Hyde

by Craig Russell

Genres: Historical Fiction; Horror; Mystery

Synopsis

From the internationally acclaimed author, a stunning gothic reimagining of the Jekyll and Hyde story in which Captain Edward Hyde, chief detective of Victorian Edinburgh, investigates a gruesome murder that may unmask his own darkest secret
 
Victorian Edinburgh. Captain Edward Henry Hyde is chief detective for the City of Edinburgh Police; as such, he is responsible for investigating all murders and serious crimes in the city. Hyde is a striking but severe-looking man who provokes unease, and often fear, in those who encounter him. Nevertheless, Edward Hyde is truly a good man ...  though he wrestles fiercely with his own unique demons.

When Hyde finds himself at the scene of a heinous murder, with no idea of how he got there or the events leading up to the discovery, his alarm is triggered on two levels. First, the crime scene is brutal and involves the Threefold Death, an ancient Celtic rite of sacrifice entangled with dark Scottish spiritual mythology. Second, Hyde's inability to remember any detail of his arrival at the crime scene makes him immediately fret about the secret he keeps from all but his physician: He suffers from a rare form of epilepsy that causes him to lose time—amnesiac absences where he cannot account for his actions—and nocturnal seizures that manifest themselves as vivid and lucid dreams.
 
As Hyde begins his investigation of the murder in a city on edge, he finds himself not only searching for real world clues, but trying to unravel the significance of the imagery in the otherworld of his dreaming. His investigation leads to the very places he fears, but has never fully imagined.

Release date: September 28, 2021

Publisher: Doubleday

Print pages: 352

Sample

prologue

He looked at his friend and wondered how he still lived. Such a strong character, such a powerful personality, such an irrepressible force of will and resolve confined in so small and fragile a vessel. He knew, as he took in the narrow-shouldered frame and the thin, birdlike face bleached yet paler by the bright sun, that his friend would not be long among the living. Even now, his presence in this world was attenuated, fading, like the image of a man unfixed and dissolving on an exposed photographic plate.

And all the time, as they sat on the bench looking out over the pale sand of the beach and the glittering shield of the English Channel beyond, he was aware how starkly his own robustness contrasted with his friend’s infirmity. As could be gathered from the sometimes uneasy glances cast by passers-by, there was nothing attenuated about the larger man’s presence in the world.

The conversation between the two was scant. Theirs was an acquaintance of long standing where companionship alone often sufficed. Also, the larger man was afraid of tiring the other. It had been years since they had last met, and the deterioration of his friend had alarmed him.

“We’ll head back to Skerryvore in a while,” said the gaunt man. “Fanny will have prepared something to eat.” Despite the summer warmth, he wore an ill-fitting jacket of heavy velveteen draped over insubstantial shoulders. There had been talk of seeking out a more curative climate—less tainted airs and brighter suns; the American West or the South Seas, perhaps—and the heavy-set man wondered if his companion would still wear the same jacket under friendlier skies, and if those skies would at long last bring some colour to his pale complexion.

“It’s this damned book as much as anything,” said the frail man without moving his gaze from the sea but clearly having read his friend’s concern. “It consumes me so, eats at me—yet I can find no clear framework for the telling of it. I know exactly what it is I want to write about, I know that at its heart must lie a tale of the duality of human nature, about the good within the bad and the bad within the good, but every day it confronts me with a blank page.”

“The duality of human nature, you say?” asked the other.

“Although we pretend otherwise,” said the frail man, “we are all manifold. There are bright angels and dark demons in each of us. It is a subject that has consumed me since childhood. You know I inherited that dresser—the one carpentered by Deacon Brodie—from my late father. It is such a beautifully crafted piece and, as a child, I would stare at it in daylight wonder—but at night…oh, at night the thought of it sitting there in the dark filled me with dread, thinking that the ghost of the other Brodie, the night-time Brodie, would steal into our house with his gang and murder us all in our sleep.

