Four days ago, on January 9, I received a registered letter in the evening mail. The handwriting immediately caught my attention. It was from my old friend and former schoolmate, Dr. Henry Jekyll.
I was surprised because Jekyll and I hardly ever wrote to each other. In fact, I had seen him and had dinner with him only the night before. Nothing in our recent relationship seemed to justify sending me a registered letter.
But the contents of the letter were even more disturbing.
This is what it said:
“December 10, 18—.
Dear Lanyon,
You are one of my oldest friends. We have disagreed many times over scientific matters, but as far as I am concerned, our friendship has never truly been broken.
If you had ever come to me and said, ‘Jekyll, my life, my reputation, and my sanity depend on you,’ I would have risked everything to help you.
Now, Lanyon, my own life, reputation, and sanity are in your hands. If you fail me tonight, I am finished.
You may think I am about to ask you to do something shameful or dishonest. I will leave that judgment to you.
I need you to cancel every appointment and engagement you have tonight. Even if you were called to the bedside of an emperor, you must refuse it.
Take a cab unless your carriage happens to be waiting outside. Bring this letter with you and go straight to my house.
My butler, Poole, already knows what to do. He will be waiting for you with a locksmith.
You must force open the door of my private cabinet and enter alone.
On the left side of the room, you will find a glass-fronted cabinet marked with the letter E. If it is locked, break the lock.
Inside, take out the fourth drawer from the top, which is also the third drawer from the bottom. Take the entire drawer exactly as it is, without removing anything.
I am so distressed that I am terrified of giving you the wrong instructions. But if you are uncertain, you will know the correct drawer by what is inside it.
There should be several powders, a small bottle, and a notebook.
Please bring that entire drawer back to your house in Cavendish Square.
That is the first part of what I need from you.
If you leave immediately after receiving this letter, you should be back home long before midnight. I am allowing extra time because unexpected problems may arise, and because what happens next must be done when your servants are asleep.
At midnight, I need you to be alone in your consulting room.
You must personally open the door for a man who will arrive in my name.
Give him the drawer you brought from my cabinet.
Once you have done that, your part is finished, and you will have earned my deepest gratitude.
Five minutes later, if you insist on knowing why I have asked you to do all this, you will understand how important every detail was.
If you fail to follow even one of these instructions, strange and unreasonable as they may seem, you may have to live with the knowledge that your mistake caused my death—or the complete destruction of my mind.
I know you will not treat this request lightly, but even as I write these words, my heart is filled with fear at the thought that you might refuse me.
Think of me tonight, trapped somewhere in terrible suffering, suffering so dark that no imagination could make it worse.
And yet I know that if you simply do what I ask, my troubles will disappear as quickly as a story that has already been told.
Help me, my dear Lanyon, and save
Your friend,
H. J.
P.S. I had already sealed this letter when another terrible thought occurred to me.
The post office might delay the letter, and you might not receive it until tomorrow morning.
If that happens, please do what I have asked whenever it is convenient during the day. My messenger will still come to you at midnight.
But by then, it may already be too late.
If that night passes without anything happening, you will know that you have seen the last of Henry Jekyll.”
When I finished reading the letter, I was convinced that my colleague had lost his mind.
Still, until I could prove that beyond any doubt, I felt morally obligated to follow his instructions.
The less sense his request made, the less qualified I was to judge how important it might be.
And the desperate way he had written the letter made it impossible for me to simply ignore him.
So I immediately left my dinner table, climbed into a hansom cab, and drove straight to Jekyll’s house.
Poole was waiting for me.
He had received a registered letter from Jekyll at the same time I had. It contained instructions for him as well.
He had already sent for a locksmith and a carpenter.
The two men arrived while we were still talking.
Together, we went to the old surgical theatre that had once belonged to Dr. Denman. As you know, this was the easiest way to reach Jekyll’s private cabinet.
The door was extremely strong, and the lock was excellent.
The carpenter warned us that forcing the door would be difficult and would cause considerable damage.
The locksmith looked almost hopeless.
But he was a skilled man.
After working for nearly two hours, he finally managed to open the door.
I found the cabinet marked E and opened it.
