After a night of applied malevolence and malfeasance, vigorous and almost strenuous peripatetic activity, hours of hair-sprung seething and cringing over ruined and missed opportunities, Mr. Edward Hyde looked well spent as the sun woke to blink into his face through the narrow spaces between the tenements in the distance. Whenever his face appeared drawn, a steady observer could perceive, his thick bristly eyebrows would each twitch toward the other.

Mr. Hyde was sprawled all over a park bench: arms stretched over and behind the bench’s back, feet and legs stretched wide apart, heels dug an inch or more into the damp dirt, chest alternately heaving silently or with a low wheeze, his haggard bristly face dropped back, eyes mostly shut and horribly bloodshot under their swollen lids. The park was deserted this early, and with no lamps in the immediate vicinity no lamplighter would be wandering onto the scene for daybreak chores. Still he was not ready to move.

Without lifting his lids, with only their spasmodic flutters and twitches, Mr. Hyde woke in one moment to begin mulling over the previous night’s savageries. He’d raped a secluded grandmother after having the chance for a fresh twelve-year-old snatched from him by the girl’s schoolmaster, the swine! The grandmother was durable to the end, anyway. Hyde fancied she would have taken a liking to him had he not broken a lamp over her head before setting her remote cottage ablaze to stop her fruitless squealing.

Usually a practitioner of sub-lethal misanthropy (only three or four misfortunate cases to his credit), Hyde had abandoned the scene before the first alarm could be raised. He’d next clambered atop a cab just prior to smashing in the mouth with a brick the dozing cabbie, stealing what was in the cashbox so he could drop it into the Salvation Army kettle on Barking Street.

As summer had begun to fade, the Salvation Army kettle on Barking Street was being overseen in late afternoons and early evenings by a fetching young woman with a generous smile who had taken to thanking him for the small coins he’d offhandedly tossed in just to test his aim. It was the fourth or fifth evening before she’d caught his eye: now, he was steadily working on gaining her trust long enough to lure her to some hidden alleyway where he could molest her, briskly or at leisure. He had yet to find a spot good for an hour or more, plenty of waste ground in the area off the dark alleys among the grimy, sooty warehouses. If he had to wind up paying for a room in some local tenement for however much time, he’d pay for it himself!

#  #  #

29 November (1888)

That bastard Jekyll, may he rot in hell! If he ever did anything good, he’ll do no more now! I don’t even have to hope for it now, he’s seen to it thoroughly enough himself, the self-made crypto-Pelagian son of a bitch! This was all his mad idea, not mine! I’m his only beneficiary now, the only survivor of his idiocy: I hope he remembers that—an eternal Sisyphus in the skull of Henry Jekyll tossing the memory of Edward Hyde around!

That Ripper card! What a lot of fuss he’s made! He doesn’t know or even suspect that I’ve spied on him, what a godawful butcher he’s turned into.

#  #  #

22 December (1888)

I’m responsible for none of this, none of this! Jekyll foisted all of this upon me! He’s the genius who refined my essence, him with his potions and his serums, his elixirs, the empiric busybody, the miserable self-made Pelagian son of a bitch, may he rot in hell forever! The stuff tasted like stale piss and sewer water both, I can tell you, with brine and bile and essence of reconstituted rat stirred in! I’ve come to think he was still too young to be practicing alchemy, not nearly enough white hairs. It’s all in the public record now, even though the fine details are plainly erroneous—Stevenson couldn’t be expected to’ve known all the details from the inside, anyway, he was a sick man even then, let us recall. —but let no one forget that I am only the product of Jekyll’s distillation of his own putrid soul, I am his own dregs, antinomian to all the whole wide world, autonomous on the inside of my cage of flesh.

#  #  #

13 March (1889)

I begin to fear I might be reproached for coming around a bit late: no more than three or four murders, a dozen or so rapes, barely a handful of arsons, only petty thefts and robberies, and only as many instances of assault (with and without battery) as may’ve occurred across all such episodes. I get more and more prickly around the full moon, the regulars and the dogs know by now, they turn away at the first sight of me.

But it’s hardly up to me to confess everything! Indeed, why confess anything? I can hardly remember it all anyway across days of seething rage and energetic application. I’ve kicked enough dogs so that they all avoid me now! They cringe when I snarl at them! (Of course, I’ve raped dogs, too.) I have never killed a cat, but I did toss a few into the Thames from the embankment, they each crawled out before vanishing.

And smothering children? Well of course. I’ve confessed to that elsewhere, but what’s to explain? Each and every time, they were savage children, squirming little brutes and beasts and brats, they met and simply were overcome by my own savagery, that’s all there was to that, little forces of nature confronted with overwhelming force. No doubt any number of brutes would be pleased to kill me just as considerately, but not one yet has come close to overcoming me! I’m always armed with a blade or at least a strong stick, I’ve smashed enough heads and ribs by now, broken enough arms, knocked out numerous teeth, gouged out eyes, cut off ears. Maybe I picked up something from that Ripper chap after all . . .

#  #  #

2 June (1889)

I remain convinced that Jekyll profoundly underestimated the completeness and the thoroughness of what he initiated, of what cumulatively he managed to accomplish: he didn’t just distill a depraved mind from a quasi-philanthropic mind, a black heart from a semi-noble breast, a bent will from a somewhat upright, mostly hypocritical and vaunting volition, nor just an appetitive body from a partly disinterested empirical frame—no, Jekyll was a hopeless idiot! Never realized it himself, never dared admit it to himself the first time, the rational lunatic!

