Professor Hyde

Henry Hyde, Ph.D., assistant professor of sociology, had for precisely one year suffered a violent and unrequited craving for the wife of a faculty colleague at Merryweather College; and here it was, Christmas Eve again, the annual eggnog fest, the anniversary of the onset of his unhappy hunger. His prey stood blonde and breasty, gaudy, apathetic, peering with great violet eyes into a foaming cup while Claude Revanche, of Romance Languages, spitefully abused prominent statesmen.

Hyde wiped off his nog-mustache and insinuated himself between his beauty and little Claude, who was the kind of freak that attended parties to talk to his wife, for so she was.

Revanche said, with the unction of a hamlet minister: "Weez and I agree that X, Y and Z are probably inverts."

"Probably!" said Hyde, robustly, so that he could roll his eyes from Claude to Louise, and hence from her bust to shin. His right arm, carrying the glass cup, drifted against her soft, bananalike left.

Revanche screamed outrage. Hyde's secret was out and he helpless. The lounge of Webster Hall was congested with faculty members, wives and offspring, and a dozen students, holiday holdovers, in basic black: the latter all girls, since Merryweather was that kind of school. And before the great fireplace, into which three Cossacks could have ridden without colliding, stood the president, Gifford T. Cudahy, hard back toward Yule log, noble face toward surrounding sycophants, arctic eyes looking over them at Hyde -- whom, Hyde happened to know, he disliked profoundly. Exposed, exposed! Hyde ranted to himself, maintaining contact with Louise and taking forever to hear that Revanche's rage was directed, (continued on page 140) Professor Hyde (continued from page 93) as before, at the alleged inverts in high places.

Hyde's elbow suddenly touched nothing but enervate air. Probing, he spilled some eggnog. "Aw, I got your shoes," he said to Revanche, and as his unsuspecting rival looked down, he turned furtively to smile some obscure message at Louise and adjust his range. She went away. The pleated skirt refused to confirm his sense of her rear end's slow, heavy roll; he parted with the Japanese on their idea of the sensuality of loose clothing. She made for the fireplace and Warren G. Harding--Cudahy within his ring of the Ohio Gang: nasty young instructors, an effeminate poet-in-residence, the sinewy Sappho who coached in field hockey.

The one gain was in also getting rid of Revanche, who had been peeved by the slop on his toecap, all the more because Louise had left before he could clean it off and he must follow; he broke off in mid-venom and left without a by-your-leave. His basic Americanism constantly showed through the French veneer, which owed only to his father's, an emigrant Pole, having passed briefly through Paris in 1911: the original was Revantsky. After two drinks Claude was wont to sweeten and give confidences. He had found Louise behind the necktie counter of an Indianapolis department store when he was teaching at a tiny denominational college in that region, but when sober he refused to confirm or deny the rumor, started by himself, that she had waited on tables in a roadhouse. However, the other wives held Louise's air of sullen torpor as supporting evidence for the racier version, and the Revanches were unpopular with everyone but the Hydes -- Hyde's wife, a Merryweather alumna who had been taught here to pull down vanity, having an addiction to outcasts.

Hyde believed that he himself when drunk became tigerishly resolute. He was very limp at present: the eggnog, mixed by Frau President Cudahy, was heavy only on the nutmeg. He licked the dregs from his cup and was made uneasy by the reflection of a tongue like the rubber tool with which his wife scraped plates.

He had formally decided to kill himself, if Louise gave him no hope, before 12 midnight, having added the extra hours -- this fete would end no later than 10 -- out of romantic bravado. He had broken his wristwatch in some recent pique. The clock on the mantel high above Cudahy was fixed on some long-passed afternoon hour at which the fencing team had perforated Vassar's. A messy-haired student conveniently threw hand to mouth and retreated a foot from some, to her, provocative remark made by a dowdy cohort, so that Hyde could see the table clock between them. Nine-thirty, an ugly Swiss thing all carved birds, gift of one Marge Partridge, Capt., WAC, BA '51; a harpy, he remembered, who in private consultations always stank of the gym. Captain Marge, we who are about to die salute you. He demonstrated with his empty cup, and luck, in a shafting mood, caused Lank Locks to see the gesture and come to him as if in summons.

