He was forty-seven. His hair was silver at the temples, his hands steady, his reputation as solid as the Portland stone of his townhouse. He had dined with the Prince of Wales twice. His paper on spinal reflexes had been read in Berlin. And he was dying of boredom.
He told himself he was a scientist. He told himself he was mapping the moral landscape. He told himself he could stop any time.
Jekyll woke the next morning in Hyde’s lodging house, lying next to the body. He had no memory of carrying it there. But the blood on the floorboards was still wet.
In a locked laboratory at the top of a house on Harley Street, a man sat in a leather chair. His face was gaunt, his hands trembling, a half-empty glass of salt solution on the table beside him. He had not slept in four days. He had been trying to decide whether the monster was the thing he became or the thing that had created it. Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde 1908
He did not kill. That would have been crude. He did worse: he indulged .
Then he tore it up.
In the laboratory, the glass shattered on the floor. He was forty-seven
He changed back. He went home. He sat in his study for three hours, looking at the silver razor he used for shaving. Then he wrote a letter to the police, anonymously, giving Hyde’s address.
He was lying on all three counts. The first sign that the machinery was breaking came on a January night so cold that the horses on Tottenham Court Road wore blankets.
He caught her at the dead end near the Adelphi Arches, where the Thames slaps against stone and the rats are as bold as terriers. She opened her mouth to scream. He put his hand over it. And something in him—something that had been sharpening itself for months—finally found its purpose. His paper on spinal reflexes had been read in Berlin
Each act was a brushstroke on a canvas of pure negation. And Jekyll, waking in his own bed each morning with the taste of cheap gin on his tongue and the memory of his own grinning savagery, felt alive for the first time in twenty years.
He waited an hour. Two hours. The dawn began to leak through the grimy window of the Leman Street lodging house where Hyde had taken a room. Jekyll—or rather, the consciousness of Jekyll—found itself trapped behind Hyde’s eyes like a passenger in a runaway cab. He could see. He could feel. He could not steer.
And then there was silence.
He raised the glass to his lips. The formula was three times stronger than usual. He had calculated the dose precisely.