Breaking Down the Door — The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Poole arrives at Utterson's fireside on a wild March night, too shaken to touch his wine. For a week the master has shut himself in the cabinet, ordering drug after drug from London chemists and rejecting each batch as impure. Notes in Jekyll's hand beg for "some of the old" salt with desperate urgency. The voice behind the door is wrong; the handwriting is wrong; and when Poole glimpsed a masked figure among the crates, the intruder was too small to be Dr. Jekyll. The butler is certain his master has been murdered.

Utterson tries to read illness into the evidence, but Poole's twenty years in the house outweigh polite theory. He recalls Hyde's key, the creature's quick light step, and the marrow-deep revulsion Hyde once inspired. Bradshaw and the knife-boy guard the laboratory exits with sticks while the two men wait in the surgical theatre, listening to footsteps too light for Jekyll. Servants huddle in the hall like frightened sheep. Poole once heard weeping from within. When Utterson calls out, the answer begs for mercy in Hyde's voice, not Jekyll's. Five axe blows shatter the lock; they take poker and axe and break down the red baize door.

Inside lies Edward Hyde, contorted and dead by poison, dressed in Jekyll's oversized clothes. Henry Jekyll has vanished from every room; searches of the theatre, cobweb-sealed cellar, and court find nothing. A rusted, broken key lies in the by-street. Chemical work sits interrupted on the table; a pious book lies open with blasphemies in Jekyll's hand; the cheval-glass shows only frightened faces. On the desk Utterson finds a fresh will naming himself heir and a letter from Jekyll directing him to Lanyon's narrative and the confession that follows. Poole's courage forces the confrontation denial could no longer delay. The chapter turns the story from suspicion into visible catastrophe and hands the lawyer the documents that will explain it. Utterson will read Lanyon's narrative before midnight, knowing Jekyll may still be alive somewhere in the wreckage of his own house, or gone in a way no search party can yet name.