The Jekyll Legacy by Jaye Michael & Levanah Greene Chapter Two Let’s Make Believe

Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?

 

By trying we can easily endure adversity.
Another man’s, I mean.

 — Following the Equator (1897)
 — Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

 

“What was that? Did I hear someone scream?” Dr. Lanyon came running into the lab with a worried expression.

“Damn. I knew we needed better sound-proofing,” Hastie muttered to himself as his father’s eyes locked onto Jack, unsteadily getting to his feet.

“Is everything all right, Miss?” the older man smiled. Turning to Hastie his smile turned to a frown. “I thought we’d agreed that you would tell your parents when you have a friend visiting?”

“Right, Pop. I’m sorry. I guess I forgot.” Gesturing to Jack, he continued. “Dad, I’d like you to meet Selene. Selene, this is my Dad.”

Selene seemed more preoccupied with herself and failed to acknowledge the introduction. Before his father’s sensibilities could be aroused and Selene was asked to leave, Hastie rushed to continue an introduction.

“She’s new to our school and asked for some help with chemistry. I hope you don’t mind, but we were about to use the blackboard here in the lab for a study aid.”

“Oh. Okay, son, but next time we — your mother and I — want to know when you have friends over, and I want to know before you use the lab. I’m running the start up routine for the TSP right now and I would really prefer that no one use the lab right now.” Mrs. Lanyon appeared behind her husband just as he was finishing his instructions. She nodded in agreement and waited to be introduced.

“Hi, Mom. This is Selene. Selene, this is my Mom.” Selene nodded distractedly until Hastie kicked her to get her to focus on what was going on around her and not get them both into hot water. He was also worried that she might do something stupid like trying to check out her new anatomy in public.

“Selene, you have lovely hair, is strawberry blonde your natural color? It’s just perfect on you with your delicate skin tone; it makes you look like a young Maureen O’Hara.”

“Excuse me? Maureen who?” she said, still distracted.

“Your hair, is that the natural color? It’s quite becoming, almost like Hastie’s friend Jack’s hair. I’ve always thought he should let his hair grow a bit, at least more than the extreme buzz cut he usually wears.” Mrs. Lanyon stepped around her husband to approach Selene and fluffed out the younger woman’s hair so that it spread appealingly about her shoulders.

Hastie almost turned green with his mother’s reference to Jack, certain that in his obviously bewildered state his friend would give everything away.

“Oh, unh, yes.”

“Yes, what, dear?”

“Yes, I’m a natural redhead. I’m going to have to make an appointment to have it cut as soon as I can. It’s too long right now.” She glared at Hastie as he smirked and fought to stifle a snicker.

Hastie’s mother, on the other hand, was shocked. “Cut your beautiful hair? Oh, no, Selene, you mustn’t. It’s perfect on you, simply wonderful, just the way it is.”

“Ah, folks. Can we continue this discussion in the living room?” Dr. Lanyon moved protectively next to the closet door and tried to usher everyone out of the room. “I have an experiment under way and it would be safer if everyone moved this discussion to another room, like the living room.”

As if to emphasize the good doctor’s words, there was a rumbling from the closet. Everyone turned towards the door as the rumbling became louder.

“I think we should all leave now.” Dr. Lanyon suggested with more urgency.

The rumbling became a deep moan as it continued to grow in volume. Now, it was so loud that everyone covered their ears as Dr. Lanyon grabbed Selene in one hand and his wife with his other and started dragging them towards the exit.

As suddenly as it started, the noise stopped and everyone turned back to the closet door. There was a small red glow coming from the keyhole. The glow became brighter and before anyone could move the entire door was missing, replaced by a red swirling vortex. Incidental to the door’s disappearance, a whistling sound began that rapidly grew louder and louder until it was a roar. Papers, then small pieces of lab equipment, then books, furniture and people began flying into the vortex. Several minutes later there was a faint click and the vortex snapped off, leaving a completely empty room.

