The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Dr Jekyll & Mr Holmes (25 page)

Holmes nodded. ‘He is quite right, Watson. And even then, should he be fortunate enough, against all the laws of nature, to stumble upon the key to the mystery, the odds against his duplicating the exact ratio of the impurity to the base required to accomplish the desired effect are astronomical. One in twenty trillion would not seem too farfetched an equation. I am something of a dabbler in the chemical art myself, Dr. Jekyll,’ he added modestly.

I smote my forehead. ‘By thunder, that’s right! I’d completely forgotten! Holmes! You’re a chemist; where one man’s knowledge has failed, another’s may succeed. What say you, Doctor? Will you consent to have Sherlock Holmes examine the impurity?’

Again he shuddered. ‘I had one remaining dose of the original powder; I consumed that just now. That is what I meant when I said that soon Jekyll will cease to be. Even now I fancy that I can hear Hyde’s unearthly laughter echoing inside my skull. His triumph will be the end of us both.’

Even as he spoke, I imagined that I saw traces in Jekyll’s features of that ghastly pallor which we had observed just before the termination of our last interview. I rose. I wanted to be gone before that transformation took place.

Holmes remained rooted before the fire. He studied our host with an air of clinical interest, as if he were a specimen on a card. ‘One more mystery stands in need of a solution,’ said he. ‘Two months ago Hyde revealed himself in broad daylight near Lanyon’s house. I know for a fact that he ventured out as Jekyll. Why did you take that risk?’

The scientist nodded. ‘So it was you who pursued Hyde that day. He suspected as much, though he hardly recognized you.’ He shrugged wearily. ‘It was the madness of despair. I was obsessed suddenly with the notion that with Lanyon’s brilliant assistance I might yet find some way to duplicate the original powder. The transformation
en route
brought me, or rather Hyde, to his senses and the rash hope was abandoned. The murderer’s reappearance on Lanyon’s doorstep might have prompted him to summon the police. He instructed the driver to return him to Jekyll’s house, or rather round the corner from it, where he might gain entrance without the servants’ seeing him. The conclusion came too late; by then Hyde had already been spotted.’ He paused, then looked up with interest at my companion. ‘What is it that has brought you here on this fateful day? Can it possibly be that in so short a space you were able to find the same truth which took me a lifetime?’

Holmes waved aside the question. ‘A mere instinct. Something which I read earlier today came back to me over my violin. That, and something I witnessed this afternoon and failed to recognise for the final act of desperation that it was.’

A silence ensued which was as long and as heavy as that pall which settles over a room in which a corpse lies in state, seconds after the last mourner has filed out. Somewhere in the distance a clock ticked out Henry Jekyll’s last moments in measured, emotionless beats.

Something akin to sympathy glimmered in the detective’s normally cold eyes. ‘What are your plans?’

‘There is a phial of curare on the work-table. Jekyll has not the courage to use it; Hyde has not the will. I pray that he will choose it over the rope, which will certainly be his fate once he has been apprehended. There is no other direction in which he can flee.’

Holmes shook his head disapprovingly. ‘Hyde will never commit suicide. His wicked self-love would demand that he find some other way to cheat the gallows.’

‘Then there is but one alternative.’

As we watched, Jekyll pushed himself up and out of his chair and took up a poker from its place beside the fire. With it balanced in one hand he started towards the detective.

‘What are you doing?’ Holmes demanded. He fingered the revolver in his pocket.

‘What a man who lacks both the will to live and the courage to die must do,’ said the doctor, advancing with ponderous steps.

‘Don’t be a fool, Jekyll!’ My companion retreated a step, exposing his weapon.

I raised my own. ‘Look out, Holmes!’ I cried. ‘He’s gone mad!’

Jekyll laughed then, a low, mirthless chuckle that convinced me that his mind had indeed become unsettled by his awful personal tragedy. ‘No, Doctor,’ said he, without slowing or taking his eyes from his intended victim. ‘I really believe that I am thinking clearly for the first time in many, many months.’

Holmes had his back against the door now and could go no farther. Jekyll raised the poker high over his head and braced himself for the downswing. As he did so, his powerful frame, like a wax statuette placed too near an open hearth, seemed to shrivel until it resembled nothing other than Hyde’s shrunken configuration. Holmes fired point-blank into his mid-section, once, twice.

For what seemed an eternity, his assailant stood as if paralysed, the rod poised over his head to deliver the fatal blow. I held my revolver steady and prepared to fire. Then Jekyll — Hyde, now — swayed and toppled, releasing the poker so that it fell with a clang to the floor. In the next instant he was sprawled on top of it. He shuddered and lay still.

I rushed forward and felt for a pulse. After a moment I looked up at my friend, who remained standing with his back to the door and the firearm smoking in his hand, and shook my head gravely.

‘May God have mercy on his soul,’ murmured Holmes.

There was a frantic knocking at the door.

‘Jekyll!’ It was Utterson’s voice, taut with alarm. The doorknob rattled. ‘Great Scott, Jekyll, if you’re all right speak up! Down with the door, Poole!’

The door bucked in its frame as if a shoulder had slammed into it. Holmes was galvanized into action.

‘Get over here, Watson!’ he barked. ‘Quickly! Hold the door!’

Putting up my pistol, I performed as bidden. I had no sooner placed my own shoulder against the door than my friend left it and dashed to Jekyll’s worktable, which was heaped high with papers bearing notes and chemical symbols written in a close hand. He glanced at them briefly, then gathered them up in his arms and dumped them into a steel basin at his elbow. He then snatched up a bottle labeled ‘Alcohol,’ unstopped it, sniffed it to verify the contents, and upended it over the papers, soaking them thoroughly.

