Join Host Bree Carlile as she reads the ninth chapter of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

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Today we'll be continuing the Strange Case of Dr.

Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde by Robert Lewis Stevenson.

Dr.

Lanyon's Narrative on the 9 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.

10 December 18 dear Lanyon, you're 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 honor, my reason depend upon you, I would not have sacrificed my.

Left hand to help you.

Lanyon, my life, my honor, my reason.

Are all at your mercy.

If you fail me tonight, I am lost.

You might suppose after this preface that.

I'm going to ask you for something dishonorable to grant judge for yourself.

I want you to postpone all other engagements for tonight.

I 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 pool.

My butler has his orders.

You'll find him waiting your arrival with a locksmith.

The door of my cabinet is then to be forced and you're to go in alone to open the glazed press.

Letter E on the left hand breaking.

The lock if it be shut and 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 file 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 changed 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, laboring 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'd 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 tomorrow 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 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 frago, 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 the table, got into a handsome, 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.

A tradesman came while we were yet speaking and we moved in a body to old Mr.

Denman's surgical theater, from which, as you were 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 2 hours 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 color.

The file 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, exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point.

All this, though it wedded my curiosity, told me little that was definite.

Here were a file of some salt in 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 honor, 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 defense.

00 had scarce rung out over London, ere the knocking 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 bullseye open, and at the sight I thought, my visitors started and made greater haste.

This particular struck me, I confessed 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 neighborhood.

This bore some resemblance to incipient rigor, and was accompanied by a marked sinking of the poles.

At the time I set it down to some idiosyncratic personal distaste and merely wondered at the acuteness of the symptoms.

But I've 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 collars 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 miss begotten 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've 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 somber 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 this fair and imitation of my ordinary manner to a patient as the lateness of the hour the nature of my preoccupations and the horror I had in 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 great 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 the 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 minimums 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 color, to effervescence audibly and to throw off small fumes of vapor.

Suddenly, at the same moment, the ebliition ceased and the compound changed to a dark purple, which faded again more slowly to a watery green.

My visitor, who had watched these metamorphosis 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 parlay?

Or is 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've 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 a glass to his lips and drank it.

One gulp.

A cry followed.

He reeled, staggered, clutched 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 leapt back against the wall, my arms raised to shield me from that prodigy.

My mind submerged in terror.

Oh, God.

I screamed, and oh, 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 when he told me in the next hour I could not 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 Karoo Hasty Lanyon.

Thank you for joining Bite at a Time Books today while we read a.

Bite of one of your favorite classics.

Again, my name is Brie Carlyle and I hope you come back tomorrow for the last bite of the Strange case of Dr.

Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde.

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