Waves of heat shimmered over a reddish sandy plain surrounded by layered cliffs, rounded and formed into strange multicolored rainbow shapes from ages of blowing wind. In the hazy azure sky, two suns were visible above one sculpted cliff. A single tree struggled to grow from a rocky ledge on a low hill, providing a limited amount of shade for the four bodies sprawled awkwardly beneath it. It was not until the twin suns settled behind the cliff for the night, that they slowly began to stir themselves to rise from their semiconscious stupor.

“Ow! I hurt.”

Assorted moans echoed the sentiment.

“Me too. What happened?” Selene asked as she angrily tugged her hair away from her face.

“I don’t know.” Hastie replied as he struggled to a sitting position. “I guess Pop’s experiment had a bug or two in it.”

“Is that true, dear?” Mrs. Lanyon groaned and asked her husband. Seeing Selene struggling with his hair she reached over to help. “Why don’t we put your hair in a ponytail, dear?”

“I’m afraid so, Emily dearest.” Dr. Lanyon interjected before Selene could snarl back the frustrated answer Hastie was expecting. Instead, Selene wisely bit her tongue and held back the first retort that came to mind, something about ‘like father, like son;’ instead saying, “Because despite what I look like, I’m really Jack and I haven’t the faintest idea how to do a ponytail or anything else with my hair.”

“Excuse me? I thought Hastie said your name was Selene.”

“He lied. I’m Jack. Jack Utterson. This body,” he gestured, “is another one of Hastie’s botched experiments.”

“Is that true, young man?” Mrs. Lanyon angrily turned to confront her son.

“No, Mom. Or at least not really.”

A loud snort of disgust came from Jack’s direction.

“I followed the instructions exactly. It was great grandfather’s formula.”

Mrs. Lanyon’s hand went to her mouth while Dr. Lanyon groaned, this time in disappointment.

“But Pop, you told me great grandpa had perfected it.”

“Yes, Hastie, he did develop a more benign version of Dr. Jekyll’s formula, but I also told you that the family has decided we would never use it. It was too dangerous.”

“Dangerous? Dangerous how? I knew you were holding out something from me, Hastie.” Jack was angry again; this time the anger was tinged with worry.

“It’s not dangerous, Jack. It worked, didn’t it?” Hastie responded quickly before turning back to his father. “Besides, I don’t see how it could be any more dangerous that your TSP.”

“That will be enough out of you, young man,” Dr. Lanyon glared at his son.

“I’m afraid he might be right, dear. Have you looked around?” Everyone looked beyond the piles of furniture, equipment and books that surrounded them.

“Oh….” Dr. Lanyon actually looked at the destruction, and realized that his experiment hadn’t gone quite as swimmingly as he’d imagined it would.

Jack muttered, “It looks like we’re not in Kansas any more, Toto.”

His attempt at a wry sort humor fell on deaf ears. There was no doubt that they weren’t in Kansas, since they’d never been there, but they obviously weren’t in New York either. In fact, it was doubtful whether they were even on the planet Earth, although the area looked something like the Monument Valley area so popular in ancient ‘cowboy’ films. Last he looked, there was only one Sun in the sky back on Earth, and it didn’t seem like the sort of thing one could forget.

“Unh, Pop. Something more than ‘Oh,’ seems called for here. Look!” He pointed down the hill toward the plain, where what looked like a distant herd of centaurs were galloping toward the hills.

“Never mind where we are. Give me one of those darned test-tubes so I can get back to being me again,” Jack demanded as she started crawling toward Hastie with a clear intent to do whatever was necessary to get what she wanted.

“Hastie, didn’t you tell Jack?”

“Not again,” Jack said irritably. “What else didn’t he tell me?” The slow crawl stopped. He’d made it as far as Mrs. Lanyon who gently put a comforting arm around the pretty blonde beside her.

“Hastie,” Dr. Lanyon “tsked.” “You know what we’ve told you about telling the truth, the whole truth.”

“Yes, Father.” Hastie seemed particularly chagrinned. “Unh, Jack, you can’t exactly turn back for a fortnight.”