‘Hurry, Holmes!’ said I. A third party had joined Utterson and Poole on the other side of the door, and holding it against their combined efforts was taxing both my strength and the lock.

The detective stood back, struck a match, and tossed it into the bowl. Immediately the papers were engulfed in a sheet of flame that reached almost to the ceiling.

‘And with Jekyll’s notes go the chances of anyone ever repeating his diabolical experiments,’ said he, watching the conflagration as it consumed the hopes and dreams of that misguided unfortunate, Henry Jekyll. ‘You may come away from the door now, Watson.’

His final words were all but drowned out as the heavy door splintered beneath the blow of an axe.

A
DVICE
F
OR
M
R
. S
TEVENSON

O
ne day towards the close of spring I returned to Baker Street after a morning spent over the billiard table at my club to find Sherlock Holmes deep in conversation with a man whose features I could not see, seated as he was with his back to the door. Excusing myself, I was backing out to leave them in peace when Holmes hailed me and waved me back inside.

‘You might wish to meet our visitor, Watson,’ said he, rising. ‘As fellow writers, you have much in common. Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, allow me to present Dr. Watson.’

I gazed with interest at the man who rose and turned to face me, extending his hand. I would have placed his age at forty, but in fact he was several years younger. Slight of build, he wore his black hair long and parted to one side and sported a drooping moustache which concealed the corners of pallid lips. His eyes were deep-set and melancholy, his face gaunt as that of my fellow-lodger and nearly as pale. He seemed sickly, and though his grip was firm I received the impression that he was not naturally robust. The black frockcoat he wore served only to heighten the funereal effect of his appearance.

‘You are familiar with the name of Stevenson,’ said Holmes with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. ‘He is the man who penned that story from which you enthusiastically read extracts for my benefit some months ago, the one about pirates and pieces of eight.’

‘Treasure Island!’
I cried, and fell to pumping our astonished visitor’s hand until his sallow cheeks flushed with embarrassment. ‘Robert Louis Stevenson, of course! My congratulations upon a fine example of storytelling. When Jim Hawkins encounters Ben Gunn —’

‘Enough, Watson, enough!’ chuckled Holmes. ‘It’s plain that you are causing our guest discomfort. He has come not to talk of past triumphs but to lay the groundwork for his next literary effort. I have been filling him in upon the details of our recent adventure with the late Henry Jekyll and his unlamented companion, Edward Hyde.’

‘That is correct,’ said our visitor, in whose cultured speech I thought that I detected a trace of an American accent. He indicated a notebook lying open upon the arm of the chair in which he had seen sitting, its pages filled with closely-written script. ‘After substantial argument I have persuaded Mr. Holmes to provide me with a fairly complete account of the affair. I hope to publish it in the form of a case history after I have spoken with one or two of the other principals involved.’

I looked at Holmes in reproach. He shrugged.

‘My dear fellow, do not be disheartened. I have betrayed no trust which has not already been betrayed. Too many at Whitehall were privy to the secret. It was bound to be leaked by someone sooner or later. I have been unable to convince Mr. Stevenson that he knew quite as much about the affair as I did when he arrived.’

‘Concerning the facts, yes.’ agreed the other. ‘But the personal slant was missing. Mr. Holmes has been gracious enough to supply that essential ingredient. I have nearly enough now to begin writing.’

‘A most bizarre episode,’ I commented, repressing a shudder at the memory of recent events. The newspapers had only just ceased carrying eulogies for the departed Henry Jekyll, who was interred late in March following a simple service over his closed casket. At the time, it was said, pallbearers had commented upon the surprising lightness of the receptacle as they were carrying it down the steps of the church.

‘I quite agree. Mr. Holmes’s version of the story proved most enlightening. He is a remarkable man. Do you know that he divined without my telling him that I had spent a great deal of time in the American West, particularly round San Francisco? Something about my speech. I think that I shall have no difficulty making him the hero of my account.’

Holmes held up a hand. ‘I am afraid that I cannot allow you to do that, Mr. Stevenson. No, no — hear me out. There is a serious possibility that the law, particularly a certain Scotland Yard Inspector of my acquaintance, will accuse me of withholding evidence if my name is allowed to appear in any active capacity. There is also the little matter of my having killed a man, and self-defence or no, I am far too busy at the moment to waste my time engaging in idle banter with some barrister at the Assizes. Newcomen was angry enough when I did not make good on my promise to provide him with a solution by the end of March; I would rather not rub salt into wounds which are still raw. I have your own reputation in mind as well, for any mention of Dr. Watson or myself would automatically establish yours as an account of an actual event, and I have already decided that no-one is going to believe you. You would spare yourself much pain if you published it as fiction and left us out of it. The tale is entertaining enough to assure you a permanent place in literature, but as a documentary it rings much too fancifully and could expose you to ridicule. I commend to you, sir, the writing of a thriller which will captivate the world, but to let what is past remain in the past. You would be doing both the world and yourself a very great favour.’

Throughout this monologue, Stevenson’s expression changed from one of bewilderment to protest, from protest to dismay, and finally as the validity of Sherlock Holmes’s argument became clear, to grudging acquiescence.

‘But how shall I go about it?’ he demanded. ‘I can alter the facts to say that Jekyll fulfilled his intention to poison himself, but that is only one problem among many. What shall I tell my readers when they ask me where I got my inspiration?’

The detective smiled, and again the mischievous light danced in his grey eyes. ‘You are the writer; use your imagination. Tell them you dreamt it.’

Robert Louis Stevenson forgot himself so far as to smile at this pleasantry, but it was evident by the thoughtful look upon his face that his imaginative brain was already at work. And when, some months later, his account swept the reading public by storm and it came time to explain to a curious world where he obtained such an intriguing idea, I was not very much surprised to learn that he had not forgotten the advice which Sherlock Holmes had given him.