The Jekyll Revelation

by Robert Masello

From: Robert Louis Stevenson, Vailima House, Samoa To: W. E. Henley, 18 Maybury Road, Old Woking, Surrey, England Dear Henley— What I must tell you now, I tell you with dread. It has happened again. What we thought—what we prayed—we had left behind us in the back alleys and darkened doorways of Whitechapel has, I fear, awakened from its awful slumber. It has struck again, right here, in what I had foolishly thought might be Paradise. And I have been the unwitting agent of its malevolence. To you alone, my oldest friend—you who know so much of the story and played such a brave and crucial part in it—can I entrust this final account. I will send it to you by way of the next packet boat to leave the island. Who else, I must ask, would believe it? Last night, as I sat on my verandah, lighting a pipe and contemplating the face of the full moon—sometimes, Henley, it hangs so close to this mountaintop, it is like having a silver pocket watch dangling in front of my eyes—I saw a flicker of light emerging from the jungle and making straight for the house. For a moment, I thought it might finally be one of the aitus—evil spirits—that the natives believe haunt the tangled slopes of Mount Vaea, but then it resolved itself into the burning end of a torch. Someone was running across the cleared land, torch held high, and I could hear, above the soughing of the wind in the banyan trees, a voice shouting, ‘Tusitala! Come quick!’

The Romanov Cross, The Medusa Amulet, and Blood and Ice. His

guide to composition, Robert’s Rules of Writing, has been adopted

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