Hammer Horror: Jekyll's Inferno

by Elphinstone Dalrymple

Trawl through the muck that is Victorian London and meet Dr. Jekyll, scientist and drug abuser, and his satyromaniacal and homicidal alter ego, Edward Hyde!

JEKYLL'S INFERNO

By

Chattery Grymsteed

Based on the screenplay of the classic Hammer Film 'The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll'

© 1960 Hammer Film Productions Limited

'On one side of him was beautiful; but on the other side was rotten, maggots were dropping to the ground.'

Joseph Campbell.

Chapter 1

Rat Sack

'Reserve within thy kingdom

A 'Mansion' for the Rat!'

Emily Dickinson

There is no horror more profound than that of the unspeakable, so gather in close on our tour, don't be shy, and feast your eyes, glut your soul, and be entertained by some revolting, cold-blooded cruelty, and if you can't abide the sight of blood, turn away! I want you to look over there, across the street. That is where our little adventure begins. 'A theatre!' Yes indeed, a theatre. That is the Alhambra, the most beautiful of all such palaces dedicated to the performing arts, the finest as this magnificent city of ours should offer. Marvel at its splendid interiors, all styled in white breccia marble, with blue granite and chiselled pear wood. How can you not but admire the luxury and the spectacle of the dreams that it promises? How can you not but adore the heavenly singing that cascades sweet and harmonious from its stage, or be awed by the saltatory giddiness of Terpsichore? Such dreams you say are a folly reserved for the rich, but I plead that you do not dismiss our starting point so readily. You have seen one hundred theatres if you have seen one, you declare, so what is special about this particular odium? Yet I can promise you, on this night, within the Alhambra, are to be had some terrible thrills. Even the angels in the high vault empyrean, with the herald of their tears, must all aver that the lovely Christine Charles, the pretty chorus girl, singing the lead in Lord Ambrose D'Arcy's new opera 'The Tragedy of Joan of Arc', was nothing short of magnificent. If I dare say so myself, never have I heard the voice of Seraphim rung as clearly or as dulcet as I did tonight when I heard the notes glorious flow from her sweet lips. Such glorious music! My ears are still filled with the melody of Joan's Aria.

'In the sound of rain

As a storm wept its dying

In darkest night

In broadest day

I have the strength

All dark has passed

I have no fear

To come at last

I hear your voice...'

The deuce, you complain! You did not come on this excursion to digest notes on an opera about the burning of a heretic! You want adventure, and you want romance, you want thrills! Well, so be it, and as your guide for the evening tour I am obliged to fulfill our contract. If opera is not to your taste then perhaps sensation might be! Without further ado let us then proceed not to the Alhambra's deserted entrance, or linger by the now empty stage, but instead let us go towards the lane that runs beside the theatre. Let us step into the shadows, and see, down there, in the glimmering gaslight, look…! Yes, you see those four char women who emerge flapping through the doorway like battered geese? What has happened? They are screaming and squawking and waving their arms about, and with faces as grey as ash, their howling mouths are red as fire, shrieking for Jesus to save them. They have fled something that has startled them, rushing by that tall, darkly cloaked man, who has been standing alone in the shadows of the dimly lit passage. He watches them as they throw down the birch broom and leap the stairs two at a time, and sprint to the exit. In a gaggle, they grip the banister and trip up the stairs as they run, spilling upward and away to depart the Alhambra, a flying blur of caps and feathers and shawls and tattered skirts.

Their cries echo across the stage as they flee over the wide oak boards, shrieking all the way up past the private boxes and beyond the fly, their yelps filling the orchestra pit, resounding off the walls. Those screeches are offensive, grating screams of terror in stark contradiction to the celestial voice of the beautiful young ingénue who has sung but an hour before. If you look up among the ropes you will see the great chandelier, pulled up to the ceiling, floating high to bathe the spectacle in golden beams. Its candles are out now, pulled up into blackness, dangling on thick hemp ropes, up in the rafters, in the blackness where no stars shine. Against the painted screens and backdrops of medieval France, Joan of Arc has burned at the stake, her skin fired red, as red as the petals from one hundred red roses that have been thrown at Christine's feet. The singer has finished her electric performance and taken her bow to the roar of applause, but now the clapping has ceased and only the echoes of hysterical screams sound as the char women scramble through the auditorium. For them, in their fright, the opera house is now alive with whispering phantasmagoria, with writhing, threatening shadows. Squawking we can see the cleaners as they emerge from the back stage and spill out into the lane, screaming for attention, swearing that they have seen a ghost in the guts of the theatre.

'It's in there!' One of the women points to the stage door. 'Black! All over black!'

'You are seeing ghosts- you silly char!' We might be inclined deride, and be uncharitable in our assumptions as to mock her and not take her word as gospel, but such a woman belongs in the depths. Why should we believe anything these hysterical females shriek? Why, you must agree that instead of aspiring to be anything better, she contrarily works her way down to the bottom of the domestic service hierarchy, uneducated and unsanitary, and resorting to charring to make a living! None of these trollops could ever aspire to be pretty Christine Charles!

'Huh!' they cry at us in indignation, pointing fingers. 'Then you, sir, and you madam in your finery, feel free to go have a look if you won't believe us!'

That man, the women have not glimpsed, he watches them as they gather about us like ducks. All enfolded in a black cloak he keeps within the shadows. Outside the theatre all four foolish hags take pause. See their fluttering hands and their heaving bosoms, pretending the vapours, moaning in the watery gas light of the narrow back lane, dishevelled and sobbing amid the trash and the feral cats and vowing never to come here at night again. Not for pennies, not for gin! The man waits for a moment and his eyes look in the direction from which the women have come running. He gazes intently in the direction of a great arched and darkened passage that leads to the bricked-in bowels of the building. Down there, beyond the clearing zones and the accessory workshops, beyond the rehearsal and the dressing rooms, and the elevators and scenery turntable, is the gaping maw that leads to the cellars. He does not have to wait for long, for up from the pit an orange light comes shining, cutting through the gloom and casting shadows into grotesque life upon the wall.

I sense you shiver, for it is a thrill, isn't it, to encounter the unexpected, so suddenly, to walk into the unknown? Come, let's follow, and leave these silly females to gaggle among themselves. Who is this man, says you, and what is he seeking? Quiet now, be silent and observe, and watch the shadows, for they are enormous, swelling like thunderclouds, roiling in that single ray of hellish illumination. As the light beams into focus the conjured shades contract and expand, suspended in the doorway. As the darkness comes forth it begins to take solid form from the stencilled cut-out of a dusk-clad figure, a shape all over black except for the lamp that it holds aloft. The figure approaches with slow and deliberate steps, a waft of vile putrescence billowing before its stride. With fixed eyes, the man stares at the shape and see his body tighten, his muscles going tense, and he grips his fingers into a fist, not knowing what will come next, his heart thudding, expecting the worst. At last the shadow figure speaks.

'It's only old rat catcher!' the figure says, his voice surprisingly soft and almost mellifluous save for the rough linguistic associations that betray his lower-class origins. Ah, is that a sigh of relief that I hear? 'Tis indeed good to feel the tension dissipated, but remember to hold in close, for this is simply the first surprise! The rat catcher shuffles into the passage, his torch beaming a long finger of shining light, dressed in a tattered black cloak and cap, and over his shoulder is slung a sack that pulses and throbs. His face, a not pretty visage I must admit, is smeared with soot and grime, but his eyes are like agates and they sparkle in the light of his lamp. Instinctively the other man takes a step back. Wouldn't you? Undeniably, I dare say you would! Is the rat catcher not repulsive? Yet the rat catcher hears the man's sharp intake of breath.

'Don't be alarmed,' he reassures. 'I won't do you no harm!' His eyes flicker, look upward in the direction of the stairs. 'I think I must have given them cleaners a bit of a turn!' He makes a broken laugh between broken teeth. 'They're usually gone by the time I'm around.' The odours from his unwashed skin assail the other's olfactory senses and the gentleman holds in his breath as the tattered creature speaks.

'I'm the rat catcher you see, sir. The old Alhambra is alive with 'em!' Gleefully he holds his lamp high so that he might see the other's face, and his eyes are shining bewitched stars, all aglow and black-green. When he speaks he seemed to utter phrases in a sing-song fashion, words from lips that form great astonished circles, his expressions glazed, as if he is somehow mesmerised by the striking orange fire of his torch.

Repulsive, isn't he? A truly grimy individual, and perhaps slightly mad!

'I searches about with me lamp,' he goes on mindlessly, nodding like a puppet, 'and I sort of hypnotises 'em, 'til I'm near enough to pounce!' Swaying rhythmically back and forth he is, like a grimy pendulum, and then he makes an abrupt leap forward as if to demonstrate his rat catching alacrity. For one second the other man is startled and takes two paces back. I note how you too have flinched! Noting the gentleman's reaction, the rat catcher apologises. The vagrant straightens his tattered lapels and smiles gratuitously. His incongruous grooming does little to ameliorate his grotesque appearance and the other man holds the arm's distance between them. Here the rat man flips the sack down from his shoulder and a succession of muffled squeals comes from deep within the hessian. The bag undulates and throbs with its obscene contents.

'I caught a couple of beauties tonight, sir. Fat! Like young puppies they are! Here, I'll show you.' Before the man can protest, the trapper has handed the other his torch and begun fumbling eagerly at the rope tie that closes the throat of the filthy satchel. Stare is all that the dark man can do, watch as the rat catcher's dirty hand dives eagerly into the pulsating depths of the bag, chasing his fingers among the scurrying contents. The rats within the sack screech in protest.

'Now then, none of that!' the rat catcher reprimands as sharp little teeth slash at his fingertips, the fat rats squirming and evading his grasp. 'I'll find 'em for you in a moment, sir. You'll never believe your eyes!'

'Please don't bother on my account,' the man says, most politely, to the rat catcher, but nevertheless repulsed at the thought of being delivered a plump and squirming rodent for his supper. As the rat catcher searches the other man places the lamp upon the floor.

'No?' he replies, uncomprehending. 'Oh, I could let you have a couple for tuppence, sir. They make a lovely pie!'

'I'm a vegetarian,' the man quickly responds, feeling his stomach lurch at the prospect of eating such a hideous repast.

'Pity,' the catcher says, the light fading from his eyes, knowing he must eat them himself or starve.

'Here,' the man says, reaching into his coat pocket, as if to atone for not wishing to partake of the culinary delights of rodent flan. The rat catcher's eyes gleam at the prospect of a few coins. 'Here's something for your trouble.'

'Thank you so much, sir!' The rat catcher's face lights up with a delighted smile. Thrusting aside the folds of his black cloak the tall man takes from his coat pocket a spike instead of a coin, a hard and sharp and slender tapering blade, and as swiftly as he withdraws the knife he plunges it directly into the rat catcher's left eye. Oh, turn your head if you will, but you will still hear the sickening squelch and the sharp crack of steel against bone.

Gasp in horror! Yes, I warned you, I said there would be more surprises! You have gone pale, appalled, but still you look! The hobo gasps in shock as the tall man drives the blade in deep. The spike penetrates the soft, grape-like eyeball, and passes through the socket to embed in the curved bone, and then the assailant thrusts the length hard into the brain. A squirt of vermilion gore and vitreous fluid sprays out of the ruptured eye and the man pushes the steel deeper into the rat catcher's head. The attacker twists the blade, buried to the hilt in the rat man's face, the vermin catcher gurgling obscenely and spewing foamy gore as he shudders and convulses on his feet. In a violent spasm, the rat catcher begins shaking his precious hessian sack. The victim falls, his knees buckle and his body goes limp, and the assailant lets go of the knife. With an agonised and pitiful groan the victim drops his bag. A spray of blood jets across the floorboards and the man lands face down, the stiletto driving with force through the pulpy grey matter of his brain.

See the dagger's gory tip crack through the back of his skull, poking through strands of filth-matted hair. Several of the rodents bolt from the bag, and dash away into the dark. Swiftly the attacker stoops and ties off the bag so that no more of the rodents shall escape, and with an unceremonious kick he turns the fatally wounded victim onto his back. The rat catcher flails and groans and grasps at the knife hilt. His fingers are slippery with blood and they are quickly becoming numb and unfeeling, the dark is filling up his dimming vision. Holding the filthy bag of rats at arm's length the aggressor turns quickly on his heel and runs into the dark, his cloak flapping like great bat wings, leaving the rat catcher to convulse on the floor and to expire in a widening pool of crimson blood.

Oh, do you feel giddy? Do you think you might faint? Terrible you say, shocking even, and just like you, I shall turn my eye away, for I too must admit, that even I truly cannot abide the sight of blood!

Chapter 2

Mutes and Mummery

'Father heard his Children scream,

So he threw them in the stream

Saying, as he drowned the third,

'Children should be seen, not heard!''

Col. D. Streamer

On the west wall of the laboratory hangs a mirror. It is an eye of glass, three feet wide and two feet deep, and it sees all. In it I glimpse the boundaries of the world, my own reflection and the shadows of obscurity as I peer furtively into the lane that runs behind my house. Still, I am not much tempted to walk beyond my garden and embrace those who dwell amid the shadows, to mingle with the excessively passionate kingdom of people. Safe in my secluded haunt I openly admit that I mostly dislike the world beyond my fence, and I distrust most people. My fear of people makes me reticent to join them in either revelry or grief, even though, at times, I find myself having to brave their company. The demands of the world dictate that I must participate in civility if I am to function in that sphere, but it is sometimes difficult to do this, and most do not understand. For even as the afternoon sun descends over Morley Street, even as it slides into another evening that promises social gaiety for the elite and a new nights' succour for the poor, the thought of being with humanity makes me shiver. The waning light pours like syrup over church spire and roof tile, and it traces long black fingers over the lawn. Deepening into shade, the viridian foliage of the climbing hydrangea quivers in a little breeze. The vine with its wide jade leaves clings to the trellis, reaching desperately across that gap between its stems and the masonry to grasp at the wall, tortured and twining in the diamond crisscross of lattice, a prisoner to its own contortions. Perhaps that is indicative of my mind, for how that vine is akin to the anxieties I harbour, about the terrors that inhabit the domain throbbing and pulsating there beyond the wall. The vine aspires to escape into the outer realms beyond the fence, but my mind wishes only to cling to anonymity. Those green tendrils are symbolic of the clutch of the perverse humanity who dwell in the outer realms, of those who wish to entangle my purpose and misunderstand, of those with whom I must deal and their social contracts from which I cannot be freed. Clawing against the lattice frame, their roots yet anchored to the earth, the leaves hide the ugly mortared wall and the uglier world beyond where order is replaced by chaos.

My inner thoughts are so much like that climbing vine, for both are entangled; but the mind is knotted up to abstract acuity and the plant to a trellis that is bolted all the length of the high brick fence. That fence is the narrow boundary of two lives, the barrier between darkness and light, and even if you will, between good and evil. Conversely, who among humankind, among anyone who has ever existed, has not wondered what lies behind walls, wishing as they strained their eyes that they could see and understand the things that secretly pulse beyond the barriers? Who has not wanted to peer into other people's lives? I know there are those who wish to pry beyond my wall, to see within, and there are some who think that it is their right to pass upon me their judgment. Yet if the truth be known we all have things that we hide behind such obstructions, don't we? How many among us are not curious and how many can claim to be stainless, how many of us do not have nasty little secrets? All of us have secrets! Even I, Doctor Henry Jekyll, ashamedly admit that perhaps I too am less than unsullied, weak in my human nature, having done injurious things during my researches and in my personal life that I perhaps should regret. How many people will readily admit to such a truth, how many would willingly confess to their failings, to their culpabilities? Sometimes, reject the notion as much as we try, evil and violence are the only two measures that hold any power. For in such admissions we are made to encounter the darkest of extremities, and yet ambiguously I am not the only actor in this tale with clandestine intention. Regarding the nature of secrets there are some undisclosed facts that I must now relate to you, and, I will try to be honest in my confessions about one individual, the covert and yet dynamic Mr. Edward Hyde. Hyde is my secret, but even so he has been pivotal in my studies. Do you think I lie, that I make excuses for the man? Upon that issue, you must decide for yourself if you think I prove unreliable, for nonetheless, being frank finds my heart being twisted in a vice.

How did I come to know him so intimately you might ask, that most captivating of gentlemen? Clouded is the day in my memory that he first entered my life, difficult it is to recall the day of our acquaintance, for I fail to recall the two of us ever having been formally introduced. How is that so, and Mr. Hyde being so close a friend that I feel I know him as well as I know myself? Yet if I cannot remember the moment of our introduction, especially considering all that has happened, all seems veiled in mist. It is as if I have always known him, that he has always been close, always part of my life. Nonetheless, he is so opposite from all the things that I am that it must speak incredulous to most that the two of us could even be companions! I am not like Hyde, and Hyde is everything that I am not, and never the twain shall meet. Our partnership will no doubt confound and confuse many as I reveal more of the intimate details of our friendship, and some might consider the association unwise and unhealthy, ruinous even. Regardless, Edward Hyde and I probably met one fiery day in Hell, a day when the Devil, in boredom, strode petulantly out into the dominion of mankind. That statement might have resonance if I, Henry Jekyll could ascribe to faith and to religious myth, but as science is my god it must be stated here that I am a confessed atheist, and as for faith, well, Mr. Hyde does not believe in god either, or the devil for that matter. He only believes in his own will and in the vibrancy of the flesh. I can speak confidently upon that fact.

Edward Hyde's attraction is that he possesses the power to provoke in me an experience of life entirely outside of the principality of my own existence. Through his agency life becomes both exciting and dangerous, and yet to know him is to know more than simply an erotic précis. He is like a great force, a wave that gathers me up and carries me along, a tidal surge that wants to fulfill every desire without restriction, wants to strip away all inhibitions without rational thought or reason as to their consequences. His is a supremacy that seems almost magical, for he overwhelms, and his persona is so strong that when I am with him he is almost inside of me. He clouds my perceptions and my mind and I seem to become bisected and torn between reserve and excess. Perhaps in this I must tell myself to be honest and admit that it is indeed in that liberation of repressed sexual desires that I find his attractions so irresistible. Surely, I pursue the man's company as much for the thrill of all that is bad in the world as much as I wish to pursue any research disguised as noble and virtuous. Nonetheless, I canter upon the theoretical scaffolding of science, and there I place a wavering step. Well, Hyde might certainly be worth special focus, but the man would laugh at me and call me a liar should I proclaim my single dedication to the microscope in favour of his vital companionship or the pulsing length of his member. What emerges from his influences are happenings as remote from peace on earth as is Kitty's desperate want for social recognition, but I believe that my wife is deluded in her need for friendships. Even when I was resident in Oxford, I found it most difficult to make and to maintain friends. Ernst Litauer, one of my esteemed lecturers, was perhaps the only man I have ever known to successfully breach my defensive fortifications.

One might jokingly observe that Edward Hyde is a man of adventure who has no need of friends as such, being almost a law unto himself, and he is not one who is so dependent upon the emotions of others. Be assured that his stimulus for adventure is intoxicating yes, but as dangerous as it is glamorous. I would never permit Edward and Ernst to meet, the conflict would prove utterly disastrous. Of that I am certain. Litauer's intellect would cross swords with Hyde's hedonism, and yet, even as I think this I know that when Hyde is absent, I find part of myself irrational and pining for his return. How can I explain that his absence makes me feel lost, like an adolescent lover is lost without their infatuating amour? I find that I willingly reject Ernest and that I crave the filth of Edward Hyde's camaraderie. His influence on my mind is perhaps damaging and pernicious, and no matter how I try I seem always to fail to guard against the evils that have beset me. So strongly do I want to hear his voice, and smell the crisp odour of his cologne-scented skin, and yet perversely, when we are divided, I would, if asked, steadfastly deny the attachment. In my head, as justification, I invent a somewhat different version of his experience, one contrary to that which I genuinely feel. Is it really for scientific practicality that I lie to myself about Hyde's importance to my experiments? Or do I lie to placate my fevered and suppressed desires? To the exclusion of all and everything else, I discover the more time that I spend submerged in the influence of Edward Hyde, the deeper into his flesh I want to go. So deep in fact that he drowns me and the boundaries of the man's iniquity become so blurred as to appear non-existent, become as joy to my senses. His flesh and spirit are the tempest and my desires are the waves that run up mountains high. Even Kitty becomes confused at the changes she observes in her husband, but she does not know why. Hyde and Kitty have never been introduced, and on that point too am I loathed to concede. If she suspects this ambivalence in my behaviour then she mistakenly believes that my analytical processing is weakening and that it is a result of experimenting with drugs, of overwork and tireless dedication. Kitty knows not the half of it! In my search to interrogate nature, as conversely as I observe through my scientific experiments, Hyde wants to lure me instead into the sexually complex world outside of the laboratory, beyond my garden and gate and propel me into the domain of humankind that has long held me introvert and afraid. Yet the path to understanding is always dangerous, the path to knowledge will always break down the subconscious, for the mind is a complicated and baffling thing. Hyde would be an interesting subject for study, but I must pin him down first, and fleeting in his passing over my life he surely awakens the spirit and leaves me desirous and thirsting for more.

If my case is sheer projection, you no doubt think that I unashamedly seek for the gratification of my erotic senses. Conceivably I might harbour a wish to experience the mystical and the scientific at once, but surely that is not all. One must understand that Edward Hyde is dashingly handsome and provocatively charismatic, and that regarding sex I believe he possesses no preference, but if I am to follow, to navigate the boundary between the lofty and the damned and to remain at most unscathed, perhaps I must prepare for unhappy consequences. Part of my subconscious reels with pompous thoughts indeed, but my nucleus, my passion is perhaps at war with rationality, and it whispers that my reasons might be beyond such superficiality as addiction to drugs and sex, despite my laboratory being the closed locker wherein it seems I pretend to examine the fundamentals of those yearnings. In that compartment, dark as pitch, almost blinded to understanding, the Stygian space within myself, I try to hide away my baser desires. Absurd and contradictory may I appear in my extremes, sadomasochistic and pornographic, torn between love and lust, between gratification and knowledge, between existence and atrophy. Because I may be meretricious in what I relate, you will have to determine whatever I tell you is the truth, and what is not. Come, turn an attentive ear and I will attempt to unravel the tale of the benighted Doctor Henry Jekyll's friendship with the bohemian Mr. Edward Hyde, and it is a tale of reflections, of dreams and nightmares and a merciless contemplation of a host of other twisted and infernal horrors. Whether they have been perpetrated in the realm of the senses or are but a case of mania, whether you gain credence by my confessions or think them but sewage, either way you shall find out what it is to love an abomination.

Love, a casual term encompassing a gamut of emotional tumult from mawkish sentiment to heated physical exchanges, is, I confess, a sensation that is peculiarly alien to me. Love is the dominion of poets and folklore, or so I have always told myself. I have believed that I possessed a staunchly aloof heart and that because of this I have never needed to encounter the elusive passion that has, as history records, failed heroes and felled mythical beasts. Dare I confess that even when I married, when I exchanged vows in Our Lady of Victories, I was not in love? For it is hardly with confidence that I can attest that the sting of armour's arrows has ever truly launched a poisoned tip into and infected the throbbing tissue of my steely heart. I like to deny that love has ever infected me. Once upon a time my mind might have avowed to the probability of just such a flippant attitude about the weakness of love. What does that great tome of fairy stories proclaim? Oh, yes, if I recall the book of Corinthians tells us pretentiously that love is patient, love is kind, that it does not envy and that it does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. So how is Edward Hyde not my truth? Yet in this Edward Hyde might teach us all that love is not gentle and benevolent, and the lesson of him might prove that love is violent and overpowering and all-consuming, that love is strong and diverse, its bonds gripping and overwhelming, and that love can kill. How foolish am I then, foolish enough to believe that it is in the laboratory, peering down the microscope and in observing the diminutive organisms that swim under the glass eye of the lens that I am safe and removed from love's existence, from love's killing blow? Perhaps it is that I hide in study and biology, and have hitherto pretended their importance over my sentiments. I see and I know that in a slide of vitreous liquid there is only the natural world to contemplate, with no interference from the supposed banality of emotions. Yet the natural world and our biological impulses so interconnect and collide that I oft wonder if I have truly circumvented the furtive sensitivities of irrational and passionate thought for those of reason? It seems that my obsessive scientific pursuits appear to have been to the chagrin of those who have indeed loved me.

Katherine Jekyll, 'Kitty' as I affectionately call her, should have loved her husband, but I know she does not, and this is a fact that she ineptly fails to conceal. I hear you cry hypocrite, especially considering what I have just professed, but perhaps, and only perhaps, she did love me once upon a time, in the puerile way women embrace the heady build up to matrimony with all its superficial lacy trims and vapid sighs and fairy tale predictions of happy ever after. Yet to think that true is to over indulge in a male vanity regarding prosaic female projections of romance. As it now has become evident to Kitty, I seem to have never given credence to or been smitten by romance, and I would be the first to stoically confess that although Kitty is beautiful I do not consider her intellectually stimulating, and I am not certain that I have ever really loved her as lovers are supposed to love. Devotion hath found me wanting. Nonetheless, upon my return from Oxford, presented with a medical degree and the assumption that I should, like all good doctors, open a general practice, Kitty had agreed to wed me that spring day six years before. Our engagement is hardly worth mentioning here, for we are both the victims of life's social dictates and its many clichéd common graces. It is an old chestnut to be sure that a man needs a wife, and that marriage is but another of those undeniably peculiar social contracts that confuse me. Both Kitty and I have each found that our union has become a puzzling relationship, one in which she imagined her supple skin might inevitably prise me away from my beloved microscope and my chemistry, or that my research could be so easily cast aside in favour of her petty social needs. A barren and fruitless binding it has turned out to be too, with no children and no false promises to decorate its hideously conventional parameters.

Perhaps convention was the first indicator of our domestic misery, and it sprouted brittle, autumnal leaves in our ridiculous matrimonial garden. You judge and think that I paint a most unhappy picture, true, and that I am heartless and repressed and have not sympathy for my wife. You say she is young and beautiful and how could I not indulge her whims? You could be right in your observation, but I believe both Kitty and I have equally daubed the paints upon that canvas, but sadly, we cannot divorce. That would be a social suicide. Perhaps I misunderstand my privilege, thinking that my wife should be happy with the conservative comforts that a good marriage promises- a pristine home and a comfortable social standing; but our marriage has become a chariot that I must drive through the spatial unhappiness that demarcates our conjugal lives. Kitty is not happy in the morning room serving tea and cakes but is seduced by the gala, for Kitty loves the ballroom as opposed to the drawing chamber. As we now have but one servant, Nanny, Kitty must sometimes turn her white hands resentfully to minor menial labours and household management. It is evident in her eyes, in her sighs, manifest even as she dreams that she is above such tedious tasks, above wiping the dust from the mantle. For Kitty, the parlour might just as well be the death room, the chamber in which the corpse is laid out, an uninhabitable interim wherein the drapes are drawn and the mirror is turned to the wall. She resents being consigned to that room, a room where all female power is subdued- a chamber in blackness, a neglected space, a crypt. In that space, she might share a commonality with my mother, a woman who also haunted a shadowed place where only the dead came to visit. Thus, is our marital decay. When she sleeps Kitty dreams, and in her dreams, she bolts and locks the parlour door against me, and from me she flees to the palace where she dances and laughs and drinks champagne, and she whispers of these desires in her perturbed midnight slumbers. When she wakes, when we meet in the sterile corridors of our marriage, I detect fatigue in her voice and lethargy in her icy embrace. Kitty clings to an embittered illusion and I play the embattled husband, the man of science whose dedication to study unintentionally causes her distress, the scourge and the destroyer of matrimonial felicity.

Kitty rarely permits me to touch or to kiss her, instead she declares me with every look that she will not be confined, not be wrapped up in yards of mourning crêpe. In her eyes, I see that she wonders if I feel anything at all resembling that love to which the Book of Corinthians might have alluded. Unfortunately, as I have already stated, I am a foreigner to love and ambiguous at best to the subject of religion. It must be a point of vexed contemplation to the world, a world that conjectures that our marriage might have simply been one for appearance rather than one for a conjoining intended to fulfill love's bliss and familial harmony. Perhaps it is because Kitty is so beautiful, as beautiful as a glacier is beautiful, splendid and yet cold, grand and lovely but brittle and fragile and lifeless that makes me want her to be submissive rather than potent. With every resentful breath, she takes she despises me, and she is a woman of will power, for her social desires will not be denied. Some part of me admires her vivacity, and yet by stark contrast I really am a rather dull, unattractive and reclusive individual and I wish her to be likewise withdrawn. Things seem to have become so much worse now that Edward Hyde has come into my life.

Hidden within that most sacred and holy of male cloisters, my laboratory, when I look in the mirror that hangs on the wall, I sometimes imagine that I see the reflections of both Kitty and myself, see our visages, and they are faces harrowed by misery, trapped within a wavering and silvered veil of frost. This suggests irreconcilable opposites, and for Kitty it bespeaks of a fear that may well be truth, but the mirror also reflects Kitty's romantic losses and my scientific obsessions. Of course, Kitty addresses me as Henry, as she should, but upon deliberation she will say that her husband never calls her Katherine. 'Kitty' is a moniker that she no doubt detests, because she knows that when I say it I belittle her and rob her of power. It is a name that bespeaks of her as my possession, as nothing more than a fluffy animal, as a plaything rather than as a grown woman. Yet she does not utter complaint when others refer to her as 'Kitty', and it is in her silences that I know she resents the appellation. Yet, in her passive aggression, she has never asked me to refrain from using that name. Intellectually I find that her unspoken grievances against me might be valid if I were to genuinely care, for whenever I call her Kitty, and perceive the resentment bubbling bitterly under the epidermis of her lovely coil, I find a chill as equally as cold as my wife's love has cast a withered breath over my heart. In this I fail to understand the hypocrisy, in that it is anything other than acrimony.

Perhaps that is unfair, but undeniably true is the fact that sometimes I catch myself encountering my cruel failure to recognise that Kitty is indeed a woman and I want to admonish my heart, but I don't. Sometimes I am looking upon a most gorgeous creature and other times I am contemplating someone that I hardly even recognise. If I fail to see within the ivory cage that clothes her silken skin and into her crimson heart and her fevered mind, then I likewise fail to see that she has any true value other than to appear glamorous and amusing and to represent to society a sculpted Hellenic face to mask our domestic abnormality. Perhaps I just cannot fathom the feminine, perhaps I just do not understand women. Under my own skin I itch to my core as I play out what others would deem a foolish charade. Why did you marry in the first place? That is what they would ask, and I am damned because I do not want to face my truth. To lay blame, I insinuate that the ideology of Edward Hyde and his liberties fester at the core of my being, and it is the excess he generates that sparks my flesh, not the boring formality of marriage. Yet in my own skin that itch both excites and repels my emotions, and Kitty is all but rejected when Hyde enters the picture. That is when the itch leaps outside of my own flesh, that's when the conundrum of desire escalates and becomes almost overwhelming. That is when I, Henry Jekyll, become humbled before confusion, and that's when I flee to the haven of the laboratory and throw up its bars to lock myself within. In chaos, I do not want to know what possesses me. In that place, in my laboratory, I can ignore the call to social milieu that demands my unhappy attendance. I can ignore the fatuity of the world. That Kitty is consumed by the desire to sparkle and to fake normality among the prosperous upper-classes is a problem too, but she must not forget that she is still my wife and bound to my authority. Hyde once remarked that Kitty is a lovely thing, a nicely sculpted porcelain doll over-painted with gilding perhaps, a gem that sparkles, a light that blinds. He has commented too that such a gem should be worn by others occasionally. Whatever he means by such remarks is a puzzle, for as far as I am aware he has yet to meet my wife in any social setting. Could it be that I am ignorant of some rather intriguing facts? When he speaks of Kitty in this way I am oft caught by an unreasoning jealousy, for I sometimes see a lascivious leer upon his lips and a wild glint in his eyes. Yet for whom is this jealousy made manifest, for Kitty or for Hyde? Perhaps they have met and I am just being duped, perhaps she hides little secrets in her vapid world of tedium to which I have no privilege, perhaps he deceives me in my friendship?

Nonetheless I refuse to allow Kitty to choose my associates, for they are none of her affair, and thus, upon the occasion of any disagreement about my other friend, Paul Allen, she complains that I give him too much time, too much attention and too much of my money. Kitty says that I am deliberately turning her into stone, that the world is shunning and forsaking her because of my ignorance, and so she has just cause to be distant from her husband, cause enough that in my laboratory I am holding an equal distance. Still, it is not for her to say who I might choose as friend. No doubt Paul's association with me also perplexes Kitty to no good end, but as I have stated I believe I owe my wife no explanations, and I refuse to elucidate my peculiar relationships and the cruxes upon which they are predicated. Nevertheless, I suspect there are other factors that cause the inflammation of Kitty's senses, the restless yearnings that plague her throughout the dull days of her life, desires I cannot fulfill. There is no one to see the glittering diamonds and silk gowns that she wears around a cold and sterile house, and at night her bed is icy and she needs it warm. Nothing can ever make her forget that she is owned and that her sheets are empty. Kitty believes she is an accoutrement, nothing but a full stop at the end of the dull paragraph in a smart young doctor's journal. How she hates this life of ours, for I refuse even to open a practice and treat the imaginary aliments of the rich, and how she hates Paul Allen, that incorrigible rake, and I know she really hates me too.

In this city, I would like to believe that I have built something of renown, but that repute swings above my head like a sword of Damocles, double-edged and sharp. Although, it must be noted that of late there are those among the medical fellowship outside of Oxford, several eminent scientists and doctors, those who do not move among the ordinary people, who have suggested that I might be eccentric. They were wary of me in Oxford, for they thought me bright and capable but inexplicably strange. Though it is disheartening to realise that some of these critics reside among my own profession, and they wonder in puzzlement at how the son of an undertaker could have climbed so prominently out of the lowest pit of class structure to know success. They have begun whisperings of a most unflattering nature, suggesting that I am the spawn of a degraded sphere of commerce, the symbol of an uncouth and beleaguered grasp for upward mobility. There is no respect paid for the nature of my lineage and little credence is offered for my research. In their unrest, they have begun rumours to sabotage my credibility, questioning my emotional state of health after the death of my mother and the disappearance of my stepfather soon thereafter and now they attack my most recent paper. The validity of my credentials has also been the subject of talk, and by probing into my preferred isolation they equivocate that I am losing a fight with normality. At a loss, I confess to have no real understanding as to why these doctors feel so vehemently threatened, but perhaps they disagree with the recondite nature of my research and that is what stirs up the rumours. No doubt they have yet to divorce the body from the body snatcher!

In their delusional superior morality, they have still not reconciled their fantasies from fact, and perhaps they harbour a foolish, almost mystical religious fear of the unknown. Regardless, there exists an irreducible difference between the medical faculties and my own field of study, for theirs are rigidly enforced boundaries that outsiders must never transgress without being punished. Almost laughably inflexible is their doctrine; that they guard in secrecy, a covert practice, almost a cult, and they attend their vocations with jealousy, and the research of others they treat with disdain. Arrogantly they do not let me forget my ancestry. A whisper suggests that my black-clad mother was a fallen woman and her second marriage a ruse to cover up a lie. Such cruel and unfounded myth! Yet I have always shunned the privileged and never sought their favour. These people have also insinuated, without any justification, that the experiments they think I conduct are tantamount to blasphemy and that my foolish investigations began in the unsanitary cellars of the funeral charnel house and no doubt will end in the asylum!

Perhaps they fear that the pallid corpse is a herald for the decaying inevitability of their supposed tier of class hierarchy. The truth might be that they have little care for the dignity of the dead, as little care as the funeral parlour that pretends respectability but shadily garners profit. Since Albert's death from typhoid and Queen Victoria's tirelessly unending mourning, it has been the fashion to grieve and to wear black. For them, the popular perception is that the funeral director is a vulture, extorting high costs for their rather suspect services. True, it is said that up to a quarter of the money in British banks is being held for the purposes of funerals, but the jibes of the Council go beyond these sordid facts. They mutter that because of this the funeral director accumulates his wealth to the point of criminality, and that if the truth be told, I had little right to attend Oxford and none whatsoever to mix with the learned elite.

Often, I have heard the foolish rhetoric; how can it be acceptable to place a profiteer of corpses among doctors and chemists and other medical professionals, let alone he whose mother amounted to little more than a mere working woman? Some of them believe that mortuary procedures should only be carried out by a medical professional, but who among them would sully their hands with maggots and rotting flesh? It is the undertaker, the black-clad raven from whom my mother is descended, the Bullstrode lineage who challenged this cultural inertia, the sickness at the deepest root of my problem. The funeral parlour that paid for my university degree was, by true right hers, for it was a business and a property that she inherited upon the death of her father. Nevertheless, once she married my father, Markheim Jekyll, he legally absorbed her inheritance, and the widowhood was not included in his patrimony. Markheim Jekyll died when I was a young child and although his is not a face that I recall, the ownership of Bullstrode and Holroyd legally passed to me. For all the years that came thereafter, mother must have resented me, and is it any wonder that we became somewhat estranged. A handsome, willowy and beautiful figure was she, always clad in sable and clutching a crucifix. Always beseeching God for absolution for some ridiculous and imagined sin. At length a melancholia took her, and she began spending forgotten hours in her room, preferring the company of no one but the Almighty nailed to his cross. In that respect, we two were somehow alike, for the cross I bear is my dedication to science. If my preference is seclusion, though I emphatically renounce mythology, I will have no truck with the fanciful judgments of an apocryphal deity.

Her second husband, William Fortune, voiced many an objection to certain aspects regarding her money. He bitterly complained of her voluntary seclusion and of my control over the funeral home. Nevertheless, it was now my money and I insisted upon education. Of course, these are all lies and could not be further from the truth, and yet the Council has cited articles in recent papers and aligned my work with another. That other, they say, who recently ran amok on the Continent, has had to flee into exile. Like most, I am not unfamiliar with the works of Baron Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant scientist himself, yet they say he should be condemned to hell for his botched attempts at brain transplantation. Brain transplantation though, an entirely new and exhilarating notion of Frankenstein's own genius is not however in my field of research. Regarding the corpse and science, the grotesque entanglement of the lines that navigate the cadaver between the living and the dead, such carvings into human flesh, they protest, are against the higher authority of god. Though what god has to do with the surety of science is a mystery unto itself! I must applaud Frankenstein for his dedication, his mind unconstrained by the normal and suffocating order. However, Frankenstein has title and I do not, and he need not aspire, as do I, along the slippery path of free operation that so condemns my lineage. Sadly, I can only find Frankenstein misunderstood and damned by all medical faculties and universities across Europe, and condemned also by the deity. Nonetheless such accusations make me laugh nervously because, although I feel empathy for the baron, corpses, surgery and anatomical dissection are not the subject of my own field of exploration. The university knows this, yet it is a colloquium consumed by a peculiar moral confusion and it insists in its foolish condemnation of the truth.

Despite this grave state of humour I have started to wonder if the higher circles have been listening of late to other grievances that discredit my nature. They have begun to probe between the boundaries of the professional and the domestic, that vague space where commerce meets with sentiment, and their tongues and their ears are acrid with complicity. The black talk about my parents has taken new twists, and I wonder, have they begun listening to the agitated purring of my bored little kitten, that they should falsely reflect in my scientific actions a deeper sense of their own inadequacies? Or are there things deeper and more threatening here at work against which I should be guarded? For who is it that really controls the body or the mind in this pecking order? Do they control me? Not yet, not utterly, for if one is to belong one bends, or else, like Frankenstein, must be destroyed. Although I refuse to completely bend I am yet to fully possess the power of true independence, to branch out completely on my own, to challenge the hierarchy of the Academy and to voice confidently any objections to refute such attacks. I need also acknowledge the line of demarcation and be aware just where and when the foot may step across that line. Kitty has not learned that lesson, but that is her personal immaturity, and unlike Kitty, I wish to be beholden to no one.

Having inherited the money from Bullstrode and Holroyd upon my coming of age, I obtained a good education, albeit upon my own insistence, but this does not make me overly wealthy. Many a rumour have I evaded that suggested my stepfather was involved in some nefarious criminal activity. His trafficking in illegal opium from the Orient was the rumour that attracted the most gossip. Twofold they muttered that it provided the funds for my learning and was the reason for his disappearance. It is common knowledge that festering opium dens are to be found all over the city, and it is no secret that London's back streets are visited by well-to-do luminaries and artists, not just the addict and the criminal, and it is with disgust that I even entertain the hypocrisy of the Guilds. With certainty, it is that I suspect any one of their league of gentlemen covertly visits opium dens, and regarding that, we might do well to also remember that the Pharmacy Act, once pro, now proclaims opium dangerous and struggles to restrict its sale only to registered chemists and pharmacists. If my stepfather was involved in such criminality then perhaps he courted his own vanishing. I, of course, returned from university as both druggist and doctor and care not for the Guild and their boorish jibes, and if we knew the circumstances surrounding William Fortune's supposed illegal activities and his disappearance we could of course lay the matter to rest. Regardless, I do not trouble myself overly upon the fact, and I now enjoy home comforts that are substantial but not ostentatious. The funeral home is past, no longer my asset, for I sold it some time ago for a decent profit. Thankfully it furnished me the means to equip, to finance and to continue my researches without too much outside interference, despite the odd financial drain that the likes of Mr. Paul Allen demands of me. Yet, conversely, I am not held up to a higher endorsement, but am mocked for my social shortcomings. Perhaps one day my findings might validate all that I have researched and achieved, perhaps one day I will transform the understanding of the scientific world with some stunning revelation, but that day has yet to come.

Still, the madness in man drives me onward, goading me to investigate in the privacy of my home laboratory the realm of what most would term insanity. The faculty laughs at me but I turn a deaf ear to their interference and to the spiteful gossip of the higher entitled bourgeoisie. My exploration has led me to probe the notion and the nature of what drives the self. In that direction, I have devoted many hours and scraped about in the dark, and no doubt because of this I have become even more closed off from the social world and reclusive. Nevertheless, my obsession with research has indicated that through the inducement of certain drugs I believe I can mimic specific chemical reactions produced by the brain, chemical reactions that come to the fore and conjure the id into the temporal world when imbibed or injected. If only I might be able to replicate their effect perfectly there may come a day when the madness within every man might be controlled… Tirelessly, I work towards that goal. For the present I have managed to distill certain compounds and have monitored their reactions and effects in my lab animals, and it only remains for me to test their potencies on a human subject. Soon I am certain, I will be ready to trial the effect of my elixir vitae on the brain's obsessions, and I will observe how the mind wavers in performing its routinely dull and uninspiring cognitive tasks then swings so seductively to the indulgences of unbridled violence and libidinal behaviour. It also remains to be seen whether, as my friends so warn, such nostrums are addictive. Still, if the unknown, like sexual connexion and dying, is a paradox that begins with pleasure only to terminate in pain and dissolution, it is hardly surprising that I am still willing to take the risk, no matter what the consequences. Perhaps I will find the answers within myself.

The point of especial interest to me is that moment, the mechanism that trips the frenzied mind into carnality, the moment in which pleasure cedes to pain, and thus brings the flesh a razor's width from death, and why the flesh wishes only to return to that dangerous and fervid spot over and over again. I have searched for answers, biological answers that might help me to reproduce in my laboratory the same chemicals that are produced in the brain at that instant, but a broader understanding is needed and admittedly I am but a fledgling. Deep within the flesh there hides the secret that keeps most men's baser lusts regulated, but if I can free that desire, split the good from the bad I know I shall find the answer. Somewhere amid the myriad tangle of cells and sparks that fire inside the dome of the human aponeurosis there lies the key. If I can separate morality from biology, divide one from the other with the injection of a drug, then man himself is upon the edge of a wholly new state of being. Perhaps I can eradicate the bad in nature wholly, for the thought is not without a possibility. Beyond the facile flesh I vow to take this search, beyond the burning over stimulated nerve-ends, beyond the sensorial and throbbing pulses of the arterial flow and into the beating heart of existence itself. Vainglorious you may think I am, but I shall push towards that objective undeterred, push beyond the officious university councils and their pretentious discussions of medical diagnoses. Ignoring Kitty's whining, I shall seek to find the other through finding the self, and it is my belief that I can achieve this goal via chemical stimulation. That is my ambition, yet my colleagues scoff at the idea. They have stated that I would not be the first to turn the mind to arousing the senses with drugs and that I will not be the last, and they have begun to think me on the verge of derangement. To continue such madness, they warn, will find me resident in the Engerfield Nursing Home for the Mentally Disordered.

Knowing that my experiments differ radically from those undertaken by the Academy of Natural Science, and having read my paper, they have determined that I lack skill and care and diligence. They have even indicated that my scientific interrogations are but in their infancy and that I read the information incorrectly and published prematurely. They infer that my secret distillations of organic substances into unknown drug compounds will ultimately lead me into grave danger. Since I fail to name the drugs I am using then I must therefore fail to understand their effects. Yet I cannot reveal my apothecary, for if I am successful in creating a synthetic analgesic for the good of humankind I suspect that my piers will only be want to protest further trouble. They will say that my success will only create unknown physiological and biological effects in all who I inoculate. I have heard them utter that if I were successful in bringing my delusion to fruition I would achieve no less than my lowly parentage, peddlers in drugs for illegal profit. The Academy derides and laughs at me, saying that if I do not make public my chemistry then I will have invented nothing more than an addictive sedative or worse, a nightmarish and dangerous hallucinogen. Could I be wrong in my suspicions, that should they know my compounds, they would steal them and give me no credit?

I remember Professor Marlowe's curt and smarting sting: 'Did you ever read De Quincey?' and how they were all amused by that joke. Such addiction is only good for writing bad poetry and puerile romance they attest, not for writing science and exploring fact. Every occasionally, I even hear the ridiculous protest that the only thing that can come from my research is evil and self-destruction. Regardless, I do not see my experiments as a religious or moral debate, and I am convinced that locked inside each man's mind there is a great storehouse of energy, driven by complex voltages that we do not understand. If I might find a way of harnessing that force it might be possible to progress triumphantly beyond such simplistic notions of right and wrong. What did all those stuffy old fools do when I did eventually release my paper? They laughed! If in the process of finding the answer to man's struggle with himself I have become reclusive, if I must reject the jibes of the medical councils, if I must give up any notion of toiling in a dull medical practice, if I must lock myself away from Kitty's sparkle for society, then be it so.

The path to knowledge is always dangerous, and that path often unwinds along the obscure boundaries of our lives. Those boundaries keep the unthinkable contained, but at some point, those restraints are overturned, torn down and obliterated. One day I swear that I will unveil the unthinkable, and I shall shout in triumph that all should know of my discovery. Nonetheless, arriving upon that point of liberation or annihilation is but an abstract problem at the heart of a problem. Still, as I have learned, we cannot have everything our own way, for there are those individuals who are so influential that it is folly to tangle within their realm. These people are of authority, and they manipulate and control and apply subtle pressures that can either make or break the world in which I live. To dare defy their conventions, and of course these people do not tolerate insolence, risks grinding the wheels of science to a halt. If I am to approach a modicum of honesty I should admit that I do not encourage visitors to my house, but still they sometimes come. The esteemed Doctor Ernst Litauer, reputably one of my few friends, is visiting now, more so to dote on Kitty than to support me in my researches. He is a wise man true, one whose lectures taught me much at Oxford, but this fact has its odd repercussions. When Ernst visits he comes with persuasion, for he dictates contrarily against my own requests that Kitty should refrain from balls and masques and parties and social events and take more seriously the role of wife. In this she heeds me not, because the lips of unrequited love will always invoke a generous amount of pain. No doubt he comes because Kitty nurses a desperate need for association that I do not. Nonetheless, love is at the root of everything, it has beguiled the most notorious warrior and seduced the illustrious conqueror, and even now, as Ernst arrives, it sweats convulsively, waiting in the wings. Be assured that these are not the wings of the dove that can lift you from your earthly bonds into heaven, but rather the fervid wings of annihilation. If love has eluded me in my denial thus far and made a mockery of my wife's affections, it is soon to become manifest in a corner of my soul that has previously been kept locked up in a dark, dark oubliette…

My laboratory is a long room, converted from a carriage house with a door that opens onto the garden. There is a window that faces the garden, and that window is almost always closed against the prying eyes of the world, the blind is generally drawn and the drapes pulled. Today I have opened the drapes and pulled up the blind and the window allows the amber sunlight of the afternoon to wash in from that odious and remote world of activity without. Dully aureate rays gleam upon tubes of glass, and like liquid the light drizzles over instruments of chrome and brass and multi-coloured essences. The light twinkles in the eyes of the tiny creatures that snuffle in the straw in their cages, the rabbit, the guinea pig and the monkey. Soon I must feed my pets, for they have begun squeaking and tittering for their evening feed. Reflected in the mirror I can see the garden's edge, defined by a tall wall and a gate and a trellis that bisects the climbing roses and the hydrangea, and beyond the timber and the bricks and the mortars there is the lane. I observe the world through a darkling vision, so dark in fact that I am almost consumed by shadows, and I see the images of a perverse and predatory civilisation reversed in the looking glass. I see myself in the silver glass, trapped within the liminal space of its surface, the real world in which I am anchored reversed in the fantasy beyond the glass. My, I hardly recognise myself, for I appear so much older. My beard has become fuller and thicker and my hair longer, my cheeks gaunter. Perhaps I have worked too long at my experiments and should rest, but my work has become obsession and I must discover its truth. Glancing beyond my reflection, looking above the high fence and beyond the creepers I see an intersection in the street where the ways cross, and I catch sight of the boulevard, see the high tip of the street sign, Morley Street, albeit the wrong way around. Above the fence top I detect part of a shop sign that proclaims F. W. Morter, Rope Maker and Ship's Chandler, and my mind, in a moment of peculiarly gloomy simulacrum, sets to conjuring the familiar coils of rope and the red and white rings of life preservers to the gasping, desperate horrors of my own fear. In the black ocean of my imagination I see only a shipwreck of drowning people and those people are then dragged from the water and carried to Bullstrode and Holroyd.

Beyond the intersection the lane snakes away to the main thoroughfare and if you follow that street it leads towards the great river, to avenues and boulevards and markets and hospitals and to civilisation, to people and noise and squalor and cemeteries. Nonetheless, to go in that direction, to leave the West End parishes, is to follow a course of detritus toward excrement and filth and to choke on the appalling stench of the London sewers. Along the borough ways one leaves middle-class comfort for vice and misery and desolation and hopelessness. Move away from the curtilage of this house, move beyond the Morley Street shops and the river; move away into the scurrilous Eastern habitations and you will have to adopt a new terminology for the immorality and the grime that you will encounter. Beyond the polluted Thames and deeper into the grim backstreet domains of the capital, you will find a wretched people whose miserable lives are exhausted, scrabbling in the midden heap of pathogenesis and contagion. Caught in this ghastly malfunctioning central nervous system of misery, in this despoiled and squalid universe, the rules of polite society have no meaning. In the stews, in the slums, the way becomes littered with assaults, recklessness, violence and abuse and disease. Keep going and you will come upon life from a most different perspective, one in which the medical universities are conceptually hopeless, one where you will never see my lovely Kitty, all dressed sparkling like a princess for the bal masque. You might think me hypocritical, but I believe it is within my power to relieve this troubled city of some of its ills. I believe that if I can look beyond the tip of my scientific nose, beyond the stifling nidor of the reeking world it sniffs, I might achieve something monumental. My quest spurs me through the science of microbiology, and the tiniest of universes fascinates me and shows me how small things can have huge implications. Of course, I too am tiny in the scheme of things, but I am certain that I can accomplish great deeds! I recall quite vividly that wonderful man John Snow, twenty years ago, he who pointed out King Cholera's incubation in the contaminated water from the slums. Not too many were listening, but I was listening!

Looking in the mirror, and despite its silver eye glimpsing the festering core of society, I am in truth looking directly at my own reversed image. What do I really see? True, I seem to see an image constructed from my own perception of the world. However, what do other people really see? Do they see anything beyond the dark brown hair flecked with grey streaks that crowns my head, and do they immediately assume that I am old? Perhaps they do, and when they think that I am old perhaps they condescend and assume that I doter, and that I am soon to be physically bordering upon the infirm. Then such is their arrogance, for I am not old at all and have only just passed my thirty-sixth year. Yet the tint and hue of this hair seems to speak otherwise, shows up a man who must be twice that age. Has the stress of dedication and research aged me so terribly or am I simply cursed? Do they see a ghost perhaps, a phantasm animated by living death, the cloven hoof in tenure of a corpse? This forehead is traced with lines wrought by contemplation, but those creases have not been etched there by the crumbling visitation of old age. My cheeks are perhaps a little sallow and my complexion somewhat wan, but I work on dedicated despite a growing weariness. When I speak my tone is rather sepulchral and not at all what is expected of a kindly general practitioner, neither is it a timbre one could ascribe to the voice of Seraphim. A thick moustache bristles above my upper lip and contrary to the silver streaks in my hair it is mostly chestnut in colour and extends to my profuse beard and sideburns. Yet if visually I do not delight, perhaps the world can kindly explain how it is that I am supposed to look? Kitty tells me sometimes to eat more and to watch my health, to attend my toilet, although of late her dull song has faded to an uninspiring echo. To another I must appear something like one of Darwin's primitives.

In the street, before that Ship's Chandler, a man tips his blue topper to a young woman with a yellow feather in her bonnet, and a cab is pulling up to the curb as the two people saunter up the lane, each proffering the other taciturn conversation. The diligence is stopping outside this house, halting at 29 Morley Street, and I smile inwardly but I do not take my eyes from the reflections in the mirror. Out of the muted bustle in the street comes the soft clicking noise of the man's leather soles along the cobbles, up the granite steps to my residence, to the door, and before he lifts the brass knocker I hear the iron-shod hoofs of the horses clopping away. Soon I note the sound of a chimney sweep as he struts past the man on my doorstep, stepping by the red painted fire hydrant on the curb, whistling while he still has breath in his soon to be blackened, disease-ridden lungs. There are other distant calls in the lane, the twitter of birds in the garden, a mongrel barking, and I can hear the faint and distant tolling of iron bells. Once a month, on a Friday afternoon, after lunch, the children from the Universal Dispensary come to play in my garden. Intellectually, these children are blooms of special interest to me, for unlike their miserable brethren in the Eastern district poor hospitals they are fortunate that I am sympathetic. Or is it that I am just curious, seeking for answers to my own agendas through examining their condition? For they are mostly healthy and not riddled with lice and loathsome diseases, their flesh does not ooze with open sores and they do not hunger nor cough up blood. They are not dying from the wasting effects of crowded urban living that severs so quickly the lives of the children of the dismal underprivileged.

My garden, walled off against the bustle of the world becomes their exercise yard, and when they play it is of course an activity that occurs not purely because of my generosity, but because in my research it is important that I observe. Theirs is a condition for which few paediatricians can propose answers, for the children being mute and unable to speak must communicate their emotions physically. As they play I monitor a range of emotions and a range of mental conditions, intrigued by the contrast between placid diversion and abrupt eruptions of disturbed behaviour. Whilst I watch, the children display the expected gamut of physical interaction, from pleasure and kindness to frustration and tantrum. I have tried to find the links that spark these triggers into eruptions of violence. Perhaps there is little hope at all for these children to gain an elementary education, since they cannot speak and communicate as we do in the natural and everyday world, but I can glean something from their actions, surely? Sometimes I wonder if my dear Kitty is not like these handicapped youngsters in her childish attachments to the social whirl, wanting so desperately to participate but silenced in her husband's obstinacy and refusal to acquiesce her desires.

Turning away from the mirror I cross to my desk and take up a folder in which I have recorded some notes, especially about one child, and then I pace to the door to stand patiently and wait for Ernst to come. Kitty will meet him at the front door and invite him in to the parlour where he will remove his hat and smile a patriarchal smile. Yet no sooner has that smile etched its greeting upon his lips shall Kitty begin her bitter repine. To these words Ernst will listen attentively, as a father listens to an unhappy daughter, and he will nod his head and to comfort her he will offer a useless palliation for her anxieties, and they will speak briefly. Both will not want to enter the abyss that is Henry Jekyll, and the problem will vex their minds as they discuss what can be done. Litauer will shake his head and mutter condolences as Kitty pours out her grievances, but soon thereafter Ernst will leave her to come to the laboratory to lecture his friend.

Ernst belongs to that fellowship of eminent doctors and scientists who believe that only they might elicit knowledge and understanding from the natural world. Yet like the rest of his arrogant, god-like ilk, the pompous gentlemen of London's medical fraternities, he is simply another inflated by his learning, pretending sympathy and understanding but hardly progressive in the world of modernity. The gentleman is steadfast in his judgment and his entitlement is apparent, and in this he does not disappoint. To the eye Ernst is something of a gentlemanly cliché, emerging upon the back portico, cut most neatly, sporting a dust-coloured coat and trousers, a tie with wide wings and a narrow neckband that is fastened with a flaming jewel at his throat. His is a figure that is so straight-laced as to be haughty and dull and pompous. This Friday afternoon he is all so smug and so dully predictable. He will say the self-same words he has said before, intimating that I waste my time in pointless research and that I would better serve humankind if I were to remain diagnosing aches and pains and pay more attention to my wife. Waiting for him to navigate the garden path I stifle a yawn, but I am then overtaken by a strange ripple of anticipation and set my eye to watching the children instead. Two little boys, both about eight years of age have been hiding in the bushes near the fence, their blue-grey tunics not conforming to the red of the roses and the green of the leaves. They emerge from the bushes smirking and sneering and I wonder just what it is that they have been doing. Have they been indulging in the perverted excesses of the solitary vice, a vice that so corrupts and destroys innocent youth? There is a little girl dressed in a red and white gingham smock, playing with a doll, tucking it into a stroller, and her mouth is opening and closing as if she is singing, singing a lullaby to her baby. Sad, it is to realise that her tongue is completely mute. It is an interesting act to watch, and I must study this positive as it plays out from the negative, for its implications are riddled with many abstracts. Why would she sing if she cannot articulate? When she becomes an adult woman how will she tell her own children that she loves them?

The two boys climb upon the see-saw, their mouths open and silently laughing, and kicking off one is flung to the heights of joyous abandonment and the other is plummeted to the depths of despair, drawn back to the grasping earth by the unbreakable laws of Newton's gravity. Flying high, up and down, back and forth they go, one skyward and one tethered, but not a sound escapes their lips. Somehow the wild abandoned exigency of the moment seems to imply a tangled discourse about the precocious nature of children, but it stifles their joys with silence. Ernst smiles at the youngsters as he strolls through the garden, but he is not seeing that which I see. I am the exterior, the watcher, the observer and the note taker. Here, as the little bodies are thrust up and then plunged back to earth on the see-saw I am witnessing, not hearing, the voiceless laughter of little boys. That imagined laughter and their play infers a coded discourse to which Ernst remains completely ignorant, walking as he is, slowly towards me as I wait by the door to my laboratory. With a fading echo the church bells cease ringing and the street noise diminishes. The world beyond the fence, if only for a short moment, is forgotten. In that moment, I ask myself again what it was that the boys were up to when they were hiding in the bushes and I am disallowed an answer in that it might prove crude. Yet my speculation is not without justification if I am to understand the polymorphous link between inclination and elaboration, between childhood and adulthood, between purity and debauchery, between life and death.

After a bit, the boys become bored and they clamber from the creaking see-saw and one points a grubby finger at the little girl. Happily, in her subdued role of mother she is wheeling her perambulator among the roses, but then she stops and looks about and the pointing boy pokes out his tongue. Briefly distracted the girl child chases after the boys and the baby is abandoned in the stroller. The three chase each other by another little girl, a girl who hovers beside the ornamental fountain. She is staring into the water, at the carp all reflecting golden scales in the blades of late afternoon sunshine, and there is a stone cherub on a fluted Romanesque column to watch her as she plays. Of course, the stone cherub is a boy, but his genitals have been chipped off, the boy emasculated, and a chaste vine encircles his thigh. The girl remains oblivious to both the statue and the other children as they rush by, and there is another little girl too, the one in whom I am most interested, a little older than the other children, perhaps about eleven or twelve years of age, dressed in a loosely woven folkweave. Her cheeks are ruddy and her eyes half-dreaming, and she is pretty if rather melancholy in appearance. She hovers in the background like a pretty flower, half-way down the garden steps, smelling the bloom of a pink rose, adoring the perfume. No doubt, in the Dispensary wards there are no such perfumes to be smelled, no pleasant joys and no rays of sun. Delicately she strokes the rose petals and then she plucks the flower and sits upon the stairs. A swallow skims into the eaves above and alights upon its nest of mud, its chicks squawking for the worm and she looks up at the tiny bird and smiles. From the glacis, a matron all dressed in a severe black and white uniform watches too. We are all watching aren't we, watching and waiting, but for what? With an abrupt splash, the boys agitate the calm waters in the fountain and having upset that little girl they run to torment the pretty little waif upon the stairs. One of them sits down beside her, and she is placid and smiling, and then the little brute reaches out abruptly and swipes the flower from her hands. Bruised the bloom falls to her feet, and the little devil treads it underfoot. As he tosses back his head in contempt and his mouth stretches wide in silent laughter, the tone of the scene changes abruptly from placid to violent. In a burst of fury, the girl clutches at the boy, striking at him and grasping him, shaking him roughly, pulling at his hair.

'There you are!' I exclaim to Ernst as he halts by my side, waving my folder in the direction of the squabbling children.

'There you are what?' asks Ernst, following the line of my hand and looking to where the children fight.

'In each one of these dumb human animals there is a personality which shows itself only in play.'

'They don't appear to be playing at this particular moment!' Ernst observes wryly. 'Besides, they are not just dumb human animals, Henry, not guinea pigs for your experiments. They are children who cannot speak.'

What instincts are then driving this young girl's mind? The prevailing scientific views are vague, but I suspect a peculiar conversion disorder at work in this child, for the nurse enlightened me that once upon a time this child spoke. What has occurred to find her now mute?

'True, but still I am convinced that in her case the not speaking is a refusal of one part of the mind to allow the other part to express itself freely.' We take a few steps forward into the garden while the matron attends to the scuffle and pulls the brawling children apart. The little girl is breathing heavily and her chest heaves violently, her face is still contorted with anger as her body quivers. The little boy cowers.

'Yet not in all cases, Henry. There are a few of these children who possess no vocal organs at all.'

'I know of the condition Dysphonia, Ernst, you don't have to lecture me, we are no longer in Oxford. I am not talking about organic purpose but rather about my enquiry into other conditions that impair the ability to speak. Perhaps the condition is triggered by some abstract stoppage that prevents the vocal folds from working.'

'You are inferring a mental cause? A mental cause that makes these afflicted children play out what they cannot speak out?'

'Precisely!'

'An interesting theory, and perhaps there is credence in your psychosomatic supposition. However, what therapies do you propose could unlock the mind and impel the vocal chords to speak again?'

'I have none, at present, but I will find the answer, though there is much to learn.'

Ernst remains sceptical, he cannot disguise his doubts. He believes that if the machine is broken sometimes it cannot be fixed. In distraction, he points to a garden box over by the wall, under the eaves and half in shadow. Ernst comments on the wooden crate of loam and hessian that I have placed in the cooler shades.

'I would never have considered you a keen gardener, Henry.'

'Not a keen gardener, Ernst. I am growing the mushrooms for research purposes.'

'How so?'

'By chance, in my third year at Oxford, I remember coming across an old paper, The London Medical and Physical Journal, and in it was described an incident in which a man and his family became affected after ingesting certain fungi.'

'Were they affected for the good, Henry, or does the story make for a more sinister report?'

'You seem suspicious that everything I wish to research is potentially harmful.'

'Call me cautious, Henry,' says Ernst, as he casts his eyes over the golden heads of the mushrooms. 'You know,' he continues, 'that the ancient Aztecs used them in barbarous religious ceremonies?'

'You are worried,' I tell him, 'of the inherent dangers that lie within seemingly innocent things. As you already know, it is called Teonanácatl, Ernst, and to the Aztecs it was like unto the Eucharist.'

'Then is your quest one for understanding the scientific properties of such things or are you merely excusing a romantically spiritual adventure, Henry?'

'The natural world is a complex place, Ernst, wouldn't you agree?'

'A place that is wont to subjective alterations,' he adds in a serious tone. 'You are a scientist not a Shaman.'

For a moment, our conversation stalls and we continue to observe the children playing.

'Do not worry yourself over my welfare, Ernst. I am fine.'

'So, you're the same Henry Jekyll, always obsessed, forever seeking the keys to the locked doors of the mind, even in mushroom beds. Although I venture that sometimes you neglect to acknowledge the reality of the physical reasons behind such afflictions in your quest to prove cerebral causes.' At that moment, I wish to call out to one of the rogue boys not to upset my little harvest, for the imp wanders close and squats and begins prodding a destructive finger into the compost and the mushrooms. The black bonneted matron approaches and pulls him to his feet, reprimanding him sternly by way of a pointing finger. The woman brings before us the little girl and her crushed rose.

'Thank you, Doctor Jekyll.'

The girl holds out the rose and offers it to me. From mushrooms to roses, I tell myself. It is indeed a strange world. The nurse smiles warmly, and that smile a slight ray of happy gratitude among her monochromatic folds.

'They do enjoy coming to your garden despite their minor fracas. They never really want to leave, especially Jane.'

There are so few healtheries in the city, so few parks and playgrounds to promote well-being in the young. So scarce are the commons with flowerbeds and fountains, so few are the playgrounds with see-saws and swings and gymnastic ladders on which to ramble, that my garden to these children must seem like a veritable Eden. Jane looks up at me, her trembling agitation has ceased and it is as if she knows there is perhaps understanding and protection to be had in my shadow. She gives me a wan smile and I gently place my hand on her head.

'Let me drill down through this skull into your silent world, Jane, to the bottom layer of your reality. Let me get inside of your head and I will find the answer, I will liberate your silence, I will find a cure!' Jane looks at me intensely with her deep brown pleading eyes and it is as if she can read my thoughts, and for a moment I am filled with a splendidly Utopian vision that I really have the power to make a difference in a world of misery.

'Come,' gestures the matron to all the children, breaking the almost psychic connection between myself and the girl. She uses a series of signs made with her hands, and for my benefit she says aloud that it is time to go. 'Say goodbye to Doctor Jekyll.'

The little ones all nod and wave because they cannot say goodbye with their tongues, even the incorrigible little boys. It is the nature of their affliction and the underlying cruelty of that silence in a noisy world that intrigues me. Strange how I am haunted by the shadow of my family's funeral paraphernalia, haunted by the societal correlations between the living and the dead; that my mother used to hire people to mourn at funerals and that they were colloquially called 'mummers'. All clad in black they would be paid to stand outside the doors of the funeral home, dressed in their top hats and long tails and sashes, silent in a vigil to protect the corpse within. Out of the building, feet first the dead would be shuffled, lifted high upon shoulders, so that those who mourned would not see the cold stare of death and be marked the next victim. It seemed peculiar to me then, and even now, that these mutes were the symbol of the finality of death, standing watch silently over the last and final bier, a vanguard with stilled tongues that did not even say amen. I recall that these mummers would give the families little narrow decanters fashioned from etched glass, tear catchers, with little cork stoppers, but eventually the tears would be forgotten and the bottles would go dry. These mummers were little more than slaves, spinning cogs in the machinery of a capitalistic regime exploited by my mother's family, those who took opportunities and used them to advantage. As mother so astutely pointed out, on one blustering and cold winter day, when the sky above was turning the colour of cinders, the mummers and the mourners all bedecked in long streamers of crêpe silk and ostrich plume stood shivering in a cortège:

'It's all performance, you know, boy, all performance. They do it not because they want to but because they get paid. Get paid too much for so little!' She had intimated that I observe everyone and look upon their misery and take note. 'See, they are consumed by a Charming Anguish. It is what they want, what they need! Why else would a sane soul come out on a miserable day like this? For love of money of course, not for love of the dead.' Perhaps she was right, perhaps in reality it was all social masquerade and imposture and artificiality, but if you were poor, who would not weep by the grave for a few pennies? I had asked my stepfather, Mr. William Fortune, to forbid the presence of fake mourners at my mother's funeral but he had ignored my request, and yet I am not surprised. Perhaps, if the silence is a performance, it is within my power to help Jane speak again before she becomes a mummer. In a swish of charcoal and black of bonnet, not unlike a mourner herself, the matron precedes her charges through the garden gate, going under the hydrangea and into the lane, and I remind myself to make copious notes of this afternoon's telling infraction.

'You see, Ernst,' I turn to face my visitor and he turns to face me. 'All of my experiments are directed towards the urges of the creature imprisoned within and the consequences of giving that creature liberty. That little girl, as innocent as she is pretty, cannot contain the fury within. It is as if she were possessed of another entirely different personality.'

'In your paper, the paper that began all this trouble, the medical councils disagreed when you wrote of two creatures. Your arguments are at best speculative, Henry, and it could be construed that you seem more concerned with the evils of man's aberrant sexual nature than in an exploration of any positive ramifications.'

'A false and petty accusation, Ernst. The libidinous desires must influence personality and behaviour, but to say that the entirety of my research is only concerned with that aspect is narrow-sighted, and that is far from the truth.' Turning away I step towards my laboratory door and Ernst, like a persistent dog, follows. For a second I pause, entertaining the peculiar thought that it might be me alone teetering upon the brink of knowing the secret of releasing just such a libidinous creature. Ernst would counter my argument and protest that every man holds within a capacity for evil.