“What? What the he… I mean heck, is a fortnight? Why can’t I change?”

“A fortnight is fourteen days, two weeks,” Hastie’s father interjected.

“Thank you, Dr. Lanyon. Now why do I have to wait so long? And for that matter,” Jack asked Hastie, “how the heck were we going to go back to school after Halloween if we were trapped inside your stupid science fiction/sword and sorcery bodies?”

“I… unh, I… forgot about that part.”

“You forgot? Isn’t it written in that stupid book you got the formula from?”

“No. Jack,” Dr. Lanyon explained, much to the relief of Hastie. “It was so noted in grandfather’s will, along with the warning that to try earlier would lock in the current form forever — if it didn’t kill you first.”

“Great. Just great.” Jack put her hands to her face and slumped to the ground while Mrs. Lanyon gently held her and rocked with her until a strange howling sound in the distance captured everyone’s attention.

“Dear, it seems as if we’re not alone, so I think we should think about what we need to do to make ourselves safe here, wherever here is, before wasting time in recriminations.”

“Very true. Let’s see what we have here that we can use to help us. Everyone take a corner and start sorting. Whatever seems irretrievably broken, toss away from the tree. Whatever seems intact, place beside the tree. Then we can make an inventory of what we have and see what we might be able to use to get back home. There was quite a bit of scientific apparatus in the closet, so surely enough survived to give us some hope of self-rescue.”

“Okay, Pop, but going home may be a bit difficult.”

“Why’s that?”

Hastie merely pointed upward. There in the sky was the bright full moon helping them see. Beside it was a much smaller, reddish colored moon.

“Oh,” Dr. Herbert Lanyon the Sixth, MD, PhD, said again. “So we’re not only not on Earth, we don’t even seem to be in the same solar system.” Then he smiled. “On the other hand, it proves conclusively that the TSP worked perfectly, so that’s some consolation.”

They all silently began sorting through the piles of scattered items about them.

The larger and brighter of the two moons had set by the time the sorting was completed. Four very tired people sat dejectedly about a small fire made of the combustible trash, which evidently included all the books, since they’d found little other than piles of scorched confetti and a few scraps of cardboard covers. The rest of the huge pile of junk had debris had been tossed in a rough circle around them and the pitifully small pile of useful items had been stacked next to the fire. The remains of the bookshelves and the shredded books themselves had provided a more than sufficient supply of flammable material for a fire, although the paper burned so quickly that they soon gave up on it, taking time to find bits of wood from the bookshelves instead. The refrigerator had been emptied to provide a small meal of melting candy bars and warm soda.

“Let’s review.” Sometimes Dr. Lanyon couldn’t help being pedantic, finding it difficult to abandon the academic habits of a lifetime. “The good news is that we’re alive, in good health, and that we have a nearly full box of wooden matches with an assortment of camping and survival supplies, including three remaining sodas, a few very soft candy bars, plus backpacks to carry it all. The bad news is that we have no other food, no water, only the clothes on our backs, and our weapons consist of one laser pointer, two mostly-decorative sabers which none of us know how to use effectively, quite a few small surgical knives, and enough chemicals to make a couple of pounds of nitrocellulose if we had some ice.” He pondered for a moment. “Have I missed anything? Oh yes, we don’t know where we are or how to get home.”

Everyone glumly agreed with his assessment.

“This sure ain’t Kansas, Toto,” Hastie muttered again.

By this time a despondent gloom that had settled over the entire group.

“Don’t say ‘ain’t,’ dear,” his mother corrected him as usual, but it lacked her usual fervor.

“Let’s get some sleep folks. We should probably take turns keeping watch, although I have no idea what we need to watch for. How about two-hour shifts? Who wants first shift?”

“I will. I’m not tired.” Jack picked up one of the sabers and idly examined it. Something about it seemed to fascinate him, although he had no idea what. While the others lay down on the sandy ground and tried to get comfortable, Jack began to slice the air with the blade.