“As a boy, I became obsessed with Brodie’s story, burned into Edinburgh’s history—a prominent and respected member of Edinburgh society by day, the worst villain by night. I would have this nightmare where Brodie would be in my room; I would just and no more make out in the shadows this tall, dark figure wearing a tricorn hat. He would cross the room, the tools of his daytime trade rattling in his satchel against the pistols of his nightwork. He would lean down over my bed, his neck encircled by the steel band they say he wore to cheat the hangman. As he did so, I would see both Brodies as one: his smile would be courteous and benevolent and at the same time a malicious, cruel grinning.” He paused for a moment. “I have it still, you know—the Brodie dresser, I mean. I brought it with me here to Skerryvore. Anyway, Brodie’s tale fascinates me still and I want to tell something of the like. Something not just about good and evil, but about their coexistence in the same personality, and all the shades and contrasts between them. About the dualities and conflicts within the human soul.” He laughed weakly. “Perhaps it’s the Celt in me that leads me to such obsessions. Or maybe it’s because our country itself has a divided personality: that Scotland’s dual sense of self echoes in its sons. Whatever its source, I am driven to write something about the duality of man’s nature.” He sighed, the shrug of his narrow shoulders almost lost in his voluminous jacket. “It’s just that I can’t seem to pin my story to its page.”

The larger man remained silent for a while, he too directing his gaze out to some unfixed point over the water.

“If you have want of such a story,” he said eventually, “I can tell you one.”

And under a bright but cheerless Bournemouth sun, Edward Hyde told his frail friend, Robert Louis Stevenson, his tale.

It was a sound like no other.

High, shrill, raw, it stabbed the night with sharp, juddering, ragged edges. It was a sound somewhere between a wail and a scream, yet it was unlike a voice; spoke of no human origin.

Moonless night had already claimed the city: dragging itself around the flanks of the Mound, insinuating itself through the crenels and embrasures of the castle, creeping down into the Old Town and stretching dark fingers into its narrow wynds and cramped closes; in the grand terraces and crescents of the New Town it rubbed itself blackly against the prosperous panes of the broad, high windows. But as if possessed of some dark gravity, nowhere was the night blacker than where it had sunk into the depths of the gulley that creased the city, carrying pure waters from the heights of the Pentlands to where they became soiled dark and foam crusted in the effluent shadows of the clustering mills that lined the Water of Leith.

When the sound found her, Nell McCrossan was a slight, insubstantial shadow moving through a greater darkness. Small for her fourteen years, her frame meagre and birdlike, her skin in the scarce and insubstantial pools of lamplight as bleach white as the flour produced by the mill in which she worked.

Nell was a fearful soul. She feared the walk to her shift, feared the swelling darknesses between the lamps, feared the shifting elm shadows and the voices she sometimes thought she could hear in the tumbling waters of the river. She had learned to mistrust her ears: the thunderings and clashings of the machines in the mill had distorted her hearing, tinkling in her ears as spectral tintinnabulations and haunting the vault of her skull with booming ghosts long after she had left the mill.

A generation before, her people had come to the city from the Highlands, driven from the green quiet of strath, mountain and glen to make way for the greater profit of sheep. The only world Nell had known had been the clattering, cramped, smoke-wreathed clamour of the tenements, alleys and closes of the Old Town, and the harsh, guttural Sassenach tongue of Edinburgh, yet her childhood had echoed with her parents’ soft Gaelic and tales of an unseen otherworld. So, as she made her shadow-haunted, brisk-paced way to her work in the mill, the mistrusted sounds of an ink-sleek river reached out to her from the gulley beside the

path and conjured up remembered tales of selkies and kelpies and other malevolent water spirits.

But when the sound found her, all other fears, all other noises real and imagined, fell from her. The sound—that terrible wailing screech of a sound—seemed to penetrate her insubstantial flesh and ring in her bones. Nell gave a cry of her own as the fear within her welled up and spilled into the night.

The sound came again, a shuddering, ragged screech that seemed to swell and echo in the depression of the gulley, reflecting itself off the black flanks of the mills until it seemed to come from every direction at once.