'The opinions of the Medical Council are worth little, and they will never agree with one iota of my findings. I believe that in every human personality there are two forces that constantly struggle for supremacy.'

'On a rudimentary level that may be so, Henry, but why do you believe that it is you alone who may be upon the revelation of unlocking that struggle? Many have pondered this problem before you.' Ernst is doubtful. He takes off his hat and hangs it on a clothes peg near the door. 'That is a rather narcissistic point of view. I am one in that Council and I freely admit that I too find your research quite puzzling. To coerce one personality out of the other in the hope of realising two separate entities seems unlikely, and then what does it ultimately achieve? Such an accomplishment may be self-destructive if it is anything.' Ernst looks at me with concern, and his eyes tell me that he is really interrogating me about my personal life, for he thinks that my behaviour and my research is an effrontery to Kitty's social needs. Vindicated, for sex and its motivations lie at the root of his words as much as they seem to believe that it is at the root of my studies, I listen, but am more bored than frustrated by his stance. Ernst supposes that my negative attitude for the real world is socially and personally ruinous.

'I understand,' I tell him, but I feel that it is Ernst who does not understand my words, and that his diatribe is driven by not only a fear of the unknown but by his ridiculous chivalry towards my beautiful wife. Why do all men go so weak in the presence of beautiful women?

'Please don't you think it was somewhat rash to publish your theory before you have actually had time to prove it?' No doubt he thinks I am a fool and his look of concern speaks volumes about his true feelings. 'They talk about your premise as if you have dissected a brain and opened up the mind physically! Just like that fellow Frankenstein!' Inside Ernst's head he has decided that I am variable in my judgment and I fear he must predictably align his views with prejudice. He does not have to say it aloud, that I am not worthy and that my publishing the paper on the condition of dual personality and its sexual ambiguities has only proved to the Academy that my perspective has been clouded by impulse and irresponsibility. They are smug in their inferences that I will be proved wrong, for they have openly challenged my estimations by citing the lunatics at Bethel Green as perfect examples of delusional behaviour. With incredulity, they ask why my findings are any different to the personality disorders that the insane suffer in the mad house.

'I don't have to prove anything,' I reply, piqued by Ernst's obvious contempt, keeping my ire barely suppressed. We enter the laboratory, my folder tucked up under my arm, and as we pace among the hutches the animals look at us through little jewelled eyes. 'Resigning my appointment freed me from idiots,' I tell Ernst, while a cloud of unease washes over his face and colours his ruddy cheeks a shade brighter. He thinks me arrogant, in fact they all thought me arrogant, that is why the professors and I disagreed. 'You think me foolish too, Ernst, but I know those men are no more scientists than I am a priest!'

Here I can almost feel Ernst's resentment, and that even he struggles in his observations of the boundaries that demarcate science from faith, and he still harbours the silly and irrational ideologies of religious piety. To soften the conversation Ernst lies to me and tells me that I have been missed, that the whole faculty used to enjoy my debates. I simply give an incredulous smile as I go from cage to cage clicking the locks open. I will feed the animals their supper after Ernst has gone.

'Yes,' I reply dryly, 'they must have been short on jokes since I resigned. Yet still they pull me down behind my back and smile to my face!'

We stop before the mirror and I place the folder of notes down upon my desk. The glass twinkles in the afternoon light.

'How they laughed at my last lecture,' I utter, unable to conceal the bitter disappointment in my words.

'Was that a valid reason for disappearing from professional life?'

I take a little golden pocket watch from my vest and glance at the time. The afternoon wears on, soon the sun will go down completely and I will be alone with my own shadow, for I know that Kitty intends to go out tonight.

'Marlowe and Blake said that I was of a dismal character, that I had indifferent viewpoints, and Enfield and Lanyon have agreed quite openly that I have little, if no refinement. It seems to them that I have no rightful place and do not belong among either the edifying or didactic cosmology of the institute or in general practice. Be so good as to enlighten me, Ernst, what course should I have taken?'

'Henry, you place over-emphasis on their condemnation of you. It is you who have withdrawn from them, you who have put the cart before the horse, so to speak. You live like a hermit in the middle of London!' Ernst accuses. He waves his hands about the laboratory in feigned exasperation. 'Is it wise?'

'Indeed,' I reply, 'if one does not wish to be torn limb from limb by one's supposed colleagues, it's most wise.'

'Is that fair?'

I wonder blankly just what is it is that he means. Reaching up to a filter I adjust the tap and a thin stream of amber fluid drips into a phial, and then leaving off that distillation I step up to my microscope and peer down into its magnifying eye.

'Who, I ask, in the profession has been fair to me? Everyone treats me as if I were a commoner, an uneducated buffoon. If not that then they imply that I am one of those lunatics who should be locked up in the Bedlam.'

Ernst reaches out and gently touches my hand and taking a deep breath, I reflect for a moment.

'Who apart from yourself,' I tell him, to soften my contempt, 'has even given me a hearing?' Somewhere, inside of Ernst I suspect that there is still a sliver of humanity and faith and understanding, but it does not stem the disdain that I harbour. My visitor detects my anger and offers some advice.

'Forget the profession for a moment.' He comes closer and we are face to face, our images both reflected in the looking glass on the wall. 'What of the others?' His words seem to suggest an unfinished sympathy.

'Of whom do you speak?'

'I speak of those who care for you.' Even in that statement it is difficult to step back from my wounded distance. Then a light gleans upon the truth.

'Ah, yes, of course,' I reply cynically. 'Kitty has spoken to you. She asked you to come.'

With the cat, out of the bag Ernst can no longer pretend concern.

'Think how it is for Kitty,' he pleads, but I shake my head, for even he betrays me yet again. 'Look about,' he says emphatically.

'Look about at what?'

'You live here in this house and you have no servants and no friends, you are a virtual recluse. What is it like for Kitty? What does she think about this?' I am supposed to be admonished, but instead I feel nothing but a cold, cold resentment. No one understands, no one will ever understand.

'In this marriage Kitty has never thought about the importance of my work,' I point out, and I return my eye to the lens of the microscope. 'Her family saw money and she saw prestige.' I hear him groan at my words, but it is such a large world of tears that I see in one tiny drop of liquid. Rudely Ernst reaches up and places his hand over the microscope, obstructing my view.

'Forget your work,' he advises harshly, 'if only for a moment. Your home is in ruins.'

I raise my tousled head and I stare into his face.

'Your life is in dust sheets,' he warns gravely.

'I need privacy for my work,' I protest, and I walk away from Ernst and gather up my notes. 'I can't think about anything else.' Turning my back, I face the mirror and I glimpse dedication not obsession.

Ernst does his best to appear concerned.

'My work,' I tell him, 'is far too near completion for me to stop now.'

Hovering at my back I do not have to see the perplexed look that has clouded up his face, for I hear him sigh in quiet exasperation. That sigh emphasises the distance between the two of us, the distance in understanding, the distance between his ideals and my scientific preoccupations. I place my folder on the bench top and open it, skimming the transcript and muttering in low assonance a peculiar and complicated formula.

'Yet to what end are you working, my dear Henry? What will you prove?'

Ernst walks up behind me and I turn to face him. He blinks and I stare. There is a quiet pause.

'Man has always known that his personality is an uneasy and unsatisfactory combination of conflicting elements.' I look the man squarely in the eye and he shakes his head.

'In another point of view, however we must accept this conflict and support the good in us,' he replies, almost vexed.

'Good? Evil?' I almost laugh out loud as if Ernst were voicing a jest. 'This moral quibbling is useless. I am convinced that man as he is comprised of two beings; one whom I call man as he could be in his perfection. This inner man is beyond the ethics of good and evil.'

Contemplating my words Ernst casts his eyes downward. 'What of the other man?'

'He too is beyond good and evil,' I reply, and my own gaze becomes distant. 'He is man as he would be. Free from all of the restraints and restrictions that civility and society imposes upon us.' I see astonishment in Ernst's face. 'This man,' I continue, 'is subject to his own will.' With a heavy breath, I pull my sagging frame up straight and then I turn away before Ernst can vent an objection. Ernst speaks to my back.

'That would be an exceedingly dangerous man, my friend. For what is it that civilises us other than these moral restrictions, the dictum of which you make so little?'

I come up to my workbench and I reach out and pick up a hypodermic syringe and a cotton wad from a kidney tray.

'We are scientists, Ernst,' I remark coldly, and I am still not looking at him. I justify my stance. 'It is for us to realise and to try to understand every force in nature.' I push the syringe plunger up with my thumb and a thin jet of amber fluid squirts from the needle tip. I turn and face him again.

'This higher man of whom you speak,' says Ernst, 'is perhaps no more than the weaker element in all of us. Perhaps it is just our lust and our violence that feeds the weaker man.' I give a little impertinent smile as I swab the needle. 'That is why,' Ernst pushes his point, 'that there are so few saints and so many sinners.'

I shake my head and feel my lips tighten into a thin slash. Saints and sinners! How my mother, clutching at her rosary would have heartily agreed. It must always come back to fairy tales. Ernst looks at the needle gleaming silver in the dimming light.

'Now, which do you think I am?'

'You cannot cut evil out of man with a scalpel, Henry?'

'How you so readily fall back into the conventional way of thinking, Ernst. I am not that Victor Frankenstein you have been reading about in the papers.' Thus saying, I hand the man the syringe, and Ernst follows me to the monkey's cage and he watches closely as I put on a pair of thick leather gloves. I open the cage. 'I am not concerned with a moral operation but with the control of the human personality by science.' The monkey leaps in its cage as I reach towards it and I see Ernst cringe as it shrieks and jitters. 'Quiet, Totò,' I reassure the creature, 'quietly now.' As I whisper to the trembling rhesus I hold it firmly with one hand and take back the syringe with the other, and Totò screams as I inject the serum into his body. There follows an almost deafening silence, and I truly cannot say what Ernst is thinking, seeing the consternation in his face as I place the monkey back in its cage. I slide the bolt to lock the trap and we both listen, Ernst in horrified awe, as the animal scratches and squeals and paces in the straw.

'Now watch,' I tell Ernst, putting aside the needle and removing the leather gloves. We both stand spellbound in the moment, and soon, within the passing of a few moments, the little creature becomes agitated and begins leaping about in a wild fury. 'See!' I exclaim. 'Even in the most primitive of man's forebears there is an even more primitive, totally unrestrained energy.' As the monkey becomes even more maddened and disorientated I see Ernst take a step back.

'What is this? You have hurt the poor creature. When we are hurt we react. You have turned a placid, affectionate little animal into a miniature devil, and for what reason?'

'You seem horrified, Ernst, but do not worry so. Within four hours, when the drug has worn itself off, he will revert to his former placid self.'

'Indeed, but what of the destruction he may cause while he is still under its influence?' Ernst watches as the monkey spins in frenzy, jumping up and down the length and breadth of the wire, its eyes wild and its mouth a screeching, burning, gnashing orifice. 'He is a danger to himself and to all those within reach of his claws.' The furry little demon throws its body against the cage and swipes at us.

'Totò is a monkey, Henry, and as a poor bedevilled creature any effect you note in him is not going to wholly reflect the same consequences in a person. His agitation is a direct result of how you have prepared your compound, but by what dosage, and how does it work upon the metabolism? Please tell me that you do not intend to use this concoction regarding a human subject, Henry!' I walk away and Ernst follows. 'You have injected a monkey, Henry, with a serum that you have distilled from god only knows what agents, and the creature presents almost instantaneously with what would be described in a human being as a worrying psychotic disorder. Can you not take a violent creature instead, Henry, and with some opposite drug transform it to its higher nature?'

'Of course, I am working to that end,' I remark with exasperation, stung and rebuked by his lack of perception and reprimand. 'However, first I must understand the enemy against whom I fight.'

'Enemy? Fight? Finding the devil is easier than finding god, my friend, but why would you wish to fight either? To where does your research point, Henry?' Ernst approaches and stands before me. As I turn away from his accusations with my lips trembling in suppressed rage, he reaches up and gently grasps my forearm. 'Henry, have you experimented with this drug upon any other creature?' I watch a furrow deepen his brow and some worried light glints in his eyes. 'Take care, Henry, for if you have you must prepare yourself for remorse. Who knows what hellish impulses such a concoction has the potential to release?' He casts a worried glance to the rhesus as it exhausts itself in the cage. Totò quickly reaches his threshold. Ernst's words are stern and they darkly announce the shadow that passes over the wall and splashes across the window. Even as the shade blooms like a cheerless cloud in the open doorway I know instinctively that he is not worried for me. It is Kitty. She is all dressed in white, pretending purity incarnate, her auburn hair shining like a flame, burning in coils threaded through with sparkling pins, golden topaz winking in a pendant about her throat, golden topaz scintillating in teardrops from her white earlobes, golden topaz flashing on her long and slender finger.

'Excuse me, professor,' she interrupts, so sweet, so delicate, so demure, so beautiful, directing her speech to Ernst. Ernst smiles, simpering, felled in the presence of beauty, and he waves her an invitation into my laboratory. 'I'm sorry to disturb you, Henry, but…'

'I am working, Kitty.'

'I'm sorry, Henry,' and a ripple of resentment at my admonition colours her cheek a darker shade of pink. 'Paul Allen is here again.' There is a look of vague disgust in her eyes. Ernst casts his attentive eyes upon us both, but I know he sympathises with my wife. Nonetheless he too, like Kitty, does not understand my friendship with the charming Mr. Allen, and he never will. Neither wife nor friend understands the 'Gospel of Comradeship', and from what well that amity might have sprung, for both are blinkered, and both enjoy their middle-class double standards as if it were their privilege. Unforgivably, Kitty insults and embarrasses me with her whining.

'Don't give in to him again, Henry. He is such a useless waster!' It is with suppressed ire that I quell the flame of resentment that Kitty has lit within me by complaining about my friend. Indeed, Paul Allen may well be a waster but it is not her money he wastes and it is none of her affair. Noting the discomfort and the emotional difficulty of the moment Ernst gallantly interrupts.

'You will excuse me,' he says, distracting Kitty from her coming tirade and respecting the need for domestic privacy. 'I will be late if I do not go now. I have a lecture to attend at the University, and my good friend Dr. John Pritchard, who is soon to be leaving these shores for Australia, is opening the forum and I cannot miss his talk. It is his last lecture before he departs, and it promises to be most interesting. His reiteration of Dr. Freud and the pleasure principle has been causing a quite a stir. Perhaps you might like to come with me, Henry? The lecture seems relevant to your own researches.' I tell him no, but Ernst is so officious and like his colleagues, pompous, and I know that his own talk will be less about medical practice and more about the need for economy and prudence in the poor convalescent institutions. Regardless that I loathe to intermingle with society, the odd anecdote falls into my ears. Did I not hear tell that Pritchard too has ruffled the feathers of the medical faculties? It is rumoured that he is a man notorious for his visits to Pentonville and Millbank. Although I have never actually met the man, I believe Dr. Pritchard is one of the few who shares some of my sentiments regarding the man within. Nonetheless, has not Dr. Pritchard been slumming it again of late among the prisons and the prostitutes? It has been reported that the good doctor has recently become ward to a young waif from the Whitechapel slums, a girl called Anna, whom he rescued from the house of a murdered medium, a Mrs. Golding. That Anna is said to be but seventeen years of age, makes one wonder if his intentions are completely noble. Perhaps Dr. John is grooming her for an experiment, just as I am interested in little Jane's mute condition. Though I believe I can find Jane's cure through drugs, conceivably Pritchard follows Freud, and wants to probe into Anna's unconscious mind, go deep into the cauldron of her thoughts. Yet did not Freud propose that under the surface of the flesh, in the mind, await manifestations of deeply repressed conflicts? Whatever is Pritchard to find in Anna? I suspect his departure for the antipodes has been spurred by the Academy's unbending and transparent snobbery and perhaps a quiet impropriety. Ernst slides between Kitty and myself, coolly dissipating an unpleasantly tangible atmosphere.

'Oh, Ernst, do stay a bit longer,' and there is faint hint of repudiation in my words. 'It's so good to have someone around who understands,' I extend my plea, almost choking on my insincerity.

I see Kitty blanch at the falseness of my statement. She stares in umbrage. Ernst retrieves his hat from the peg on the wall. 'I will come again, as soon as I can,' he reassures, and he walks to the door, pausing briefly to say goodbye. When Ernst Litauer has stepped from the room Kitty stands before me, pleading.

'Let me tell Paul Allen to go.'

Do I catch just the slightest glint of disgust in her eyes and perhaps she protests too readily? 'All Allen ever wants is money, my dear.' I hear her make an almost inaudible groan, but I suspect a faint element of insincerity in her words.

'Tell him that I will sign his notes as usual.'

Kitty is aghast. Watching her beautiful face screw up and discolour in livid displeasure is half-amusing.

'Henry, he takes advantage of you!' She pauses, her tongue dipping into vitriol. 'If only you'd give a little more attention to…' it is then that she catches herself as I cut off her words.

'If only you could begin to understand, Kitty.'

There is a steely glow in her eyes and even as I look on I watch them freeze over and harden into blue ice.

'What is there to understand, Henry?' I do not answer. Wishing not to engage in one further syllable of this ridiculous conversation I abruptly turn my back upon my wife, and walk away. In frustration she spins about, a groan of ire escaping from her carmine lips and she struts briskly to the laboratory door and closes it rudely upon her exit. When she is gone I pull the shade over the window, but there I hover, peeking through a crack beyond the lintel, watching, spying as she walks into the garden and meets with Ernst.

'What do you think, Ernst?' she asks, raising her sculpted eyebrows and shaking her head. The waning sunlight winks in her topaz earrings.

'I am perplexed,' says he, 'and to be quite frank, a little frightened.'

'You too!'

'Henry is working in a highly dangerous field.'

'He locks himself in that laboratory.' She casts an eye over her shoulder and motions in my direction, but I know that she cannot see me. 'He shuts himself in there for days and nights on end.' Nervously she takes a few paces away from the building and walks with Ernst towards the garden gate. 'Of late he has been looking so ill, and so much older!' Is that genuine concern in her voice? 'A few weeks ago, I had to carry him to bed!'

'Was he in a stupor?'

'It seemed so, because he was so detached from the world, from me, that he hardly recognised me. Oh, Ernst, I swear I do not know what is happening with Henry.'

'Forgive me, my dear, but I have noted a degree of deterioration in his normal social functioning and in his appearance.'

'He got up again out of bed as soon as he could walk!'

'You should have sent for me.'

'He wouldn't let anyone examine him, least of all anyone from the Medical Council. Oh, Ernst…' Here Kitty pauses and her sapphire eyes are aglow with what I can only describe as fear. 'One whole night,' she continues brokenly, 'it was terrible.' Kitty bites her lower lip and casts her glance to the earth, as if in doing so she can silence her tongue, but unlike my mute children she will voice her concerns.

'Tell me,' Ernst insists. 'Tell me…'

'I was so frightened.'

'Frightened, Kitty, of your husband?'

I feel a peculiar empathy striking a match in my heart. I don't want that Kitty should be frightened of me because of my experiments, but I only wish that she could understand, and learn to support me rather than oppose my research.

'Tell me the facts,' Ernst urges gently, and she wrings her hands together and then touches her forehead.

'I heard him in his room. He was shouting!' she states emphatically. 'It was such a terrible sound that I thought a robber had broken into the house and was assailing him. It…'

'It was a fever,' says Ernst, his face all knotted up with concern, but he wants to placate Kitty. 'A fever brought on by exhaustion.'

'Ernst… the voice, it was a strange and frightening voice that I heard!'

'Voice? What kind of voice do you mean? A man's voice?'

'Oh, Ernst, it was vile! The language was filthy. I cannot repeat what was said! I hope no one who lives nearby has heard those crude and ugly words.'

'I see,' Ernst whispers, giving Kitty an understanding nod and glancing in the direction of my laboratory. I stand back, behind the blind but I know there is nothing for Ernst to see. 'Kitty, my dear,' he begins tentatively, 'there is nothing wrong with Henry that rest and yourself cannot cure.' Kitty does not appear to believe him, if he really believes himself!

So, dear Ernst, you think me exhausted. You are indeed a blinded fool!

'Rest perhaps, but not me,' Kitty replies, and at least in that she is practical and honest. 'I can't cure anything for him.'

'You are married to a man of great talent, genius perhaps. Even I do not pretend to understand his depths. Such men are always difficult to live with, and surely you must realise…'

'Tell me frankly,' Kitty cuts abruptly into his dialogue, 'could his mind be seriously disturbed?' They pause in their conversation. There are no words upon the subject that Ernst would professionally wish to pronounce. The two of them stand face to face, each seeking answers and each confused.

'Disturbed?'

'Yes, disturbed seriously enough for him to be sent away.'

'Sent away?'

'Yes, to a place like Engerfield, or the Vandorf Medical Institute?'

Ernst raises his bushy eyebrows and his forehead creases with deep concern. He is not certain what Kitty is suggesting, for such places are the void, Gehenna, the pit, the inferno! Dismissing her veiled suggestions as foolish he gives a little, reassuring smile. 'Despite the mind being an intricate and puzzling place, I think you worry excessively, my dear. Henry is obsessed with his experiments, he seeks for accurate description in the world, driven to understand how and why things work so that he can modify the process of life, and improve upon its idiosyncrasies. His mind is not exacerbated by madness, and we must not excuse our fears in a casual reference to his supposed insanity. Sometimes, I think, we ourselves lose track of logic and reason. His is an intellectual challenge and such concentration is unwise, but he is hardly insane.'

Kitty sighs in return. She knows that there can be no controlling my mind and my actions simply because she has not felt the sentiment of love for such a long time. Her case for my insanity is far too transparent.

'Then my question, so it seems, is merely rhetorical? If accessing Henry's mind, his thoughts, his reasons, is an almost incomprehensible task, then getting through to it must come from someone he trusts. Despite whatever you might think, Ernst, it is you who must try to help him.'

'We must both try to help him.'

Oh, how they discuss me as if I were a child! As if I am the one who needs help! Like one of my mute subjects they think that I do not possess the courage to respond to their cruel words.

'Yes,' Kitty utters resignedly, 'we must.'

'Well,' returns Ernst, 'if I do not go now I will be terribly late and I will miss Pritchard's final lecture. Goodbye, my dear. I will let myself out this way.' Ernst walks to the garden gate and exits through into the back lane and heads towards the intersection and Morley Street, and the half-heard sounds of the falling eve are stirred up and drift into my smarting ear. There are horses drawing carriages over the cobbles and I can hear a man calling to another. Once the gate has closed Kitty is left standing alone in the garden. For a moment she is motionless, like a white pillar upon which sits a perfectly sculpted bust. She is not smiling. Kitty looks up. Her gaze is directed towards the house. Through the back door she sees a tall man in a dark grey suit. He has removed his hat and coat and placed them over the end of the sofa, and he is dressed in the ever-ubiquitous silk vest and cravat, and he is pacing back and forth before the door. Although Kitty's face is impassive it is still registering a cold emotion. With a hurried step, she walks along the landing and into the house. The man swings about and faces her and his face is most handsome, but blank, shaved and smooth as is a mask, perfumed with cologne. His eyes are blue and his hair black, but slightly grey about the temples. Paul Allen does not smile.

'Well?' he utters, as if she will accuse him of having no right to be here.

'Well, what?' Kitty replies flatly, her Hellenic beauty frozen into stone.

'Don't look so grim, Kitty,' says the man, pausing in his speech. Kitty walks past him and they navigate to the sitting room. The parlour seems frosty and is uninhabited by any phantom resembling love, the grandfather clock ticking off ennui in a haunted, listless space. 'I hate to ask him for help,' the man continues, 'just as much as you hate me for asking for it.'

'At least you admit that the situation lacks dignity.' Oh, the kitten has unsheathed its claws.

'Well, what did he say?'

In exasperation Kitty flings out her hand, resorting to emotion and frustrated by the ugliness of her position. 'Paul, you and Henry are such children!' She looks at Paul Allen and she is trying to probe beneath that handsome, Eau de Parfum scented skin, but she cannot find the answer to the riddle. The man might be blessed with a silver-tongue and a sparkling smile that oft makes women swoon, but the charm oddly enough seems to extend to men as well. If only it were possible to know the connection between Paul and her husband, to be able to desquamate that fragrant, urbanite coil and look within she might be able to understand both men. The handsome Mr. Allen, a man who might be anything up to forty years of age, has been a regular visitor in this house for some time, since her marriage to Henry, and Kitty has still not gleaned the merest sliver of information regarding Paul Allen's past. Kitty finds that whenever she probes in the direction of unravelling the association between the two men, either Paul or Henry become mysterious and deflect. This makes her only wonder deeper, for what could possibly have hold over her husband that he entertains an idler and a ne'er-do-well? In the back of Kitty's mind there lingers the vague suggestion of some unspeakable attraction, morbidity even, giving weight to the uncomfortable idea of a questionable physicality between the two that she wishes to deny but cannot displace. In his pursuit of the risky ticket to financial success and dissipation, Paul's relationships with others sometimes implicate the need for a socially interchangeable behaviour. No, thinks Kitty, vehemently shaking the idea away, it isn't possible, Paul is a ladies' man and the notion that he might have… Kitty stops the thought.

'I don't understand the two of you, truly, I don't!' Kitty shakes her head as she speaks, yellow luminance scintillating in her earrings as they dance back and forth. She deliberately draws the moment out so that Paul will wind up like a spring. 'As long as you have your toys and money enough for all of the pleasures in life and he has his mouldy old laboratory, you're both happy!' She smiles bitterly. 'Yet where does that leave me? With nothing and unhappy, I regret to say.'

'Damn it, Kitty!' Paul ejaculates abruptly. 'The hounds are at my heels! Stop enjoying yourself and tell me about it!'

'Enjoying myself! Such is the misconception of all men! It's so true, men can live their fantasy. Do I look like a woman who is enjoying herself?'

She approaches Paul slowly and stands before him.

'Against my wifely advice, dear Paul, yes, Henry will save you once again.'

Paul Allen makes a vocally emphatic sigh of relief in response to Kitty's cynical look, and he smiles.

'You are too good to me, Kitty,' he tells her, closing in to stand close before her niveous form, the light is twinkling in his cobalt eyes.

'I am,' she tells him, 'far too good!'

'I won't ever put you in this position again,' he grovels, failing to extract even a minimum of sincerity from his plea. 'Believe me. I don't want you to lie for me again.'

'Of course, you don't,' she tells him.

Inches separate their bodies and Kitty is looking into his face.

'I don't deserve you, Kitty,' says Paul, and his perfect lips widen into a shining smile as Kitty raises her arms and encircles them about his neck.

'You don't!' she replies, her voice sultry, and she kisses him lightly upon his warm mouth. 'Yet I deserve you,' she tells him, breaking the ethereal flutter of her perfumed kiss. 'I deserve nothing better than you!' It might just be possible that Paul's attraction to her is indeed an act, a deviant performance, goaded by self-advancement and easy money. Certainly, it is true that no entertainment seemed too scandalous for the man, and when he uses his charm and allure he almost transgresses what is considered respectable, male behaviour. Paul though, does not appear to overly care, and he does not sorrow in deception at this moment as Kitty's kiss becomes ardent, passionate and thrilling. Paul holds Kitty against his body and she can feel his manhood responding to her body, pressing against her thigh. Lost for a moment she draws a long breath, gasping against the heat that is flaming up from her core. The kiss is lingering, Paul's tongue searches hotly within her mouth, his hands are fevered, and Kitty's sighs are loud, and there are no servants to hear, for she has given Nanny the afternoon free. There is no one to carry tales of their love, no one to betray their passion. Beyond the parlour, beyond the windows and the doors, beyond the laboratory and the gate and garden, yonder Morley Street and the boroughs, the evening slides home from the west.

Chapter 3

The Khazneh

'The vine bears three kinds of grapes

The first pleasure, the second intoxication, the third disgust.'

Diogenes

I have recorded this afternoon's events into my journal, and I have also commenced notes according my theory as to why the girl Jane cannot speak. Whether her mute reactions to the world are caused through realism or illusion, whether it is even possible to quantify this child's inner struggle and find the solution to the muteness it is difficult to speculate, but I shall continue to deliberate upon her condition and hopefully determine if the illness is in her head or truly biological. Of course, it is important to understand her stressors, so at some point I must arrange an interview, to examine Jane and somehow determine her history. Perhaps only then can I glimpse another side to the rage within, that rage being the result of trauma perhaps, and if its effects are serious and ever-lasting or if they are mild and might be cured. Cured possibly with one of my drugs. Once again, I am reminded of Dr. John Pritchard who has a similar interest in his new ward, a young woman suffering some terrible post stress due to an unspecified childhood ordeal. However, his researches are directed down the path of Freud. Perhaps he believes that he can unlock the mind simply by probing into the past, and that fatherly love is the key to healing.

In the weak lamplight, at my desk, even as I ponder these things, these human conditions, my quill scratches threads of ink across my page. These notes will guide me, and surely at some point they will fire the trigger that shoots my questing brain the answer. I hear the light sound of footsteps in the path, and I put down my quill, and a moment passes before my laboratory door opens. Looking up from my journal I see Kitty. She is gloriously lovely, robed in a sparkling evening gown that accentuates her curves. A brilliant and bright moon is reflected in the eagerness of her eyes. Kitty stands in the door frame, pinned into a swathe of mazarine blue, a shade that makes adamantine the voluptuous ruby of her lips. Tied off at her throat is a cape of a hue lighter blue, thrown across her shoulder, and she is holding her satin gloves. Kitty has exchanged the topaz for a diamond and at her wrist is a fan a shade lighter again.

'I'm sorry you won't come,' she tells me, pretending ire at my obstinacy. I look down at my page and a spot of midnight blotches in the margin. Why do I feel quite suddenly pained, even dour? Within my gloomy coil I can see straight down into the abyss and I catch a tiny spark there, red with anger.

'How can you bear these endless dinner parties, Kitty?' My wife throws up her hands in exasperation. She even laughs at me.

'Oh, they can be quite gay!' she espouses, sweeping her arms about the room and then stopping the motion, pointing at my microscope and the apparatus. 'These parties are so much livelier than whatever you pursue locked up in this musty old crypt!'

'You don't even enjoy the company of these people, do you?'

'How would you know, Henry? You never come!' She gives a sly twist of her mouth, and in that there is a suggestion that her words might be a cruel slur directed at my manhood. I disregard her nasty little stab.

'I know that you would have to listen to a lot of braying asses who detest me, full of cant and hypocrisy.'

'Yes, they dislike you. Well, they do not dislike me! These are my friends, Henry. It's a pity that you don't have any, but it's lucky for me that I still do!' Insulted I push back my chair and walk up to stand beside her. Kitty does not flinch.

'Kitty…' My eyes search her beautiful face. Kitty begins to don her gloves, and as I approach I am a stranger who gingerly reaches out and hesitantly touches the cool ivory skin of her bare shoulder. She stares me with an eye of disdain.

'Let's both take the evening off- you from being social and me from being antisocial.' Kitty's red lips open wide with mocking laughter. The lioness bears her teeth.

'Please,' I implore, 'let's just be together tonight.' My wife shudders under my touch and pulls back a step and divides the space between us, and my fingers flutter in empty air, their tips still warm with her heat, still scented by the lingering fragrance of cherry sweet Crown Esterhazy.

'How ridiculous, Henry! Diana Ashburnham would never forgive me if I failed to show. It would ruin her table!' I try to conceal the hurt and the pain that pinches at my heart.

'Yes, of course. How stupid of me,' I reply quietly crestfallen. 'Above all we must not upset Lady Ashburnham's social arrangements.'

'You really are selfish, Henry. Your asking is too little too late.' The tide of foolishness is now washing its course throughout my veins, and I am at a strange loss as to know from where this random fit of pique has come. As a man, I have always resisted the merry call that predisposes women to felicity and public weakness, and Kitty's social soirées are no exception. She has resented me for being a bore and accuses me in my cultural inertia of lacking sophistication, and that I live in silence and denial. One evening, I recall that she even implied that I was abnormal, a freak, stating that our marriage had descended into a farce and that I had finally transgressed the limits of the natural world. Had I wanted a housewife who would be meek and attend to domestic orderliness, to care for my whims and to look like a doll, to be pliable in bed and to uphold a hypocritical moral rectitude, then perhaps I should not have married her!

'Now, Henry,' she quickly replies, lacing her words with a bitter and condescending tone, 'would it be fair?' All emotion has peeled away from her face and there is only quinine in her tone. 'You should have said you wanted me to stay home this evening. I believe I did ask you and I believe you did refuse me.' My inner feelings begin to whirl, and am to find myself reduced to begging? Begging because I know that something monumental is in the workings tonight. Something that I cannot explain, but perhaps Kitty's beauty, perhaps Kitty's love can stem that rising tide and hold the waves of black back from the quaking shore of night.

'I need you tonight, Kitty. Please stay home.'

'Oh, really, Henry,' Kitty replies in utter exasperation, her red lips quivering upon the point of anger. 'It's too selfish of you to make such an issue now. You have had ample opportunity in the past to engage in a life outside of this tomb!' She spins about, turns away from me and her words fly across the room. 'I don't know how many times you've prevented me from going to dinner, how many invitations you have made me reject. Not this time! You may not need any friends but I do!' I watch her ascend to the door, a pillar of pale ice, an iceberg in the North Atlantic, deeper beneath the surface but infinitely as cold. 'I am not going to insult Lady Ashburnham for the sake of your whims.'

I hear the door close with an emphatic bang and I listen until her slipper-clad feet no longer shuffle on the pavers, until the hansom cab arrives and takes her away into the night to Lady Ashburnham's glittering residence. I am alone. For a short moment, I stand isolated from the rest of the world, poised upon the brink of darkness and loathing, and I am speechless, as mute as the children who were playing in my garden, as silent as the mummers who stood beside Bullstrode and Holroyd's coffins. Totò makes the only sound, a pathetic squeak as he revives groggily from his drugged torpor. Standing uneasily on his back legs the little monkey rattles at the cage. He must be thirsty. When I have given the animal a bowl of water and locked his cage again, I go to the laboratory door and make certain that it too is secured, and then I draw the curtains over the blind at the window and I plunge the room into secretive, lamp-lit shadows. Alone in the stillness where no one can see I cross to a miniature oak cabinet and take out an unadorned tin box and a measuring glass. With trembling fingers, I pick up a phial of my distillation, swirling in the tube it glows amber in the lamp light, sparkling like resin. From the tin box, I take out a hypodermic syringe and I screw in the sharp and glinting sliver of the needle, this I plunge into the elixir, drawing it up into the needle's reservoir. When the syringe is full I rest it upon the bench-board, and then I roll up my shirt cuff, binding it tight against my forearm, feeling the restricted blood flow beginning to pulse and to throb. A wave of excitement and terror is rising within my flesh, and my head screams out danger but my flesh wants ecstasy. I confess that this is not the first time that I have tested my formulas on myself, the human subject that concerns Litauer so, and worries Kitty to fear my sanity for the sounds of threatening and obscene voices in my laboratory. This is my third experiment; where twice before the effects were short-lived, I hope this time to prolong the result and unleash in triumph- man as he should be.

With a clean cotton swab I disinfect my skin, and then I steady my fingers and I pick up the needle and I slightly depress the plunger. A thin stream of fluid jets up and sprays into air, and instantly the syringe becomes a vacuum, and then I place its cruel tip over the blue and distended vein in my arm, close my eyes, and the cold, narrow arrow bites into my body. A momentary stab of pain follows in which I cannot help but flinch, a moment wherein the sharp little tip breaches the outer layer of my coil and slides coldly beneath the epidermis. Without hesitation, I squeeze the plunger and the hypodermic injects its drug into my vein, burning into my bloodstream like larval fire, its yellow tide flooding into the canals that flow to my heart, to my brain, to my testes. My penis goes rigid and a wave of sick pleasure ripples through my body. A trickle of scarlet blood leaks from the wound as the needle withdraws. Having retracted the silver barb, I place the syringe down upon the counter and I wipe away the blood and pull down my cuff and sleeve. Shivering I take an audible breath. I return the instruments to their tin box, locking them away once more in their little timber cabinet, and I take out my pocket watch and I wait. I can read my name engraved upon the front medallion as I open the watch, Henry Jekyll, and it peels apart like a flower, like the golden petals of a chrysanthemum, revealing its spinning clockwork mechanisms on one side and the hour, the moment, the second on the other. Time passes as the heartbeat throbs and nothing seems to occur, and staring at the slim and elegant second hand ticking off time I sense my breath slowing, my pulse sounding noise in my ears. The gentleman's timepiece seems to become heated in my palm, the clock face begins throbbing. Briskly I walk to my desk and sit down, tucking the watch back into my pocket, and I feel the staggered palpitations of my heart become more pronounced, the pulse rushing up the length of my sex, and all at once, quite violently, I feel sick.

The room begins to shift, an unnatural occurrence in a natural environment, the walls, the angles, the furniture, the tubes and bottles and the animal cages all begin to misalign and this visual hallucination is accompanied by sharp and painful contractions in my facial muscles. There is a terrible spike in my brain and my lips want to stretch wide in a scream. My heart pounds and batters at the insides of my ribs, and in my head, I can hear a shrieking scream that mimics a rapid boom of thunder commingled with the shattering of plate glass. The desk shudders in the tremor of an earthquake and a trembling numbness is overtaking my flesh, as if I were freezing into ice and then burning, overcoming my will and overcoming my identity, my tenuous link to reality and the world. I recall the whole room spinning, reeling like a whirling carousel and I was madness chained to a grinning painted horse. Within the maelstrom I imagined that I tasted the vilest turgescency, a cascade of rank sourness that spilled out of my mouth and spattered upon my desktop. Convulsing I collapsed, falling face forward into the vomit and the putridity, and the bile sizzled like hot acid, and there I twitched and shuddered and at length my vision receded into endless night and nothing.

Some gentlemen's clubs serve the aristocracy, some serve the military and the affluent, and other disreputable establishments serve a garish clientele of young bucks over a bottle, a whore, tribades, and perhaps even a sodomite or two. If you have never been to such an establishment, then pursuing this tour will be like opening the door to a hitherto locked room. For the gentleman's club to which I will now take you, the Khazneh, like its ancient namesake, stands in a thoroughfare that strikes off the main road and edges upon the fringes of decent society. Hesitating as we arrive before our destination, I see you pause below the lintel. You are not sure if you wish to go in? Oh, come now, do not be embarrassed. Who shall know you here? Besides, there are none that care! 'Between the sublime and the ridiculous there is but one step' sayeth Napoléon Bonaparte, and truer words were never spoken. Regardless, that one step will take us beneath this carved faux Nabataean portico and into a temple of debauchery. Beyond these columns decorated with garlands, beyond those high and four stone eagles and the sculpted friezes of dancing Amazons, we shall encounter all manner of dissoluteness, to lesser or greater degrees, of course. Whatever is to your taste. This shrine to wantonness serves the dilettante as much as it serves the ruffian, for every man here cultivates vice, and any past exclusivity has long been eroded in favour of a rapid descent into human foible and ready cash. This club does not exist for the delights of impassioned discussion or democratised masculinity, gentlemen do not meet here for conviviality, but rather it whirls with a much faster pace, teeming with the wilder life. Here these people, mostly fallen women in their lost collective and their social dislocations, haunt this gaudily lit, smoky outpost on the fringes of London society. In this arena the gentlemen, whatever their excuses, all abandon sophistication for decadence. Within the walls of the Khazneh, in the foremost salon, you may witness these gentlemen playing at whist and faro and quinze and hazard and dice, betting at high stakes the outcome of card games and of human eccentricity alike while the women cavort in little apparel indeed.

However, upstairs, in the private rooms, for the thrill, many well-to-do gentlemen pursue carnal lust. For in this music hall many have adopted the arrogant belief that here man is free of the rigid constraints of domestic conventionality. At home, he cannot do as he pleases, but in the dancing lamplight and the burning candle flame, in this place of prurient liberty, a gentleman may do what he wishes. The Khazneh is not the stuffy and cloying home wherein the gentleman husband and father must endure a wife he has cloistered in an oubliette of ennui, but rather a palace of carnal dreams. For in the home, lascivious desire is not discussed, nor are the erotic parts of the body, where female flesh is covered from head to foot, exposing no thigh, no neck and no ankle. If the piano legs are covered at home they are fully exposed here! At home, such allusions to connexion are always avoided, and such thoughts and actions are all but forbidden the virtuous wife and Madonna. Decent women do not discuss the aforesaid perils of passion, for fear that their moral, spiritual and physical health might be endangered. Nor could they entertain the gratuitous idea of a vibrant décolleté. Not surprisingly the private receptions of the Khazneh pulsate with the luminous flesh of Aphrodite, flesh paraded within its colourful walls where no man need behave as he behaves at home. In rapacious gluttony, while they imbibe copious libations of wine and smoke cigars, the clientele revel in the sumptuous and the extraordinary forms of pleasure that are embodied in the lustful flesh of the joie de vivre, talented girls versed in the art of erotic expression. As the Spanish Major Domo will enlighten you, in this pleasure dome little is prohibited, if one plays by the rules and as long as there is money to pay for any treat. Not much then is denied the moral folly of lawyers and magistrates, ministers of cabinet, affluent businessmen, the aberrations of doctors and judges, police inspectors, military officers and ramblers- as long as their purses are full of coin.

Remember to look about as you come through the door, observe the tawdry opulence and the rococo embellishment, and glimpse too those scantily-clad women whose waists are pinched into whale bone corsets, wearing netted stockings, glass tiara's and bedecked in colourful plumes like birds of paradise. These girls entice with chalk paste faces, ruby rouge upon their lips and ample curves. There are robust and handsome young men to leer and to curse, like that young and brooding tough over there, and observe the lechers and the drunkards pawing at the women. The Major Domo, in her pin-striped trousers and ruffled shirt and velvet waistcoat, with her hair pinned to a bun atop her head, will not deny that here is queer visibility too. Some men, in their erotic peculiarities prefer an undisguised preference for their own sex, and to entertain such tastes some of the women even dress up as boys, unperturbed by the construction toute différente, and even diversely employ artificial expedients. Many a gentleman has blanched at the hard length of the leather godmiché and had his senses enlivened with much more than playing at dice and dominoes and gambling cards. Much more than he could ever dream of experiencing at home! Erotic volatility is often half-expected, and sometimes brawls break out between the young men, but all this in the natural nervous system of the Khazneh. Amid this concentration of available sensuality, a man is allowed much, yet you may wonder if such sensational and scandalous behaviour is genuinely au sérieux? The filaments of libertine culture and the upper crust of society are undeniably entwined here, knitting together propriety with impropriety, but such is the paradox. Is it simply perverse decadence or natural desire, and is it all performance despite the blush of shame that stains the cheeks? Nonetheless, regardless of any amoral indulgences, all this colour contrarily eschews the essence and anatomy of conformity, for the gentlemen all eventually must go home to their wives.

If you have a taste for jaunty adventures and you are not repulsed into indignation, then come along and join in, and forget your reserve. As your host, I will guide you amid the tables and the singing and the noise, the drinking and smoking, the gambling, and the many erogenous possibilities for fornicating to partake in the humorous spectacle of human depravity. I bid you recall the four stone eagles that over-watch the entrance, for they are perched above our heads, ready to sweep down upon our enclave and fly us snared in their claws into the temple of dissolution. Step up; I bid you, fellow thrill seekers, for it is time to go inside, to greet the Major Domo and enjoy the swirling palette that the Khazneh shall offer.

The room is gilded and therein are naked Hellenic sculptures that stand vigil over human detritus. Tobacco haze drifts blue in the atmosphere, and upon a raised dais a small band of musicians play a lively polka. The dance floor whirls with a maelstrom of colour. Dancers trip by to the tempo of the tune, their feet lighter than air, and their heads reeling. The sparkling light cast by a myriad chandelier candles washes over the polished timber floors and illumed with star-glow is every flashing eye. Pretty girls spin about in dizzying circles, clad in little more than sequins, their breasts swelling in low cut bodices. Handsome young men, and not-so-handsome old men partner the girls in the dance. The warm light makes the dance floor into a mirrored lake of spectrums and reflections. Paul Allen and Kitty are dancing. Above their heads the leaded-glass ceiling opens a view to the wheeling galaxies, clusters of stars and planets and moons all spinning just like dancers are spinning, but out there, up there in the deep and velvet dark of eternal space. Paul holds Kitty close, feeling the softness of her bosoms against his broad chest, but for some reason she feels tense tonight, and cold.

'My dearest, Kitty,' he addresses her solemnly, talking loudly above the strident violins. 'Have I ever complained against any of your charms?'

With a brief but foolish laugh, she throws back a reply. 'Your boredom is only too evident. It's my fault, I know.'

Paul is about to admonish her for her ennui, but she turns her head and looks away from his face, listlessly revolving in the dance and watching the revellers become a spinning blur.

'What is your fault, Kitty? That tonight seems less than magical, is that the issue, is there no more excitement? They say familiarity breeds contempt.'

'A woman who shows her feelings always loses her dignity,' she replies in a pathetic, matter-of-fact tone. As she speaks her cheeks burn with little roses and she looks to her feet, biting her lower lip. Kitty does not want to appear petulant and a stab of regret has run into her heart. Perhaps she should have remained a little longer at Lady Ashburnham's prandial, but it had been awkward there without Henry, among all those tosh fools and their talk of money and status. How she has tired so quickly of Lady Diana's dull bourgeois promenading of class relations and luxury. For those who care, Diana Ashburnham's dinners are said to be the highest acme of grandeur, and is it surprising that Kitty, without her husband in attendance, has become the subject of whispered conjecture? This has induced embarrassment and then boredom. The fact of his absence has provided Diana Ashburnham with lots to gossip about, and more to indulge during her next soiree, one that Kitty instinctively knows that she will not be attending. The sting of humiliation has hurt Kitty, and keeping Lady Ashburnham's good graces has proved too difficult. In this esteemed company, Kitty might as well be as insignificant as is a speck of dust. Lost in a great vaulted dining room, under its opulent chandelier, arranged like an incongruous piece of art among the furnishings, Kitty tries to sparkle. Alas, Kitty is a tiny, but beautiful light whose lustre is waning, illuminated singly in her segregation from the other guests, picked out in her blue and her diamonds under the beams of etiolated light from those high teardrop crystals. The guests drink and talk and eat, wiping their lips on the crisp, starched white napkins spread beside their fine tableware. Kitty watches them as they lift the lethal, gleaming silverware to their lethal, nasty mouths. Silverware as sharp and serrated as is Lady Ashburnham's tongue. Unable to eat the strangely perfumed Eastern cuisine that Lady Ashburnham's kitchens have presented, Kitty feigns a headache. She is disconnected as she searches amid the dinner guests, searching to find a face that she can warm to, someone to trust, but there is no one she can trust amid all this gaudy luxury. Perhaps Henry has been right all along, perhaps they really are nothing but braying asses.

Surrounded by so many pompous and elitist stiff-collars, Mrs. Jekyll has thus excused herself from the unpleasant conviviality of trite conversations about wealth and profession, knowing her husband a recluse and collectively frowned upon. The Good Lady has condescendingly excused and released Mrs. Jekyll from her social contract. Diana Ashburnham has expressed her concern for Kitty's sudden ailment, and suggests that perhaps Henry can make her a powder to relieve her pain. With a self-satisfied smirk, the Lady Ashburnham has commanded a servant to fetch a cab, but the cab, contrarily, has not taken Kitty home at all, instead it has delivered her into the arms of the charming Paul Allen, and he will help her to forget about stifling social etiquette. They have drifted into the limbo of Domdaniel. The Khazneh now finds them dancing but it does not find them entirely happy.

'Oh, come, Kitty, I offer to show you the more amusing side of respectable society, and it bores you intolerably when I do! Don't sulk.'

'Is all this tedium so especially amusing to you? Why, in me it fails to light the merest spark.'

'Now be fair,' Paul replies, pointing out how Kitty must admit 'that all of those important gentlemen you meet at those sedate dinner parties would agree with me that there is no entertainment that sex cannot provide!'

'Is that all that my husband's money is good for, sensual gratification? You should take care, considering you are most generous with it, dear Paul.'

They watch an older gentleman whisper into the ear of a pretty young thing, and without giggles, without hesitation the two leave the dance floor and walk towards the stairs that lead up to the private salons. Paul throws back his head and laughs.

'Women,' he declares, and Kitty arches her eyebrow, 'they are perfect!'

'You are a fool, Mr. Allen.'

'Still, you are the most perfect woman of them all. You so easily swing from the perfect wife to the perfect mistress and then back to the perfect wife again! All within a few hours!'

'How dare you insult me, Paul? I am not a common prostitute.'

Paul's arms enclose Kitty's body, a little more tightly. In his grasp, in his arrogant privilege she cannot pull away, and Paul lets his eyes rake over Kitty's exquisite body. Not that this bothers Kitty when they are alone and covert, in truth she likes to encourage his desires. Firstly, by wordlessly acquiescing to the fervour of his clasp and secondly by deliberately pressing her bosom against him as their bodies meet. Yet tonight is somehow different, something in the world has shifted and Kitty cannot explain the fact. She has reservations about herself, about Henry and she feels uneasy and her earlier thoughts about what kind of relationship Paul shares with her estranged husband will not leave her mind. Is that bonding, as crazy as it seemed, predicated upon an erotic ideal that might suggest gross indecency or is it simply money? There is a possibility that Henry did harbour latent desires for other men, and Paul was certainly handsome, if slightly older. Between the sheets of Kitty's marital bed is not a place that oft finds Henry pressing his affections, for he sleeps in his own chambers and always alone. Of late she has found him sleeping in his dank laboratory. Love, thinks Kitty, can trick and deceive, and love's kingdom was brim full of follies, even those between two men. Kissing someone's fundament was... Well, it can hardly be described as love, Kitty reassures herself, and men certainly went to gaol for similar crimes. Yet for Mrs. Jekyll it is so difficult to entertain the repulsive idea that something like that might be going on with her husband and his friend. Why else would Henry give in to Paul so freely whenever Paul wants money?

Kitty does not delude herself that it is anything to do with her own manipulations, but when Paul Allen had come into her life so many things had changed in her dull and unexciting marriage. Worse for doubting, and thinking that perhaps she does not want to share in such a deceptive ménage if it is happening at all, how can she give her husband any credit for either fidelity or conniving? Kitty feels a shiver pass through her lovely body. The suggestion that Henry might possibly... No, that was too weird, but such notions regardless, hammer away inside of her mind and she does not want to believe they could be true. She knows Paul Allen, or so she thinks, probably better than she knows her own husband. She knows the smile upon his lips, the shape of his body, the length of his penis, the pleasures he enjoys most. Nonetheless there is the question of her own moral stance, and she asks herself that if in retaliation to her marriage's failings has she transgressed with her faithless lover one too many times? Is something coming, some horrible retribution to upset everyone's tenuous existence, something morbid bound to punish the wrong, for all is hardly sweetness and light? The idea makes her feel a little sick.

Not understanding her own inner turmoil, Kitty watches Paul. Once Paul had needed little encouragement, for he had loved to look at Kitty. For to him she was the perfect vision of porcelain loveliness. Arrogantly Kitty had thought him besotted by her beauty, wanting to drown in her thick auburn tresses as he kissed her red glowing lips and squeezed her soft round breasts. Now it is rare that he wants to put his lips to those breasts, and this afternoon's tryst has been somewhat perfunctory with his mind set yet again on monetary gain. Kitty wonders where the passion has gone, why Paul seems engaged somewhere else when he thrusts between her parted thighs, when the act of coupling becomes just that, an act perfunctorily completed without lust and certainly not love. Paul nods a signal to the violin player to strike up another tune, but Kitty disengages from his frame and turns about. As they divide Paul senses the rift, looking to the entrance door where four newcomers are filing through.

'Decent women are so rarely seen in houses like this one,' Paul observes, waving his hand over the Khazneh's whirling maelstrom of colour.

'If I am indecent, would you have the decency then to take me home, please?'

'Most certainly,' Paul replies mockingly. 'You're home or my home?'

For a moment, anger dictates that Kitty should strike him for his insolence, but she walks away to weave her passage through the human detritus that surrounds her, to sit at their table in an alcove above the dance floor. As she sits she burns inside with indignation, as if her veins are coursing fire. Suppressing her ire, she opens her purse and takes out a kerchief and a compact. With a gentle push, she moves her purse aside so that it rests beside the heavy silver bud vase at the far edge of the table, and she opens her compact and begins touching up her ruby red lipstick. The hue of her maquillage is a shade deeper than one of the roses in that tall, but heavy vase, and the other rose by contrast is a pale apricot, a tinge deeper than her blushing cheeks. Also on the table are two glasses of amber champagne, hers is but half full, Paul's is empty, and it has been empty half-a-dozen times already. After a moment Paul joins her at the table and sits down, slouching in his chair and crossing his long legs. Kitty wonders again about his origins, for Paul seems to have little impulse control, and he so readily slips between the sophisticated and the vulgar. Following a long moment in which the music all but falls silent, Paul speaks.

'It seems to me, my dear that our affair is wearing a little thin.' Upon the articulation of the sentence affair Kitty emphatically snaps her compact closed.

'Yes,' she agrees, and there is no smile upon her glowing lips, 'it certainly does.'

'Perhaps we should terminate it before it turns completely into ashes,' Paul suggests, but his words are laced more with sarcasm than they are with remorse. Kitty merely shrugs her shoulders and folds one slim, white arm over the other upon the table top, her diamond ring and bracelet flashing cold sparks. 'Yes, indeed,' she replies, 'although, if that were to happen, dearest Paul, however would you manage financially?' The corners of her voluptuous lips turn up into a little icy smile and she flutters her eyelids. Such is Paul's weakness, his dependency on her husband's money, and she flies to that weakness as swiftly as an arrow flies through the air. Paul turns away, staring across the room beyond the dancers as they begin a new waltz, and looking to a table of gentlemen playing at cards, he almost smiles. It would be nice to be in on that game, he muses, holding the aces and betting high. He is caught momentarily somewhere between being half-humiliated and being half amused. Kitty thinks she knows him all too well.

'You must not let that worry you, dear Kitty, because the world will not end this evening.' Formality is the name of the game, isn't it, formality and reserve despite her infidelity and his extortion? 'After all,' and Paul hovers over his words like a vulture hovering over a carcass, 'Henry Jekyll is my friend, while you are but his ever-loyal wife. You have always made it quite clear to him how much you detest me.' He turns to look Kitty directly in the eye, knowing completely that he does indeed hold all the aces. The silence is long, and it is only broken when Kitty laughs. She reaches over the table and clasps his hand and places it above her soft, warm bosom. Under his touch beat the palpitations of her heart.

'You are the most utterly shameless man I have ever met,' she declares, and her eyes are sparkling, but they are alive with something deeper than humour, something much deeper, an intelligence more profound than Paul Allen could ever imagine.

'I do hope so, Kitty,' he replies, faking an earnest expression, 'because if you ever meet a more shameless man… I might lose you to him.' Kitty bows her head as she smiles and traces her lips over the back of his hand. Once upon a time her lips might have left in their wake a trail of glowing sparks, but tonight they are cool with a taste of frost, like the promise of winter in a late autumn breeze.

'That's the kind of woman you are, beautiful and unabashed, and your kind of woman wants just that from a man… complete and utter freedom from shame.'

Paul leans close and kisses Kitty on the lips, but there is little passion in her response.

In Morley Street, in my lab I have been hunched over my desk for some time, and as my senses return I am conscious of a ghastly inner turmoil that spears my body. Paralysed, I have been unable to react to or stop a terrible rage of violence within. Red, is what my eyes have seen, red and flame, and an inferno of passion and vehemence. My head is thrown into the utmost confusion, and I thought perhaps I had suffered an extraordinarily vivid nightmare. At some point, I must have passed out. Caught in a limbo, with trembling fingers I pull the fob watch from my vest pocket. The light flutters and strobes, hurting my vision, but I can see that over an hour has passed, an hour that I cannot recall. It is Totò I hear screeching and rattling at the bars of his cage? The monkey is watching me with a tense and glassy, frightened stare. Momentarily it is difficult to move my legs, for I feel sluggish, as if my extremities are made of lead, but soon I force myself to move. Pushing back the chair I stumble to my feet, and the world swims back into sharper focus and the shadows draw back from my veiled eyes. The walls reel, and I am dizzy, but only for a moment, and I push myself away from the desk. Soon my lungs suck in the air and my head clears, though my fingers are still tremulous, and I see and smell the foul vomit stains on my clothes and the pool of amber bile spreading over the desktop. Reeking, it drips to the floor, a puddle in which my feet slip. With a quick thrust, aside I push my journal beyond the sopping puke, and tearing off my vest I wipe my face and hands and soak up the mere of sickness, and then I throw my soiled clothing into the dust bin, ready for the furnace. When I have regained sufficient composure I open my journal, and luckily it has escaped being fouled, and I take up my quill and dip it into midnight ink. The words I write spider out onto the page.

Experiment 3

No results.

Experiment 4

Convulsions and violent, internal pains. My body seemed on fire for several hours and I felt as if some power within me was about to break loose.

Experiment 5

½ of 6 with 6 mm. Y2, mixed with 0.05 mg cocaine.

Complete success.

Putting down the nib I stand, and with a peculiar feeling of elation I leave my lab and walk up through the garden to the empty house, not even seeking the remnant ghost of my socialite wife, and I go to my bedroom where I draw a bath and strip naked and wash away the vomit. There is a full-length mirror in the room and as I stand before it I watch the water beading over my skin. I behold my body as I have never beheld it before, as a sculpture, my muscles, my skin, and my features all resplendent and in perfect anatomical symmetry, beautiful as is a Grecian marble. My sex is a precise spear, hard and erect and of generous proportion. Passing a stroke along its silken length I feel an electric frisson of pleasure as I retract the foreskin, feel the vital-force coursing within my veins. How it swells and throbs, eager and insistent, and I respond to my own touch with an altogether strange and indescribable veracity. I gasp and lick my lips wetly; my caress is fiery and unchaste and my arousal delirious. In the intensity of orgasm, and far from exhausted in my emission, I ejaculate the hot and milky seed of my essence, and with my nerve-ends vibrant and tingling I open my palm and raise its overflowing chalice to my parched and thirsty tongue.

Chapter 4

A Frozen Honey Pot

'It is absolutely a scandal in the nostrils of all just taste.'

Thomas De Quincey

A man emerges from the lane way and strides into the main thoroughfare of Morley Street. Under the croceate glow of a lamppost the man hovers. He is clean shaved and handsome; his eyes are afire like stars. He touches his fingertips to his smooth and perfumed cheek. With lithe muscles, strong thighs, his arms powerfully defined, his veins throbbing and pulsating with vigour, his torso flat, his line and curve beautiful, the man is like a Roman sculpture. Princely in face and figure, well-proportioned and athletic in frame. In the guise of a gentleman he could pass as dignified in bearing and genial in address- he believes that he is these things. He is dressed in a pristine white band collar shirt, a silk vest which is the colour of pomegranate seeds, and he wears sable, brushed cotton trousers held up by brass clipped suspenders. His velvet jacket is burgundy, his shoes are black leather and shining like slick oil, and he carries a hat and a walking cane with an ornate brass tip. The current of life runs hot in his veins and there is energy and decision and a masterful strength stamped into every lineament of his countenance. In his face, there is displayed a robust and passionate nature and every look and every gesture are kindle to the fire for his lust to discover a brand-new world. Within his breast is a fever of exultation, of immense rapture, and a sensual illumination quite impossible to describe. He is excited because for him the world has been fashioned anew, born of some wonderful and spectacular cosmic upheaval. Ah, you say that predictive eyes might glimpse how easily such a nature could verily collapse if the restraints of nature were to be cast to the winds, and craving and control allowed full reign. Regardless, I ask, what then are the limits possible to cruelty and tyranny and passion if they are indulged with a beautiful face? If we follow this man then perhaps we will find out!

Smiling broadly, white and perfect teeth gleaming, he shimmers in the glowing gaslight, and for a moment his eyes look to a house, number 29, on the corner, and they hold fast the darkened rectangle of the bedroom window on the upper floor. No shadow moves therein, no silhouette fills the frame, but the handsome man smiles as if he is the keeper of a secret knowledge. Soon he hails a passing cab. The cabby draws his hansom up to the curb, up under the saffron beams of the lamplight, beside the scarlet fire hydrant outside the house on the corner, and he looks down from his box.

'What a fine young gentleman,' remarks he. 'A vision in a dream, if I dare say so myself! To where might I convey the young sir?'

'To a stately pleasure dome, I decree!' says the gentleman, because London is his, and tonight, this compelling fellow forbids any frailty of the senses to go un-indulged. The great, spinning globe of the world is circling just that fraction faster, racing like a juggernaut through the vastness of space on a collision course with passion. In response, the man's vibrant heart is racing, and his energy is boundless. He wants naught more than to glut his appetite to the full, and nothing can come to pass that might dissuade him therefrom. He is up for fine food and drink, ready for merry gambling and lush women and he has money to spend on these indulgences, and he is the happiest man in the world.

High in his sprung seat behind the cabin, along dim lanes and gas-lit streets the cabby goes, and he steers and weaves his fly through the dusky and occluded netherworld, and heads towards a glittering palace that is said to stand at the lowest stratum of reputation. They pass hawkers and street sellers and coster-mongers, sprat-women and ladies of the night in tattered skirts. The cab pulls up to the cobbled curb and the young gentleman within throws back the trap and looks out. He sees people in rich finery swishing contemptuously past the beggars and flower sellers, and all congregate about the pillared entrance of a most fabulous building. Within is to be encountered the tumultuous side of London life, a less than secret living in a bad dream that yet harbours a strange unreality all its own. Our vision will be filled with brightly coloured walls all festooned with velvet drapes and gilded tassel, and glittering lights and whirling colour. Any man may change his reality, for such is the paradox of the Khazneh. The gentleman looks to the way where the steps descend into a fantasy, to an entrance guarded by two door attendants in purple livery all sewn with baubles of sparkling nickel, ready to welcome social dignitaries and the rich man into the realm of iniquity.

'I think you'll enjoy this place, sir' says the cabby to his passenger. 'It's nearly half-way respectable! You won't be on your tod in there, I assure you. You'll be half-rats and nanty narking if you're not dippin' your Hampton Wick, sir!' Upon the utterance of these words he laughs boisterously. The young man looks up to the box, to the driver, and his eyes are wide with expectation and confusion and they glitter like tanzanite jewels.

'You alarm me, my friend' says he.

The cabby looks down, his whip wriggling like a fishing line in the golden light, and the young man is the catch hooked on the end, and he points the whip in the direction of the entrance and he laughs again.

'I am new to your wicked city,' the gent confesses, hovering at the board, green as a new shoot but nonetheless ready to leap into the jaws of experience.

'It's only wicked if you're poor, sir.' The cabby casts a quick and contemptuous eye upon the flower seller as she approaches. He extends his whip to keep her at a distance. The young sir gives him a coin, a shining copper coin, an over-payment, a tip. The cabby's eyes widen in delight. The flower seller gets nothing.

'Thank you, sir. All the best, sir.'

The gentleman jumps down from the vehicle and into the street.

'Happy nights in London town to you, sir.'

'Happy nights indeed,' says the gentleman in the burgundy jacket, holding up his walking cane and smiling joyously, ignoring the old maid with her basket of flowers as she begs for alms. With a hurried step, he almost sprints down the stairs and rushes headlong under the eyes of four stone eagles, between fluted columns and into the open mouth of the hungry Khazneh. The cabby watches him go.

'Bloody idiot!' he mutters scornfully to the young man's back and he drops his fake bonhomie. He spits upon the shiny coin. It's all just butter upon bacon to him. 'Another dirty lick-finger going down the fucking sink hole!'

The Major Domo surveys her realm; she casts a watchful eye over all the colour and the boisterous cheering, the drinking, the dancing and the titillating flesh. Life is so different here in London, thinks she, although it is still cheap. In Spain, there is destitution and disadvantage, but it is a forgotten realm in a land beyond beyond. This shrine to sin is now her kingdom, and here she presides over all. Still, she harbours a deep contempt for the bourgeoisie, those lustful men, the magistrates and the police inspectors, the politicians and the upper crusts who come here on the pretence of playing cards and to spin the roulette wheel. They are here for the excitement of sex and for power, to have their cocks sucked and to fuck women in the rear.

'Estos hombres no son más que basura!'

The Major Dome smiles cynically, and she is inwardly reviled, and her steely glance passes over her cabaret to alight upon Paul and Kitty who are dancing. Of course, Lady Ashburnham's fashionable social dinner has been abandoned, and Kitty has joined her lover for the evening to dance, but dance nonetheless upon the edges of morality, under the deceptively supernal lights of the Khazneh. Here, in the Khazneh, with Paul, Kitty can dance and put aside her oppressive domestic woes. Unfortunately, it is here that Paul can also indulge his vices; gaming and drinking and romancing other women, and though she might have the occasion to do likewise, Kitty does not dance with strangers to the latest waltz or polka and she keeps her behaviour in constant check. She is fully aware that places such as this are the haunt of women possessed of questionable morals, and of gentlemen who prey upon such women. Aware of the gossip the wrong tongue might generate, she remains reticent to openly indulge. Beyond the dance hall and in the apartments on the upper floor of this establishment it is no secret that one can do more than drink and play at poker. Nevertheless, Kitty is not one of those women. Kitty has come to the Khazneh to break free of her inhibiting domestic prison, although she is fully aware that being seen in such a place by the wrong person could have the potential to see her socially vilified. Kitty responds to this danger in a pococurante manner, but if the danger that such a transgression presents is half of the fun why is she still feeling listless and depressed?

Around the parquetry she is dancing with Paul, and as she dances she pretends that she is happy. Mr. Allen on the other hand is happy- happy as long as Henry Jekyll's money is a fat wad in his billfold, and happy that he is fast approaching ebriety. Contrarily, only a few sips of champagne have passed between Kitty's ruby lips, but Paul has become a little rough as he clasps her in the dance, his breath is sour with the champagne and his step has become stumbling and graceless. Keeping the dancers whirling, a chamber orchestra of violin and piano has changed their tempo by playing a vigorous and lively polka. Into this vortex of dancing gaiety, the newcomer strides, his smile still beaming. With extended hand, he passes his cane to the door attendant and he steps down into the ballroom, to be greeted by the Major Domo. As she gives an impassive smile the young man's eyes are filled up with wonder, brimming with all the colours of the rainbow and all the thrilling sensations of sight and sound and smell. He sees colour, he hears music and he smells flesh. He knows lust for life. Looking up in astonishment at the glass ceiling through which he can see the wheeling galaxy of the stars, he is lost like one in a dream and he imagines for a second that he blends like a reflection of a reflection in the gaudy, whirling imagery doubled in the resplendently gilded mirrors. It's like a mirror maze at a carnival! The Spaniard waves him enter.

At a table not far away sits another young man, his expression brooding and serious, and he is not happy. By contrast he is dark of hair and swarthy of skin and his eyes are like coal in which boredom has buried all spark. The only colour that relieves his thunderous demeanour is a red carnation in his lapel, a fragile bloom that burns against the black of his vest with a little tongue of flame. On either side of the man, flanking left and right sit two pretty, if scantily clad young women. They too seem bored too, watching the room with roving eyes, watching and waiting for opportunity to sing its song. Of course, they have seen all of this before, the music, the dancing, the spinning roulette wheels, the card games, and the old men. They have seen those old men naked too, with their sagging bellies and their jutting dicks. Though tonight they have seen little in the way of money. Indeed, there are few men in the room tonight who are not already partnered, but this newcomer, well, he certainly looks good enough to want company, and with sufficient money no doubt to party. He might present a better prospect for the evening than their present company. It has been little fun for the two girls so far, this night, but here is a spark at last, a spark that might enliven the tedium somewhat and put a little coin in the coffers.

'Jenny, could you fancy that?' says the girl on the brooding tough's right, flicking her brunette head in the direction of the entrance, her eyes alight with more than curiosity. Her companion sits tall, suddenly stimulated from her ennui, her bosoms swelling in her overly tight whale-bone stays.

'Oh, I rather think I could,' replies the blonde as she too looks across the room.

Within the passing of a moment the two women need no further encouragement and they push back their chairs and stand up. As the polka grinds to a sudden stop and the dancers begin applauding each other, Jenny with a contemptuous sneer flicks her fingertips against their dark young man's cheek.

'Come on then, Daisy,' says Jenny, and her lips are glistening as she wets them with the tip of her tongue. 'It's way past our bedtime.'

Daisy responds with a complicit sneer. Swishing their hips and without further ado they abandon their ebon-haired companion and condemn him to a lone table. Together they approach the newcomer. The Major Domo observes all.

'Would the nice gentleman like to buy two lonely girls a drink?' says Jenny to the handsome neophyte.

'With great pleasure,' replies he, and his glance takes in her face and its red, red rouge and the prominent bulge of her ample charms, both cantilevered by her tight, tight corset. Jenny's eyes wander in the direction of the private salons and the music begins again. 'Perhaps,' the man continues, surely not ignorant of her surreptitious suggestion, 'you'd rather dance first?'

