Shadow Games
by skazka

Shadow Games

skazka

Summary

An unpublished footnote in the history of Henry Jekyll.

Notes

He passed his hand across his face, then started at his own shadow, which the lamp had sent shooting up the wall so the movement of his hand had made a giant dark motion behind him. He laughed softly. “When you were a child, Mary,” he said, “did you play shadow games?”
“No, sir,” I said.
Master looked up at me, a smile still playing around his mouth. “Just as well,” he said. “As it turns out, they can be very dangerous.”

- Mary Reilly, Valerie Martin

Really, this was just an excuse to get these two in the same room despite all logic. Content notes in endnote.

Imported from Archive of Our Own. Original work id: 20531963.

Chapter 1

"How did you imagine me to look? Some great ape? Fangs in my mouth?"

As if moved by mechanism, Henry's hand goes to trace the teeth of the lower jaw, to number them with the tip of a finger. Anatomically they are perfect, perfect and even and sharp as pins.

"I thought you'd look fairer than this, or else fouler. How a man can fall short at both extremes, I don't know. But you aren't much of a man yet — a youth, I'd say. "

The creature emits a pale croak of a laugh, eyes pinching shut with convulsive amusement. "You flatter yourself. Like only an old man can."

Not a creature, no. This was the face he'd seen for the first time in this very room, stealing before the mirror like a thief in the night to inspect his work — it is no longer laid neatly over his own bones, but fitted to some smaller skeleton. In other men's studies, Henry Jekyll has seen stillborn infants in vitrines of spirits, with their features smudged and skewed by the press of the glass. The boy has the flattened features of some creature kept stunted and under restraint. if the form he takes is familiar, Jekyll may study it now with less wondering than at the first glimpse of his new shape in the glass. In the uncertain lamplight, that shape is still distinct, cast in shades of gas-yellow and smoke-gray. But whose hand had lit the lamp?

Behold, the specimen. Small but well-proportioned, perhaps five feet tall, the size of a boy of the lower classes. Undernourished, with the proverbial lean and hungry look. Dark hair, unwashed and worn a little too long, and the small dark eyes of a stray dog. Jekyll takes his jaw between two fingers and turns his head. The bones of his face are shallow and low, his complexion sallow; his eyes are heavy-hooded, and a dimple is carved deep into his sallow cheek. He is naked as the day he was born, naked as the fellows who club together in the Lambeth workhouse, with knobbly wrists and stand-out knuckles and ropy veins standing out like a railroad map. Only the lean musculature of his limbs marks him as plainly past pubescence, anatomically perfect, and not merely deformed by precocious development. Every year a few children are born with irregular maturation of the bodily processes — girls beginning their menses while still practically in leading-strings, infants at four years old with the slack flabby proportions of grown men. Hyde has only known life for a few scant days. That is too short a term to call himself a man, but he is complete.

There is a queer shabby grace to the lines of his body; Henry's doctorly hand must slip, and the fellow turns away his head. There is an exquisite singleness of purpose in those features set above that slim trunk, a simian exactness and a perfect animality. If the boy is not fair, he remains lovable. Perhaps every man's sin is lovable to him, at least in the heat of the act. He looks not unlike one of those boys who do with men for money, both rough and gracile, both slender as a woman and hairy-knuckled as a troglodyte, bristling at the edge of potent manhood. Such specimens are capable of anything — robbing men to pay for their women, robbing their women to pay for a pair of new boots. Bully-cocks in the larval stage, subimago. Henry has envied them their liberty, that species of laughing boys careless of capture, shy when doing business, pleased when the transaction is complete. For the first years, perhaps, the lucky ones have been the recipients of rich men's charity — then, after that, they are the recipients of rich men's attentions.

How do these subterranean youths behave when they're alone? How do they act when unobserved? Do they sit in rented rooms and count their coins, do they lie with arms bent crooked behind their heads and dream of better mattresses and finer chairs? It's impossible to imagine one of them putting away money piece by piece, they must spend it straightaway or they wouldn't have such a dire need of it, to go with men. Do they squander what they get on women, or do they lose it to the steady depredations of poverty, a little here and a little more there? Depletion, exhaustion.

The youth is small but well-formed. Hyde observes the passing-over of his eyes, and crosses his legs, swinging an ankle jauntily. As though he reads his thoughts, Hyde says:

"If I am small, it isn't for lack of exercise. You cherish your habits, old man; you needn't trouble yourself with mine any longer."

"I am disciplined in my vices as well as my virtues."

"You're an old hypocrite," the boy says. "I'll have a suit of clothes, I think. A coat, too, and a cap."

How like a child, like a girl playing with silk shawls and glass beads, imagining herself to be a great duchess, Hyde aspires to the attire of any city swell. His other self laces his fingers together across his lap, looking perfectly self-satisfied himself with this new command. His broad coarse hands are knotted with animal vitality. How many men have had the privilege of conversing with their own lesser natures, and making uneasy small talk with the swept-off dross of their own Christian morality? Christ does not factor into the relationship between Henry and this lesser man. Hyde is only the skimmings of a more sober life, like the oily richness that has risen to the top of Henry's character. It will be good to be rid of him.