Then I removed the drawer Jekyll had described.
We packed it with straw, wrapped it in a sheet, tied it securely, and I carried it back with me to Cavendish Square.
Once I was home, I examined everything inside.
The powders had been carefully prepared, but not with the precision of a professional pharmacist. It was obvious that Jekyll had made them himself.
I opened one of the packets.
Inside was what appeared to be a simple white crystalline salt.
Then I examined the small bottle.
It was about half full of a deep red liquid. The smell was extremely strong. I thought it contained phosphorus and some kind of volatile ether, although I could not identify the other ingredients.
The notebook was nothing special. It was simply a record of experiments, mostly consisting of dates.
The entries covered many years.
But about a year earlier, they suddenly stopped.
Here and there, Jekyll had added a brief note beside a date, usually just one word.
The word “double” appeared perhaps six times among hundreds of entries.
And near the beginning of the record, there was one particularly strange entry:
“Total failure!!!”
These details certainly made me curious, but they told me almost nothing.
I had a bottle of strange liquid, some powders, and a record of experiments that appeared to have produced no useful results.
How could these things possibly affect Jekyll’s reputation, sanity, or even his life?
If his messenger could come to one place, why could he not simply go somewhere else?
And even if there was some reason for him to come to my house, why did I have to meet him secretly?
The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that Jekyll was suffering from some kind of mental illness.
Still, I sent my servants to bed and loaded an old revolver.
If I was going to receive a mysterious stranger at midnight, I intended to be able to defend myself.
The clock had barely finished striking twelve when I heard a very soft knock at the door.
I went to answer it myself.
A small man was standing hunched beneath the pillars outside.
“Are you here from Dr. Jekyll?” I asked.
He gave a tense little gesture that meant yes.
I opened the door and told him to come inside.
Before entering, he looked nervously back into the darkness of the square.
A policeman was nearby, walking toward us with his lantern open.
The moment my visitor saw him, he seemed to become frightened and hurried inside.
I found this deeply unsettling.
As I followed him into the brightly lit consulting room, I kept one hand close to my revolver.
At last, I could see him clearly.
I had never seen this man before. Of that I was certain.
He was small, as I have said.
But what struck me most was his disturbing face.
There was something strange about the combination of tremendous physical energy and obvious weakness in his body.
Even more disturbing was the feeling I experienced simply by standing near him.
I felt something like a sudden chill running through me, and my pulse seemed to weaken.
At the time, I assumed it was simply a personal dislike of the man.
I was surprised by how strongly I reacted to him.
But I have since come to believe that the reason was much deeper than ordinary hatred.
From the moment he entered my house, I felt an almost irresistible mixture of disgust and curiosity.
His clothes were bizarre.
They were made from expensive, respectable materials, but they were far too large for him.
His trousers hung loosely around his legs and had to be rolled up to keep them from dragging on the floor.
His coat was so large that its waist reached below his hips.
His collar spread widely across his shoulders.
Under normal circumstances, such an appearance might have been ridiculous.
But I did not laugh.
There was something unnatural about the man himself, something disturbing and almost repulsive.
His oversized clothes seemed to belong perfectly to such a strange creature.
I found myself wondering where he had come from, what kind of life he had lived, and what position he held in the world.
All of these thoughts passed through my mind within a few seconds.
Meanwhile, my visitor was visibly struggling with intense excitement.
“Have you got it?” he demanded.
“Have you got it?”
His impatience was so great that he actually grabbed my arm and tried to shake me.
I pulled away.
The moment he touched me, I felt another icy shock run through my body.
“Please, sir,” I said. “You seem to have forgotten that we have never met. Sit down.”
I sat in my usual chair and tried to behave as calmly as I would with any ordinary patient.
But given the late hour, the strange situation, and the horror I already felt toward this man, it was difficult.
“I beg your pardon, Dr. Lanyon,” he said politely enough.
“You are absolutely right. My impatience has overcome my manners.”
“I have come here at the request of your colleague, Dr. Henry Jekyll, on a matter of great importance. I understood that there was a drawer…”
He stopped.
He put a hand to his throat.
Although he was trying to remain calm, I could see that he was fighting some kind of extreme emotional disturbance.
