The Compound

Ellis Wren

Boston attorney Walter Kessler has been friend and lawyer to Adrian Voss, a celebrated Cambridge research founder, for thirty years. On a Sunday walk his cousin Devon Parks describes a small man who ran down a child on a bicycle and paid the family with money fetched from behind a battered service door on Mercer Row and a check signed by Voss himself. Voss's new will is worse: it leaves everything to a 'friend and benefactor' named Mr. Marsh, and gives Marsh the estate if Voss disappears for three months. Kessler waylays Marsh at that door, exchanges one look of unaccountable loathing, and cannot move Voss from his claim that he can be rid of Marsh at any hour. Months later a small man beats Congressman Alan Whitfield to death with a walking stick Kessler once gave Voss; the sealed packet on the body, addressed in Voss's hand, is one Voss handed the congressman that afternoon. A farewell note, a burned checkbook and a document examiner's finding that the murderer's hand matches Voss's own leave Kessler suspecting his client of forging for a killer. Voss returns to philanthropy, then shuts himself inside the laboratory above the old mill. Their old friend Dr. Alma Reyes collapses after a midnight errand she will not explain, dies within weeks, and leaves an envelope to be opened only at Voss's death or disappearance. Kessler glimpses Voss at a barred window, smiling, then seized with terror. At last the building manager brings him to the annex: behind the locked cabinet door something paces and begs for reagents in Voss's voice. They break in and find Marsh dead of poison in clothes far too large, and no trace of Voss, only a broken key, a new will naming Kessler, and two sealed documents. One records what Reyes saw when a midnight visitor drank a powder and became Voss before her eyes. The other is Voss's own confession.

Adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson's novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Published by TalesReborn.