'You look as if you'd be a pretty good dancer…' Jenny is all innocence as she touches the man lightly on the arm, trailing the tips of her fingers in a lingering caress.

'You too,' counters he, and the girl smiles broadly, and turns to her friend who has not yet offered up one word.

'Yes, sweetheart, I can dance all night.' Abruptly she dismisses her friend. 'Goodnight, Daisy. See you tomorrow.'

Daisy must now leave in disappointment. 'Fast little bitch,' she remarks sourly as she returns to her table to sit again with her dour young man. She sips a glass of arrack, and as she sips she feels the frustration of rejection in her heart. The music begins again, and she watches in defeat as Jenny leads her new conquest to the dance floor.

'Come on then,' Jenny coaxes, almost pulling the handsome stranger by the arm. 'I love this tune!'

Entwined, the two begin lazy turns to the rhythm of the waltz. The young man's stance is elegant and poised and instinctively he raises her hand and his step is graceful and gliding.

'I've never seen you here before,' remarks the girl Jenny, for how could she forget such a beautiful and beguiling face? How could she forget those sparkling eyes, those sensuous lips, those chestnut locks all so neatly trimmed, the shape of hard muscle and the Apollonian contour of those shoulders and hips? She imagines the length of his sex and she quivers.

'I have never been here before,' the man replies, and there is a strangely underlying derision in the lilting notes of his baritone tessitura that Jenny fails to detect.

'Well, it's really quite nice, much nicer than the Vauxhall or Willis'. Proper beer gardens they've become! A lady don't dare walk there on her own!'

Over his face there flickers the shadow of a question, a shadow of disgust, but she reads it quickly and diverts his suspicions. This one does not need to know of such places if he is so unbelievably ignorant and green. If it's a lady he wants then a lady she will be, all prim and proper and submissive and willing… if he can pay. If fortune smiles upon her then perhaps Venus will smile upon him. Sometimes a girl must be willing to do extras for a little extra, so let him dance here for the evening, let him enjoy her company and then he can partake of her pleasures. After a night with her and the magic she might perform with her tongue and her hips, maybe he might come back on another eve.

'You don't get around much, do you?' she quips, thinking in her confidence that tonight this man's skin will ripple against her own, that this man's warmth will radiate between her sheets and heat up her core. She pictures him naked, his phallus throbbing in the cleft of her thighs, between her breasts, and both lady and lover are concupiscent with fiery appetite.

'London and I are virgins…' and here he pauses deliberately, placing a weighted emphasis on the word, '…to each other!'

With an incredulous laugh Jenny tilts back her head, and the man swings her about in the dance. Her perfume is cheap and stale and her body vapid and even tawdrier. Still, she bethinks that it is not possible that this man knows nothing of love, for he is too handsome to be unsullied. Perhaps it is she that needs to show him, till he is full to the brim and overflowing, and how sweet and fair he shall find her delights.

'Well, I'm sure you won't be so innocent for long!' she assures him, proving intractable in her suggestive vernacular, pushing her bosoms into his chest, and he, squeezing her fingers in his grasp responds with equal zeal. They whirl about and Jenny basks in her victory and Daisy sits unwanted, the dour young man gulping at ale, and brooding still, a thundercloud billowing permanently over his brow. The attractive newcomer and his lady swing about, and then they pass a dancing couple, pass so close that the people almost touch. The swish of a garment of woven sapphire touches his leg, the glint of diamonds sears his vision, and he almost stumbles in his step. As the couple whirl amid a riot of colour the music again ceases and the applause again commences, and the young man's face changes from a happy smile to an angry leer. There is a strange agony overwritten in those features, as if he has recognised someone belonging to his heart perhaps, that someone who has made him angry, someone who should be made repentant. The dancers stop and the couple divide. Jenny is pushed back and her pretty face knots up in confusion. The man watches intently as the woman in radiant blue glides elegantly back to her table.

'I must go now,' he tells Jenny, casting her off, his hand extending and pushing her away. She is clinging to him, for she has become angry. She is not some old shoe that can be thrown away.

'That's not at all polite, now is it?' says Jenny, her wrath building as he continues to look upon her with wide eyes scintillating. She grips his arm tight, tighter, her hand like a claw, a vulture's claw raking over the corpse of hope. 'You should know that's not the way a gentleman treats a lady. It's not the way a gentleman behaves, is it?' His eyes blaze with hot fire, but they are not burning her skin, but rather they beam across the room and ignite the lovely form of a beautiful woman seated at a table, seated with another man.

'How dare you pick me up under false pretences,' protests Jenny. 'Thinking you can drop me like a moth-eaten glove!' The handsome young man sneers. He glances down to her clutching hand, her nails digging into his burgundy sleeve.

'Will you let go of me, you three-penny upright?'

'What did you say?' Jenny is now riled to the point of excited fury, and his words are an insult that her pride will not bear. Incensed she shakes him violently.

'I merely tell the truth,' responds he, 'that you are a hat frequently felt. You might be good enough for some to ride rantipole, but you're really a dolly mop, nothing less than a quicunque vult!'

'What did you call me?'

'I told you to let go,' he commands, and as he speaks he grits his teeth and his arm flies up from his side and his fist slams down upon the pale length of her trembling limb. Jenny gasps in pain, the fist punching down with such force as to knock her grasp undone and raise an instant crimson welt upon her sallow skin.

'Fuck off back to the streets, you filthy, vile cunt!' He thrusts her aside and strides off across the dance floor, navigating the last of the dancing couples and the poker tables and the raucous laughter, leaving Jenny wounded and angry. Paul drains his glass. He is slouching in his chair and drinking too much and his senses are beginning to waver, his speech to slur, his morals to lapse. A bottle of Cristal tilts two-thirds empty in the ice bucket. Perhaps, thinks Paul, in a quiet moment of his own disillusion, that upstairs away from all this glamour, might be found a salon particlière, a private room in which he sips the sweet nectar of the Raminoff's from Kitty's silken slippers. Yet they are not upstairs and the glamour of the dance hall is wearing thin. Such a fantasy, steeped in the elixir of fizzy alcohol will not find Kitty less bored. For this evening has not turned out as gleeful as was intended. Tonight, there is a palpable feeling of regret in the atmosphere, and despite his inebriation Paul can sense the social tensions vacillating, and soon tempers will flare and all will end in tears.

In the short space of a year, the spin of the globe and the passing of four seasons have found Kitty no closer to knowing the vagary that is Paul Allen. She is no nearer to understanding why her husband keeps friendly acquaintance with this man, for the cheery Mr. Allen generally only emerges from the woodwork when his pockets are emptied of ready cash. If ever there is a rogue then that rogue is the persuasive Mr. Allen. Paul Allen in his own arrogance mistakes Kitty's needs for love as true, but she is not so desperate in her love that she will always suffer his profligacy. He sometimes proves amusing in bed, sometimes taking her body to ecstatic if momentary heights of elation, but they seem all but to have evaporated. Rare moments and nothing more. Between the sheets Paul sometimes performs like the French, making love with his tongue, and that can be diverting but it does not prove his love, if anything it is simply his pleasure. Yes, he is handsome, but he is a little older than Henry, and at least ten years older than she. Perhaps he could have been an artist's model once, with his broad shoulders and flat belly, his muscled thighs and his generous length of manhood… Well, such is Kitty's fantasy.

Few women, thought Kitty, and upon this point she must concede, failed to be wooed by his glittering eyes and his killer smile. Of course, it is these attributes that have compelled Kitty into physicality with the man, though the force of such desire is perhaps both tumultuous attraction and revenge. If Paul were a prince among cads so it is when his clothes come off, as he thrusts his member into her sex. There are times when this is all she needs, the electric feeling of his skin and the hot flood of his seed, nothing but a momentary release from her dreary, confined and dull, dull world with Henry. At other times, there is a place somewhere inside of Kitty where there roils a darkness that resents her husband deeply, for perhaps he too harbours like feelings for the compelling Mr. Allen. With every visit to Morley Street Paul comes seeking funds. These visits make Kitty realise that she is missing a vital component to her own happiness. Why should the cavalier Mr. Allen benefit from loan after loan and she pass her days and her nights in a crypt? When her complicity is a complaint to Henry about Mr. Allen's motivations and his abuse of their friendship, her husband refuses to discuss the situation. Henry believes that this leaves Kitty bitter and neglected, but he cannot live inside of her head. In there are spinning the fragments of lust that are furnished by the imagination, visions ripe and ridiculous that find Kitty conceiving Paul's prick in Henry's mouth. The hideous fancy finds her jealous, but nevertheless, one sunny afternoon, when Henry is possessed of his wretched experiments, when the butterflies sip at the hydrangeas and the roses, when the children from the Universal Dispensary are playing in the garden, Paul Allen unfolds Kitty's petals as if she is the flower, and there it is he who makes ashes of her marriage vows. He is joined with her flesh and not with the wrung-out corpse of her husband! Yet where has that passion gone? Paul pours himself another drink, oblivious as to what thoughts are passing through Kitty's head.

'Don't drink so much, Paul,' Kitty beseeches, but Paul is not listening. As she speaks she pushes her own champagne glass away to the side of the table, beside the tall silver bud vase with the red and peach blooms. Paul removes a cigarette from a silver case and lighting it, inhales.

'Cunning little kitty cat,' Paul remarks coolly, blowing a cloud of transparent smoke from between his lips. 'You'd rather a dull husband than a drunken lover?' Kitty looks away from him in disgust, and as Paul laughs mockingly a newcomer materialises at their table.

'Mr. Allen?' says the man. 'Mr. Paul Allen, is it not?'

Paul Allen's eyes open wide, his focus sharpening upon this stranger.

'Not if you're one of my fucking creditors!' Paul ejaculates dismissively, and Kitty groans at the use of his extraneous language.

'Mr. Allen,' Kitty ventures a weak vindication, 'occasionally indulges himself in these pleasantries. Please excuse him.' The newcomer leans forward and through a wide smile of brilliant white teeth he exclaims that Kitty possesses such faultless manners.

'What an entirely perfect lady you are, Mrs. Jekyll.'

See Kitty's face become expressionless, see all the colour drain from her lovely skin. See her hold her breath as if awaiting the slice of the axe blade, see that she does not even blink. See the stranger threaten her with an amiable grin. Who is he and how is it that he knows her name? Paul laughs aloud as if he has had the privilege of some secret joke. He is waving his hands about in the air and crudely describing Kitty's lovely curves.

'Don't you think that she's the most perfect parcel of womanhood you have ever set eyes upon?'

'She is entirely enchanting. I venture as lovely as Helen standing high upon the walls of Troy.'

'Please,' protests Kitty, and she is both weary and embarrassed that she should be considered a mere plaything for men to ogle, 'I am so tired of your jokes, Paul.' In her indignation, she begins to rise from her seat, but the handsome newcomer arrests her with a gentle motion of his hand. Paul watches, and he is amused, his sardonic smile half-veiled by a grey-tinged spiral of cigarette smoke.

'Please don't leave, Mrs. Jekyll,' says the stranger, and Kitty is confused and tries to place his face. No, she can't remember ever having met this man before, and yet there is something vaguely familiar about him… but what exactly? Is it in his aspect, his manner or his voice? Kitty cannot tell. She is upon the edge of enquiring just who he is when the man offers her an explanation.

'Your husband is an old acquaintance of mine.' The man is so charming and he appears quite genuine. 'I have wanted to meet you for such a long time.' Draining the last drop of champagne from his glass Paul scoffs aloud, sceptical, and then he clears his throat. The strange chap ignores the sound.

'Indeed,' says Kitty. 'You're most civil, Mr.…?'

'Hyde,' the fellow returns. 'Edward Hyde.'

'Please join us,' Kitty requests, fascinated by the enigma of Mr. Edward Hyde, and motioning for the man to sit at her side. Wondering how Mr. Hyde has eluded her for so long and why she has never been introduced, Kitty is intrigued, but then there are so many things about Henry that nobody really knows. So many things that Henry refuses to talk about, his life all clammed up and secretive. As she thinks this she casts a glance upon Paul. Even Paul, her amour, so readily falls into the category of obscure, so why not too this seemingly charming and altogether refreshing gentleman about town?

'I hope that I am not intruding,' Hyde apologises, and he looks to Paul for approval.

'Oh, don't worry about that, old boy. Mrs. Jekyll absolutely adores intrusion!' He watches her as she raises her eyebrow in repugnance at his coarse portrayal of her morals. She feels that on this night she has made a brutal mistake coming out with the free Mr. Allen. His earlier words sound again in her head. Perhaps Paul is right, perhaps they should end their affair before it all turns irrevocably nasty.

'Anything to lighten the burden, eh, Kitty?' Kitty whispers a curse. Paul only half-catches the words, something about Henry poking bow wow mutton. Reaching over Paul touches his fingertips to Kitty's chin, and she looks him in the eye.

'Is that so, my dearest?' Those fingers graze the smooth curve of her jaw and Mr. Hyde might appear to be in the grip of an outrage, a protest at Paul's intimacy.

'Indeed,' says Mr. Allen, not caring, 'my icy Snow Queen… my frozen honey pot!' There is anger in her reaction, and with indignation Kitty swipes his hand away.

'Perhaps,' says Hyde, 'you'd rather I left?'

'Perhaps…' begins Kitty, but Mr. Allen cuts her words away as if he cuts her with a knife.

'You'd make a stuffed bird laugh!' declares Paul, and he refers to either or both of his companions, and laughs aloud. 'Don't get poked up, Kitty, and you, sir, don't be an ass. Jekyll isn't the possessive type at all.'

Humiliated Kitty grasps at Paul's arm. Her face is a mask of controlled anger. How dare this drunken fool cast aspersions upon her fidelity in the company of strangers.

'Damn good chap is Henry,' Paul babbles, and Kitty's hand withdraws. 'Best friend I ever had.'

'That's because you have no real friends!' thinks Mrs. Jekyll, standing up as Mr. Hyde appears upon the brink of laughter. Kitty is not so sure that she knows just what it is that is so funny. Is it she? Is she the joke that keeps them all laughing? The wily Mr. Allen throws her an incorrigible smile.

'Absolutely first-rate fellow!' Paul stubs out his cigarette.

'I think it's time we left,' interjects the wounded Kitty, gathering up her purse and her gloves and her sky-blue cloak. 'Come along, Paul,' she seethes, and to Mr. Hyde she apologises. 'Do forgive us.'

Edward Hyde stands up.

'Yes, do forgive us,' says Paul, and he sounds like a drunken parrot with a limited and repetitive vocabulary. 'We've got to go home to do our duty. We always do our duty, don't we, Kitty?' Duty implies dusting the cobwebs from the shelves and changing the sheets and fucking but never enjoying being fucked. The moment has brought Kitty almost to the point where she can take no more. What a dreadful evening all round it has turned out to be. Perhaps Henry was right to ask her to stay home, maybe then she might have avoided all this pointless humiliation.

'We're under a great deal of obligation to Kitty,' Paul confesses, about to blurt that the champagne has been paid for by Henry Jekyll's money and that Kitty…

'Stop it! Stop it at once!' Kitty declares and she turns to leave.

'Nonetheless,' Paul muses, casting his eye upon the revellers as they join in a new dance, 'there they go again.' Shakily he stumbles to his feet.

'One last dance, a waltz for lost lovers, and then home?'

Kitty's face is made of stone.

'Perhaps,' Edward Hyde interjects, 'you'd care to dance with me?'

'With pleasure,' Kitty responds, and with her back to Paul she tosses her cloak and it falls upon her chair, spilling out like a glassy lake, dripping scintillate stars down the length of its cabriole legs. Mr. Hyde whisks her away to the dance floor leaving Mr. Allen to teeter and then to collapse into rejection.

'Oh, the hell with it all!' he mutters, and he calls to the Major Domo who signals a waiter, and the waiter brings a fresh bottle of chilled champagne. This time it is a bottle of Pommery, dry and sparkling. 'Yes, it's about fucking time,' Paul cusses the waiter. 'Well, hurry up, serve it!' The waiter keeps his tongue and his lips clamped tight, but he wishes he had a dram or two of poison in his pocket.

'How well do you know my husband, Mr. Hyde?'

'Quite well.'

'Will you be calling on us? We don't often get visitors.' Kitty's last visitors had both left her less than invigorated. Ernst Litauer has promised to speak with Henry about his friend's obsessive and reclusive behaviour and Paul Allen, while kissing and fondling her body has only had his mind on Henry's money. Sadly, Paul is too blunt, too hasty and too inconstant in his grab for a slice of Paradise.

'Indeed, I will. I have business with Henry and of course friendship, I hope… with you.' Edward Hyde and Kitty whirl amid the dancers. They spin through another revolution and then another, blending blood red and sapphire blue in a palette of colours splashed upon the ballroom floor. Reflected therein too are the stars that twinkle in the night sky overhead, gleaming through the high glass ceiling. Kitty risks looking directly into Edward Hyde's eyes and therein she searches for a clue that will unravel his mystery. The man is incredibly beautiful, but she only fleetingly imagines his naked flesh exposed. For some reason his flesh is ephemeral, unreal, despite imagining his iron-clad chest and his ochre nipples, his flat belly and his raging cock. A rufescent blush momentarily stains her cheek, but there is something perversely unattractive about what should be an attractive man. What lurks behind his handsome mask that confuses Kitty so? Though it troubles her she does not know what it might be, for Hyde is looking at her as if he can read her thoughts, as if he knows what she looks like without a stitch of clothing upon her flesh.

'Friendship? I hope so, Mr. Hyde.' Kitty glances nervously over his shoulder, looks towards their table and she sees Paul sitting and drinking another glass of champagne. Yet for the moment she thinks that Paul must be punished. 'Can I trust you?' she asks hesitantly. Edward Hyde smiles surreptitiously. That Kitty in her love affair should come undone so easily is indeed a taxing worry, yet she instinctively guesses that Edward Hyde is no prude and beneath both their perfumed skins lurks two beings far from chaste. He seems to know too that if she be taxed with the consequences of love's fancies there is no point in her adopting a foolishly coy and modest air. It is the nature of the game, and she hopes no less that he can be manipulated to be discreet about her sporadic series of deceits. Surely, he would never reveal her adulterous secret and denounce her, although how can she be certain of that, she does not even know him.

'You may do so completely,' he reassures her and Kitty glides at that moment even closer to the edge of uncertainty.

'There, over there!' spits Jenny in humiliated anger, 'that fellow!' She is pointing to the dance floor and singling out Edward Hyde as the culprit who has caused her pain, and shame. The swarthy young swain and the jilted strumpet both look to the dancing couple. 'That's him all right.'

On that note, the waltz culminates and Kitty and Hyde withdraw to their table. The ruffian and the trollop approach.

'Are you sure, Jenny that this is the man who hurt you?' asks the pimp, and he with a surly look in his eye.

'It is. He tried to force himself upon me, said he wanted to do stuff a gentleman would never ask a girl to do! It was awful and I was terribly shocked. Said he wanted me like a dog, down on all fours. It was disgusting! When I told him, I wouldn't he…' and the girl embellishes her imprecations, 'turned on me like an animal!' She shows her bruised arm as evidence of the fact. Ignoring the bawd Mr. Hyde is helping the beautiful Kitty into her cloak of blue stars. He is not the type of gentleman who suffers fools lightly, and he will brook no conduct that shall cause him a stir.

'Friends of yours, old boy?' asks Paul superciliously, having made some slight reflections upon his drunken disgrace.

Hyde turns to his friends.

'Are you going to do something for this young lady,' says the swarthy tough, 'or do I have to teach you how to behave like a gentleman?'

Kitty steps aside.

'Be off, wretched slut!' says Hyde, discharging the woman and her escort from his presence.

'You take that back,' she sputters.

'You go find a sty and fuck this pig here!' returns Hyde, to which Paul, awakening abruptly from his drunken totter cries with bravura.

'That's right, you scum! How dare you talk to a gentleman like that! You lout!' cries Paul with phony conviction.

'Loud mouth arsehole!' spits the young tough.

'Please, Paul, forget about this,' begs Kitty, a frisson of danger and terror then sweeps through her lovely body, 'and take me home.'

'Really, Kitty,' Paul utters, 'women have no sense of honour. How can I leave my new friend like this?'

'I'm giving you one more chance, despite your insults' says the young thug, pointing threateningly at Edward Hyde. 'Give Jenny here a few sovereigns and there'll be no more said.'

In exasperation Kitty gathers up her things and walks away. 'Goodnight, gentlemen all!' she declares as she departs, and her anger is almost equal to the violence brewing in the men she forsakes. She pushes through the crowd and vanishes into the night.

'You know,' Hyde informs the two intruders, 'there are countries in which unmarried ladies are of easy access. Men attend them for their lustful amusements. They have no honour and no virtue and the enumeration of their iniquities is endless. Men spend the nights stopping up well-poked holes until those holes, both front and back are virtually running with odious juices. Only the devil might entertain how many cunning ways you are obliged in your evil genius, you bitch!'

He waves dismissively at the pimp and the pimp's face turns florid.

'Just what I should expect,' says Hyde vehemently, 'she lures them and excites them and then you rob them. Perhaps I looked most prosperous, even without my prick hanging out of my trousers! It might be better you had plied your filthy trade in the urinal!'

Jenny gasps with offence.

'Cunt!' yells the thug, and he dashes forward with his fist raised and ready to strike a punishing blow, but Hyde's arm is extended, fending aside the blow and gripping his opponent by the lapel and throwing him off balance. With his free hand Hyde has swiftly scooped up a champagne glass and mad with rage plunges it into his attacker's face. A squirt of blood jets from the torn skin of the man's cheek and splashes over Jenny's cleavage. Jenny screams. Hyde feels his pulse burst upon a galloping race. With his other hand Hyde quickly punches the cad a cracking blow to the face, the blood smearing his knuckles. The red carnation snaps in twain as the lout stumbles over his own feet. Blood and mucous come gushing from his broken nose, and under his own stumbling momentum the young man propels forward, his fist striking nothing but air, and when he pitches he slams down into the table. Champagne glasses and the lone bud vase all fall to the floor, the crystal shatters into a dozen pieces. People sitting at the nearby tables scream and scatter, others roar with laughter at the new spectacle. The Major Domo claps her hands together and sends for some men to clean up the fracas. When the young tough raises his head, and tries scrabbling to get to his feet, Hyde curls his fingers into the young man's hair and begins smashing that face into the table. There is a horrible sound as the man's flesh collides with the timber and a crack as his teeth are smashed. The starched white of the boor's shirt front is spattered with blood and his limbs are trembling.

'That will teach you manners,' roars Paul, thumping the attacker a belated blow to the back of the head and sending him crashing again face-first into the table.

'Fucking cunt bastard!' the oaf gurgles, but his mouth is so full of blood that the curse is garbled and almost unintelligible, broken teeth are spit out upon the niveous linen. Hyde has taken up the vase and cracks it over the young man's skull. Jenny is screaming as she stumbles back, covering her yelping mouth with one hand and pointing madly with the other.

'Now we'll leave your little friend here to look after you!' Paul breathes sneering at Jenny, and withdrawing back a step he is satisfied that he has provided with aplomb his gentlemanly duty. Though Hyde, in his fury cannot stop his violence. The ferocity is a thrill that ignites his nerves, and it flares through his body with a sadistic intensity that he wants only now to mash the trespasser's head to a bloody pulp. The world about him is whirling, but there are staccato gaps in its reality, as if slices of what he sees are broken up by light and dark flashing. Again, he raises the metal vase and brings it down, and again and yet again, and he does not want to stop the violence. The victim sprawls and twitches and groans and Jenny runs away crying out for help. The Major Domo's men come running.

'Easy up, old boy,' cries Paul, with difficulty restraining the repeated descent of Edward Hyde's arm, 'you don't want to kill him.'

'Yes, yes I do... I do want to kill him!' shrieks a terrible voice within Hyde's head. Hyde opens his tremulous fingers and drops the vase and it falls with a thud and rattles and rolls on the floor, and his visage has gone all pale and his skin has become damp and sweaty. Paul notes a peculiar change in his new friend, that in his face something has altered and the lines of eye and mouth and nose have subtly rearranged. Paul is made aware that there is something odd in Hyde's condition, that there is a perhaps a struggle taking place, a struggle to suppress the sudden upsurge of violent emotion that has erupted. Hyde's pupils have grown gigantic, so large as to have absorbed his eyes darkly, and he is sweating, his features blooming florid.

'Are you all right, old boy?' asks Paul, and he is concerned that Hyde might be having some sort of medical fit. In Hyde's face, the muscles are twitching and a spasm is twisting up the man's lips.

'Let me alone, Jekyll!' Hyde's voice cracks and plunges down a pitch, into a darker register, as if it is the voice of a completely different person. Paul lets go of Edward's arm.

'Jekyll?' Paul questions, confused by the voice and the spasm and the violence... and the name.

'Leave me!' Hyde ejaculates, and his voice has become a baritone and he is reduced to pleading. 'Leave me!'

Paul watches on confused as his new friend sways and shudders, and he is not certain that the request has been directed at him.

'I must get back,' Hyde declares abruptly as he gathers himself together and composes his rage, knocking it down to a poorly controlled calm. He casts not one glance at the bloodied young man he has beaten, who has now rolled off the table and is lying prone on the floor. 'Damn you!' he cries aloud as he stumbles away from Paul and charges headlong into the parting crowd, smashing into tables and scattering people left and right. 'Damn you, Jekyll!'

Hyde does not know exactly what has just happened to him, or what has provoked this overt and altogether unrestrained behaviour. He knows not what will happen next, but he does know that he is beginning to feel ill. Just like one who is caught in the liminal space between the nightmare and reality, he exits the Khazneh as the Major Domo's men arrive to engage in the melee, and Hyde staggers through London's back streets, along narrow cobbled ways and through soupy fog until at length he arrives in the alley off Morley Street. His heartbeat is racing as he unlocks the gate and stumbles into the garden, and he lurches into the unfamiliar and yet familiar space of Dr. Henry Jekyll's laboratory. How he has come by the key to admit his entry he cannot guess, but he strikes a match and lights a lamp. Totò is the only creature who espies his entrance, and the monkey watches with wide and frightened eyes as the man reels amid the apparatus. The mirror on the wall reflects his image as he buries his head in his hands, and his body is hot, as if his flesh is being consumed by fire. There comes a horrible moment of angst when the man thinks that his heart will thud to a stop. Yet in the looking glass the dynamic Edward Hyde is reflected, and he glimpses the semblance of the reclusive Henry Jekyll there too, that man's bearded features flashing as if in a lantern show. Hyde shudders, wanting only the exhilarating, receding physicality of his lust. No, the elation must not be exiled, yet the one who gasps and leers in alternate frames must be obliterated for he cannot be real. Edward Hyde must experience the wonderful world of excitement again, and there is no denying the absolute glory of this truth.

Hyde's hand reaches out and it touches the mirror, touches the face of the other.

'No!' he groans, and he turns away and his fingers grip a beaker full of amber fluid, and as his face contorts with agony his fingers curl about the glass and press, and press until the tube shatters in his grasp. Shards of glass scatter onto the floor, glittering lethal and sharp as the yellow liquid spills in a convecting pool. Blood pours from the neat cut in his palm. Pain, physical pain brings the man back from the brink of insanity. A dreadful spasm crawls over his skin, and he almost collapses, urinating uncontrollably while the monkey screams inside its cage. He watches the blood mingle with the fluid and he laughs at the thought that it appears to be his ichors that are flowing, both blood and voided piss leaking into the floorboards. Taking a handkerchief from his pocket he wraps up his injury, stemming the pulsing torrent of crimson. Perhaps the cut will require stitching. The blood seeps through the material and runs down his forearm. In that moment, close to sobbing, his voice sounds in the semi-darkness.

'I will return, Jekyll,' declares he, 'I will be back!'

'Never!' replies Jekyll's baritone. 'After tonight… Never!'

Staggering and tottering, dizzily he falls limply into the desk chair, and therein he slumps while the shadows on the wall behind his body writhe and convulse. In gasping distress, he clutches at the edge of the desk, his stomach churning, his eyes glazed. The shadows tower gigantically over the man's jerking head and they flow up the wall, expanding almost all the way up to the ceiling. The shades grow bigger and bigger, become thickly corporeal, spinning a woven column of black mist, to palpitate and to pulse in synchronised agony to the man's spasms, twisting in the hideous dark. Within these ghastly undulations of the night there comes a horrible and yet exciting sensation that begins a burning fire below his pelvis, a contraction of his testes and a hardening of his sex. Lights flashing in the maelstrom spark in his vision and his flesh is re-sculpted from the blackest of clay. He tears open his urine-stained trousers and liberates his phallus and grips it in his hand, hard and hot and throbbing, working it up and down with vigorous strokes. Aloud he screams in chorus with Totò, wracked by the flames of pain and pleasure, a protest that is part denial and part consent, and he ejaculates and the most profound darkness seals his vision.

Chapter 5

'Who am I?'

'I can't control myself at all!

I am hidden, and I am not.'

Arthur Rimbaud

Kitty has retired, but she is still awake, and I can see the lamplight seeping from beneath her bedroom door. I know that Kitty hears the shuffling of my footfall as I make my way in the dark up the carpeted stair and along the corridor. When I click open the bedroom door I stand briefly at the entrance, hovering and not given invitation to enter. Kitty lies between the sheets, a white sylph in a tide of oyster, and she has been reading. Sardonically I tell myself that she has not been perusing the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine or Mrs. Beetson's Household Management, in the hope of becoming a good wife. Glancing up she hardly bothers to remove the bored expression from her lovely face, and perhaps she knows all too intuitively what I am thinking. Is she uninterested in her book or more directly to the point, uninterested in me? With a languid movement, she places the book on the night stand. How beautiful she is, her hair combed out and loose upon her silken pillow, an auburn tide, thick of tress and soft and perfumed. I can even smell the faint scent of her cologne. She does not ask me in.

In the doorway I linger, frozen as if in time, disdainful in my lack of movement and doubly inept in my lack of speech. Unable to find my voice, robbed in trauma of my vocal just like the child Jane, I push my unsteady feet forward and step across her threshold, into her boudoir, timidly navigating the slender path between heaven and hell. My vision is pained, and looking upon my wife only strengthens the strange notion that she will forever remain remote to me, remote and unknowable. Is all of womanhood the wide world over so damnably strange, all beautiful and yet thoroughly cruel? Our communication has been lost, lost between our realities and our fantasies, and we are both irrevocably broken. A shadow ripples over my face and I feel its velvet stealth in passing as surely as one feels a wave of heat, as one feels the breath of cold. Finally, and with a tired sigh, Kitty turns to face me and she speaks.

'Why must you work so late?' she reprimands. 'Not that you missed anything at all brilliant tonight.'

I know what I did not miss, and yet somehow my memory is jagged, fragmentary, as if I struggle to recall things that I could only have dreamed. Still I want to fly to her side, but am I frozen, rooted to the spot. How she lies, telling me untruths, of this I am certain. Deceptions are now the only words that spill from her ruby lips, and how is it that I know that she has been dancing in the Khazneh, dancing with the duplicitous Mr. Paul Allen? Have I but dreamed her infidelity? What voice inside of myself confirms that she is perjuring herself of her dull, dull social evening and lying to me? My hand hovers on the door handle, gripping it tightly as I watch her rub cologne upon her slender wrists. The bedroom wafts with a floral enfleurage. There is a weird madness between us, a space that taunts and rebukes me and leaves me frightened.

'Oh lord,' she exclaims with the best sigh of tedium she can affect, 'those boring, formal dinners!' Her curious eye takes note that my hand is bandaged and that there is a stale, nasty smell wafting from my clothing, but she does not see that I am bleeding. I thrust my hand behind my back so that she cannot focus on my injury and begin unnecessary questioning.

'You really should have come, Henry,' she admonishes sarcastically. 'It really is unfair to expect me to carry the whole burden by myself. Consequently, I am sure we will be the talk of the town and I shall never be invited to Lady Ashburnham's again.'

Forcing myself to do so, I step into the room.

'One lives in society,' she rebukes as she puts down her perfume bottle and sits up in her bed, plumping up the duck-down pillows, 'and because of that one really has to respect social conventions.' Swiftly I approach the bed, but my abrupt movement causes her to flinch. She pulls up the sheet to cover her bosoms. I see her flesh recoil in revulsion.

'I am exhausted,' Kitty complains, thinking that her husband may be entertaining ideas of a less than romantic coupling. Upon the thought, I am certain that I see her nose wrinkle in disgust. I have never observed her excited in our love making, just perfunctory and dutiful. Now she is repelled by me. She puts her head down and tries to relax. 'Not that my evening is of the least bit of interest to you.'

At the bedside, I pause and I note that she has been reading Zola.

Kitty fluently speaks French and 'La Conquête de Plassams' proves no language challenge.

She sighs aloud.

'You would not enjoy it in the least,' she declares emphatically. 'There are too many unscrupulous people in Mouret's inhospitable house for your liking!' She supposes that I believe her reading such literature is a complete waste of her time, a dissolute exercise that can only lead to her moral compromise and ultimately contributing to her downfall. Kitty closes her eyes, but she continues to elucidate upon her evening. 'You live in a place that is far too remote for such mundane matters. Lady Diana Ashburnham's social world would only confuse you, Henry.'

Though did it confuse you, Kitty?

After a moment of silence in which I find I am unable to reply she opens her eyes and there is irritation in her lovely features. Suddenly she sits up again as I perch beside her on the bed.

'For heaven's sake, Henry,' Kitty exclaims with frustrated exasperation, 'say something!' Of course, I want to speak but my lips are trembling and my throat is stoppered.

'I need you, Kitty,' I manage at last, and my words are broken and simply speaking presents a dreadful trial. I know she thinks that our marriage is an unrighteous contract, and that she suffers, but why does she not see that I suffer too? Amid the loss of innocence and loss of virtue I truly seek for a remnant of deliverance. There is a need in my flesh that is implicit and struggling for trust, that if we two united in wedlock are to live together we must put aside the tempestuous desires inspired by others and simply love each other. I can forget her trysts with Paul Allen... I can forget Lady Ashburnham.

Yet I cannot wholly remember…

Such dalliances can only confound and skew one's point of view. It is best to annihilate their memory, give them over to ashes. I clasp Kitty's hand, tightly, and my hand shakes like a leaf, as if my fingers have never touched her skin before. As if her fresh, perfume scented body is a new country waiting to be explored. My touch travels up her lily-white arm.

'I need you desperately,' I tell her, and I know that my penalty will be her rejection. If Kitty is in want of humour then she need look no further than the pathetic pleading of this, her almost emasculated husband. In an up-rush of emotion I bury my head between her bosoms, and Kitty shakes in revulsion and fends my affections off, pushing me away.

'Henry, please! I'm tired,' she protests, her nightdress dishevelled and pulled down, the rosy nipple over her heart exposed in the golden lamplight. I try to kiss my wife, to taste the ruby of her delicious mouth, her breasts, but she turns aside in horror. 'I am not in the mood for the indulgence of your pathetic licentious and fervid imagination! You have hardly bothered in the past. Why, it is almost three o'clock in the morning!'

Abruptly I feel crushed, and I do not understand, and I suffer the pain of rejection. This only causes Kitty a further measure of pitiable disgust. Realising that I have pushed beyond the boundaries of decency I admonish myself for my lewd folly.

I raise my head, my bearded cheek glistening with the salt of a tear.

'What are you really like under that pretty coil of alabaster skin, Kitty?'

Kitty responds by laughing contemptuously. 'I am your wife!' she says, and she mocks me in her brutal reply. 'That's all I am, your wife!'

Neither am I your lover!

'Kitty...' I stumble and the pain of it all makes my insides go cold, the single tear rolls away and my cheek once again becomes as sallow as is the skin of an Egyptian mummy. 'The woman inside of you... is that woman my wife?' Kitty gives an uncomprehending look, and she is revolted by me, stares at me as if I wear a face that has been eaten away by ulcers. Perhaps she wonders if I suspect her infidelity with Paul, but the truth is that I would rather she satisfied herself with an artificial phallus than haunt the stews and fuck with him, align herself with the filthy gutter-girls in Spitalfields, squandering my fortunes to ensure her illicit pleasures.

'Isn't it a little late for these obscure discussions?' she asks, pulling up the bosom hem of her nightdress to cover her naked breast. The breast that Paul Allen has so recently kissed, soft and creamy and lovely. I shake my head, for how do I reply?

'Will we ever know who we really are?' I ask, calling up a herald of our coming day of judgment. There is little left of devotion or of respect. Kitty's eyes glow, but they are as cold as steel.

'Who are you, Kitty?' I insist, but she refuses an answer. 'Who are you?!'

Violently I shake her, shake her like a frustrated dog might shake a startled cat. For she has become a thing, only a pretty thing, she always has been, but my pretty thing, all trimmed with lace and lovely. Suddenly there is fear in her face, a true reaction at last, and then there is the blood stain that I leave upon her skin, red on the white curve of her shoulder, and she gasps in revulsion. In our brief struggle Zola is knocked to the floor.

'Your hand is bleeding,' she cries, repulsed. 'You reek!' With a little shudder, I pull away and hold my bound fingers up before my face. There is indeed blood, red and bright and running from the kerchief into my sleeve.

'My hand...?' I start, but the words evaporate upon my tongue. 'Who...?' Kitty shrinks back into her bed sheets, as far away from my body as she can possibly squirm.

'Who am I?' I ask, my head reeling with the unanswerable question. 'Who am I?'

Abruptly I leap from her bed and I hurry to the window and pull back the drapes upon the night, upon the black precinct of Morley Street. From that window, I stare into the giant cesspit that is London. In a dizzy fugue, I ask Kitty again who I am but she only shakes her head in confused disbelief.

'Who am I?' I plead in splintered dereliction. 'Who am I?'

Chapter 6

Parlour Games

'In everything disappointment is the lot of women.'

Lucy Stone

Before there was 29 Morley Street, Bullstrode and Holroyd, was my home, and although the day that I returned from Oxford was bright and sunny, I stepped down from my coach knowing only shadows and a wave of loathing. Dismally I recall the street outside Bullstrode and Holroyd was awash with a sea of people all attired in black, a not uncommon sight to see outside a funeral parlour. Upon receipt of a letter, written by my step father, in which he had briefly outlined a strange and consumptive illness suffered by my mother, I had been requested to return to London. An involuntary shudder rattled my bones for I suspected that all was not quite right. It is true that I shared an estranged relationship with my mother, but I had even less time for the man to whom she had re-married following my father's death, Mr. William Fortune. The house sat waiting for me, like some horrible beast, silent in its smug and perfidious necrology, with that despicable man ensconced in its heart and the dead festering in its mortuary bowels. That every window was curtained with heavy drapes inspired a peculiar emotion that chilled my heart, and I knew an unhappy detachment and did not wish to be here. This I admit freely, because I hate funerals and I dislike Mr. Fortune intensely.

Here, in this, I will cede a tiny sliver of sentimentality, for I had brought with me a trinket, my mother's rosary, the one she had gifted me upon my leaving for Oxford. The gift had always seemed like a macabre joke that she had played me, for she knew that I held no particular bent towards god; yet her own conviction could not possibly be so simple, that perhaps in faith came strength. I wondered at what mischief she was playing when she wrapped it through my fingers, little beads of golden light to count off little whispers of penance. I have always disregarded the trinket, for I believe in the natural sciences and not in fairy stories, but mother, who had only returned a nebulous smile at my protest, had pressed it more furtively into my hand. In that clasp, she prophesied some future need or importance. It had belonged to her mother, and therefore should belong to me. I have always found that a bizarre notion. What strength it was to impart to me still holds me mystified, though I swear, and will always hold, that I refute such things and am never likely to bend before an imaginary deity. In that passing, in that moment of unequivocal fantasy and even religious fear, mother's mercies were peculiarly tempered. She being the trust through which my education was realised, I must here relate that even she hardly believed in my ability. Mother, as I recall had once read an article that had quoted Pasteur, and she disliked his 'Temple of the future' citation and joined Mr. Fortune's chorus that an Oxford education was a terrible waste of good money. She had argued that it was a misuse of her Markheim's fortunes, to be sending me off to medical studies, especially when the coffin room and the mortuary were the rooms that should engage my time. Despite a general phobia of people, and indeed for the world at large, it is not without a level of peculiar satisfaction that I did go to Oxford, not caring for Mr. Fortune's ire or my mother's lack of support. I knew quite well that Mr. Fortune's real concern was the funeral home and how he might deviously secure it for himself. Nevertheless, I would brook no argument, even if I had not yet reached my twentieth year, my world had need of erudition, and if one did not tread the road to knowledge one was foolish. For me, well, it was a difficult phase, and yet an opportunity for embracing the joys of medical learning and education beyond the tawdry mortuary of Bullstrode and Holroyd. Although, these years later, I am still divided in my heart, coming home now after all that time spent in education at Oxford, to her corpse, was a curious and peculiarly impassionate experience.

This moment of course heralded a new beginning for my own professional career; for I knew that I could never live under what Mr. Fortune mistakenly hoped would be his roof, so I took a temporary lodging in a street nearer the boroughs. It was thought that I would do everyone the good graces of opening a private surgery for a wealthy clientele, and marry, yet in the former do I live to disappoint. Mr. Fortune had lived to control, but nonetheless, I swore that I would never give that man license over my flesh or one shilling of my money. Whatever power he had over my mother I cannot judge, but he and I never did see eye to eye, and I suspect he might have enjoyed breaking my spirit had he ever wrested the opportunity. I resolved that he should profit nothing, not a penny. Perhaps I should make the fact a little clearer, that Mr. Fortune and I lacked the fundamental tools of communication, and with good reason, for he was just as cruel and relentless in his hatred of me. Narrow of build, wily and possessed of a cunning turn and a treacherous eye, Mr. Fortune had somehow connived his way into the widow Jekyll's bed, and ultimately into wedlock. Frankly I could never understand the attraction my mother had for this man or why she entertained his tyranny, and their relationship never did make sense to me. Although I never witnessed even one instance of domestic violence, I strongly suspect that he beat her. Perhaps he thrashed her with words rather than with his hands, for he was intolerable and a bully. Did she ever wish to escape? How can I ever know? Thankfully my life has been spent away from them both, and all I imagine is that all instinct prevailing, I have resolved the end of his power and to sell the funeral home.

It was in returning to this world, to my unwanted yet legally owned realm of death and decay, Bullstrode and Holroyd, I was determined to divest myself of its cadaver choked shadows. If I stayed and continued its business I courted my own doom. Mr. Fortune knew not what I intended to do, but of course I did not return home with my head full of middle-class notions of doing well in a little medical practice down the lane while still profiteering from a funeral home. Who then would have sought me as their doctor, who would have let me put my hands upon them if they thought that those hands touched the rotting corpse? Nevertheless, I did not relish either the thought of doling out pharmaceuticals to the affluent, of diagnosing cures for their colds and their gout! What I really wanted was to begin a line of research that had taken root in my head at Oxford. I wished to conjure from chemistry and to delve into the mind of man, and the encumbering mortuary would have been but a millstone around my neck. My return made me sick at heart, but it also empowered my steadfast tenacity to be shot of London's elitist circles.

At university, and under the tutelage of many a great educator, I had met numerous respected and interesting people. Although most of them have thought me strange and socio-phobic, Ernst Litauer was one of those men, a wonderful instructor who coaxed and seemed to genuinely care for my well-being. It was at Oxford, after many a trial, after many a provocative paper, after many a reflective experiment and numerous late nights, that I had one day awoken to the idea that man's interior was indeed divided into two beings. This notion went beyond the simplicity of mere good and evil as dictated by the supposition of mythology, but much deeper and deeper yet still into the nature of sex and compulsion. As the idea grew into my obsession it caused my fellows much consternation. Sex and the Id were a branch of knowledge that confronted them. Sex and the Id made them cringe with embarrassment and shrivel up in shame. Sex was about the forbidden and lustful, the conjuring of an incubus called crudity that resulted in the over stimulation of the genitals. The flesh was disgusting but man was compelled to it, and the Id was about self. Who in their right mind wanted to look within?

Somehow, by some means, I believed that the psyche might be manipulated, that the sexual impulses might be regulated, that good feelings and bad could be separated by the introduction of certain chemical compounds. Embarking upon this journey to the unknown, my ideas regarding apothecary were only just the beginning, but it was the way to which my future pointed. This was destiny. I knew that I could try myriad combinations of certain new drugs, drugs like cocaine and papaver somiferum, to be tested for my experiments, drugs that had properties previously unknown that might be distilled and proven. For I had dreams, perhaps they were grandiose, of experiencing the heights of ecstasy and taking mankind there without guilt. Why should one feel less than human because one thought about sex, about the body unclothed? Surely it is an irrefutable human right to feel attraction? Was I wrong? Is man so corrupt that he is indeed divided only into simplistic good and evil? How is it good to feel shame but contrarily base to want pleasure? Such confusing morality. Still, I had other dreams of delving deeper into mankind's soul, deeper than most men would ever think to go. Naturally there emerged those in opposition to my aims, and even to this day they still bray like donkeys and teach the same old regressive rubbish but they do not progress.

This day not only announced my mother's funeral but it also predicted the beginning of my doggedness to continue my own field of research, unfettered and unpolluted by the dictates of my stiff-collared colleagues. In this I had decided to continue with my research, and that setting up a practice near Middlesex Hospital or Riding House, as was expected, would never serve my purpose. Soon enough I knew that I would retreat to a secluded place where I could devote my time to research. Of course, I lied to myself. Fate is a strange thing and even as I pondered what it was that I had to do, I had not factored into that equation the advent of my marriage. To this day I still am unsure that I was not living in a dream, and it is a mystery just as to how the spoken vow came about. Through some formal introduction of Ernst, if I rightly recall, some months after the decease of my mother. Although the day of my proposal and Kitty's acceptance, the circumstances and the hour have all but been obliterated from my memory. I do recall her white wedding gown and the bouquet of creamy roses, the bells clanging from the belfry of Our Lady of Victories, and the winged flight of doves above our heads… but all else shrivels into nothingness…

Now outside of Bullstrode and Holroyd, I found myself in the grip of the most awful depression. For the life of me, the wedding bells have become tolling funeral bells. I do not exactly know why, but it seems as if I were upon the brink of something utterly horripilate. All that I knew and all that I could see as I descended from my carriage was black everywhere; people in black suits, black gowns, black plumes, black horses and a hearse with ebony timbers and polished glass. The hearse was yet to receive its wooden box, and its team were stamping their hoofs, impatient to drive the long road to Tower Hamlets. Bullstrode and Holroyd- Mortician & Undertaker, was etched in gold letters on a black sign and hanging from a brass chain above the entrance, it swung gently in the breeze. The mourners had gathered in the street for the departure of the dead. I really did not want to go inside, for it meant that I had to merge with and to go between their shadows, but I was grieving a loss that was different from theirs, my loss could not be made so final. In the vain hope of avoiding their multitudinous gathering I remember deciding that it was best if I took the side gate and traversed the alley. This would lead me to the back of the house, to the stables and the carpentry shed. A few moments later I passed into a cobbled court and as I looked about I heard the muted draw of a saw and the dulled tapping of a hammer driving nails into timber. Horses snorted, and the air was ripe with the scent of straw and sawdust and horse manure. The odours were vaguely familiar if not entirely unpleasant. The crisp breeze came again and it pulled at my clothing and I drew the neck of my coat in tighter. The house stood off to the left at the end of the narrow lane, and the high stone wall with its iron spikes was edged with a manicured oleander and magnolia, and they in turn, like troops along the side-lines, were offset by beds of bright red asphodels. A stooped old gardener was diligently pulling up weeds, his rake and wheel barrow were parked nearby. I did not nod to him as I walked by, and he did not raise his head.

With an unhurried step, I approached the back door and pulled the bell chain. That was where I first beheld the undertaker, standing there, dressed in his black coat and tails and his tall hat. Yet though he was all over black he hardly appeared to me to be the colour of a raven; for even as the sky was cerulean and despite mourning convention, he looked down upon me and his face was alive with colour. He was a good four inches taller than I, and I saw his blue eyes flash in the morning sun. Of course, he had no way of knowing who I was, perhaps questioning my temerity for using the tradesman's entrance. He was holding a whip, its black line dangling in his grip. For a moment, I thought that he might threaten me and ask me to leave. With a crisp voice, he did ask what my business might be and I informed him that I was Henrietta Jekyll's son, come home from university.

'Then I need not show you into the parlour to see Mr. Fortune,' he quipped sharply, and without further ado he stepped about me and disappeared around the house and up the narrow lane. Bemused rather than angered by the man I stepped over the threshold.

William Fortune, my step father, was at least ten years older than my mother. He had always been a thin and gaunt severity in black and there was no surprise in his eye when his gaze fell upon my face. Under the brightness of gas lamps, on an oak trolley, a sliver tray sparked fire. It was piled with funeral cakes and biscuits. He was eating a piece of cake as I entered through the door, but he did not get up from his desk to greet me.

'So, it has been some time, boy' he muttered as he swallowed. How I resent being called a boy. I am no longer a youth and the sooner Mr. Fortune realised this fact the better for him the world might be.

'Yes,' I responded, and I found it difficult to look at him. There was a peculiar odour about the man too, and it was most repulsive, of pine and cedar and chemical unguents all mixed together that were faintly masking something unpleasant. The smell of death and rotting flesh. As he daubed at his salivating mouth he waved me to a seat; an over-buttoned leather and rosewood monstrosity that possessed not a shred of comfort. I would have expected Mr. Fortune to have been broken with distress, but by all appearances he was not.

'Enjoying your cake?' I asked facetiously.

'Eating as much sin as I can,' he retaliated bluntly, dropping his napkin upon the desk. 'We were just about to leave.'

I was not going to be so easily intimidated.

'Can I offer you a piece of cake… or a biscuit, perhaps?' asked he, and I responded to his triviality with a look of disgust and contempt. For a moment neither of us spoke.

'Well,' I replied, 'you seem to be eating your full, so hopefully I won't get hungry, but that's beside the point. Where do you intend to inter mother?' I asked, and he crisply replied that he had some time ago purchased a crypt in Tower Hamlets.

'Why not with my father, at Highgate?'

'Because she was married to me, I believe, Henry, or did you forget that fact?'

Offended I expressed my reserve but he was as cold as a fish and uncaring for my opinion.

'I get no say in the matter?'

'I believe you don't. Both she and I discussed this some time ago. What else have you come for? What else do you wish to know?'

'Had she been ill for long?' I deflected. 'No one wrote me to let me know. It's rather inexcusable, wouldn't you say?'

'No,' he returned flatly. 'As if you would have cared.' I was stung by his truth. 'She had been ill for a short while, a wasting illness but a rapid one, as I indicated to you in my letter.'

'Can you describe her symptoms?'

'Ha!' he ejaculated contemptuously. 'You do so love to play the doctor!'

'I did not go to Oxford for all of those years to play at my profession, Mr. Fortune.'

'You cannot convince me, but since you have asked, and you are her only child, I will try to enlighten you. A few months ago, I noticed a change in her face.' In the lamp light Fortune's features looked nothing other than shifty. 'Her eyes had reddened and she intimated that her throat was sore. We both suspected a head cold. That's all.'

I must admit that a head cold was a common illness and hardly life-threatening, but this news that it had preceded her death astounded me, for mother had always been of sound health. 'What were her other symptoms?' I pressed, determined to find out all that I could, and Mr. Fortune grunted at me as if he could not afford the time to explain. 'Well?' I insisted.

'If you must…' he carped in irritation, 'the first time that I found her swooning in her ridiculous green room, I thought her bodice too tight, and she groaned of stomach pains.' He began shaking his head as if exasperated.

'Abdominal cramps?'

'I suspected bad milk, you can never be too sure, especially after she had vomited. A few days later she seemed to recover, only to be afflicted again by cramps in her legs and a most laborious loss of breath. It took all her strength to climb the stairs to her bedroom, and might I say she would refuse my help! More than once I found her in her room gasping, her lips turned blue from lack of breath, and I had to throw open the window so that she might breathe fresh air. Then came the headaches and her prostration, and her rejection of me in bed…'

'Please,' I protested upon this point, 'there is no need for me to know the intimate details of your life.'

Fortune half-laughed as if he had enjoyed my discomfort. 'Her decline into weakness came quite rapidly, but the doctors could not say for certain what might have been the cause. They thought at first that she had developed pulmonary tuberculosis, or even cholera. Needless to say, everyone was frightened at the mention of contagion, but no one else seemed to get sick and inevitably, I am afraid to say, she died.'

'You said her green room?'

'Yes!' Mr. Fortune laughed in disgust. 'Did she not tell you in her last letter of the gross amounts of money she had spent to tart up her boudoir with the latest dêcors? With gauche enthusiasm, she had gushed over that appalling Acanthus wallpaper. How she so loved her newly green-papered bedroom. She was quite pleased with how she had given the old place a much-needed sprucing up, and had promptly seen the musty old flock stripped away, and up went the gaudy William Morris green. Décors are not something that either inspires or concerns me, and wallpaper designs and hues not at all.'

'I have always thought her wary with her spending.'

He pondered my words for a moment, conjugating the inference that she had spent the money to spite him, and then he made another grunt, and there was envy in the sound. Fortune's explanations all sounded so suspicious to me.

'So what was responsible for her death?'

'A heart attack, that's what killed her. There's nothing else to tell.'

'A heart attack! Who wrote the certification of death? I should like to speak with him.'

'An Austrian fellow, Doctor Froheim. A blood specialist originally from Vienna, I believe. He has been in practice locally for a short bit, reputedly he served as the personal physician of the Countess Heritzen...Whoever she is… Your mother had been seeing him, but I am afraid you will not be able to.'

'Why not? I should like to speak with this Doctor Froheim immediately.'

'Unfortunately, he left for the Continent only yesterday, so I presume you will have to correspond by letter if you need to pursue any further information.'

'Why do you insist on insulting me?' I asked him pointedly, and Mr. Fortune looked down for a moment, but I suspected him far from repentant, but rather momentarily his thoughts were somewhere else, somewhere that did not include me.

'So, where does all of this leave us, boy?'

'I don't know what you mean.'

Fortune raised his eyebrows and swept a hand about the room.

'This place, what happens now? You, after all, own it, do you not?'

'I cannot talk upon this now. Surely you must have envisaged the moment that it might come?'

'Frankly, I never did.' Fortune was silent for a moment, contemplative. 'Would you like to see her?'

Mr. Fortune's abrupt question took me off-guard, and I must admit that upon those words I shuddered, knowing exactly what he would have done in his foul little workshop to prepare mother for a viewing.

'Pardon?' I returned incredulous, almost shocked at the suggestion, and all I could think were ghastly imaginings of the flesh- the dead flesh under his pawing hands!

'You can say a private goodbye.' Fortune licked away some cake crumbs from his awful mouth. 'She did after all send you off for your education, made that sacrifice. I hope it was worth it! Got to pay her some respect, don't you agree?' Before I could object he had taken my elbow and unceremoniously pulled me from the big, overstuffed rosewood chair.

'I… I'm not sure… 'I protested, feebly drawing back, finding my words drying up in my throat, and all of my so-called resolve having suddenly deserted me, leaving me powerless.

'It's all right,' the clever Mr. Fortune insisted, condescending and loathsome as he increased the pressure on my arm, and almost propelled me from the seat and out into the corridor. 'Won't take long. Can't keep everyone waiting, now can we? Got to get on to the church.'

He led me through a door and down a passage to where the sacred heart of Jesus bled in the leaded glass of a double door and we came into a small chapel. A row of twelve short pews flanked either side, a narrow aisle bisecting them, and at the end of this was a raised dais screened off by a pall of claret coloured drapes. Above the pall light streamed livid through the open wounds of a stained-glass Jesus, done in the same style as the heart in the chapel door. The sun washed through crimsons and yellows and greens, blood dripped from a crown of glass hawthorn.

'I'll leave you for a little while then,' said Fortune, and he disappeared quickly leaving me cold and sick. Eerily the curtains slid back to reveal a casket raised up, on a marble catafalque, the lid was propped up upon a stand, a tortured Christ and a brass nameplate were nailed thereupon. From some hidden recess, the low sound of atonal organ music was filtering through the walls. Someone must have been playing in another room. At the coffin's head, a tree of candles lent a suffused light to the scene. The light was thick with swirling motes, the ethereal threads of translucent smoke pouring from the hot tapers in the stuffy, perfumed airs. The smoke gave off a strange perfume, a scent redolent with the aromatic incendere from a golden thurible.

Furthermore: 'all that is solid melts into nothing.'

I cannot remember who it was who once said those words, but they made me shudder. I held back, teetering upon the threshold of something I did not really want to do. The life force had irrevocably gone and yet my mother had only been forty-seven years of age. I hardly recognised her, inert and inanimate despite the faint tinctures cast by the surreal candlelight. I did not want to approach further, yet something compelled me to do so. Hesitantly I stepped up to the coffin and looked upon her fully in her repose. Fortune in his talents had done a fine job, for mother lay unruffled, clothed in black in her Cherry wood box, reclined in a tide of tulle and oyster coloured satin, her head at rest on a blue velvet pillow, her hands clasped together, so calm, and so incredibly serene. Her crown of thick dark hair flowed over the pillow and spilled among golden tassels, threaded through with pearls. A large cross of polished brass, studded with red garnets, stood decoratively at the foot end of the box, an Anglican symbol in refutation of her Catholic faith. The cross reflected back splashes of carmine that fell across mother's lips and cheeks giving her features an unnaturally warm hue. She was so still in her coffin, so still and yet so dead despite the imitation of life leant her by the mortician's cunning artistry. Presenting for all intent and purpose as one who was sleeping, the vision repelled me, for there was no deceiving the senses. The woman was deceased, not sleeping, and her vital force had exited this world. Nonetheless, it was difficult to accept Doctor Froheim's diagnosis. A heart attack? It seemed ludicrous. Who was this strange physician fellow anyway, for I had certainly never heard of him and his name had never been mentioned by anyone at Oxford? Perhaps the regulatory systems for practicing physicians was different on the Continent.

Looking upon the deceased woman, I felt a shiver of penitence, for most of my life I confess that I have felt divided from my mother. She was not a particularly warm creature and for some reason I have always thought her restless, a sentiment that seemed at odds with the domestic problem of rearing a fatherless child with a substitute father. The strict division of female duty as mother and home maker must have clashed with her control over the funeral home, rubbed sentiment up against commerce, cash flow and William Fortune. Not for one moment do I believe that she was completely loathed to invest her time in me, but by that foible she extended power to Mr. William Fortune. Conversely, though he may have wished it so, there was no way on earth that she would ever darn his socks. In the beginning, in the first year or two of my absence from home, mother wrote sporadically, but as I became assimilated into the obsessive courses of my education our communications at length dropped away. Little word had passed between us for well over seven years. While I pondered our separation, I took a chain from my coat pocket, a work of fine gold and upon it dangled a cross. It was heavy and made of jet and the figure of Christ was nailed to it, his tortured body rendered in coloured glass paste, spiked through with tiny golden rivets, his voluptuous nakedness gleaming with shiny bleeding skin. Looking upon the Christ I thought, and I cannot account as to why, that the semi-nude and tortured image, with his seeping wounds dripping gore almost to his visible pubis, reminded me somewhat of that famous Renaissance painting of Cesare Borgia by the Italian Altobello Melone. Just why I thought this now was peculiar, and the idea made me chortle. Religious mythology means little to me, and it was so riddled with pornographic iconography that with the notion came religion's outlandish hypocrisy. There was something blatantly erotic in the agonised image, dripping blood, whipped, transposed from pain into pleasure, and even as I thought this something spurred me to the action, some force that impelled me to loop the chain about my mother's neck, for it belonged to her, after all. Let her suffer lust's tortures in the afterworld.

Even then as I did this my arm rose involuntarily, stretching out and I reached within the coffin. Still clasping the cross, I could not stop myself from touching her, my fingers lightly caressing her slim white hand and expecting it, by a cosmetic illusion, to be warm. The flesh was indeed cold, so icily cold, but it was oddly supple, made so by the injection of formaldehyde. Her fingertips were painted a pale shade of rose, and Mr. Fortune had lightly rouged her lips. He had also placed a lily with a yellow ribbon upon her breast, but the flower had turned slightly limp. It was the mar that spoiled the care with which he prided his artistry. The candle light became quite intense at that moment, flaring in the chapel like a starburst, and I watched as the large ruby-studded cross at her feet glinted and pained my eye. It seemed my vision filled with red, that my eyes bled, that the light bisected, split in two, and light and dark fell over both sides of her breasts, carving her face and suggesting two women lying within the box, one chaste and one soiled. Some long-forgotten vow to a love that I did not know sounded in my ear, an indefinable threnody that got mixed up with the singing of a wondrous choir ringing in my head. I could feel the rush and surge of the blood making noise in my veins. Somehow, I imagined a lure and it swept upon me like a raven from a lightning blasted tree. The light ebbed and dipped with fire and a strange agony began to spread heat through my body. When I looked at mother's face a visible sweat had broken upon my brow and my palms too had become clammy. My head had started to pound with a most dreadful throbbing and a sick feeling of nausea invaded my gut. For one dreadful second I thought her lips smiled up at me and a ghastly chill leapt up my arm, and when she opened her eyes and looked at me I recoiled in horror absolute.

'My dear boy' she said, perceiving my dread, reaching up and fixing her cold clutch upon my arm so that I could not run away. The dangling chain became entangled in her fingers. How I wanted to flee but I was rooted to the spot upon the bier, shaking, and with a tongue that clamped down a scream. She took my hand, her fingers like slivers of rose-tipped ice as they slid along the flesh of my arm, the Christ glinting in his nakedness. Her grip was a clasp as unforgiving as was winter's frozen bones. She held me squirming and touched her other hand to my face. Then she caressed my shaved stubble.

'You follow the fashion of Alexander- you can't even grow a beard!' she declared, and the words stung my pride. 'Not like your father. Oh, he had a wonderfully thick beard…' She smiled a strange and lascivious smile replete with a most disgusting implication. 'So smooth, like a peach… why you may as well play Hephaestion!' she declared. Finding myself almost upon the point of vomiting, I squirmed to release her grip. 'Perhaps I should have listened to Mr. Fortune's advice and taken it more seriously,' she continued, 'and intervened much sooner. Tied your hands together and kept them above the covers… disturbed and depraved child that you are!' Stinging its way up my throat I could feel the bile erupting, and she smiled cruelly and whispered that it was time for a game…

'What game?' I managed to whisper, incredulous with horror, and she gave a mocking laugh.

'I want you to pretend for me, that you are all grown up… like your father…'

Suppressing a cry of disgust, I leapt back, and the gold chain fell across her bosom and slid into the confines of the silk and satin of the lining, a black and gold spill among the splashes of red spectrum, light and shadow against the bruised chalice of the lily. In that moment of repulsion, the vision abruptly dissipated. Here I realised, almost to the point of sickness, that I had been caught in a terrible momentary delirium. No, she had not moved, but still lay in her coffin inert and quite still. The needle and the thread had stitched her eyes and lips shut and my over-reactive imagination had assailed me a phantasm, for after all Henrietta Jekyll was indeed dead. There came upon me a horrible sensation of disbelief that shivered through my bones, and I stepped falteringly away, my head reeling. Abruptly the organ music ceased, and shaken and unnerved I found that I could not stay another moment in the chapel, the vision had been so unsettling. Yet why I had suffered this moment of panic I knew not, but it was stirred no less by loss and estrangement and guilt, and Fortune would have enjoyed the moment had his eyes bore witness. It had been a mistake to look upon mother, a terrible mistake, and I took a handkerchief from my pocket and wiped at my brow as I exited the chapel. In the corridor, around a corner and somewhere close by but still out of my sight I heard Mr. Fortune quietly laughing.

Up the stairs to the residence I walked, battling to calm the contents of my stomach, my feet a little unsteady. There was no one to stop me as I turned the handle to my mother's bedroom and alone I walked into shadows. It was gloomy and stale, so I crossed to the window that overlooked the back court and pulled open the heavy emerald green drapes. Sunlight flooded the room. The walls were certainly green, a floral pattern but not as excited as I might have expected, and not quite as garish as Fortune had stated. Arranged about the room were objects that had obviously amused and appealed to my mother; an oriental fan, a lute, pastoral paintings and china, everything seemed cosy yet lifeless at the same time. On her dressing table were jewelled combs and diamond earrings that caught the invading sunlight and flashed like brilliants; a blue-silver satin gown with a white silk magnolia pinned at the centre of the neckline but one of several that hung in the great oak closet. There was a slight odour of mould in the air. The bedding had been covered with black silk and the mirror had been turned to the wall. A white sheet of paper was on the writing desk and a feathered nib and ink well. Upon it were neatly written these words:

'Beyond this window's iron grate the pale light weeps in shades of slate

Wan pools of sunshine, shivering lie in dull tones 'neath a sombre sky

All shrouded is the garb of morn as if Apollo in his scorn

Has sheathed the bright tips of his spears, instead to rain down woe and tears.

Each dim regret eternal falls beyond these crumbling, mortared walls

And shades of grey and faded stars expire between these rusted bars

And I wonder wretched, wonder long why misery should sing my song.'

It was a depressing message to impart, yet it was nothing for anyone else to know, for the room was now at last little more than an abandoned well soon to be strung with cobwebs. Above the bed end I noted that the green wallpaper was lifting at the seam, and I stretched out my fingers and touched it, feeling the rough surface beneath where it had not been properly glued. I tore a strip from the wall, as big as my hand, and I laughed with contempt as I did this. Walking up to the wardrobe I stooped and rifled behind the voluminous folds of dress silk, and buried in its darkness my fingers touched upon cool, lacquered timber. Flinching, knowing the box still there, I snatched back my hand as if I had been burned and I stood upright, shaking, looking about the emerald room, furtive in the hope that no one saw. Suddenly feeling again quite sick, I fled, closing the door quickly and returning to the downstairs parlour. There, in the quiet, I poured myself a glass of water from the decanter on the sideboard. Composing my nerves took a few minutes longer, and as the spasms that pinched my guts receded I risked a glance through the heavy olive-green portierés and out into the boulevard. Up the way the mourners were filing towards the church, Our Lady of Victories, on the rise, and they were undulating columns of fluttering black under the blue sky.

What was their fascination with death if it wasn't perverse? I looked at them all, and I saw the women trailing long veils of crêpe as if they were flying streamers, their pale faces obscured, mysterious, morbidly fetching in their dark beauty, the bright sunlight sparking off their black-only jewels. Half-a-dozen black silk parasols were flying over those black veils; white hands were buttoned up in long black gloves, coat tails flapped intermittently in the gentle breeze. The gentlemen too were rendered in an elegantly but like monochromatic compatibility. Along the cobbles they all drifted away from Bullstrode and Holroyd, slowly, lethargically, solemnly, up to the great iron gates of Our Lady of Victories and beyond, to attend their last respects and then to unwrap from black crêpe their funeral cakes. With a choking gag, I imagined I tasted the dry, unpalatable biscuits and I saw William Fortune in my mind's eye as he swallowed his own slice of cake, and abruptly I vomited into the ewer.

That night the sky was deepest blue, and a great moon, all silver, was pinned on high. The man in the moon watched through thin veils of cloud as I picked my way through a rising fog crawling up from the foetid river. Through the narrow-cobbled streets at midnight my path led me, wrapped in a long black cloak and carrying my Gladstone bag. Every now and again I heard distorted and muted voices within the aural spaces I traversed, and the voices co-mingled with the faint echo of clopping hoofs and the clicking of my boot heels. I could hear the soft chink of the little vials within my Gladstone bag as the glass came together. Few people were haunting the ways I chose, and the lanes were secretive and empty, and eventually the streets found me outside Tower Hamlets. By the long, high stone wall that demarcates the boundary of the living from the dead I walked in silence. A thick vine crawled along the length of the stones, and all dressed in black, had anyone been there to bear witness, they might have sworn that I looked like a spectre blending darkly into the swirling shadows. At length, I passed beyond midnight and I came upon the lych-gate of the cemetery. The roofed gateway divided the spike-tipped fence, and the iron gates were chained and locked and bolted. Musing to myself I almost laughed out loud. Rattling them gently I tested their security, but even as I did this a little thrill went through my body. I remembered the unfortunate events of the day, those events that only seemed to make Mr. Fortune's position more unfortunate.

Through this same entrance, these iron gates, guarded by a Seraph with fractured wings and clasped hands, mother's funeral cortège had passed at the hour of three. Under the lych-gate the funeral procession had briefly paused, hovering like a clutch of shadows in matt-black crêpe. Yet mother was not to be buried in the ground but in a mausolea, a bricked in building on the north side of the cemetery, a black room with narrow grilled windows and austere, panelled doors. A black sarcophagus her final and ultimate point of rotting termination. It is said that the northern section of a graveyard is reserved for outcasts and aliens...

In the late afternoon, mother's funeral procession, in all its tenebrous pageantry, arrived at Tower Hamlets. The hearse, with glittering glass and gold and silver trim, with its polished Red Cedar coffin covered in floral tribute, with two black mares driven by the undertaker I had met at the funeral home, came slowly into the cemetery. The hearse was decked with six large and floating ostrich feathers, followed behind by two mourning carriages with the blinds drawn. From somewhere beyond the gate a dog barked and drawing up the blind I looked from my carriage and I saw a murder of ravens perched upon a swaying branch, watching the procession with glinting eyes of reflecting onyx. After a momentary pause the cortège was conducted through the gates by Mr. Fortune himself, and the man walked in front of the hearse, all attired in his long tails, tall hat and black gloves, leading his pallbearers and his mourners along the stony path to the tomb. As mother would have noted, he was 'acting', and all was performance. The man filled me with disgust. Sitting quietly, watching the birds hop along branch and twig, I watched with hardly feigned disgust, and although I was silent I ruminated distractedly over my experience, and pondered my physical and emotional reactions to both Fortune and my estranged mother at Bullstrode and Holroyd. I wondered if he was not such a raven, and I wondered too what it was that I must do now.

