“They’re here,” Chuck said as Teddy caught up to him and they turned into the vast hall.
“Who?”
“The warden and Cawley. Just keep moving. We gotta fly.”
“They see you?”
“I don’t know. I was coming out of the records room two floors up. I see them down the other end of the hall. Cawley’s head turns and I go right through the exit door into the stairwell.”
“So, they probably didn’t give it a second thought.”
Chuck was practically jogging. “An orderly in a rain slicker and a ranger’s hat coming out of the records room on the admin’ floor? Oh, I’m sure we’re fine.”
The lights went on above them in a series of liquid cracks that sounded like bones breaking underwater. Electric charges hummed in the air and were followed by an explosion of yells and catcalls and wailing. The building seemed to rise up around them for a moment and then settle back down again. Alarm bells pealed throughout the stone floors and walls.
“Power’s back. How nice,” Chuck said and turned into the stairwell.
They went down the stairs as four guards came running up, and they shouldered the wall to let them pass.
The guard at the card table was still there, on the phone, looking up with slightly glazed eyes as they descended, and then his eyes cleared and he said “Wait a sec” into the phone, and then to them as they cleared the last step, “Hey, you two, hold on a minute.”
A crowd was milling around in the foyer—orderlies, guards, two manacled patients splattered in mud—and Teddy and Chuck moved right into them, sidestepped a guy backing up from the coffee table, swinging his cup carelessly toward Chuck’s chest.
And the guard said, “Hey! You two! Hey!”
They didn’t break stride and Teddy saw faces looking around, just now hearing the guard’s voice, wondering who he was calling to.
Another second or two, those same faces would hone in on him and Chuck.
“I said, ’Hold up!’”
Teddy hit the door chest high with his hand.
It didn’t budge.
“Hey!”
He noticed the brass knob, another pineapple like the one in Cawley’s house, and he gripped it, found it slick with rain.
“I need to talk to you!”
Teddy turned the knob and pushed the door open and two guards were coming up the steps. Teddy pivoted and held the door open as Chuck passed through and the guard on the left gave him a nod of thanks. He and his partner passed through and Teddy let go of the door and they walked down the steps.
He saw a group of identically dressed men to their left, standing around smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee in the faint drizzle, a few of them leaning back against the wall, everyone joking, blowing smoke hard into the air, and he and Chuck crossed the distance to them, never looking back, waiting for the sound of the door opening behind them, a fresh round of calls.
“You find Laeddis?” Chuck said.
“Nope. Found Noyce, though.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
They nodded at the group as they reached them. Smiles and waves and Teddy got a light off one of the guys and then they kept walking down the wall, kept walking as the wall seemed to stretch a quarter mile, kept walking as what could have been shouts in their direction hit the air, kept walking seeing the rifle shafts peeking over the battlements fifty feet above them.
They reached the end of the wall and turned left into a soggy green field and saw that sections of the fence had been replaced there, groups of men filling the post holes with liquid cement, and they could see it stretching all the way around back, and they knew there was no way out there.
They turned back and came out past the wall, into the open, and Teddy knew the only way was straight ahead. Too many eyes would notice if they went in any other direction but past the guards.
“We’re going to gut it out, aren’t we, boss?”
“Damn straight.”
Teddy removed his hat and Chuck followed suit and then their slickers came off and they draped them over their arms and walked in the specks of rain. The same guard was waiting for them, and Teddy said to Chuck, “Let’s not even slow down.”
“Deal.”
Teddy tried to read the guy’s face. It was dead flat and he wondered whether it was impassive from boredom or because he was steeling himself for conflict.
Teddy waved as he passed, and the guard said, “They got trucks now.”
They kept going, Teddy turning and walking backward as he said, “Trucks?”
“Yeah, to take you guys back. You want to wait, one just left about five minutes ago. Should be back anytime.”
“Nah. Need the exercise.”
For a moment, something flickered in the guard’s face. Maybe it was just Teddy’s imagination or maybe the guard knew a whiff of bullshit when he smelled it.
“Take care now.” Teddy turned his back, and he and Chuck walked toward the trees and he could feel the guard watching, could feel the whole fort watching. Maybe Cawley and the warden were on the front steps right now or up on the roof. Watching.
They reached the trees and no one shouted, no one fired a warning shot, and then they went deeper and vanished in the stand of thick trunks and disrupted leaves.
