On the ninth of January, now four days ago, I 
received by the evening delivery a registered 
envelope, addressed in the hand of my colleague 
and old school companion, Henry Jekyll. I was a good 
deal surprised by this; for we were by no means in 
the habit of correspondence; I had seen the man, dined 
with him, indeed, the night before; and I could imagine 
nothing in our intercourse that should justify formality 
of registration. The contents increased my wonder; for 
this is how the letter ran: 

“10th December, 18—. 

“Dear Lanyon,—You are one of my oldest friends; and 
although we may have differed at times on scientific
questions, I cannot remember, at least on my side, 
any break in our affection. There was never a day when, 
if you had said to me, ‘Jekyll, my life, my honour, my 
reason, depend upon you,’ I would not have sacrificed 
my left hand to help you. Lanyon, my life, my honour, 
my reason, are all at your mercy; if you fail me to-night, 
I am lost. You might suppose, after this preface, that I 
am going to ask you for something dishonourable 
to grant. Judge for yourself. 

“I want you to postpone all other engagements for to-night — 
ay, even if you were summoned to the bedside of an emperor; 
to take a cab, unless your carriage should be actually at 
the door; and with this letter in your hand for consultation, 
to drive straight to my house. Poole, my butler, has his 
orders; you will find him waiting your arrival with a locksmith. 
The door of my cabinet is then to be forced; and you are to 
go in alone; to open the glazed press (letter E) on the left 
hand, breaking the lock if it be shut; and to draw out, with 
all its contents as they stand, the fourth drawer from the top or 
(which is the same thing) the third from the bottom. In my 
extreme distress of mind, I have a morbid fear of misdirecting 
you; but even if I am in error, you may know the right drawer 
by its contents: some powders, a phial and a paper book. This 
drawer I beg of you to carry back with you to Cavendish Square 
exactly as it stands. 

“That is the first part of the service: now for the second. You 
should be back, if you set out at once on the receipt of this, long 
before midnight; but I will leave you that amount of margin, not only 
in the fear of one of those obstacles that can neither be prevented nor 
foreseen, but because an hour when your servants are in bed is to be 
preferred for what will then remain to do. At midnight, then, I have 
to ask you to be alone in your consulting room, to admit with your own 
hand into the house a man who will present himself in my name, and to 
place in his hands the drawer that you will have brought with you from my 
cabinet. Then you will have played your part and earned my gratitude 
completely. Five minutes afterwards, if you insist upon an explanation, 
you will have understood that these arrangements are of capital importance; 
and that by the neglect of one of them, fantastic as they must appear, 
you might have charged your conscience with my death or the shipwreck 
of my reason. 

“Confident as I am that you will not trifle with this appeal, my heart 
sinks and my hand trembles at the bare thought of such a possibility. 
Think of me at this hour, in a strange place, labouring under a blackness 
of distress that no fancy can exaggerate, and yet well aware that, if you 
will but punctually serve me, my troubles will roll away like a story that 
is told. Serve me, my dear Lanyon and save 

“Your friend, 

“H.J. 

“P.S.—I had already sealed this up when a fresh terror struck upon my soul. 
It is possible that the post-office may fail me, and this letter not come 
into your hands until to-morrow morning. In that case, dear Lanyon, do my 
errand when it shall be most convenient for you in the course of the day; 
and once more expect my messenger at midnight. It may then already be too 
late; and if that night passes without event, you will know that you have 
seen the last of Henry Jekyll.”

Upon the reading of this letter, I made sure my colleague was insane; but 
till that was proved beyond the possibility of doubt, I felt bound to do 
as he requested. The less I understood of this farrago, the less I was in 
a position to judge of its importance; and an appeal so worded could not 
be set aside without a grave responsibility. I rose accordingly from table, 
got into a hansom, and drove straight to Jekyll’s house. The butler was 
awaiting my arrival; he had received by the same post as mine a registered 
letter of instruction, and had sent at once for a locksmith and a carpenter. 
The tradesmen came while we were yet speaking; and we moved in a body to old 
Dr. Denman’s surgical theatre, from which (as you are doubtless aware) 
Jekyll’s private cabinet is most conveniently entered. The door was very 
strong, the lock excellent; the carpenter avowed he would have great trouble 
and have to do much damage, if force were to be used; and the locksmith 
was near despair. But this last was a handy fellow, and after two hour’s 
work, the door stood open. The press marked E was unlocked; and I took 
out the drawer, had it filled up with straw and tied in a sheet, and 
returned with it to Cavendish Square. 

