The Second Key

Ellis Wren

Elias Corbin, a methodical Austin lawyer, prides himself on asking no questions. Then his friend Dr. Roland Vane, a celebrated pharmacologist with a shadowed private life, quietly executes a trust that hands everything to a sinister stranger, Silas Rook, if Vane should disappear for three months. Corbin has glimpsed Rook once, through a door on Cherry Lane: small, deformed, and radiating a kind of evil that makes grown men faint. When a respected senator is beaten to death on a riverside trail and the police identify Rook, Corbin's patient hunt begins to circle back to Vane himself, who is oddly at ease and swears he has done with the dangerous preparation of his laboratory. Piece by piece the truth assembles: the handwriting expert Dana Reyes identifies a forged note; Vane's aide Marcus Dodd describes a master he no longer recognizes; and the dying testimony of their old friend Dr. Emilio Salazar reveals that Salazar saw Rook transform, before his own eyes, into Vane. Rook and Vane are one man, two natures housed in one body, freed and separated by a drug Vane synthesized from a contaminant in his own supply. On the last night, Dodd and Corbin break into the laboratory to find Rook dead by his own hand, his face fixed in a mask of Vane's features. Vane's full written statement closes the book: the experiment, the impurity that made his dark half strong, the pleasures and terrors of the double life, and the slow triumph of the worse self. Corbin is left holding the evidence of a brilliant man's destruction, and the knowledge that the second self was not a visitor but the truer one.

Adapted from the novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, published by TalesReborn.