In the mad lurching moment before, Henry had been braced for the worst of it, he had been fully conscious of the likelihood of convulsive birth-pangs and of the grinding of bone against bone — or for messier paroxysms, should his chemical salts prove straightforwardly poisonous. But when that wrenching dread had subsided and the bodily earthquake with it, Henry had been staggered by the sheer joy of his new body, and at the bursting-forth of new life, young life. It was like a fever breaking, and from there only lightness, sweetness, easiness in every step and gesture. That is what this fellow stands for, the ease that comes without restraint. That is the animal pleasure of Hyde's being, and of being Hyde.

This is his ultimate success — to dissociate good from evil. To transform from one man to another, that much is child's play. But to encounter one's own transformed self, as one man with another, is the marvel that surpasses all marvels. This fellow in all his sleek viciousness is harmless — harmless, as long as he is sequestered from Henry's own reputation. Whatever harm he may do, it can be kept secure and apart from all that the reputable professor Henry Jekyll has toiled to obtain.

Is this Henry's greatest success, in all its fair foulness? His triumph was only waiting for an ideal time to express itself; this is a delayed blossoming of all his great work. Perhaps in some later year a biographer will scorn him for his moral cowardice, when this process has been perfected and his accomplishments are fit to be widely known, but no one else is fit to judge the true causes of a man's actions, not even the most patient of Boswells — no man, never.

His higher intentions have only ever been sincere. He had sought to purge himself. Perhaps he has only let the devil out. This is the miracle that all the world's Platonists and clergymen could only dream of, the division of aspects into discrete forms — has it been enough to sever the shadow from the form that casts it, or are there further divisions to pursue? Hyde, quartered; Hyde in octavo.

Henry knows this fellow, or the shape of him. There is something familiar in the insistent chin and the high-boned bloodless cheeks, a saucy freshness in the crooked set of the mouth. It is a likeness of the first boy — the first boy he had ever known, some yellow-smoked evening on a stroll through one of the city parks. It had not been a single slip done in drink, as men in the dock must so often claim of their sins. No, it had been a sequence of calculated errors, from the first glance to the last look, shot over the shoulder in shameful retreat with a purse two shillings lighter and the muzzy feeling of sexual release sinking into his bones. If his intentions were not pure, if his motives were not so noble as they might be, then it was the consequences of an exhausted moral sense that brought him there — the insupportable strain of being so very damned good all the time. Not the first youth and not the last, either. That vice wells up in him like a cancer and from time to time it obliges him to cut it out, to cast it into the fire.

Henry laughs. "A coat and a cap. That's small enough — I certainly think I can afford you that."

The young man makes an impatient gesture at his charity.

"How do you expect me to go about your business, except in your livery? Or would you like to see me roaming the streets stark-naked, like a damned Barbary ape?"

Henry stirs himself up under the bedclothes, withdrawing his legs — he is altering his own habits to leave this phantasm an absurd bare place to rest itself. What has become of him? What has become of his casting-out of the appetites? That boy in Hyde Park had once been innocent. He had had a father and a mother once, he had prospects that did not involve the exchange of beauty for lucre. Henry has paid for his faint heart ever since with charity. Not three weeks after the act had first transpired, he had subscribed himself to a pious initiative for the rescue of imperiled waifs and strays before such debasement could usher them to the prison-house or the gallows or the anatomist's bench. When a blackmailer drives a respectable man to such frantic extremes that he can only act, however rashly, that is the black and dread extreme from which Henry has always shied away, the horror of one sin snaring a man into another error that is yet deeper and more fatal. How many sacrificial bodies have crossed the surgeon's table bearing the stigmata of ill-use by men? How many strange cases has his own operating theatre seen of deformities spun out of a long life of wasted substance?

At least this fellow, his Hyde, was never innocent. The dimple in his cheek says as much, and his lips like rose-leaves, and his eyes. Once Henry had been invited to view a collection of photographs in the possession of a former school friend — exquisite compositions of Sicilian boys set against the wild splendors of nature, all in the best of taste. He recalls one dark boy with a wooden lyre in the crook of his arm, staring into the camera with open disgust. It is that same dark look of inquiry that bores into him now like a shoemaker's awl. It is those eyes that pierce him,

This is only a dream. It is only a chemical phantasm as insubstantial as the shadow of a sunlit image on a glass plate. Henry must rise from his bed and shake this vision off. If he can only rise up, he will find this phantom as immaterial as air, he can throw wide the window-sashes and let the cold air bring him back to his senses.

"We have seen enough of one another for one night," Henry says with a humorous lightness that does not extend as far as his heart. "Tomorrow you will have your exercises, but tonight I will have my rest."

"You old cunt," Hyde says. "I should cut your throat for that. You think you can send me away like a boot-catcher. I should fuck you like a dog." There is a convulsive quality to his obscenities as if speech itself is on the verge of failing him, but his posture adopts an unmistakably threatening quality. His small hands twitch into fists.