Here I proceeded to examine its contents. The powders were neatly enough made 
up, but not with the nicety of the dispensing chemist; so that it was plain 
they were of Jekyll’s private manufacture; and when I opened one of the wrappers 
I found what seemed to me a simple crystalline salt of a white colour. The phial, 
to which I next turned my attention, might have been about half full of a 
blood-red liquor, which was highly pungent to the sense of smell and seemed to 
me to contain phosphorus and some volatile ether. At the other ingredients I could 
make no guess. The book was an ordinary version book and contained little but a 
series of dates. These covered a period of many years, but I observed that the 
entries ceased nearly a year ago and quite abruptly. Here and there a brief remark
was appended to a date, usually no more than a single word: “double” occurring 
perhaps six times in a total of several hundred entries; and once very early 
in the list and followed by several marks of exclamation, “total failure!!!” 
All this, though it whetted my curiosity, told me little that was definite. 
Here were a phial of some salt, and the record of a series of experiments 
that had led (like too many of Jekyll’s investigations) to no end of 
practical usefulness. How could the presence of these articles in my house 
affect either the honour, the sanity, or the life of my flighty colleague? 
If his messenger could go to one place, why could he not go to another? 
And even granting some impediment, why was this gentleman to be received 
by me in secret? The more I reflected the more convinced I grew that I 
was dealing with a case of cerebral disease; and though I dismissed my 
servants to bed, I loaded an old revolver, that I might be found in some 
posture of self-defence. 

Twelve o’clock had scarce rung out over London, ere the knocker sounded 
very gently on the door. I went myself at the summons, and found a small 
man crouching against the pillars of the portico. 

“Are you come from Dr. Jekyll?” I asked. 

He told me “yes” by a constrained gesture; and when I 
had bidden him enter, he did not obey me without a 
searching backward glance into the darkness of the 
square. There was a policeman not far off, advancing 
with his bull’s eye open; and at the sight, I thought 
my visitor started and made greater haste. 

These particulars struck me, I confess, disagreeably; 
and as I followed him into the bright light of the 
consulting room, I kept my hand ready on my weapon. 
Here, at last, I had a chance of clearly seeing him. 
I had never set eyes on him before, so much was certain. 
He was small, as I have said; I was struck besides with 
the shocking expression of his face, with his 
remarkable combination of great muscular activity
and great apparent debility of constitution, 
and — last but not least — with the odd, subjective 
disturbance caused by his neighbourhood. This bore some 
resemblance to incipient rigour, and was accompanied 
by a marked sinking of the pulse. At the time, I set it
down to some idiosyncratic, personal distaste, and merely 
wondered at the acuteness of the symptoms; but I have 
since had reason to believe the cause to lie much deeper 
in the nature of man, and to turn on some nobler hinge 
than the principle of hatred. 

This person (who had thus, from the first moment of his 
entrance, struck in me what I can only describe as a 
disgustful curiosity) was dressed in a fashion that would 
have made an ordinary person laughable; his clothes, that 
is to say, although they were of rich and sober fabric, were 
enormously too large for him in every measurement — the trousers 
hanging on his legs and rolled up to keep them from the ground, 
the waist of the coat below his haunches, and the collar 
sprawling wide upon his shoulders. Strange to relate, 
this ludicrous accoutrement was far from moving me to laughter. 
Rather, as there was something abnormal and misbegotten in the 
very essence of the creature that now faced me — something 
seizing, surprising and revolting—this fresh disparity seemed 
but to fit in with and to reinforce it; so that to my interest 
in the man’s nature and character, there was added a curiosity 
as to his origin, his life, his fortune and status in the world. 

These observations, though they have taken so great a space to 
be set down in, were yet the work of a few seconds. My visitor 
was, indeed, on fire with sombre excitement. 

“Have you got it?” he cried. “Have you got it?” And so lively 
was his impatience that he even laid his hand upon my arm and 
sought to shake me. 

I put him back, conscious at his touch of a certain icy pang 
along my blood. “Come, sir,” said I. “You forget that I have 
not yet the pleasure of your acquaintance. Be seated, if you 
please.” And I showed him an example, and sat down myself in 
my customary seat and with as fair an imitation of my ordinary 
manner to a patient, as the lateness of the hour, the nature of 
my preoccupations, and the horror I had of my visitor, would 
suffer me to muster. 