Students at faculty parties were habitually drunk on water. This specimen, one Nan Schine, belonged to his own class in Social Pathology, and was perhaps related more closely than usual to the subject matter, though Hyde saw criminal inclinations in everyone who opted for the course.

The cruelest greeting he could give her, and so he gave it, was: "Miss Schine, how lovely!"

Hair like kelp, dress hanging as if it still rode the rack some Puerto Rican trundled through a Seventh Avenue gutter, she gave him back measure for measure: "Thank you!" Adoringly. He never failed to attract the creeps. This one was very rich, being the sole issue of a fat illiterate who owned a trans-American chain of coffee shops -- called, in fact, Coffee-Shoppes -- where Hyde could testify, the essential ingredient of all dishes was a small, hard, black foreign object and the milk always curdled in the dark venom referred to in the corporate name.

Miss Schine's smile was the wirework of an expensive, incompetent dentist. She chortled: "I'm doing my homework right here!"

Leave it to her, pathetic conformist, to use the jargon introduced by Cudahy, who worked in violent reaction to his "progressive" predecessor, sun-tanned, ousted Roger Whelp, who had unwittingly hired a representative of the Soviet foreign office to lecture on Biblical literature (Job turned up as the resident of an underdeveloped country smarting under the imperialist lash). A spy of a chauvinist organization sponsored by a senile Texas millionaire was taken on at midyear for the course in marriage relations, and shortly thereafter forwarded a dossier to Fort Worth -- on Whelp, not Lermontov -- and before you could pronounce "Friedrich Engels," the board of directors showed Whelp the door and flung his tennis racket after him. As to Lermontov, he had kept his job -- even, it was resentfully whispered over the ugly little sausages in the faculty cafeteria, was to be promoted.

Anyway, with Cudahy research had returned to the homework of traditional American girlhood, just as his own title was now president and not the chancellor of Roger Whelp, or Adolf Hitler -- a disjunction which Cudahy sometimes failed to maintain in his faculty talks.

And what Miss Schine meant was a project which Hyde, secretly an outlaw, had assigned his students for the Christmas holidays: 2000 written words each on Unorganized Prostitution in American Society. Hyde, to himself at least, had meant it literally, knowing his safety, for your typical undergraduate -- which, in spite of all, Miss Schine was -- would go into a spasm of idealization. Her angle was how television entertainers were mere procurers for the sponsors' products, and, balancing her ungainly figure on first one ballet slipper then the next -- her party eyeglasses had three sequins at each hinge; her celery neck was enpearled, and from clavicle to shank her person ran flat as a boy's -- that is, with no recommendation at all she insisted on making an oral report here and now, notwithstanding Hyde's desperate counsel that no significant thinker since Socrates had shot his wad in speech.

Nine thirty-five, said the timepiece of sweaty Marge. Miss Schine's friend, a student he did not recognize, hung by it and peeped sideways at them: of course in love with him, too, being acned and wearing a skirt so tightly plastered to her fat bottom that you could see the ridge of her under-armor. Instead of suicide. Hyde decided to murder a host of other people and throw acid in Louise's face . . . Miss Schine had, to all appearances, concluded. He said splendid, splendid, and she melted like maple walnut at high noon and dripped all over him. He never knew from one moment to the next where his masochism might take him: he helplessly was about to invite both girls to Christmas dinner with the Hydes, and was saved only by the children's chorus, led by Mrs. Cudahy jabbing the air with a forefinger, starting God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.