But I do begin to wonder, now that Jekyll has been utterly absent for, what, six or eight months? —What if from my refined position I begin to crave notoriety or attention? What if I should discover that somehow I want to boast, to make a specimen of myself before polite and respectable society? Granted, this idea never persists, it just flutters and flits around in my head and then flies right out, with whatever frequency this stupefying boredom of London inspires. (What is it that keeps me from migrating abroad?)

#  #  #

27 August (1889)

Jekyll’s distillation, what it achieved, what it wrought, pah! Don’t get me wrong—I know your readiness to see me in a bad light, but don’t worry, my magnanimity grows by the day, my “philanthropy” by the very hour! I may yet endear myself to humanity at large!

#  #  #

By the time Mr. Hyde had smashed the cabbie in the mouth and jaw with the brick he’d pried loose from the kerb, he’d been up for three days straight, with neither sleep nor any intervening opportunity for sleep. As the cabbie spit out bloody oaths gyrating in his seat, Hyde pocketed all the bills and coins he found in the man’s pockets and stabbed open with a screwdriver the tin cashbox fastened to the cabbie’s floorboard for the rest.

Hyde had then staggered and stumbled from the scene, he hadn’t felt so tired in a long time, truly a year at least, probably longer, the way he felt at this moment. He’d collapsed on the first park bench he’d reached. The sun would be up full within the hour: the pretty lady wouldn’t be at her Salvation Army kettle on Barking Street before four in the afternoon. For one moment he worried about oversleeping, but he’d probably be up as soon as he felt the heat of noon in his attic lair. As the sun lifted up full over the horizon, Hyde lifted himself from the bench and staggered half numb down sparsely populated streets bound for his East End attic.

#  #  #

5 September (1889)

How is it that I didn’t kill her! I didn’t even molest her! What is happening to me?

Along with the cash I’d stolen from that cabbie, I’d beaten two gold half-sovereigns out of someone and dropped the lot, coin by coin, into the pot in front of her, saving the two half-sovereigns for last. She actually wept. Then most unexpectedly, suddenly something inside me cringed: it was not embarrassment, and it damned sure was not guilt! I could not identify it then, still cannot now: maybe it was something like a tardy revelation that I was pursuing an impractical course, or an erroneous course. I turned and stepped briskly down Barking Street and into an unlit alley, abandoning her and all the plans I’d made to lure her to a private spot once she was free for the evening. (I’d found a convenient spot, another alleyway ending in a dark cul-de-sac, no doors anywhere, between two large brick warehouses.)

This is madness! This cannot be conscience at work! Stevenson may never have noticed, but I recall that idiot Jekyll even now: “There is no ‘good and evil’: we have only ‘truth and terror’.” Truth—I prefer to call it simply “facts”—truth and terror, facts and horror! If anyone can be so disposed to this manner of thought, it is I, of all persons it is I, I am committed to facts, to simple deeds and to simple records of simple deeds, let others deem me terrible or horrible if they wish! To perpetrate terror or horror—it is not my decision! I must have tripped up when I planned what to do with that woman—relying on spontaneity, I would not have erred. My bent volition was cast in the furnace of Jekyll’s beakers and test tubes, his flasks and retorts, and it is only what lurked inside him himself, the self-regarding, mangy cur! How can I possibly care to characterize my behavior, how could I dare judge myself, much less submit to judgment? Call me amoral, hell, call me immoral for all I care, no doubt I am beastly, even by prevailing standards of morality and decorum, and so, I recall, was Jekyll when he ever cared to observe them, even as he was preparing to commence his unholy experiments, “there is no evil, only the discomfort and the distress and the dislocation we call ‘terror’ or ‘horror’”. —and in fact, as we know, Jekyll was all so keen on undertaking his experiments in the name of Holy Science! —as if that legitimated everything that followed, everything that he completely failed to anticipate!

So how can it be that I halted, what restrained me, and from the inside? Have I become some radical arch-empiricist to Jekyll’s rarified and refined idealism? Weeks ago, I knocked down an unsuspecting policeman from behind with my stick, then stomped him good enough to leave him for dead, and I’d’ve just as gladly turned ’round to strike dead any magistrate seeing me do it . . . but today, I cower in my attic, too petrified to leave, too afraid to be seen even by a child, too cowering to cast a shadow. What is happening to me?

That woman . . . now I remember! After diving into that alley off Barking Street, just around the corner, I snuck back through the dark for a glance! I saw her look left and right as passers-by opened up spaces on both sides around her and the Salvation Army kettle. —and once she was persuaded that no one was looking, she took those two half-sovereigns out of the kettle very furtively and dropped them into her purse! No one else was watching her just then, only me. The thin coppers and the worn silver she left in the kettle, but the weighty gold she took for herself! It’s as if she showed me how her set-up works! She never saw me, but then she sealed her lips with a thin smile, as if she dared me to break her filthy secret! It was then that something inexplicable scuttered through me, a large black cockroach with long sharp spurs on its legs crawling through me somewhere, a huge black hideous roach with sharp spurs on its long dark scuttering legs . . .

It makes me shudder even now. Do I need a doctor? I feel genuinely sick, I think I’m coming down with vertigo.

#  #  #

Two days later, the afternoon’s papers carried a small item in their back pages of a presumed suicide discovered in a garret in the near East End, near Houndsditch and Aldgate High Street: some dissolute man appeared to have hanged himself, leaving behind the room strewn carelessly with a fair amount of cash and coin and the bare remains of what might have been an incriminating journal, had most of its pages not been torn out and burned in the grate. Some suspicions have been aroused, but the police are offering no comment.

– Edward Burke