Nell whimpered, a child lost in the night, desperately scanning the darkness to catch sight of the dread thing that issued such a fearful sound, to work out in which direction she should run.

Again. A third inhuman wailing.

Nell turned on her heel and fled, plunging into the darkness between the lamp standards.

She ran straight into it.

A mass unseen in the darkness but suddenly solid, as if the shadows had coalesced to form an obstruction to her flight. The force of her collision caused her to rebound and she landed painfully, her back slamming against the grease-slicked cobbles. The impact winded her, and she desperately sought to draw air back into her tortured lungs.

She had no breath to scream for help as the shape leaned down over her, its silhouette growing larger, darker yet against the black gathered night. Strong hands seized her, and Nell issued a strangled cry, still not yet possessing enough breath to shape a scream. And still her captor remained inhuman; she could make out no face, no feature.

The dark form lifted her to her feet as if there were no substance to her. It held her by her upper arms and she felt it would cost this monster no effort to crush her, to fold and crack her bones. She was helpless as he steered her into one of the pools cast by the gas lanterns.

The lamplight and shadow now etched a face for Nell to see. Her breath had returned to her but she found herself still unable to form a scream, to call out into the night for deliverance from the rough beast who now held her captive. The man in the gaslight had features that instilled terror. Heavy, brutal, harsh features that, while cruelly handsome, provoked revulsion. Fright. Terror. She felt captured by some monster; by the devil.

Then she recognized him. She knew exactly who he was and it did little to abate her fear.

“Are you all right?” His voice was deep and as velvet dark as the night. “Are you injured?”

Nell shook her head.

“Where did it come from?” he asked. Again she shook her head dully, still hypnotized by the bright blue eyes that glittered in the cruel face. “The scream, girl,” he urged, his voice impatient. “Where did that scream come from?”

“I don’t know, sir,” she stammered. “It was like it came from all around. But the first time…” She pointed vaguely down into the gulley beside them.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked. Nell once more took in his face, the glitter of eyes from under the shadow of both hat and heavy brow, the wide, sharp-angled shields of cheekbone, the broad bulk of the jaw. It was like a face carved from some material harder than stone. She nodded, still fearful.

“You are Captain Hyde, sir.”

“What is your name, child?”

“Nell, sir. Nell McCrossan.”

“Do you work in the mill, Nell?”

She nodded again.

“Then run there now and tell your foreman I need men to help me search—and tell him to send someone to the Dean police office to bring constables.”

She neither replied nor moved, instead fixed and immobile in her study of Hyde’s face.

“Go now!” he urged with more severity than he intended, and the jolt of his words sent her running in the direction of the mill.

Hyde took a pocket lantern from his Ulster topcoat and scanned the path, the trees and the river around him. Its light gave menacing life to his surroundings: the rushing water glistened blackly and oil-sleek in the lantern’s beam; the shadows of trees and bushes that edged the river writhed sinuously. Yet there was no sign of anything wrong.

He surrendered the path and took to the river’s edge, following it in the direction indicated by the terrified girl. The river became a sleek-backed snake, writhing its dark way towards distant Leith and the sea, while all around the sounds of industry clamoured louder in the night. Hyde startled at a loud metallic clang as the buffers of unseen locomotives clashed in Balerno railway goods yard. As he made his way farther along the water’s edge, the sounds beyond became lost. The currents of the Water of Leith drove the waterwheels of the mills along its course, and at intervals the tumbling torrent would cascade over weirs and cataracts. Hyde could hear he now approached the thunderous rush of water over a weir.

The tangle of branches and bush along the river’s edge slowed his progress and he had briefly to retake the path. Over the roar of the waterfall he could just and no more hear the sound of voices calling him: the men brought from the mill. To indicate the direction he had taken, Hyde removed his service whistle from his pocket and gave three sharp summoning blasts.