All styles of midget, they were lined in two wobbly parallels before the casement windows. Miniature Brooks Brothers were the boys, buttoned-down and vented, but the girls were all hollyhocks or rare birds. Hyde recognized his daughter, seven, legs bowed, in the front line. His 12-year-old son, an undersized but formidable bully, in the second: the tense set of Leonard's right shoulder and the wince of a plump pink maiden between him and the audience suggested what harassment he was up to sub rosa.

Good rest yeem airy gentlemen, let nothing hue this May: Leonard's lips were clenched as if he had to do something, but this was sheer fraud, for he had ample nerve to do that, if he had to, in public. Sestina Hyde, on the other hand, opened her small red hatchway down to the tonsil scars and belted out the old carol as if it were a bawdy roundelay and she a sailor full of cheap wine. A vulgar trick of nature, which Hyde saw through the stained central pane in each window that reproduced the Merryweather coat of arms with its bar sinister, suddenly ejected a fall of snow like the bloated soap chips they used, he understood, on TV, and he wondered whether a handyman had been posted on the roof to open a hopper at this point -- he had forgotten for a moment that Whelp was gone and Cudahy in.

Hyde had been stud much more recently than was represented by the two carolers: by the Christmas tree (Cudahy had brought back green, and balls of many colors, and at the apex, instead of Whelp's Great Seal of the UN, stood an armed angel with cotton hair, a kind of blanched Mau-Mau) stood his wife, and in it groped her most recent production: rounded-headed, bellicose twins of three, boy and girl, Nicolas & Nicole. And she, Patricia, narrow-hipped as a lad, short-haired, androgynous, she was the type of wife that certain suspect movie actors eventually take at 47 or 50, except she had no money of her own. Today Pat wore a navy-blue jumper, like a Girl Scout working on her merit badge in carpentry, and her sole decoration was a copper abstraction at the neckline, a piece of antijewelry, and below it an antibosom, cunningly arranged to be as flat by art as poor Miss Schine's had been ironed by nature.

For G. S. Kreiss our slaver ... Hyde's sour ear detected Leonard's alto cleverly corrupting the hallowed old lyrics: a 19th Century, Dickensian father would have beat such a boy blue and packed him off to a boarding school run by sadists. Pecksniff Hyde smiled across to his wife, who merely looked back in the level way that was protocol at these gatherings. Unobtrusively he indicated the twins at their dreadful work beneath the tree -- they had begun to assault the lower ornaments and Nicolas had his corrosive gaze fastened on the fattest tinsel rope, the pulling of which would spin the tree like a yo-yo and fell the entire assemblage. Pat produced the modern-dance shrug she had been taught here at Merryweather a decade and a half earlier.

Hyde shifted his red eye to Louise Revanche, for whom he had determined to die. She stood in all her zaftig vulgarity near the pansy poet, who had been imported from England for one year in the Crabb Chair in Contemporary Verse: one Alto Shawm, who kept a Siamese cat and showed execrable manners to everybody else. No danger there. And then to her left, of course, impotent little Claude. But behind them, statesman Cudahy was not attending to the music, dirty old man, but rubbing his unrighteous jaw as he checked the trim of Louise's calves. Hyde could fancy a private colloquy in which the president said: "Now, my dear, how would you like to be Mrs. Head of the Department? Splendid, now just let me ..."

Or something like that -- Hyde's reason was fast vanishing, and he took no trouble with his fantasies. Nine forty-five. Mrs. Cudahy signaled for another carol, neighing in holiday euphoria. Nine forty-six. Midnight had been set as the absolute deadline, but Hyde now found himself yearning for an earlier surcease: everybody to bed in the Hyde home except paterfamilias, who would then be free to draw a high bath and submerge his head. Put out the light, and then put out the light! He was himself both Desdemona and Othello.

Like all people who could read and write, Hyde was naturally craven, but experience had shown that he came through in extreme situations where the moral was clear: once when he left a roadside diner and saw a big swarthy man vomiting on the left rear wheel of his automobile, without reflection Hyde ran fiercely at him and drove him off. Another time, on an urban bus when a glowering Negro, muttering gibberish, swayed along the aisle clearing straphangers from his passage, Hyde stood his ground at the centerpost. ""Scuse me," said the colored man, and even sucked in his big belly to slip by without touching.

