inner raging of Hyde. He needed quiet to deal with his thoughts.

He understood now, better than ever, what great malevolence he had unleashed. His discovery of Hyde did not save him but damned him further. There was no excess Edward Hyde could not withstand; his evil knew no bounds. He was a twisted perversion of even Jekyll’s darkest desires. He had only freed the beast from the restraints of his conscience, not his conscience from the torment of the beast.

He thought he was removing the sin from the life of Henry Jekyll, but he had not split his natures into the wrong and the right. Yes, Hyde was unadulterated evil, but Jekyll remained the tortured mix. At any rate, Henry’s dissolutions were ones of weakness— the attempt to combat the feeling of being marginalized and overlooked all his life. It was only weakness, a thing that was entirely human. There was no humanity in Hyde. His crimes were solely of malice, the willful desire to cause suffering. He was a rapist and a murderer, the cruelest, most bestial of all sinners. The creature was pure evil, and that was the only purity he had.

There was a mirror he had moved into his laboratory, one he had once used to observe his transformations into Hyde. He turned to it now to regard himself, the self that was Henry Jekyll. The face that had once perhaps been handsome was worn and drawn. His skin, always fair, had become pale as a ghost. His eyes had been haunted before, but now they were dark and shadowed with pain. Edward’s presence was wearing on him, and the strain clearly showed.

He vowed to keep Hyde forever within him from that moment forth, to never let his evil see the light of day again.

But the monster’s insidiousness could not be undone.

The raging within him became too great. Henry could bear it no longer. He opened the leather box in which he stored the vials of his formula. With every transformation, the agony increased, along with the monstrousness of Hyde.

He barreled out into the city on a mindless path of destruction. The tatters of what had been a fine suit still hung about his colossal frame— a pathetic veneer of humanity on a wild beast. Before long he had left the back ways and shadowed alleys where his evil had heretofore always lurked. Now he was out in the main blocks of London. It was there that he saw the figure hurrying along the street. He had the air of a kindhearted, well-mannered elderly gentleman. He seemed to be seeking directions.

The man looked up, and up, at him and froze in shock. He towered over the old man like a giant. To think that when it all began, Jekyll had been taller than Hyde.

He carried with him then Jekyll’s heavy brass-fitted walking stick. He lashed out with it like a club.

The kindhearted, well-mannered elderly gentleman was dead by the first stroke. Hyde, in his brutality, kept on striking him. The thick wood of the pace stick cracked in half.

It wasn’t until the newsboy had come with the paper the next morning that Jekyll saw the enormity of what he’d done. A serving maid had been witness to the crime, had seen it all from a window and reported it to the police. She spoke of the murderer as so bestial as to be a monster rather than a man. Gabriel Utterson had identified the victim as a client of his, a gentleman by the name of Sir Danvers Carew.

Jekyll stared at the headline in horror. He knew that name. Hyde had murdered a Member of Parliament.

It was hardly the first time Edward had committed such a horror, but never before the eyes of all the city. His other great crimes had been in the shadows, deep in the underworld of London where cruelty and depravity were a matter of course. No one had seen him there, no one knew what he had done. Now all of London knew, and was up in arms to hunt down the beast.

The terror of it all gripped Jekyll like a vice. They were hunting Hyde now, and therefore hunting him. They would seek him out and destroy him, destroy them both for whether in exposure or punishment for their crimes, Jekyll would be finished. No matter how Hyde would rage and roar, to let him out would be to sign both their death warrants. The doctor’s heart thundered in his chest, his blood racing in his veins. He happened to glance in the direction of the delicate antique looking-glass, one that once belonged to his mother, hanging beside the fireplace.

He was himself, and yet the face that stared back at him was not Henry Jekyll’s.

It was Edward Hyde’s.

~~~

To be continued...