“I beg your pardon, Dr. Lanyon,” he replied civilly enough. 
“What you say is very well founded; and my impatience has shown 
its heels to my politeness. I come here at the instance of your 
colleague, Dr. Henry Jekyll, on a piece of business of some 
moment; and I understood...” He paused and put his hand to 
his throat, and I could see, in spite of his collected manner, 
that he was wrestling against the approaches of the hysteria — 
“I understood, a drawer...” 

But here I took pity on my visitor’s suspense, and some perhaps 
on my own growing curiosity. 

“There it is, sir,” said I, pointing to the drawer, where it 
lay on the floor behind a table and still covered with the sheet. 

He sprang to it, and then paused, and laid his hand upon his 
heart; I could hear his teeth grate with the convulsive action 
of his jaws; and his face was so ghastly to see that I grew 
alarmed both for his life and reason. 

“Compose yourself,” said I. 

He turned a dreadful smile to me, and as if with the decision of 
despair, plucked away the sheet. At sight of the contents, he 
uttered one loud sob of such immense relief that I sat petrified. 
And the next moment, in a voice that was already fairly well under 
control, “Have you a graduated glass?” he asked. 

I rose from my place with something of an effort and gave him what 
he asked. 

He thanked me with a smiling nod, measured out a few minims of 
the red tincture and added one of the powders. The mixture, 
which was at first of a reddish hue, began, in proportion as 
the crystals melted, to brighten in colour, to effervesce 
audibly, and to throw off small fumes of vapour. Suddenly 
and at the same moment, the ebullition ceased and the 
compound changed to a dark purple, which faded again more 
slowly to a watery green. My visitor, who had watched these 
metamorphoses with a keen eye, smiled, set down the glass 
upon the table, and then turned and looked upon me with an 
air of scrutiny. 

“And now,” said he, “to settle what remains. Will you be 
wise? will you be guided? will you suffer me to take this 
glass in my hand and to go forth from your house without 
further parley? or has the greed of curiosity too much 
command of you? Think before you answer, for it shall be 
done as you decide. As you decide, you shall be left as 
you were before, and neither richer nor wiser, unless 
the sense of service rendered to a man in mortal distress 
may be counted as a kind of riches of the soul. Or, if you 
shall so prefer to choose, a new province of knowledge 
and new avenues to fame and power shall be laid open to you, 
here, in this room, upon the instant; and your sight shall 
be blasted by a prodigy to stagger the unbelief of Satan.” 

“Sir,” said I, affecting a coolness that I was far from 
truly possessing, “you speak enigmas, and you will perhaps 
not wonder that I hear you with no very strong impression 
of belief. But I have gone too far in the way of 
inexplicable services to pause before I see the end.” 

“It is well,” replied my visitor. “Lanyon, you remember your 
vows: what follows is under the seal of our profession. And 
now, you who have so long been bound to the most narrow and 
material views, you who have denied the virtue of transcendental 
medicine, you who have derided your superiors—behold!” 

He put the glass to his lips and drank at one gulp. A cry 
followed; he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and 
held on, staring with injected eyes, gasping with open 
mouth; and as I looked there came, I thought, a change — 
he seemed to swell — his face became suddenly black and 
the features seemed to melt and alter—and the next moment, 
I had sprung to my feet and leaped back against the wall, 
my arms raised to shield me from that prodigy, my mind 
submerged in terror. 

“O God!” I screamed, and “O God!” again and again; for there 
before my eyes—pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping 
before him with his hands, like a man restored from death — 
there stood Henry Jekyll! 

What he told me in the next hour, I cannot bring my mind to 
set on paper. I saw what I saw, I heard what I heard, and 
my soul sickened at it; and yet now when that sight has faded 
from my eyes, I ask myself if I believe it, and I cannot answer. 
My life is shaken to its roots; sleep has left me; the deadliest 
terror sits by me at all hours of the day and night; and I feel 
that my days are numbered, and that I must die; and yet I shall 
die incredulous. As for the moral turpitude that man unveiled to 
me, even with tears of penitence, I cannot, even in memory, dwell 
on it without a start of horror. I will say but one thing, 
Utterson, and that (if you can bring your mind to credit it) 
will be more than enough. The creature who crept into my house 
that night was, on Jekyll’s own confession, known by the name 
of Hyde and hunted for in every corner of the land as the murderer 
of Carew. 

HASTIE LANYON. 