
Right in the midst there lay the body of a man sorely contorted and still twitching. They drew near on tiptoe, turned it on its back and beheld the face of Edward Hyde. He was dressed in clothes far too large for him, clothes of the doctor’s bigness; the cords of his face still moved with a semblance of life, but life was quite gone; and by the crushed phial in the hand and the strong smell of kernels that hung upon the air, Utterson knew that he was looking on the body of a self-destroyer.
“We have come too late,” he said sternly, “whether Reference to save or punish. Hyde is gone to his account; and it only remains for us to find the body of your master.”
The far greater proportion of the building was occupied by the theatre, which filled almost the whole ground story and was lighted from above, and by the cabinet, which formed an upper story at one end and looked upon the court. A corridor joined the theatre to the door on the by-street; and with this the cabinet communicated separately by a second flight of stairs. There were besides a few dark closets and a spacious cellar. All these they now thoroughly examined. examined Each closet needed but a glance, for all were empty, and all, by the dust that fell from their doors, had stood long unopened. The cellar, indeed, was filled with crazy lumber, mostly dating from the times of the surgeon who was Jekyll’s predecessor; but even as they opened the door they were advertised of the uselessness of further search, by the fall of a perfect mat of cobweb which had for years sealed up the entrance. Nowhere was there any trace of Henry Jekyll, dead or alive.
Poole stamped on the flags of the corridor. “He must be buried here,” he said, hearkening hearkening to the sound.
“Or he may have fled,” said Utterson, and he turned to examine the door in the by-street. It was locked; and lying near by on the flags, they found the key, already stained with rust.
“This does not look like use,” observed the lawyer.
“Use!” echoed Poole. “Do you not see, sir, it is broken? much as if a man had stamped on it.”
“Ay,” continued Utterson,” and the fractures, too, are rusty.” The two men looked at each other with a scare. “This is beyond me, Poole,” said the lawyer. “Let us go back to the cabinet.”
They mounted the stair in silence, and still still with an occasional awe-struck glance at the dead body, proceeded more thoroughly to examine the contents of the cabinet. At one table, there were traces of chemical work, various measured heaps of some white salt being laid on glass saucers, as though for an experiment in which the unhappy man had been prevented.
“That is the same drug that I was always bringing him,” said Poole; and even as he spoke, the kettle with a startling noise boiled over.
This brought them to the fireside, where the easy-chair was drawn cosily up, and the tea-things stood ready to the sitter’s elbow, the very sugar in in the cup. There were several books on a shelf; one lay beside the tea-things open, and Utterson was amazed to find it a copy of a pious work, for which Jekyll had several times expressed a great esteem, annotated, in his own hand, with startling blasphemies.
We also saw on our way the trunk of a tree barked in long strips and splintered deeply. Montgomery called my attention to this. “Not to claw bark of trees, that is the Law,” he said. “Much some of them care for it!” It was after this, I think, that we met the Satyr and the Ape-man. The Satyr Satyr was a gleam of classical memory on the part of Moreau, — his face ovine in expression, like the coarser Hebrew type; his voice a harsh bleat, his nether extremities Satanic. He was gnawing the husk of a pod-like fruit as he passed us. Both of them saluted Montgomery.
“Hail,” said they, “to the Other with the Whip!”
“There’s a Third with a Whip now,” said Montgomery. “So you’d better mind!”
“Was he not made?” said the Ape-man. “He said — he said he was made.”
The Satyr-man looked curiously at me. “The Third with the Whip, he that walks weeping into the sea, has a thin white face.”
“He has a thin long whip,” said Montgomery.
“Yesterday he bled and wept,” said the Satyr. “You never bleed nor weep. The Master does not bleed or weep.”
“Ollendorffian beggar!” said Montgomery, “you’ll bleed and weep if you don’t look out!”
“He has five fingers, he is a five-man like me,” said the Ape-man.
“Come along, Prendick,” said Montgomery, taking my arm; and I went on with him.
The Satyr and the Ape-man stood watching us and making other remarks to each other.
“He says nothing,” said the Satyr. “Men have voices.”
“Yesterday he asked me of things to eat,” said the Ape-man. “He did not know.”
Then they spoke inaudible things, and I heard the Satyr laughing.
It was on our way back that we came upon the dead rabbit. The red body of the wretched little beast was rent to pieces, many of the ribs stripped white, and the backbone indisputably gnawed.
At that Montgomery stopped. “Good God!” said he, stooping down, and picking up some of the crushed vertebrae to examine them more closely. “Good God!” he repeated, “what can this mean?”
“Some carnivore of yours has remembered its old habits,” I said after a pause. “This backbone has been bitten through.”
He stood staring, with his face white and his lip pulled askew. “I don’t like this,” he said slowly.
“I saw something of the same kind,” said I, “the first day I came here.”
“The devil you did! What was it?”
“A rabbit with its head twisted off.”
“The day you came here?”
“The day I came here. In the undergrowth at the back of the enclosure, when I went out in the evening. The head was completely wrung off.”
He gave a long, low whistle.
“And what is more, I have an idea which of your brutes did the thing. It’s only a suspicion, you know. Before I came on the rabbit I saw one of your monsters drinking in the stream.”