But as to sex, Hyde's trouble was this: the kind that attracted him was always inconvenient and thus impossible of heroism. Like everybody, he had no morals in this area but many scruples. He wished to put the horns on his best friend -- which in spite or because of, Claude was -- but he could not risk a rejection by Louise, for all parts of whom other than her body he had enormous contempt. (He was certain she had been a waitress, and more besides, in a roadhouse.)

At one and the same time an atheist and an usher at the Dutch Reformed Church, Hyde saw himself usually and his wife always in commercials of typical young couples choosing deodorants and colored toilet paper, on the television he had been pressured into buying for his children and ex post facto justified as socially healthy because it worked off aggressions. The slavering beast lurked under this facade, which was so dense that Hyde in his sober moments realized Louise probably had no hint of his yen; indeed, almost hoped she did not, for if he knew anything of women she would still fail to submit to him while at the same time lording it over her husband. She had the look of a person who lived in a void and wished to populate it only with certain dull hatreds. He had directed perhaps 10 words at her in the course of their acquaintance -- even "hello" and "goodbye" were always put to Claude -- and once at dinner in the Revanche home, five of them had been exhausted on "Louise, where is the bathroom?" It was when she gave him tit for tat, of course symbolically, at last year's Christmas party -- during the carols, in fact, and in a fragrant whisper: "Henry, where's the little girls' room?" -- that, galled, he knew he must know her in the Biblical sense.

After the holidays he had to read themes, and then it was end-of-term and examinations, not only for his students but his own children, who were being educated publicly and grievously needed aid: Sestina was a disciplinary problem and Leonard was forever threatened to be held back a year for gross inadequacy in every area of learning and conduct. Next came spring vacation, and he was commissioned by Pat to destroy one wall of their home -- between living and dining rooms, making one large enclosure impossible for either living or eating -- and paint the others a deep sewer-green. Soon occurred summer, when he stayed home a week to prepare new reading lists and then returned to teach through the hot months for the girls on the crash program. Hard on the heels of which followed fall, and no sooner did you see October than it was the day before December 25.

Throughout the twelvemonth, every Friday night Pat sprayed her hair with the kind of cologne they are always giving out samples of with hand-lotion purchases, and came to bed in a pajama top. She had not added a pound of flesh since they were married. In Hyde's fantasies he frequently bit Louise's solid shoulder. Though a rationalist, he was a great mystic, believing that surely all those quanta of passion transmitted by him into the ether could not fail to strike the proper antenna.

Now at last the caroling was done, and Hyde's dwarf fiends ran to him while Mrs. Cudahy oozed a few parting words of holiday sentiment from a mouth that seemed to be gumming a small ear of corn.

"Why didn't you wear your good suit?" snarled Leonard, punching his father in the jacket pocket which carried the cigarettes -- although to frustrate him Hyde often switched them from right to left sides, he never missed, unless something more fragile was in the other. "You don't think enough of me, hey?"

"Of you!" snorted Sestina. "A male parent normally gravitates toward the female children, and the reverse obtains in ratio, isn't that true, Henry?" And yet in school she couldn't learn the alphabet.

Yes, said Hyde to himself as he grimaced down upon her pigtails, I suppose I would drown Leonard first, if it came to that. Aloud, he suggested: "Now, you friends run along and get your coats. We must leave."

"I go under protest," Leonard warned. "There is a girl whom I wanted to stay and hurt, and you know what hostility does when not vented."

"Indeed I do," said Hyde, hiding his clenched fists. "But you see, we all have some, not just you."

"Mine is worse," Leonard replied, "because, you see, my father is in flight from his role." Nevertheless, he swaggered off toward the cloakroom, about four feet high but all bone and muscle.

