Chapter 3: Angels and Demons

Excerpts from the journal of Henry Jekyll

29 July 1893

Last night, the dreams returned:

When I awake, the images are still playing in my mind. For a moment, I do not know where I am.

I recognize my bed. My wife, asleep beside me. I scrabble for my journal. Flipping through pages of neat, even notes, I find his now-familiar scrawl:

It’s not a dream. Not a nightmare.

It has been seven years since I last encountered Edward Hyde. I thought he was gone forever, conquered by Lanyon and I. Exorcised by the inexorable power of love and science.

I’ve since learned that love and science—those forces in which I placed so much faith—are bound to fail, to fly apart in the stark light of day. For here he is, returned to the world of the living. Writing in my journal. Attacking my wife.

2 August 1893

I dream:

The Polo Player returned last night. That, at least, is familiar: While he might occasionally take a sabbatical to ride through some other man’s nightmares, he always comes back to me, like a bad penny or a blood red moon, to remind me of my greatest aspiration. My greatest failure.

I arrived in Afghanistan in 1878, fresh from medical school, with the formalin stench of the dissection theater still clinging to my coat. Wrapped in a blanket of youthful idealism, I had turned my back on the seedy politics of the hospital and the blustering prestige of the university, choosing instead to dedicate my art and skill to nothing less than the advancement of mankind.

To my starry young eyes, the outbreak of hostilities in Afghanistan promised a shining opportunity for a grand crusade. What better way, I imagined, to carry the torch of civilization than by seeing to the needs of her Majesty’s soldiers as they fought the depredations and perversion of the Emir of Afghanistan? Instead of an angel’s flaming sword, I would wield my scalpels and saws, anaesthetics and cauterizing irons. I would show the infidel the carrot of civilization, even as Britannia’s armies dispensed a stick to punish their barbarism.

What dreams I had! What hubris!

My first battle was Charasiab. I prepared my field hospital with the zeal of a true believer, stocking it with gleaming rows of white rolled bandages and polished instruments. The stretchers were assembled and waiting to be deployed, the cauterizing irons cleaned and ready to be heated. When time permitted, I watched the battle in the distance, eager to play my part in the grand drama.

At first, it was an orderly affair: General Roberts’ Kabul Field Force was arranged in precise ranks. With boots polished, rifles gleaming, and bayonets set, the soldiers’ stony faces proudly awaited the arrival of the adversary.

Within an hour, the field was bedlam.

Roberts’ forces attacked the Afghans from both flanks. A peculiar rattling gunfire—which I later learned was Gatling guns—decimated the enemy’s ranks. But soon the Afghans moved too close for the guns, and infantrymen from both sides engaged in close quarters, trading blows and kicks, bayonet strikes and saber slashes. Soldiers in English red coats clubbed their opponents with rifles, like prehistoric troglodytes squabbling over some scrap of meat. Everywhere I looked, there was stabbing, gouging, rolling in the dirt. Gleaming uniforms reduced to dust-covered rags. Men reduced to monsters.

Then the Polo Player came.

Watching him wade into the melee on horseback, my breath caught. Red coat aflame in the sunlight. Gold buttons gleaming. Man and beast fused in matchless, fluid form. Astride his steed, pith helmet in place, he appeared almost a vision, the platonic ideal of the English soldier.

He raised his saber like a polo mallet, swooping it down in a perfect off-side swing. And the ball flew down the field.

I stood for a moment, stock still. Then I vomited.

According to official reports, casualties were light at Charasiab, but in the surgery the difference between light and heavy casualties was academic. My boots slid across the blood-soaked floor as I rushed from table to table, extracting bullets, suturing wounds, clamping vessels, sawing bones. Later—after Maiwand and Kandahar—I realized just how easy was my entry into this brave new world. But that day, I imagined myself born again in a wave of blood and foeces, tattered flesh and shredded bandages.

My soul recoiled at the blood and screams of the surgery, but something within me thrived there. A cool, pragmatic force took charge—efficient, skilled, and lacking in any measure of empathy.