Part of me wanted to depart, but I had not the resolve, and part of me wanted so desperately to avoid the observations of others. Soon the hearse stopped again, and Mr. Fortune gathered together his pallbearers. All that I could think, when my eye fell upon the man, was how he had done little but dishonour my father and that he was nothing but a crafty and vile despot. To me at least, Fortune was a man condemned to rudeness and ignoble, an ass whose character was little above that of the thief and the robber. With affected solemnity, the pallbearers drew the coffin from the tray and lifted it with strain and difficulty upon their shoulders. Leading the way, William Fortune walked them to the crypt. The path was rocky and ill kept, the way narrow and uneven, and the pallbearers wove through attenuated paths trailing weeds and brambles. They stepped over broken monuments, the fractured blocks from headstones and obelisks that had toppled, and walking behind the bearers, the mummers sobbing at my back, I had to keep my eye upon the ground lest I turn an ankle in the rubble. As if in answer to my imagined peril, a most unfortunate event occurred upon that moment, and this appalling horror has forever marked the unhappy occasion of my mother's burial.

With unsteady feet, the bearers approached the tomb, and upon the exigency of Mr. Fortune turning in his sable livery, turning about like a black finger pointing towards the abyss, to wave his men forth and up the stairs and through the panelled doors, the foremost bearer stumbled and fell. Flying asunder like a deck of black aces the other men overbalanced and pitched forward, their grip on the heavy box undone. The coffin dropped with sudden violence like a block of stone, slamming down in its forward thrust, the first man falling under its weight. His head was instantly crushed to a bloody pulp between box and broken headstone, and there came a most sickening and loud crack as the man's skull broke open and his brain was evacuated from his cranium. A gasp of horror passed through the spectators, and I saw squirting red blood, pink brain matter and yellow bone as the unfortunate bearer's face collapsed. With a nauseating pop, like a grape erupting from its skin, the eye was ejected from its socket. It all happened so quickly, within the space of a lightning volt, and a volley of horrified cries went up from the lips of the mourners. Two of the women, tightly laced in their black crêpe, fainted upon the spot and one never regained her breath. The ravens on the oak branch abruptly took to frenzied flight, flapping raucously like portents of doom, flapping so close over our heads that I felt the wind from the beating of their ebony wings upon my face.

Even as the man with the crushed head twitched in his death throes, the coffin hit the ground, scattering pebbles and dirt, and it thumped violently upon its side and the lid shore free. My mother's corpse, with black hair combed and braided, her skin grey, and the white lily, all tangled in the coffin's wrap of oyster tulle, rolled from the silken confines. Grotesquely her head turned about with an audible snap, and her shoulders thrust out in one direction, her arms splayed as if in abject supplication and her red-painted mouth shaken agape. It was a disgusting spectacle, for all standing close beheld her body exposed, her skirts pushed asunder and her lower half revealed. She was wearing no drawers and no stockings, and her legs were splayed akimbo. The mourners rushed forth, all to see, ignoring the fainted women and the man with the crushed head, and I felt for one dreadful moment that the whole world stopped. With a sickened groan, I looked away. Although her eyes were sewn shut I could swear that she was staring at me, accusing, and I could not stand her reprove. When I dared look again I breathed the name of William Fortune, and I cursed him for allowing such a terrible thing to be done.

With this foul spectacle still burned into my mind I let go of the iron bars of the gate, but let it be said that no lock has ever kept me from any quest, and this night I was possessed of only one objective, revenge. With some little difficulty, using the vine that crawled along the wall as a rope, I threaded the creeper through the handle of my Gladstone bag and then I secured it about my middle. Testing the vine, I pulled upon the creeper to be certain that it could take my weight, and then like a monkey I scrabbled up and scaled the stone wall. On the other side of the wall grew a grove of splendid oak and yew trees, towering sentinel in the dark, their sturdy trunks and grand canopies tenanted no longer by the ravens, but instead by owl and squirrel, salamander and frog. Chorusing from this sacred grove I heard the frogs and the insects as they sang their night song. Here I pitched, dangling precariously, scrabbling with my grip, my boots kicking against the stone until at length my feet touched the ground. Quickly I undid the knotted vine from my bag and creeping along, hidden in the darkness, I moved among the trees. A little wind rippled over my cheeks. Here was a stone garden that now lay overcrowded with the bones of the dead. It was a wild, eclectic nether land of cracked cherubim and regal seraphs. Pausing for a moment when the moon dipped behind a cloud I removed a candle from my pocket and struck a flint and lit the wick. Shielding its flickering luminance, I moved through the treacherous rows. Broken angels seemed to float in an ocean of translucent waves. Here were elegantly wrought monuments of granite and marble, a gorgeous celestial city of richly ornamented tombs crumbling silently under the weight of neglect. Between the rows I passed, my trajectory north, under eaves of carved stone, by biers sculptured with fractured rosettes and hung in rigid tassel. Stone trumpets made a silent clarion call to deaf ears, harps and pipes and chiselled bouquets were detailed everywhere, defiled crosses and mouldering tumuli were aisles through which I walked alone among the dead. On the western edge, I passed through rows where the coffins had been stacked one atop the other in deep, cavernous shafts, those pits covered by boards that gaped wide, leaking their putrefying stench and heaving with a sea of maggots. Here I did not linger because the smell of cadaverous vapours and the swarms of vermin was terrible, and the macabre and the grisly simmered like festering gruel just inches beneath my feet. Thankfully the paths finally led beyond the mass graves and gave over to monuments and finally to crypts and mausoleums. After some moments had passed the moon reappeared from the bank of cloud, and I recalled the musty smell of the earth and the scent of the floral tributes that could scarce mask the nasty murrain of corruption.

Keeping my eyes fixed through the darkness, I stumbled several times, almost falling to the ground, and as I descended the overgrown terraces I eventually came upon the rows of crypts with stone blocks and porticos drawn starkly in the pale lunar beams. At length, I located my mother's place of final rest. No thought of divine retribution assailed me when I walked up to that tomb, and neither was I affected by any dismay or fright at this thing I did- no pale-sheeted ghosts threatened me. The panelled door to the tomb was sealed with a brass padlock, its shackle looped through a linked chain fed through a clasp. Setting down my candle I rummaged in my bag, and from that leather doctor's satchel I withdrew a small but sharp saw, and briskly I began to hack through the shackle that held the fortress closed. After a while the lock gave and I flung it aside, and upon opening the gate, I picked up my bag and holding high the candle, I proceeded into the crypt. Within the vault was pitch black, and my candle was the only illumination, but it realigned the shadows and showed me the stone sarcophagi to the left that held the Red Cedar box and my mother's body. Floral offerings lay propped about the walls and on the tiled floor were withering sprays and wreaths whose once vibrant colours were beginning to corrupt into a sickly brown. Tentatively I stepped up to the stone sarcophagus. The granite lid looked most heavy and I doubted that I could shift it, but setting the candle into a niche and dropping my bag on the floor, I placed my hands upon the smooth covering stone. Under my palm the granite was cold, and I traced my fingers along the length of the slab. Herein, lying on her velvet pillow stretched out the corpse of my mother. Soon her body would swell and bloat, soon enough the worm would snack, the maggot would be at its work, and soon enough there would be nothing left. The catabolism of the flesh would quicken into a vile putridity, a mess of blackening grume and yellow bones. With a grimace, I tested the rigidity of the covering, pushed against it, but it did not yield. Yet again I thrust, and this time with more force, holding my breath as I heaved, but to no avail. A lever, I needed a lever, but I had not thought to bring a pry bar. It was with disdain that I entertained the thought of having to procure an iron and return, and even as I thought this my heart, for one dreadful moment, paused in its beat in the ivory cage of my chest.

'Need any help there, old boy?' said the shadow as it loomed in the entry, and I swear, as I was caught in the moment of my necromantic burglary, I almost joined my mother in the afterlife.

chapter 7

Tigers Need Not Lick Their Lips

'How shall the Shown pretend to ken

aught of the Showman or the show?'

Sir Richard Burton

Ah, do you recall our last visit to the Khazneh? Yes, I am sure you do… and did that night of brisk entertainment whet your appetite for further adventure? I am sure that it did! Well, delay not another minute and do come with me again, for tonight I can promise you a particularly special entertainment, one that you most certainly will not have experienced before. Of course, you will need to be liberal in your views, for our adventure shall find us entering the realm of the wholly unexpected. Your wild eye betrays you, and I see you are intrigued, so please do not be reticent, for your appetence is wet upon your lips and it discloses all your innermost and unexpressed desires. Imagine for a moment that you are engaged in kisses of the sweetest kind, that the flesh abounds, ripe and fresh within that great antechamber beyond the stone eagles and the pylons and down those marble steps. Hear the singing and rejoicing as we walk again beneath that portico, to find ourselves tempted by the most unusual of erotic diversions. Nevertheless, I am but your guide, and not the guardian of your virtue or your purity. Here, carnality is the order, and for those less prudish, less emotively fragile, picture the most glorious beauty to ever shine its light upon the earth. Ah! Conceive that the devil is a girl and you shall know your lust her slave. However, I see some in our group are still hesitant. Perhaps you think that my words are false bravura, or that the vicissitudes of lust pour from my lips like libations, yet I swear, in the Khazneh tonight pulses one with such diversity to life that the genitals they have been assigned means nothing! Though right or wrong, it is not for me to judge, for who would not seek for new thrills when the Khazneh strives to cater for all tastes? Why else do you walk with me this night? If you are wishing to love, and to be loved in the most wondrous guile of concupiscence that you could ever imagine, to plunge head first into lustfulness and be ensnared in the most unusual pleasure, then proceed with me, come now, for life scarce can wait upon indecision, and I have much to divulge… If love might sink deeper and deeper into depravity, command a special sex that is not yet named, the beautiful unknown, who are any of us to judge? Let us join our dashingly handsome new acquaintance, Mr. Edward Hyde, as he encounters a veiled erotic day-dream, a delicious appetizer that one must suck down in eager mouthfuls, love-rousing and with a heart trembling in fiery delight.

'My dear, Paul,' says Hyde 'you have no idea what a pleasure it is to be in your company again! What wonders are planned for tonight?'

'Whatever the world should offer, I trust that you will not be too disappointed.'

'Disappointed!' exclaims our handsome gentleman. 'Heaven forbid any disappointment!'

Mr. Hyde is with Paul Allen, in the Khazneh, and they are laughing, merry in their drinking and their revel.

'I have not been graced with your presence for a few weeks, old boy. Where have you been?'

'Had a slight accident,' returns Hyde, uncurling his palm. A pale but crimson and recently healed wound is revealed.

'Cut yourself?' says Paul casually, with no actual concern in his tone. 'You must learn to be more careful.'

'Nothing serious,' replies Hyde. 'My dear, Paul, you have no idea what a joy it is to be in your company again!'

'Glad to hear that, my man!'

At their table are two lovelies, beauties of the night, women with white skin and luscious curves, drinking champagne and giggling. Their bosoms are almost spilling from their dresses; their lips are glossy and ripe like raspberries wet with dew.

'Well,' Mr. Allen says to Hyde, 'you should have been here last night! Wonderful fun!'

They both laugh loudly and Paul slips his hand inside the bodice of the girl sitting at his side. Squeezing her nipple beneath the shining red taffeta, Mr. Allen licks his lips and leers and she squirms and giggles. He recalls how his fingers have already stroked her lower parts and found their way into her sticky well, and she thus finding her pleasures a thousand times strengthened has teased his cock with her raspberry lips. Last evening, Mr. Allen has paid a small fortune, courtesy of Henry Jekyll's patronage, for lust untamed, and in a private salon, grinning and groaning, he has unbuttoned his waistcoat and straddled this whore's naked body. Between those breasts he has thrust his sex, and those fleshy, ivory mounds, pressed together, have brought him to his ecstasy, and her bosom and neck have received his milky effusion. These girls have but one purpose, to serve his pleasure. His pleasure with Henry Jekyll's money!

'Still,' Paul remarks, shivering at the memory, smiling up at his new friend, his reverie melting into a sardonic smile, 'I am glad that you like the old place.' 'Admirable,' says Mr. Hyde, and then adding 'rather like Fortnum and Mason.' Paul is quizzical, and what an odd thing to remark. Did the man denigrate? Fortnum and Mason, as everyone knew, was a department store in Piccadilly. Paul failed to see Hydes's reference to these lovely ladies in relation to ready-to-eat luxury meals served in aspic jelly. 'Fortnum and Mason, I don't see the similarity? 'This is not a chaste café where people drink tea and shop for preserves and dried fruit.'

'Well, it may as well be a monastery!'

'The Khazneh,' returns Paul in offence, 'is no meeting place for monks!'

'Monks! Not likely,' squeals the girl closest to Hyde, and she strokes Edward's cheek, her white teeth sparkling as her wide lips part in a knowing smile. 'You can buy anything here,' she tells him, 'except a cup of tea, or a bible!'

Her companion titters with laughter at her jest. 'Pray buy me a proper drink then, and absolve me of my sins!' jokes the girl. An annoyed Paul summons forth a waiter to bring them a fresh bottle of champagne. The bubbles flow and everybody laughs.

'Edward, old boy, have you not noticed anything different about the place tonight?' asks Paul, quickly finishing another glass of sparkling wine.

'Different?' asks Hyde, who has not imbibed any alcohol. His eyes are as big as saucers and he casts his glance furtively about the reception.

Is everyone but he in on a private joke? Yet the Khazneh is different tonight, for the game tables have been removed and the dance floor has been cleared, and the clientele have been relegated to the periphery of the maelstrom. Under the diamond glint of the glass ceiling the lights suddenly plunge and the room is darkness and mystery. An abrupt hush falls upon the punters.

Tonight, a special pleasure will be presented for our fine citizenry, for they will be entertained by musicians and pretty dancers. They wait quiet anticipation until there comes to the ear the low and rhythmic beat of a two-sided drum. The pulses and the cadences vibrate upon Mr. Hyde's skin. Hyde can feel the beat and it throbs into his chest, inside his ribs and into the vibrant tattoo of his heart. The gentleman watches with fixed attention as a single light comes on to guide two tall Nubians into the centre of the room. They are strong men, swarthy of skin, skin so dark it shines jet-blue, beautiful male specimens they are, whose lineage surely must hail from the ancient kingdoms of Kerma and Kush. Behold the symmetry of their perfect bodies, their brawny arms and bulging biceps, their broad and hairless chests, their sturdy thighs. Note the muted silence of their tongues.

On their noble heads, the Nubians wear each a scarlet turban adorned with an aigrette of ostrich plumes, their waists are encircled by gold tassel, their manly generous +endowments covered by flimsy, spotted animal skins. Flammulated ruby and blue chalybeous stones glimmer in the golden bracelets coiled about their forearms. In their necklets are chalcedony and white jade. Between them, in their strapping clasp, they carry a cloaked object. It is an object shrouded by veils of all colours, thin and gauzy camouflages of wispy material. The airs fill with burning incense, the heady perfumes of wafting myrrh and cinnamon. Slowly other lights come up, lights with coloured filters over the lamps, gaudy reds and greens and yellows, casting infernal pools upon the polished boards of the dance floor and spectrums upon the faces of the crowd. A band emerges, each topped in red fez, and they position themselves in the darker recesses, their bodies half-lit in the shadows. They are like silhouettes on the raised dais where they wait with their instruments at the ready, the stringed oud, the qanun, the sistrum, the long flute and the harp all poised in the interval between this breath and the next, momentarily as silent as the Nubians except for the woman playing the tarabouqa. All listen to the beat of that drum, and the thumping heralds the passions, calling the Khazneh's gentlemen ever closer to a mystery, into the less than chivalric world of dissipation and erotic corruption. The veils come away, one by one, peeling back like coloured petals, first by one Nubian and then by the other. Fuchsia twirls away, gentian floats in the air, jasper ripples, lavender and azure, cadmium and citron unwrap, the Nubians remain implacable. As Mr. Hyde watches on eagerly, intrigued by what might be revealed, magenta and blood-red are stripped back, and finally there is the black shroud, black as ink, black as thunder, a black veil that drops to the floor to the final emphatic beat of the drum. A gasp ripples through the air, pulses through the gathering of thrill-seekers and Edward Hyde is not disappointed when the woman is revealed. She is a vision, rare and beautiful and voluptuous, the remote unknown, her body a curving instrument upon which must be played the most wondrous music.

'Is she not gorgeous?' remarks Mr. Allen, his words spoken lowly, half to himself and half to the hushed and awed multitudes. He recalls Daniel's verse:

'Love is a torment of the mind,

A tempest everlasting;

And Jove hath made it of a kind

Not well, nor full, nor lasting.'

See that Mr. Hyde is smitten even though he knows that the moment is surely a dream and fleeting. How tall is this woman, above the usual height, and her legs are shapely and muscled, smooth like silk and the colour of a pearl? Her hips are a curve following the arc of the moon, her belly flat and toned with a navel pierced by the fire of a glowing ruby. Of some exotic Arabian caste is she, the absolute evocation of the feminine principle, her slender limbs decorated with bangles of jewel-encrusted gold and silver, with slivers of cornelian and turquoise and lapis-lazuli. Still as a statue, a beauty of the noble Theban type, the last surviving relic of the splendour of a vanished world, with cheeks of ivory and small but rounded breasts of flawless alabaster. That lovely form is cloaked in two immodest pieces of shining cloth, both that cover those breasts and the triangle at her sex. Cloisonné and semi-precious stones and little brass bells are stitched to those tiny strips of fabric and they catch the light like scintillating stars. Her arms are extended above her head, a woven wicker basket held high over the thunderous storm of her inky locks. The woman wears a mask. Her face is her secret, her beauty the abstraction. The Nubians step away and the alateeyeh begins to play, bringing forth with slow concinnity the euphony of the music. The sistrum jingles like a tambourine, the long flute weaves a mellow air, the harp strings and the qanun vibrate gently, plucked and coaxed like ethereal filigree, the pulses of the tarabouqa herald the dance. From the bonds of harmony, the beauty is unleashed. She steps forward, followed by the coloured lights, the lantern beams tracking her as she moves from yellow light to blue and then to red. At length, she flutters within the aureolin radiance as if she were a moth.

One elegant leg extended in a straight, inflexible line, she holds the poise momentarily. The music signals her next movement, and she bends her knee, and her toes descend to graze the boards. Inexorably the other foot slides forth, and as she walks with slow and deliberate steps she lowers her arms and holds the wicker basket before her bosom. All wonder what might be contained within that raffia, but all eyes are riveted and their tongues are stilled. A little quake passes through her body, from toe to crown, knowing that they watch, voyeurs all, and she feels the tremor travelling like quicksilver along every muscle, every nerve, but controlled and rolling like a ripple in a millpond. Edward Hyde is fascinated, beguiled, his eyes are wide and glassy. He watches, like one who is caught in a dream, watches as she weaves before the audience and gently lowers her basket to the floor, placing it amid the tide of multi-coloured veils. The bells in her immodest costume tinkle as the high lanterns go out one by one, all but the yellow light, and it narrows its beam and she is standing solitary in a pillar of nacarat flame. With a slow gyration, she moves around the basket, her naked back turned to the audience, and she reaches down, down with a measured and dilatory motion, her slim white hands peeling back the wicker lid. With a lingering impulsion, she straddles the basket and elegantly splays her legs, turning again, nimbly, to face the crowd, her knees bent with her feet pointing aside. She is balanced as if upon some magical point, her hips and cleft obscured by shadow. She dips her hands beyond the lip of the weave, into the well of blackness, down into the depths of the basket, up to her elbows. Throwing back her head so that her long neck resembles that of a swan, the lantern moves swiftly up to shine upon the glittering and bejewelled mask that covers her face. In that moment, her lower body becomes as dusk, a pool of shades and obscurity into which not a single eye can see. Mr. Hyde licks his lips and his appetence is balanced upon the edge of the void. How unexpected an entertainment this is proving? In his tête montée our gentleman is noting the quickening of his pulse, and the thrumming as the blood makes noise in his ears. The dancer begins to straighten, to stand up, and as she does this it is revealed that her hands have been plunged within the fabric that covers her sex. The light pours forth again, illuminating the symmetry of her whole body, and a startled gasp rushes from the collective lips of the onlookers. The Arabian pulls forth from between her thighs, from beneath the flimsy cloth of her garb, an undulating serpent.

The sistrum makes a vigorous rattle, and a few of the ladies on the periphery draw back in their seats, grasping at their gentlemen, suddenly afraid. They watch on, horror-struck and in awe as the snake emerges, its wedge-shaped head drawn forth, its eyes like blackly-glittering jewels, its tongue rapidly darting. The dancer caresses the creature, a long and loving stroke as its length is withdrawn, revealed, slid between those milky thighs, thick and luxurious, its diamond scales rubbing against the inner petals of her cleft, her eyes fluttering behind the mask in voluptuous felicity. She can feel the cool scales as they move torturous and slow over her pale flesh, each scale a viridescent ornature that glides, that slides, and that pleasures and thrills. Up and along her slowly gyrating body, up above her sable hair the dancer raises the snake, its long and sinuous thread caressing her from pubis to cheek until its flicking tail emerges. With a casual pirouette, the woman loops the creature about her shoulders, a cold-blooded and living stole, and as she spins the serpent receives a blandishment upon its basilisk lips. With a flickering, tasting, furcate tongue it reciprocates the kiss. The audience is electrified and repulsed, entranced, for this is a totally new experience for them, enthralled as the snake twists it length about the concavities of her body, and becomes a lubricious emerald circlet about the dancer's throat. How the beast throbs and swells, lightly constricting, tightening, slackening and tightening again. How the music throbs and swells. How Mr. Edward Hyde's sex throbs and swells. The dancer unfurls the creature from her slender neck, holding it just under the head and by the tail, and she raises her right leg and passes the snake again between her thighs, pulling it up and down and gently back and forth. Abruptly, in a sinuously arduous and winding undulation, the vermiform beast coils about her arm, its length a tendril helix wrapping about her breasts. She dances faster then, in jerky, staccato movements at first, steps that begin to punctuate the dynamic beat of the music, her feet moving a little quicker, her hips gyrating and thrusting, her eyes glinting like gems, her hair like raven pennants flying.

A red fire ignites in the ruby embedded in her umbilicus. The woman seems not to recognise that she performs before an audience, for both dancer and spectators are spellbound, and they gasp and recoil and are yet fascinated. All there is in the world is the music and the rhythm and the snake and the dance. From side to side and round and round she spins and reels, going faster, dancing to the quickening rhythm of the music, to the rattling beat of the sistrum and the frenzied plucking of the harp strings. How she shimmies and how she quivers to the twang of the oud, contorting her abdomen muscles into thrumming circles, swinging her hips as she twists about, the little bells jangling. The serpent is elevated and thrust high, then plunged low and resupinate, an emerald whorl, a rippling and viridian pennant. Masculine in its suggestions, the snake throbs in her hands, and she dances to subdue the patriarchal power of the phallus. Into the mind and into the heart the image is burned, the male and the female in opposition; she dances her magic, the beast twisting in its cunning, never still, never placid. Through the flesh galvanic the serpent spirals, imbued with white-hot energy, weaving to the dissonant music. Edward Hyde is almost giddy, his mind a burning expanse of scrambled signals and glorious erotic images. He has no thoughts that are calm, forgotten is time and morality, for he is trapped in her vision and cannot drag his eyes from the dancer. He can feel the hardness of his sex, the throbbing of his own lustful serpent, and he wants nothing more and nothing less than to thrust his spear into that woman, into the dancer's heated flesh and to know that which tempted Adam.

Hyde wants to peel away his clothes, to join the snake dancer in the arena, in front of these onlookers. He wants the assemblage to witness his potent male victory as he feels her skin, as he explores her incendiary and naked flesh. Versed in the art she shall map his body first with her fingers and then with her mouth and then with her snake. Into his wanting coil she shall manipulate the living phallus, and with darting tongue the snake shall trace its kiss along his thighs, higher and higher, guided by her hand, until it pauses at the base of his manhood. He shall shudder with a thousand ecstasies, and his fingers will grip into tight fists as the serpent must penetrate, widening his entrance while her own ruby mouth shall work hotly upon him. All about their combined flesh the world shall gasp and spin with lurid shape and texture and substance, its horizontal vertical, its vertical revolving. Deeper will slide the snake, deeper into his darkness and the dancer's flexing fingers shall retract the beast but inches, and wetly lubricious it will plunge in again, maddened and brutal. The mind's agony predicts Hyde's impending climax, the turbulent culmination of fantasy's touching, smelling, grasping and probing, of sucking. Paul Allen cannot help but notice his friend's agony.

'A tigress!' says Hyde, licking away a fleck of spit from his lips and breathing laboured breaths to stem the moment of his own ejaculation. He can feel the pain of his testes constricting, demanding the release of his seed. Paul Allen laughs in rebuke.

'Tigers need not lick their lips over her unless they are handsomely rich!'

'Is she so exclusive?' says Edward, for exclusivity to him is a most foolish deprivation of the senses.

'Only princes, pashas, millionaires or distinguished actors or their managers need apply!' A wave of fire passes over Mr. Hyde's face. On the parquetry, the dancer abruptly ceases her gyrations and she places the serpent on the floor between her feet. The music ebbs and a woman screams and leaps from her chair and stumbles back, and a loud gasp ripples through the onlookers. Again, the music rises as the snake winds into a coil, and the Arabian recommences her dancing thrusts, her hips swivelling to the frenzy of the music. Faster and faster she moves, her pelvis stabbing at the air, the little bells clashing and jangling in her sinuosity, the flute piping. Abandoned to her dance the Arabian spins and spins a vortex, lithely stepping over the snake, with her flesh as undulatory and flexous as the creature she worships. The snake pulses on the floor, palpitating obscenely, and the woman's flesh pulses obscenely, palpitating in her dance. In a maelstrom she turns, faster and faster, her step skipping round and round the snake, and as the music arrives upon its point of crescendo the dancer throws herself down upon the floor amid the coloured veils, spreading her thighs wide, inching her barely concealed fissure closer and closer to the coiled, ophidian creature. Splayed apart are her legs, her buttocks lifted off the floor, trembling, and beneath her body is the damask veil, flowing from between her thighs like a pool of erubescent blood.

Mr. Hyde is engulfed by his passion for this woman, and he feels his throat go dry, and his fingers ball into a fist, a hot, desert wind blows in his face. There is a squirming itch under his skin, a black blight that cannot be scratched away. In Hyde's veins there pumps the fiery, Vulcan stream of desire, yet he is wary too, for he understands the danger of his temptation, senses the dangerous vengeance of the reptile should he dare touch the dancer. He can hear in its hiss a malediction that is not charmed by the flute, for it is guardian, protector, beautiful and yet lethal. The woman writhes to the music, twisting about and touching the serpent without harm. Pale, but nonetheless inflamed with lust, Hyde must surely struggle to remember Nicanor, who fainted away when he heard the sound of the flute! Though Hyde must not faint, Hyde will not faint, and his female companions have not failed to notice his reactions. They are both nervous of him and envious of the dancer. The girl in red taffeta feigns boredom and begins to pick at her fingernails. She turns to the other whore at her side. They know what must come, for they are not delusional. There will be little coin to chink in their reticules this night, not when the handsome Mr. Hyde, afflicted in his recrudescence, finds that lust overtakes his head and his heart.

On the dance floor, under the burning fire of the yellow lantern, the snake slides up over the auroral veil, up between the dancer's legs. How silky it feels, smooth and velveteen, and closer and closer to her silken folds it rises, its wedged head pressing against her perfumed entry. Out flicks its tongue, darting rapidly, and shivering in a rippling frisson the exotic reaches down and picks up the serpent. She lifts the scaly beast up to her face, her eyes glinting, and then she looks across the crowd and her eyes meet those of Edward Hyde. Even as he stares entranced, enraptured, beguiled, she stretches wide, wider her rose and satin lips and with an unexpected wickedness she quickly and forcefully propels her face forward, engulfing the serpent's head with her mouth. In the sky dome, in a wheeling galaxy, a distant star explodes at that moment, a shattered world blown into fire and dust, the cymbals clash loudly and the light blazes. The Arabian's debauch repels the women in the audience, prostitutes mostly, who have oft kissed the phallus in the boudoirs of Venus, who have swallowed the milky venom of the serpent but who cannot conceive of kissing the lips of the snake. They turn away, their faces white, appalled, spectators to an act they think so loathsome, as to make them confused upon the line that demarcates enjoyment from danger. Still the dancer, in her climax, draws on the serpent, sucking in her cheeks, moving the snake about in the hot furnace of her mouth. The thing quivers and shakes and she holds her breath and stretches its length against her skin, pulling the serpent taut, stroking, squeezing, rubbing, hard, inflexible, rigid, stiff. The music crashes to a cumulative finale and the lights are extinguished. For a moment there is silence, silence in the Khazneh's temple of iniquity, and then suddenly all the lights come up blazing again and the audience roars and applauds. Mr. Hyde is beside himself in agitation; his eyes are wide, still swimming with the glorious spectacle that he has just witnessed. His breathing is tumultuous.

'Forget it, dear boy,' says Paul, reading Edward's mind by observing the obvious written in his face. Hyde's countenance is contorted by the wild display of his disrupted emotions. 'She's not in the prep school class. Believe me, I've already tried to sample her Turkish charms.' The Nubian men come forward, blossoming from out of the dark, lithe like jungle cats, the lights shining silver in their ebony skins, and they cloak the dancer in a shawl of coloured veils, her body diaphanous and curvy beneath the gauzy filaments. As the Arabian walks, away they scoop up her snake and return it slithering to its basket, all the while the people clap and cheer, and throw coins and roses from the tables. The dancer pauses upon the stairs and she finds herself face-to-face with Mr. Edward Hyde. Hyde stands respectfully, to greet her, but he does not bow.

'Ah, Mayati…' Paul interjects, his lips pursed into a knowing grin, 'the unattainable… she who leads foolish men along the narrow adjunct between Heaven and Hell, only to drain them of their vital essences and to leave them a dried-up husk!' Mayati breaks her stare from that of Edward Hyde's, and she looks at Paul Allen as if she is looking at something she finds regrettably disgusting. She does not speak. 'Eve and her serpent in a garden of sinful delights,' Paul continues, his tongue tumbling idiotically over his drunken and barely concealed failures. 'No apples, just snakes!'

'It is likewise pleasant to see you again, Mr. Allen,' says Mayati without conviction, 'but I scarce can even remember who you are.' Hyde notes the musicality of her strange and exotic accent. Perhaps she is indeed from the land of the Pharaohs.

'Perhaps you have forgotten me, but you have a new admirer, my dear,' says Paul. 'May I introduce to you the dashing Mr. Edward Hyde?'

Paul waves mockingly as he presents his friend.

'Enchanted,' returns Hyde, 'and I offer my sincere compliments for your unusual performance.'

'You are most kind, Mr. Hyde.'

'Such natural manners,' Paul quips, and he cannot restrain himself. 'She only uses Christian names in bed.'

The two whores sneer and laugh at Mr. Allen's remark and Mayati's face becomes a fury. She steps forward and snatches up a glass, and with a cry of 'Pig!' she throws the champagne into Paul's face, the wine stings his eyes. Both whores flinch and they recoil as Mayati glares at them, daring them to speak. Without a word, the dancer turns about and walks away, her variegated veils lifting in the wind of her passing, a hot wind blowing once again in Mr. Hyde's visage. Paul swabs the champagne from his face and his lapels. In the moment he suffers little embarrassment, for the world is filled with the troubled at heart, with female impudence and life's vexations, and Mayati, the unattainable holds as much enchantment for him now as does a troubled stomach. Mr. Allen watches as Mr. Hyde follows the angry Sylph, treading stealthily in her gleaming footsteps, in pursuit of that coveted rosy spot between the dancer's legs. Paul laughs within, knowing that Hyde will soon understand that such a treasure is most certainly not public property.

'Well, ladies,' says Paul, stretching out his arms and embracing each of his coquettes, 'it seems that I must entertain you both.' The girls sigh. They each know that he is bereft of coin and dependent on another people's money. Mr. Allen has been drinking and pleasuring this night from the generosity of Mr. Hyde's pocket, and with Mr. Hyde in pursuit of the exotic, well, Mr. Allen is of no use to them at all.

'I guess we'll just have to manage,' says the whore in the red taffeta.

'Somehow or other,' says her companion, making a quick scan of the other potential gentlemen in the assembly. Disengaging themselves from Mr. Allen's arms they rise and languidly stroll away.

'Thank you for your confidence,' Paul mutters, reaching for another glass of champagne and thinking that his night of joy cannot possibly be all but over. Mr. Hyde, leaving his companion Paul, takes to the stairs and ascends to the floor above. The private apartments of the Khazneh are to be found here, closed doors about an atrium overlooking the leaded glass panes that allow a vista into the ballroom below. He comes upon a door and he opens the door without knocking first. It is the door to Mayati's dressing room. From the main salon Hyde hears the muted fanfare of music as it fades into the background, replaced by the soft splash of water being poured into a porcelain bowl. There is a table overspread with lace, and upon this table is a vase brimming with roses. Under the roses there rests an antique knife, a blade of obsidian as sharp and as keen as on the day it was carved. Hyde runs the tip of his finger along the hard and brittle blade, black and sharp along the serrated edge of an ancient conchoidal fracture. He muses at what throats it might have cut through red, though now it only cuts away the thorns that ladder rose stems. On a sideboard are discarded many bangles and circlets studded with glinting, coloured stones. There are strange and exotic treasures here too, a stylized bust of a dead king from the Valley of the Kings, a regal face but elongated and with full, fleshy lips. There is a framed papyrus decorated with a cartouche and precise hieroglyphic texts, and over there, a chair, a semi-circular seat with gold painted fretwork lions, their paws tied, their claws each looped about the bows of a lush red and rounded, velvet cushion. On the table, under the roses are several alabaster jars with hieratic inscriptions pressed into the stoppers, the wafts of glorious perfumes emanate when they are opened. In an ivory cradle, there is a polished marble phallus, an ithyphallic remnant from the Temple of Amun at Karnak. The room is heady in its scents and colourful in its superficial candour, and littered with artefacts that seem to link the dancer to an ancient and bygone past. Hyde looks about but he cannot see the woman that he seeks, and he does not call out her appellation. To the left of the door there is an adjoining apartment, an antechamber, its arched entry curtained off in plush and claret-dyed velvet portierés. Beyond the curtains floats the island of the bed, a bower of silk sheets and satin pillows. In that bed Edward Hyde can see himself, indulging in a fleeting fancy with Mayati, her red lips upon his sex, his sex thrusting like a steam-driven piston deep within her opening, even as he manipulates the stone phallus for her pleasure. Hyde strolls casually through the reception, toward another apartment wherein there is erected a gilded and ornate cage. The snake is coiled in the cage.

Hyde stares at the snake, that 'old serpent', a vile thing from the moment of its creation, a creature with a vicious instinct to destroy, symbol of the evil tendencies within man. Yet he is not repulsed. Slithering from the dark waters of creation that snake, thinks he, has visited its lechery upon Adam and Eve with good cause, for how insipid were they? He muses that this beauty, Mayati, might be a priestess who lustfully reveres the ophiolatrous serpent, a Naassian versed in the magical rite, to venerate only the gloriously stiffened penis. Hyde steps around the gilded bars of the cage, looking down at the snake. Reaching out, his fingers flex and quiver.

'You have come to the wrong room, Mr. Hyde,' says Mayati, the chiming tintinnabulation of the little bells in her costume betray her sudden appearance. Her intruder turns and faces her, but her mystery is still hidden behind her mask. She is decorated with jewels, with necklace and bracelet and waistband, and about her white length of throat there dangles a chain upon which glints the winged sun disk. She crosses her arms, her body language defiant. 'I do not entertain here.'

'Beware of she,' says Hyde bemused, 'who comes from some unknown shore, for when she approaches she makes the mind dizzy, makes all thought swirl like the depths of unfathomable waters.'

'How poetic of you, Mr. Hyde, but take your pretty words and go.'

'I see that your partner guards you constantly,' replies Hyde, ignoring her request for him to leave, his eyes flicking over the snake. 'Can he not easily slip between those gilded bars?'

'Keep away from him,' Mayati warns solemnly. 'He is dangerous.'

Uttering this caveat she walks up to the cage.

'Goodnight,' she whispers lowly, 'and sleep well my sweet.'

Mayati pulls a tasselled rope and draws the velvet curtains about the cage, concealing the serpent from view. With a stern look she indicates to her unwelcome visitor that he must leave the room. She waves him out and she closes the door. In the parlour she stands before Edward Hyde.

'Your friend,' she declares, 'spoke to me as if I were a common whore!'

'Mr. Allen? Why, he is hardly a friend of mine, but rather the friend of a friend.'

'I do not care for your silly riddles,' says the beauty. 'I am not a man's toy. You must leave. Go now.'

Mayati motions Mr. Hyde towards the door. She escorts him beyond the table and the knife of black glass, beyond the blind eyes of the ancient king and beyond the hard length of the polished marble penis.

'In all fairness,' says Hyde, running his touch along the length of the predynastic stone erection, his fingertip tracing about the head, and a little shiver tingles along his spine. 'Mr. Allen never implied that you were common.'

'Close your brazen mouth, and do not speak to me,' Mayati spits. 'You and your friend are both insolent. You do not realise, but I am descended from the great Pharaoh Akhenaten and before the Aten your tongues should be torn from your filthy mouths!'

'I'm afraid my knowledge of the ancients is limited,' says Hyde as Mayati removes her mask. Anger flares in her black, black eyes.

Upon the revelation of her face, Hyde takes an audible breath. She is the most exotic woman that he has ever beheld, her face is peculiarly lovely, but strangely elongated and with a shapely but narrow chin, like the sculpted bust under the roses. Her neck is long and slim, her eyes almond-shaped, her arms and legs slender but likewise long, her white hands ending in tapering fingers, those fingers glowing with gold and glass paste and garnets. Her form is complimented by rounded thighs and buttocks, by small but firm breasts. Her complexion is fair, like one who avoids the sunlight, and her hair is black, as black as the thunderous sky dome at midnight. She flings the jewel-encrusted mask aside and it falls in a shower of flaming stars. Thinking that he has come to offer what most men cannot afford, she throws him a haughty glare and pre-empts his male privilege.

'Just how much money did you have in mind, Mr. Hyde?' Mayati is playing with him, and soon she will crush his brash insolence into dust, crush him underfoot like an insect.

'I would never insult so beautiful a woman by offering her anything so trivial,' says Hyde, smiling as he speaks, musical in his reply.

Dismissing his handsome but superficial charms, Mayati waves Hyde to the door. She has had enough and the man, though beautiful is a braggart and his manners distasteful. She removes another bangle and another chain, unpins the winged sun disk that encircles her neck and drops it to the table top.

'Thank you for your politeness,' she says scornfully, 'but goodnight.'

'Don't mention it,' replies Hyde.

'I have to wash and dress,' says Mayati.

'Don't let me prevent you from your ablutions,' returns Hyde, standing implacable, just where he is, and with no intention at all leaving.

'Mr. Hyde, I have an appointment,' the woman insists.

'I am afraid you'll be late,' he tells her, and her mouth opens to utter a protest at his impudent disrespect.

'I said, I have an appointment,' and there is a harsh edge to her voice, a deeper, almost masculine tone, a threatening tone.

'That can wait,' Hyde replies coolly. He takes a cigarette from a silver case in his coat pocket and strikes a match. A ribbon of blue smoke uncurls in the air.

'What could possibly detain me?' Mayati questions, her voice irritated. She picks up a brush and begins to comb her tenebrous tresses.

'I intend to.'

The beauty chortles, as if laughing at a joke.

'You are too impertinent, Mr. Hyde.'

'Yes, that is so.'

Mayati puts down her brush. There is an electric current in the air, something that she has never felt before.

'You have an amusing approach,' she remarks, and Hyde draws upon his cigarette, the tip glowing red, an ember in the mouth of a dragon.

'Merely direct,' he returns, his words lilting in an expelled breath of perfumed smoke.

'You are confident,' says Mayati, walking up to her intruder and standing close. Hyde can feel the warmth radiating from her skin and she can smell the heady intoxication of his cologne.

'Could a man without confidence approach you?' His question is almost a jest. Mr. Hyde does not do tests.

'The man who begs,' she utters sharply, 'gets nothing!' Harshly is her maxim delivered, but he wavers not.

'I do not beg.' Hyde disputes.

'If a man buys, he pays too much for little,' she counters, for his disappointment will be unavoidable.

'I am not buying,' he replies flatly.

'You do not buy. You do not beg…' Mayati reaches up and takes the cigarette from Hyde's mouth and places it between her own ruby red lips.

'Is there a man who simply takes?' She draws the smoke into her throat and then blows the Sulphur into his face.

Hyde takes back his cigarette and grips her slim, alabaster hand, and he is surprised to find an unexpected strength in her resistance.

'I am that man,' he retorts, crushing the fire from the taper out upon the table top, and forcing her hand down to the hardness bulging in his trouser front.

'I thought you were,' she whispers, and she squeezes his sex, and he enfolds her body in a sweeping and fervid embrace. Zealously he dances her roughly through the chamber, through the door and to the bed. Across its tide of covers he pushes Mayati down, and holds her fast, and she does not resist, though in his eye she glimpses something wild, something fevered. She reaches up and kisses his lips but he turns his face away and climbing upon her he straddles her torso, unbuttoning his flies. Pinned beneath his shuddering frame Mayati is unable to move, constricted by the hard clamp of his thighs. This time it is Mr. Hyde who commands the serpent, his fingers liberating his sex from his trousers, erect and ready to strike. He presses his member against Mayati's lips, drawing back his silken shield, and commanded by merely a look, in a repetition of her public performance, she takes the pulsing serpent into her glistening, perfumed mouth.

Chapter 8

Love is an Idiocy

'Is not corrupted nature in yourselves

But ill-conducting that hath turn'd the world to evil.'

Dante

Early morning, not yet seven o'clock, outside 29 Morley Street, Hyde is to be found waiting upon the doorstep. He is dressed in a stainless white shirt and a black coat. His vest is claret and he wears a black felt hat. He is fixing a pink carnation through the hole of his lapel. He is smiling. This morning, in his joy he has decided to pay a visit to Mrs. Jekyll. Their meeting the other evening in the Khazneh has sparked within his veins a surge of carnal desire and his motives for seeing Kitty are of course less than pure. He entertains thoughts of lust, of an unlawful and flagrant adultery, in which he expiates his enjoyments in Mrs. Jekyll's extramarital deceptions. Hyde smirks in his supreme treachery, and when he is satisfied that his buttonhole is tidy, he extends a manicured finger to press the bell button. There he pauses. His fingertip traces a lazy path about the bell button. Strange, thinks he, in a moment of delightful reverie, how the most innocent of objects, of shapes, this bell button and its rounded outline, can remind one of other more luscious circles. He recalls the unashamed rapine of his previous night's dissipations. Ah, yes, how he re-enacts the passion now, relives that second just before the moment of his climax, that torturous instant before the release of his seed. Throbbing and shuddering, he returns to the dressing room of the Arabian Mayati, revisits his episode of pleasure. A fleeting fancy it is as he takes his stiff member from Mayati's lips and leaves her gasping, his own lips spitting forth orisons to Beelzebub. He calls her taunting names but there is no resistance in the Arabian, and with rough pleasure Hyde peels away the flimsy fabric that shields Mayati's breasts, and rolling from his dominant position he splits in twain the lower half of her costume. In his quest for debauchery she is made to serve his great satisfaction. How his eyes leap into flame, and in his frenzy, expecting her cleft to be humid and wet with anticipation, know then Hyde's utter surprise when in his erotic jubilation he is presented with a like member, the sexual parts of a man and the rosy circlet of but one entry.

Indeed, Hyde grins even now on the steps of Morley Street as he remembers, as he considers his dupe, and the performance of gender. Yet what is practiced by Venus is luxurious, yes, but Mayati has been an altogether fresh experience. Awash in the tumultuous uproar of the blood rushing in his veins, Edward Hyde might sample the delights of a new kind of quean. Mayati, the beautiful, whose skin is a covering of dissembling pleasures, immodest in her shameless dancing craft and untroubled by the revelations of her actual sex, only spreads her thighs and buttocks wider beneath the debauched fellow, inviting Edward to take his joy. How Hyde has laughed, for the devil must lie sublimate under his naked, pulsing body, and he in his depredation is taunting whoredom and marauding modesty, Mayati not wholly a young woman and not wholly a young man. Here, exposed Hyde finds a mystery of hermaphroditical nature, a verse written in the Grecian script, an anomaly diverging from the accepted natural and a manifestation of what the world might think a criminal outrage. Yet over his body there nonetheless leaps a fire, and Mr. Hyde wavers only for that fleeting moment, burning lava in his veins and slave to his primeval urges. He moistens the rosy circlet with the dew of his spittle and he penetrates therein Mayati's body, striking with a fevered madness, thrusting again and again and withdrawing again and again. Many times, do they embrace in such fashion, long past midnight, and lusting and enjoying each other they perform acts more efficacious than a chaste kiss, clinging together, sweating together, copulating like dogs, blasted by heat and fever until the dawn finds Mayati supine and Edward Hyde strangely alive and elated. They are lying in the bed with the gold-tassel and high mirrored canopy, their clothes discarded and strewn about the floor, their reflections glorious and naked. Mayati is stretched upon her stomach, her head on the satin pillow facing her amour. She is otherworldly, neither nymph nor satyr, beautiful in her cloak of ivory skin, adorned with naught but the essences of a long nights' lovemaking. How Edward's breathing has become wild and laboured and stentorous, gasping, and his skin is now warmer and clammy. She touches him to be certain that he has not been overtaken by a sudden fever. Clearly there is something not right. His eyes are open. With a sudden movement Hyde flings, back the sheet and plunges from the bed. Mayati takes in the view of his handsome form, the muscled thighs, the firm buttocks, the wide back and strong arms. In haste, his fingers scrabble for his trousers.

'What is wrong?' Mayati asks, suddenly alert to Hyde's troubled mien. 'Are you going?'

'Yes,' he replies, stepping into his pants, his now flaccid penis covered. He turns to face Mayati. The exotic raises her head.

'Will I see you again?'

'Perhaps,' he mutters, but there is an unconcealed disinterest in his voice. Of course, he has satisfied his perverse desire for the moment and indulged in caresses and lasciviousness, but his mood has changed. Mayati turns over and begins to rise from the bed. She glimpses herself, reflected high above the bed, her beauty a ghostly cameo in the oval of the vanity mirror. These reflections but nothing substantial, nothing quite real.

'What does perhaps mean?'

Mr. Hyde pulls on his shirt, the whiteness covering his chest, enclosing his body.

'Edward? Why perhaps?'

For a short pulse in time Edward Hyde does not respond, and then quite abruptly his handsome face begins to contort, to twist up into painful lines, and his voice seems to change. The timbre of his tone plunges an octave, and it quavers and he suddenly clutches at his gut. Taking a deep breath, he composes himself.

'How do I know?'

Mayati observes his frisson in the watchful eye of the mirror.

'Are you unwell?'

Edward does not speak.

Something is wrong, and Mayati must know what afflicts her lover. She clothes her form in a diaphanous robe and turning from the mirror walks slowly towards him. She reaches for his hand and places his palm against her bosom.

'You know what you feel,' the Arabian whispers, and Edward Hyde shakes his head in the negative.

'How presumptuous of you,' he declares. 'We English never know what we feel, my dear.'

Disregarding his Colonial indulgence and presumed superiority, she clasps her hands together, locking her embrace about his neck, and she pushes her lithe body hard against his.

'Will you come back soon?'

Mayati strokes his open shirt front, squeezing his nipples lightly. With a stoop, she rubs her cheek against his chest.

'I don't know,' he responds coldly.

'Say you will,' Mayati insists. 'Say it… Tell me that you will return! We can contrive to meet again and I will perform so many miracles of love upon your flesh.'

'You indulge yourself in love-sickness. Do you think that there is more to this than just spreading your legs for my satisfaction? Don't flatter yourself in your exclusivity, for your sticky hole will avail you nothing! Mayati, my dear, you have no secrets now, for you behave like an ordinary slut in a Molly House with nothing to offer of surprise or wit!' Hyde cruelly breaks her grasp, smashing her wrists brutally apart with his fists, and she gasps in pain as she is disengaged, and trembles in sudden fear.

'So be it,' she cries in hurt defeat. 'Regardless, will you come back?'

'I told you,' says he, propelling her callously towards their desecrated bower, 'I don't know!'

Thrown off, discards her like a broken doll, Mayati stumbles against the bed and falls into its tendril sheets, and Hyde's face is all knotted up with barely controlled anger. 'If there is a next time,' he growls, 'I might find myself taking pity upon you, and happily pissing in your stupid, begging, greedy, wanting mouth!'

'You are a cruel player of games,' whispers Mayati ruefully, 'but only chance decides the outcome. You are a consumer of women, and you think yourself irresistible. Alas you lack truth in your heart as much as you lack charm and refinement. If you think that I am simply a thing at your disposal, Mr. Hyde, you are wrong.'

'Do not blame me for your unhappy condition,' says Hyde contemptuously.

'How can you know of my condition?' questions Mayati, her face suddenly fallen as if she has been caught in lie, as if a grave and innermost secret has been exposed. Her body is gripped with tense suspense. 'You know nothing!'

'Sadly, your dismal, but atypical charms are not to all tastes, my dear!'

Recovering quickly, as if from a slip of words, Mayati responds to Edward's cruelty. 'I have known all of my life,' Mayati addresses her persecutor, emboldened by his impertinence, 'that I was different, but that does not give you the right to hurt me. Still, your hatred is nothing new. You are terribly predictable Mr. Hyde… and weak, like all men.'

'You might hold your tongue, or regret your words.'

'Regret? Oh yes, I regret. I regret much. I regret that I exist in this twilight world that chains me between man and woman, but despite that I do not deserve your callous heart.'

'You do tragedise so,' taunts Edward, becoming bored. 'You poor, tender thing!'

'You must hate so deeply.'

'Hate?' asks Hyde, as if the concept is completely alien to him. 'What is there to hate when there is so much to despise?'

Mayati holds in a sob.

'You are no more and no less than a piece of flesh,' Hyde tells her, 'and as such you are mine to do with as I please.'

'You wish to destroy me then, Mr. Hyde, for you must be afraid to love?'

'Afraid of love?' Hyde says incredulously. 'I am afraid of nothing!'

'The stain of filth is deep in you! Yet I understand.'

'What do you understand?'

'Of course,' says Mayati, shrinking from his humiliating words but defiant to the hollow truth. 'You have a nice, cold cunt to go back to!'

Mayati's cry of scorn becomes a whimper as Hyde comes up to the bed and strikes her a hard blow to the cheek. Blood trickles from her lip. There is a cruel revelation in Hyde's fierceness. He grasps Mayati's face, his palm over her mouth and nose, his fingers like spider legs, squeezing hard until she gasps for breath. His grip is like a vice, torturous, and he can see her terrified, pleading eyes between the splay of his iron fingers. Mayati's fear is a pulse that throbs under his touch, which pulses in his grasp, filling Hyde with galvanism, with ecstasy. Mayati does not clutch at the man's hand, but the harder he squeezes the limper her body goes, and then quite abruptly her whole form sags flaccid and her eyes roll back in their sockets. In the change from vibrant to supine Hyde notes that Mayati's body spasms, goes as rigid as a plank, one tumultuous shudder passing through her white flesh and frame. Her lips drain to mulberry and her skin goes cold. Intrigued, Hyde releases his grip, stepping back as he flings her upon the bed, watching as the beauty is held in morbid, twitching spasms. It is with strange and obsessed interest the he stares until the fit passes.

'What an amusing idea!' he chuckles as he observes the dancer return to thought and reason, as motion and breath come back to flush her cheek pink and her lips red. She is disorientated, but seemingly oblivious to her assault.

'A nice, cold wife!' Hyde corrects, and Mayati looks at Hyde uncomprehending his words. Gleefully he licks a spot of Mayati's blood from his reddened knuckles, even as the dancer, suddenly aware that she has been hurt, massages her bruises. In Hyde's eyes, there is glowing some feral, burning, violent force that even he cannot understand. He senses something truly incomprehensible, some notion that remains just out of his reach, a weird thought about a marriage vow and a wife… As Mayati rubs her temple, for the pain throbbing in her head is now intense, she glimpses the primal and dangerous animal that lives within Hyde's handsome skin. In the blank spaces of her own momentary confusion she also sees his inner chaos.

'A frozen honey pot!' he declares, but he is parroting another's words, and those words connect to a face as beautiful as it is glacial. So here he is, in the glory of the morning's amber sunbeams, outside Henry Jekyll's house, his finger pressing the bell ring. As he waits impatiently a carriage clops away up the street, heading towards the markets, and Hyde hears a thrush warbling from a high branch in the garden. He smiles pompously to himself that he too should croon a song as sweet as the thrush sings.

Soon the maidservant opens the door. Nanny is dressed like a raven, a grim severity all over black except for the cheap little white and pink cameo at her throat and her face is an unmoving mask of suspicion.

'Good morning,' greets Hyde. 'I have an appointment with Doctor Jekyll.'

'It's indecently early for someone to be calling, even for an appointment,' reprimands the maid, 'and besides, he's away.'

'Perhaps I could speak with Mrs. Jekyll?' He hands the housekeeper a card of introduction.

'Again, I say, it's a bit early to be calling on a lady, isn't it?'

She takes his card nonetheless and casts a curious eye upon his name. She sees a handsome young man, but his beauty only inspires her distrust. In her wise sixty years, she had come to believe that beautiful things generally hide a secret jeopardy. In passing the card Hyde abruptly steps up and around her, breaching the doorway and entering without her ado. He removes his hat and thrusts it upon her, and she is aghast, but her reaction is dismissed and she is left standing under the lintel. Into the residence he confidently struts, heading directly towards the staircase as if he knows each tread and to the room that they will take him.

Kitty is standing at her washstand, looking into the mirror, a fire has been lit in the grate and it provides some warmth to a large and chilly and sterile room. She has only just risen and washed the sleep from her eyes. She has had a night of untroubled slumber and cannot even recall dreaming. Her robe is white, the hem and the waist is a furbelow of yellow silk ribbon. The door opens and the maid enters, her look is stern and condemnatory. With indignation, she presents her mistress with Hyde's card.

'He says he has an appointment with the doctor,' she utters, disbelief in her voice and angry at the man's audacity. Kitty Jekyll scrutinizes the card. Ah, yes, she remembers the name. She remembers the man. She remembers the Khazneh. Her lips arc into a mysterious caprice.

'Ask Mr. Hyde to come in.' The housemaid blanches. Why, such a thing is scandalous! An unknown gentleman in a lady's bedroom! In the bedroom things should be private, kept private, for things that are done in private should be likewise secret and hidden. A married woman's boudoir was the territory of her husband, not the place for entertaining strangers. The housemaid stands in moral judgment of her mistress, but before she can protest the man steps across the threshold and enters Kitty's bedroom. Kitty espies his form and figure as he blooms in the argent surface of her looking glass. Now it is useless for the maid to make her outrage known, and she shakes her head as she glances towards the door.

'He already has,' the maid states flatly.

'Mr. Hyde?' says Kitty, turning from her mirror, and he nods the affirmative. 'What a pity my husband is away on business.'

'What a pity,' he says mockingly, and he casts a disapproving look at the maid.

'That will be all, Nanny,' says Kitty, dismissing her servant so that her privacy might be eschewed.

'Forgive me for receiving you in here,' says Henry Jekyll's wife as her maid exits and closes the door. 'Lately this house has become unused to visitors.'

'Please don't mention it,' says Hyde, and he has not come to listen to apology or complaint, not in a lady's bedroom.

'I understand that being the wife of a recluse is not an easy role to play.'

The newcomer strides confidently up to the beautiful Kitty and they face each other. In a beaming smile, he unfortunately reveals his supercilious intent, for Kitty is not the silly, little fluffy animal that men so readily believe her to be. He places his hands in his trouser pockets, puffed up with smugness. Hyde notes the warm lick of the fire's light as it plays upon the pink hues of Kitty's skin. He is drawn to her, wanting to touch her, to stroke her, to taste her. Her face becomes ruddy, as if she suddenly realises that her position might be tenuous and that receiving this man into her apartments might cause tongues to wag. Perhaps he is reading her thoughts, for he is bold and shameless. Kitty fans her face with the tiny strip of his introductory card. To conceal her ruddy blush, she turns away.

'You have obviously heard of my husband's strange way of life?'

Mr. Hyde strolls casually up behind Kitty and stands so close.

'Yes, I'm afraid it is common talk,' states he, and Kitty picks up her scented cologne and removes the cut crystal stopper.

'Perhaps I can help you with your business?' she offers, and slowly turning about again their eyes meet. Strange how this man seems so familiar, for what is it in his look, in those eyes? Yes, they glint with a cognizance that gloats over her flesh, as if he knows her body exposed beneath the pellucid folds of her robe. Hyde exudes a magical spell, and Kitty suppresses a vague shudder.

'Business can wait,' he replies calmly. Since our chance meeting I have wanted so much to see you again.' To break his spell she walks away, moves languidly towards the window, still holding her bottle of aromatic fragrance. She sits down in a chaise and gathers her robe provocatively about her shapely legs.

'Mr. Hyde,' says she, 'I do hope that because of the circumstances of our first meeting you won't come to any wrong conclusions.' Her words hover in the air as does her perfume, pretty but suggestive. She splashes a little upon her slim fingers and rubs the scent upon her throat. Putting the cologne down upon a little table she picks up a buffer and absently begins to shape her lovely finger nails.

'It's because of them that I've been trying to put you out of my mind,' Hyde confesses. He steps forward again, to reclaim his spot within her space. 'You see,' he continues, his tone modulated and silky, 'I have no wish to trespass on Paul's…' He pauses melodramatically upon an unfinished implication.

'Paul's what?' asks Kitty, and she begins to feel a strange sense of implied threat coming from her guest.

'Paul's… friendship,' he replies, sounding ever so like a manipulative schoolboy wanting in on some imagined kisses. Kitty laughs aloud.

'The question of trespass hardly arises,' she states emphatically, tossing back her head, her red hair splaying out like a stream of carmine and cochineal and roses. 'Mr. Allen has no property rights over me.'

'What about Henry?'

She shrugs nonchalantly.

'Henry leads his own life. He doesn't seek my approval and I don't seek his.'

A strange but fleeting glimmer of disapproval and vehemence flashes in Mr. Hyde's glare.

'Is that so wrong?' asks Kitty, as if in such a declaration she might excuse her infidelities. Yet what hold this man thinks he has over her, she vows silently, is not going to be, even as Hyde laughs with animated bravura.

'We who seek no one's approval, are not concerned with either right or wrong,' states he.

'What then are we concerned with?' Kitty's imperative is direct and challenging.

'Perhaps with the pursuit of nothing but pleasure,' he replies, unaffected by her remonstrance. 'Perhaps with the fulfillment of desire… for exciting alternatives…'

Kitty laughs again, for she has uncovered his base weakness, the needs of his prick, the wormy thing between the legs that all men are a slave to and cannot deny once it goes stiff.

'Alternatives to what?' she asks once her derisive laughter has abated, and Edward Hyde is somewhat peeved at the unexpectedly jocularity of her response.

'To the boredom of being a rejected housewife,' he returns almost gleefully, turning the screw of embarrassment into her flesh a little tighter, thinking that her frozen honey pot must be in need of a good stirring, 'and of course,' he continues boldly, 'to the humiliation of being a rejected mistress.'

Insulted, Kitty springs up from her chaise, throwing down her nail file, and she returns briskly to the window. Looking out into Morley Street she sees the world in all its dull familiarity. That street had brought her to this house, in a carriage, her face concealed under a veil, her white dress besprinkled with rice and roses. She had removed her marriage veil for Henry's kiss but had received instead the embrace of ennui.

'You underestimate my freedom from convention, Mr. Hyde,' Kitty speaks and her voice is controlled but laced with simmering vitriol.

'Forgive me,' he simpers, to which she crosses her arms and continues to stare out beyond the garden and the hydrangea and the tiled rooftops, the cobbled street. 'I was forgetting that even the most honest of women,' and Hyde approaches her from behind, 'must be courted with the most dishonest of phrases.' Here he takes his hands from his pocket and brushes some imaginary dust from his lapel. Kitty laughs again, but this time in unconcealed disgust.

'If anything,' Kitty tells him, 'you are honest. A trifle obvious perhaps, but honest.' She punctuates her words with an extended and accusatory finger.

'Listen to me, Kitty,' wheedles Hyde, 'why should we pretend?' He still thinks that he is the cat that gets the cream.

'From the moment that I felt you in my arms as we were dancing in the Khazneh, our future has been clear to both of us.'

Kitty laughs scornfully, yet again, and throws back her head, touching her hand to her heaving bosom.

'You, sir, take far too much for granted!'

In an embattled attempt to keep control of his slipping manipulations, Hyde places his hands upon the smooth lily-white of her shoulders, sliding down the fabric of her robe down, exposing her rosy nipple.

'Great affairs,' he says sincerely, 'always begin without discussion.'

Quickly she snatches the fabric back and covers her breast. She violently pushes his hands away. At least she has stopped laughing. Breaking away from the cage of his embrace she refutes his foolish claim.

'My great affair has already begun,' and she places two steps between them both, watching as Edward Hyde's face becomes pale and expressionless. 'It was well advanced before ever you appeared on the scene.'

He claps his hands together in mock applause.

'I wonder,' says he in a modulated and controlled tone, decisively delivering his hoped-for coup de grâce, 'what is the special quality in a man who is weak, unscrupulous and utterly unreliable as is Paul Allen?'

'I don't question your description, Mr. Hyde,' Kitty returns, pausing deliberately in her speech before the delivery of her own death blow.

'Well then, why?' asks he, his gaze freezing into ice.

'I merely happen to love him.'

'Love him!' Hyde explodes, unbelieving the ridiculousness of her defence. 'Love is an idiocy.'

'How is it that you of all people became so wise?' Kitty retorts, and Hyde turns away from her in a growing fury. 'Your erudition must surely rank as arrogance. I suspect you could know little, if anything of love!'

'I say again, love is an idiocy!'

'An idiocy of mine,' Kitty spits angrily, 'and no doubt an idiocy of every poor and enfeebled stupid woman that ever lived, yet it is a fact, Mr. Hyde, an undeniable fact- I love him!' Although she wants to believe that this is true, in her heart she understands all too well that Hyde is correct and that her love for Paul is her dream and only her dream. Nevertheless, she cannot let Hyde win, she cannot let him wrest control over her will. 'I love Paul Allen!' she repeats emphatically, her voice becoming a note this side of shrill.

Kitty's words provoke a dark cloud that ripples through Edward Hyde's features, and in anger he bolts for the door. Kitty watches him, surprised at his flight. He appears to be having some sort of struggle, falling against the door panels, his arms flung outward and his palms flat against the timber. His fingers begin flexing like spiders, and clawing and scratching. Hyde's reactions are extreme and she is mystified. It is as if the threshold to the bedroom door is now a barrier over which he struggles to retreat, but eventually he bursts through the door and rushes headlong downstairs. At the bottom of the stairwell, at the newel post he stops and his body buckles, redoubles, his face is a hideous mask of pained torture. Through the Jekyll's parlour he staggers, out into the garden and shortly he finds himself in Henry Jekyll's laboratory. Fighting a spasm, he totters, knocking over a glass beaker and shattering it upon the floor, flailing his arms and scattering Jekyll's notes and his folders, choking and contorting and changing. Totò screams in terror in his cage, charging up and down the length of his prison, flinging straw and clawing at the iron bars and screeching. The beast looks on as Mr. Edward Hyde collapses at Dr. Henry Jekyll's desk.

Later that morning Paul Allen makes a call upon his mistress. Kitty Jekyll is not thrilled, for she knows exactly why he has come and that which he hopes to gain. Of course, the money he has pilfered has drained quickly away and now he needs more cash.

'No, Paul,' she tells him, 'I will not be your bankcard any longer!'

'Kitty, my darling,' he pleads, and he is pathetic, really. 'Why not leave Henry to take care of life's little problems and leave us to the gaiety?'

She turns away from Paul, having done arguing. This is shameful and indignant, and she knows that she can no longer extort money from her husband's purse for Paul Allen. It amounts virtually to some obscene kind of prostitution. With a swish of her pretty skirts, Kitty walks to the staircase. Paul reaches out and takes her hand, caressing her gently.

'No,' she tells him, retracting her hand. 'I am sick and tired of being used.'

'How can you talk of our love in this way?' he accuses.

'Our love!' retorts Kitty vehemently. 'You hypocrite!'

Paul's dignity shrivels up.

'There are debts,' he says solemnly, 'debts of honour, and I can't go bad on them.'

'Honour!' Kitty cries in disgust. 'What do you know of honour? What a typical gentleman you are, Paul!' She moves away from the stairs, for only the bedroom lies at the top of those steps, and Kitty shakes her red head, preceding Paul into the abandoned parlour. Angrily she crosses her arms over her breasts.

'I hope so,' he returns, his feelings vaguely crushed.

'All your honour is staked on the cards so you have none left for any man or woman!'

With a twisted grimace, Paul strides before Kitty and he turns to leave.

'I see,' he mutters in defeat, 'that nothing I say will avail. Goodbye, Kitty.'

He passes petulantly through the door, and somehow crushed herself, Kitty finds a contradictory pain in her heart.

'Paul!' she calls after him, but he does not respond, and she watches him depart while her mind and her emotions tumble about in a dreadful maelstrom.

Co-incidentally, that morning and upon that hour, Ernst Litauer makes a call upon his colleague. Kitty has called for Ernst, for she has noticed changes in my physiognomy that are best described as unusual. Therein my visage I too have noted deeper lines in my forehead and furrows about my mouth. My cheeks have become hollow and my hair is streaked with threads of grey. On more than one occasion I have found myself felled by bouts of uncontrollable lassitude. There have been moments of indescribable pain in my muscles too, but granted, these painful bouts are infrequent yet they have pushed me to the boundaries of tolerance. I have encountered several other disconcerting disorders that have come to pass, mood swings and anxiety, and sometimes I cannot bear the thought that Kitty does not love me. At night, I lie in the grip of insomnia, contorting from abrupt muscle spasms that keep me from Morpheus. At times, I even experience spikes of euphoria, and I am so happy, so high do I ride that words fail me my joys, but eventually these feelings have found in me again the need to run to my laboratory. I am pursued by demons of the mind, and only in the laboratory, in the safety of my cloister, in a cold sweat and exhausted can I seem to find myself, recovering from those torturous pains and the blank moments in my memory, gazing covetously at my little medicine cabinet and then at my dissipated reflection. There is a weak little voice calling out inside of my head that is begging me to inject again, to find paradise, to know liberty and freedom. Resisting is a struggle. Foolishly I entertain the absurd idea that I must share my secret with Ernst, but then there is another, a stronger voice within, and it is the iron clamp upon my tongue and the barbed cage that imprisons my flesh. No, I cannot tell, I can never tell!

I am seated at my desk and Ernst shines a light into my eyes, and in that light, I see the corona of the sun. My vision reacts, my pupils widen and retract, and I blink. Under his gaze he notes that my eyes are still equal to reactive light, the iris at the centre still contracts, no difference flickers in either eye. Then he looks deeper, towards the back of the eye, at the fundus. I know what he is looking for, but still, there again Ernst can detect no sign of swelling or tumour. Under the eyelids there is no indication of inflammation. Ernst touches my throat, presses upon the lymph glands, but there is no pain, no swelling. Litauer is somewhat mystified, but I know he harbours his own theories about the causes of my condition. Will he dare offer his explanations?

'Well,' says I, my voice deep and even, 'you confirm my own observations, Ernst?'

'I am afraid I do.'

'Something is not right,' I reiterate, 'but no doubt it is nothing with which to overly concern ourselves.' Perhaps the degenerative effects being caused by my drug compounds will lead to potency and virility problems. Note: I must take a sample of my semen and under the eye of my microscope shall I observe any changes in my vital force.

'Yet it is obvious that something is happening to you, something that appears to be accelerating your entire metabolism. You look older, Henry, as if your cells are burning out. This is a worry. Your anabolic processes must be compromised. From your physical appearance, I would suggest that your constructive metabolism is failing, that it is not maintaining your body's cells and tissues. Something appears to be compromising your available energy, consuming it at a fantastic rate.'

Am I dying?

Within my flesh I feel hot, like a star must be hot, my skin a restless, crawling mantle of spreading fire, electric like a taut band of flame. My blood, my muscles, my bones, my nerves, my brain, my being has become an inferno in which I burn – I burn!

