Jekyll's Wife

Chapter Twenty Six - Paper Revelations

It was the middle of the night when she woke, sometime in the early hours of the morning. As silently as she could, she turned to look at the sleeping form of her husband, before slowly sitting up, swinging her legs out of the bed. 

The notebook burned bright in her mind – she had to find out what it said.

Her feet padded across the carpet, her breath catching as the bedroom door made a sound.

She watched him silently, her heart in her throat, when he didn't move she breathed a small sigh of relief and then headed into the living room, crossing into the hallway.

She slipped open the basket lid and her nimble fingers brushed through the contents until she felt paper beneath her finger tips.

She gripped the notebook and pulled it into her palm, before making her way into the living room and sitting in a chair, facing out over the garden.

On a table beside her a lamp switched on as she hit the button. Resting back into the soft fabric of the chair, she pulled a blanket over her body and settled in, opening the notebook onto the first page.

The handwriting was definitely Jonathon's. It was slanted and messy as his always was, but she could tell that to start with he had tried to make it as neat as possible.

Eyeing the date in the top right hand corner, she was surprised to see that he'd begun these notes almost three years ago, as she read through the first page, skimming over words and sentences that made no sense to her, she was even more surprised to read a reference to Rolins, the professor she'd met earlier. It seemed that the two of them had been working together on the theory that every man was made of two personalities and that each could be harnessed to improve their abilities in different situations. It seemed that to start with, they'd been looking to create a weapon.

She jumped and froze as a thud echoed through the house. She pulled herself deeper under the blanket and scanned the shadows in the next room for movement, her eyesight distorted by the lamp light.

When nothing else moved and she heard no other noise, she began to relax but knew that she would need to worry.

She began scanning through the pages, her eyes drawn to certain words and ignoring others. At some point Rolins and Jonathon had fallen out, their research taking them in different directions, it wasn't long after this that Jonathon's entries had become much shorter.

She kept reading, her mind not really taking in any of what it said, until she saw her name. She paused and flicked back to the page, realising that the handwriting looked different here, softer, the letters rounder, she read the short passage, her heart sailing in response.

It was a memory that he'd included for some reason. It was of the day they'd gone to the great wood. She smiled fondly and leaned her head back against the chair. She'd almost forgotten about that.

It was about a year ago, more or less, and he'd come home early and surprised her.

He'd suddenly and spontaneously decided that they would go and picnic up in the Great Wood, so they wandered amongst the tall trees and spring tainted leaves until they'd found a patch bathed in the warm sun.

They'd eaten, drunk and laughed like they hadn't in years.

She clutched the notebook tightly against her chest, she'd had such an amazing day that day.

Although she realised that the memory was coloured by the following day when he'd arrived home in a foul mood. Now as she thought about it, she realised that, that had been the first time that he had hit her.

Realisation chased her as she began manically searching through the book for every time the writing changed. In every passage he referred to her as Mary and every entry was a fond memory, the earliest being the Great Wood and the giant tree they'd sat beside. That was when the splitting had begun.

Angered by the secrets that had been kept from her for so long and devastated that the only good times she'd had with her husband over the last few years was when he was suffering from the side effect of a science experiment, she burst into unexpected tears. How had this become her life?

Trying to lift herself from her own self-pity she kept reading, noticing a passage in the different hand writing that wasn't a memory, but instead an observation.

"That two sides of the some person can exist within oneself is not a new discovery, but that the refusal to accept that both sides exists, causes the battle for supremacy and ultimate dissolution of the two sides, is a point that requires further research." She recited, her mind turning the words over and over in her head.

Learned and Instinct, that's what her monstrous husband had said, the two sides. If her gentleman didn't accept the instinctual side, then that is what must have caused the two to separate as they did.

"Wife. Why are you awake?"