I was born in the year 18 – at the whim of a physician, a man of strong existential duplicity, torn between his restless nature given to amusements, diversions and solliances and a certain snooty vanity that drove him to deny his intemperance in order to sink deeper and deeper into an existence of laborious virtue. An abject sinner was he who created me, who summoned me from his own limbs and who made use of me, the scapegoat of his own iniquities. It happened one night, in a rush of courage he left all qualms behind him and drank the thick potion in one breath. From the atrocious spasms that followed, from the horror of the spirit that ripped the very core of his personal identity apart, I was born. I had never been liberated before, no man had ever dared to go so far in his courtship of evil as to set him free, free not only to be but also to exist outside himself, to have his own form, his own flesh, his own likeness with which to move at will. I felt heavy, weighed down by the knowledge that I had a body of my own, but at the same time happy, intoxicated by the life that had been freely given to me. A restlessness was rising in me, a yearning for life, to savour with licentiousness all those pleasures I had long been deprived of. A disordered flow of sensual images gushed through me, whirling in my imagination, finally free of restraints, like a mill. I was a newborn and like all newborns I was hungry, I stretched out my arms in the bursting thrill of those new sensations. I felt Jekyll rejoicing in me, delighting in that feeling of acquired liberation. I looked at myself in the mirror: I was small in stature but strong in musculature, decadent looking, lustful. I would only realise later the instinctive repulsion I aroused in others, how they looked at me with intense revulsion as if I were not human, but a damned juggernaut with an unpleasant and deformed appearance. I was undoubtedly something primordial, an anomaly of nature, but ultimately a product of that same corrupt society, of those same laws that harness the most sordid human impulses. I was the unrighteous twin, free at last to follow my own path of nefariousness, of evil crimes, freed from the fetters and aspirations of the virtuous man who could, in turn, proceed swiftly and safely in performing those praiseworthy deeds that would gratify him in the eyes of most. I was for him a hired killer sent ahead to carry out his misdeeds, while he kept himself in the shadows, at the ease of his bourgeois respectability. I never really existed, except as a malformity that society itself repudiated, a dark, fast, hidden figure slipping stealthily through the abandoned houses of a sleepy London. But I am more real than you wax dummies, lazy and dulled in your comfortable armchairs in front of the fire. For you I have incarnated myself, for you I have unhinged the doors that imprisoned your innermost desires, I have put your proclaimed virtue to sleep and left you free to answer the call of lust, of unseemly pleasures. Despite the instinctive revulsion you feel for me, I am a part of your soul, the evil, perverse part, made up of pure egotism, which you send around to satisfy your impulses bent on the worst, for which you refuse all responsibility. You have tried to repress me, to crush me, to control my lust for life, despite the fact that I have helped you to free yourselves from those inhibitory brakes that have stifled you for so long, offering you a way out of yourselves, a chance to embrace other guises and proceed freely amid temptations. You did not even know how to protect me, you sent me to the pillory, to despair, forced to live in terror, in constant fear of being caught, recognised, of being sent to the gallows for crimes that dwelled in the recesses of your hearts, of which you were the sole and true perpetrators. For all of you are slaves to evil, in different ways and to different degrees, all of you intoxicated at the thought of indulging in it with impunity.