"You do prefer me, don't you, Henry?" crooned Sestina, running her hand over the back of his in what she believed a fetching manner, and sending up the odor of licorice though her mouth was clean. Ah, there it was, an amorphous black mass stuck in the hairs of his fist. She retrieved it directly, simply tore it away.

"I could eat you up." he answered, and showed her the teeth with which to do it. Wincing with both pains, he saw Louise Revanche, in a coat with a great hairy collar, come out of the cloakroom and collide with the entering Leonard, whose burr-head made a trinity with her breasts. Neither disliked the encounter, Leonard displaying an abominable sweetness, of which since he hoarded it while spending his spleen he had a goodly supply: Louise, who was not in fact a mother, becoming one in fancy. She squeezed the boy and rumpled what hair he had and -- what was the little wretch doing? Hyde started toward them just as Nicolas leaped for the tinsel, caught it, and brought down the Christmas tree.

* * *

The Hydes had erected a tree of their own on a giddy end table in their living room: it was scrawny and sprayed white, and when lighted looked like the ghost of an old woman. Below it Pat had stacked the Christmas gifts against opening time next morning, but as Hyde predicted, the children would have none of tradition. When the family got home that evening, Leonard stormed the table, with Sestina and the twins close behind, and all disappeared in a blizzard of bright paper and ribbon.

The boy emerged carrying the wet-diaper doll meant for his sister. To Hyde, he said: "This is a pretty piece of aggression on your part."

Pat, at whose door could be laid every one of his neuroses, was as usual uproariously amused. She threw herself, with a boyishness beyond Leonard's, onto the foam-rubber sofa for which Home-Workshop Hyde had crafted the plywood frame, and giggled. "You know that's Sestina's gift."

"Then what is mine?" he cried. "This, this, this?" One by one he tore packages from the hands of his siblings and held them aloft.

The twins ran crying to their mother. Hyde turned away, his stomach curdling at the sight of Pat simultaneously indicating to all four that they were not rejected. As he slunk upstairs he heard Leonard's triumphant shout: "A chemistry set! Thank you, Pat, oh thank you!" (When in fact Hyde had himself purchased his son's gift after much thought.)

Naturally, Hyde was frustrated in his plan to drown in the tub; they had only one bathroom and by the time all five predecessors had used it and gone off to bed, there was no hot water left. One might wish to perish in agony but never in discomfort, which would obscure the moral. Therefore he dallied there, looking in the mirror at his hazel irises rimmed with crimson, until stealthily listening at a crack in the door he heard five regular suspirations from various points off the hall: they every one had fallen instantly to sleep, including Pat, who wore an old flannel nightgown stained with cough syrup and buttoned to the neck.

Hyde stole downstairs in darkness, hugging the staircase wall so as not to touch the creaky median surface of the steps. He had forgotten to bring matches, and barked his shin thrice on as many articles of furniture. But quickly enough he found the ghostly Christmas tree, which the reflection from a street lamp made a living presence, and beneath it one of the gifts, taking which he went to the kitchen and turned on the overhead light without fear of discovery. This business had been made necessary by Pat's outlawing all toxic medicaments from the bathroom cupboard, lest the children drink iodine, say, and turn black. There was no proper poison in the house: even the garden classics, like the arsenical weed killers which are responsible for as many liberations as the state of Nevada, fell under the ban.

But resourceful Hyde had thought of Leonard's chemistry set, and now broke it open upon the lip of the sink, seized a number of vials at random, dumped their powders into an ex-jelly glass, sloshed in some water from the tap, and -- He checked the clock on the stove's superstructure, which indicated 10 minutes of 11: 70 minutes early. Thirsty from his rashness, he swallowed half the cloudy potion in a single gulp. It was mildly salt and had a faint odor of public swimming pool.