'Are you eating properly? Sleeping well?' Ernst clips up his little black Gladstone bag. He notes the laboured breaths that exhale from my lungs.

'Yes, to all those things,' I lie, trying to remain calm and unperturbed. 'Then what is your diagnosis, doctor?'

'I am uncertain, Henry. Perhaps I need to do some tests. A blood sample might help.'

'No. You suspect that I am a simple-minded opium eater.'

'You underestimate me, my friend,' says Ernst, maintaining his doctor's professional mien of civility under my sudden attack. 'I can diagnose opium addiction, but your addiction, I suspect is something less familiar… and possibly more damaging.'

Tiring of this, for I know that Ernst is probing now into the nature of my researches, he wants to unravel the signatures of the chemicals that I have been compounding, perhaps even copy them! He might find their traces in my blood, but I vow he will not have any of my secrets.

'Henry,' says Ernst, and he rubs his chin thoughtfully and engages my face, my aging face, 'there's something else that troubles me.'

'What might that be, Ernst?'

'You understand my concern for Kitty…'

'Yes, and I do not need you to remind me that you believe I neglect her. Why must you continue to lecture me?'

'Henry, you misunderstand my intention. Indeed, it is for Kitty's sake that I speak, but are you not aware of the reports in Lloyd's Weekly, concerning the recent spate of crime in the stews?'

'Crime? Oh, yes, according to the Pall Mall Gazette, a Mr. Lushington was charged while drunk in command of a van and horses, and there was I believe a rather unfortunate petition on the part of the wife for a dissolution of her marriage, on the head of her husband's adultery… and her claim coupled with cruelty. Someone's pig attacked a man in the market and a woman died attending church, killed by her own corset!'

'I did not know that you read the newspapers so diligently, Henry.'

'I spend little time reading such trivial trade, Ernst.'

'That may be so, but despite your erudition, several women have been murdered, Henry, and in the most brutal fashion.'

'Women of low reputation, no doubt.'

'High or low, Henry, what does their status matter? It is still a nasty business and I would not have believed that such uncaring words could have come from your tongue.'

I refuse to be chastised. 'How does this sensational reporting concern Kitty?'

'If it were not for the fact that the murders have been perpetrated not far from here, and Kitty has been out late visiting Lady Diana Ashburnham's, perhaps you might think her safety at risk?'

'Kitty seems perfectly secure,' I respond, although there is a vague suspicion in my head about the veracity of her evening soirées.

'The authorities are seeking someone, who various witnesses describe as 'a tall man in a tall hat and black cloak'. There are posters pasted to walls all over the neighbourhood calling for anyone who has knowledge to report to the police.'

'That description could apply to any hundred men in the vicinity. I have seen no one, for I hardly ever go out. You know that. How ridiculous you are! Is there a suggestion that a gentleman is responsible for the crimes?'

'Perhaps, Henry, and it is most mystifying because each female has not only been viciously killed by having had her throat cut, but the sex organs have been removed- the womb cut out, the ovaries gone, the vagina mutilated. Henry, the person doing this is sick, and there are inferences that the man the police seek may have medical knowledge.'

I look at Ernst and my eyes are wide with horror at his vile but unspoken accusation.

'Just what is it that you are suggesting? If you think I am losing my mind, and you cannot deny that both you and Kitty have discussed my sanity, I no longer see that my friendship is valuable to you. If you can for one second entertain such a disgusting notion that I might be capable of such heinous acts…'

'Henry. Henry, please,' Ernst interjects, 'I speak only out of worry for both Kitty and you, and I did not infer that you are a maniac... You have not read the posters of course because you never go out, but you can't stay locked up in this stuffy laboratory. Look what is happening to you. What is happening to you, Henry?'

Whatever the consequences might be, Ernst pleas and whines over concerns for me, yet I must continue my experiments. Something bright and shining and strong has been sparked and it cannot be denied a place in this dull and deceptive world that I inhabit. Nonetheless I feel a battle for dominance rising to the cusp in that world. In that same space in which I live I find a competitor not only emerging but jockeying for supremacy. I do not want to rebuke or repudiate the manifestation of that being, but I do not want to lose complete control of myself as a result. Driven by this notion, I have decided, to modify and control the passion, to change my compound, to slightly alter some of its constituents. Popular opinion believes that the opposite sex is the weaker sex and thus easily given to sentimentality and romantic whims and impulses. It is difficult to agree upon this, although as men are generally considered of a more robust physicality and of stronger will, to soften the compound, I have decided to trial a mixture of the dose with a concentrate of female hormones. At this stage in my experiments I am curious to whatever change this should bring about, be it hopefully a positive change. This premature aging that assails my cells should be lessened, for I do not know if the dissipations of my drug addiction might suddenly accelerate. During my researches, I believe I might have glimpsed in my microscope, strange molecular structures in the corpus lutuem that suggest they awaken certain neurotrophic elements in the body. It is an exciting and provocative herald, and I need to pursue this research irrespective of its outcome. If it is the sex hormone, and I can stimulate the brain to produce it in exact modification, then I might be able to control the more violent impulses and the cellular breakdown that appears as proof of the liberation of my base desires. To procure the chemical extracts from the adrenal glands necessary for my serum, to hopefully produce a tempering effect, I have had to engage, through illicit means, the services of the somewhat dubious characters of Mr. Burke and Mr. Hare. With trepidation, for I despise the world and do not like to engage in its outré grotesqueries, I have sought these two men under the auspices of my scientific endeavours. Finding these two men proved easier than I had imagined, as I was directed to the disreputable establishment of a dame, Mrs. Murphy, and her flea-ridden tenement lodging.

Over the last two weeks the men have clandestinely brought to me the materials I require for my research, arrived at my back-garden gate, dressed in their black hats and black cloaks, unfurling from the secrecy of midnight. I exchange coins for a small box of ice and there is blood in the ice… If this aligns me to the charnel house that I have always so vehemently denied is my heritage, then I must think of the greater good. To save the liner I might have to sacrifice the lifeboat. Still, in case any scandal might ensue, I remain wary of their shady reputations. I have been discrete in my dealings with these men, despite the whisper of the unsavoury and the unscrupulous that seems to cling to their names, despite the posters on the wall. Although I feel that I am reducing myself to hypocrisy, I hereby justify my science in that I seek for the higher ideals in mankind. Thus, I ask of them no questions, because my methods, I am convinced, have been vital though they seem to be not entirely ethical. I know that I skid dangerously along that fine line between science and death. Perhaps this will quieten and placate the violent urges of the flesh that I have unleashed, and expiate the weakening effects that I later suffer in the gaps in my memory. Hopefully the toll of cellular deterioration will be lessened. It remains to be seen what results might come.

I have also picked the fungi in the garden box and distilled from the mushrooms a potion to administer to myself in the advent that I find my experience heightened by anxiety. Although Ernst has warned me against their use, I say he lives in such a predictably conventional world, for I am willing to undergo the most wretched and obscene trials if such an elixir shall prove a pacifying agent and a boon to mankind. Into a stoppered bottle I have poured seven drams, and I will administer this only if the violent impulses cannot be contained and are likely to become a danger to my life. However, passions forbidding, though the weaker nature seems unwilling, I hardly understand the desire that overwhelms me. What possesses me is disturbing but it dictates and it commands. I find myself weak in my resistance, and I want so much to visit again upon my flesh what most must consider the shameful pollutions of fornication. Unable to hold back the compulsion there seems to be nothing that can dissuade me from that joy, even if I only half-recollect what wrongs that I have perpetrated, the things I do in dreams.

Much have I read about the properties of these psilocybin mushrooms. Ernst, I recall tried quite recently to lecture me in their archaeology, as if I knew not that Shaman used them to attain a state of transcendence. Perhaps, when my own being is diminished, and my potency and my vital essences are much drained away, I might stem the consumptive effects that emerge, nullify the violence and achieve serenity and calm by drinking the mushroom elixir. Yet that terrible force that is held repressed inside of the mind rakes at my flesh and burns my being as if I am covered with live coals. I confess that I am not so averse to its perverse callings and tempting delights. It is a strange thing to contemplate that I might enjoy the liberation of the destructive urges that are harboured within, because they are excess and not ascetic.

'Thank you, Ernst. If Kitty has not read the newspapers nor seen the posters, you might tell her not to worry so, and that I am not a mad murderer. Even though she tells me that she heard a crazed man's voice in my laboratory. How ridiculous! My metabolism might be disrupted at present, but I am sure there is a logical explanation for the tic in my health, an explanation that isn't fantastic!'

I dismiss Ernst then, and turn my head away, and I glimpse my aging countenance in the mirror beyond his shoulder. Upon this moment Paul Allen steps into my laboratory. It is a peculiarly serendipitous moment of interruption because I am feeling hurt and vexed by the implications in Ernst's dialogue. I do not get out of my chair, and Totò rattles his cage as if in irritation at Paul's intrusion.

'Ah, Mr. Allen,' says Ernst, turning to address the newcomer, 'perhaps you can persuade our old friend to lead a more sensible life.' There is a condescending tone to Ernst's words. He does not live in ignorance of Paul Allen's bohemian dissipations, so how can he bray to spendthrifts about my sensibility? 'Goodbye, Henry.' Ernst collects his coat and hat.

'Why, it's hardly my specialty,' returns Paul. 'I'll try.'

We both watch as Ernst leaves and then Paul tentatively approaches. I know what he is going to say, even before his lips part. He is going to ask me for more money. The gaming tables and whoring have sucked the cash away for the moment, and I fear that I must refuse.

'My dear, Henry,' he begins with a foolish triviality, 'what are you doing here?' He motions limply about the laboratory. As if the likes of Paul Allen could ever understand. 'Are you looking for the elixir of life? You must be because you look terrible, old boy.' He gives a low chuckle and all I can do is to stare at him coldly. Is Paul so ignorant? Surely, he is, for assuredly he knows that I seek not rejuvenesence or the prolongation of life, but instead for a panacea to treat the ills of man's troubled mind. How could I ever begin to explain to him the true nature of my sorceries, what it is that I distill and congeal, what mystic treatments I must develop until my mysterious elixir emerges from the crucible?

'I shall leave the life-search to you and your friends, Paul. Now what do you want?'

The words are so flat and matter-of-fact that Paul is slightly taken back.

'Merely to thank you, my dear, Henry' he stumbles feebly, too late realising his flippant trespass. 'For your past, and extraordinary generosity.'

'Thank you for your rectitude,' I reply, 'but now I must get back to work.'

Standing up I move away from Paul.

'I…' Paul hovers upon the brink, an embarrassed suppliant. 'I wonder, Henry, if you could manage…?'

I cut his words short.

'My experiments are costly, Paul. Besides, as I no longer have the funeral home for income, I am afraid that I have rather overreached myself- with your help of course.'

'Damn your experiments, Henry, you might be forgetting our little contract…'

'Do you not think that the time for our little contract is over? You have no hold on me, Paul. We can conclude this without resort to barbarous words.'

'My apologies…'

'It is no use, for you alone must deal with how you squander this time. I will not help you.'

No matter what he says I will not relent, and I shall refuse his requests, his pleas, his allusions to blackmail, everything.

'Sorry indeed,' he repeats ruefully. 'Nonetheless, sorry could be a grave error.'

I ignore his feeble pun and pick up a beaker and I begin measuring a small amount of green fluid. Concentrating thus I intend to pay no attention to Paul's slurs. He begins to speak again, no doubt to recall some past redress, but I must be firm regardless of any threatened consequences.

'Don't bother to call again,' I interject, and the colour drains from his face. 'I shall be away for some time.'

'Oh, are you going far?'

Such prophetic words they are.

'I wonder,' is all that I whisper, and the rhesus screeches in its cage as if to punctuate the primal nature of my thoughts. I do not look up as Paul leaves, but when I am certain that he is in the garden, I creep to the window and peer out. Kitty is sitting by the reflecting pool, and she is idly snapping twigs. Under the mutilated Cupid she is seated, her own reflection cloudy in the limpid water. She watches the mindless goldfish, looking up and laughing derisively as Paul emerges from my door.

'Well, I suppose you lied your way successfully out of debt again,' I hear her declare, and she tosses away the broken stem of the dry twig.

'Unfortunately, no,' Paul returns, and is that genuine surprise that flickers in my wife's beautiful face?

'I must be losing my grip,' says Paul, walking around Kitty and pausing to take in a gulp of air. He shakes his head.

'He refused to help?' Kitty seems unable to believe that I have declined my position as banker.

She stands up. 'What will you do?'

Paul looks at Kitty in faked contrition. 'It's good to see the Jekyll's reunited at last.'

Strutting off, he heads towards the garden gate.

'Paul!' cries Kitty, catching him up and arresting him with her hand upon his forearm. 'What will you do?'

'Please don't disturb yourself on my account,' he tells her, his face turned to stone. Kitty takes hold of his hand.

'You won't do anything desperate?'

I do not understand why Kitty pleads so. Why does she care, why does she profess to love this fool?

'Apart from continuing to live,' he mutters melodramatically, 'nothing…'

I watch on, smiling contentedly as Paul passes through the gate and into the lane beyond the hydrangeas and the red bricks, leaving Kitty bereft and alone and confused.

In my journal, I record the following:

'I am determined to discover and to experience all that life can reveal, even if in such revelation my sins are multiplied. When the syringe first pierced my vein, I knew of the risks that must occur, and I conjectured fearfully that my elixir's potency might not be permanent. I must inject again, for in withdrawal there is pain and melancholia combined. This reality is terrible, for the drug needs refinement, but does my mind really avow more control over its effects? I am a man of science and surely, I understand the dangerous implications that lie in the subtle residuals left tailing like embers within my nerve ends? There is a vibrant potency in the chemistry, but it needs modifying, though in continuing my experiment I risk calling up those brutal and primal physiological manifestations that might soon be beyond my control. Manifestations that are making nonsense of my noble aims. Yet how am I to deny the thrill? That this drug may prove evanescent, and that this dependency be predetermined, suggests the madness of the awful truth that the medical council has arrogantly prophesied. Regardless I am impatient to begin, to follow my friend Mr. Edward Hyde, a man who is willing to share with me life's sweet mystery, burning with desire, and I care not for the oppositions of the world. My bank and my solicitors are instructed to regard Hyde my attorney in my absence, my heir and my executor if I fail to return. I know not where the darkness may lead, but nor do I want to return to a duplicitous wife and to a life of frustrated isolation and loveless misery. Kitty will no doubt wonder at my disappearance, and my excuse is that I have gone back to Oxford for an unspecified period. In this I shall offer her no further explanation, and if she should seek after me she will receive no happy news. All of my dealings will now be communicated exclusively through my only loyal and trustworthy friend, Mr. Edward Hyde.'

Putting down my nib I blot the ink with bibulous paper, and I close the covers of my journal. Presently I rise from my desk and I walk slowly to the drug cabinet and once again I roll up my sleeve…

Chapter 9

A Gentleman's Agreement

'This moral, I think, may be safely attached

Reckon not on your chickens before they are hatched.'

Jeffreys Taylor

A gentleman's club at three in the afternoon. Here, we shall find a despondent Paul Allen, sitting in a chair and nursing his ill fortune, pouring his monetary regrets into an inebriated ear. He is blessed to have that ear into which to repine his troubles, for so few would know empathy for such improvident conduct.

'Damned bad luck I hear you've been having, old man,' says the man, a Mr. Michael Carmichael, who is sitting across from Paul. They have been sitting together for the best part of an hour, drinking, but sadly for Paul they are not even playing at cards. Paul of course has given up thinking that he might find his purse replenished with Mr. Michael Carmichael's bank notes. Mr. Michael Carmichael is not in the business of extending loans, and besides, as the Principle of a swank country boy's college he has other things to consider, and entangling his available funds up in the clutches of the spendthrift Mr. Allen is not one of them. Mr. Michael Carmichael has been quite ready to drink though, and is, at this moment, tipsy, indeed almost to the point of complete inebriation. Caught in a moment of dangerous reflection, he wishes to forget about a few things that have absolutely nothing to do with Mr. Paul Allen's monetary troubles. Firstly, Carmichael curses the fact that he only has one arm, his right arm. Blasted thing still causes him pain in the stump. Sometimes he wants to scratch at it, raise it, flex the fingers. However, all that is phantom. Carmichael can recall the day in the woods when the arm was mutilated by the shot. He can also vividly recall the operation in Seven Dials, performed by that hack Dr. Thomas Bolton. Seven Dials of all places! Why had Molly insisted that he be taken there? That was a charity hospital catering for patients of the lower classes. Carmichael was a man of station. Ruefully he shakes his head; station did not save one from the surgeon's knife. Indeed, his arm had been amputated without anaesthesia. The past was painful, true, but it was only half as painful as the adulterous treachery of his wife, Molly. Thus absorbed, Mr. Michael Carmichael has not been listening to Paul's griping for quite some time. Paul lights up a cigarette and draws in the perfumed smoke.

'Damned bad luck,' he reiterates, blowing blue tendrils of vapour into the air and into Carmichael's ruddy face. Mr. Michael Carmichael is certain that Mr. Allen said that same thing only half an hour previously.

'Oh well, luck's a bitch, old boy,' says Michael Carmichael, ruminating at that point upon Molly's beautiful but hard face. Under that lovely skin was a bitch indeed, but you wouldn't tell her that, not when she pointed the barrel of a rook gun at you. Life was most certainly a bitch, and such a ruthlessly true statement too, but of course words are of no help to our Mr. Allen. Only bank notes.

'I shouldn't think so,' replies Paul defensively. 'I've always had the best possible luck with bitches. Well, almost always… Anyway…'

'Huh!' scoffs the other gent. 'A bitch is a bitch!'

Mr. Carmichael loses himself for a moment amid the corridors of his rural school. He can hear the boys reciting lessons and playing music and he can also hear their cheers from the rugby field, but even as his mind wanders, he perceives the echo of Molly's footsteps. While he is in London drinking, Molly is attending to the school's Curriculum… when she is not in the park with her gun hunting pheasant that is…A grossly unwomanly woman is she! Well, the new teacher Mr. Carmichael has engaged, Mr. Robert Heller, and his sweet new wife Peggy, they should help make the rooms and corridors less lonely for Molly… if she can get her mind out of the gutter! Pulled from his reverie Mr. Michael Carmichael acknowledges the arrival of our other player, Mr. Edward Hyde. Hyde approaches from behind Paul's back so that our spendthrift cannot see. Hyde smiles at Mr. Michael Carmichael.

'Well,' says the retiring gentleman, 'I must be off. Got to get the coach back to Letchmoor Heath.' He stands up as straight as he can and adjusts his wooden arm, unbending the elbow joint with a loud snap. 'Damned nuisance thing,' he remarks. 'Shouldn't play with guns, or bitches, hey?

Mr. Allen returns a look of distaste.

'Goodbye,' says Michael Carmichael, and with a quick swig and a gulp he finishes off his glass of whiskey, and then, giving Paul a condescending pat on the shoulder, he departs. Of course, this leaves Mr. Hyde to make his presence known. When they are alone Hyde greets his friend, and Paul immediately sparks up from his glum mood and returns a like smile.

'My dear, Edward,' he almost gushes, 'just the one man I was hoping to run into!' He waves Edward to the now vacant chair. Take a seat, please. Would you like a drink?'

'Thank you,' replies Hyde as he sits and beams a wide and artificial smile. Paul sees not the depth of Hyde's contempt, and summons the waiter.

'Bring another glass, will you, and be quick about it.'

The waiter reacts slowly, bringing a clean glass to the table and pouring the whiskey from a decanter.

'Business problems?' Edward asks.

'You know my weakness,' says Paul. He sighs, for his troubles are transparent, and there will be no lying to Edward Hyde.

'Women?' asks Hyde, toying with the word, briefly recalling the glamorous Mayati.

'Gambling, my dear boy!' replies Paul, crestfallen. 'Women aren't a weakness, they're a recurrent necessity.'

Edward laughs knowingly.

'I thought that one of these necessities of yours was in the delightful habit of honouring your debts for you?'

'You can't trust anyone these days,' says Paul bleakly. 'Oldest friend lets me down. Oldest mistress lets me down. No one to turn to.' Paul pours himself another drink.

'What are you in for?' asks Hyde, and Paul Allen is surprised at the directness of the question.

'About two thousand,' Paul admits, and his embarrassment colours his face crimson.

'Sell your soul,' suggests Mr. Hyde.

'Gladly,' returns Paul. 'No takers.' He breathes in another drag upon his cigarette.

'I'll take it over,' returns Hyde, and Paul blanches. He cannot believe what he is hearing.

'My soul?' asks Mr. Allen in a moment of puzzlement.

'That'll be about as useless to me as it is to you,' Hyde reflects openly, the irony in his words is almost humorous. 'I meant the debt.'

'Well,' replies Paul, not quite certain that Hyde is genuine, 'that's extremely kind of you, Edward, but I… couldn't possibly permit it.'

Paul rises upon the point of exiting.

'I'll stake you to five thousand,' says Hyde, and Paul's eyes widen with delight and surprise. He can hardly believe his sudden change of fortune. Nevertheless, Paul hovers, tempted but still not sure. Any offer comes with a price, and what must be Hyde's?

'Are you quite sure this is convenient, Edward? I mean, it is kind of you to offer your help. I would be obliged.'

'Just pass the notes over to me as they come in,' says Edward, and his eyes turn steely.

'Don't you think it would be better if you were to give me the five now and leave me to…' Edward cuts Paul short.

'No, I'm afraid that's the only way. Of course, if you would rather not leave yourself in my hands…' Watch Paul almost do a little dance to regain his footing.

'My dear Edward, I am only too happy to be in such generous hands. It's kind of you.'

'There are other ways you can repay me,' says Hyde, a leer playing about his lips.

'London is your oyster, my dear boy,' Paul assures his new creditor, 'and I am the one who can open it for you.' Paul sits down again.

'Open it wide!' says Hyde. 'Break its hinges. Rifle its pearls!'

Hyde is emboldened even if his desires are obscure, and Paul must now acquiesce without considering the consequences. Tossing back a whiskey both laugh heartily, and Paul's cigarette is burnt into ashes.

Chapter 10

Poisonous Possibilities

'As you are lolling hammockwise

It contemplates you stomachwise.'

Ogden Nash

My heart almost stopped in fright. Backlit by the light of the moon, the shadow hovered. For a heartbeat, I could only just vaguely discern the shape of a man looming in the portal. The interval seemed interminable and suspense held my tongue. Terror prepared me to either fight or flight, and I was all but trapped in the confined space of the crypt. There was nowhere to which I could run, and my intrusion blatantly discovered.

'I did ask, old boy,' said the shadow. 'Do you need any help?'

The moment suddenly became almost comical.

'Who are you?' I asked and the shadow approached, and I saw as the watery light of my candle washed over that face that it belonged to the undertaker that I had encountered at Bullstrode and Holroyd. The tall man's eyes sparkled in the candle glow. At least he was neither sexton nor constabulary, and realising this made me a fraction less tense.

'Paul Allen is the name,' and he extended his hand. I did not shake it nor did I offer my own in friendship. 'We met informally at the parlour.'

'You are the undertaker?' I returned, suspiciously.

'Don't make the word undertaker sound so unprofessional!' he chastised. 'I take my position quite seriously.'

'I am sure that you do,' I said sarcastically, 'after today's disgusting spectacle.'

'Yet isn't that the reason why both of us are here, in this graveyard tonight, sir, professionalism? You are, of course, Doctor Henry Jekyll?'

'What if I am?'

'Well, I should bloody hope you are! I don't make a habit of making late night visits to cemeteries, my friend, just during the day, earning a crust! What are we up to?'

'I know what I am up to,' I replied defensively, my boot nudging against my Gladstone bag. Mr. Allen was watching me closely with a vapid smile plastered to his lips. 'I have no notion of what you are up to. In any case, I should not think it need concern you.'

'Ah, but it does concern me.' He moved a couple of steps closer and I felt dwarfed under his towering frame. The man was perhaps six feet and four, and the effect of extreme height was only slightly diminished when he removed his hat.

'You see,' he continued, 'this could all be quite serendipitous to us both. I foresee a long and prosperous partnership.'

'Partnership! You are caught in a dream, sir! For what reason would I wish a partnership with the likes of you? Why, we have only met today, and in passing, and have not been formerly introduced until this rather blackly comical moment. I don't even know you.'

'You know my name now, so therefore you know enough,' Paul said evenly, and he squinted in the yellow light. 'We can't go on talking all night though.' He pointed to the crypt. 'I believe that you might be a seeker after truth, and that is what has brought you here. Best get it open before the dawn finds us, hey what?'

'I haven't uncovered the truth yet,' I told him pointedly, and perceiving my double entendre he threw me a wide smile. 'In any case, what would you know of the truth, kind sir?'

'Like I have already observed,' said Paul Allen, as he rubbed his chin thoughtfully. 'The truth might be revealed if we start by opening up that coffin.'

'Wasn't it already opened today, friend?'

Mr. Allen ignored my accusation and produced a pry bar out of the folds of his long coat. 'Just the thing I neglected to bring,' I returned, risking my own ridiculous smile.

'Then a splendid tool it shall turn out to be!' said he, stepping forward and scraping the flat tip of the iron in between the seam of lid and crypt. From another pocket, he produced a hammer.

'You seem to have thought of everything,' I remarked, but he ignored me and set to work driving in the spike. The resounding crack of sound shuddered about the confined space of the tomb and I dare say my bones almost leapt out of my skin. With another whack, the iron had been driven home and with our combined effort the covering stone was levered up and pushed back, revealing the Red Cedar box. Paul threw down the iron. The brass pins of the coffin were already ruptured and the head end of the box broken, so it was without difficulty that I prised up the lid. A day and a night in the tomb had trapped the gases bloating within the body. Slim as my mother had been, the corpse was beginning to emit a most foul and pungent vapour, a stink almost of rotten garlic that immediately assailed our nostrils. The beginnings of corruption were evidenced in her flesh, for a fly danced from the cavity of her left nostril, shivered its silvery, gossamer wings in the dark as it crawled upon her lips. Trailing over her breast was the gold and jet crucifix. When I looked at my mother's corpse it was almost as if I were caught in a dream. It was because of this, and only this that I could imagine that in my vision she floated in a sea of undulating mist, wavering and shimmering even though she did not move. I convinced myself quite quickly that she had not begun to stink, but that she was all curved and more beautiful than the Goddess of the Evening Star, and lovelier, more graceful than Ophelia amid her drowning flowers. In her tresses were still braided the cream droplets of pearls and beneath the film of her dress, as I peeled it way, I could see the pale tincture of roses, the swell of her small, apple-shaped breasts the streaks of blue-green marbling, which pressed against the layers of tulle. Rigid in bizarre symmetry she was, in my fantasy, still beautiful, but it was difficult not to grimace, for her perfumed flesh was struggling with the odours of corruption.

Thus revealed, only moments before hidden by her clothing, we looked upon the decomposition that had begun in Henrietta Jekyll's skin. The lines were deep red and blue and green and livid, almost the shade of her coveted wallpaper, crisscrossing the epidermis. The body tissues were swelling and distended by trapped gas, expanding her once slim stomach. I suspected that the rapid hemolysis of the blood indicated how quickly the decomposition was winning against the Saturol embalming fluid that Mr. Fortune had pumped into her dead veins. Complete putrefaction was but a day or two away. Mr. Allen had failed to note my rapture, for he laughed with mock disgust, showing supreme disrespect as he waved his hand before his face and pinched his nose. He did not ask what it was that I had to do, but I turned away from him and stooped and picked up my Gladstone bag.

'Bring the light up here,' I instructed, and Paul Allen took up the candle and held it close so that I could better see. Mother's painted features seemed to smile in their burial serenity. I took a syringe from my bag and plunged it into her thigh, just beside the pubis, deep into her femoral artery. A bud of ropey, thick black blood blossomed at the puncture, and I moved the spike of the needle about and then I began to extract the fluid. The blood had begun to coagulate and it was difficult to draw it into the syringe, but I massaged the vein vigorously, forcing the clots to dislodge and the thickening gore to flow. When the syringe was filled I withdrew the spike and wrapped the tip in a cotton wad and then returned the needle to my bag. Mr. Allen watched all with interest, and all the while he watched I wondered at his game. Soon, no doubt, he must reveal his ulterior motives for helping me, but I knew that for this knowledge I must exercise patience, for my patience would ultimately bring its own reward.

'Why do you need a dead woman's blood?' Paul Allen asked of me as he stood there dutifully holding the candle.

'Not just her blood,' I replied ambiguously, and left the statement hanging in the stale atmosphere. The man was piqued with curiosity. Reaching again into my bag I retrieved a scalpel and as I lifted it slowly I watched his reflection twist and realign in the blade's cold, mirrored surface. I wondered with brief amusement if Paul even entertained the idea that the blade might find its kiss at his throat, and a little surge of power flooded my body. I felt my fingers itch and fancied, oh so briefly, that I cut him, slashed his throat and that his neck fell open like a sliced fruit. Perhaps he should be nervous, for how could he trust me? Of course, he could not, but something inside of me, call it instinct, told me that Mr. Allen could have his future uses. Though how my hands trembled with restraint.

'Mr. Allen, you had best stand aside for a moment.' I spoke calmly as I cut deeply into my dead mother's abdomen, slicing through the pale adiopocere and into the thin sack of the gut. The swelling instantly deflated and the close chamber was filled with the most rank of airs. 'Would you be kind enough, after you can take a proper breath, as to do me the good service of handing me a jar from my Gladstone bag, please?' Gagging, he dutifully retrieved one and even uncorked it, griping as he did so in a most offended manner. I threw the blood-stained scalpel into the Gladstone bag. The stink was repulsive as I pressed my fingers against the stomach and held the lip of the jar against the bloody incision. An eruption of decomposed food and bilious liquid squirted out of the stomach and into the glass, bubbling over my fingers and staining my shirt sleeve. When the glass was half-filled I re-corked the jar, and handed it to Paul to return to a safe place in the bag, among the wadding.

'Make certain that it doesn't spill.' I wiped my bloodied fingers upon a piece of cotton wadding and threw that as well into the case.

'Now that was most certainly disgusting,' my companion quipped.

'Yes indeed,' I returned. 'So now let us see if by the alchemy of science, we can discover mother's hidden secrets.'

'Alchemy? You sound like a wizard, old boy.' Paul pointed to the jar of body fluid. 'If you can turn that filth into gold we might become the richest men in the world!'

'A metaphor, Mr. Allen. I use but a metaphor. The gold lieth in the revelation.'

'The revelation? Well, that is something that I must see with my own eyes.'

'Dear Mr. Allen,' I looked up from my mother's mutilated cadaver and stared directly into his eyes, 'I see no need for you to see anything further.'

'Ah, but in that you are wrong,' Paul half-laughed. 'My dear Henry, I am now your grave robbing accomplice, so I see every need, for you must understand that you cannot appropriate my services for free.'

'So, now we come to your moment of truth. Mr. Allen, you appear to be many things- a handsome chap, a lively soul and a bad blackmailer.'

'Blackmail! No, no! Call it your helping me out in my spot of trouble. A little cash wouldn't go astray now, I dare say.'

'Do tell. I am all ears.' I had to admit to a strange curiosity, because there was something about this gauche undertaker that oddly appealed to me, even attracted me.

'I have a couple of gambling debts, old boy. I like to play at cards, but sometimes, regrettably, I lose.'

'Why didn't you just ask for the money instead of stalking me and resorting to this ridiculous subterfuge?'

'Where is the excitement in that? Besides, I divine a long and fruitful relationship in the cards.'

'I only see loses in your cards, my friend.'

'A good point,' Paul stated flatly, 'but who can say what the future might bring?'

'Indeed,' I replied, and I looked intently into his handsome face. There was a light in his eyes that shone lively, sparkling with both veracity and temerity. 'This is a rather flimsy excuse for blackmail though, wouldn't you agree?'

'Let's not call it that, Henry,' said Paul. 'Instead, let's say we have reached a gentleman's agreement.'

'A gentleman's agreement!' I scoffed derisively. 'How many gentlemen have you met, Mr. Allen, who before your eyes, have cut up the corpse of their mother or who rob graves at midnight?'

'None,' he replied matter-of-factly, and then, 'but it was not I who 'cut up' your mother.' Without any further words, we replaced the lid to the sepulchre and stealthily departed Tower Hamlets.

Out of the dark rang the iron tongues of bells, clanging out the late hour, hollow and muffled; a mournful calling to lost souls. In the night sky, the moon was a discus of silver ice, a cold lamp among the trusting stars. The city crawled smoky and darksome as we returned to my lodgings. Carriages passed in the almost deserted streets, clopping along the cobbles at irregular intervals, horses and drivers translucent in the soupy light thrown from the lamp posts; sometimes figures met and blended together amid the shadows. No one took notice of us as we walked, and we did not speak to each other, and after a bit we came to the narrow steps that led up to the tenement studio I had rented. We mounted the stairs, making as little noise as possible so as not to wake the tenants, nor rouse the concierge. On the stairs, I paused for a moment and Paul paused with me, silent and breathing heavily in the semi darkness. With a nervous glance, I pointed to the light seeping from the crack under a door.

'Shh!' I whispered to Paul, putting a finger up to my lips. 'The landlord.'

When the door did not open we resumed our ascent, upward to unveil destiny, ever upward, climbing the creaking steps.

'So many things can happen in such a short space of time.' Paul Allen gave me a questioning look as he pondered my words.

'Is not fate the strangest of all things in life?' he replied in a muted whisper.

'How deep you are, Mr. Allen,' I returned obliquely, 'yet from the cessation of life can come the strangest knowledge. Sometimes death can divulge to us the most bizarre truth despite its seeming mummery.' I opened the door at the top of the stairs and we walked into shifting blue darknesses. Paul peered into the shadows unable to perceive much by way of detail in his surroundings. I instructed him to be still for a moment, for I did not wish him to blunder in his step and crash into my medical equipment. Mr. Allen's crafty eyes sparkled in the dark. From a box of tinder, I took a match and lit a lamp, its blackened wick magically turned into orange fire; and I held the lamp high. I could see Paul's curious wonder as the tubes and vials became visible, surreal and multi-coloured and almost glowing in the dance of the shadows. I struck another flint and soon a fire came to life in the grate. The shadows waltzed with the lamp light and the firelight and all seemed somehow warm and comforting despite our macabre adventure.

'What is this place?' Paul asked, believing no doubt that he has stumbled into an alchemist's crucible, for indeed all must appear as saturnalia, magic and diversion.

'Since I cannot stay at Bullstrode and Holroyd, this is my temporary home, my friend,' I replied. 'The place where my alchemy will prove some answers to a puzzle.'

'A puzzle?'

'A simple test,' I told Paul. 'Nothing too complicated.' I took him gently by the elbow, sidestepping books scattered on the floor, and we both pushed through clumps of straw and between undone crates. Steering him deftly I told him to be careful not to break anything, for the glass tubing was expensive. We did not want the landlord up from the void below, and we did want to injure ourselves.

'Where did all of this laboratory equipment come from?' Paul asked, and as I set down the lamp and my Gladstone bag.

'I ordered it before I left Oxford. You are so full of questions, Mr. Allen! Quiet your lips now and let us retrieve the gold from the purse.'

My leather satchel gave forth its purloined contents and I set the two samples, the vial and the syringe, upon the table, under the lamp, and I drew aside the velvet cover exposing my Ross London dissecting microscope. Firelight glinted in its brass pillar, making orange reflections glow in the little concave mirror. Settling into a chair and with Paul standing beside me, I took a slide made of thin glass, upon the surface of which I squirted a few drops of the blood from the syringe. Mr. Allen attended as I peered into the condensing lens, adjusting the focus and the direction of the light so that the blood, under my observing eye, magnified and became a fluid atmosphere of swirling cells. Lifting my head, I bid him peek into a world of minutiae and secrets that he had, no doubt, never witnessed before. Predictably, Mr. Allen gave a small gasp of wonder.

'Incredible stuff, to be sure,' said he, 'but what does it tell you?'

'Nothing for the moment,' I replied, and I recorded a sceptical arch of his eyebrow. 'Be patient.'

On the bench, I had assembled an odd collection of testing paraphernalia. To a small stand I fitted a thin glass tube and into this tube I poured a diminutive amount of zinc.

'With this,' I told Paul, 'and a splash or two of that…' I picked up the phial of foul liquescence that I had collected from my mother's gut, 'we shall attempt to unravel the etymology of existence.'

'I have no idea of what you are on about,' confessed my blackmailing companion, 'but I suspect your putrescence is far from elixir and closer to poison! I wait with piqued anticipation your next magic trick!'

I laughed quietly at his remark.

'Poison, you say? Magic trick? I suppose it is magic, in its own way… but natural magic. Before us we have the unknown, but that is simply for the moment.' I went on, pouring into the zinc some of the stomach bile. 'To you it seems incomprehensible and capricious, yet the reasons we have procured these essences from death will divulge much. Believe me, it might just be possible to transmute this vile fluid into a satisfactory and possibly condemnatory explanation.'

'An explanation condemning what?'

'Well, Paul,' I spoke softly but with measure as I continued my work, 'to extract the secret I must use the liquid from an anthropological source, and from that I should be able to determine our toxicological concerns.'

'Anthropo… toxico…what?' said Paul, scratching his chin. 'You talk in riddles and I'm afraid I don't understand one word.'

'I don't expect that you should… just yet. Watch… I shall divine the elemental with my sorcery.' I placed a cork stopper fitted with a dripping funnel into the top of the glass tube, and this funnel contained a portion of hydrochloric acid. When the acid mixed with the zinc the magic began.

'Look, Paul,' I commanded, 'I play the magician!' A peculiar and viscous fluid began to form and bubble through the funnel, the pressure squeezing the fluid via a pipette that branched off from the side of the glass. With a wooden peg, I clipped the edge of a circular piece of glass, a round no thicker than the slides that I had placed under my microscope, and striking a match I held the spurt of fire to the end of the pipette. Holding the circle of glass close to the heat a white powder began to precipitate out of the flame and to adhere to the clear surface.

'What is that smell?' Paul crinkled up his nose and looked perplexed and yet excited.

'It is an odour that some would say smells like garlic,' I responded. 'According to Nicholas Culpeper, my friend, garlic is an enemy to all poisons and breeds corrupt blood.'

'You've lost me again, old boy!' said Paul, to whom I merely smiled and replied:

'And polished, that therein my mirror'd form

Distinct I saw

The next of hue more dark that sablest grain.'

My quote from Dante seemed to confuse him yet more. 'This, my friend, is what some so respectfully call a 'foreign irritant'. I suspect deliberate poisoning by arsenic.'

'Arsenic!' Paul exclaimed. 'Why that is simply amazing, old boy! Where did you learn that trick?'

'Does this not tell you anything, Paul?'

'Well, perhaps if I might indulge in a black humour, it suggests that your loving step-father, the good Mr. Fortune, might have slipped your mother a nasty cup of tea!'

'Indeed, it does.'

'Steady on, Jekyll, that's a bit wild, old boy!' exclaimed Paul, suddenly grasping the dark possibilities inherent in the situation. 'I was only joking. Poisoning? What would he stand to gain? Your money? How?'

'Well, if not immediately, perhaps later. It would mean that he'd have to eliminate me too… eventually.'

'A rather nasty possibility, I suppose. What are you going to do?'

I put down the glass circlet and pinched out the flame. I gave Paul Allen a cold smile.

'You know, Paul, I have always harboured an implacable hatred for that man. Mr. William Fortune's life is but a disgusting parody of privilege, this fact one cannot dispute. He is ignorant and stupid and moreover proves to be a treacherous demon. Here we have his folly, his imposture, this evidence right before our eyes that he so stupidly hoped to conceal, and if all are blended together then Mr. Fortune, undone in his perfidious crime, surely courts a most horrible fate!'

Chapter 11

Pugilism, Papaver and Pulchritude

'Let the wingéd fancy roam

Pleasure never is at home.'

John Keats

Tonight, we will forgo the thrills of the Khazneh and take a little journey with our new friend Edward Hyde, into the filth of the rookery slum. Put aside your romance and prepare for a wild, dark night, one through which we will hurtle swiftly and headlong, knowing both fearful phantasmagoria and unbounded indulgence. Come! We must commence immediately and not tarry at the gate, for the pale glimmers of the morning star will soon spark a herald flicker in the eastern sky and all this nights' history will be as dust. The wily gentleman, Mr. Paul Allen has so consented to show Mr. Hyde all that London must offer… all of vice that is, so let us burst like a demon upon the gates of the great metropolis and joyfully sample its empery and its illicit delights! We will follow Mr. Allen and Mr. Hyde, and so will our senses too be awakened. Mr. Allen surely gives one the impression that he is an individual best fitted for such work, for steering the uninitiated through a host of adventitious burlesques and orgies, so let thy loins not be girded by reticence, but let them be throbbing with impudicity! Please, and I stress, that if the mysteries of lust and the iniquity of dark debauchery be not to your taste, then you should keep your eyes wide shut and perhaps discontinue our tour. However, for the curious, and for those who consent to voluntary transgression, come with us into the East End and into the constricted streets of New Court, into the Limehouse Causeway and Pennyfields, and if you dare, enjoy with Mr. Edward Hyde the thrill of London's dens. There may we satiate all cravings for adventure, for we will walk with Edward along the border-line of hallucination and reality and thus explore a little deeper his good friend Dr. Henry Jekyll's profundity about the synthesis of good and evil, of man as he could be and yet man as he really is. Come now, embrace the unbounded solicitations of indulgence that simmer beneath the skin of civilization, and afterwards, if you have one left, you can forget entirely your soul's salvation.

Down into the depths we will plunge, towards a new frontier, to step over the border between civility and light and shadows and rapine. Behold! In this subterranean corral see Mr. Allen cheering at the rail. He shouts and jeers with a chorus of others, both men and women of mixed class, all loud and unruly and obnoxious, all with an appetite for lust and for blood. Beside Mr. Allen stands Edward Hyde, the handsome devil, all smart in his style and with cash to spend at the betting booth. Remember that Paul has promised to open London's oyster, and for the first call of the evening they have weighed anchor momentarily in a grimy fight pit. Off a back alley, in a disreputable pub, in a red brick cellar that has been cleared to serve as an arena, there is haze and sweat and drinking and yelling. The arena proves the sport to come. This secret room in the bowels of the tavern is the haunt of the thief, the bludger, the flimp and the cut-throat, a welcoming hearth for crime and a gateway to the Underworld. In this subterranean vault, an improvised arena has been constructed, a patch of hard dirt in the centre of the room. Wooden guard rails demarcate the spaces of spectator and sport, and above there is a makeshift gallery from which dangle men like monkeys, holding on to poles, elevated for the best view. Among the gathered multitude, among the Fancy, we find the handsome Mr. Hyde, but his smooth and perfumed visage bobs jarringly among the lower tier, the dirt and the filth, the broken teeth, the unwashed and the unshaven, the waist-coated tosh and the whore's minder. His company, Mr. Allen notwithstanding, is a mix of the repulsive and the riotous, the silk fogle and the swell, a heated human detritus all, and bellowing for blood.

'I request excitement and you bring me to a cock fight!' declares the jaded Mr. Hyde, lighting a cigarette. He is not thrilled. Laughing loudly, and half-inebriated, Paul Allen waves his hand towards the arena.

'More aptly a cat fight!' he roars, his sides almost splitting in his mirth.

They emerge from the shadows and into the garish lamp light – two women squaring up for a bare-knuckle challenge.

Says the referee: 'On my right, behold the lovely Teutonic, corn-crowned Hilde – Concubine of Tartarus and clawing tigress. This beauty is guaranteed to rip out your guts!'

Hilde raises her arms above her head and roars at the spectators, and they applaud frenziedly.

'On my left, we have the ravishing red-headed Beulah, the breaker of bones, the devourer of other women and the devil's own plaything!'

The crowd are shouting with merriment and Hyde's eyes widen in surprise as Beulah flexes her muscles, her biceps swelling, as big and as strong as any man. The women stand face to face, armed with nothing other than bare fists and determination.

'See,' calls Paul Allen, 'I promise and I deliver!'

Women and men are screeching cat-calls from the stalls, hurling insults: 'Slut!' and 'Strumpet whore!' and 'Pox ridden Judy!'

'Come on down here and say that!' threatens Beulah, and she shakes her fist at the audience, and the women nearest the rail scream and retreat. The men laugh, but Beulah could probably best even the strongest man in the pit. Stepping back the referee leaves the fighters to size up each other, their eyes fevered and their bosoms heaving, their sleeves rolled up, their boots tightly laced, their hair tied back. With arms extended and poised in defence, shoulders hunched, they ready themselves for combat. Mr. Hyde grins with renewed anticipation. He views the spectacle with voyeuristic pleasure, and within that fray the two women become feverish metaphors for good and evil. A voice is sounding in the back of Hyde's mind, a voice that belongs to another, to his weak and embittered friend, Dr. Henry Jekyll, and Jekyll is touting utter bullshit about the intellect in battle with the brute strength of barbarism.

'How boring you are, Henry!' Hyde says aloud. 'You need to learn how to live for once in your miserable existence!' Hyde seems momentarily distracted in his conversation with someone who is not there, and he speaks loudly, but Paul standing at his side does not hear for the calling of the throng is louder still. Hyde begins to laugh, almost maniacally.

'What a show!' calls Paul over the bellowing jeers.

'Yes, dear Paul,' Hyde must admit, his eyes gleaming 'how exciting. I am not as enlightened as are you, so I'll wager a guinea on the Bavarian.'

'I will wager the Irish!'

The women invite each other to the challenge, and curve and form ripple into a fighting stance. They stand upright, as if posed before a mirror, leaning back slightly and holding their arms facing outwards, fists balled into fleshy hammers. Although bedraggled there is a strange dignity about these women, they are here to win, to be paid their pittance from the bets, to prove that they cannot be bested, and that in the ring they can better any man. Why, Beulah has fought with many a male opponent and has oft won her combats. She spits onto her knuckles and rubs the saliva into her skin, and all the while Hilde curses silently, shivering in anticipation.

'I am going to ram my fist fair down your stupid fuckin' mouth!' declares Hilde, and laughing at her taunt, Beulah replies that she will 'Mash her opponent's cunny until her guts run down her bleedin' legs!'

With a spit and a lunge, the fight begins and bare fists connect with flesh. Beulah strikes first and her punch slams into Hilde's skull, and the Bavarian's head snaps back with a sounding crack.

'Hit the fuckin' bitch again!' the crowd roars as they pitch forward in their fever, shouting for more shots to the head.

Hilde returns the strike and Beulah ducks and weaves. The Irish girl is a marvel of strength, agile and swift, and delivers her blows as if she were a tiger springing upon its prey. Feel the mallet of the fighter's knuckles connect with skin and hear the thump, feel it, feel the sound as if it wallops into your own ribs! The reverberation is sickening, but is there not something perversely satisfying in watching people destroy themselves? Watching women destroy themselves?! As your guide, I ask you this simply because I saw you flinch. If the scruples bother you, why is this display of violence any different from the Games of Patroklus? Of course, you stumble to answer because you like the blood, you like the violence, and in that you must admit that depraved as it may seem there is pleasure and there is excitement in watching two women fight! What is it you say, they are the fairer sex? Surely you jest. Of course, here the sadism is at odds with society, but society is for the tosh, and you are in the boroughs! This is the East End, not Mayfair! You infer quite uncomfortably that women are too delicate to be participating in such sport! Take another look, my friend… I ask you, are those women delicate in any form or fashion? Fragile little flowers both! Yes, there are tits and there are quims, but don't be so fooled, for in the sack they'd snap you in half! Still you protest… ah, sir, you are too enlightened for me, for all I know that here you might enjoy the pursuits of barbarism and no one, but no one is going to judge your pleasures!

The redhead spins and kicks upwards, her boot sinking into Hilde's gut. The blond doubles over and the redhead cracks her challenger a punch to the neck.

'Snatch the trollop bald!' shouts Hyde, his own fists striking at the air in imitation of Beulah's rain of blows. All the same, Hilde recovers, sucking in a breath and lashing out, clutching her opponent by the hair and pulling viciously. Screaming her defiance Hilde lands a balled fist into Beulah's face. There is a spray of blood as the woman's nose breaks and the skin of Hilde's fingers is serrated upon Beulah's teeth. The two fighters grapple in a tangle of battered female flesh, striking the rail and scattering their jeering audience. Hilde's bodice is rent in the tumult, her right breast exposed, a splash of blood from her adversary's broken nose colours the nipple a bright rosy red. As Hyde licks his lips, almost tasting the blood, the women crash around the rail. The wooden beam splits and buckles in protest and he is flung aside, and Paul Allen roars with laughter.

'Beat the shit out of her! Come on, slam the bitch!' Paul shouts at Beulah. 'I've got a wager to win, whore!' The feral cats scratch and hiss and parry and dance, bristling with violence and lusty in the attacks. Another crack to the head, another kick to the guts, and Hilde breaks two fingers with a full-force punch. Wiping a smear of blood from her split mouth she spits at Beulah.

'Is that all you have, Lady Bare Knuckles?'

'Why, no!' shouts Beulah, weaving and dipping and dancing with fancy foot work and agile style. She bobs low to the ground, her fingers curling about a cudgel that someone has tossed into the ring, and Hilde's fate is sealed. With a brutal swing Beulah smashes the staff into the face of her opponent and the impact breaks nose and teeth and jaw. The woman's face becomes a squirting rag of crimson and the crowd goes wild. Under the merciless hammering, Hilde shudders and twitches and drops to the dirt, struck over and over and battered almost into a piece of raw meat. Beulah pummels her antagonist as the foe sprawls on the ground, attacked with repeated kicks, and Hilde's rib bones pop and blood pours from her mouth and foams from her nose. She twitches on the ground, gasping for air, the sharp sliver of a snapped rib poking at her lungs.

'Get up, bitch! Fucking get up!' screams the crowd, but Hilde is finished and Hyde is elated even though he has lost his bet. Triumphant in the space of ten minutes, Beulah screeches out her victory to the adulation of her audience and Edward Hyde is thrilled and yet somehow still empty, for the blood sport has ended all too quickly and his lust is unfulfilled.

From the pits of pugilism Hyde and Paul advance now to the Whores' Alley, to visit some of the Daughters of the Town. In this establishment there is unbridled indulgence, it is a seedy cavern not unlike the Khazneh, but much worse. You might consider it a jocund place for those who seek after filth, thick its atmosphere with puissance and wet in its palpitations. They are ushered through a gilded door by a lovely creature whose face is hidden beneath a canine mask, but her naked body is all sensuous curves, her pubis plucked, and her perfume intoxicating. Our gentlemen are expectant, and the woman is accompanied by a great black dog likewise with a human mask tied to its head, a golden leash looped about its neck. The dog's hind portion is shaved of its pelt. The sight is unsettling, and the woman introduces the animal, Zoltan, as if it were a person. Throbbing from some concealed chamber, stabbing fingers play Liszt's Der Nächtliche Zug in a wild accompanying frenzy to the sounds of a rushing maelstrom of obscenity.

'I am Fidelio,' she tells the two gentlemen. 'Follow me.'

Hyde almost laughs aloud at the incredible joke implied by the appellation, and casting Paul a look that accuses the spendthrift in all his mendacity, in all his adulterous artlessness, Hyde grins and his eyes flash cruel. Yet Paul does not see. Once within, the young woman and the dog escort Hyde and Allen into a cavern of lust. Here excitement is inseparable from hazardous adventures, and here there are no private salons in which to discretely make love, no soft and immaculate beds with satin sheets upon which to lie, but the act is done on the floor, on the benches, against the walls, over the chaise, all the demands of carnal desire and fornication performed openly. Fidelio informs her two new customers that any sensual phantasy can be fulfilled, any obscenity, any pleasure, and more for those who have a generous purse. Hyde's eye is taken by twins, lush raven-haired girls of nineteen, sweet sisters with perfect curves, fresh from Venice. They stand together, as if conjoined, their hands stroking each other. 'Would you like them?' Fidelio asks of Mr. Hyde, but he returns no reply to temptation. 'They are beautiful are they not, Frieda and Maria? Lovely young orphans, so far away from home.' Paul prompts Hyde to touch the pocket, and Hyde produces his billfold.

'How much?' Hyde asks of Fidelio, and her fiscal request is met with surprise. Paul urges with an improvident argumentum ad crumenam, for the sumptuary exchange must be paid by someone… and Hyde with a steely eye withdraws from his billfold a clutch of notes from the Bank of England. Sequestered in a corner find Edward Hyde now playing the voyeur, he who watches the saturnalia as the sex act is celebrated. He espies pretty and licentious women endeavouring to outdo others in their excesses, and his expectations are eager but the plethora of sex is somehow trite. His eye searches but it cannot settle, his trousers open and his member in his hand, flaccid and uninterested. For not only do these women take the male member into their mouths but they also gyrate as another member is thrust into their rears.

There follows a multitude of intoxicating sexual situations, of immoral and blasphemous mania in which Hyde might be forgiven his thinking that this cloying and close apartment seems more like a gymnasium than a brothel. Men press their tongues into the female oyster, and there are women who do like acts with other women. Morality and respectability have no place in this bordello, even the danger of unlawful Hellenistic high culture is indulged, for men perform the same with other men as they would with women. With perverse imagination, they enact a cavalcade of decadent sensualities, for there are men subordinate to other men, naked and on their knees like curs, like Zoltan, and men on their backs like rolled over terrapins, all slaves to deviant and unbridled and unnatural impulses. Hyde witnesses the human form contorted into many positions, as in the Sanskrit writings, performing and enjoying tricks of jugglery, of friction and churning, of pressing and kissing and scratching and sucking and swallowing, of urinating and defecating and other repulsive and unpleasant gratifications. Here plays out a spectacle of unbounded indulgence visited upon the erotic senses. These phantasms of the flesh are libertine and ardent, possessed by the devil of obscenity in their carousing, reckless in their vices, shameless and compelled into the maddest of unrestrained behaviours, indulging in an orgy of the skin, unable to resist the erotic urge. Into their orifices, vaginal, anal, oral, in voluptuous jubilation, they insert the godmiché and there is even glimpsed an elaborate abuse of the masked dog, Zoltan, and all give in to the glory of degeneracy.

Hyde watches the acts that are performed but he does not become erect, even as Paul Allen partakes in fellatio acted upon his member by the two lively grisettes, Frieda and Maria. Hyde gazes with glassy eyes as the women ply Mr. Allen's length, their lips by turns sliding up and down the man's shaft, their tongues wet and warm, and their fingers probing at his entrance. Ah, twins of evil, that's what they are, and their naked flesh fills every corner of the phantasy, twisting in every possible combination of lust, every possible composition in the excitement of penultimate intercourse. There is no chaste part of the body here, no vulva that is not damp, no phallus that is not erect save Hyde's, only a banquet of skin and moans and the stinging perfume of semen and sweat. It is a bacchanal, an unrestrained and extravagant and uninhibited erotomania, but even so it does not fulfill our gentleman's needs. For him this glutinous worship of the carnal spectacle is lacking true passion, and it is unable to quench the unnamable thirst that boils away within Hyde's skin. The performance is extravagant indeed, almost too much too soon, but in this temple for Venus, Hyde has quickly become bored, bored with the monotony of fleshy thrusting, of flagellantic extremes and with the odious caresses of masturbation. In tedious repetition, all the bodies revel about him until they drop in exhaustion.

Thinks Edward Hyde, to himself, that before his eyes these flesh-pots may as well be as mating animals and banal in their couplings and devoid of poetic description. Even when he is ultimately invited to share in the most soporific gratifications of the orgy, Hyde's heart remains separate, and remote and frozen and disappointment is his lot. From the vortex of all the carnality one face is compelled into Hyde's troubled and drug-addled mind, one face that fills his vision, one lovely, beautiful face that spurns his lust and yet revels in the scandal of shameless and utter whoredom– Kitty Jekyll. For she is the succubus that deceives, the devil that inhabits the female body, her skin like satin, her lips like ripe red fruit, her body's hidden places eager for ravishment and delicious and sweetly luscious. She is the love denied, the fever that mocks 'Fidelio', that possesses Hyde's refusal of rejection.

At length, emerging from this prurient palace of iniquity, Paul Allen, with Edward Hyde in tow, recess for a short moment at a filthy little tavern in the boroughs. A dwarf serves them both eel pie and mash, and Paul is a ravenous glutton, spitting the fish bones into the sawdust on the floor and washing the mash down with harsh whiskey. Paul gives the tip of a penny to a hunchback who serves the drink, and Hyde mocks his companion's peculiar generosity, for after all it is his money. They drink and drink and continue their revel, but Paul is ignorant to the disillusion and the violence growing within Mr. Hyde yet again, an uncontrollable lust to hurt someone. Paul Allen's face is so handsome, perhaps that face should not be so… Mr. Hyde is holding up his ornate and brass-tipped walking cane, holding it up before his own face, and he is not listening to Paul, but he is looking at him. Hyde has closed down the sound of his companion's inane remarks about the great time they are having on the town. Hyde grips his cane with stiffening fingers, his knuckles whitening, for so far nothing has quenched his lust for life, not female brutality, not sex in all its masquerades, not alcohol. Paul is failing in his contract. Hyde can only hear the blood pulsing through his veins, the roar of fire as it burns up his insides. Paul is slipping into inebriation and from his blurry point of view the cane seems to bisect Hyde's face, and in the division, might be glimpsed another face on the right, and then on the left, and then on the right again. It is a mirage, surely, for that face is strangely familiar. Nonetheless its vision, though fleeting and struggling to assert itself, flicking into prescience only to vanish again like a staccato shadow whirling in a magic lantern show, seems recognisable.

'Be gone, Jekyll! I am not done this evening!' Paul, in his drunk state sees Hyde's lips form the words, but he can't hear them, for the blood sounds like a whirlpool in his head and the world is spinning and tenuous in its converging dimensions. Over there, at a table pushed up against the far wall Paul can just make out the wavering forms of four drunks. The sots are full of Old Tom Gin, their choice of poison evidence of their common lower rung on life's fragile ladder. As his cane swings, back and forth Hyde watches too, gritting his teeth and gripping his stick and breathing deeply, his lungs blasting a furnace of hatred. One drunken fool has passed out over the bench, face up and with mouth agape. If Hyde cannot hurt Paul Allen, then someone else must play the scapegoat.

The men are all singing a silly song, and a fragment of the lyrics find their way into Mr. Hyde's ear.

'One more drink and then you'll be in for a big surprise

When I've drunk up a gallon

I get like a stallion

And blast your eyes!'

Jumping up abruptly Mr. Hyde strides to the table and picks up the jug of spirit.

'One more drink before it is from thirst I die

And now my friend you may drink your fill

And blast your fuckin' eyes!'

With an odious grimace Hyde pours the whole of the Old Tom Gin into the prostrate drunk's mouth. The sot comes awake, choking and gagging, and he splutters and retches and everyone laughs as he slips onto the floor and vomits. Hyde throws down the jug and it smashes, shards among the eel bones and straw, and he tosses the other men a handful of coin and they howl their appreciation. There is a powerful urge raging within Hyde to strike the man lying prone at his feet. The violence sparks along his nerve-ends, readying to lash out, but Paul is suddenly at his arm, dragging him away, reeling and staggering and propelling him into the street.

Soon the night finds them wandering again to yet another location. Their steps take them to a narrow street in Bluegate Fields, into an isolated and alien sub-culture, an immigrant community of squalid and dilapidated dwellings inhabited by shadowy and unscrupulous villains… The walls are hung with laundry, clothes of silk hanging incongruously among scrolls of paper wrought from mulberry bark, all overwritten in some unknowable calligraphic script. There are golden dragons and jade statues, and the atmosphere is wreathed in plumes of blue vapour. The Chinese, Chi Ki, is lighting a taper to warm the iron disc fastened to a bamboo pipe. Watch the opium preparation as it fizzes under the flame, and see as he mixes until it becomes thick and sticky. Who are his clientele? Why, they are every man, rich and poor alike, artist and poet and writer, politician and celebrity, butcher and pimp, and they might even be you! Do you see that man there, that man with the anchor tattoo on his forearm? He is an old sailor, hailed from the distant Black Sea port of Balchik, and he claims that he once sailed upon a ghost ship and that he knew the Mystery of the Marie Celeste. If you pay him credence he will tell you a wild tale, about a cargo full of coffins and a creature ensconced in the ship's hold that drained the life's blood from the passengers and crew. His eyes seem crazy but he swears that his tale is true, that he alone escaped on the lifeboat! Surviving the ghost ship in his coracle, his wavering compass has steered him to this ghastly port, and he is paying for his addictions with the last of his pennies, scooping them out of his thread-darned pocket with trembling, anticipatory fingers. Look at them all, these people, they are lost souls cast upon a sea of regret, awaiting one tiny slice of heaven, if paradise can ever be theirs! They are not unlike the detritus of the world, the brutish and uncivilised, the lost and the neglected, and they are the lowest of the low who drown in the filth of London's squalor. Chi Ki, the cunning Oriental, brings them succour, gives over the opium pipe and soon the depraved appetite is indulged and the smoker prone upon a litter and drifted into palsy. There is no room in the dulled mind now for talk of vampires and ghostly galleons.

Among these wasted human slaves to papaver somniferum, and likewise sprawled seemingly lifeless upon a ragged bunk, with limbs all twisted, his eyes almost sightless, and his mouth gaping wide, we find Mr. Allen. He his lost in the land of euphoria, and his breaths are slow and shallow, and he is dreaming in a drug-induced calm after his night of debauchery. Yet his companion, Mr. Hyde is still observant, sucking on his bamboo pipe, drawing in the burning opium. Although his face and his mood appear now passive there is still a darkly concealed violence thick in his blood. He cannot but think of Kitty, Paul Allen's mistress, and he imagines her timorous and degraded into submission at his hand, and he smiles a vague but twisted smile.

He is looking at an incongruous print nailed to the wall above the bunk in which he lies. It is an etching of Eros and Psyche, incongruous because this is a Chinese smoking den and its relevance here might be only for the element of flying fantasy. The lovers are winging through the ephemeral clouds to someplace above Olympus that is beyond carnality, some mawkish, foolish and fairy tale paradise. They are the passive dream after coition, tender and loving, and besotted, bound by oaths of devotion, but those declarations are not the whispers in Hyde's head. All he can hear is a demand, a command that goads his violent lust to desecrate Kitty. He could climb up into the top cot with Paul if he wished, and place his lips upon Paul's lips and taste what Kitty Jekyll so often tastes. In that kiss, for one moment, he might sip the essence of Eros and the philosophy of comradeship as he strangles the cad. Such love and death could make a mockery of Kitty's adultery, and such thoughts consume Hyde's opium-addled brain, filling it with eternally revolving desires of irreconcilable contradiction. Hyde has spent his night in desperate longing, but not discovering the new experiences he has been promised he finds his urges even stronger and more difficult to control. As he gazes at Eros, knowing a profound sense of detachment from the real world, he imagines that he flies with the Grecian lovers, pirouetting in an airy dance, clear of the bonds of earth, in levitation, in legerdemain, in illusion, until he is carried beyond the moonlight, beyond the stars, beyond the flesh, beyond the crude and the uncivilised and delivered to the dark and cold and waiting bower of a mouldering tomb.

The moon and the last stars begin to fade in the purple sky dome, and they seem to glimmer so pale and so close to the earth that a sweep of the hand might gather them into the palm. They beam where the great oaks splendid reign, upon a garden of sculpted bouquets, and they light Hyde's path as he enters the crypt. Within the quiet sepulchre he moves slowly, sliding his feet through the dust of unremembered time. Before the raised dais and the stone tumuli he pauses, and remarkably such detail is revealed in the diminishing light of the moon. Along the chiselled granite, caressing the inscription, he traces a fingertip, discovering the outline of each embossed letter, along the stonemason's calligraphy that hath forever here named the sleeper- Henrietta Jekyll. His fervid and trembling lips mouth the syllables of her name, but his mind stumbles to remember. There are gaps in his memory, fissures in his splintered mind as wide as mountains are high and as unknowable as seas are deep. Mr. Hyde shakes his head, for something admonishes him and reproves his foolishness, for here is a name that must be important, and he should know- but he does not.

'Boy, at last you come!' Startled by the abrupt voice echoing in the burial chamber Hyde spins about in the dark. She stands in the shadows, and she is tall and slim, all bound from head to toe in funeral black. She is beautiful. A brilliant emerald pulses green fire amid the delicate black lace at her throat. Mr. Hyde's eyes open wide, wider, but he cannot speak. He thinks he is seeing a ghost.

'Too long have I waited,' the woman reprimands. 'I told you to bring me the box. Where have you been for so long? Learning foolishness at university no less!' No words of apology slip from Edward's lips. The figure of the woman does not shimmer or waver, her black frame is neatly drawn, but nonetheless she is unreal, like a weird phantasm or hallucination. She stands there motionless and impassive, her ire rankling over her skin. Abruptly she raises her right hand and she is pointing at him, scolding as if he were a child.

'Did you bring the box?'

Hyde lifts his arms but his hands are only filled with empty air.

'Oh, how you disappoint,' she says coldly, and her white face is melancholy amid her pillar of black and tenebrous crêpe. 'How you always disappoint! Can I not trust you to the simplest of tasks? Then it is left for me again,' she sighs, and her sighs intone a gloomy finality. She waves Edward aside as she points in the dark to the granite covering of the crypt, and it slides soundlessly back, pulling streamers of spiders' silk into sticky strands and revealing a Red Cedar coffin nestled under the stone. Insistently she holds her finger pointing, as if it is an emphatic exclamation mark at the end of a sentence, and Hyde is wordlessly compelled to look into the tomb and to reach in and to prise back the coffin lid. The coffin is empty but for a jet and gold crucifix on a filigree chain and a polished timber box with brass clasps and hinges. The objects shine in the pale moonlight with an aureate lustre. Hyde removes both box and crucifix, and turning slowly he offers them to the woman.

'Jesus Christ, the most immaculate of all lambs, opposes your schemes,' she says, 'and you should fear him.'

'There is nothing to fear from imaginary deities, and yet part of me is afraid of you,' replies Hyde in confusion. She loops the cross about his throat and Hyde shudders as she does so, but he does not stay her hand. 'Yet I know not in what schemes I engage that so disturbs your reckoning.'

'You seek to find the dominant man inside of your own skin, to exploit his vile and patriarchal power,' she declares, 'but your search is just an excuse for your lustful vengeance upon womanhood, upon me!'

'My vengeance upon women?' Hyde hears the bitterness and malice in her words. 'What need of I for vengeance upon a creature that is inferior and should be subordinate?' he declares, but the woman in black silences his words with a wave of her hand.

'Enough!' declares she with a twisted smile, and that smile is the first animation in her revenant visage. 'Oxford taught you lies!' The phantom's gaze is faraway but her fingers hover over the contents of the box. 'Look,' she whispers musically, her voice strangely altered, reverberating in the morbid space of the crypt. Edward listens to the cadence of her voice and thinks perhaps that it sounds like a strange songbird that has drunk from a crystal chalice only to warble chilly notes. She opens the box of rare wood with brass corners and clasps, folds back the lid. Within its lush green velvet lining its contents are revealed, a stage actor's make-up paraphernalia, paints and brushes and gum and hair.

'This belonged to a man we once buried,' she mutters almost distractedly. 'An actor, a Mr. Edward Kendal Sheridan Lionheart. What a pompous name! Mr. Lionheart liked to think he was a great Shakespearian actor, but really, he amounted to little more than a peculiarly eccentric fellow. He had apparently played Gloucester and Othello and Hamlet and numerous melodramatic villains on the stage, but never the hero, never the romantic lead. Performances that never gave him any critical acclaim. In fact, the critics loathed him. By all accounts he was mediocre in his craft, to say the least, and had reduced himself to performances on the Continent, in the tasteless Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol. His last role, I believe, was in the short-run Theatre of Blood, after which he returned to London, embittered and all but forgotten. He committed suicide by drowning himself in the Thames, and thus he came to Bullstrode and Holroyd.'

The ghost pauses in her far away reminisce and smiles, as if Lionheart's tragedy is half-amusing.

'Do you know that I even had to pay the mummers at his funeral to collect their own tears, for there were so few people who came that could remember but one of his performances without difficulty? No one could recall his supposed host of characters, no one remembered how well he allegedly trod the boards. There he was, in his last performance, in his casket with his dark hair and finely cut features, you know, and I tell no lie, his beard was not real! This was his box of magic tricks.'

She rummages amid the contents. Her finger dances among cork-stoppered vials of powders and pastes and paints and emollients. There are long, narrow brushes too, and a sea sponge, a bottle of spirit gum, a small scissors, a tweezers, a tiny knife, a bodkin, a sewing kit and thread, and most peculiar of all, a moustache and a beard. Hyde can only conjecture if it is human hair or horse hair, but the things waft with a potent, musty odour that makes him feel vaguely sick.

'Perhaps we should have buried his kit with him, no?' sings the revenant and she almost laughs. 'You know, Mr. Lionheart's tomb is in Kensal Green Cemetery, and upon it is depicted the sculpted figure of a seated man, one hand placed on the head a beautiful damsel kneeling in adoration, while the other hand holds an open volume of Shakespeare. How ridiculous!'