What might Henry Jekyll do, fully surrendered to such a polar influence? Nothing he would not like. His night exploits have cast his nerves into disarray, but a false image conjured out of nervous impulse is only an image — it has no weight, it cannot touch. False images can be produced by deprivation of the other senses — a prolonged rest-cure in a darkened room might generate the figures of landscapes or of persons sketched upon the mind's eye. He is experiencing a moral hallucination.

Henry casts aside the bedclothes, letting the cool air meet his body in one shock, and in a moment Hyde has fallen upon him — Henry knows with bodily certainty that he will be throttled, that those many-jointed fingers will close around his throat. But then Hyde's sharp knee presses between his legs, and his slight weight leans on Henry's trunk with a jostle. For such a slight figure, he possesses a prodigious strength — very much like the weight of a larger man, pressed and channeled through a narrow point. Henry had thought his lonesome vices to be ugly things, but small ones just the same; he had half-imagined himself even in the depths of his self-disgust to be exaggerating their scale and significance. Now with the evidence of his transgressions before him, he is not as sure.

"There's no need to make demands," Henry says, and it seems a marvel that he doesn't wheeze for breath like a bellows beneath that trim satanic pressure.

"I will make demands, damn you, and you'll cater to them if you know what's good for you. Without my pitiful existence, you cannot have your own grand life. This house you've fashioned for yourself would fall to pieces around your ears if you let yourself do half of what you desired. I am your liberty, Harry. You cherish me, but you're the one who keeps me in chains."

"It's not me who's penned you up. It is the sweet hypocrisy of society itself. We are both prisoners to society; it was I who sought to free you."

"And what's a society, if not a crowd of sanctimonious men washing their hands of what they do and pinning it on another? I am your agent, and you are my master. Only leave me a little slack and I'll do whatever you like. I know what it is you want."

Hyde is his wanting made flesh. Animal instinct is a matter in which Jekyll has never been found wanting — even as a mature man, at the stage of life when it is commonly understood that such interests diminish and abate, he has been as plagued with bodily desire as ever before. Even in dreams, he spends himself on some nonexistent object and still wakes with a member like an iron bar, in a state that decency would forbid him to mention even to his own physician — smutted and spoiled and still hot with desire for worse things.

Hyde's hand is in his lap, encircling his member — thumbing back his foreskin as he stirs to his full length. The roughness of his hand is exquisitely painful, and when Henry cries out the damned imp is only amused and not deterred. Not the brisk short strokes of guilt and expedience but long sleeking caresses born out of leisure. The creature spits into his palm, and presses the tip of his thumb into the head of Henry's prick. His face is cast in a savage light, and for all Henry's winces and groans as that small hand moves on him, Hyde speaks through gritted jaws:

"You live in me, and what do I take from you? What do you give me for my trouble? Why should I settle to be Henry Jekyll half the day?"

"I give you your shape. If it weren't for me, you'd have no form to speak of." Henry is breathless and discomfited; the sweat springs forth on his brow, and the stink of fear is rising off him.

"One day I'll call on you, doctor, for more than that."

He forces him to the brink of ecstasy and then holds him there, where he is left utterly unhinged by the refusal of satisfaction. Hyde torments him to the very edge of release again and again, throttling the head of his cock in that cruel small hand.

At last Henry spends in an agony, pouring out all his essence in a fair flood of spunk — for a moment it is as if he has fainted away. There is no feeling in his limbs and his blood has turned to water, he is utterly enervated. And with Henry's exhaustion, Hyde is freshened; there is color in his sallow cheeks, and a wicked joy written across his features. He wipes his hands on the bedclothes with malicious relish and reclines on an elbow, hairy knees dimpling.

This is the earnest-payment for their devilish bargain. What can he give to this fellow Hyde to which Hyde does not already possess complete access? He can hardly soothe him and send him off with a gilt cigarette-case, and it would be inconvenient indeed if a man's alter ego were to reappear at intervals demanding further concessions. He must situate him in a distinct zone for his vices, he must quarantine him off in an arena primed for selfish pursuits — lechery composes only a fraction of any great man's sins. The unreconstructed Jekyll was impatient, covetous, wrathful, jealous, and lazy to boot. His double will be all these things and more, but he must have leisure.

"How would you like a room of your own," Henry asks, still short of breath. "A whole suite of rooms, decorated to the best of taste. Would that suit you?"

They share a secret, and that brings them into a giddy closeness with one another. How closer might two men be, than truly being one?

At the shot edge of his vision, Hyde is smiling convulsively, ducking his head like a schoolboy. "That would suit me very well."

Hyde will need a private place in which to perform his darkest acts. Even rats have holes, and dogs have dens. Henry Jekyll shuts his eyes and lets the bloodless darkness run down over him.

End Notes

Content notes: Vintage ableism, classism, and homophobia; one misogynistic slur; generally dubious approaches to sexuality and consent; unreality; references to underage-by-modern-standards sex and sex work; verbal threats.