Author's Note: Although I've listed this story under the category of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and though the original premise sprung from my desire to create a more true to life interpretation of the tale, all scenarios and characters are orginial and belong to the author solely. My intention is to create a work that examines a true and clinical dissociative disorder. At the beginning of the 20th century, cases of schizophrenia, fugue state, insomnia, and depression were not well understood and there were many methods employed at finding a cure...These consisted of everything from asylums to drug therapy. Stimulants, of course, were used very liberally and often to the detriment of the patient...
Chapter 1
London, 1902
House of L. Hall
The good doctor is preparing his injection. The syringe is filled, alcohol cleansed and ready. He primes the tip. The waste goes drip-drop and the smart headed tube ingests a timely meal that is expunged even before it can form a resin within the cylindrical slip of metal.
The delivery is only moments away. The doctor's old second hand pivots slowly, steadily, winding round to the thirty-second mark. His clock is a reliable transportation system, fuelless and efficient; heirloom technology from a decade that was decidedly less affected by the waste consciousness of workers, the industrious marrow of bank clerks and long-winded practitioners of legal spit, motivated only by a future junction in space-time. His clock is a fine facilitator. It is as much lacking in the department of souls as any one of its pragmatist observers. The clock is as the indifferent labourer, skilled in but one task, coolly operating in any locale, operations sanctioned or unsanctioned, despised or in compliance with - this is of little concern to such delicate hardness and brass tack. Precise to all the doctor's hours, the second hand fits itself like a scalpel into thin tissue. Ticks and clicks and a repetition of sound. A little heart without tremor or distemper.
The doctor grunts out a noise that wrestles for attention as he slips the needle in, meticulously fingering the plunger and depressing the shape with the pad of his thumb. He does not enjoy being stuck and would prefer his dose in the form of a tablet. The needle, however, will permit a quicker action, an easy hole into the bloodstream, employing all the necessary mediums for absorption, an entrance into the microcosmic byways and intersections running between brain and spine and organ, forever forming the ellipsis of a circuit.
The oil lamp has been refilled, illuminating the room wherein many errands of science have been performed - a tidy workplace for the doctor and his trade. Secure within their holders, corked and suspended from a rise of shelves, like headless tulips arranged for a weekday market sale, the test tubes make houses for liquid and dry matter, distilled and reconstituted solutions, chemicals new and aged, souring and keeping and coating the glass. The mortar and its pestle, always a melancholic grey, have lost their function for tonight. The vessel and its tool are merely shepherds for dust now, a deadened echo of the doctor's working hands, which are resting on his lap as the perspiration finally arrives, tunnelling out of the pores and winding down the temples.
He seeks the window with his eyes, longs for the outside rush of cool, humid air in a windowless room. Even the noise he would welcome, the bustling of street-changers fixing their feet towards an open shop, the thump of a cane withstanding an awkward load, the trodding of the well-to-do women with their pointed shoes, a rat-tat-tat on the iron gates, the child armed with chalk and ball, a lighter, anxious hustling from these heels. Street bodies with their voices, ricocheting off the city's slum and splendour.
London is a boiler room for wreckage these days. The gilded ladies hole up in buildings full of red sloth. The gentleman pays for services rendered. Two shillings and he still manages to keep his moniker, reputation as white as the powder within his pill box.
Morose is the doctor, tired and sweating and dreaming of something beyond the addictions of the world's westerly edge, beyond the excesses of the upper and middle classes, their immodesties crammed into a corner closet, germinating under tepid beds of expression, their false faces honed for the sake of a false pride. There is no vacancy for pretence within the doctor, except that he must hide what he would rather not, building his defences for the sole shelter of his solitude and for the few remaining strings of sanity, to which he does not feel or proscribe to as fully as the majority. He is ever alone and predisposed to a rarer notion of society, which is to say that he views all things through the lens of his microscope, his one socket permanently filled with a dark, metaphorical glass.
The night is a spring of quiet order. The district's early evening travellers have shuffled off to their dwellings and the migratory sounds of men with their swindler and misfit companions, the refuse of pubs and late night establishments, all choked out, smothered by an expansive dark and by the vigilance of the city's justice dogs, ever encroaching on the moving of solicitors and pedestrians suspect of holding their drink a little too unreasonably.
The doctor's staff have retired, weary from the dry monotony of folding and pressing and sweeping and scouring, and all those tasks which are dictated to and overseen by a Mr. T. Irving, commander to the ship of domestic affairs, with a paunch as wide as his righteous continence and perpetual frown. Mr. Irving reserves all kindness for his employer. His smile is a sight to behold: fleshy cheeks and elastic lips pulled back over small, straight teeth, his chin regressing far into the folds of his neck, where these flaps of skin shake like half-eaten bowls of custard. He has eyes protruding from the sides of his head and one eye centered at the back. These eyes are always open, keen for detecting idle hands and long faces, to which he might employ his favourite method of discipline: pulled wages and pulled porridge, as he refers to it.
He'd had, of course, a schoolmaster in his childhood years, one with something to prove and a proverbial itch in need of constant scratching. This was the sort of character who got off terrorizing the yard boys, striking up the same fear as a peeler with his night stick, abusing the privileges of his occupation.
Mr. Irving, however, did not overuse the authority trusted onto him, but he did take pleasure in the discomfited stares and minor sufferings of those placed under his charge. Yet if the doctor knew of the house manager's propensity towards vicious thought, he would have been less inclined to supply the man with as hefty a salary. Nevertheless, Mr. Irving was dependable and this was a quality which far outweighed any inconvenience put upon the household staff by his shrunken personality or staunchly sown lips and asshole.
No, our good doctor requires dependable service in other ways. Let Mr. Irving be kept occupied with his daily dictations and the staff with their skimming of broth and pressing of shoelaces. For in this way, the doctor can maintain his hours, pushing hard into the night. His applications need not be disturbed, though to what end these applications might pertain, this is the doctor's most errant vow of silence, a scarlet letter born only onto himself.