Hyde staggered to the kitchen table, which he had made from a flush door and wrought-iron legs purchased in kit form from a back-page advertiser in The New York Times Magazine and never truly finished -- there was a host of tiny air bubbles in the varnish, which should have been rubbed down with steel wool -- and hurled himself into a grubby plywood chair from the same source but which had never been painted at all. He regretted not having drawn up a will bequeathing the children to the sociology laboratory and Pat to the garbage man, a hairy cretin she thought peculiarly well adjusted to his environment.

The clock sounded a sharp pluck when its hand reached 11 and passed the alarm gadget used to time eggs -- incidentally clueing Hyde as to when Pat ate breakfast, three hours after he delivered the twins to nursery school. The noise also reminded him he had been dying for 10 minutes without marked detriment to himself. Indeed, he felt better by the second, growing hard yet not tense. Therefore he was not at present expiring, the launching of the inquiet soul into the smoggy void, but if not, why not? ... The manufacturers of Leonard's gift would hardly stock a child's chemistry set with lethal powders. He tried to be exasperated by his folly but failed, such were his rising spirits. Striving to be down-in-the-mouth, he felt with all 10 fingers that he was grinning strangely. Another piece of news to his hands was a harsh, pumice-stone beard, though he had shaved at 6:30.

He got to his feet and lumbered about, new clumps of latissimus dorsi muscles forcing his arms akimbo. It was then that, approaching the window, he saw, in an advance from the yard outside, the simian figure of the aforementioned garbage man, whom he had always considered a primary enemy though never having exchanged anything with him beyond monosyllables on how to separate dry refuse from wet. Hyde fell into a barbaric crouch, and his adversary followed suit. They stalked each other until they came vis-à-vis at the glass. Hyde had never before quite appreciated what an ugly swine the man was, with nose pores big as dimes, a black stubble of emery cloth and gloating, feral eyes, not to mention little animal ears lying close to his head. He muttered an imprecation; the enemy's lips did as well. How long was it, nostril to nostril with that hateful face, only the cold glass between them, before Hyde understood he was snarling at his own reflection?

Yet unquestionably it was also the image of the garbage man, whose name was Scallopini. Some kind of transference had taken place which Hyde, a man of reason, did not immediately understand but was laboring over. Interesting work was being done in Psych concerning the effect of chemicals on emotions; the old analysis stuff of person-to-person was being fast outmoded. He must call Dr. Fowler soon with this new data, meanwhile observing the effect of his transformation on societal relations, which in extension could be seen as relevant to his own area of scholarly commitment, with many ambivalences in between. Namely, what was more promising for Social Pathology than Hyde's psyche in Scallopini's Neanderthal body?

At this point he received a greater surprise, for being a man of mind he could hardly assign fundamental importance to a mere change of physique: he had also got another will, ostensibly Scallopini's, which was at marked variance with his own. How else explain, following hard after his tentative outline of the structure of the problem in hand, the deep negative which rumbled through his rib cage and was verbalized as "Crap!"?

Scallopini's face, in the glass, showed a brute grin, winked malevolently, and offered a hoarse, coarse suggestion that made Hyde, in the portion of the soul still his own, blench. Yet now that it was established he would not die, at least not tonight, he had no option but to agree tremulously and be dragged by Scallopini out the back door and into the icy night -- in which, strangely, he was not uncomfortable though dressed only in pajamas and robe, which were at once too long and too tight on Scallopini's barrel trunk and ape legs. His feet were naked within felt slippers, but negotiated the back-yard atolls of encrusted snow as if they were so many scatter rugs. Out the driveway, past Hyde's garageless car, which sat quietly rusting under the drip from the eaves, up the silent street where the windows of some houses were still modestly afire with the season, others were black, and street lamps guttered over guttered slush. How often had Hyde made this trip in the brothel alleyways of his imagination! He was breathless now; Scallopini was not, and fairly flew, taking the wind in his hairy nostrils, circulating it within his pelted chest, and scratching his unshaven cheeks with a furry hand.

