The change took seventeen seconds.
London, 1908. The fog did not merely creep; it clung . It wrapped itself around the gaslights of Marylebone like a patient strangler, turning the new electric streetlamps into jaundiced, buzzing eyes. Dr. Henry Jekyll, F.R.S., stood at the window of his Harley Street consulting room, watching the soot-blackened broughams slide past. Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde 1908
He told himself he was a scientist. He told himself he was mapping the moral landscape. He told himself he could stop any time. The change took seventeen seconds
The salts in his laboratory—the last batch, the one he had synthesized from the contaminated ergot that arrived from Marseille—promised a different geometry of the soul. He had tested it on a stray terrier. The dog had torn a robin to pieces, then slept at his feet for three hours, weeping. Jekyll, with a clinical shudder, had understood: the dog had remembered what it was to be a wolf, and the memory had broken its heart. It wrapped itself around the gaslights of Marylebone
He named the creature Hyde. Not Mr. Hyde—that would come later, a thin veneer of respectability he’d use for rented rooms and forged bank drafts. Just Hyde. The thing beneath the name. For six weeks, Jekyll lived two lives with the precision of a railway timetable. By day, he attended the Royal Society and spoke earnestly about the need for urban sanitation. By night, he became Hyde and walked east.
He burned the hair. He washed his hands seven times. He wrote a letter to his solicitor, Utterson, appointing him executor of a will that left everything to “my friend Edward Hyde”—a name Utterson had never heard.
On the night of January 17th, Jekyll took the formula and changed, as usual. But this time, he did not change back.