I felt bad about the dorm transfer request, especially because Alice seemed to think it was all because of her. It partly was – our conversation about violent impulses lingered in the dark recesses of my mind, peeking its head out from the shadows whenever I tried to fall asleep – but it was mostly because I needed to get away from the North Tower. I thought that if I could maybe transfer to Nettlebank or Rosemary Green, one of the halls furthest away from the main campus, then maybe the tower’s grip on me would loosen.
After I got off the phone with my dad – I hadn’t let him know anything was wrong, because he’d only worry – I hid the ruby in my throat with a pashmina.
That morning I had my first session of the infamous elective in Gothic literature – the one famed for sending students mad. Both Dawn Middlemiss and Fiona Taylor had taken it before their untimely deaths. Professor Sanderson’s seminar was hallowed ground, and it felt important for me to tread it carefully. Just flipping through the list of lectures in the course outline made me shiver: ‘The Castle of Otranto, Birthplace of Nightmares’ and ‘Edgar Allen Poe’s Terror of the Soul’ were later in the semester. I could barely wait.
The classroom was filled with hideous miscellany; sheep skulls and Baphomet figurines, rusty pentacles and a plague doctor mask, coffin-shaped mirrors and curious insects suspended in amber. Sanderson was also a collector of morbid ephemera: death notices and obituaries; long, sad sonnets and torn-up wedding photos; sepia-stained letters to orphanages begging them to take in a possessed child. These terrible collages hung in black frames on the stark white wall, any references to literature circled in blue fountain ink.
Our first seminar was onThe Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a novella I knew almost by heart.
‘Evil,’ said Professor Sanderson, spreading his arms wide at the front of the classroom. Tall, pale and raven-haired, he was informally dressed in black jeans and a T-shirt, with studded black leather cuffs around his wrists that looked like miniature dog collars.
‘What does the word mean to you? And how far would you go to eradicate it if you found it within yourself?’ A curious lip curl. ‘Or would you simply . . . submit?’
The classroom was packed out with curious students watching Sanderson hungrily as he spoke, as though he were a cult leader we were only too happy to follow into the dark.
As Sanderson gave an overview of the text, I noticed his voice had a peculiar rhythm to it; an unnatural cadence, pauses and inflections in subtly awkward places. It was as though he spoke with an unpredictability designed to keep you from falling asleep.
‘How-ever.’ He sucked his bottom lip between his teeth, narrowing his eyes and nodding to himself. ‘However, we will notsim-ply be analysing pretty sentences and prodding at wishy-washy themes. I couldn’t care less about the duality of man. A flat,life-less concept. Likewise, Stevenson’s writing style is of little interest to me. What Iaminterested in is the impact of the Gothic on the world around it. The power it had to corrupt.’
The air in the classroom was pulled taut as a corset.
‘In August 1888, a stage adaptation ofJekyll and Hydeopened at the Lyceum Theatre in London. An actor called Jack Mansfield played both roles. His performance was said to be so utterly horrifying that audiences left the theatre in states of absolute distress.’
Picking up a piece of chalk, he wrote ‘J&H play’ on the left side of the blackboard in chalk, drawing a circle around it.
‘Themur-der of Martha Tabram – a crime believed to be the first committed by Jack the Ripper, the Whitechapel Murderer – took place just two days later.’ He wrote ‘murder of MT’ on the right-hand side, circling that in white too.
He turned back to us and shrugged. ‘Of course, to the modern mind, these two events seem entirely independent of one another. But at the time, the public drew connections between Stevenson’s story and the medical manner in which the Ripper removed organs. One paper reported that after watching Mansfield’s performance, a well-dressed young man threw himself from a bus that was travelling at speed, convinced that the repulsive-looking man he found himself sitting next to was either Dr Hyde or the Whitechapel Murderer. Another gentleman wrote to theTelegraphsuggesting that “the perpetrator is a being whose diseased brain has been inflamed by witnessing the performance of the drama of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”.’
Sanderson turned back to the board and drew a stark white line between the two circles.
‘It would be easy to dismiss all of this as a simple matter of Victorian hysteria. Perhaps it was. Or perhaps the Whitechapel Murderer reallywasinspired by Jekyll and Hyde.’ His black stare was hard and bright. ‘Personally? I believe that the Gothic has an almost supernatural power to corrupt. To unravel, to violate, to deprave.
‘To my mind, a story is not a story until it is shared. There is an esoteric current that flows between author and reader; an arcane golden thread whose nature we cannot truly grasp.’ He gestured to the stark line on the board, stabbing at it with his piece of chalk. ‘Thatis what we’ll be studying in this class.’
A final, vampiric smile. ‘Try not to go insane.