She lifts the hair from the box and sniffs it and smiles, and then she places it aside. 'Come here,' she commands, 'come close.' She opens one of the vials and picks up a brush and dips its tapered end into a viscous fluid. Stirring the gum until it thins somewhat, even as he flinches, with a quick stroke she has painted a narrow line along Hyde's naked jaw. The olibanum resin reeks strangely of frankincense and rockrose, and then she picks up the curling wad of beard and puts the pelt up to his face. There she presses it upon Hyde's perfumed skin with the tips of her slender fingers. When the gum has dried and the beard hangs upon Hyde's chin, she remarks: 'Much better! Now you are handsome, much more handsome than the undistinguished Mr. Lionheart, and with a proper beard!'

With a drawn-out sigh, she runs her fingertips through the bristles. 'A man should have a beard. A man without a beard, with a cheek as smooth as a peach is a man who seeks for love under another man's coat-tails!'

Hyde is like one locked up in a dream, unable to repulse the ghost, reviled by her fetish.

'Ah, my darling,' says she, her eyes fluttering, her body shuddering in a spasm of ecstasy, but it is as if she speaks to someone other. 'So handsome, so beautiful.' She stoops like a swan, white of limb but black of plumage. There is a blue artery distended and throbbing in her slender length of throat. Its pulse fire burns electric through her veins. The ghost takes Edward's face in the cups of her palms and she draws her face up to his and they kiss. Hotly her tongue searches his mouth, wet and greedy, and as she kisses deeply she begins to unclip her bodice. A light breeze dances in the darkness of the tomb, and the night, like black velvet, ripples with blinking stars. Far up in the vault empyrean the pale moon descends beyond the great oaks and thin veils of cloud drift black on indigo blue. Something within the spirit's ethereal flesh awakens, something that has been for so long sleeping dormant in the Underworld, something that yearns for the warmth of a lost love's touch. The ghost unpins the flaming emerald at her throat and casts it down, and then she undoes the silken laces of her corset, and the pins of her black skirt. When all the clips are opened she slips the shroud down her torso and over her hips, and it pools at her feet. Her naked breasts stand high, their centres the closed buds of roses tinged erubescent against her creamy skin. That skin seems to glow in the dark, her form etched in a silver halo cast in the light of the moon. Her hair falls, combed out by her long white fingers, a tide of suffocating black silken threads upon her bare shoulders. The spirit reaches out and caresses Hyde's face, marvelling at the thickness of his new beard, and she leans closer and Edward is aflame with a new and unquenchable passion that cannot be denied. With a slight movement of her hand and a nod of her sculpted face she beckons that Edward should kneel.

Breathless and repulsed and yet unable to resist the ghostly beauty, Hyde looks with thirst upon those breasts and those hips, upon the tangle of fine down at her thighs, at the black radiance that spills from her core. Placing her hands upon his shoulders she commands him bend in the dark shadows of the tomb, and their shapes became as one, melded at her hips, and she clasps his head tight. His tongue is a burning brand that sears between her thighs and she gasps, her hair flying in a storm of midnight whorls, but she knows no pleasure.

'You want me pure and innocent, my love, but alas I am not!' she cries aloud, throwing back her head. 'It is true, it is true, I still feel the irresistible impulse of my flesh but the passion is false. I was told that I was shameful when my touch strayed there, and that I suffered a sickness.'

Edward's kiss slips between her thighs.

'My punishment was cruel, for in my failing female graces, little more than a child was I, they called the physician and he cut the core of lust from my flesh!'

There is the pinching of the bud and the slice of the scalpel, the scream of pain and the ribbons of blood. The phantom screams and screams and screams again. With this confession everything is obliterated, and the old flesh, the redundant vellum of death is cast off like a mantle of grey dust, and the apparition groans and cries out one word in abject misery, one name, over and over and over…

'Markheim!'

Chapter 12

To Procure Dreams

'Mind and matter…glide swift into the vortex of immensity.'

Charles Dickens

It is still dark when Hyde, overcome by some unnamable intensity, finds himself no longer with Paul Allen, his iniquitous guide. Mr. Allen's physicality has dissipated, drifted away to join Eros and Psyche, blown upon the winds into the maelstrom beyond the confines of the crypt. He knows not where nor the moment when they have parted, but we now find Mr. Hyde walking alone along a shadowy and cobbled path. Look! His mind is set in a fever and his body is trembling violently. Perhaps Mr. Hyde is now lost and has lost his mind. He most certainly has experienced a long night of perpetual raptures and ecstasies, too much perhaps for the flesh to bear. Try not to be disturbed by his vexed expressions and his agitated mien, but we must keep observing nonetheless for our tour of the night is not yet done. Soon the sun will rise and the rose-gold morning is not far away. We shall follow him however, for are you not curious as to what perversity may engage him now?

It is not too long before sunrise and Edward Hyde is still not fulfilled, he seeks in London's abyss for that rare and extraordinary instance of singular exultation. He knows not what it is that possesses his mind so tenaciously, what terrible thing it is that grips his soul, nor how to make his desires manifest, but he knows that he must follow its call. Into an enclosed court he stumbles, his feet dragging, and above his head, in the hazy sky dome Hyde beholds the descent of the waxy, yellow moon. Above the narrow street he looks to the moon and smiles, and Hecate smiles back, even as she fades. He stops and looks down at his feet, and then he folds up, buckles, tosses down his brass-tipped walking cane and throws aside his hat, and he sits heavily in the deserted court, his back against a red brick wall, and the darkness rings with the most diabolic peals of Kitty Jekyll's taunting laughter.

Mayati picks up the dagger of obsidian. In the ebony glass, her eye catches the elongated reflection of her elongated beauty. She smiles with speculative deliberation, her finger sliding along the sharply chipped edge of the knife. Three thousand years ago this knife might have been held in the hand of an embalmer in Abydos, might have cut the flesh of the Pharaonic corpse and dissevered a curling juggle of entrails. What if this blade could now cut out all the woes in her life, cut out the heart that beat inside Edward Hyde's cold, cold skin, could Mayati then be happy? Perhaps not… Her eyes are lined with kohl and her lips stained red, and they tremble, quivering poised upon the thought. With the blade, she cuts the knotted twine from a brown paper parcel. When the paper is peeled away there is revealed a dead rat, plump and large and white, and freshly trapped and killed. Mayati begins humming a forgotten tune as she picks the dead rodent up by the tail, keening a song in an ancient tongue.

'Wailing saves no man from the pit,

Lo, none who departs comes back again.'

Dangling heavily, a fat and sallow lump of flesh and fur, the rat swings like a pendulum above the snake cage. She pulls the corded rope and the serpent is revealed, its curves and coils intervolving, throbbing, pulsing. The snake's eyes are gleaming ruby red, as if they are on fire with expectation, its split tongue flicking madly, tasting the rat's waft in the air. The exotic jiggles the rodent above the snake and it strikes up with mouth agape, embedding its fangs into the dead flesh and engulfing the offering. Mayati smiles as she watches her protector eat with slow indolence, and swallow the rat. As it gulps there comes a rapping upon her door. Without pulling the drapes to the cage closed, Mayati crosses to the door. There she is presented with a card and the card announces Mr. Edward Hyde. Part of her heart skips with fevered joy and yet another part of it churns with fear. She is unable to explain, even to herself, this irrational attraction she harbours for the man, for she senses something deeply disturbed festering under his skin, but nonetheless she seems compelled to his flesh. A searing flame ignites through her fingertips the moment she touches the card inscribed with his name, and a flash of heat colours her cheeks. She wonders what could possibly bring him back to her, what fever it is that has stirred within his blood. Has he come to taunt her? She looks up and the man himself is standing in the door frame. Without further introduction, he strides over her threshold and steps into her realm.

'Mr. Hyde,' Mayati says coolly, 'what brings you here?'

'I was bored,' replies he sarcastically, putting his cane down on the table next to the black glass blade and the cut twine and the plain paper. Although she is incensed by his disregard, Mayati ignores his remark, and she pushes it down into her depths and closes the door.

'You will be even more bored in this room,' she quips. 'Have you not already sampled its delights and found them wanting?'

'Perhaps,' says he, and there is a nasty humour in his voice. 'Perhaps not.'

'You are cruel in your torment and haughty in your aggrandisement. Do you think I am interested in the least that you draw attention to your power over me? What do you want?' asks the dancer, and she rubs the cheek he has so brutally struck, remembering his violence, his obsessive and malicious rage, and she is quietly panicked in her vulnerability. Yet Hyde is the devil himself, the force that beguiles her reason.

'Mr. Allen is downstairs in the main salon. He is having trouble sorting his gambling debts. You see, his debts and my money don't mix. I am cutting the man loose.'

'I am unconcerned for your ridiculous partnerships,' says she, walking back to her pet in the gilded cage and casting her dark eyes upon the disappearing rat. Engorged, the snake's throat undulates as it swallows, forcing the fat meal into its gullet. Mr. Hyde sneers as he hears bones snapping like twigs.

'Hell has extended an invitation to me and how am I to refuse?' says he, casting his own eye upon the feasting serpent.

'You are a heartless fiend,' says Mayati. 'It is better that I forget you.'

'How can you forget me?!' Hyde breaks into peals of vicious laughter. Turning from her tormentor, Mayati reaches her hand through the bars and strokes the feeding snake.

'Your game will end and find us both in tears,' says she, her prophecy final, pulling the corded rope and closing the velvet drapes of the cage. The snake seethes and the rat is nothing but a tail protruding from its jaws. Mr. Hyde seats himself in a sofa and crosses his legs.

'You know you should have been downstairs just now. Mr. Allen could not have treated you like a common whore tonight.'

'I care less,' the dancer says dismissively, but she is nervously watching Hyde's every move.

'Nonetheless, it was amusing watching him bested. He was sitting there, thinking he was king, thinking that my money would see him honoured. Yet the king is but a fool at a table covered with green baize and a suite of spades. Colonel Matthews played keeper of the abacus, and Hereton looked after the betting chips and played banker. Mr. Allen made so many bets over the limit of his funds that it was justice served on a cold plate when he threw his cards on the table in a fury. Defeat is an ugly feeling. He was playing against Hereton and Colonel Matthews, those two old pros. Bad choice.'

'Indeed, your friend is a boorish idiot, but I have no desire to hear his tale of woe.' Hyde lights a cigarette, and blowing an acrid trail of smoke he continues his summary of Paul's folly, ignoring Mayati as if she has not spoken.

'What a night!' declares Colonel Matthews and he says this as Paul is scratching on a scrap of paper, with a quivering hand no less, another one of his useless promissory notes. He is thinking that I will foot his extravagances again, but to be honest, Paul's bargain to entertain and to amuse me has stalled somewhat. As Hereton points out, and rightly so, Paul had already written several useless bits of paper and now he wants to give them more. Oh, how I almost laughed aloud! Mr. Allen is so defensive, I watch as his face collapses, knowing full-well that he can never deliver on his promises. 'Have you ever known me to welsh on a debt of honour?' he protests, and again, I say, I nearly burst into laughter!'

'Your story is dull,' says Mayati. 'I have no liking for Mr. Allen, you already know this, and his unfortunate plight is of his own accord. Why should I pretend sympathy?'

'Colonel Matthews regales Paul, telling him that it is a bit thick, the same thing night after night. Mr. Allen is so humiliated that he picks up his unserviceable notes and tosses them into the air. He protests that Hereton and the Colonel are trying to insult him. Hereton tells it like it really is- tells Allen to stop being an ass and that this time they will take his notes but they may not take them in the future. I suspect that they take anybody's notes really, but they will be taking no more of mine, not the green kind, that's for sure! Later, when the table has folded, I meet with the good Mr. Allen, and he cannot wait to pour out the circumstances of his ill luck into my less than empathetic ear. Mr. Allen fails to note my contempt.

'My dear fellow, what else is there?' he implores of me. I must confess, Mayati my lovely, that at this point I was quite vexed. I felt my palms itching so, and I wanted to strike the man right between the eyes. Of course, I did not. I ask of Paul- 'Is London so limited in its entertainment?' and Paul is dumbfounded and his eyes search mine for empathy. I tell him that if he wishes more of my patronage then he will have to think of something else, something livelier and more exciting. 'I have', he manages disparagingly, 'and we've done it.' There and then did I want to give him leave before I did strike him in his audacity, but I contain my anger and I set my eye upon him. Paul insolently stretches out on a chaise as if he is exhausted! The temerity!

'Incidentally,' he adds, foolish in thinking that I will be understanding and forgiving. 'I've done the five, too.' Can you believe that, my dear, the spendthrift has frittered away five thousand pounds in virtually one night! He pulls out his promissory notes and he waves them in the air, proof that I need rescue him. 'So soon?' I say pointedly, reminding him sharply of the one talent that he truly possesses, to waste money faster than any other man in London. You should have seen his face go rosy with embarrassment. He was crestfallen! He starts to beg, the dirty weasel, debasing himself, throwing dignity out of the window. 'Do you think that perhaps…?' Right there, in mid-sentence, I shoot him down. 'Continually,' I reply, 'that you are a fool.' I take Mr. Allen's notes and I stuff them in my vest pocket, for a rainy day. You never know what joys they can yield. 'Try me instead, my friend' I tell him, and just watch the shame evaporate and his smile beam victorious. How he does misinterpret my ire! 'What a good chap you are, Edward,' he gushes, but his face turns to stone when I tell him that I will try Kitty.'

'The ice queen, his mistress?'

'Oh, Mayati, do I detect a note of jealousy in your tone?'

'You detect nothing but boredom. Have done with your story before I faint away from ennui.'

'So many fools in love,' says Hyde, smirking and relishing his power. 'Paul leaps to his feet and his face becomes a thunder cloud. 'What the devil do you mean?' he splutters indignantly. In reply, I suggest to him that the answer to that should be simple enough for even him to understand. 'I'm telling you to obtain your mistress, for me!' I reply flatly, and he shudders with impotent rage, the cards all useless now and ill played, all the aces in my hand. He calls me an unspeakable devil and I laugh at his Christian hypocrisy.'

'A devil you might well be,' Mayati whispers under her breath. 'Even the devil fell from heaven.'

'How amusing,' says Hyde, 'but this is not a theology lesson. You see, Paul Allen, breaker of every law in the moral code is shocked into morality! Unbelievable! Indignantly he grits his teeth and clenches his fists. He calls me a vile and disgusting degenerate. Such kind words after all I have done for him! I tell him to be rational, for really, all that I am asking for is the temporary loan of a proven adulteress… one of whom even Paul himself has grown somewhat tired. He blanches and shakes in his temper, and then he towers over me, threatening me impotently. At this point I laugh in his face. 'You go back to fucking Hell!' he chokes before he storms away, before his fake courage and his ridiculous shock both make him belittled and stupid. I vow to punish Paul for his insurrection.

'Later, driven by my impulsive need to castigate, and who would know better than you, my love, the cruelties of passion, I ponder how I will destroy his vanity and his pride.'

Mayati suppresses a shudder, but she says nothing.

'As the night drifts with shadows I go to the house of my good friend Doctor Henry Jekyll, and I use the key he has left me to enter through the back door. The residence hulks in silence as I glide into the parlour, its cold demarcations lit by three glowing candles flickering in a silver candelabra. A grandfather clock of polished brass and glass and inlaid timbers softly ticks out the minutes just after ten. Stealthily I creep into the sitting room, and I quietly place my walking cane on the table near the candelabra. For a moment, I pause and I listen, and then abruptly I sprint upstairs.

'I arrive in the doorway to Kitty Jekyll's bedroom, and she is seated at a desk and she is writing a letter by lamplight. The pinkness of her skin is warmed in the rosy firelight from the hearth. She pauses in her construction, as if uncertain that the words she writes are the right words to choose. I can only speculate upon her thoughts. Is she thinking perhaps to abscond with her lover, to leave the empty corridors of her empty and loveless marriage? Silently I stand in the open doorway and still she does not hear me.

'Abruptly she senses that someone else is in the room with her. 'Is that you, Nanny?' Kitty tilts her head about and with a startled cry she drops her pen. She leaps from her chair. 'Mr. Hyde!' she exclaims, and I see her lips quiver in fright and her lovely body trembles. She is dressed in a vivid purple skirt, a wrap of regal porhyry and stainless lace, threaded through with violaceous ribbons and embroidered white asters. 'I hardly expected to see you again!' she declares, gathering her glacial beauty into a defiant and unmoving pillar of sculpted ice. 'Do you make a practice of breaking into other people's houses?' Coolly I remind her that her husband, unlike she, trusts me with all that he owns.

'I walk forward, into the heart of the room, but Mrs. Jekyll refuses to be intimidated, which strikes a nasty nerve under my skin. I let her see that I possess the key to her door, and I toss the key irreverently between my palms, deliberately from one hand to the other. 'Front door… back door… bedroom door…' Her eyes widen in surprise and disgust. 'Henry? You've seen him?' I tell her that I have indeed. Curious, not knowing if I lie, she turns and picks up the letter that she has been composing. 'I will not ask you under what circumstances,' she says with a measured forte, as she folds the letter up and slips it into an envelope. 'I'd be delighted to give you a full account of all of Henry's doings…' I say with utmost sincerity. 'Since he deserted you…' I add coldly, and I see anger burning in her eyes.

'I prefer not to know,' she replies, keeping her tone civil but lacing it with poison. 'Should you see him again,' and Kitty seals up her correspondence with a false kiss, 'perhaps you'd have the goodness to give him this.' For a moment, we stand eye to eye. 'With pleasure,' I tell her, taking the letter and tucking it into my pocket.

'Why should I care about Kitty?' asks Mayati with a shrug, combing her fingers through her raven locks and stifling a yawn. 'I do not even know her. She seems like an ungrateful bore.'

'Perhaps I do not know her either…' I reflect, though I feel my curiosity sharpening with an edge to violence. 'Yet still something tells me that I must.'

'All you really want is revenge,' Mayati whispers, and there is a piteous melancholy in her voice.

'You know me so well, Mayati? I think not! Perhaps we only think that we know people.'

'Finish your story, it is late and I wish to retire.'

'Of course, Kitty folds her arms defensively and intimates that our interview is done. 'Now suppose I see Mr. Allen,' I ask slyly, 'is there another note for him?' Kitty breaks our tense tableaux and moves suddenly to her bedroom door. 'I prefer to give Mr. Allen my own messages, personally.'

'I walk to the door and stand but inches from her face. She is so beautiful and so courageous in the light of her filthy infidelity. 'Goodnight, Mr. Hyde,' she says with finality, and she stands aside, although all this inspires is my further contempt. She watches as I fish about slowly, deliberately, in my waistcoat pocket. 'I have Paul in here,' I say superciliously. 'In my pocket.' A look of confusion screws up her lovely face. 'What do you mean?' she asks, to which I return, 'Allow me to present your lover.' I produce Paul's promissory notes.

'A handful of bad debts,' I declare, and a thrill electric washes through me in my triumph. It would be thrilling to throw Kitty down upon her bed and split her thighs, the compulsion is a great wave that slams against me. She tries to snatch the wad of paper from my grasp and to scan them. I glare at her with incredulity. 'Perhaps you would care to buy them back?' A look of horror passes over her face. 'Come, Mrs. Jekyll, why not sell what you have so often given away?' Her look of horror turns into one of hardened spite, and she laughs.

'Her laughter rankles me, for she is calling my bluff, turning the tables, pushing her white queen into the black square. 'I might agree to your preposterous suggestion, Mr. Hyde,' says she with measured calm, 'were it not for the fact that you utterly repel me!' Even as her words sting I crush Paul's notes up into the ball of my fist, for it is all that I can do to restrain myself from striking her, from breaking her face into a thousand icy fragments. Ripping the notes into pieces I throw them in her face. She hardly even flinches. All Kitty does is to smile in victorious elation at my defeat. She mocks me and laughs at me as I leave, and she slams the door upon my exit and I hear the latch click into place. I swear to you, Mayati, that no fucking door shall ever bar my way to desire! I hear the lovely ice queen slump against the door, knowing that she trembles even in her victory, and I storm in a vile rage through the parlour, taking up my walking cane and slamming the front door till it rattles on its hinges. In my fury, I step into the street, and I smash my cane against the stair rail, its clatters sounding like thunder in the street, banging against the iron, but it does not split in twain.

'Overwhelmed by my emotions I want to damage someone. Through my skin runs an electric charge, a fiery tingling and I know a pain in my chest. Inside my ribs my heart is pounding, thudding like a hammer, and I struggle to breathe. Looking up to Kitty Jekyll's bedroom window I see her silhouette filling the silver frame. Moonlight filters in between the curtains and it washes over her form. The light glances pale off the sculpted marble skin of her cheek, makes her lips a deep and dark and quivering red bow. From the house, from the hall, the clock chimes the half-hour and the reverberating echoes whisper furtively in the darkness. I feel my face contort into a mask of hated and fury, and for a moment I imagine that there is another shape behind her in the glass, a shape trapped within the reflections of moonlight, the vision of something warped and twisted. It bears the shape of a man, someone whose face I half-glimpse and half-know, but it is only a reflection of a reflection, of a reflection that is glimpsed on the other side, obscure and a phantasy.

'Alas, for him, it is then that I encounter the scapegoat, an itinerant in the street, a bedraggled beggar who implores me with open hands, pleads that I give him a quarter. He calls me 'Governor' and I sneer. 'Just a quarter for gin,' he solicits, and my nostrils are assailed by the stinging, pungent stench of filth emanating from his rancid, stinking body. He grasps me by the lapels, puts his grubby hands upon my silks, and the rage trips in my head like a fireman's alarm, and as Kitty watches from her lofty heights I strike the hobo down and stomp my boot heel into his face. From the house I hear Kitty scream, and that shrill cry excited me, and I put out the beggar's eye.'

With a suppressed shudder Mayati turns away. The story that Hyde tells is repulsive, but there is a sick thrill tingling in her skin. She dares not say a word. With a grunt Hyde finds his fingers fumbling in his coat pocket, and therein he touches a little phial. Pulling it from the dark folds of his clothes our gentleman looks at it nestled in his palm. Dulled light sparks from the glass and the fluid is turbulent with cosmic dust and bursting stars. Some vague and abstract notion as to how it has come to be in his pocket stirs his mind. His thoughts though are like cobwebs spun over an occluded pane of crystal, and his scattered head provides no answers. He has a vague idea that it has been distilled from garden fungi, but he cannot understand how he could even imagine such a thing. As Hyde shakes the fluid in the bottle it stirs and swirls; is it an elixir perhaps, a medicinal to rejuvenate his tired senses? Without thought or hesitation Hyde swallows the fluid, seven drams, in one gulp, and he flings the tiny bottle into the carpet. It bounces and chinks against the wall, and Mayati flinches.

'So, you wish to shock me,' says Mayati. 'I am hardly surprised at your violence. I remember your caress all too well.' She lightly touches her cheek with a strange masochistic pleasure. 'Simply to tell me this confession is not the reason you have come. From you I do not expect connubial happiness, so what is it that you want, Edward?'

'I want something new, something different,' he insists as he swallows the fluid and wipes his lips. 'What have you to offer to keep me interested? What other unexplored tricks do you have up your skirts?'

There is brief pause and Mayati's eyes come to rest upon the ancient, marble phallus. Mayati claps her hands together and her two Nubian slaves enter.

'Take Mr. Hyde into the bedchamber,' she instructs, and then she turns away and vanishes from view.

The Nubians grip his arms, and Edward Hyde abruptly feels the floor going soft under the soles of his boots. The walls tilt and his perspective alters. He can sense a rapid change to his heartbeat and there is a tingling in his hands and feet. He does not struggle against his captors. The two dark men lift him from the floor and he throws back his head and seems to float, his pupils are dilated and it feels as if his skin is on fire. All the colours in the room are somehow more vivid, brighter, and he beholds blowzy reds and watchet, splashes of varicoloured lividness all stirred and swirled with croceate and aureolin and beryl and bleach. The bust of the long dead Pharaoh leers at him with swollen lips, and it winks with eyes of lapis-lazuli and Hyde imagines that his mind is about to erupt from its parameters, dragged across the limits of space and time. The Nubians tear his shirt from his back and throw him into the bed and then they let go of his arms, and Hyde is falling into its tide of sheets, and the sheets ripple like gentle waves in a lake. Sinking down, sinking into their satin deeps, into an opaque and lymphatic atmosphere, drowning as he drops heavily to the bottom, Hyde gasps. He struggles to breathe amid the tendril reeds, to gasp for air, and possessed of a wild desperation he is soon kicking upward. In a moment Hyde breaches the surface, gasping and sucking in oxygen, and he can hear Mayati calling to him though he knows not from where she sings. He swims among leaping fish that are iridescent and swift, swims to the bank of a river, rising amid the reeds all bedecked in crystal tears. The wading ibis with its long, hooked bill sifts through the mud, and restless in the shallows of the primeval marshes, a crocodile watches with an unblinking darkling eye. Its scaly tail undulates and its sharpened tooth and claw gleam yellow. Swishing that tail it churns up the muddy silt into a dense and milky cloud. When the water is wiped from his eyes Hyde gasps and breathes more deeply.

The vista he sees is rosy in the first glimmers of a new and reborn sun, and the wind blows to the north rippling the water's surface. In the distance, he glimpses the giant pyramid and the human-headed Sphinx, and near the river bank, in the reeds, amid the floating lotus, are men fishing. Tanned, their skins are naked in the sunlight, strong of muscle and wide of chest, their heads shaved, their eyes lined with stibnite khol, their nets glittering with silver fish. Over the water floats a barge made of tightly woven reeds, a gilded boat all agleam with forty golden oars pulled by forty naked maidens. The fishing men bow as the barque glides by, and in the diffused light, on the boat deck, the nubile maidens twist and bend to the motion of the stroke, their small and rounded breasts jiggling and flecked with diamond jewels of sweat. It is a funeral barque and its sacred cargo is a great sarcophagus, wending the gentle tidal surge to the waterless river of Ament. Clearly, the first thing to be done is to swim to that boat, so propelled like a swishing dart Hyde does indeed swim, the ancient and green-dyed reptiles also slide into the waters. Hyde skims the rippling blue surface, stroke by stroke. With the Ra lustrous on his white skin, between the water lily stems, he weaves, trailed by ancient claw and tooth. Soon he swims in the gentle rush of the Nile, up to the barque and is pulled to the deck by an ebony-skinned slave. This slave is blind, made sightless from the blown dust and sand, groping at his body, her teeth chattering like dry bones. Down the middle of the raft he walks, leaving the wet imprint of his feet on the deck. Under a pavilion of silk, at the end of the boat there is a great wooden coffin, covered on all four sides with gesso-gilt, and poised with outstretched hands, their faces wrought in golden piety, are the tutelary goddesses of the dead. Pausing at a wishing cup, sculpted from semi-translucent alabaster, with lotus flower handles on either side, Hyde closes his eyes. Silently he makes a wish, and in answer to that desire, before him materialises a most beautiful creature of phantasy, her robes all sewn with gold thread, her face hidden behind a mask encrusted with jewels. She has stepped living from the tomb, smelling of sweet scents, of myrrh and musky aromas that recall memories of intimate, bygone trysts. Upon her crown is a headdress of extraordinarily vivid turquoise-like faience. A snake, the Uraeus, the sacred cobra, her protector, slithers indolently about her feet.

'You have come again,' says she, smiling upon him, and strangely he understands her words, though her language is ancient and forgotten, its syllables long buried under the rubble of antiquity. 'I knew you would.' She is pointing to the shore, to a city poised upon the extremities of time, all throbbing with magic and woven with a maze of sanctuaries and cemeteries, shrines for the fragments of human bones, of millions of sacrificial bones, canine bones and feline bones, avian bones and simian bones. Thousands upon thousands of wrapped and embalmed bodies, sealed in pitch and resin soaked linen. The woman points beyond the tombs, beyond the horizon, beyond the swirling sands, beyond to the land of the dead. 'We go towards the next world, to the Hall of Truth,' says she. 'Let us not linger here, but journey onward.' The woman places a funerary bouquet beside the tomb. 'However, you should be guarded, indeed, be afraid, for the next world is a dangerous place, haunted by monsters and beasts, with serpents, and crocodiles, and demons and traps. In accordance with the cosmic order, your heart will be weighed against the feather of righteousness, and if you are not pure, the devourer, Amenti awaits.'

'Surely my heart is blacker than any feather' laughs Hyde in his sacrilege.

'You must let me be your beacon in this darkness of the soul,' says she, and smiling, her white teeth flashing like pearls, the woman sings a hymn to the sun. 'We shall onward to the dawn, far from this necropolis, beyond Thebes, yonder death and the underworld.' Through her sparkling mask she kisses Mr. Hyde and her fingers meet his skin, they graze a trinket in the shape of a cross and it glints in the half-light. He closes his eyes, intoxicated by the glory of her perfume. She touches the cross but its shape is not the looped Ankh, not the crux ansata, and because of its straight crossbeam the symbol means nothing to her that she can understand.

'Strange trinket,' she remarks, and the maiden slaves dip the oars and giggle, and the crocodile glides beneath the hull, a hull painted with a map depicting the way to the afterlife. Weaving slowly, undulating, beneath the markings of hieroglyphs, the reptile escorts the funeral barge as it sails quietly to the underworld, slips gracefully over the narrow adjunct between heaven and hell.

'Whose coffin do we escort?'

'A dead king. Does it really matter? You must follow me beyond the Field of Reeds,' says she, 'to meet with Maat. It is she who wears the feather in her hair. Although, before we proceed, you must choose an offering. Dare you hope that your offering is acceptable and that you will not be judged unfavourably, lest your name be forever obliterated!'

'What should I choose?' asks he.

'Perhaps you should choose the snake,' replies Mayati, and her hand slides over his belly and her fingers dance upon the awakening shaft of his penis.

'Ah!' Hyde gasps. 'You have found my serpent!' The beautiful female lightly caresses his sex, her stroke glides between flesh and blood, between night and day, guiding Hyde in ecstasy to the sanctuary of death in the god Set's domain. Quivering, he throbs and pulses, rippling, and she hardens her grip upon his shaft. Hyde's is a state of excitement that surpasses tempestuous desire, but he knows that the moment cannot last. It is dream of passion, a dream through which they drift in their subterranean journey, enveloped in darkness, swept upon a diseased wind. Dressed in shadows the woman is upon her knees, holding him fast with her lips. As Hyde climaxes, he submits to a simulacrum of death, for he sees his face in a vision, altered somehow as if it were another, in a polished glass, a reflection of his transformed flesh consumed by fire. Maat reaches up and draws the feather from her locks...

Just before the golden arrows of the morning sun brings supernal light again to the earth, we find Mr. Edward Hyde with eyes wide, wider, his heart beating fast, faster. He thinks he might have slept, but has now awakened in a vast, stone chamber. Rosily the light flows through the terrace, over sandstone and marble and silver plate and softly stirring tulle, and Mr. Hyde's ear hears the musical stridency of someone else's breathing. With a groan he stirs, thinking that he must have procured dreams upon his nocturnal journey. He remembers the Egyptian dancer, Mayati and her snake familiar, dangerous and undulating, coiling and constricting. Hyde writhes about, searching for the serpent among the tumult of rugs and silks. No snake raises its hooded head, and rising Hyde pours a glass of water from a copper ewer. Looking about he sees opulence and grandeur, gilt and ostrich feathers and ivory and lapis-lazuli. Yet his clothes are scattered about the floor, his stained shirt draped across the furniture, across a semi-circular chair embossed with carved lions and a red velvet cushion. Discarded are his trousers, vest and shoes. With a sluggish hand, he feels his own nude skin, the buds of his nipples, the loose prepuce, and the smoothness of his rounded buttocks. A crucifix of jet and gold is looped about his throat and it is cold against his flesh. Fire darts in his eyes and he blinks away the vestiges of sleep.

In the mirror beside the bed he beholds his body, and as he gulps down the water he catches a fragment of a memory in the silvered glass, remembers the thirsty tongues reflected therein, tongues and mouths and lips that have tasted his physique. Burning censers have made sweet the saffron scented air, and Mayati's dream chamber has become a phantasy scented like a perfumed garden. Her breathing is susurrant, and she glides into Hyde's vision, and she is singing his name, though her lips quiver with the sound of some other exotic and ancient appellation.

'Awaken, oh Min,' sings she, though her face is still hidden by her mask of precious stones and marquetry, and upon her forehead she wears the diadem of the snake, the serpent god, a cobra of burnished gold and of rare coloured gems. On her right hand, there is a ring inscribed with a Cartouche and a royal name.

'Akhenaten,' she whispers, 'Son of Amenhotep and ruler over stars.'

With elegant grace, she peels away her clothing, filmy veils pinned by gold rivets and turquoise, until she stands nude but for a triple necklace of yellow and red gold and a large black scarab pinned over her cleft. He body is long, her limbs slender, her breasts small and her hips wide.

'Honoured before the great god Khem, am I,' she chants, her mouth becoming long and stretched out, 'descended from the Aten, born of the golden arrows of the winged disk of the sun, the Ra.' Mayati's forearms click with coloured beads and amulets, and she waves her willowy arms through smoky whorls of scented vapour, and those arms become like the vapour, swirling in ribbon-like whorls. The mist engulfs Hyde. Her two Nubian attendants are wearing masks too, one the head of a spotted Cheetah and the other a black Jackal. They do not dance, instead all three approach Edward Hyde and all three surround him. At once they stroke his body, begin to caress and to embrace. Hyde trembles in the throes of a fantastic and disordered imagination, shuddering as a sextuplet of limbs ply at his face, at his chest, at his thighs, at his buttocks. Their bodies move out of sequence, sweating and throbbing and pulsing, and the blackness of the Nubians skins becomes a colour so intense that it fills Edward's eyes with infinity. Mayati whispers and her whisper is fractured, broken into echoes, and in distaste as the echoes die she flicks aside the Christian bauble about Hyde's neck. 'This is not the cross of Isis.'

'I believe only in the flesh,' says he, not knowing how the cross came to be upon his body.

'Then you believe in a lie! You know not of customs older than the world, for your own greed for experience is so narrow. You squirm in the sands, like a worm and the entire length of your existence is less than half of a heartbeat. It is the magic of the ancients that has invoked all that is civilisation, not a dream produced by the vile fluid from your little flask! How ravenously you drink and how quickly you forget!'

Hyde laughs, and his eyes bulge from their sockets. The beauty has such large and lovely lips and they move redly and fleshy in a song of hallucination.

'I offer you the sacrifice of my own serpent!' he utters in disrespect, stoking his throbbing phallus. His swollen sex juts boldly, defiantly, shamelessly, magnificent.

'The light of the Sun spears beyond all that is creation. Your lust and your violence is an affront to the Aten… Look, Mr. Hyde… Mr. Edward Hyde, take a glimpse and tell me what do you see?'

'I behold your beauty more radiant than any of the queens of the noble Theban races,' says he, shuddering as dark hands caress his torso. 'Yet I wonder…' he sighs in his ecstasy. Leaping is his skin.

'At what do you wonder?'

'Someone…' Hyde closes his eyes and trembles during the rapture. 'I am reminded of someone…'

'A dream,' says Mayati, pulling upon the bud of his nipple and caressing his testes, her fingertip playing at his entry. 'An extravagant phantasy.'

'No,' replies Hyde, 'not a dream.'

'Who, Edward, really exists at all?'

There is numbness in his flesh and there is fire in his mind, both in the same instance, and her fingers caress both his sex and work simultaneously at the aperture of his body. 'Henry…' Hyde moans.

'Who is Henry?' asks Mayati, probing his entrance. She dips a finger into an alabaster jar of perfumed unguent. Hyde groans as she violates the warm valley of his buttocks. The Nubians remain implacable.

'Oh, just an eidolon…' groans Hyde, his mind, his thoughts now flashing with staccato glimpses of an older man with a thick chestnut beard whose features, in a nightmare, seem to metamorphose into his own face. 'He haunts my dreams sometimes. He lies in his morality, and wants us to believe him so respectable, and so clever and yet he is nothing but deluded! He knows not who he really is… but I do!' Hyde gasps then as if he is wanting air, and Mayati withdraws her finger from his body. 'You are beautiful,' he moans, the slaves gripping him tighter, 'and I am not deluded in that!'

'You flatter so, but still you are blind,' Mayati purls, her eyes glinting with diamond chips. 'Is this face not more remarkable than your Henry's face? Am I not really that which is the remote unknown, the sublime power, the evocation of the feminine principle… the sinuous body of the Uraeus as it coils about the burning furnace of the star? Am I not the lust which strikes with the fangs of the serpent, the stinging venom of your vital essences?'

'Lovelier than any star, more potent than my lust!'

'Lovelier than your little plaything, Kitty?'

Mayati smiles enigmatically and takes hold of his hands. How can she speak that name? Her grip is firm, and she opens his arms wide, as if he were Christ on the cross about to be nailed through the wrists with nine-inch nails, and she strokes her willing sacrifice in the silken bower of the four-poster. She kisses him, pressing her white skin against his, exploring his mouth with her tongue, and the Nubians grip his forearms.

'Unlike her, unlike your passive little Kitty, I am commingled with the body of Min, and my flesh, my soul, glows with the light of a thousand constellations,' says Mayati, unbuckling the scarab and casting it aside. Mayati's own length is revealed, hard and urgent and pulsing against her gentleman's pubis. 'You, your body, your flesh, your skin, your jutting phallus,' she says calmly, 'are now but a fragment of nothingness. In a four-thousand-year panoply you are unknown, scattered ashes, your name lost! Amenti judges you- eats you! I am your punishment!'

The Goddess of Truth places her feather upon one side of the scales and Edward Hyde's heart upon the other. It is a time of endless death, for a most dreadful beast watches slavering, hungrily, with crocodile jaws, ready to gobble up sin. Black as midnight the Jackal pours his hairless and muscled form upon the bed, lies on his back, nigrescent skin buffed and shining, and his shaft is erect and glistening. Lithely the Cheetah climbs up and straddles the Jackal, and strong dusky thighs clamp against a muscled and oiled torso. The cat loops its thick, strong arms about Edward's pink torso, pulling him back upon ebony flesh. The Cheetah purrs loudly, gripping Hyde in the vice of an unbreakable embrace and lifting; and like a bow strung for the arrow, Edward is arched above the Jackal, his flesh taut. It is Mayati in her jewel encrusted mask who fills his vision, her form like a burning taper, smouldering and sighing, stroking and touching and making lightning dance along Edward's nerve ends. She removes her gemmy mask and throws it aside, and comets and meteorites speed into velvet space. How her face gleams as might polished alabaster, her fleshy lips coloured ruby red. Hers is the face of an ancient idol, beautiful and impassive, and she moves like the snake moves, weaving in undulation as the Nubian Cheetah pulls Edward down, his back hard against the darksome torso and chest of the Jackal. Edward's mind is almost deranged now, almost severed from its fetters, the lover burning in the act of wantonness, yearning, extravagance, cupidity and cruelty. Throbbing with forbidden love, Hyde opens his eyes to an arabesque, and Mayati fills his vision, radiantly white against the black flesh silhouettes of her Nubians. She is so close, so close, and pulsing, her visage throbbing like a heart exposed in the ivory cage of the chest. Mayati parts Edward Hyde's body, opening it as if it were a pliable fruit, and into that body she guides the Jackal's sex. With a loud and strident ululation, she sings a shrill chorus, and in response, with a cry of pleasured pain, Edward curses, calling her the most vile and filthy names that he can utter. Run deep by the lance, pierced, his mind reeling and spinning, he gasps and moans and Mayati takes her own spear and she too presses it forth and deep. Hyde's flesh is seared under the wind from a blast furnace, stretched and rent to the nerves, to the threshold of tolerable pain, and he cries out again, contorting wildly, unbelieving, his body worked twofold to its core, thrust into untold pain and joy, a joy darker than the bitterness of sweet death. The dancer's thrust is hard and swift and rough and violent, and Hyde clamps his jaws tight. The Uraeus on Mayati's crown sparks with chalcedony and malachite, twists as if it were alive, and in his fevered mind, in the shadow of the pyramids, Edward Hyde knows a collision of stellar space incendiary with the burning embers of his black and violated soul. In that shadow, all pulsing with alabaster and obsidian, all that is flesh is torn asunder and his heart is seared in the blinding and glorious light of the brightest and most glorious, golden Aten.

Chapter 13

A Penny for the Gypsy

'The moral tone…at first vague and unsatisfactory, generally becomes

repulsive and even criminally obscene.'

Montague Summers

We shall recommence our tour, and tonight we will walk another thoroughfare, into another scandalously poor and overcrowded slum. Into the East End. To get there we must unfortunately pass through the 'stink industries', some breweries and some slaughterhouses, to see what we need to see… so have your kerchief ready to put over your nose. Don't breathe too deeply! Look, over there, yes, they are the Sewer Hunters, sieving through the disgusting, and scavenging at the turn of the tide. Why, I have heard tell, and it may be a lie, but a good £2 may be had in a week among the mud larks! That gent coming up the way, the one with the rancid sack over his shoulder, yes, the wily lad, he seems amiable enough but you might find his profession a little challenging. Smile, give him a little wave as he goes by, but oh god doesn't he smell! A Pure-finder, that's what he is. Sorry, Miss, you don't know what that is? Will you laugh so gaily once you know he collects dog shit for the tanning factory up the way? It is a squalid area to be sure, and unsanitary, so mind your step, people do tend to empty their waste into the streets…

We shall head down this way, into this narrow alley and into this court, into the dustbin. I'm sorry, darling, are you feeling sick? It isn't nice at all, is it, not when you step in a puddle of nasty! Here, right before us is a little world of activity that you probably never gave thought to, not before you decided to slum it in the East End. Why, just over there is the butcher in his black and white striped apron sharpening his knife, ready to gut the rabbit, and there are some stalls for the hawkers. Why, surprised am I that one of them is selling books! Well, blow me down, if that don't beat all! Who reads in Whitechapel?

Can you hear that lovely voice, oh, so sweet, singing from that tavern where it is reputed fine wines and London's best ales are served! I see all of you are sceptical to that claim, and I cannot blame you for that, but let us pause in the street here for just one moment and listen to the girl as she sings her song.

'At the end of the next long street, he'll be there

Waiting for me

Around the next dark corner, he'll be there

Waiting for me

I keep searching, looking, waiting, hoping

He'll be there, the boy for me

That's how it's gotta be, that's how it's gotta be for me.'

For whom do you think she croons, sir? For Prince Charming? Do you think it is unlikely that she should find him in this place? Unlikely indeed, for she is far more likely to find that… look to the poster on the wall! I hear your murmurs of disquiet and perturbation, but remain calm, together we are in no danger, that is unless you stray from our collective, and if you do that then I cannot vouchsafe your protection. Let us abide our own safety and keep alert for any suspicious man dressed in a dark overcoat and black felt hat. Be forewarned, because I give no refunds. Can you read the sign for me, sir?

'£200 REWARD

Whoever gives information to the Police which will lead to the identification and the

APPREHENSION

Of the East End Murderer

Described by witnesses as a tall man wearing a

Tall Hat and a Dark Cloak

Shall receive a reward of £200.

'Yes, I hear you gasp because these killings are virtually identical to those unsolved murders committed by that fiend, 'Jack the Ripper', almost twenty years ago! That's the name the newspapers gave him, remember, and the police never caught him, did they? Indeed, we walk in the shadow of another bloodthirsty killer! Perhaps this monster is drinking in that pub over there, contemplating his next foray, even as we contemplate his forebear's deeds. Are you game, if you are, let us cross the street and take a gander in at the window, shall we… Oh, you protest, it's too risky, and what if he were indeed in there? Truth is, my lovely, no one knows who he is, so come on, let's pluck up a bit of courage! What is that you say? The smell of blood from the butcher's block is turning your stomach, and the sight of the rabbit being skinned, its pelt being peeled back like a glove… gutted… You are frightened? Well, so am I, a bit! It makes one want to swear off eating rabbit ever again, that's for sure, but everyone deserves at least one good scare!

Ah, there she is, the wispy little singer with her cap of faded yellow roses pinned into her long black hair. She is so young and sweet, singing for a penny as she wanders through the drinking and the detritus. There's a fat man in a red chequered shirt and a brown coat, wearing a pork-pie hat, and he is entertaining our good friend Mr. Hyde. The fat man grips the singer by the arm and pulls her into the chair between himself and Mr. Hyde. He is laughing, she is not. Watch as a woman stumbles roughly by the girl, tripping upon the legs of a stool, cursing as she reels toward the door. She is perhaps in her early twenties and she is pretty, and her economic independence is unfortunately the vessel of her own body. It is the only commodity she possesses. Dizzily she comes out into the street. She is dressed, as one might expect, in discoloured finery, a plume of turquoise and crimson feathers in her hat, the sheen of her pink skirt lustreless. At least she is not dishevelled and dirty and wholly dissipated, although, nonetheless she is stupid with ale and gin, slipping in her modesty and toiling in her harlotry.

'Here, Maureen,' calls another drunken trug-moldie, Yvonne, from the door, 'if you find a Gent charge him half a crown! Tell him it's gone up. Tell him everything's gone up!' She lifts her own skirt and flashes her drawers, and the two women break into peals of laughter. Stripped of all life's romance, Maureen no longer pretends that her opportunities will improve, for as long as men are governed by their dicks and can pay for their sexual gratifications she might be able to procure supper and a place to sleep for the night. She has had two customers already this evening, not particularly handsome fellows, granted, but unwisely she has drunk those pennies away in the ale house and now she must solicit another willing gent. Once again tonight she will have to dodge the 'Copper' with his lantern in the lane, and once again she will have to debase her flesh. Perhaps the law might even be interested in a bit, but best not, for the truth would be he wouldn't pay for the privilege, more than likely she'd end up paying him- for the sex and for the protection! A right joke and reality. She begins humming the chorus of the young whore, Mary's song, hoping that around the next dark corner the man of her dreams will be waiting, that her next transaction in the flesh will not end in disenchantment. Maybe he'll be a noble gent and handsome, maybe he'll marry her and perhaps they'll leave London and its sewers and go far away, to the Colonies, to Australia even! Wouldn't that be grand! She is stuck here in Spitalfields, in the slums of a most vile existence, castigated as a slut, and Maureen continues to phantasise as she staggers drunkenly along the narrow, foggy, cobbled lanes.

There is a presage of doom in the air, can you feel it, a waft, a ripple that has drifted in with the fog. It is a promise of kismet that even our gentleman Mr. Hyde cannot anticipate, because in the tavern his drug-addled mind is reeling and his senses are dulled. Edward is not in possession of his usual dynamic physicality, being full of liquor and other intoxicants, and therefore he chooses his companions badly. Inside, in the thick and hazy air of the tavern Mr. Hyde is being entertained by an amiable chappie, that fellow in a red chequered shirt and brown coat and the pork-pie hat. Mr. Allen is not with him tonight, the two gentlemen having disagreed upon the ugly subject of money. In a dim corner, a gypsy has taken up singing where the young girl has ceased. The men gather around, all drinking and in their cups, loud and raucous, laughing and carousing.

'A penny for the gypsy, a penny for the gypsy

And if you make it two, I'll tell you what I'll do

I'll let you have a twang on my guitar'

'It is of great privilege,' says the rotund fellow in the pork-pie hat, his cigar clamped at the corner of his liver-coloured lips, 'for myself and my sisters here, and my lovely little niece, Mary, to be drinking with a distinguished gentleman like you, sir.' As he speaks he empties a round of drinks from a tavern wench's tray. He does not offer the woman a tip. The man pushes the liquor before his gentleman guest, before his sisters and in front of the pretty young girl Mary, who could not be past her thirteenth year.

'Oh, indeed it is!' remarks the older woman sitting to Mr. Hyde's right. She is bedecked in the tasteless finery of faded feathers and worn velvet. There is a pencilled beauty spot near her brightly painted mouth.

'Such good luck,' says the other woman, her own clothes soiled and patchy and darned and long out of fashion. She winks at the younger, prettier Mary. Innocent is Mary, with her black hair tied back in a vermilion ribbon, a little hat with yellow roses pinned into her locks, with her pale complexion and her big brown doe-like eyes. She is blessed with a generous cleavage for one so young. Mary says nothing, sandwiched uncomfortably between Mr. Hyde and the man in the pork-pie hat.

'Drink up, Mary dear,' insists the fat man, and everyone lifts their glasses. He holds her hand, forcing the gin to her lips, forcing the girl to swallow the fiery spirit down in one gulp. Coughing and spluttering she gasps for breath, and the other women laugh. Edward Hyde takes a swig of his drink, and he is not seeing the world clearly. He can see, but hazily, this young girl, see the ample curves of her breasts, and he thinks that he might, without raising protest, reach over and free them from her dress. Of course, he only has Mary's best interests at heart, and who better than he to teach her the fundamentals of sex? Ah, how fortuitous he is, having stumbled without his usual guide into another desirous experience, having procured a young virgin in the putrid byways of London's filth.

'I am sensible of the honours that you are doing me,' he stammers drunkenly, his speech slurred. 'You are all admirable and lovely people.' His eyes try to focus on the maiden's charms, her breasts a revelation, her thighs open to erotic possibilities. Who better than he, the sophisticated gentleman, Mr. Edward Hyde, to uncover her virtues and split her in twain with his potency? He chuckles at the vision of her supple body lying under him.

'Such a pretty little novice,' he tells her, touching a finger to her lips, and the man in the pork-pie hat leers. The girl shrinks back, pushing Mr. Hyde's hand away, but that hand slips downward and grasps at her thigh.

'Such a lovely young man,' says the woman in the faded feathered hat.

'I think its love at first sight,' remarks the other, and they both nod their agreement. The second woman leans forward and loosens the line of her tattered bodice, exposing a brown and inch-long nipple prickled by a light crop of dark hairs. 'What about you come along with me and my sister, dear?' Mr. Hyde stares fascinated at her wizened bosom.

'A penny for the gypsy, a penny for the gypsy.'

The Zingaro sings louder, her audience clapping and chanting, her guitar strumming.

'You can really enjoy yourself,' says the first woman, her hand gripping Edward's crotch under the table and through his trousers. The serpent does not awaken, and Mr. Hyde rolls a coin of copper across the table.

'Much appreciated, young sir, but it's a hard life being a mother,' says she, retracting her liver-spotted hand and coveting the coin. She laughs revealing yellowed teeth.

'Indeed,' says the porcine man, 'and just as hard being an uncle.' He looks Edward squarely in the eye. 'Is it hard for you too, kind sir?'

All three share the fractured humour, all but little Mary.

'A penny for the gypsy, a penny for the gypsy.'

The Didikko's refrain echoes about in his head, reverberating around and around, stuck in a moment and repeating, the guitar twanging in his ears. Hyde has been imbibing alcohol since he first staggered through the door of this tavern, since his first invitation to sit among the detritus, with thoughts of initiating the young girl, Mary, into womanhood. He is still thinking of her honeyed sweetness despite his disorientated vision and his slurred speech. Hyde must connive to get her away from her uncle. The fat man leans across the table and whispers to the woman in the feather hat. 'He's about ripe. Bring him out just after I go. Right?' The two women are complicit and nod, signalling Mary that the time has come.

'I must go piss,' says the man, and he gets up and walks away, and Hyde barely registers that his new-found comrade has gone from his side.

'Well, what about it dear?' says the second woman, pinching her nipple back into her stays.

'For sure,' replies Hyde, not knowing what he says, for he has lost control of logic and sense. 'Come on, you unwise virgins!' The three women rise and all hug their benefactor, reeling him toward the door and the street and the alleyway. Outside the tavern, there stands an old fool holding up a sign for temperance.

'Aye,' declares he to the fat uncle, 'the consumption of alcohol is a wasteful and unlawful distraction from reality. Thus, does it serve no purpose save to make men a slave to vice!' The fat man spits the butt of his cigar into the gutter and he feels in his vest pocket.

'Beware of bad houses,' warns the wizened old man, holding up his protest sign and pointing a righteous finger to its black-painted legend. 'Give not into impulse and ale. A man under the influence of the demon alcohol, a man intoxicated and drunk can no longer be in control of himself!' Under the soupy light of the street lamp, the fat man looks at the sign, but it is incomprehensible to him as he has never learned to read. He laughs and flings a coin at the old man. 'Here, mate, go and get one for yourself!' The old man's eyes widen with surprise and avarice, and he drops his placard instantly and catches the coin between crabbed fingers. Nodding his appreciation, he stumbles into the pub. In the doorway, he pushes past Mr. Hyde and his harem, and the women are discussing the value of Mary's supple young body, for she is a commodity to be used and has no other function than to be exploited.

'Oh, I know you'll get your rent money tonight,' quips the woman in the tattered bodice, winking at the other and jabbing her ribs with a bony elbow.

'Yes, Mrs. Murphy won't have cause for complaint tonight!'

In the shadows, in the alley where none can see, Edward's fingers are grasping at Mary's bosoms. He pushes her roughly up against a corrugated fence, and she squirms under his grasp, fending off his clutching fingers. With a salivating leer Hyde pushes his smooth face into Mary's, his tongue wet and drooling upon her lips, invading her mouth, and his taste is sour with stale alcohol. His weight against her is crushing, and as he kisses deeply he fumbles at the buttons of his flies.

'Look at her, acting like a right little duckett! Ooh, but I dare say I wouldn't mind a bit of that. I'd do him for fushme and then do him again!' says the woman in the wilted ostrich feathers. Both trollops snicker. With his fingers in his trousers, liberating his member, Hyde in his lustful and drunken foolishness does not see the shape of the pork-pie hat nor the fat man in the darkness, but he does feel the smash of the cudgel as it meets with his skull. Hyde releases his penis and falls into the dirt, and the fat man kicks him in the gut, chest and face for good measure.

'Very nice timing, my love,' says the woman in the feathers.

'She's terribly religious, our little Mary,' says the other woman as the girl straightens her clothing. Mary is pointing to the twitching form of the gentleman in the dirt, pointing to a gold chain and a crucifix that has slipped from under the rips in his fine shirt. The fat man reaches down but Mary stays his hand.

'Leave him have it, uncle, please.'

Some superstitious inkling has flashed into her head and she wants no part of the trinket, not even for Sunday church, and instead the fat man pulls a sealed envelope from Hyde's vest and tears it open. Expecting money, he finds only a note, but he cannot read Kitty's script to her husband, Dr. Henry Jekyll, and he scrunches it and throws it to his feet. Then with violence he tears away at Hyde's fine clothing, ripping and rending the gentleman's vest and shirt and trousers till all the buttons have popped. With a grunt, he locates what remains of the grandee's money. Hyde's eyes are open throughout the entire ordeal, but he cannot see, cannot feel, for his mind is locked in a terrible paralysis of flashing colours and wildly tilted perspectives. The man in the pork-pie hat, how his pudgy face has been squeezed to a sliver, how pretty Mary's dark hair seems alive with living snakes. The two women are pointing down at him and laughing, but no sound comes from their lips. They lift their dresses and he can see the raw valley of their clefts, and Hyde cannot even manage a groan. A torrid thirst grips his throat, his lips are agape, his tongue seems to be swelling in his mouth, his lungs sucking at the air desperately, his heart pounding as does a mallet. With a violent shudder Hyde defecates, releasing his bowels, staining the tatters of what remains of his brushed cotton trousers. His velvet jacket is ripped, his boots scuffed. The stench rising from his soiled garb is disgusting.

'The dirty fop has shit himself!' laughs the fat man, stuffing the money into his pockets, the coppers chinking.

'Pity really,' says Mary quietly. 'I rather fancied him.' She begins to lowly sing her song again.

'I keep searching, looking, waiting, hoping, he'll be there.'

Her uncle strikes her face, leaving a red welt upon her white cheek. 'Shut your fucking mouth, you little bitch! You didn't even have to work it tonight. Though if you're lucky it's me who'll be there, later, and you can work my cock. That's how it's going to be!' Brutally he squeezes her cheeks hard and then throws her back and away. She stumbles and trips on the discarded sign that warns all to beware of bad houses. Losing her little hat, her hair a black screen over her eyes, Mary cringes in fear, staring at the placard that has cut her ankle, but sadly, like her fat uncle, she cannot read.

'Now get inside, the lot of you cunts!'

'What about us, are we to have nothing?' pipes his sisters in unison.

'Maybe I'll be so nice as to buy you all a drink.'

He takes his member from his pants and relieves himself over the beaten man at his feet, a stream of pungent urine splashing over the gentleman's face, into his wide staring eyes and into his open mouth. I see you look away, but I did warn you that on this tour you might bear witness to some confronting horrors! Though your revulsion is justified, pray remember that I have already given you the option to leave this excursion. Of course, it is never going to be a pretty thing, watching a man make water over another, but if you will, we must continue. Still, I caution you once again, if you possess a tender constitution then you must accompany us at your own risk. There can be no refunds, no taking back what occurs, and yet again I advise you to leave now and turn not another page, for the most unpleasant things are yet to come… Brace yourselves, and let us follow once again follow that first whore, Maureen, as she wobbles away into the back alley. Remember, she is humming little Mary's song in a broken refrain.

'Around the next dark corner, he'll be there

Waiting for me.'

Maureen begins laughing to herself, tipsy, giggling, and imagining an amour waiting up the next street, with his pants down and his prick out. He better have a nice fat wallet too! She has been dreaming about a rich man making her his wife, but she knows that the only real way you can measure a man is by his dick. Why, on one occasion, when she was young, just shy of fourteen years of age, Maureen had once engaged in a brief conversation with syphilis. Not that she herself had contracted the disease, but that she had boarded in a squalid room in Bluegate with another young woman, an Irish lass. That girl, as she lay doubled up in the corner of the bare attic room, on an old mattress stuffed with shavings, with no bed-linen but a thin patched quilt and a few dirty rags, related to Maureen what she was feeling in her last agonies. The girl's skin was encrusted with rupia, and she was weakened to the last degree, though bearing marks of having once been a pretty girl, and bemoaned that she had nevertheless been seduced, diseased, and deserted by a married man, having been infested in the profession. This lesson was not lost upon the young Maureen, although there had been a few close scrapes that luckily for her had not written her epitaph. We must follow Maureen now as she is stumbling into the murky lane and paying no heed to that other poster on the wall, warning such women as she to look out for their lives. The area has been witness to several attacks, carvings perpetrated by a homicidal erotic maniac. Yet what would she say should she meet with any gent in a tall black hat and a long dark cloak? What do you think she might do? Is it likely that she will communicate to the constabulary anything about anyone she encounters of even remotely dubious character? Even for the handsome reward of £200? She would not have the reward for long, and the money could never be her salvation from the pit. You think not, and you know it is truth, because she is what she is, but she isn't so stupid because she has so far survived the drowning slums and would not risk her life running tales to the authorities.

True, she must pay for her lodgings, she must stay somewhere, and she must pay for her supper, even if it is eel pie and mash. Yet it isn't so comfortable to be bent over with your skirts up about your bosoms, up against a wall like a dog getting fucked in the back street. Perhaps there is something in the connexion of the flesh that is the shameless desire in us all, in you, sir, in myself even, I dare say. Come, steel yourself, this is what we came here for, is it not… to look? I'm sure Maureen would not object too vociferously if we are to catch her at her game, maybe she might ask for a few extra crowns for the privilege of our watching. Ah, she might let you take turns, and you too young lady, I dare say! I might pay for a little bit of that… would you? However, remember, sir, that tonight you shall eat your supper under the edifice of freedom, this poor damaged beauty must eat hers in an overcrowded slum, and that is if she is to eat at all. You protest that it probably tastes of chip-buttie anyway. Yes, if that is your opinion, but we are not dealing with delicate little sweets here, are we? Oh, come now, do not pretend that you care. If you wanted good moral character you would not have come with me this night. Cease your hypocritical grumblings, and let us pass down this misty lane way here, you may all hold hands if it assures your comfort. There is nothing like the thrill of danger, is there, no thrill equal to the anticipation of the unspeakable? Ah, young lady, I see you shiver with expectation! Cling tight to your gentleman, he's got big strong arms to protect you! Pick up your step, walk lively!

Down the grimy cobbles we follow, navigating the dark mews and alleyways with a few abrupt and narrow turns, into tunnels from which the lamplight has been sucked and where shadowy darkness crawls along the walls.

Listen to the echo of her boot heels upon the stones. Faint staccato tapping, careful, Maureen might turn an ankle in the dark. Hold back, just for a moment, and we shall let that Copper over there with his little torch do his rounds. He is checking to see that the doors are locked and bolted, but we don't need to engage him in our tour. You can take a breath now, the copper has gone… but where is your young lady, sir? Oh, I hope she hasn't wandered off by herself. That would be a terribly dangerous thing to do in these parts, on a night such as this! Quickly, everyone, stay close, around this corner now we must fly, but alas, detained as we have been, we must find the young miss. Keep your eyes peeled, all of you, for anything that moves, for in the rookery no wise person would dare venture. Perhaps we might see where she might have gone. What was that, sir, did you see a bobbing feather? No? It's too dark, and too foggy, and there are too many warrens. My goodness, what are we to do now?

Lo! There is a blood-curdling scream, and now there is silence. Oh, god! Down there, look, in the darkness, like a phantom in the mist, is that a man in a tall black hat and a long black cape? Quickly, let us race upon the minute. Oh, my goodness, sir, come here at once. There, miss, it's all right, we're here. Calm yourself, calm yourself! By a stroke of luck, you are unharmed. I did say keep close. The fog was too thick you say, and you became lost. Yes, that is so easy to do in these narrow lanes. Can you tell us what has happened, did you manage to see anything? A man, you say, wielding a knife? A strong knife, six inches long at least, and sharply pointed. A thick, straight knife! No? You are not making much by way of sense, young lady. Oh, you say we are too late, what are we to do now, how dreadful, for bloody murder has been done. The whore has been killed, splayed out like a gutted animal in the lane way, like the butcher's rabbit. Look, the gutter is messier than the butcher's shop! Please, sir, it is best if you take your young lady over there, I think she is going to be ill, she has gone so pale. This killer, so quick and yet so efficient. There is so much blood, and see that it has squirted in a crimson torrent all over the wall and stained that poster offering the reward. Careful where you step for the blood is pouring over the cobbles. What a revolting spectacle it is. Yet, once again, I did warn you that our tour of the boroughs would not be so pleasant, but you did insist, even as you paid your fee, you maintained you possessed courage and fortitude.

Should we look a little closer? Surely, we must! Regardless, we should do so before the police arrive, before we hear the Copper's shrill whistle, we don't want to be questioned by that bumbling fool, Inspector Murray, do we? Quickly, let's peel back the layers. Nervous are we that the maniac will return? Well, I shouldn't think he would risk that, so I dare say that it would be even more of a crime if we did not look closer. Pardon, young lady, what was that you said? You must be mistaken. One can see from the extent of the killer's mutilations, that what you say is impossible. Look, you only must imagine what brute strength it took to slice the throat from ear to ear, to lacerate down to the bone so that the head is only held to the torso by a thin strip of flesh. The face, oh good god, her face! Look at that slash that has divided the upper lip and gone through to the gum! The point of the blade has broken her tooth. He must have been some right pervert, a vengeful and impotent fiend, for see he has sliced through her chemise too in his avaricious probing and cut across her breasts. Disgusting, oh yes, and I surmise that since there has not been enough time for genital contact, that knife is his phallus, for he has plundered what he could in the vermilion grotto of the abdomen. Yes, those are her bowels, for the knife has carved through vagina and rectum, and that muck spilling from the torn gut is partly digested fish and potatoes. If I am not mistaken, what do you think, sir, is there something missing? Oh, Jesus, I think it might be her uterus that is gone, all carved out, her belly gaping! In the puddle of human entrails and the shit there is all that blood, all that blood! You insist, young miss, that it wasn't a man that you saw, but a girl, a young girl, but one possessed of the devil! Her hands, you saw her hands, branded by the mark of the fleur de lys- the pox infested hands of the ripper! Nonetheless that is impossible, for surely the Ripper is dead! Oh, do you feel giddy? Do you think you might faint? Terrible you say, shocking even, and just like you, I too must admit, that even I cannot abide the sight of blood!

Chapter 14

By My Own Will

'You should have put on your black clothes like the others and gone to church.'

A. P. Herbert

Try though I might, it is so difficult to connect to the reality of the world, to endeavour to sift the truth from the phantasy. Somewhere in my mind I know that I must be partaking in a most gross social disorder and that I have shared in acts that have turned decency upon its head. Though it is as if I have been inhabiting another and more virulent coil when the urge to sex has commanded me. I do not understand how or why I am damaged. There is a desire too, that I must inject the secret elixir again into my veins, for I swear without it my vital essences are ebbing away. Only my compound of drugs or the psilocybin distillation can stem the agony in my head. Another 5 fluid scruples would not be too high a dosage, perhaps I might imbibe even more. The euphoria and the liberation that each injection brings helps quell my anxieties. When under such influence my tactile and mental senses are stimulated one hundredfold. Unfortunately, I know not what should be the optimal dose. Therefore, I cannot predict the risks, and I find I must imbibe regardless, even though the higher levels indicate my participation in dangerous behaviour. Yet what may be the ultimate penalty for my foolishness and my addictions I cannot say, but I know that Edward Hyde, although monstrous and strong, is the true force that I am seemingly unable to resist. Something within me is afraid to reject the abominable tenets of his lusts, for I am drawn to him like a lover is drawn to their object of desire.

Such a handsome and devilish rogue is Edward Hyde, and yet I know his debauches must eventually result in my death. How his eyes sparkle, and the light from them flares like the starbursts blazing from spinning Catherine Wheels. I can see him naked, and I gloat upon his glorious and sculpted form, his flesh and his muscles throbbing with vitality, as beautiful as Discobolus. If in the remainder of my life should I ever encounter a thousand murderers and thieves, a thousand ruffians and brigands in any of London's slums and stews, I shall never know another force as strong or as violent or as impetuous or as wonderfully potent as is Edward Hyde. His friendship is driving me to the point of madness and disgrace and yet I am unable to relinquish him, and I must confess in my sickness that part of me revels in his misdeeds. I want nothing more than to meld with his flesh but confusion rends me apart, and what am I to do? It is revulsion that I feel, and elation too, all commingled. I am the hypocrite complicit in Hyde's slumming and debauchery, yet in my conscience, seeking for the higher man, I have found only loathing and lust. How Ernst would proclaim my failings should he see me in this dreadful state, and Kitty would shrink with abhorrence. Through all of Hyde's foul acts and his inability to repent them, for all his extravagant pursuits of prostitutes and homosexuality and alcohol and fornications, I have only found myself the willing lunatic gibbering in his shadow. His lusts are wearing me out, for I am crumbling away, but I know my fate is written in his blood. My body, when I awoke in the gutter, in the seeping dark, was that of a feeble septuagenarian, worn out by the night's excess and the degeneracy of sex. Lost, I am unable to fully recall just how it is that I came to be here, stripped of my clothes and robbed of all money. Bent and bleeding am I, soiled with excrement and reeking of piss. What is it that I have done? I tell myself that I cannot permit this extreme existence to continue, for fear that it will account for my eventual death.

Perhaps I need help, for I fear I am stepping into the twilight zone and this head of mine is a madhouse! It feels that I am no longer one individual, but two, that I have been cloned and that I am living, ensnared and exhausted, assailed by Hyde who is stronger. Nonetheless, even as I descend into Hell, into my own inferno, he ascends to a glorious kingdom, bright in his heresy, showing no remorse or despair. My life is at grave risk, and yet there is a sick and almost pornographic element to my mind set. I am caught up in a maelstrom that seeks Hyde's sexual liberation and gratification at the expense of my destruction. I fear that my experiments, even those recently involving female hormones that I reasoned would soften his libidinous rages and his violence, have proven all but futile. Despite the triple dose of my last injection, with him there is no demarcation between love and lust that I can clearly define. Only violence. Still I must not give up, for I believe that the clue to dampening the rage is to alter the chemistry by contaminating its sadistic impulses with that essence which makes the fairer sex more tolerant. My head commands I find Burke or Hare again to procure me another female part, and yet another force within, a compulsive force demands my subservience and my supplication. I do not even know if I am myself or Mr. Edward Hyde. How can I be two?

As I lie in the detritus in the lane I see a beggar woman, all bedraggled in her filthy smock and tattered veil. She approaches me and looks down, looks into my face. How implacable is her visage, unmoving, that not one muscle twitches? Her eyes scan me as if she seeks for something she too can rob, but there is nothing left, unless of course she wishes to steal my iniquities. For a long moment her vision arrests upon my exposed genitals, and perhaps she is thinking that this is what it really comes down to, the degeneracy of the wealthier classes. The woman sees a well-to-do man all besmirched with grime, in the gutter. No doubt she has seen it all before, and she shakes her head. She shall have no truck with my kind, no doings with the degenerate who indulge in polluted ways. There is no sweetness or tenderness, no mercy in her face. Turning away she forsakes my pitiful condition and rummages in a bin for a handful of limp radicchio leaves. After the woman has gone I manage to pull myself into a sitting position, my back up against the corrugated iron of the fence, and in my misery, I look to my feet. There in the tangle of my torn clothing I see a slip of scrunched up paper, and with trembling fingers I peel it open.

'It is impossible to carry on, and I have decided to leave you. Kitty.'