“Jesus,” Chuck said. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”
Teddy sat down on a boulder and felt the sweat saturating his body, soaking his white shirt and pants, and he felt exhilarated. His heart still thumped, and his eyes itched, and the back of his shoulders and neck tingled, and he knew this was, outside of love, the greatest feeling in the world.
To have escaped.
He looked at Chuck and held his eyes until they both started laughing.
“I turned that corner and saw that fence back in place,” Chuck said, “and oh shit, Teddy, I thought that was it.”
Teddy lay back against the rock, feeling free in a way he’d only felt as a child. He watched the sky begin to appear behind smoky clouds and he felt the air on his skin. He could smell wet leaves and wet soil and wet bark and hear the last faint ticking of the rain. He wanted to close his eyes and wake back up on the other side of the harbor, in Boston, in his bed.
He almost nodded off, and that reminded him of how tired he was, and he sat up and fished a cigarette from his shirt pocket and bummed a light off Chuck. He leaned forward on his knees and said, “We have to assume, from this point, that they’ll find out we were inside. That’s if they don’t know already.”
Chuck nodded. “Baker, for sure, will fold under questioning.”
“That guard by the stairs, he was tipped to us, I think.”
“Or he just wanted us to sign out.”
“Either way, we’ll be remembered.”
The foghorn of Boston Light moaned across the harbor, a sound Teddy had heard every night of his childhood in Hull. The loneliest sound he knew. Made you want to hold something, a person, a pillow, yourself.
“Noyce,” Chuck said.
“Yeah.”
“He’s really here.”
“In the flesh.”
Chuck said, “For Christ’s sake, Teddy, how?”
And Teddy told him about Noyce, about the beating he’d taken, about his animosity toward Teddy, his fear, his shaking limbs, his weeping. He told Chuck everything except what Noyce had suggested about Chuck. And Chuck listened, nodding occasionally, watching Teddy the way a child watches a camp counselor around the fire as the late-night boogeyman story unfolds.
And what was all this, Teddy was beginning to wonder, if not that?
When he was done, Chuck said, “You believe him?”
“I believe he’s here. No doubt about that.”
“He could have had a psychological break, though. I mean, an actual one. He does have the history. This could all be legitimate. He cracks up in prison and they say, ’Hey, this guy was once a patient at Ashecliffe. Let’s send him back.’”
“It’s possible,??
? Teddy said. “But the last time I saw him, he looked pretty damn sane to me.”
“When was that?”
“A month ago.”
“Lot can change in a month.”
“True.”
“And what about the lighthouse?” Chuck said. “You believe there’s a bunch of mad scientists in there, implanting antennas into Laeddis’s skull as we speak?”
“I don’t think they fence off a septic processing plant.”
“I’ll grant you,” Chuck said. “But it’s all a bit Grand Guignol, don’t you think?”
Teddy frowned. “I don’t know what the fuck that means.”
“Horrific,” Chuck said. “In a fairy-tale, boo-ga-boo-ga-boo-ga kind of way.”
“I understand that,” Teddy said. “What was the gran-gweeg-what?”
“Grand Guignol,” Chuck said. “It’s French. Forgive me.”
Teddy watched Chuck trying to smile his way through it, probably thinking of a way to change the subject.
Teddy said, “You study a lot of French growing up in Portland?”
“Seattle.”
“Right.” Teddy placed a palm to his chest. “Forgive me.”
“I like the theater, okay?” Chuck said. “It’s a theatrical term.”
“You know, I knew a guy worked the Seattle office,” Teddy said.
“Really?” Chuck patted his pockets, distracted.
“Yeah. You probably knew him too.”
“Probably,” Chuck said. “You want to see what I got from the Laeddis file?”
“His name was Joe. Joe…” Teddy snapped his fingers, looked at Chuck. “Help me out here. It’s on the tip of my tongue. Joe, um, Joe…”
“There’s a lot of Joes,” Chuck said, reaching around to his back pocket.
“I thought it was a small office.”
“Here it is.” Chuck’s hand jerked up from his back pocket and his hand was empty.
Teddy could see the folded square of paper that had slipped from his grasp still sticking out of the pocket.
“Joe Fairfield,” Teddy said, back at the way Chuck’s hand had jerked out of that pocket. Awkwardly. “You know him?”
Chuck reached back again. “No.”
“I’m sure he transferred there.”
Chuck shrugged. “Name doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Oh, maybe it was Portland. I get them mixed up.”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed.”
Chuck pulled the paper free and Teddy could see him the day of their arrival handing over his gun to the guard in a fumble of motion, having trouble with the holster snap. Not something your average marshal had trouble with. Kind of thing, in point of fact, that got you killed on the job.