I began to feel sorry for him.
And, perhaps more importantly, I was becoming increasingly curious myself.
“There it is,” I said, pointing behind the table.
The drawer was lying on the floor, still wrapped in the sheet.
He rushed toward it.
Then he suddenly stopped and pressed a hand against his chest.
I could hear his teeth grinding together.
His face became so horribly pale that I began to fear for both his life and his sanity.
“Try to calm yourself,” I said.
He gave me a terrible smile.
Then, with the desperate determination of a man who had nothing left to lose, he tore away the sheet.
The instant he saw what was inside, he let out one enormous sigh of relief.
I was so shocked that I could barely move.
A moment later, his voice was under control again.
“Do you have a graduated glass?” he asked.
I had to make an effort to stand.
Then I found the glass and handed it to him.
He thanked me with a small smile.
He measured out a few drops of the red liquid and added one of the powders.
At first, the mixture was reddish.
As the crystals dissolved, however, the liquid became brighter.
It began to fizz loudly.
Small clouds of vapor rose from the glass.
Then, all at once, the bubbling stopped.
The liquid turned dark purple.
Slowly, the purple faded until the mixture became a watery green.
My visitor watched the changes with intense concentration.
When the transformation was complete, he smiled.
He placed the glass on the table and looked directly at me.
“Now we come to the final question,” he said.
“Will you be sensible?”
“Will you trust me?”
“Will you let me take this glass and leave your house without asking any more questions?”
“Or is your curiosity too strong to control?”
“Think carefully before you answer.”
“If you tell me to leave, everything will remain exactly as it was before. You will gain nothing except perhaps the satisfaction of having helped a man who was in desperate trouble.”
“But if you choose otherwise, I can open an entirely new world of knowledge to you.”
“You could see something here, in this very room, that would destroy the disbelief of even the devil himself.”
“Sir,” I replied, trying to sound calm when I was anything but calm, “you speak in riddles. You cannot be surprised that I find it difficult to believe you.”
“But I have already gone too far into this strange business to stop before I discover how it ends.”
“That is the answer I hoped for,” he said.
“Lanyon, you remember the oath you took as a doctor.”
“Everything that happens next must remain protected by professional secrecy.”
“And now, you who have spent so many years trapped in the narrowest and most material view of science…”
“You who have rejected the possibility of higher forms of medicine…”
“You who have mocked those who claimed to know more than you…”
“Watch carefully.”
He lifted the glass to his lips.
Then he drank the entire mixture in one swallow.
A terrible cry escaped him.
His body staggered.
He grabbed the table to keep himself upright.
His eyes bulged.
His mouth hung open as he struggled for breath.
And then I saw something happen to him.
His body seemed to swell.
His face suddenly darkened.
His features appeared to melt and change before my eyes.
For one horrifying moment, I could hardly understand what I was seeing.
Then I jumped to my feet and stumbled backward until my back struck the wall.
I raised my arms as if they could protect me from what was happening.
Terror completely overwhelmed my mind.
“Oh God!” I screamed.
“God!”
Again and again, I cried out.
Because standing before me was not the man who had entered my house.
There, pale, trembling, and barely conscious, the man was reaching out with his hands like someone who had just returned from the grave.
It was Henry Jekyll.
What Jekyll told me during the following hour is something I cannot bring myself to write down.
I saw what I saw.
I heard what I heard.
And the memory of it still makes me physically sick.
Yet now that the horror of that night has faded slightly from my eyes, I sometimes ask myself whether I truly believe what happened.
I have no answer.
My whole life has been shaken to its foundations.
I cannot sleep.
Day and night, I am haunted by a terror I cannot escape.
I feel that my own death is near.
And yet, when that day comes, I suspect I will still die unable to believe what I witnessed.
As for the terrible things Jekyll confessed about himself, I cannot even think about them without feeling horror.
I will tell you only one thing, Utterson.
If you can force yourself to believe it, that one fact will be more than enough.
The creature who entered my house that night was, according to Jekyll’s own confession, a man known as Hyde.
He was the man being hunted throughout the country for the murder of Sir Danvers Carew.
Hastie Lanyon.