The letters, neatly written in Indian ink, begin to run with black streaks in the first spots of morning rain. There are tears in my eyes. Alas my recall is punctuated with dark spaces, so I am assailed by other terrible yet vague memories. At some point, struggling with the finality of Kitty's decree, I rise and stagger through the filth and the squalor and the unsanitary alleys of London's slums. The cobbles are sticky with noisome slime and the air reeks like an oily sink. A scurry of rats goes before me as I lurch and teeter along. I can hear distant and muted sounds emanating from the docks, and by this I know that I must be somewhere close to the river. There are muffled voices calling too, and shouts and jeers and the waving, flickering beams or orange torch light, but I am ignorant as to their direction, and I am a stranger in a strange country, crawling bruised and beaten lamely back for succour to the civilisation I so abjectly despise.

Now our tour of the slums takes us back along Shoreditch High Street and into Spitalfields. Look, friends, see that establishment over there, that dilapidated building wherein misery and sin and rot have all set in, that is a boarding house. Behind that façade of crumbling, plastered brick we will find the likes of prostitutes and thieves and other disreputable types. I see you are hesitant, that you hold back and do not wish to cross the street, for you remember all too vividly the last street we crossed! Trust me as your guide, we must not miss the excitement, for tonight there is a riot taking place just up the way. What is that you remark, that we should steer clear of that uproar? The turnout has not reached us yet as we stand here outside of this house- Mrs. Murphy's Rooms to Rent, but if you are reticent to continue let us ask that prostitute on the corner why the flare-up.

She looks rather familiar, no? Oh, yes, sir, you are correct in your observation- we did meet her earlier, at the ale house, lifting her skirts and remarking that 'everything was going up'. Your memory for a pretty face astounds me, but by the appearance of your trouser front, sir, her skirts are not the only thing that's going up! Look, is that not our friend, the good Doctor Jekyll, wandering in the street? He looks quite dishevelled and out of sorts, quite lost, wouldn't you agree? What is he doing out slumming at this ungodly hour? My goodness, but his clothing is all torn and he looks as if he has been set upon. Ah, please, do not be fearing for your safety again, we are all together and there is of course safety in numbers.

'Looking for something, darling?' says Yvonne, sauntering and doing a little spin.

'I'm not looking for you!' I reply, brushing by her as she pirouettes. I am disorientated and my head is reeling with the fragments of a horror in which part I know I have somehow participated. Participated in another body, another mind. 'What has happened?' I ask of himself, and there are great black gaps in my memory. Whatever has occurred, I fail to understand how I have come to be near the Khazneh, in the purlieu of the boroughs and why I cannot remember one moment from another clearly. Is it good and evil that clash within my body? Yet I cannot contemplate the two with equal equanimity, for the urge to evil is strong and the desire to repent humiliating. Why can I not seem to purge that which is evil, when it is that stronger force that drives me, consumes me, and it does not respect the good? What is happening to me, what is happening to me?

'Your loss then,' Yvonne regales, and I stop and stare blankly at the woman and then into Mrs. Murphy's boarding house. The windows are broken and the front door is hanging from its hinges. 'You won't find Mrs. Murphy if that's who you want. She isn't home.'

'Tell me then, where is she?'

Yvonne erupts into a chortle of sniggering laughter. 'Probably floating down the river, I shouldn't wonder.' Yvonne glances down the street, and I can just make out the glow of the torch and hear the noise of a jeering multitude.

'What's going on?' I ask the whore, and I begin shivering and shaking in the tatters of my clothing, and my body is pained all over. There are bruises and cuts in my skin and yet I have no recollection as to what has happened.

'It's Burke and Hare,' cries the prostitute emphatically, 'the grave robbers!'

'Grave robbers?' I repeat incredulously, and I feel my countenance twisting into a mask of confusion. Why would I need to find these two men, grave robbers! In my professional circle, I can never afford a scandal attached to such criminal activity. The past and the funeral home and its cadaverous associations have been burden enough.

Says Yvonne, smirking, 'Mrs. Murphy's been a'boarding of 'em. That mangy old bitch! That'll teach her to have body snatchers under her roof!'

How confused in the moment am I, knowing the horror of the implication that Burke and Hare have disinterred corpses, or worse, done murder upon my request! In a whirling moment of absolute shock, I grasp at the woman, gripping her arm.

'Hey!' she protests, warning me off. 'You let me go, unless you got half-a-crown…' I cannot even fathom why she is asking for money, and somehow the woman doesn't seem quite real, and there is something else tugging at the insides of my head, clawing at my mind, a voice that taunts and reviles me for being weak.

'Go on, fuck the bitch! Shove your cock up her arse!'

'Leave me alone, Hyde. Shut your filthy mouth! Leave me be! I will fight you. You will not win!'

'My mouth filthy!' scolds Yvonne in objection, rubbing at her arm, mystified by the abrupt change in my eye and my voice, of the aspect of the man who stands before her.

'Where are Burke and Hare now?'

'Burke's up there,' says she, pointing above to the rotting, tilting gable over our heads. There, before Mrs. Murphy's sign, the one that warns away tinkers and gypsies, dangles the body of Mr. Burke, a knotted rope looped about his broken neck. His dead eyes are popping from their sockets, his tongue is fat and black and protruding, his coat-front is splashed with sticky bile. Yvonne breaks into peals of raucous laughter. 'Look! He's come in his pants!' Her gallows humour washes over me with the subtlety of a falling stone. 'Yes, darling,' she winks at me and elbows my ribs. 'It's true, like I said, everything's going up!' Yvonne lifts her skirts and jiggles her hips. 'Stupid cunt!' she shouts, gesticulating at the hanging man, and spots of rain begin to splash upon her rouged cheek. Even as she laughs, the cries from the end of the street grow louder.

'Where is Hare?' I plead desperately, and my eyes are blazing with the light of the approaching faggots as their orange fires ignite the shadows. Blinking, the radiance flutters in my vision, flicking from light to shadow rapidly like the wings of a moth beating before the naked flame. I can hear the mob yelling.

'Oh, you can see Hare,' says Yvonne, 'but I doubt much that he'll see you- not after he gets out of the lime pit!'

As the young woman laughs the hoards swell and flood around us, shouting and calling and sweeping us along in a tide of horror. Caught up in that ghastly surge of the vulgar herd, how I want to scream, engulfed in that uprush of the enemy I fear most. Unable to fight against the pull of the repugnant tide, the flow of dirty skin, of filthy flesh, of boiling blood, of bitter diffluent stink and the humectation of sweat and noise, I am pushed by the curling wave of anger that thrusts me headlong into a nightmare. It is Hare, in the lime pit, covered with white chalk, and he is screaming from a burning mouth and clawing at his blinded eyes. With spade and trowel the angry mob begin to throw more caustic lime onto the wretched man, another gang are emptying pails of water. The rain spatters into the white lime and the slush, and Hare screams as the powder turns to ordure and sticks to his body, scalding his flesh. He yelps like a whipped dog and the posse poke at his buckled frame, as they rake away his clothes and roll him naked into the white and burning furnace of the pit. The powder sears down Hare's throat, and fire begins dissolving his skin, eating at his thighs, at his genitals, at his chest and face, and he is gasping and gagging and bleeding and oozing. The crowd roars with elation and I retch with fear, and I lose sight of Yvonne as I force myself to run and to stagger away from the hideous multitudes, away into the darkness.

'Who am I?'I groan pathetically, limping at last away from Mrs. Murphy's and away from Yvonne and from the cesspit of the slums. Unsure of my safety in the darkness I can feel something wrenching at my insides, tugging and pulling at my flesh, and as the shadows devour my form I set my feet upon the twisted path to a rendezvous that I know I have not made, but one that I know I should keep.

So far so horrible has been our tour, would you agree? You most certainly have sampled depravities and stimulations like no others you have ever experienced before, no? Still, this tour is yet to conclude, and you must agree, that now Jekyll's journey is a journey into darkness utter, into disgust and fear, for no longer can he think to modify his serum from the hormones he has extracted from the dead female uterus. No longer can Jekyll elicit the services of the unscrupulous Burke and Hare. Sorry, sir, what was that? What is left for him, you ask? He deserves to be punished? Oh, if everything were ever so simple! Hyde is too strong to be subdued by Jekyll's serums now, for he is Jekyll's Id and manifests by his own will, and whenever the fancy now takes him. We can follow Jekyll for a bit, shall we? Let's tread the cobbled way in his shadow as he flees Spitalfields, as he avoids the thundered chant of the crowd and the murderous ire of the multitude, the mob. See, as he staggers in the rain, as he takes one step as Dr. Henry Jekyll, and the next step as Mr. Edward Hyde. The battle to purge Hyde's evil finds one force not concordant with the other, and the good and the noble are notions to be crushed, mashed like the jaws of the lion snaps the bones of the antelope. Thirsty for evil, it is Edward Hyde, and then it is Henry Jekyll, terrified and repentant who staggers towards Morley Street, clutching at a little jet and gold crucifix.

It is either late or the coming of the dawn, I know not which, and the rain has become a torrent over roof and rotting timber and cobble. The wash splashes upon the rusted iron with the pitch of a growing drum tattoo. As I hobble along the rain becomes heavier. What a sorry and pathetic animal I make, lower than the rat, lower than a maggot even, wet with deluge but not washed clean. This sickness in my soul makes me fear for my mind. Aching in every joint, wracked with pain and stinging with lacerations, my limbs scarcely obey, but I challenge myself to keep standing, to keep going, to get home. The rain is teeming and the street beneath my feet is clogged with mud, the air at least is eventually cleansed of its miasma and gives over to a mild, fresh petrichore. I begin to shiver, so in futility I grasp my tattered clothing across my chest, and it is then that I note the crucifix depending from my throat. How strange, that in a world of filth I should find the consecrated and the pure, and yet I still do not believe. Seeming to remember that it belonged to my mother and that she gave it to me when I left for Oxford all those long years ago, had I not returned it to her when she died?

My eyes are stinging as I glimpse its dull golden sheen. My mind seems suddenly upon the brink of a revelation and my feet upon the ten steps up, to stand beneath the vaginal arc of Our Lady of Victories. White is its portico, and gleaming even in the dark, and the red brick chapel rises like a tower above my head, reaching for the sky. With a moan, I collapse against its double oak doors. I arrive in filth at the baptismal font, where my sin of being born was absolved and my flesh sanctified. At the church, I reject. At this altar did I hypocritically and superficially kneel before god and exchange with Kitty marriage vows. Here is supposed redemption and forgiveness, here was the corpse of my mother cradled and ushered into the glory of a Christian afterlife. So now must I face, in my purblind refutation of god, my own vulnerability and the revocation of Edward Hyde's enormous wickedness? Clinging to the crucifix with one hand I pound upon the church door with the other. Unbeliever that I am, may hope's salvation not be closed unto me yet, but pray shall I be guided through whatever unspeakable horrors lurk in the blackness beyond my mind.

It is some weeks later and I find myself still weak and frail, my wounds though are healing, the bruises fading. My hair is grey and my skin sallower, but there is no one to care. Kitty is surprised at my reappearance, but she has resisted asking any questions yet I know she intends to desert me. Now she avoids me like the plague. She awaits her moment to separate completely and to leave me abandoned. Kitty does not speak to me at all. I see her eyes are filled with loathing for me and disgust. She will disappear soon enough, it is inevitable, and there is nothing I can do to hold her back. Nonetheless, she does not know it, but I keep watch, that part of me will not let her go, for she belongs to me! Thinking that I am sequestered safely in my laboratory she has dismissed Nanny and put on her rouge and her diaphanous negligee. Soon Paul Allen arrives, I see him, the cad, entering my house and engaging my wife. Behind the drawn curtains they touch and a violent shudder of rage courses through my being as I watch from my secret lair. Reclined on the sofa Kitty whispers to her amour, and he seated on the rug, his head nestled in her bosom, is crooning his everlasting love.

'Why does love make us behave so hatefully to each other?' she asks Paul, running her fingers through his hair.

'Because we're cowards, my darling. We want everything.'

For them it is true, they do want everything, they want my home and my money and most of all they want me gone. They want me dead!

She bites her lower lip as if contemplating an agony.

'Let's go away, Paul,' says Kitty. 'Let's start a new life together.'

'We will, my love,' he promises. 'We will.'

Soon I must look away, but their concupiscent images sear my eyes, and I wish blindness upon myself rather than my sight be tainted with their heated and desirous longing for each other. Even so, I hear them together, I hear Kitty's sighs as Paul peels away her negligee, and I hear her gasp as he kisses the pink rosebuds of her breasts and spreads her thighs and enters her lovely body. They are besotted in their intimacy, and the ritual of sex is sounded in my ear. How I am tortured to the darkest corners of my mind as I hear Paul's thrusts, as he groans and thrusts, as Kitty sighs as he thrusts, as he groans and thrusts harder, and comes. I clench my fists into tight balls, my whole body shaking with anger, a miserable prisoner of my own ineffectual and pathetic life. There is a voice, Hyde's voice, telling me that I must punish them, for they deserve no happiness, and Kitty belongs to me! Try as I might I cannot resist his truth. Hyde is right, they blaspheme my generosity and the sanctity of my marriage vows. There is a fury building that wishes to strike them now, to obliterate their naked bodies, to flay them in their connexion and to wipe their memories from my mind. However, although I am impotent in my anger, I must not listen to Edward Hyde. He would have me condemned if I acted upon his advice, and he so often lies. Yet despite this I have decided what must be done.

In my journal, I write the following:

'Despite the modifications to my formula, despite my attempts to soften its effects by introducing female hormones into the mix, I find myself caught in the vice of addiction and growing more violent as the nights go by. The chemical enslavement has become all ensnared with emotional dependency. Yes indeed, the Medical Academy has said as much, that I risked becoming a slave to drug addiction. To right the wrong and set myself once more on a stable path I have destroyed all but one last phial of my formula and emptied the remainder of the drugs into the sluice. I fear that Hyde has too much influence over me, dictating that I carry out a most terrible vengeance against Kitty for her infidelity. I must not give in to the man, for no degeneracy is low enough to satisfy him. I have locked the door…'

Yet before I have finished the sentence there comes the sound of footsteps at my laboratory door. I look up sharply, remembering that the day is the last Friday of the month and that the children from the Universal Dispensary have come to my garden. Today I have pulled the drapes and the blind and the window is closed against the amber sunlight of the afternoon. It is the close of the day and the hours have slipped away, hours in which I have stalked the narrow boundaries of my laboratory, glimpsing my reflection in my cold, cold mirror, questioning myself and what it is that must be done. Little Totò has sensed my aggravation and has withdrawn, chittering, and I watch as he somersaults within the confines of his cage. There is a terrible similarity between myself and the monkey, for we are both trapped and full of fear. I have neglected to cancel the children's visit, so occupied have I been in my retreat, and it is little Jane's heart-shaped face that presses against the glass, trying to see into the realm of my laboratory. Her rosy lips are smiling and her eyes are sparkling. With a hesitant step, I put down my nib and close my journal, and I go to the door to greet my silent little subject. In her hand she has a gift, a bouquet of flowers that she has picked in my garden, and she smiles at me as I emerge from my laboratory door.

'Goodbye, Dr. Jekyll,' says the nurse, beaming a happy smile as she straightens her bonnet. I find I am unable to reply, that I am so frozen into numbness that I cannot even nod. The children are running and clapping and playing, but it is time for them to go, and their nurse waves, herding them toward the gate. They gather under the hydrangea, and waving their goodbyes, the gaggle with their nurse pass through the red brick wall and spill into the lane. All but Jane. When I glance away from the nurse and the mute children I look towards the house, and through the door panel I see my wife, Kitty and her lover, Paul, and they are standing in an embrace, their fingers, their arms entwined. Rage burns through me, pure malice, hatred and mania! I look down at Jane, at that mute child whose porcelain face is beaming like a light, full of adoration for me and for her hope. Yet I cannot see beyond the confusion of my anger. All that I can think about, the madness that consumes me, is the punishment I wish upon those two devils.

'See them, Jane, look at them!' my mind screams, and I am pointing to the door and the lovers framed therein. 'Look, child,' I scream, but my voice, just like Jane's, is silent, only my mouth, my lips form silent, angry words. I have become in that instant a funeral mummer, wanting someone to bear witness to Kitty's maleficia and Paul's ungodly betrayal. Here is my crisis point, and it erupts like so many thousand other stories of infidelity have erupted, into sheer torment and fury, and I am vowing my vengeance upon the cuckolds. The child standing beside me proffers her bouquet, and I snatch away the flowers, just like that other horrible little boy has done on that other, fated Friday afternoon, and I grip her by the upper arm, squeezing till her eyes weep tears of pain. It is with ignominy that I here relate how I threw the innocent to the ground and how I wanted to strike her and strike her again.

How I must have looked like the beast, the ogre, puffed up with impotent wrath, my eyes ablaze, my teeth set in a fury, but to my disgrace how could I expect the dumb little child to understand? There are tears streaming from her eyes, tears of terror and of betrayal, and for one ghastly and yet revelatory moment my mind flashes as if it knows the answer to her silent anguish, but my mind does not care. Such dreadful sins we wreak upon others, how we, cruel and violent adults, make the children to suffer. How is it, that in my ire I have somehow unknotted the corded puzzle of Jane's muteness, and that I now understand her innocence has been violated and defiled and that her body has been abused? Pritchard's dabbling with Freud strike a note in my head, but by that time Jane has crawled into her silence to protect herself, crawled away from a most horrible life, not trusting in fathers, not trusting now in Dr. Jekyll's higher man! The little girl covers her face with her hands, and in fear and in shame, feebly attempting to guard herself against the wave of violence that must ensue, that must beat her and abuse her body and mind, she sobs without sound. She is too terrified to even look at me, but I know it is not my face that she has glimpsed in that moment, but the face of that other, the demon, the monster, Edward Hyde.

A shiver of self-disgust goes through me and I finally realise that I transgress, that I destroy the only decent part of myself when I lash out. Striking the child reduces me to the basest of all animals. The flowers at my feet lie broken and Jane scrabbles to her feet, her folkweave smock begrimed, and there is a bruise upon her arm. Wiping the tears from her cheeks she flees in terror. I want to call her back, to reassure her that I will never hurt her again, but she runs, runs like the rabbit from the butcher, the madman sharpening his knife to skin her alive.

'What have I done? What have I done?'

Like one caught in a horrible dream I spin about and stagger back to the sanctuary that is my laboratory. I cannot scream out my agony so the monkey, Totò, screams in my stead, and as his shrieks reach crescendo pitch I put my hands over my ears to block out the sound. Totò begins to jump about in a crazy agitation, throwing himself violently against the bars, almost breaking his own bones in the fury, and baring his teeth, his eyes wild. Standing there, my own eyes staring crazily and with my fingers plugging up my ears, the rhesus defecates, a gross brown jet of liquescent excrement squirting over his fur, his thigh and onto the straw. Totò swipes at me, screeching, and he scoops a claw-full of the filth and flings it through the bars into my face, into my mouth. Bespattered with feculence, in the madness of the moment, I am blinded, and my throat contracts and my tongue ingests, and with a convulsive coughing gag I cannot prevent swallowing. Collapsing in the next moment, Totò's eyes roll into white and the monkey goes limp and drops to the floor of his cage, overtaken by a fit and then with absolute fatigue, and I gag as I flush my face in the sluice, vomiting as I do so. After the frenzy abates I check the cage, and Totò has fallen into sleep, reeking in the tarn of his foul discharge. Giddily I go to my desk, wiping my face dry with a rag, and the floor is coming up to meet me, the earth is shaking. With trembling hands, I reach for my journal, and I open it, almost ripping the paper with benumbed fingers. Groaning I take up a quill and I begin to write, though my script is crabbed and the words are scribbled and disjointed.

'I now know that I must exorcise him. I must reject his dominance and expel him from my life. I must find a way to somehow drive out his control before I am driven to an act from which I can never…'

Lo! My hand wavers! My fingers tremble even more than they trembled before. In this uncontrollable shivering paroxysm, I gasp and I cannot catch my breath. I behold the miracle taking place right before my eyes, see the change being written in my skin, the wrinkles smoothing away, the bushy beard retracting, and the streaks of grey vanishing. Some dark magic is unfolding and I can hear the caul of my soul in its stridor. I can smell an ambrosial pot-pourri of flowers, of sweat and of blood. My ears are tuned to a cadent sonance, it is the dulcimer that I hear, the solmization in the timbre of my voice. There are bells ringing out the most sweet and harmonious music, and a choir. I am singular and yet I am two, I am whole and yet I am fragments in the beast that is nothingness. I am the sky above the mountains, I am the abyss below the sea. I am the dark side of the moon and the hot core of a star. I am forgiven and I am condemned. I am the ancient and I am the new. My eyes are filled with light and glory…

The trembling of the earth ceases abruptly and a serenity washes over my being. The words in the journal are now elegantly rendered in the most beautiful Roundhand script, more smooth and confident in their execution.

'I have returned- by my own will,' the letters proclaim. 'I am free!'

'How could you let yourself get into the hands of such a man?' asks Kitty and there is desperation in her voice. Paul is picking up his hat and his gloves, preparing to leave. They have been free to love but neither of them are free to live.

'You and Henry left me no alternative,' he reasons, and it is a coward's reasoning, even now unable to take responsibility for his gambling impulses. He moves towards the door. Kitty feels that she should be offended by his words but she pathetically still only wants his love.

'Paul,' Kitty pleads in desperation, holding him by the arm, arresting him before he departs, 'we should have had the courage to go away together a long time ago.'

'Then how wretched are we that we did not?'

'It doesn't matter, surely. Let us abandon this miserable place. I beg of you.'

'Darling, Kitty,' says Paul, and there is horrible resignation written in his face. 'You know so little about me, about my history. If you did know you might not like me so much. You could never love me.'

'Let's forget all of that. I love you, Paul, is that not enough? All your melodramas are in the past, and all my chains are now breaking. If the links come apart and the fetters are cast off, then we are now longer slaves to our unhappiness, are we?'

'Even if our love survived those truths, how could we exist on my gambling losses?'

'Make that your history too, my love. Don't go back there.'

Kitty reaches up her slender hand and gently touches Paul's cheek. 'Am I not worth the sacrifice? Is the sake of our love not worth our starting anew?'

'Oh, I'm so sorry to intrude!'

The lovers turn suddenly and break apart.

'Mr. Hyde!' exclaims Kitty with a voice less confident, a voice tinged with fear and weakened by attrition. Hyde stands in the parlour door, his face emotionless as if it is made of wax. He is splendid in his fashion, sartorially elegant, with his black coat and white shirt, his red satin vest and his silk imperial tie.

'What the devil are you doing here?' ejaculates Paul angrily.

'I have a message from your husband, Mrs. Jekyll.'

'He could have delivered it himself. He is a coward. Keep your message, Mr. Hyde. I do not care.'

'Please,' returns Hyde, 'it is important. Henry has decided to forsake a situation which is too difficult for him to contend. He has asked me, as his only friend, to implore you for a final reckoning… tonight at the Khazneh.'

'Oh, Paul,' implores Kitty, lowly, so that Hyde should not hear. 'Don't listen to him.'

'Henry wishes that our last evening together should be a happy one.'

The lovers are silent, staring with incredulity at their tormentor and the imposture of this request. How could anything be happy at this moment, how can the presence of the smarmy Edward Hyde fool anyone into calm? Kitty suspects something unpleasant and she is hesitant to answer.

'Until tonight then, Mrs. Jekyll?' insists Hyde, placing a weighty emphasis on Kitty's appellation. The words are an omen, foreshadowing evil, and Kitty feels this evil, for the man's words have made her shiver. She feels sick to her stomach, once again snared as if she were someone's property, this time Edward Hyde's property.

'Paul?'

Paul's eyes are looking into space and he does not answer, and Kitty watches Hyde's smile melt away in his victory, but he steps back, not waiting for their acceptance, and his form retreats and vanishes.

'I wonder what he is up to?' says Paul when he and Kitty are again alone.

'I don't want to know,' replies Kitty, her dread roiling havoc inside her lovely, supple body as she remembers the terrible scream and Hyde's assault on the beggar in Morley Street. 'I don't want to go, Paul. I'm frightened.'

Paul holds her reassuringly, and then a light comes into his eyes. 'Listen, Kitty,' Paul says at length, 'this could be the solution to all of our problems. If Henry has decided to get out then he's bound to make a decent settlement…'

'No, Paul. We should forget it and leave tonight. That man, Hyde, he terrifies me.'

Paul is not listening, his mind is whirling like a roulette wheel, and the cards are all a falling suite of winning aces. 'What a fool I am,' he smiles, and he kisses Kitty on the forehead. 'What an idiotic fool.'

Chapter 15

Burial of Rats

'Poke out the nests and block up the holes!'

Robert Browning

With my Gladstone bag in hand, I stood in the foggy midnight looking up at the lamp-lit sign, Bullstrode and Holroyd - Mortician & Undertaker. The moon was alight and chrome, shining mistily through the thin veil of fog, and the night air was cold and I shivered as I looked cautiously around to check that no one saw. The translucent fog wafted up from the river bringing with it the faint miasma of tanning brine. A leather tanning factory lay upstream, and the scum from the soaked hides flushed into the flowing waters. With a wrinkle of disgust twisting my lips I conjectured the vile nature of the tanning process, and I mused how the adjoining upstream neighbourhood could by no means have been described as a pleasant place to live. Similarly, the thought of living next to a funeral home must have, no doubt, inspired a similar disgust in the mind of any neighbour. I glanced about but there were no lights glowing in the windows of any of the nearby buildings. That intermittent waft aside, no other unpleasant element made itself evident. There was no noise in the street, no carriage rolled along the cobbles, no man offered coin, no fallen woman lifted her skirts illicitly in the byways, no dog was barking- no doubt because it was late by the clock. The absence of sound made me feel slightly ill at ease.

For some unaccountable reason, perhaps it was because I was once again at the funeral parlour, I began reflecting upon my youth. How my head was assailed by a weird free-floating agitation. Regarding the funeral home, although I do not believe it haunted by the dead souls who were shuffled through the mortuary, I felt a strange trepidation. Across my face I felt a sneer of contempt furrow into brow and lip, and it was William Fortune's face I saw when I did not wish to see it, laughing at me as I fled the viewing chapel. No matter what, I swore, that man would never get his grubby hands on my business or any of my money. Although I had actively distanced myself from its running and its concerns, my mother was the business woman who had all of that in control. Maybe, on a deeper and unspoken level she resented me for my inherited rights, and too for my hatred of her second husband, but perhaps she also realised quite early on that undertaking would never have suited me as a profession. It was not that I harboured any revulsion concerning the grotesque aspects of the business, contrarily it stimulated my mind with ideas on a level that did not concern the parameters of the grave, but I bore no fear of the dead. Although mother sometimes groaned that my head was full of 'soft stuff', she advocated perhaps a little too easily for my sojourn to Oxford, to forcibly expel me into the land of the living. Counter to my fear of humanity, I looked forward to the day of my departure. No doubt, at Oxford, in the gross examinations of death that required my participation, I excelled, but I gave not one thought to the embalmer's table or the coffin. I wanted not to finish university only to take up somewhere as a general practitioner, but my path lay in science. My goal was to seek deep into the fabric of man, into the body, into the mind, and know the secrets of both flesh and thought, to investigate the duality of being. All they could ever do, mother and William Fortune, was laugh at my intention. After a moment, I shook my head and cleared away the cobwebs in my mind, for I had come with purpose and must not permit the past to occlude my vision.

Moving away from the main building I walked toward the rear of the establishment and the stables. For some curious reason I felt nervous again, and I could not explain this frame of mind for it troubled me. Leaving the streetlight behind and navigating the narrow alley beside the premises, it was difficult to see in the dark, and the mist was thick, but I beheld a crack of light emanating from beneath the door to an adjoining building. With a quiet step, I walked over to the shed and the past familiar perfume of shaved timbers and lacquer came to my nostrils. Raising my fingers, I reached for the door, and as my fingers met the timber, from somewhere within, I heard the whisper, a faint and mellifluous sound that I almost imagined was real. My heartbeat tripped inside my chest and its thumping became the dominant sound. Yes, I hesitated, foolish in my moment of anxiety. Faintly, the whisper came again.

'Markheim…' The ghostly refrain echoed in the dark until it trailed away in the breeze, a swirl of crisped leaves danced a mad eddy about my feet, and I pushed on the door and it opened slowly and without a creak. The leaves blew in across the floor. Here was the coffin workshop where a dozen different boxes, from a simple elm to an elaborate cedar casket, were stationed on trestles. With a tentative step, I paused to look about. The sing-song call did not come again, that name did not come again, and I sighed with nervous relief. My imagination was playing tricks upon my mind and it would not do at all to become distracted. The floor was unexpectedly clean, the timber shavings had been raked and swept and stuffed into hessian bags, a great coil of rope hung from a strut, in a rack beside a long cutting table were bolts of silks and other cloths for trimming. Silk linings were tacked inside most of the coffins, and polished crosses decorated a few lids, some had handles made of rope and others bore long bars and scrolls forged from iron. The workshop, lit by a single hanging lantern, swam with dulled light around which a death's-head moth fluttered, and the space was as cold as ice. Illumination from the lamp was so weak that I found myself squinting, trying to focus amid the shadows on what it was that I sought. With a shudder, I pulled my coat tighter in a failing attempt to keep warm.

'Markheim,' the whisper called again, mellifluous and sibilant in the misty air. Furtively my eyes tracked the dim surrounds for the direction of the voice. In a blink, they came to rest on a coffin that looked strangely out of place where it rested at the rear of the workshop. A bold compulsion bid me approach it, and it was black where none of the other coffins were black, roiling within the shadows and reeking of wood-stain. Moisture was condensing on the oblong box, and the cold, it was glacial, as if winter were about to awake from under the lid. When I looked down upon it, the coffin lid began to slide back. A hand, cold like ice, erupted from the box and gripped my forearm in a vice as tenacious as steel.

'Markheim!' I heard the name shouted with violence and anger, and it was a sound uttered as if it had been made by an animal that had learned the art of human speech. With a start, my heart took a panicked leap into my throat, nearly bursting from my chest, and I dropped my Gladstone bag. Madly I struck at the grasping hand and tried to pull away. The dead actor, Edward Kendal Sheridan Lionheart, hauled himself from the casket, letting go of my wrist and stumbling erect. He was dressed as Macbeth, and he was laughing, almost to the point of madness.

'Oh, you should see your face!' he ejaculated brokenly, pointing at me and doubling over at his waist. His mirth could not be contained. When he stood up he was clawing at his own face, and he was peeling away his moustache and beard, and then he threw the disgusting wads of hair at me and they struck my face and then fell at my feet. For one ghastly moment, I thought that I might cry out and be sick at the same time, and then I realised in my madness that the dead actor had been but a phantasm. It was a full minute before I could restore my nerve and calm the irrational foolishness in my head. Confused and offended and startled, all in the same instant, I stumbled back and looked away, and I gasped and wondered if my mind were coming undone. I could not let the ghosts of the past assail me now, not when I needed my nerve to accomplish the deed that I had to do.

'Now I am seeing ghosts,' I breathed, shaking my head and picking up my bag, and gripping the handle so tight that my knuckles turned white. Almost sprinting from the workshop, I headed towards the house, to the back entrance of the parlour and pushed the door ajar slowly.

'Why isn't it locked?' I questioned, and my heart beat with further expectation, for I wanted no more ghosts to assail me this night. I did not need anyone's help to guide me through the house, for I knew every step and every hallway and every room and every shadow. Soon I climbed the stairs, the treads lined with olive green carpet, and my boots made no sound, and in a moment, I was upon the threshold of a cedar door. Here I opened my bag and removed a piece of cloth and a stoppered bottle of clear, sweet-smelling fluid.

'Open the door,' I commanded myself, for it seemed easier a thing to do if I gave over instructions, and so my fingers turned the porcelain handle and gently pushed. The room beyond swam with the foggy illumination of the moon, for its silver beams flowed milky through the window where the heavy curtains were not drawn. The opaque moonlight revealed the hulking monstrosities of furniture dark and ornate, made of walnut, and with barley sugar twists. There was a wash stand with a bevelled mirror, a plain ceramic jug and bowl and a little silver trinket box that sparkled in the moonbeams. Of course, there was the bed, that opulent and overblown miscreation of tubular brass with its end boards all wrought with scrolls and curves and floral designs. It hardly seemed a fittingly masculine bower for the man who slept within- Mr. William Fortune. On the right of the bed I approached and stood, looking down at the sleeping occupant. As I placed my Gladstone bag gently on the carpet I imagined myself a black angel, the bringer of justice, my world vindicated, towering over him. I was poised to throw my weight upon the man and to hold him down. Prostrate on his back, his head sunk into the feathers of a duck-down pillow, snoring, Fortune slept rather fitfully, twitching in his sleep, visiting no doubt where tumbling shades abide.

Abruptly I moved, and I shook Mr. William Fortune rudely awake, and sputtering the man tried to sit. My hands clamped upon Fortune's face and I roughly thrust him back upon his pillow. Fortune's eyes popped open to their extremes, knowing his bedroom invaded, and I saw a glint of recognition there too, for he saw my features and knew my face. With equal speed, I leapt upon him and held the chloroform soaked cloth to Fortune's mouth and nose. He gave a startled, choking gasp in a futile effort to hold his breath, but a sharp jab to the ribs made him suck in air. With a wild convulsion I heard him gurgle, almost as if he were upon the point of vomiting, before the sound was abruptly cut off and there ensued a brief struggle, tousling about in the net of bed sheets. Wildly he began clawing at his assailant, but I brutally clamped my quarry down under the weight of my own body, and his flesh was warm and fervid against my clothes. Soon Fortune's eyes rolled back revealing their white balls, and he dropped away into unconsciousness as swiftly as a passing dream slides by.

'How long can a rat hold its breath?' I asked myself aloud, and straightening I reminded myself to hurry, for the unconscious man would only be gone from reality for a few short moments. Stuffing the chloroform soaked rag back into my Gladstone bag, I re-corked the chemical and clipped it into its little pocket, and shut the satchel. Reaching forward and with some little effort I pulled William Fortune from his ostentatious bed and slung the man up and over my shoulder.

When my stepfather opened his eyes, in the absolute dark, in a heaving sea of black and dread, he would have tried to scream, but finding his mouth gagged, such an alarm would have proved useless. Too, he would have tried to move, but again, he would have found his limbs bound and that a struggle to liberate his extremities would have been quite futile. Then he would have experienced a strange disorientation in his darkness, in the movement that carried him along. A swaying and rocking and rolling motion as if he were upon a ship at sea, strange, and I dare say his terror would have been utterly profound. What do you think he might have heard? All the sounds that would have fallen upon his ear would have been muffled and muted, and there would have been stretches of silence in which he could have heard only the sound of silence. His auditory senses would have sent through his mind a thrill or two of sheer terror.

Mr. Fortune's journey lasted a long and yet a short time- short because terror always protracts the moment and long because the space of half an hour of fear becomes an eternity as you ride past midnight. He would have perhaps realised that he was held captive in the dark and being driven in a carriage, perhaps he heard the crack of the whip or the dull rumble of wheel over cobble, the strike of iron shoe and neighing. His mind would have tripped and screamed and begged and pleaded for release and for explanation, but of course none would have been forthcoming. Eventually the swaying motion would have ceased and a brief stillness would have been of small succour, a lesser respite in which he would have heard nothing but the pounding of his own thumping heart, a gap in which he knew himself perched upon an unknowable precipice and could only contemplate the enormity of his kidnap. Lo! I heard him trying to thrash about wildly, from left to right within his enclosed prison, banging his head and thumping like a trapped cat driven wild in panic. Through the darkness he would have heard the muffled noise of footsteps in gravel, and the ever escalating crescendo of his own bursting heart. He would have felt the tilt and the thump as his prison was lowered and dragged along the ground, and once that motion stopped he would have sensed only stillness again.

I opened the box.

Mr. William Fortune lay within, and he looked out, looked up, and he saw by the yellow glow of a hurricane lantern that he was in a dark space, but he did not know where. The light from the lamp was pale and jaundiced and it danced the dark, making the shadows whirl as if they tripped at the lip of the inferno. Confused, the man lay within a rude box- no elegantly polished casket for him, just a rough-hewn crate that Paul had knocked together quickly at my request, a box with no handles and no escutcheons. The man was naked and shivering, for I had stripped him of his nightdress, and there was a gag in his mouth, a dirty rag torn from his undergarments, stuffed between his lips to prevent his cries from being heard. Not that he would be have been heard, not in this place. I reached into the coffin and I loosened the gag, and as he spat out the cloth he gasped for breath. His lips were flecked with bubbles of foam.

'What are you doing?' he bawled, recognising my face as it swam in the amber beams of the hurricane lamp. 'You must be mad!'

'I hope you tasted your own shit!' I spat at him. Fortune began to scream aloud, but I informed him that it was a futile effort that he made to be heard, to attract a saviour, for here there was nobody about but the two of us. No one would come. He tried to move his arms and legs, but found to his horror that his arms were roped tightly and the ropes nailed to the inside of the box. The same was done to his legs, looped about his ankles and thighs, but unlike his arms they were bent upward at the knee and raised as much as the box depth would allow the lid to be sealed neatly, and held apart, as wide as they could be. It was then that he realised that he was bound inside a coffin. A board, cut with an arc to accommodate the shape of his body, was nailed across the torso, thus dividing the top half of his body from the bottom. I gave a laugh of disgust at his scrawny, naked body shivering. He looked like a plucked chicken, his ribs showing and his skin pimpled with goose-flesh. His genitals were wet with urine for he had peed, and his eyes were wild and delirious with terror.

'What are you doing? This is insane! I always knew that there was something fucking twisted about you, boy!'

'You can't even call me Henry. You never could, and I hate it when you call me 'boy',' I said coldly.

'Get me out of this box. Get me out!'

'Save your rant,' I advised, and I left the coffin briefly only to re-emerge bearing a sack of hessian that throbbed as if it were filled with something indescribably obscene. Dropping the sack at my feet I stepped aside.

'Please,' pleaded Fortune, 'don't bury me alive!'

I laughed as if at a joke, and I held up an instrument that gleamed pewter in the flickering shades. 'I'm not going to bury you alive,' I said reassuringly, smiling as I said the words. 'Burial will be the least painful part,' I told my captive, and I showed him a tin funnel with a reservoir that narrowed into a three-inch-wide, tapered tube. Fortune gasped and yelled and he bucked against his restraints. Perhaps he anticipated what it was that I intended to do as I hovered the funnel before his face, waving it back and forth and then I dragged it agonisingly slowly over the expanse of his white and quivering flesh, over his belly and lower, lower.

'Did you know,' I uttered conversationally, 'that a mouse can exist for a considerable time without much air?'

Of course, Fortune in his terror could not reply.

'Why the fuck should I care?'

'Why, no, you wouldn't. Of course, I too did not know that trivial little fact,' I said, as if I were answering myself. 'Though I know little about mice, I do happen to possess a sack full of rats!'

Fortune gasped and made a curse.

'Have you fetched them here?' I went on, pointing to the grimy sack from which came forth the sound and pitch of squeals. Mr. Fortune writhed and screamed aloud, trying vainly to raise an alarm.

'I suppose you want to know why?'

Uttering these words, I reached towards Fortune's face and I pinched at the prisoner's mouth. 'Well, I suppose every condemned man might ask after his fate. We are not in Tower Hamlets, nor Highgate, but in Kensal Green, and not far from here is the grave of a dead actor, Mr. Edward Lionheart. His last performance on the Continent gave me the idea for my vengeance upon you.' I raised the lantern and the light insipidly washed up the walls, revealing mossy rough-hewn granite and high festoons of spider silk. William Fortune wrenched violently at his bonds, but the ropes that bound his wrists and his legs only bit into his skin and did not loosen.

'You really didn't think you'd get away with it, did you?'

'Get away with what?' ejaculated Mr. Fortune.

'Poisoner!' I spat, and then I laughed.

'Poisoner?' he managed in his distress. 'I haven't poisoned anyone. What madness are you speaking?'

Without stuffing the gag again into his mouth, I let him scream and I turned and glanced down at the undulating sack near my feet. I watched impassively as it pulsated and then turned my attention again to Fortune as he thrashed his face from side to side, choking off the stream of pleas and invective and prayers that began to spill from his throat, but he knew his doom. The man then evacuated his bowels, and writhed and squirmed in a puddle of offensive smelling brown faecal muck.

'Dirty!' I remarked. 'Dirty man. Perhaps I should have left your underwear on!'

William Fortune's scream of pain was strangled in his throat and his bony frame went as stiff as a plank of oak as I inserted the tin funnel deeply into his body. Twisting and pushing I wedged it tightly in between his splayed thighs so that he could not force it out, and all the while he gagged and groaned, his fingers balling into fists. After that I lifted the lid of the coffin and nailed the lid closed, sealing him up in the dark. Through a rough hole in the foot end of the box I stuffed a handful of straw, and then another and another, and then, untying the hessian bag I prodded its contents. Out of the bag and into the hole in the lid now spilled a stream of black rats, a dozen at least, eight to ten inches long with thick, darting tails and eyes like burning rubies, plump and fat like puppies, just like the rat catcher at the Alhambra had informed me before he died. In a frenzy, I heard them scurrying within the confines of the coffin, dashing about and screeching in the dark, scratching and scampering in the narrow space, running their furry bodies in a tumult of panic over the captive's legs and thighs, but unable to go further, unable to escape. Fortune screamed and bawled as he felt the rats on his flesh, and then I struck a flint and I set the taper to the bright green piece of wallpaper that I had peeled from my mother's bedroom wall. The flame burst into nacarat, the orange glow lit my face and my smile, and I poked the burning paper through the aperture. The flame caught the straw and a tendril of smoke began to trail from the hole in the box. As the straw caught alight, I listened, and the rats squealed and dashed away from the heat and the smoke and the fire, into the black throat of the funnel, and into the cavern of William Fortune's intestines.

'No!' I heard him shriek. 'No, Markheim, no!'

I heard the accusatory appellation and I went white in a fury, for my name is not Markheim, no, that is my father's name! I could only imagine why William Fortune would have called me that, in his animosity for me, and I stopped up my ears though the name rang in them like the echo of a pealing bell, spiking a pain in my head that speared through to my nerve ends. What came next, as I shut out the sound of William Fortune's outraged screams, was the sound of something worse. There came the clamour of a wild thrashing, and of wetness and squelching and of an obscene chewing as the rodents began to tear and bite inside of his body in their terror to gain liberty. The result was that the unlucky fellow must have died in a most unbearable agony. Yes, the veracity of the matter of the Acanthus leaf wallpaper plastered all over mother's bedchamber, full of hydrogen arsenite, was going mouldy in the rising damp and giving off toxic vapours. That was the reason for the odd smell like garlic tubers suffocating the airs in her room, the reason for her ill distempers and the true cause of my mother's swooning demise. Indeed, her death has been the process of arsenic poisoning, yet not by her second husband's grubby, money-hungry hand, but by vainglory and foolishness. Regardless that he did not actually poison my mother, I hated Mr. William Fortune anyway, and I had but helped him into the afterlife, a deserving fate for the opportunistic, flea-ridden rat that he was.

Chapter 16

The Pattern of Justice

'The unconscious sends all sorts of vapours… terrors and deluding images up into the mind…jewels…and dangerous jinn.'

Joseph Campbell

Ah, Dr. Jekyll, as we have observed, is caught in the sweep of the pendulum. Mr. Hyde now visits quite frequently, and with savagery, and without invitation. A battle of wills is unfolding, a contest for who shall dominate the flesh, but it is a nightmare because Dr. Jekyll's left hand does not know who Mr. Hyde's right hand is killing! It is revealed that the good Dr. Jekyll has not always been so good! His past has predisposed him to the imbalance of violence and revenge, of childhood morbidity and madness, and perhaps that is the crux of his weakness. Perhaps that is why the rake Mr. Hyde has such a tenacious grip on his mind, on his body. So be prepared on our tour this evening for the unpredictable, for we shall meet them both again, but do not be nervous- be horrified! Once more we pass beneath this carved faux Nabataean portico, and yet again we are thrust into the Khazneh's temple of debauchery. Drawn to this palace of sin are we, like that moth that could not resist the flame, to pass between its columns and carved garlands, to go under the talons of those high and four stone eagles, to only glimpse in our haste the sculpted friezes of dancing Amazons. We know that here we have come to expect less of virtue and more of vice, to laugh at probity and revel in obliquity. It is with verve that we again encounter our thirst for dissoluteness and unrestraint, meet with joy our greed for the flesh and the sybaritical, and tonight, beyond the spectacle of the music hall, as Mayati in her dressing room selects her crimson gown, unspeakable horror too!

Within, we now witness a tumult of colour and the high energy sensation that has whirled and spun across the channel, from the left bank of the Seine, from Montparnasse, home of the Muses, the dance hall and the cabaret. With all the glitter of the rue de la Gaité, aglow with myriad and gloriously spinning hues, we see the Spectacle Varié. Tonight, is scented with the erotic perfume of the Parisian brothel. Oh, listen, it is Offenbach's Infernal Galop blaring in a torrential outburst of sound, and witness! Is the cancan not thrilling, and scandalous? Quick, let us find a table amid the crowd and the noise and the uproar, so loud is the trumpet and the piano, the strum of the guitar, and the burst of the cymbal. Look! Here come the dancers, ah, not quite what you expect, but a chorus of beautiful men, the Quadrille des Clodeches.

All eight of them fine specimens, their faces handsome, their wide chests clean shaved, their physiques rippling, a male burlesque of black trousers and black suspenders that crisscross bared nipple and nape, with biceps and muscles and bulging crotches. Four are dressed as women, twisting and turning with provocative movement and erotic connotation, lifting their skirts, a swishing tide of red and pink and purple and green and underneath white, white petticoats, revealing lacy drawers and black netted stockings. See them bending over and pointing their wriggling bottoms at us, and see their partners poke out their tongues and twist their arms, and with their abandoned, gyrating hips, behold, they mimic the thrusts of lovemaking! So, you are amazed at the rotary knee and the grasping of the ankle, at the body that leaps and bounds and lifts the leg high, it is fun is it not? You can see right up in between their legs when they split, and it makes your pulse run, doesn't it? It excites you, the thought of all that hard and throbbing manhood! What does it feel like, what does it taste like? Ah! All those men entangled in your wanting skin all at once, thrusting, heaving, and killing you with lust! You say yes, and despite the blush upon your cheek, you applaud and want to join in the vigorous conflagration of sound and colour and skin. You want to taste that lovely skin, to be in the grip of the dancer, of all the dancers at once, to immerse yourself in sweat, to revel in their potent essences. Don't hold back, reach out, go on, touch it, grasp it, stroke it- kiss it! It is no sin young ladies, and young sirs, to want to dance with these athletic French bucks, to feel the velvet of their skins and the pulses of their simmering flesh. You are all hypnotised, I can see it is true, entranced by the spectacle of glorious male skin unvanquished, lassoed by the music, spellbound by the rhythms, drowned in the sweltering exudate, screaming for those muscled thighs to grip you in their vice. Ah, the riot of pleasure enjoyed by all who are here! Oh, but if the joy could only last longer than one night! Yes, you may whoop and yell, join in, goad them on, for they are skilled and wickedly adventurous, and may your eyes pop as these gorgeous men display their specialties, as they perform the rond de jambe and the battement, as they twist with the port d'armes and flip with the cartwheel. As they climax with the grand écart, leaping high with the flying jump-split.

Sadly, for the present, we must leave the spinning vista of the cancan with its dance and its merry cheer, and we must go upstairs, up above the glass domed ceiling and down the iron-lace glacis and into Mayati's room. In her private, backstage boudoir we shall find our Mr. Edward Hyde is with his courtesan, and he takes her by the arm. She is dressed in a gown of crimson velvet; a silk scarf veils her thick black tresses but it does not obscure her face. Her body burns like a flickering taper.

'Now, you do understand all my instructions, don't you?' says Hyde, but Mayati does not answer. She can hear the tumult of song and cheer as it emanates from the lower floor, and to some it might be an aria, a prelude to pleasure, but to her, under the rubic of exile that Hyde has offered, there is no song, no dance, no show that she wishes to perform on this night if it is not with him.

'As soon as I get this business over,' Hyde continues, and his voice is as smooth as brandy and his smile as sweet as honey, 'I shall join you there.'

He gives her a key and he whispers some secret directive, and Mayati does not even blink an eye for she does not truly believe in him, but she is nonetheless compelled. She clutches the key in her palm. It opens a door, but will it open a door to a new life, to a loving heart, or is it the key to something torturously worse? To believe in Edward is to believe that the madness of dangerous pleasure can bring happiness. Mayati has had her conviction shaken, and though she is driven by the will of another she is grasping at a dream. Over there, in that green field of flowers is promised a joy and fulfillment that has never been hers, but here, in this dreadful prison, what is there for her to explore? Nothing, she admits to herself, there is nothing but shadows and guilt and regret and exploitation, nothing but the twisted desires of bourgeois men who want only to discover their own perverse longings, to enjoy the forbidden eros of sado-masochistic, sphincteral love. Edward Hyde gives her a chaste kiss on the cheek. Mayati cannot fathom her own feelings, trapped as she is in a situation of violence but being unable to leave it and to be true to herself.

'Don't keep me waiting too long,' whispers Mayati, a fool for love and a fool for desire, a fool dancing around the flaring rim of the inferno. Hyde escorts her to the door, and without a glance backward she passes through. When Hyde closes the chamber door he turns about, and a cold, cold smile freezes his lips into a rictus. Cloaked in red, Mayati releases herself from the Khazneh. She climbs up into a hansom cab and closes the fly, giving the driver the address, and the cabby taps his whip to flank and the chestnut mare clops off, just as another carriage pulls in behind. From that carriage a couple descend, and at the top of the stairs, under the eyes of stone eagles they pause, their feet hesitant. They stop and the birds watch them, impassively, hovering like a judgment and ready to tear them apart with sickle claws. From inside the cabaret the man and the woman can hear the lively cacophony of music and merriment, and there is a strange apprehension etched into the woman's lovely face. It is Kitty and Paul, arrived under Edward Hyde's instructions, but Kitty has forsaken her usually bright and glamorous attire for a gown of blackest crêpe. How white her skin looks, niveous against the black cloth, white like porcelain, white with fear. She is even wearing black gloves and a black veil, which she peels aside and drapes over her shoulders. One could forgive her the notion that she has dressed for a funeral.

'I had no idea that Henry was familiar with this place,' she remarks nervously, and Paul can offer no reply.

Mr. Allen looks about as the two enter the cavalcade of the music hall. The male troupe perform their routine with alacrity, shedding their clothing as they dance, almost completely naked now and wet with sweat.

'It seems to me,' says Paul after making a brief sweep of the arena, 'that we never quite knew Henry as well as we thought.'

Paul speaks to the Major Domo. How androgynous she is, standing erect and self-conscious in her pose, overseeing the colourful diversity of her night culture, with her close-cropped hair, her slim form stitched into the monochrome geometry of her suit and shirt and vest.

'Where is Mr. Hyde?'

The Major Domo returns her answer in Spanish.

'Todo está prepardo en la sala de la Señora.'

'Indeed,' returns Paul. He glances to Kitty and their eyes meet, and there is a silent question poised upon her ruby lips.

'Por favour, Señor Hyde te esta esperando.'

'Perhaps,' says Paul, 'I think I had better go and see what this fellow is up to. You wait here.'

'Oh, I don't want to be alone!'

'You will be all right. Everything will be all right.'

'Don't be long, Paul.' There is a hint of both fear and desperation in Kitty's voice. Involuntarily she grips at Paul's arm, as if to stay him, bind him to the spot.

'Champagne para el Señora?' asks the Major Domo.

The androgynous woman escorts Kitty to a table away from the dance floor, and she snaps her fingers, summoning a waiter. Kitty waits and watches all clothed in her mantle of black, a raven among the birds of paradise, and her heart is taken by a curious detachment as the revel spills over into the crowd. Everyone is dancing, old satyrs and young women, young women and young men, old men and young men, women and women. Kitty does not understand at all why she worries so or why she is trembling, why there is little delight and satisfaction in the gaiety that whirls about her, but she is agitated nonetheless and can find no peace of mind. She hopes that Paul will return soon.

In Mayati's dressing room Hyde is waiting for Henry Jekyll's guests. He has ordered a table to be set out for dinner, for four, laid with fine china and silverware and crystal, a salt cellar, a small cruet-stand and other savoury and sweet condiments. There is a menu card that promises the delectable:

'Muscles Sautéed with Herbs, Sauce Blanche (La Valene), Asparagus, Mousserons, Carrots and Peas and Lemon Water Ice'.

It is a luscious meal no doubt, one to savour under the vase overflowing with red and yellow carnations and roses in the centre of the setting. Hyde is fingering a card that he at last places strategically in among the flowers. Satisfied with himself, Edward Hyde casts a quick glance about. He has put away the stone phallus and the bust of Akhenaten, all baubles and jewellery have been stored in drawers, the doors to the snake cage and the bedroom have been discretely closed. He has placed a bottle of Spanish Champagne to chill in an ice bucket and from his vest pocket he produces a little white envelope, and pours from it a powder, into one of the glasses on the table. There comes the anticipated knock upon the door.

'Come in,' says Hyde, and for a moment he feels like the big, bad wolf in the fairy tale who has eaten up Granny with large, sharp teeth and donned her likeness, to lie in wait for the prey. Paul enters, and closes the door, and Mr. Hyde is standing by the table with his back to his guest.

'Ah, my dear, Paul,' Hyde simpers, 'how considerate of you to be on time.' As he speaks Edward rearranges and fusses with the roses, but Paul finds he dislikes the attitude and the way that Hyde has spoken.

'What exactly do you mean, Hyde?'

Edward looks around, his brow is creased with consternation.

'Where is your enchanting mistress? We can't possibly have our party without Kitty.' Paul crosses the room and stands before his host.

'Surely we can leave Kitty out of this?'

'I don't think so,' remarks Hyde as he curls his fingers about the neck of the champagne bottle, stroking it phallically and twisting the bottle about in the ice. How the ice and the champagne reminds him so of Kitty, cold and frozen and yet luscious...

'Well I do think so,' says Paul firmly. 'She is going to wait downstairs in the cabaret until this damned business is over.' Paul looks about the room. 'Where's Henry?'

'Naturally you are impatient to see your old friend,' chortles Hyde, and Paul Allen finds the hairs on the nape of his neck unaccountably bristling. 'I thought it would be nice if we shared a toast to our new lives.' Hyde pours two glasses of sparkling wine and hands one to Paul. 'Cheers,' he offers salutation, and both drink, Paul hesitantly, watching Hyde above the rim of his glass. There is something colder and nastier about this man tonight, thinks Paul as he places his empty glass back upon the table.

'Shall we get on with it?'

'By all means,' replies Hyde.

Mr. Hyde steps towards another door, an adjoining apartment. 'Henry would like to speak to you first, privately.' He opens the door and waves Paul within.

'What the devil is all of this?' asks Paul, and his ire is tinged with a little fear.

'Henry Jekyll has suggested to me certain arrangements providing for your future, which he'd like to complete… with you. Please don't hesitate, Paul. This meeting could finally solve all of your problems and we need never see each other ever again.'

'I say yes to that,' remarks Paul, stepping through the open door. 'Let's get it done, shall we?' Once Paul has passed over the threshold Edward Hyde closes the door, and Paul turns about to face him. They are standing in an empty rest room of green-veined black marble and golden taps. There is but one vanity, one sink, a mirrored storage above that sink, and nothing else.

'There's no one in here, Hyde, no one but us. What foolish game are you playing?'

Hyde only smiles. 'Look more carefully, my friend, and you will see that we are not alone.'

'Don't be ridiculous, Hyde, there is no one else in here but you.'

Paul hears the sibilant hiss, and he looks up as the mirrored door clicks open and Mayati's serpent slithers forth. It drips from on high like an amber and emerald ribbon, slowly, slowly unfurling, its forked tongue flicking wildly, tasting the air.

'Oh my god!' whispers Mr. Allen, and then a strange and violent cramp slices through his abdomen, making him buckle over as he stands. Something is happening, something is making him dizzy, and something is making him feel violently sick. There is a terrible pain in his gut, and clutching at his belly, doubled-up with a stabbing hurt, Paul ejects the contents of his stomach. A tawny and offensively reeking projectile of sickness spurts from his mouth and splashes over his shoes, jets across the tiles. In a spasm of agony and in terror he stumbles back, away from the snake. A numbness begins clouding up Paul's senses, and then, labouring for breath he falls to the floor. The snake drops lethargically, effortlessly onto the sink, its tail doing sluggish circles about the golden taps and the spout. Paul tries to call out to Hyde but Edward has backed away, and he is laughing.

'After all you are a fool,' says Hyde to Paul. 'Did you think your petty blackmail ever stood for anything? That's right, Mr. Paul Allen, undertaker, philanderer, adulterer, extortionist! You have had your amusing moments to be sure, but I have only had truck with you so much as it served my purpose!' The snake's long and sinuous length drips down to the floor and begins to slide across the tiles.

'How do you know?' Paul manages to gasp, his heart pounding like a mallet, his tongue swelling, his breath laboured. 'What did you put in the drink?'

'We do seem to share a poisoning commonality, don't we?' says Hyde, and Paul is confused. 'Only this time it is you who is being poisoned.'

Paul coughs, and splutters and his insides are torched by another blaze of pain.

'I have something else for you, my dear friend, Paul,' says Hyde, and he quickly unbuckles Paul's suspenders and unbuttons his flies, keeping a wary eye upon the grotesque monstrosity that is sliding closer, coiling inch by inch towards the victim on the floor. With a violent tug Hyde pulls Paul Allen's trousers down, and he kneels in between the man's splayed thighs. The serpent slides closer and Hyde steps about the beast. It creeps in undulation onto Mr. Allen's torso, winding upwards, and Paul can feel its scaly husk against his inner thighs, the forked tongue flicking against his testicles, the belly of the beast rasping over his exposed genitals. Paul is paralysed and cannot move, cannot fend the creature off, and it slithers upward towards his chest, towards his neck, coiling about his face.

'You should never have crossed swords with me, Paul, and most importantly you should never have bedded my wife.'

'Your wife? Who are you?'

The snake begins to tighten, and Paul somehow manages to find the strength in his fingers to reach up and claw at the thick, pulsing coil. There is a spasm then, a rejection by his body as he feels the cold thrust of something entering his lower extremity. His mind is reeling, his body twisting in the spiralling helix of the monster, shuddering in a seizure that rolls him about, encircled by the serpent, in the puddle of his own vomit. Although he wishes to do so, Paul finds he is unable to scream. He is choking. He can hear the warped thunder of Edward Hyde's taunting laughter, and he can feel the snake squeezing his chest, constricting his throat, compressing the breath out of his body. As the first of his ribs snap, Paul bucks and groans, and a stream of gore pours from between his lips. Conjured in pain, images in his mind flip like silhouettes in a magic lantern show. They are myriad and disconnected, visions of black plumes and cemeteries, of cards, of aces, of promissory notes and bad debts, of Henrietta Jekyll wasting away in an emerald green room, of William Fortune suturing the mouth of a corpse, of Henry Jekyll at his microscope, of Kitty… of Kitty's naked body, her breasts, her vulva, and his illicit taking of her body. How his mind stutters, how his body shrieks with the writhing rejection of a cold, smooth object riding back and forth, being pushed deeply into his flesh. Suddenly Paul's eyes open as wide as they could ever possibly open, and a strange and final thought blazes in his mind- is Hyde actually Jekyll? Paul would laugh if it were not for the fact that in his asphyxiation he feels his member go stiff, and as his last heartbeat is sounded in the ivory cage of his chest, as the snake pulverises his thorax, he knows the warm rush of his ejaculation before his popping eyes are veiled with crêpe. Edward Hyde stands up, rubbing his hands together like a gleeful child and steps through the door and pulls it closed, still laughing, thinking how justly the extravagant waster, Paul Allen, has ultimately disgraced himself, and has shamefully expired in a flood of his own lascivious pollutions.

Says Edward Hyde: 'How thoughtless of Paul to leave you here, all alone.' Kitty is startled as she sits waiting for her lover. She snaps her head about to look at the man who has suddenly sprung up out of the cabaret's riot of noise and colour. She is afraid.

'Where is he?' she questions, pushing her fear down into the pit of her gut.

'Shall we join him?' Hyde waves her in the direction that he wishes her to go, backstage and upstairs into the Khazneh's private salons. Kitty looks up to the glass ceiling and she can see the ghost of the moon shining through and a glimmer of silver stars. One star falls through the ultramarine sky dome, trailing the dark like a jewelled pin aflame. Hyde watches the meteor spark in Kitty's nervous eye.

'Please,' insists Edward Hyde. 'Paul and Henry are waiting.' Kitty rises from her chair, a pillar of swirling inky folds that passes through a tide of throbbing, cartwheeling, dancing flesh, and she nervously follows Hyde through the revelry and soon they mount the stairs.

They pause outside a door.

'What is this place, Mr. Hyde? A salon! Are you amusing yourself again?'

'Why no, Mrs. Jekyll.' Regardless, the man cannot feign innocence.

Hyde clicks open the door and they enter, then he quickly turns the key, locks the door, and drops the key into his pocket.

'Where are they?' questions Kitty, looking about anxiously and not beholding either husband or lover. She notes the dinner setting and the champagne, and the used glass. Taking off her long black gloves she asks again, 'Where's Paul?'

Hyde pours her a glass of sparkling wine as she removes her tenebrous veil.

'At least you are dressed appropriately for a funeral,' observes her host, but Kitty does not hear his awful jest and she walks towards a closed door.

'Paul?' she calls, but there comes no answer.

Hyde crosses the room and presents the beauty with the glass of champagne.

'Time to celebrate,' he tells her, holding the glass by its slim, slim stem, and her eyes see the bubbles erupting upon the surface of the liquid.

'Where is Henry?' asks she, trying to catch the mounting terror that is punching through her chest.

'Believe, me, your husband is here,' says Hyde, and with trembling fingers Kitty reaches up to take the glass of champagne, but he withholds the celebratory offering. With a violent sweep Edward Hyde dashes the glass to the floor, and Kitty almost screams in her fright. With his face twisted into a grimacing leer, his right hand splayed open, Edward Hyde's fingers, as nimble as the legs of a spider, encircle Kitty's bosom, grasping above her heart. He can feel the pulsing throb of that organ as it pounds beneath her breast, and the woman cries out in horror. Hyde pushes her backwards, steering her with his arm extended, and she is stumbling over the train of her veil. It all happens so quickly that Kitty has little time to react, to claw his hand away, and how those fingers press and clutch at her body, how they hurt. Just as quickly, Hyde grasps her throat with his left hand, and he tightens his grip.

'Oh, my god!' the woman screams, but no one can hear her cry above the din of the cabaret. 'Let me go. You're hurting me!'

'Quiet now, adulteress,' breathes her assailant, and his eyes are aglow with a fevered Vulcan shine, so hot that each iris seems to disappear and turn bright scarlet. 'So beautiful, my little Kitty, and yet so foolish.' Kitty squirms, and she strikes against him, but Hyde, releasing her bosom, bats away her hand and balls his fist and punches her in the stomach. There comes a terrible moment then when Kitty almost ceases to feel, the blow knocking the wind from her lungs, and a flood of tears streams from her eyes. Senseless, her body sags like a rag doll, held up by the throat, and Hyde drags her across the room and kicks open the bedroom door. He tosses her into Mayati's bed.

'Now you find your way home at last, my dear,' the beast spits, but in her insensible state Kitty is gasping to regain her breath and she cannot hear the man as he speaks. He rolls her over and ties her hands, binds her wrists with a cord, and he hauls her quivering form into a sitting position against the pillows. Roughly he stops up her mouth with a gag. Above the bed, upon the ceiling gleams a wide expanse of mirrors, and they reflect the horror of Kitty's bondage and of her terrible fate.

'Paul Allen tried the artifice of blackmail once, my dear- to blackmail your husband. Mr. Allen was quite foolish, yet your husband found him somehow amusing. Henry has only entertained the rake under a pretext, but the day has come for that relationship to be finished. In fact, the writing was on the wall when you grew bored with your husband and decided that Paul should warm up your bed with another. Henry sincerely hopes that you both enjoyed the pleasures that his money provided… because that was a fatal mistake!' Hyde is standing beside the bed, and he begins to remove his clothes, to disrobe slowly, as if performing an erotic strip, to take off his vest, unbuttoning button by button, and his shirt, button by button, to peel down his trousers, until he stands naked, his skin flushed and warm, his penis jutting erect. Kitty begins to sob.

'Kitty, I have a confession to make,' says Hyde, caressing his sex until it glistens with dew, and he rubs the dew over his lips and blows her a kiss. For a moment, he stoops down and rummages under the bed, drawing forth an old box. It is a box of rare wood with brass corners and clasps, and he folds back the lid. He carries the box to the vanity and sits naked before the mirror, and beyond the warped image of his own reflection he can see Kitty writhing in agony splayed out black upon the white sheets of the Arabian's bower. Within the box, within its lush green velvet lining are revealed a stage actor's make-up paraphernalia, paints and brushes and gum and hair. 'I asked you who we were, Kitty, and you lied when you declared that you were my wife and that I was your husband.'

Kitty shakes her head violently from side to side, not comprehending that someone like Hyde could possibly know of the intimate details of a conversation that she has had with Henry. Kitty is caught in an irrevocable nightmare with a madman.

'You think not? Still you aver that you do not know who I am. You seem confused, and I must admit, I too am perplexed. You see, at times I do not even know myself.' As he speaks Mr. Hyde uncorks a little bottle and picks up a brush, and he paints his cheeks and his jawline with a translucent fluid, and then he retrieves a wad of hair and presses it in place over his upper lip, and presses another to his cheeks and jaw and chin.

'Mother used to say that one could not be a real man if one didn't wear a beard.' The man before the mirror speaks with Henry Jekyll's voice. 'She oft said that father always wore a beard, a thick and lustrous, wonderful beard.' He tousles his hair and his features alter and he smiles as he turns his head, his face now changed, its lines rearranged. Kitty almost loses her mind.

'Yes,' says Hyde, gleeful in his revelation, his voice pitching up from another man's baritone. 'I know you betrayed your marriage vows, you strumpet whore! How can I know? Because I am your husband, Henry Jekyll!'

Jekyll comes to the bed, and he is holding a knife, a peculiar and ancient blade of obsidian, and he is quaking, for there is a delitiscent imbroglio manifest in his flesh.

'I will not let you do this,' declares one voice.

'You have no say in what I do,' replies another. 'You pretend philanthropy, lighting your path with vulgar logic, but you are yet guided by your cock! My cock! It is the magic wand, the divine ecstasy, the power, the instrument of judgment!'

There comes a twisted, snarling bellow that follows the words, an animal yelp of horror commingled with joy.

'You are a madman!'

"No, you are the madman!'

The dual entity leaps to the bed, and straddling Kitty's body he begins to cut away the cerecloth that is her dress. She flinches in terror as the blade slices downward from her bosom to her cleft, cutting through the fabric easily, and then the man is ripping at the seams of the garment, brutally rending the sable undergarments until the white flesh of his victim is displayed. He cups at her exposed breasts, and he pulls painfully upon her nipples, thrusting his hand between her thighs and agonisingly invading her body. She screams against her gag, and thrashes about, but the fiend only laughs at her wretchedness, and with his new face he leers, and he vomits up a colourful stream of invective, calling Kitty every filthy name that he can conjure from his vile and disgusting tongue.

'Which will you have, my love?' Hyde demands as he brutalises Kitty. 'Please choose, for I am at a loss as to know who I am. Do tell, darling, which of the two faces of Dr. Jekyll do you prefer?'

Kitty is screaming against her gag, but there can be no release from the violence.

'You once asked who I was... What a silly question. I am Henry Jekyll. No, I am Edward Hyde... No! I am Henry Jekyll... Yes, that's who I am, Henry... Hyde... Edward Hyde!'

Pushing her onto her stomach he grips his member, and he enters Kitty, violates her in a cruel and vicious fashion as no man has ever entered her before. It is an eternity of pain that Kitty endures, bound and with her eyes shut tight, and the world is darkness, total darkness as she weeps. There is no subduing the dream, no slacking the violent hunger of the monster who sates itself, the imposter who gluts at the fountain of her flesh, submitting her to the most abominable cruelties until she is broken and cut and her body mapped with bruises. He paws at her, defiling her, never satisfying his sexual lusts, beating the woman, thrashing the lovely ice queen in the maddest of rapine's excesses, until she ceases to be human, simply humiliated, and passes into night, carried upon a tide of spilled blood.

Mayati finds herself in a house in Morley Street. She has turned the key that Edward has given her in the lock and opened the door. There is no one home, just as Hyde has said, none one, not even the maid, and the house is a house of dark shadows. Hyde has whispered to her that she will be quite safe and that she should not worry, and that she must follow his instructions to the letter. He will meet her there soon. Edward has confessed that he is intoxicated by Mayati's beauty, that her body is as smooth as is velvet under the ebon canopy of the night. He croons that her body is the feast for the senses, the treasure of ancient kings, and that her face, her beautiful face surpasses the grandeur and the sublimity of the night sky, wherein the goddess Nut dwells. For him there can never be another. Seemingly spellbound by his words, Mayati is like unto water in his hands. The Arabian lights a candle in the candelabra, and by its flickering light she glides as stealthily as a cat up the stairs. At the top she finds a door, and opening the door she enters a bedroom, a woman's bedroom, with a soft bed and a plush coverlet, with a dresser and bottles of scent and cologne, with Zola bookmarked under the bedside lamp.