Hastie wasn’t sleepy either, and he didn’t have a TV, nor any video games to fool with. As the only action around was Jack playing with the big knife, he watched his friend. With a twinge of guilt he realized that in her current form, she was very pleasing to look at.

“Hey, Selene. When did you get so good with a blade?”

“I don’t know. It just feels right. And don’t call me Selene. That’s what that stupid barbarian woman of yours was called in the movie.”

Hastie watched as Jack continued practicing his swordplay, moving faster and faster, making more and more difficult moves. She was good, very good. Better than she had any right to be, and there was something else, something different about her. Hastie concentrated, trying to figure out what had changed.

Her hair? Was her hair a different shade of red than he remembered? Maybe, but that wasn’t what was gnawing at the edges of his awareness. It had to be something else.

Her acceptance of the name Selene? Hastie had been teasing, but Jack usually became irate when teased. Maybe, but he didn’t think that was it either.

His clothes? Jack had been wearing a skin-tight reddish brown leather camisole when they’d come back from practice, hadn’t he?

“Unh, Mom, Pop, Jack. I think we have another problem.”

“What?”

“What’s that, dear?”

“Something’s happening to Sel… Jack. Her… his clothes are changing.”

“Nonsense, Hastie,” his mother chided him. “I remember complimenting her on her choice of leather when we met.”

“Mom, first off, that’s Jack, not a ‘her,’ and one problem is she… he’s not even correcting us. The second problem is, like I said before, her clothes are changing. We were both wearing sweats with the school logo on them, just like mine, when we left practice this afternoon. It’s a team rule.”

“Are you sure, dear? I definitely recall complimenting her on how nice she looked when we met.”

“I’m sure, Mom. I’m sure. Look. Now there’s a scabbard too.”

“Oh my, I certainly don’t remember that being there before.”

“Neither do I,” Dad chimed in.

“I don’t get it. What’s happening?”

Dr. Lanyon cleared his throat and everyone turned towards him. “I think I can explain, at least part of it.

“When she took the Jekyll formula her body changed. Now her mind is changing to match her body. That’s why she’s adjusting to the use of the name Selene. Watch.” He turned to address Jack.

“Jack, would you please tell us your name.”

“Sure.” Her face showed the strain as she concentrated on what should have been a simple request. “It’s Son…. It’s J… Jel… Selene. That’s it, Selene. My name is Selene.” Jack beamed at the others as he repeated the name over and over, her hair was now bright red, and she had freckles.

“Thank you, Selene,” Dad smiled politely at her. “You can stop now.”

“I can’t explain why her clothes are changing, but I think I can explain what’s responsible for the changes.” He stopped and peered carefully at each of the others. “I’m pretty sure it’s only happening to her, so I think it’s a safe working hypothesis to assume that it’s somehow related to her ingestion of the Jekyll formula.”

“I don’t understand, Herbert. How could a formula, even one that somehow changes a person’s genetic makeup, change non-living matter?”

“I don’t know, Emily. Only with time and careful observation do we have a chance of determining that.” He started patting his pockets, looking for a notebook and pen so he could write down his observations.

“Dad?”

“Yes, Hastie? Please keep your voice down. Your mother is sleeping.”

“I haven’t figured out exactly how yet either, but the changes may help us.”

“How’s that, son?”

“The formula can change us into forms that are better suited to surviving here, like those centaurs we saw.”

“That’s true, son, but I don’t remember any reference to changes in non-living matter. That’s something new and, I must admit, worrisome to me.

“Gentlemen,” a woman’s voice called softly from the darkness

“Yes, Selene, I mean Jack?”

“I think you should be aware that we are not alone — and don’t call me Jack. That’s not my name and it’s just plain silly.”

The two men quickly scanned the darkness but saw nothing. “What’s up?”

“There are several large four legged creatures circling our campsite, I think six. Look away from the fire until your eyes adjust and you will be able to catch glimpses of the red glow of the fire in their eyes.”