He walked on, along the path in the direction of the weir, but the river was shielded from him by a screen of dense vegetation. He reached the cataract and the water’s edge suddenly cleared of undergrowth. A short section of iron railing, rusted and time bent, offered the only security from where the river dropped twenty feet to the lower level. The darkness of the night and the thunder of the waterfall disconcertingly rendered him deaf and blind to anything outside this small theatre of his awareness. He shone the light from his pocket lantern along the riverbank on his side, then across the foaming edge of the waterfall to the other bank.

It was then he saw it.

It moved in the light, turning, twisting and shuddering: something sallow and fleshlike. At first, he could make no sense of it.

The bough of an elm reached out across the water as if offering Hyde its pale fruit. The form which hung from it was at first unrecognizable in the insufficient illumination of Hyde’s hand lantern. What added to the confusion was the movement of the thing, as if alive. Then he made dark sense of it: close to the far bank, suspended by a long rope fastened around the tree’s bough, a naked man hung upside down, his ankles rope bound. Hyde’s lantern followed the pallid form to where a wound gaped lividly in the chest. A thick trail of blood, glistening black and sleek in the night, traced its way down to the man’s throat, but his head was hidden, submerged in the frothing water of the river. It was the tugging of the impatient current on the unseen head that had given the form motion and the semblance of life.

Hyde again took the whistle from his pocket, turned in the direction he had come and gave three short blasts.

As if in response, it came again. The cry. Audible and no more over the roar of the waterfall. To start with, Hyde thought it was the echo of his whistle, but he recognized the same high, inhuman sound, this time more plaintive, mournful. He spun around but couldn’t fix the direction of its origin. But wherever it had come from, one thing was sure: it had not issued from the dead man hanging upside down from the tree.

He gave another three blasts on his whistle and was answered this time with louder cries of mill workers hastening towards him. When they arrived, the young girl who had run into him earlier was with them, her face ghostly in the light of the lanterns. Hyde instructed the men to take her to one side, lest she see the horror hanging from the far bank of the river.

“Did you hear it again, sir?” she asked Hyde. “The bean-nighe.”

“The what?”

“The bean-nighe.” Nell’s voice trembled with a fear sown not just into her fabric but woven through generations before her. “The washerwoman—her that laments by the water’s edge.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Hyde.

“The bean-nighe comes up from the Otherworld and wails while she washes the clothes of them about to die.” The shaking of her voice was now a tremor through her whole insubstantial body. “That’s what we heard. The bean-nighe—she’s a ban-sìth, you see.”

Hyde nodded. “I understand now. But I assure you what we heard was very much of this world, Nell.” He turned to one of the men. “She’s in shock. Take her back to the mill and have someone attend to her.”

After the young Highland girl was gone, Hyde led the men to the nearest bridge across the water and back along the other bank toward where the naked man hung from the tree. They stood in silence for a moment, as men do in the presence of violent death. Hyde could see the body more clearly, but the head and face remained hidden in the rush of the river. The wound in the chest he could now see was deep and wide, like a gaping mouth. Someone had removed the man’s heart.

“He’s been murdered,” said one of the mill workers at Hyde’s shoulder.

“More than that,” said another. “He’s been three times murdered.”

Hyde turned questioningly in the man’s direction.

“Hanged, ripped and drowned…” explained the man. “Why would anybody do that to someone?”

“Get me a pole or anything with a hook on it,” said Hyde. “I want to bring the body to the riverbank.”

A third mill worker volunteered to run back to the mill and find something suitable.

As he waited with the others, Captain Edward Henry Hyde, superintendent of detective officers in Edinburgh’s City Police, was greatly troubled by two thoughts. The first was that he had, by pure chance, uncovered a brutal murder through his entirely coincidental and fortuitous presence at the scene—yet he could not, for the life of him, remember why he was in this place, so far from his usual habit, or how he had got there.

The second thing troubling him was the earnest terror of a young, frightened mill girl haunted still by the distant Highlands and their myths. A terror founded on the belief that what they had heard had been the cries of a ban-sìth.

A banshee.