The clock in the parlour, the tall and upright grandfather with polished brass and inlaid timbers chimes out the hour of twelve. Yes, it is indeed late, and she hopes that Edward will not be long. Perhaps they will go away, elope to a far country where their love will not be condemned. Upon the dresser Mayati places the candelabra and she opens the wardrobe doors. What a wonderful array of dresses are displayed, silks and satins and lace. How Mayati gasps with pleasure as she touches those gowns, but the scent that wafts from the material, it is strange that odour, like the pungent scent of male essence. Mayati's nose wrinkles in disgust and then, as she takes one gown from a hanger, a sudden shock crashes through her frame. It is like a volt of electricity, a galvanic stab that throws her to the carpet. Her mind, her thoughts spark and are speared with lightning, her sense of touch is lost, her sense of taste is turned to iron. On the floor, she jerks like one possessed of a demon, her extremities flailing, her eyes rolled back. Mayati's head thrashes to and fro, her body ripples in a violent wave, twists in a most harrowing clonic seizure. The shaking of her limbs is the gift of her ancient heritage, the fault in her blood passed down through time mutated, from her royal forebear, Akhenaten. The epilepsy lasts for a full minute, and then she goes limp and she too passes into darkness.

Hours pass, the hands of the clock are now positioned just after two. Along the boulevard, away from the slums, preceded by his shadow, the gale of a black tempest gusts Edward Hyde into the house in Morley Street- his house. He has sprinted along the lane, past the Ship's Chandler and enters through the garden gate. His shade ripples and stretches obscenely and undulates blackly over the grass, over the hydrangea, over the roses, and he goes up to the house. He has stars in his eyes, black stars, dead stars, and he entertains a moment wherein he remembers throwing Kitty down upon the tangled sheets of Mayati's bed and the blood that oozed from her body. How gloriously crimson that blood, like mead, and thickly commingled with his seed, and sweet, dripping from his member, and smeared over her lips. The house is silent, as silent as is the grave, and he creeps upstairs to surprise his concubine. When Edward Hyde enters Kitty's bedroom there is a fire glowing in the grate, and by its dancing light he beholds Mayati, poised before the mirror, dressed in one of Kitty's negligees. She turns to face him.

'Do you like me in this?' says she, and Hyde comes up to her side.

'I like you in this place,' he tells her, reaching up to touch his fingertips to her face. He notes that there is an opaque mark upon her arm, like a faint bruise and that her skin wafts with a floral odour.

'I love you in any place,' returns she, tying off the corded silk that loops about her waist.

'What is this?' he asks, glancing over the rest of her form.

'It is nothing,' says the exotic, 'I merely fell.'

Though her bones are fragile she has picked herself up off the floor to sit before the mirror. Perhaps there is a fracture in her humerus, for it aches and is painful and it feels as if insects crawl in her body, crawl just under the skin. It is not the first time that she has fallen, it is not the first time that she has suffered sensory changes and illusionary disturbance. It will probably not be the last time either. Though she is cursed she hopes the sickness can be driven from her body, hopes that a cure may be discovered. Nonetheless, that it will afflict her again is the reality of her condition. Mayati despairs that she will not be able to keep it secret, keep it from Edward, but reality has a secret life all its own. The dancer is terrified that soon the cat will be out of the bag, and what will happen then, will he cast her off? All that she really wants is his skin, his arms, his thighs, his sex, his love eternally. Before the mirror, Mayati has stared into time, waiting, her thoughts skipping like a stone over water, terrorised by the horror of her own identity.

'The voice of reason is helpless in the face of grief,' declares she. 'Despite your sorrows, here, reflected in the mirror, you have the power to be in two places at once. Such magic!' Can she change the nature of her reality by merely looking at herself? She touches the glass, so cool, so smooth, but so telling. See, her face is long, her lips are fleshy… and the mirror only further distorts her endrocine body shape beyond its natural curves. Mayati is filled with fear and anger. For the past hour, she has listened to a curious sound in her head, a voice like music, proclaiming a new phenomenon, and there are lights beaming in her eyes. Her vision is bright and golden and she smiles, for only she understands the marvel that the voice announces is her own unique and glorious beauty.

'Soon,' says the disembodied voice, and Mayati sees her reflection in the mirror mouthing an edict, 'from the Temple of the Sun God Ra, I shall rise. Then shall I shine through Egypt's ruins as a beacon shines to light the way. I shall pass through the dark passage of time and be reborn from high antiquity. For I am resplendent and my body is beautiful, supple, smooth, voluptuous, carved in long ago Armana, in the shape of Akhenaten. In this body, I am the Description de l'Egypte made flesh. All shall know my name again, and from whom I am descended, from the one who sleeps under the rubble of ancient cities, in the Valley of the Kings… I am the line of communication between this reality and the undiscovered boy king!' She sees herself nod as she rambles her incoherent declamation and prophecy.

Mayati opens a jar of perfumed oil and massages the unguent into her skin, along her slender arm. Made of alabaster is that skin, and threshed from obsidian are her tresses, her eyes are bright like glass-paste.

'You should be more careful,' Hyde advises. She embraces her lover, but he does not respond to her as she kisses his lips.

'The pattern of justice is now complete,' says Hyde, and there is a twitch in his face, a tic, an agitated nerve. Mayati does not understand his declaration. The dancer disengages from her lover and steps aside.

'Whose room is this?' she asks.

'Mine,' says Hyde triumphantly. 'At last!' Violently Edward grasps at Mayati's body and he rips the negligee from her skin.

In Mayati's chamber above the dancing, revelling iniquity of the Khazneh, Kitty Jekyll returns to the tortured world of the living. Her body is all over scratches and when she looks up to the mirror suspended over her head she only sees a mutilated woman whose face she does not know. That woman is battered and broken, torn asunder like a raggedy doll. She wants to scream, but her mouth, no longer gagged, is choked by a throat that is bruised and crushed from strangulation. Again, and again Kitty tries to stand up, falling only to get up and to fall again, weak and exhausted. When at last she manages to stand on her feet, a sticky stream of blood and semen leaks from her vulva. Kitty retches and coughs, blood spitting from her lips. She is dizzy and reeling and unsteady on her feet and agony suffers her to weep. Kitty has tasted the bitterness of death, even if she is not dead, and her virtues have been rent and her torments have plunged her into the abyss. She staggers from the bedroom, from the desecrated bower, and she sways, tripping into the parlour. At the edge of the table she pauses, steadying herself, weeping, and under her shaking hand the champagne glasses fall to the floor and shatter, the dinner service is displaced. There is a note among the flowers in the vase, a rectangle of paper upon which is written:

'To make this a perfect Eden we have brought the snake.'

Behind the battered woman there is another door, and it is open now, and gasping Kitty turns about. The door unfolds upon the barred cube of the gilded snake cage, and the cage is empty.

'Oh, god!' Kitty moans, for she hears a noise, a slithering, rasping, sliding, alien and animal sound coming from another door to her right. In fear and trepidation, the battered woman hobbles towards that door, wincing as she steps upon the broken and jagged shards of the champagne glass, bleeding a trail of garnets in her wake. Kitty lifts her bruised arm, stretches out her fingers, and pushes the portal wide. Screaming, she falls back, slipping heavily to the floor and twisting her foot. A new blade of agony cuts into her body. In that room Kitty sees her lover Paul Allen, naked, his body splayed out upon the tiles, his buttocks cloven by a protruding stone phallus, a mire of gore pooling about his twisted limbs. Mayati's serpent is coiled about his throat, his face is bright blue. His eyes are unseeing, dead, but they are staring at her- staring at her!

'Oh, no, no! Paul! Paul!' she screams, pleading but beseeching only the air, for there is no one to hear her cries. Crazily Kitty's world spins out of kilter, the walls tilting at irrational and impossible angles and almost crashing in upon her form. From below, and from somewhere far, far away, Kitty hears the staccato pounding of the Infernal Galop, a rhythm growing louder, louder. The music squalls in a tempest, spiralling in a tornado of noise, drowning out the sound of her own blood pulsing through her veins, and she crawls away from her dead lover and away from the constricting serpent. Through an agony of wreckage, through the ruin that is the exotic dancer Mayati's dressing room, Kitty grovels, forcing her battered and bloodied body to the French windows and to the platform beyond. At the iron rails Kitty stops, wracked with pain and overcome with tears, and the music from beneath the glass swells to crescendo, and she hears it blaring faster and faster, a rising symphony to terror and heralding the blast of doomsday. With clawing, bloodied fingers Kitty pulls herself up, pressing herself against the rails, swaying back and forth like a reed in the wind, and she looks up to the wan and distant stars and then down beyond the glass ceiling, seeing the vague ghosts of the cancan dancers twirling and leaping below. They contort and spin until they blur and become diffuse, and then all that is colour, all that is tint and hue drains from Kitty's eyes. With her head pounding and her vision spinning, spinning faster than a dervish, whirling around and around, Kitty releases her grip from the railing and she plunges headlong into the abyss.

Her hour come, Kitty falls through eternal space, a funereal black whorl coming undone in the frosty midnight air. Her body smashes through the glass, sending lethal shards flying, slivers that slice into face and bosom, a cataclysm that scatters the revellers and the dancers screaming. With a pulverising thud the woman's body hits the dance floor, smashing a table and breaking chairs, her thighs and legs snapping like sticks, wrenched and pinned back under her broken back, her head crushed upon the boards. It is a horrible spectacle to behold, disgusting, oh yes, and all that blood spilling from between her legs! She has fallen, the fallen woman, buckled and broken in a death that has mimicked the climactic moment of the snake charmer's dance.

What a terrible climax to our evening tour! Oh, do you feel giddy? Do you feel sick? Perhaps you might faint? Ghastly you say, shocking even, and just like you, I too must admit, that even I cannot abide the sight of blood!

Chapter 17

Jekyll's Inferno

'It's a reflection of a reflection, of a reflection, of a reflection, of a reflection

But I see you on the other side and we've all got things to hide.'

Arcade Fire

Mayati and Edward fall into bed, into Kitty's bed, and those sacred sheets are soiled by their lust. Such a stormy and passionate bout of carnal desire, for the general exhibitions of sex seem dull and tame, when compared to the physical acts that Hyde and his concubine perform. Their coupling is not an extension of life's romantic poetry, but accommodates voluptuousness within the sullied and vulgar veils of sodomy and darkness. They thrust into each other, and taste of each other, lathered in the dews of heat, slippery, and with polished skins anointed with spicy perfume. Their groans are zestful, the synthesis of their flesh completed in fire, twice, three times, even as the clock spins the hour closer to dawn. Now breathless and exhausted, they lie beside each other in the cradle of Kitty's darksome bower. Mayati reaches over and strokes Edward's chest. He is awake and he is wet with perspiration, he is fevered and he is staring into space.

'I love you, Edward,' says the dancer, gently pulling at the hairs about his nipples, and she notes the faint yellow-purple blotches of bruises upon his body, but she does not ask how he came by them.

'Love?' he replies, knowing what foolishness is love and where such idiocy must lead.

'Just love,' she returns, her smile benevolent and gentle.

'You don't know me and yet you love me.'

'I don't care about knowing.'

'You animal,' says he, and she laughs at his statement, but he is not joking. Her emotions are only what they are, base, physical reactions to lust.

'You don't care whether I am good or evil.'

'All the men who bought me,' she says pensively, 'they knew about good and evil.'

'You despise them, for their lust and you cannot reconcile good from evil. You must dispense with the unnecessary, my dear.' He pushes her hand away. 'That includes dispensing with good and evil and love, for they are all false notions that are confusingly meshed together, but they do not cohere into a whole, they ultimately mean nothing.'

The gentle smile melts from her lips.

'No,' says Mayati, 'I cannot throw away love.'

'Surely you understand by now that I cannot love, not you, not anyone?' Hyde continues to stare up at the ceiling, into the heights of space, into darkness and into emptiness. 'I know nothing about love.' In Hyde's mind, there can be no reconciliation, nothing, only a darkness as distant and empty as the vast eternity of space.

'Then that is sad for you,' say Mayati, 'but I think you have been hurt, like me, and you wish to deny that another could care. Perhaps it is sad for me too, but I still love you. I still care.' Edward does not reply, but he narrows his eyes. The nymph lightly kisses his cheek.

'I forsake love,' says he, pushing her away.

'Perhaps you do, and perhaps some terrible thing in life has made you feel this way, but life also made me what I am, and yet I can love.'

'You are a romantic,' says Hyde, 'and romance is but an ethereal notion, insubstantial, like a vapour. The weakness of love is that it clings like a vine, but that which it clings to is not stable.'

'I am uncertain of your meaning,' replies she, a shadow of concern drifts over her face.

'Have you ever considered the dual nature of man?' Hyde, rises upon his elbow. 'How each of us is reflected as a Janus?'

'I am afraid your words baffle me.' He strokes her naked belly, his fingers teasing the silken down at the valley of her sex.

'Let us pretend that you are the dark, more liberated invocation of the woman who sleeps within this bedchamber, that you are made of fire and not of ice. Too, let's pretend that I am the dark side of her husband...no, I rephrase that- the darker side of her husband, that which was already within his skin, the tempestuous surge that he has long hid from the world.'

'That notion is the way to the nightmare,' says Mayati, 'because it speaks of a battle for power, one over the other, and yet by the same token they share a black commonality. It bespeaks of rejecting responsibility, for one is no better than the other. If I were to replace the likeness of that woman, as if we were each before the mirror, and I the more liberated evocation of this other female, then I must become a slave to the flesh and give up all care for the world and its people, and I should despise her as weak. Yet I do not, for whoever she is, I believe that such dual purpose can only reinforce transgression, and perhaps she has caused you pain but maybe she can be forgiven. If the mirror reflects dark things, reflects cruelty and tragedy, then it can reflect light too. Dark thoughts are destructive thoughts, and they conjure forces that must seem symbolic of a struggle happening within.'

Hyde gives a low chuckle. 'How deep and profound you are, but I do not believe in symbols or in souls,' says he, 'and only the strong survive. The world does not allow for weakness.'

'Perhaps then it is time for you to look within, to find spiritual faith.'

'What if I were to tell you that I have already sought after spiritual faith? You would not believe me, for you think, in your little head that I am nothing but a hedonist and a heathen. You are right to assume that I would have no truck with god, but…' and Mr. Hyde pauses in his speech and Mayati watches as his lips quiver, as if he is trying to force out a confession.

'What?' the Arabian questions.

The pitch of Hyde's voice abruptly changes, and he begins speaking in a lower register, and his words waver as if he is upon the brink of tears.

'Two weeks ago, I dreamed that I found myself in a street, in Spitalfields, at midnight. It was as if my consciousness had altered and that I acted as another, but I was different somehow, both in body and in mind. Of that night only fragments remain in my head. The night was alight with burning torches and an angry mob had hung a man by the neck from the rafters of a boarding house. In my dream, I had no idea how it was that I came to be there, outside of that place… strange, I can even recall the sign from which the man dangled on that corded rope: 'Mrs. Murphy's Rooms for Rent' it proclaimed. It was almost as if I had been sleep walking, for my mind was indeed in a fugue, but I was there, I know I was. I recall a woman, a pretty girl, but she was done up in taffeta and feathers and she spoke in a most coarse and inelegant fashion. She had said something about another man having been thrown into the lime pit, and because it had started to rain I could only have guessed at the horror of that man's dissolution!

'Of course, I did not linger in the stews, but I found that my body had been beaten, and I was weak and exhausted. Upon a church step I fell, at the portal to god's kingdom, Our Lady of Victories, and a priest, a Father Sandor found me. 'How have you come here, in this filthy weather?' he had asked, kneeling by my side and taking me in his embrace, holding me close. In the succour of Father Sandor's arms I limped in out of the pouring, polluted rain. Under the chapel arches he had smiled when he beheld the crucifix I wore. How he spoke with soft sympathy, surmising that I had been the victim of a heinous crime, reassuring and with condolence, but the man, had he known, should have been terrified and appalled at who and what I am!'

'Edward,' breathes Mayati, 'you need not tell me any more of this dreadful dream. You are distressed…'

'Be quiet, my dear, hold your sweet tongue just for this moment,' says Edward Hyde in Henry Jekyll's voice. 'Father Sandor had taken vows of holiness, but is it not remarkable how such men forget their oaths, especially when their lustful urges are concerned!'

'Please, Edward, do not tell me more!'

'Father Sandor's soul could not have plunged any deeper into a well of shadows as it did in my dream. You see, he bathed me and fed me, and rubbed salve into my bruises, but by the first light of the morning, undressed of his purple robes, his lips had kissed mine and his flesh had submitted in the fashion of the Greeks.' Hyde's face has turned to stone and his voice is cold and indifferent, he turns and stares at his concubine like one who is haunted, and Mayati feels her skin prickle with goose-flesh. A crawling horror in her heart suspects that this confession is no dream, but rather the revelation of a terrible, terrible truth.

'On the threshold of the baptistery he blew out the candles and I revelled in our blasphemy under god's roof. Self-confessed atheist that I am, I did not repent the deed, entangling his body under the spreading arms of his Christ, spreading him open upon his altar all white with starched linen and lit by golden candles. We even drank a chalice of wine and ate of the holy host, ate the dead body of his lord, no different in our gluttony of the divine deceased flesh from those mummers who ate their corpse cakes at Bullstrode and Holroyd. In the province of the devil, not god, we performed the ritual of sodomy many times. Willingly, yes- willingly was Sandor consumed and besotted and heretical, having been starved of pleasure for so long. How those hours were blasphemous, and yet glorious too. The priest and I enjoyed the sins of the flesh, the wondrous length of the serpent as it slithered from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, coaxed and beguiled, and for three nights thereafter we coupled under the vaulted Gothic grandeur of the church. There is no name in heaven that describes Sandor's pleasures, hungry for the rapturous carnal joys of which he had dreamed night after night after night, but which he had never tasted. How he forgot his Saviour all in one blazing moment, and forgot too, the things that civilise mankind! I received his reverential kiss, and he was impious and lewd with his tongue, and when our prostrations were done he asked of my name so that I could be forgiven and have the sin of sodomy absolved- Hyde, I told him happily, my name is Edward Hyde.'

Mayati shivers as Edward caresses her skin.

'That is a terrible dream, Edward. You must try to forget it, erase it from your memory.'

'No, I cannot forget, for eagerly did I cleave his body unto exhaustion, with all the foulness of vice, and yet does he rest now, satisfied among his angels, with my mother's crucifix, telling his beads one by one, the rosary and the blood… blood and beads both scarlet and faecal, flowing from the cleft of his lower body, all over the white, white altar, with a face that is twisted beyond beatitude!'

'Your mother's crucifix? How revolting!'

'Yes,' cries Hyde, his eyes rolling back in his head, so that the whites gleam like opaque moons, his fingers trembling violently as he is reaching out, 'my mother's crucifix!'

His is a shout, loud and animal and its bellow erupts from Edward's lips.

'I thrust Christ's rosary in deep, both length and cross-shaft and beads, I watched on shuddering in ecstasy as the tortured martyr disappeared into the egesta of his own deluded acolyte. Right up that dirty priest's arse I kept pushing my fist, my arm even! You should have seen him squirm, his legs parted in a red sea, gushing forth a discharge of waste matter and yelping like a whipped cur. Oh, Mayati, my love, how you thought you had new things to offer! The pious Father Sandor cursed and swore and groaned as I worked my fist into him, and as I wrenched the crucifix from his defiled hole I slit his throat. Father Sandor lay twitching, both ends foaming blood and filth, and then in my triumph I licked the befouled cross. Yes, I licked the fucking thing! I even swallowed the beads, rolled them hungrily over my tongue, and I tasted the ordure as if it were as sweet as treacle, gorged upon it, and revelled in the filth. I was gluttony!'

'Oh, my god! Who are you, Edward, what are you?' shrieks Mayati in disgust, and she makes quickly as if to rise from the bed, but Hyde savagely pushes her back down. 'Don't touch me! I am frightened.'

'Frightened?' whispers her assailant, for now Edward Hyde's intonation has returned, but roiling in his head are a troupe of tumbling shades nocturne. He stares at the dancer, watches the utter fear rippling in her face. Mayati lies with her head upon Kitty's pillow, with her streams of black, black hair flowing over the lace, with her ruby lips slightly parted, with her white, narrow neck like a swan's. Indeed, thinks he, this is the reflection, the subversion, the evil. He cannot love, does not love and in either mind, in Jekyll and in Hyde, there is only a struggle for power over others. Nothing can stem that surge towards violence, not faith, not religion, not morals, not sex, not feculence. The predilection to filth has always been there, and in that mire one mind must conquer the other, and the weakest mind must fail.

Hyde shifts his body and reaches up his right hand and his fingers encircle Mayati's neck. He does not hate Mayati for what she is, nor does he despise her for her life's subterfuge, the performance and her serpent, both have been necessary to ensure her survival in a world of intolerance. He does not despise her for her gender ambiguity, he does not loath her for her desperations, but she is Kitty's opposite, she is the reversed reflection in the silver glass. Mayati has become the fleshy vessel through which the seemingly straight-laced and dedicated and yet hopelessly hypocritical and repressed scientist Doctor Henry Jekyll has perpetrated the same adultery of which he accused his wife.

'Dreams or nightmares, whatever is real or false,' roars Hyde, 'I don't know which is which!'

Edward Hyde, the tumultuous, lascivious, violent other- he is the true power that must ultimately subsume and crush the weak and pitiful Jekyll into dust. There is no higher man here! Thus, like Kitty, Mayati must die. He begins to squeeze Mayati's throat and she struggles in her terror. How she screams, but her cry is silenced, her vocal chords wrung into mute terror, crushed, pulverised.

Says Jekyll: 'You shall not have her blood!'

Hyde squeezes tightly, clamps those flexing fingers in a vice-like circle. A fervid sweat has broken in a flowing, salty tide upon his forehead.

Says Hyde: 'Leave me! Leave me, you weak, fucking bastard! I must be free!'

Mayati struggles, fights for her life, grasping at the interlocking trap of Hyde's fingers, clawing at them, pulling them apart. The clamp is broken all but for the fragment of a moment as they tumble about upon the bed, thrashing in the sea of sheets. Hyde throws his body onto hers, pins her down, his strong hands crushing together. The assailant is surprised that Mayati is stronger than he anticipates, despite the legend and the legacy of a weakened bloodline. Yet the dancer's struggle is in vain, for Hyde's blood runs hot with acid, he is charged like a volt of lightning is charged, and he is strong and cruel and possessed and murderous.

'You must die!' he shouts. 'Everybody must die!'

Mayati's struggles lessen, as her body is abruptly but mercifully overtaken with a shock of epilepsy, and although her eyes bulge and her body arches against Hyde's naked frame, he is robbed in the last of his power over her body. She twists in a spasm under his fingers, for to Edward Hyde Mayati is no longer a person. Perhaps she never was- but now her regal face, a face that resembles a Pharaoh from antiquity, has collapsed into calm. She no longer wheezes and gasps, she cannot feel Hyde's sex hardening against her thighs, as he ejaculates his scalding milky effusion, groaning. Mayati's soul is flying beyond the Field of Reeds, her misty eyes flooded now with the aural radiance of the sun, sprawled amid the sheets, in Kitty Jekyll's bed, splayed apart like a jewelled insect, like a scarab, its wings plucked, desecrated. Edward Hyde climbs from her body and stands up staring down at the motionless shell of her flesh. There is a current in the air, a galvanic essence, swirling and tumbling and diving about his naked skin. Hyde touches his chest, his stomach, his thighs, the ropey, translucent fluid of his spilled seed, and his fingers prickle with static.

'Why?' I ask, and I feel my skin shrivelling and stretching and lacerated by pain. They are my fingers that are grasping, my hands that are trembling, clawing feebly at the empty air, at nothingness. I am overwhelmed with fear and confusion, for the opposites of my flesh and my mind have collided and yet they are the same, manifesting at once, oscillating, alternating and changing from one personality to the other in the liminal spaces between breaths.

'Because it is I who exists, Dr. Jekyll,' says Edward Hyde. 'I will be rid of you. Rid of you, rid of you…rid of you!'

'No!' I scream. 'I will not let you win!'

With a cry, I flee Kitty's defiled bedroom, it is me, Henry Jekyll who staggers from the scene of savagery perpetrated by Edward Hyde, trips down the stairs, past the clock in the parlour and out of the door and into the garden. The first rays of the sun are breaking over the slate rooftops, and the rosy light gleams like primrose upon my naked body. There is a little breeze that shivers through the roses and it caresses my skin, combs through the curling hairs upon my arms and chest, strokes against my cheek. How good and pure and clean the wind feels, but it cannot blow away the evil stain that is Edward Hyde. Knowing I cannot linger in my garden, I limp to my darkened laboratory. Perhaps if I hide behind its shadowy walls, where I feel safer amid the familiarity of its benches and apparatus I might find the needle waiting. One last injection, that might be what is needed, one last infusion of my elixir so that I can subdue Edward Hyde and conquer this evil.

I see Totò, his little claws grabbing at the bars, screeching as if proclaiming a dire warning, and the rabbit burrows into a corner of its cage and the guinea pig squeals. Locked within the confines of the lab, locked away from the world that I despise, these little creatures are my only witnesses. Alone in the only place where no one can see, I cross to a miniature oak cabinet and take out an unadorned tin box and a measuring glass. With trembling fingers, I pick up the phial that contains the last drops of my modified distillation. This is what I have been truly working on these years, a drug to keep my violent urges under control. Damn mankind, for I really have no care for altruistic weakness. Yet I need to stop the nightmare that rages inside my head, the bad dream that was turbulent inside my mind long before there was William Fortune, Oxford, Paul and Kitty. It is the strongest cocktail of repressive agents that I have concocted, to force upon my nerves an ever-needed calm, to inhibit the violent and pathological impulses that make Hyde manifest. In the filtre too are the last extracts of female hormones, and the fluid is swirling amber in the lamp light. From the tin box, once again I take out the sharp hypodermic syringe and I screw in the glinting silver sliver of the needle, and without a gasp I inject the drug into my throbbing vein.

I stand before the mirror hanging on the western wall. In its glass eye, three feet wide two feet deep, I see a horrible nightmare. Swirling and reflecting with provocative glimpses is the vile and licentious evil of the world that lies beyond the drawn blind, beyond the garden wall and gate, beyond Morley Street. I behold tenfold the iniquity that has played out in the slums, in the stews, in Bluegate, in the Khazneh, in the filthy streets of the mews, under the oaken ribs of Our Lady of Victories.

'Why?' I ask my reflection. 'Why?'

Soon a mist rises and clouds up the argent pane of the glass. Lightning forks across its surface, stabs in its depths, its luminance lingering with larval glow upon the breadth of my burning skin. Inside the frame of the mirror is a perilous place because struck in its borders, Edward Hyde is staring back at me.

'Why must you destroy?' I ask the man, and I am sick of mirrors, for all that they ever really reflect is the misery of truth.

'Because I want to be free.'

'How can a pervert and a murderer ever be free?' I ask, shaking my head angrily.

'Perversion? Murder?' returns Hyde, 'I have my unusual peccadilloes, to be true, but you are equally as notorious!'

'Your indulgences are governed by the devil!'

'You don't even believe in the devil! You hypocrite- or are you all trembling now that you have tasted that part of yourself that excites you? Can you ever go back, Henry Jekyll? Can you ever find redemption? Don't forget that you have performed murder long before I was ever part of your life!'

'Yours will be a most awful judgment!' I declare, and Hyde breaks into the most hideous peal of laughter.

'No,' says Hyde emphatically, when he ceases his laughter, 'mine will be the exultant victory and yours will be the miserable defeat!'

'I will fight you!' I decree, and my body is quaking all over.

'Everything I do is directed towards that end,' cries Hyde.

It is Hyde's voice and my lips- it is my hands and Hyde's wild eyes.

'Killer!'

'You are the killer,' says Hyde.

'Shut your vile mouth!' says I.

'You, that's right- you revenged yourself on Paul Allen.'

'It was you who let loose the serpent from the Paradise of Eden, you who so willingly glutted yourself at the bowl of temptation. You who murdered your stepfather.'

'What of Kitty?' I bemoan, suddenly realising the vast and destructive extent of Hyde's carnal rampage. 'Poor Kitty.'

'Poor Kitty!' exclaims the tormentor. 'Don't forget the Arabian dancer! You should have kept a better eye on me… no, on yourself! '

The mists in the glass begin to roil and to churn, to spin about the ever-changing figure who gestures, who speaks, who taunts.

'What have you done?'

'Everything in order to be free.'

'I cannot let you free!'

'Oh, Henry,' says Hyde, and his lips have drawn back into a quivering snarl, 'how I would like to destroy you, but I cannot do that without destroying myself, but through their deaths I will become free of you. Your mind will weaken and eventually collapse, unable to deal with the horror. The guilt will send you mad, and you will be hunted. You will have to flee, to go somewhere far away, to hide, just as I have had to hide! It is then that I will take control of your body.'

'You hate me!' I accuse brokenly, raising a hesitant hand up before the boiling glass.

'I have no feelings of hate towards you whatsoever,' replies Hyde matter-of-factly. 'I do only what is logically necessary for the higher man's survival. Admit the truth, Henry, you are at last defeated.'

'Never!' I declare.

'You must lose,' replies Hyde coldly.

I break free of his spell for one shattered moment, and I turn to run for the door. Against the barrier of its portal I am abruptly arrested.

'Is it wise to leave here?' says Hyde, and his voice rings with mocking saturnalia. The reply seeps from my own lips, my mouth forms the words that are distorted by a strange and strident echo.

'In a few hours, they'll be searching...'

'Yes, searching for you, Jekyll!'

'What have I done?'

Not knowing that I move from the door I stagger forward, towards the looking glass once more, and all I can hear is the sound of Hyde laughing, laughing at his prophecy.

'Then I must end this struggle between us, and you shall lose, Edward Hyde.'

'I think not, dear Henry!'

A foetid wind blows in from the river, blows up Morley Street with the malodorous taint of the tannery, and it rankles the hydrangea, and it bows the roses, and it blasts into the laboratory and it pours into my screaming mouth. I am bloated with his bedevilment, with Mr. Edward Hyde's psychopathy. My senses are overshadowed, they have been from the first moment that I allowed him to enter my life. How did I permit Hyde dominion over my mind? How did I give him licence over my world? I was weak, and yes, I enjoyed it without reservation, the first stab of the needle, and the first flood of his essence into my body and my brain. I welcomed his power. Yes, it is true, he has always been here, within, and I have always known him, known that he festered under my skin. Perhaps Hyde only seems so opposite from all the things that I am because what lies beneath his skin is really no different to anything that lies beneath my own. I perform, he performs, like all people perform, like Mayati performed, like Kitty performed, like Paul Allen performed, like my mother performed, like Edward Kendal Sheridan Lionheart performed, like William Fortune performed. All roles that thrilled and yet repulsed.

Yes, it is true, I live love's violations vicariously through Edward Hyde, and his sex is the power that triggers all my experiences outside of the realm of my own existence. Through his cupidity, life's desideratum becomes inextinguishable avidity. Hyde's ardour can never be sated, emerged from the cocoon of my timidity, blossomed like the Monarch butterfly drunk upon milkweed, taken in flight to the edge of the earth and the spaceless sky. He is everything that is exciting and colourful and dangerous. His is the lust that knows no boundaries or recognises consequences. In his supremacy I am almost overwhelmed, intoxicated and lost and I lie to myself that I wish to reject him, for the deeper into the mirror I look the deeper into his flesh I want to go. So deep in fact that he drowns me and the boundaries of the man's iniquity become so blurred as to appear non-existent, become as joy to my senses. Even as I look he stands beside me in the argent glass, separate to my body and yet cloven from my flesh. We meet in the mirror of a dead god's eye. Stand, both in fire, two yet one in a blazing bright and incendiary torrefaction. There too reflected is my flesh, naked, scarified by heat, enkindled, and enslaved by the scorching touch of his fingers. This is the day that the Devil strides out of Hell, the day we meet face to face. Hyde reaches for me and violently embraces me, and in his arms, I am helpless and unable to resist. I shudder against his nakedness and my blood boils. Who would not buckle under the calidity of his caress, at the friction of his stroke along your arms, your cheek? How the hairs tingle and stand up upon my skin as his caress is trailing fire across my chest, over my belly, down the width of my back, between the cleft of my buttocks. There is no air in my lungs left to breathe, and in the flames of madness I gasp and I groan. Soon Hyde's fingers slip between my thighs and there they scintillate sparks upon my testes, along my member.

I cry out and I tremble, I seethe and I boil, and my lips sear Hyde's lips, and his tongue goes deep inside of my mouth. Against my thigh I can feel the pulse of his hardness, over the sweep of my bare shoulder burns his wet and velvet lips, upon my neck I feel the plutonic scald of his mouth and the bite of his teeth. Shuddering in ecstasy I grasp at Hyde, clawing at him, melding his body into mine. Neither can I now distinguish what is true or what is false, wholly obsessed I do not pretend grace, for I know that ultimately, I am promised nothing but a sure and certain death. Having taken the kiss and consented to Hyde's abominations I am lost, and my flesh is brought to utter submission. Violently assaulted by the demon, my skin is raw and its excitements intense, pyrexial, and I am filled with his blasphemy. Hyde grips my frame and bends me like a supple reed, and he brands my body with the molten glory of his tongue, tasting, savouring, and then he spears my flesh with such brutal force that I scream and curse that I wish him to savage me forever. Until the end of time might I suffer the impudicity of this loathsome intercourse, until the cosmos cracks in two and my mind is reduced to ashes.

The solar wind blasts, tearing away my skin, exposing the muscles, stripping them back to veins, evaporating the ichor, peeling mass back to cells, flying those cells into atoms. Bedlam and boiling, rampant and unappeasable is Hyde's pleasure, matched only by my own violent, vehement, and outrageous responses to his thrust. Bound by hysteria, enslaved by hallucination and nightmare I am being squeezed into the dead heart of a collapsing star, and my joy becomes Hyde's, one penultimate concurrent and cataclysmic orgasmic event. Hyde swells and pulsates and curses, and he releases his vital fluids within me, purifies my senses and my flesh with chrome and sparks and flames. In that second, in that moment of predominance, his beautiful face, his strong arms and thighs, his buttocks, his sex, all become merged with my own flesh, and as Janus we two are resplendent in the purgatory of Jekyll's inferno.

Chapter 18

Fire's Astonishment

'This darkened phantasm walks

Where nightmares are.'

Walter De La Mare

'The arrangements were made by Dr. Jekyll?' Inspector Murray of the Metropolitan Police surveys the spectacle of destruction that is the ruin of the Khazneh.

An ambulance has arrived but the stretcher carries only the corpse of Kitty Jekyll from the slivers of glass and broken timber, through the shattered cavern that is the Khazneh. Her twisted coil is pulled back into the semblance of a shape that is uniformly human, the snapped legs are drawn down parallel, the arms laid beside the lacerated torso and breasts, and a sheet, now stained with gore, tugged over the mutilated visage. The Major Domo shakes her head as the body is walked to the main door, and there are dripping spots of crimson splashing in its wake. Through a monocle she peers as the cadaver is carried up the stairs and under the portico over-watched by the four stone eagles, but she is no sentimentalist. The horror of the incident has become the talk of the neighbourhood but the Major Domo refuses to be coerced into any visible emotion. She is a woman of experience, wise in the ways of the establishment.

'The arrangements were made for Dr. Jekyll by a Mr. Edward Hyde,' says she, adjusting her monocle. 'They were to dine together last night with the ladies. Mr. Hyde is a good friend of the courtesan- the snake dancer, Mayati.'

'The dancer… the exotic?'

'Yes indeed,' replies the Major Domo, preening in her androgyny and smiling ambiguously. It was a shame really, the destruction and the loss of income that it would bring, but so went the world. Inspector Murray observes her look of indifference but he merely grunts.

'Where is this Mayati?'

The Major Domo shrugs.

Says Sergeant Rogers- 'What else do you know of this Mr. Hyde?' He scowls in surly fashion but the Major Domo ignores the man. She finds his long, thin face, narrow nostrils and sallow complexion quite unremarkable. The sergeant has been poking about amid the glass, looking perhaps for a clue, but ineffectually.

'Well,' returns the Major Domo, 'he was Era algo así como un libertino, a free-spending gentleman.' She moves slightly as she speaks, her feet crunching upon broken glass. A clot of blood squelches under her sole.

'Yes, yes,' says Inspector Murray impatiently, giving the Major Domo the impression that he remains unconvinced.

'Apart from his virtues as a client.'

'He always seemed the perfect gentleman. Truly, that is all that I know, Inspector.'

'What of this Dr. Jekyll?'

'Again, I cannot say, Inspector. I never met the gentleman.' Disgruntled, Inspector Murray has a difficult case upon his hands, but as he is familiar with the workings of the Khazneh and its clientele, he does not wish to delve too deeply either.

'All right,' he tells the Major Domo, dismissing her. 'You can go.'

'Así que amable de su parte, Inspector!'

Men have begun to clean up the shattered furniture and the showers of slivered glass. The ceiling and its dome now lie open to the skies.

'Inspector,' says the Major Domo before she slinks away, 'the management would be prepared, I feel sure, to make certain arrangements with you if…' She pauses leaving her sentence hanging in air.

'I'm sorry,' apologises Inspector Murray through his teeth, 'it's not possible this time.'

The slim androgyny smiles back a knowing smile. Says she- 'Of course, there's always a next time…'

Sergeant Rogers interjects. 'I suppose, sir, Dr. Jekyll could have arrived and left by the back door.'

'With this Mr. Hyde?' Murray rubs his chin in contemplation.

'Accompanied by the dancer, Mayati?'

'Well, we'll soon find out, Rogers. In the meantime, we shall keep this place closed.'

The police stand anchored in the debris field, looking about but with few clues as to what exactly to do.

'I think,' says Murray, a little light taking spark in his eyes, 'that we shall need pay a visit to this Dr. Jekyll fellow. Come on, Rogers.'

Without another word, they depart the Khazneh, their mission to interview the good Dr. Jekyll and to perhaps shed some light on a most gruesome puzzle.

The morning is passing so quickly that I have little time left to accomplish that which I must do. I have scratched out the following and hasty note:

'So, my dear Ernst, you are the only one I can look to. You alone, and only you, can perhaps help save something of the life and honour of your truly repentant friend, Henry Jekyll.'

Folding the note, I seal it into an envelope. From the lane outside the Ship's Chandler, drifts the sound of a man whistling. His cheery not conflicts with my troubled mien, but I need him to leave off and to deliver my message. Walking quickly to the door I open it and pass through, and beyond that I open the garden gate. There the sweep whistles with bucket and ladder, and how happy and ignorant he seems.

'Come here, will you,' I summon, and the man puts down his bucket and broom and steps from the ladder.

'Yes, sir,' he calls back, 'I won't be a minute.'

Back into my laboratory I turn, pacing and pondering, and ridden with a terrible angst, thinking that Edward Hyde is eavesdropping, listening to all I say.

'Ernst will come,' I tell myself. 'I know he will come.' Though even as I speak I feel the other clawing at my insides. For Hyde knows everything I say and feel, knows every thought I have, breathes every breath I take.

'You summon Litauer to his death!'

'No! You are a fiend!'

'Such a half-wit you are, Henry Jekyll. Surely you have gleaned by now that I do not have any respect for life. Neither do you. To protest otherwise makes you a fucking detestable liar!'

Spinning around and around is my head, and the confines of my laboratory walls tilt and revolve like a cart wheel. Yet again I feel the Stygian heat of Edward Hyde's lust returning to my veins.

'What can I do?' I plead uselessly. 'To whom can I turn? How can end this torture?'

'You weakling! How you turn my stomach, you snivelling, gutless little cunt!'

Throwing up my hands I clasp at my face, and I turn to the wall, but the wall folds under my flesh. I can hear Hyde laughing at me. I can see...

'Yes, sir?' says the chimney sweep, popping his head through the door, and into this realm of madness. The man is confused, is about to ask whether there is something wrong.

'Are you all right, sir?'

'Yes, I am quite all right.'

The man smiles even though bewilderment wrinkles his weathered face.

'See that hamper over there?'

He looks to a large wicker box held shut by a chain and padlock. The man nods.

'I wonder if you'd be kind enough to take it to the mews for me.'

'Of course. Most certainly, sir.'

Stooping with bent back the sweep begins his attempt to shift the crate, but it is heavy, filled with obsolete laboratory equipment.

'Can you manage alone?'

The man protests that the box is rather heavy. He begins to push and to heave, sliding the hamper in the direction of the door.

'This is heavy, sir,' says the man, puffing and gasping in his effort, straightening up and massaging his strained back, and then he feels the touch of cold steel against his temple.

Totò shrieks, and in that moment, upon the sound of a shot, a police wagon abruptly pulls up to the curb, halts before the fire hydrant in Morley Street, and a troop of blue-uniformed constables from the Bow Street Foot Patrol pour into the road.

'Cover the back!' calls Inspector Murray. Waving half his crew to the rear lane and the garden, and the laboratory, the Inspector and Sergeant Rogers fly to the main building.

'We'll check the house!'

Inside the laboratory, behind its locked and bolted door, the chimney sweep is slumping it over the expanse of Dr. Jekyll's desk. His skull is a blasted mess of red pulp, an eyeball spattered and blown out, his head cracked open like a rotten fruit. Soon is heard smashing glass followed by a heavy thudding as the Bobbies throw themselves upon the door. from under the jamb seeps the reek of spilled kerosine. Totò shrieks and leaps frantically about in his cage, and outside, in the garden, the police rush once more upon the laboratory door. They pause for a moment, hearing the monkey scream, and then they begin to pound the barred portal again and again.

The main house is empty, and there is nothing to find, no body and no blood, but the main bedroom is a shamble, and clothing and linen is strewed about the floor. Sergeant Rogers peers from the bedroom window.

'Inspector, I think we should hurry to the rear!'

'Let's get down there,' shouts Murray. 'Quickly!'

Outside the laboratory a constable shouts- 'Doctor Jekyll, are you in there?' but no one answers. The men hear a further smashing of glass, the splashing of liquid, a maelstrom of flying papers and the frantic screams of the monkey. 'Open this door! Open this door!'

Through the window is hurled a leather-bound volume that smashes the pane. A glinting silver shard of lethal glass is propelled into the air, going deep into the eye of one of Murray's men. Above the calamity there comes a cry- 'Jekyll's gone mad! Be careful, he's got a gun!' A scuffle ensues, and the sound of more breaking glass, as if a struggle is taking place. 'Let go, Jekyll!'

As the constabulary attack the door the air becomes incendiary and the laboratory is abruptly enveloped in a holocaust of fire. There, on the periphery of the flames Hyde hovers, his face an insane mask of glee. Fire's astonishment licks up the walls, its heat bursting tubes and pipettes, smashing phials and blackening Jekyll's microscope, warping its glass eye and turning his notes to ashes. Hyde reels back from the blast of heat, and the blaze is so intense that it ravages the body at the desk, red tongues searing through tissue and splitting the lifeless skin. In the roaring inferno, the body of the chimney sweep spasms as if it is twitching, its extensor surfaces, its knees and its elbows are flexing and retracting. There is little left of the face after the exit of the bullet through the temple, and blood begins to pour from the burning flesh. The gore oozes and sizzles, thick as chocolate, the bones begin to crack. It does not take long for the flames render the flesh unrecognisable. The fire blackens and engulfs the hamper.

'He must be completely insane,' says Murray, emerging from the house and rushing towards the laboratory and the yellow-orange glow of the fire. He calls for his men to fetch the fire engine. Upon these words, another shot rings out. The police are forcing the laboratory door with the flue cleaner's ladder, and as the door bursts open Hyde tosses the pistol into the flames, the gun striking the voyeuristic oculus of the mirror and splitting it from width to breadth.

'Jekyll,' he gasps, besmirched with soot and emerging from a billowing cloud of smoke, 'he's set fire to the place. He has shot himself! He tried to…' All trembling with feigned exhaustion, Hyde stumbles from the blaze. Between the police he staggers, to watch on as a young man writhes in agony, blood spilling from his eye. Amid the chaos nobody notices that Hyde retrieves the book lying in a pool of broken glass, and nobody observes his twisted smile. Hyde can hear the monkey Totò shrieking in terror, and a brave police constable enters the inferno and returns a moment later, gasping for air, from smoke suffocation, and with scorched hair trailing cinders, clasping the terrified simian to his breast. The flames are roaring, forcing everyone to retreat, the fire advancing to the main building, the orange light pouring like syrup over gable, and roof tile, tracings long dancing fingers over the lawn. Soon the flames sear the viridian foliage of the climbing hydrangea, even as its wide jade leaves cling to the trellis, reaching desperately across that gap between its stems and the masonry to grasp at the wall, tortured and twining in the diamond crisscross of lattice, turning to ash. The roses become incendiary, the garden cherubim cracks in two, the French doors shatter. The fire brings into Jekyll's domain the terrors that inhabit the throbbing and pulsating inevitability of the outside world, heralds a blazing purity. Clawing with Vulcan claws against the lattice frame, against the bricks, reducing the house to cinders.

'Don't say anything more just now,' says Inspector Murray to the distraught Mr. Hyde, and Hyde is laughing hysterically within, confident in his dupe and confident in his victory, tucking the book inside his soiled shirt to conceal it from view. Within minutes the fire engine has clattered up to the curb, the red hydrant filling plump hoses. Water is jetting to douse the flames, but too late.

Availing himself of any guilt has proven so easy that Hyde can hardly believe it himself. How his eyes are maddened and aglow in his triumph, having finally and cunningly condemned the weaker and foolish Doctor Jekyll to the pit of the abyss for all of eternity. Morley Street watches as the inferno and the water blast reduce Number 29 to blackened cinders, debris and rubble, and destroys forever Dr. Henry Jekyll's note for redemption to Ernst Litauer.

Chapter 19

Inquiry

'The link between two perspectives is dissolved.'

Joseph Campbell

So, we must now sit patiently in the gallery, at an inquest held by the Medical Council and the police, and then to hear the final verdict. They of course are investigating the horrors that have been perpetrated and have heard testimony and declaration and in places they have found the strange case of Dr. Jekyll clear-cut and simple. It is probably best that we sit quietly and listen, and please, madam, do not fidget, for these twenty men will have no truck but to eject us if we so blatantly show our disrespect.

Says Professor Marlowe- 'It would seem from the evidence of Professor Litauer and of Mr. Edward Hyde that the balance of Dr. Jekyll's mind was disturbed from dangerous experimentation with certain unknown drug compounds of his own making. Drugs to which he became addicted.'

At the end of a long bench they sit side by side, the handsome Edward Hyde and the rather scholarly severe Ernst Litauer. They have never met before and each regards the other with suspicion. Thinks Litauer, 'Who is this Edward Hyde?' The man is charming, and beautiful of form, but he is noticeably nervous. All eyes are upon them, all ears are listening.

Continues Marlowe- 'In his deluded state Dr. Jekyll executed a diabolical revenge for imagined wrongs, and at the last, took his own life.' As the man delivers his decree Edward Hyde sits smugly confident that he, the supreme entity, has vanquished the feeble Henry Jekyll.

Says Litauer, looking to the strangely arrogant beaming young man- 'It is fortunate indeed that Mr. Edward Hyde escaped from Jekyll's inferno.' Litauer wants to ask Hyde how it is that he knows Henry Jekyll, for Henry has never spoken of this man before. The scholar begins to ruminate upon unpleasant thoughts, thoughts of possible impropriety. He cannot ask Kitty about Edward Hyde, for she is now dead, slain in a den of iniquity. Hyde casts his eyes to the floor, for there is something itching just under his skin that he wants to scratch, something unwanted squirming in his epidermis. The man cannot bring himself to engage Ernst's eyes. Hyde begins sweating profusely, an altogether unpleasant fire igniting in his body. There is a force swimming through the Vulcan ichors of his veins. Strange, thinks Litauer, that there is something not quite right about Edward Hyde, but he has yet to reach his own verdict regarding the inquiry, not that all the facts are yet known. 'So,' continues the ever-officious Marlowe, looking down the length of the table and casting a steely eye over his band of men, 'the case of Dr. Jekyll is a solemn warning to all of us not to meddle with the divine pattern of nature!'

Ernst Litauer is not certain that he can fully condone those words. He shakes his head and observes as Hyde smiles insipidly. There is a somewhat wholly disagreeable aura emanating from the man, thinks he, and how does one trust a man who simpers?

'The verdict: death by suicide.'

Marlowe, waves his hand over the assembly. 'Thank you, gentlemen. The proceedings are closed.'

A murmur passes through the twenty and Edward Hyde rises quickly from his chair, his visage twisted with a smug leer. He collects his hat and his coat and he walks briskly from the room, but his legs are suddenly stiff and they do not want to move as he wishes them to move. In the hall, he stalls and staggers.

'I don't understand all of this,' says Ernst, 'for the Henry Jekyll I knew had some fine points. I do not know much of his past, nor am I privy to any dark secrets that he harboured, but I do know that he possessed a brilliant mind.'

Edward flinches nervously for he does not wish to speak with Litauer.

'He was a murderer and an arsonist,' whispers Hyde, but only Ernst hears. 'He failed to realise his higher man, free from all restraint.'

'His higher man?' reiterates Ernst Litauer thoughtfully and tragically. 'What a curious thing to say.'

'The one who lives solely by energy and reason. He takes what he wants,' says Hyde.

Ernst stares at Edward. 'For one moment, there you sounded exactly like poor Jekyll,' and Hyde's face begins to screw up as if in pain.

He breaks away from Litauer, and the hall in which he walks tilts as if it is turning upside down. Something terrible is happening, something that he cannot govern. All the colour drains from his face and his skin goes ashen, Hyde's hair is even toning into grey.

'Mr. Hyde,' says Ernst, 'are you ill?'

Forcing a smile, Edward Hyde gasps, even as he draws away. 'I must leave immediately,' he groans, rejecting Ernst Litauer's steady hand.

'Are you sure you are able?'

'Yes, please, I have to go.'

With the floor rushing up to meet him, Edward Hyde almost falls. Look, look at his hands, how wrinkled they have become, how emaciated his visage. What is happening?

'Help me,' I plead, and my voice is the voice that Ernst must recognise.

'Not here! Wait, I beg you' cries Edward Hyde. 'Not here, not here! Leave me!'

'Never!' I shriek aloud. 'Never, never, never!'

'Henry?' whispers Ernst in horror. 'Is that you?'

Litauer studies my abruptly aging face and a wave of confusion washes over his countenance.

'Only I can destroy him!' I shout, leaving the Medical Council and Marlowe and Blake and all the rest reeling where they stand. 'I have!'

With one final groan of panic and remorse commingled, I break away and I run for the door, tripping and swaying and almost vomiting as I flee.

So now our tour is finished, and you might ask if Inspector Murray was ever able to arrest Henry Jekyll on a charge of willful murder…

Nonsense, I say imperiously, for the fervent scientist must yet proclaim his true conquest! Watch but do not scoff with incredulity as he staggers into the street, into the fog, into the darkness, to evade arrest. True, he is ashamed and terrified and exalted, his mind still imbued with an unholy fever and utterly unaware of his true character. Towards fate Jekyll lurches, wavering and tottering, forward with each irrevocable step, his body quaking, riven with convulsion and his vision is seared by flame until he is almost blinded. Into the stews he runs, losing himself among the pick-pockets and the prostitutes, subsumed at last into the teeming masses of the underprivileged. Part of Henry's subconscious reels still with pompous thoughts about all the noble things he wants to achieve, to release the higher man, but deeper, deeper than that sullied core, there is a hunger perpetual roiling for all the joys when the nasty things that lie beneath are unveiled. Whatever drives him, whatever power, it glimmers and it shines behind his eyes, for it reflects a reflection of a reflection that entraps him on the other side of the mirror. His thoughts are waking dreams and nightmares and a merciless contemplation of a host of other twisted and infernal horrors. We know that no matter what happens he must run, and he can never tell anyone the truth, not ever, for to tell that is to confess that he has loved an abomination. That he is in love with Mr. Edward Hyde!

Chapter 20

The World Below

'Let us make a bargain never to refer to this again.'

Robert Louis Stevenson

Anyone who has ever crossed swords with the Devil shall know that after the pain and after the struggle, after all the horror of the battle, the thing the sinner seeks most of all is redemption. Praying for that redemption, and strong in the hope that Hyde, in his unpredictable recrudescence, like a terrible disease, shall manifest no more, we can join Dr. Jekyll now, having slipped at last from the Bluegate stews and sailed into exile…

As the ship rocks from side to side in the gently rolling open sea, I reflect upon all that has occurred as I look into the mirror. It is an eye of glass, tiny in comparison to the three feet wide and two feet deep rectangle that hung in my laboratory. No longer do I glimpse the boundaries of the world that lie beyond my garden fence and gate, but instead the endless green-blue waves. In the mirror is my image, seen as others see me, as I now see myself, reflected in the silver glass. Beyond the vast ocean I am not so foolish as to believe there will be no more shadows, however, I am still not tempted to embrace the excessively passionate kingdom of people. Sadly, I am no longer safe in my haunt, for even as the afternoon sun descends over the tallest mast, even as it slides into another evening beyond the horizon, my inner thoughts remain troubled. What a stir my adventures have caused, and even the Medical Councils and Oxford have decided now, under the insistence of Ernst Litauer, to examine some of the psychological implications of my alleged schizophrenia. They have begun plagiarism, trying to emulate some of my research into the use of mind altering drugs, but who knows what horrors they will unleash upon the world. I have heard that they too now seek for that primal higher man, he whom I once espoused but now know a fallacy. The Council, those pretentious denigrators, have begun to re-evaluate my paper, the one that started all the fuss, but without my journal they seek in the dark. For it is I who possess the journal and I shall never reveal its secrets to another living being. If you look for me, it will be with great difficulty that you ever find me, for perhaps you will need to look twice, seek for something you least expect where you least expect it to be found. Today I am engaged in a new philosophical adventure, and one in which all is never quite what it seems. Believe me when I state that I now understand the important distinctions of mind and body, of the noble and wicked, of love and loathing, and with that knowledge do I vow to reinvent and to purge the worst and the foulest depredations I have caused. No, I cannot blame you in thinking me irredeemable, a psychotic maniac, a killer, for that is unfortunately the truth. Nonetheless, something I cannot explain has awoken within my coil, and perhaps its cause and its changes are affected by the residue from the drugs that I have imbibed. Truly, I do not know, but I swear that I am different, and that my mind is clearer and more alert than it has ever been.

Upon the three-masted Clipper Ship, Thermopylae, I am now bound for Australia, booked a passage to take me from England to the antipodes, and the graceful barque, the speediest ocean transport known to man has circumnavigated the globe in a surging rush of sixty-five days. The craft is now delivering me to an altogether new world that floats below the equator. I am told that it is a country of wool and gold and grain and risks, and there are many lawless outposts and dangers to be encountered. Eventually, and such are my expectations, I must find myself in the lawless and vast regions of Queensland, off to an ungoverned little colony called Rockhampton. Do not think that I am blessed in my escape and that in penitence I shall find answers to all of life's questions. Yet see, is it not remarkable that with me have come three travelling companions, an East End prostitute, a mute child, and a beautiful Arabian. Yes, you are correct, the pretty woman is Yvonne, she who presided over the rope that hanged Mr. Burke above the creaking gables of Mrs. Murphy's Rooms for Rent. The child is Jane, the orphan from the Universal Dispensary, and the Arabian, well, of course it is Mayati, mercifully taken by a fit of epilepsy before a madman's hands could completely crush the breath from her lungs, though now her larynx is compressed and rendered useless, and she too is sadly mute. Surely the oppressed are allowed no voice in a world with a preponderance for disparity.

Yvonne feels no remorse for either Mr. Burke or Mr. Hare, having oft suffered under their filthy grinding hips, and although she could not collect the £200 reward for the information she delivered to the police, she has wisely kept the coin she has and bound for adventure, boarded with me for this long ocean voyage in a bid for a new life. You might query why I have taken Jane, and perhaps that amounts to another crime, kidnapping, but I am compelled by duty and I swear that at some point I will claim back her voice. Jane's little face has never beamed as happily as it does now, and the ocean voyage and the journey have agreed with her health. She even trusts me again. Mayati, the alluring dancer with her gender secret is now my constant companion, and I have vowed to find a cure for her broken voice and for her epilepsy. Ah, what strange bedfellows does melodrama make?! What adventures lie before us, what new experiences shall be ours in the colonies?

Nonetheless, we have come a long, long way, sailing from Plymouth, across the vasty blue of wave and spume for over 13,000 miles. Our journey has seen us sometimes sick with mal de mer and our nostrils filled with salt spray, yet always our eyes are brim with the glorious light of hope. We have seen the sea both calm and furious, for sometimes our passage has been steered in unruffled tranquility, and in those moments our boat trailed happiness and promised fortune in our wake. Storms have assailed our craft too, the winds howling, and I have curled up in the rectangle of my bunk as the ropes tangled in the masts on high and the sails were ripped as if by titan fingers. At night, above our heads, from the sky dome, we have glimpsed stars falling and lightning stabbing, and we have wished upon those stars and stood frozen in awe as both blazed silver fire over the horizon. The surface of the ocean was sometimes like a black glass, obsidian and false and untroubled, like a mirror, but not like the mirror that hung in my laboratory.

We have almost grown accustomed to the creaking of the timbers, the stretching of the ropes and the rigging, the flapping of the sails and the surge of the waves. These natural elements have become as a strange symphony of sounds to our ears, and of course we discuss all the wondrous things that might await us on the distant shores of the land down under, beneath the southern skies of the world below. Yet I know fear, for I am not foolish enough to think that ignominy and judgment cannot yet crest upon the stormy wave of my arrival and drag me under, even in exile. For two months have we sailed, in which time we have all drawn close and become, oddly enough, friends. How I never thought that I should ever know the true meaning of that word. However, none know of my inner demons nor what I have done.

Yvonne has been forever full of cheer, and at night she oft wishes upon that star up there, all aglow in the celestial cross, for she says that it is the constellation of her heart. Her old ways have been somewhat curbed, despite the rough men and the sailors who leer and grasp, and that is not to say that she has been completely reformed. She has cast her eye upon a young man from another cabin, and they have exchanged smiles, but she keeps any notions of romance at a distance. Nonetheless, her eyes are wide with the shining possibilities of the new world, though perhaps she cannot avoid the fact that her body might be the true instrument through which she must always reach for that star. I do not plan that fate for Jane.

As for myself… well, despite my homicidal doings, have you not noted a rather different demeanour in my mien, in my face, even as the days at sea are long and the earth curves southward? It is with interest that you might come to understand that I have decided upon a new path of research, one that will benefit women like Yvonne and Mayati in their imminent clashes with syphilis and other social diseases. For vain is human nature, always vain when driven by the need for redemption, and yet despite this it cannot throw off its conceited impulses, try as it might. How many women can be cured, and what drugs can perfect such a miracle? Very few I dare say, so in my capacity as chemist and doctor I know I bring with me the seed of something good, even if it has been planted in the midden soils of evil. Perhaps I alone possess the knowledge and the medical skills to tackle the problem from a new and fresh perspective. Perhaps I can even heal myself. Though the psychotic impulses have at last abated, redemption makes the soul restless, it forces us back from our grandiose delusions and makes us put on our dowdiest clothes, it makes us repentant in all that we say and do. If the eye no longer shines with lustful passion, yet now is it is alight with a much more intense and deeper understanding of the needs beyond the superficial flesh. Try not to overly reproach me my sins, for if you look too hard and too long into the darkness, you too, just as easily, may see some paths upon which you too have lost your way. Yes, indeed I run from justice, but I swear that while there is life yet in me I can somehow, somewhere achieve good things, despite the horrors of my past and the pestilential bane of my botched experiments. You suspect that I might relapse, and of course there can be no surety, but I shall face that jeopardy as it faces me.

The sun has risen over the horizon and the ship's bow is pointing straight toward an inlet called Botany Bay. Beyond the flapping rigging and the tall masts and the white width sail, through the spy glass you can just glimpse the sheltered cove, and the wind is warm and the auspices glorious. From my deck cabin, I can hear a sailor calling that land is sighted ahead, and a bell begins clanging. Yvonne bursts into the cabin and clasps Mayati's hands.

'We are here, at last!' she exclaims, and her smile is the sunniest smile that she has ever worn. A ray of sunlight strikes the surface of the mirror pinned to the cabin wall, and the sun is so bright and intense in that flare that it almost burns our images from the glass.

'Come, come quickly!' insists Yvonne. 'It's first sight! We can't miss that!'

Smiling wanly at my reflection in the mirror, I nod and Mayati pins up a long brown tress of my hair. Her own sable mane has been bound and pinned beneath a silk scarf. She flexes her fingers, imitating a scissor, the joke being that I need a haircut, but she is satisfied that I am at least presentable. My companion hugs Jane and smiles and then she stretches out her hand and her fingers entwine through mine. For some unaccountable reason I am shaking, trembling because we are so far away from the grime of England and upon the frontier of a new life. The four of us go above deck to greet a new day. Here is a fresh world and a new persona for us all, and redemption for the past evil utterly possible. Gently I squeeze Mayati's hand and we smile, and Yvonne and Jane run to the bulwark rail and lean precariously forward and begin to wave in the direction of their new home. A flash of sunlight sparks in the golden topaz necklace about Yvonne's throat. A string of jewels that once adorned Kitty Jekyll's lovely neck. Above Yvonne's head a wheeling gull squawks in a warm eddy over the mast.

'I keep searching, looking, waiting, hoping

He'll be there, the boy for me.'

Yvonne is smiling as she sings Mary's song, and the deck is filling with passengers and cheer. The ship's bell is clanging and the tugs are coming to meet us. Good things can be done in this country, I so want to believe this, good things to help the health of fallen women and those destitute like Yvonne and Mayati. I must not fall and become that monster, Edward Hyde, or ever plunge the depths of Henry Jekyll's soul ever again. I must refine my researches and my drugs. I can succeed. The kiss of the breeze is soft against my cheek, and that long lock of hair falls free again, but I no longer care, instead I close my eyes and I let my body sway to the gentle undulations of the ocean. Standing beside me Mayati beams in the sunlight, her raven locks tumbling from under her scarf. At last I understand that finally the dying fires of Jekyll's inferno are doused and that the ashes of dissipation and debauchery, of weakness and infirmity may forever and utterly be scattered to the quittance of the winds. We dock and the gangplank opens before us, and there is so much bustle and commerce and activity that we are somewhat overwhelmed. It has been suggested that I take up an appointment in Sydney's new Foundling Hospital, and this I shall consider, if but for a short while, before we head north. Hopefully we can settle untroubled into our new lives. The discovery of gold and copper and tin and other rich minerals have begun a lucrative mining industry northward, in Queensland, and this has drawn men to the frontiers seeking quick riches. Here then I perceive a wonderful opportunity to pursue my researches and to help those women who must follow the men, those most at risk from syphilis and gonorrhoea. As we stand on the wharf deciding what is to be done next, Jane smiles and begins tugging at my sleeve. She is pointing to a colourful poster plastered to a great crate that goes by on a cart. It declares that the world's most famous tightrope walker, Blondin, The Hero of Niagara, will arrive in Sydney on the twelfth of August, and that is a future date to which we must return. It promises entertainment and fanfare and fantastic thrills. I squeeze Jane's hand and I promise that we shall go, and she hugs me so tight that I feel I am almost going to cry. Walking the tightrope of our new life is going to be difficult but I truly believe this new country will have its joys too. For a moment, we are stranded upon the dock, a strange group of people each wanting the other to take charge of our destinies. Soon we are approached by the young man who has befriended Yvonne aboard ship. He is handsome and strong of shoulder and back and thigh, his hair is the colour of midnight. Look, his eyes are bright blue jewels. Yvonne has been smitten from the first moment that they met, and perhaps her wish, her song might come true yet. The young man assures us that he is willing to help should we find ourselves in any difficulty, and he asks after our names by way of introduction.

'My name is Michael Pritchard,' says he, and he tips his hat. 'That distinguished looking gentleman over there is my father, the eminent Dr. John Pritchard, follower after Freud.' An elder man with a black moustache waxed to arrow tips and wearing a tall silken black hat gives a friendly wave, a pretty girl of about sixteen stands at his side, but she seems distracted and her gaze peers away into the bustle of the docks, as if nervous. 'That's Anna. She is our ward.' The young man smiles upon Jane. 'Perhaps you shall become friends?'

Jane smiles too, but as she cannot speak, so she nods her head in reply. I look at Anna, a pretty girl dressed in her primrose lace, but she is somehow both fragile and mysterious and with a nervous eye. Dr. Pritchard is standing close beside the girl, and it seems to me that he shields her, yet I read something other in his poise, something that goes beyond the borders of care, something that touches upon obsession and possession. His hand glances against her forearm, lingering upon the satin, white skin.

'Anna,' Pritchard whispers, 'will you say hello to our new friends?'

Anna quivers visibly, rippling in a tense moment, bristling with angst.

Suppressing a shudder as Anna's eyes turn to mine, I find I am vaguely alarmed because I sense in that look something disturbed and panicked. Her eyes are aflame, and they are filled with terror and violence, and I do not understand how no one else sees what I see. How can I explain that I fear the girl harbours something evil, that she is irrevocably damaged? Pritchard knows, he knows there is a demon in that girl's skin! Something strange twists its chilly way along my spine, for I feel I am upon the brink of understanding the girl's plight because of the violence that has driven my own destiny. Turning my face, I look down at little Jane, and I draw the child closer to me in a protective embrace, and I force a smile, even as a spike, like a hot nail goes deep into my brain. The pain shoots behind my eyes and tingles my flesh. I feel Mayati shudder, as if she registers my pain and her hand reaches out and grasps my forearm. In Anna, am I recognising a 'like' being? The girl does not smile, and I wonder if the sudden hurt in my head is a herald, her call for help, a psychic link to the knowledge of doomed womanhood possessed of male violence. Have I glimpsed a madness boiling behind her mask, a madness waiting to be unleashed? Dr. Pritchard cannot help this girl, I know this, but perhaps I can. If I can gain her trust and my chemistry proves true, I may be able to make some good of the past… I turn to Mayati and I give her a feeble smile.

'We'd be honoured if you might share our carriage into town, and perhaps join us for lunch?' says Michael Pritchard, addressing Yvonne, his eyes sparkling, his teeth flashing white in the bright hot sun. He waves that we should join his father, and on this point, I harbour strange misgivings.

'Well, handsome,' says my lively friend, radiant and fresh, her amber necklace gleaming with hot fire. She is extroverted enough to speak for all of us. 'My name is Yvonne, darling…'

Anna's face contorts into a pained grimace as her eyes are dazzled by the sparks dancing in the jewel at Yvonne's throat, and nobody sees, but I see. Yvonne draws me close in a warm and loving embrace, scintillates of yellow light playing over her lovely cheeks. 'This is my friend, Mayati, and this is my niece, little Jane.' Yvonne stoops and gives Jane a petite kiss on the cheek. Jane extends her hand, a little star, and Michael Pritchard kisses her too, and the pain inside my head erupts as if there were a multitude of pulsing horrors trapped inside my skull. There is a voice reverberating in there too, a strangely melodious male voice that tries to soothe amid the cacophony, and it is a voice that calls to Anna. In the mirror of her eyes I see a fireplace that blazes with burning logs, and I glimpse a knife protruding from the breast of a dead woman splayed within the shadows. The man who calls, his hands are the hands that have wielded the knife, and they are splashed with blood, reaching towards a child, and that child is Anna. His hands are scabbed with oozing sores, covered with syphilitic pox and marked by the stamp of the fleur de lys. I can hear the girl screaming. Reflected in the flashing sparks thrown by both fire and blade is Anna's tear-streaked face, and the man's hideous visage descends and his foaming, bloody lips kiss her cheek. In that moment, I am fused with her terrors, horrors triggered by the flashing lights and the kiss- by the kiss! Like Jane, she has suffered a profound trauma that has left her beyond trusting, dangerous and psychotic. She is clasping her own hands together, tightly, and then shaking them as if they were crawling with insects, and they do look like another's hands, a man's broad and hairy and scabbed hands- the hands of a homicidal maniac... the hands of the ripper! The girl's whole body has gone rigid and her pretty face has drained of all colour. How is it that I am the only person who sees this?

'Charmed!' remarks Michael as he winks, unaware that calm has almost fled his father's ward. Beware, John Pritchard, for you dance with the Devil! In the Doctor's eyes, I see more of lust than concern, and it is an almost incestuous rapture that captures Pritchard's soul and is guiding him towards disaster. In that girl, I too meet the equal of my own homicidal shadow, and I am repulsed and cannot repress an agonised shiver.

'Glad to meet you, young Miss,' Yvonne says to Anna, reaching out her hand to the pretty waif. A blaze of starburst sparkles in the topaz jewel at Yvonne's throat, dazzling Anna's wide and staring eyes. 'This is my…sister,' says Yvonne, introducing me as I gasp and shrink back, and my companion is stepping forward as the words leave her tongue. 'She's a widow. Her name is Hyde… Mrs. Hyde.'

Yvonne leans forward and kisses Anna on the cheek, and Anna screams.