We say “I shall never do this,” or “I couldn’t do that.” But then one finds oneself sawing through the femur of a screaming man, or choosing one soldier to live and another to die. And you realize that you can do things you never imagined possible, make choices that you hoped you would never have to make.

And then it becomes easier.

I’d had glimpses of this side of myself before. In medical school, I was routinely required to demonstrate my nascent surgical skills upon cadavers. Most of our subjects were of advanced age or had lived hard lives, and it was easy to ignore the divine hand that had crafted these bodies. But one day, I removed the shroud on my table to reveal the body of a comely young lass, rather than the world-worn and shriveled former horseman whose cadaver I had faced the day before.

I had been proud of the surgical detachment that I displayed in the operating theater, the jaded eye that ignored bodies and saw only wounds and diseases, organs and bones. But now it was gone.

My breath caught.

My anatomy professor, Archibald Bell, was standing at my side. “Young women, aged approximately 20 years. Death by strangulation,” he stated, as if he was reciting the day’s specials at the tavern across the street.

My eyes traveled the length and breadth of her body. Her young breasts, firm and pale. Her smooth flesh. Her colorless lips.

“Well, get to it, lad,” Bell ordered.

My blade hovered above her sternum. I took a breath and closed my eyes. In the darkness, I felt something shift; when my eyes opened, I was no longer gazing at some paragon of God’s divine artistry, but rather a body, nothing more. I made the first incision and began my autopsy.

In Afghanistan, that detachment seized hold of me for ever-increasing periods, a process about which I felt a certain ambivalence. The rank and file, however, didn’t share my concern. Where I saw myself becoming something less than a man, they grew increasingly convinced that I was some sort of angel of mercy—a position that was reinforced during Maiwand, when I worked for three days without respite, burying my doubts and confusion in the bloody, sticky work of the surgery as the cold, efficient butcher within me took charge.

But could an angel of mercy close his ears to the screams of the wounded as he sawed through their bones or held cauterizing irons to their oozing flesh? Could an angel ignore the entreaties that he give just one more dose of morphine? Could an angel walk blithely past the limbs stacked outside the hospital? The corpses piled like cordwood?

How many times did I save a young man, only to deliver him to a future that was brutally diminished? No, if I was an angel, I was an angel of death. If I was a doctor, I was an obstetrician, attending the birth of new lives that would be measured in shortened horizons and dashed dreams.

If I was a man, I was half a man, no longer capable of human emotions.

9 August 1893

Hyde is hiding.

It has been 11 days since last he haunted my dreams. Has he gone away, or is he just biding his time?

Last night, Collins visited me in my sleep.

He was an infantryman who lost his legs at the siege of the Sherpur Cantonment. He begged me for death; when I refused, he tried to remove the stitches I had sewn into his stumps. Three times, I thwarted him, until I was forced to tie his arms to his bed to forestall further attempts at sabotage. Exhausted, he finally gave in, allowing his body to begin the laborious process of healing as he quietly sobbed for his mother.

Two days later, he appeared to have regained his senses. While somewhat apathetic toward his circumstances, he seemed lucid, and was even willing to discuss his future after his return to Britain. Convinced that he had resigned himself to his convalescence, I released his bindings and let him regain the use of his hands. That afternoon, I found him in his hospital bed, his skin gray. His arms dangled from the table, laid open by the scalpel that had fallen to the floor after he used it.

Exhausted and numb, I closed my mind to the horror as I retrieved the scalpel from the pool of blood and cleaned it.

The religion of my youth tells me that Collins was a suicide, forever denied entry to the gates of heaven. What punishment must then accrue to me, the man who forced that decision upon him? Was I an angel for Collins?

14 August 1893

Hyde has left no further missives in my journal. I am thankful for the silence, but also suspicious. I imagine him lying in wait, anticipating my next move. I feel his eyes upon me.

Lanyon continues to distance herself from me. I can only imagine the horror she faces, the confusion and hopelessness as she is torn between her dedication to our marriage and her fear of Hyde’s assaults upon her body. How betrayed she must feel! How terrorized by the fiend in my flesh who relentlessly torments her.

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—

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.

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

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

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.