It took two tense minutes for their eyes to adjust and even then it took luck to catch the occasional momentary glint of red from the fire reflected in the eyes of the creatures in the darkness.

“Should we wake Mom?”

“No, son, let her sleep. Your mother is many things, but not a fighter.”

The night was shattered by an unholy wail, like the one they had heard earlier, but much closer. “What was that?” Mrs. Lanyon was wide-awake, her eyes wide with fright as she jerked herself into an upright position.

“So much for not waking your mother,” Dr. Lanyon muttered, before responding in a louder voice to his wife. “It’s nothing, dear. Selene saw some animals nearby, but the fire is keeping them at bay.”

“Oh dear. Do we have enough wood to make it through the night?”

“More than enough, dear,” he answered aloud before muttering to himself, “I hope.” There was no assurance that this world rotated on a twenty-four hour schedule. He cursed himself for failing to keep track of the apparent motion of the stars.

“They’re getting closer.” Selene had taken a wide-footed fighting stance, with her transformed saber in hand as she concentrated on the things in the dark.

“Dearest, you stay by the fire and make sure it keeps burning as brightly as it is right now, but don’t make it any bigger. We don’t know how long the nights are here.”

Dr. Lanyon gestured to Hastie to move to another quadrant and find a weapon. As one, they ran to the lab table and yanked on its two remaining legs until they broke off in their hands. A club was better than bare hands and neither felt comfortable with the lone saber left.

Club in hand, each moved to a position at the barrier, about a third of the circumference of the circle of junk away from Selene. From the noises behind them, Mrs. Lanyon was digging through the piles of useful material, throwing out every flammable item she found, but neither of the men was willing to look back towards the fire where she was for fear of losing what little night vision they had.

There was another undulating wail and everyone but Selene jerked a bit. This one seemed louder and closer still. As the horrid caterwaul faded into the night, Selene spoke quietly but decisively. “They’re coming now.”

Seconds ticked by with only the crackling of the fire to confirm the passage of time. The tension was unbearable and Hastie glanced at the tense and unmoving figure of Selene to his right. “Where the hell are they?” he said, just as he heard a sound behind him.

Quickly turning back, he found a huge slathering mouth, full of teeth and snarling at him from the top of a pile of junk just inches away from his face. Before he could scream in fear and shock, it leapt from the pile straight at him, knocking him backwards to the sand within the circle, and then jumping onto his chest, knocking even more air from his lungs. Everything began to move in slow motion.

Gasping for breath he held the club in both hands as he tried to push the teeth, surrounded by ratty brownish fur, from his neck. As the jaws snapped at him he could hear sounds of battle around him, but couldn’t concentrate as he felt the thing’s neck sliding back off the club. The next time those jaws closed it would surely be around his neck.

Suddenly, the thing on his chest spasmed, giving him a chance to drop the club and grab at it’s neck on both sides, just behind the teeth. As he scrabbled for a grip, his hand brushed against something stiff and hard and it spasmed again before snapping at his neck, determined to bite him.

Hastie knew that his grip was slipping. Desperately grasping for a safer grip, he again brushed that stiff object and again the creature jerked as if in tremendous pain. Grasping at whatever it was, he absently noted that it was slick with some fluid, but that was secondary to his need to jab at the toothy monstrosity on top of him with the stick or whatever it was. He pushed it in firmly and twisted.

The creature howled and squirmed, clawing his chest painfully. He pushed harder as the creature made yet another lunge at his neck. The teeth were close enough that they had moved out of sight below his chin when the creature became rigid and… and stopped moving.

Hastie kept pushing and twisting the stick, or whatever it was for more than a minute, until he realized it was no longer moving. As he tiredly pushed it off, he realized that it had horrible breath — like sewer gas, fœtid and thick with decay — and that there was some type of fluid on his chest. A tired hand brushed absently at the sticky liquid and held it up for his inspection, twisting it into the amber light from the fire. It looked blackish red. It was blood. His last thought before passing out was to wonder if it was his.

Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved