Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: The Last Change

After the murder of Sir Danvers Carew, Jekyll swore to himself that he would never again become Hyde, and for two months he kept that promise, living quietly and doing good.He almost believed that the monstrous side of himself was gone for good, and one fine January afternoon he sat down on a bench in Regent’s Park to enjoy the winter sunshine.As he sat there comparing himself kindly to other men, a sudden wave of nausea and trembling came over him, followed by a strange new boldness and a contempt for danger.

He looked down at his own hand resting on his knee and saw, with horror, that it had become thick, corded, and hairy: without taking any drug at all, he had turned into Edward Hyde.A moment before he had been a respected, wealthy man with a home waiting for him; now he was a hunted murderer with nothing but the clothes hanging loosely on Hyde’s smaller frame.His drugs were locked away in his own cabinet, and as Hyde he could not simply walk in through his own front door without his servants calling for the police.

So he thought of Dr. Lanyon, an old friend who could get into the cabinet for him, and he realized that one part of his old self remained: he could still write in Henry Jekyll’s own hand.He hired a cab to a hotel, wrote urgent letters to Lanyon and to his butler Poole, and had them sent by registered post so that he could be certain they arrived.Then he waited out the long day and night in a private room, shaking with fear and fury, until at last he made his way, in borrowed, ill-fitting clothes, to Lanyon’s house.

What happened there broke something in Lanyon forever, but for Jekyll it was, for the moment, a rescue: he drank his own drug in front of his old friend and became himself again.He woke the next morning shaken but relieved, grateful simply to be safe at home again, close to his cabinet and his drugs.

But that very same morning, crossing his own courtyard after breakfast, the same sickness seized him again, and he barely reached his cabinet before he changed into Hyde a second time.From then on it took a heavy dose of the drug just to hold the shape of Jekyll at all, and the change would come on him unasked, in his sleep or at any idle moment.Jekyll and Hyde had come to hate each other completely: Jekyll saw Hyde as something less than human sharing his own body, while Hyde raged at being only a fearful, hunted part instead of a whole person.

Worn down by sleeplessness and terror, Jekyll might have gone on suffering this way for years, but then his last piece of luck ran out entirely.The original salt he needed for the drug finally ran low, and when he sent for more and mixed a fresh batch, it simply did not work.He now believed that his first supply must have held some unknown impurity, one that no new batch of the same salt could ever be relied on to reproduce.Writing this final confession with the very last of his old powder, Jekyll understood that Henry Jekyll would soon cease to exist and that whatever became of Hyde afterward was no longer his concern.