The Revanche home lay five blocks north, one west. Scallopini-Hyde arrived there within three minutes, bounded across the front yard, and pressed their beard against a window in that corner of the living room known to Claude as his study area. And there he sat, back to them, little head round as an orange, malignantly grading bluebooks. He had achieved an evil celebrity with the student body by making his holiday observance a midterm exam, given on the last day before vacation. Watching the little swine wield his maidenly red pencil, Hyde at last and at once fused completely with his captor, who now breathed furiously through a distended nose and clawed the brick wall. Soon he found the aluminum downspout and swarmed up it like a gibbon.

Crouching before the left front dormer window, he saw Louise Revanche in her boudoir. She brushed her honey hair and wore a negligee all lavender sensuality. Black underclothing was strewn about in the most aphrodisiac insouciance. He made the glass squeak with his paw. She came immediately to him and opened the window, murmuring in wry provocation: "Merry Xmas, Sandy Claws." He bounded in.

* * *

Trotting homeward in a nimbus of pungent scent, Hyde experienced a brief depression as he began to separate from Scallopini. For one, he grew cold in his night clothes; for another, he lost much of his hair and all muscles. He suffered some retrospective cowardice -- what if he had slipped from the rainpipe and fractured his coccyx? At the corner he saw an oncoming pedestrian and plunged into a bush of barbs and clotted snow, later emerging with superficial wounds.

Yet these negative reactions were the mere condiments, so to speak, in his general dish of well-being. He had had and was done with Louise, nobody the wiser. He triumphed over all adversaries in, so to speak, one leap: Louise herself, Claude, of course Scallopini, President Cudahy, his own family -- invariably he thought of Leonard rather than Pat -- and even, in a delightful irony, over himself: irony because he had not exactly been his own man, delightful because he had prevailed.

As he entered the driveway, only a vestige or two remaining of the savage who had earlier traversed it going the other way, here and there a wire whisker falling limp, a fang losing its edge, Hyde had almost completed his retransformation, from sanguinary to sanguine, quite a gain over the onetime hopeless Hyde -- that is, it was definitely not a return to the same old self. He had plans, plans, plans, which were stimulated by a poignant recollection that in the character of Scallopini he had been as ready for murder as love. Louise, who apparently played grande dame with her trash-can paramour, had been alarmed.

He had access to power, could strike without warning, violating, marauding, slaying, and vanish without a trace: cherchez Scallopini! He anticipated visiting a reign of terror on Merryweather and environs. Fiend Strikes Again . . . Home Ec Teacher Assaulted . . . College Prexy Throttled . . . Garbage Man Released When Outrages Continue Though He Is Jailed. (In a necessary affinity with his double, Hyde refused to fantasy a miscarriage of justice; besides, simply by being Scallopini he revenged himself sufficiently on the trashman, who Louise had given him reason to believe was affectionate, ingenuous and non-criminal.)

With such splendid hallucinations, and a thirst more grievous than ever, Hyde, the scholar-felon, that rare man of mind who practiced what he observed, that Lord Acton who tended toward the corruption he hypothesized, climbed his back stair and entered the kitchen. His current weakness of body, exaggerated by the memory of recent strength, suddenly upset a fine equilibrium of flesh and spirit, and he went all the way, asking: Why ever stay just Hyde?

The room looked as before. The ceiling globe burned; the open pedal-can showed an eggshell and an apple peel, which the real Scallopini would eventually cart off; the chemicals were still broadcast on the sink top -- could Hyde recall his formula? But meanwhile he had half his original mixture to go on. The glass still stood on the plywood table -- oh yes, it was there yet, but now quite empty.

The stove-clock, which he had reset for midnight, reached 12 sharp and sounded a remote, evil buzzer, like a dentist's drill entering the pulp. Weak, wet, glabrous of body, clean of face, spent of passion yet feverish for more, Hyde heard a series of unspeakable grunts issue from the corner near the refrigerator and knew, long before he turned his eyes there, that his time was up.

Leonard, transformed into a ferocious little ape, dropped a banana and leaped for his father with murderous paws.