Chuck held out the piece of paper. “It’s his intake form. Laeddis’s. That and his medical records were all I could find. No incident reports, no session notes, no picture. It was weird.”
“Weird,” Teddy said. “Sure.”
Chuck’s hand was still extended, the piece of folded paper drooping off his fingers.
“Take it,” Chuck said.
“Nah,” Teddy said. “You hold on to it.”
“You don’t want to see it?”
Teddy said, “I’ll look at it later.”
He looked at his partner. He let the silence grow.
“What?” Chuck said finally. “I don’t know who Joe Whoever-the-Fuck is, so now you’re looking at me funny?”
“I’m not looking at you funny, Chuck. Like I said, I get Portland and Seattle mixed up a lot.”
“Right. So then—”
“Let’s keep walking,” Teddy said.
Teddy stood. Chuck sat there for a few seconds, looking at the piece of paper still dangling from his hand. He looked at the trees around them. He looked up at Teddy. He looked off toward the shore.
The foghorn sounded again.
Chuck stood and returned the piece of paper to his back pocket.
He said, “Okay.” He said, “Fine.” He said, “By all means, lead the way.”
Teddy started walking east through the woods.
“Where you going?” Chuck said. “Ashecliffe’s the other way.”
Teddy looked back at him. “I’m not going to Ashecliffe.”
Chuck looked annoyed, maybe even frightened. “Then where the fuck are we going, Teddy?”
Teddy smiled.
“The lighthouse, Chuck.”
“WHERE ARE WE?” Chuck said.
“Lost.”
They’d come out of the woods and instead of facing the fence around the lighthouse, they’d somehow managed to move well north of it. The woods had been turned into a bayou by the storm, and they’d been forced off a straight path by a number of downed or leaning trees. Teddy had known they’d be off course by a bit, but judging by his latest calculations, they’d meandered their way almost as far as the cemetery.
He could see the lighthouse just fine. Its upper third peeked out from behind a long rise and another notch of trees and a brown and green swath of vegetation. Directly beyond the patch of field where they stood was a long tidal marsh, and beyond that, jagged black rocks formed a natural barrier to the slope, and Teddy knew that the one approach left them was to go back through the woods and hope to find the place where they’d taken the wrong turn without having to return all the way to their point of origin.
He said as much to Chuck.
Chuck used a stick to swipe at his pant legs, free them of burrs. “Or we could loop around, come at it from the east. Remember with McPherson last night? That driver was using a semblance of an access road. That’s got to be the cemetery over that hill there. We work our way around?”
“Better than what we just came through.”
“Oh, you didn’t like that?” Chuck ran a palm across the back of his neck. “Me, I love mosquitoes. Fact, I think I have one or two spots left on my face that they didn’t get to.”
It was the first conversation they’d had in over an hour, and Teddy could feel both of them trying to reach past the bubble of tension that had grown between them.
But the moment passed when Teddy remained silent too long and Chuck set off along the edge of the field, moving more or less northwest, the island at all times pushing them toward its shores.
Teddy watched Chuck’s back as they walked and climbed and walked some more. His partner, he’d told Noyce. He trusted him, he said. But why? Because he’d had to. Because no man could be expected to go up against this alone.
If he disappeared, if he never returned from this island, Senator Hurly was a good friend to have. No question. His inquiries would be noted. They’d be heard. But in the current political climate, would the voice of a relatively unknown Democrat from a small New England state be loud enough?
The marshals took care of their own. They’d certainly send men. But the question was one of time—Would they get there before Ashecliffe and its doctors had altered Teddy irreparably, turned him into Noyce? Or worse, the guy who played tag?
Teddy hoped so, because the more he found himself looking at Chuck’s back, the more certain he grew that he was now alone on this. Completely alone.
“MORE ROCKS,” Chuck said. “Jesus, boss.”
They were on a narrow promontory with the sea a straight drop down on their right and an acre of scrub plain below them to the left, the wind picking up as the sky turned red brown and the air tasted of salt.
The rock piles were spaced out in the scrub plain. Nine of them in three rows, protected on all sides by slopes that cupped the plain in a bowl.
Teddy said, “What, we ignore it?”
Chuck raised a hand to the sky. “We’re going to lose the sun in a couple hours. We’re not at the lighthouse, in case you haven’t noticed. We’re not even at the cemetery. We’re not even sure we can get there from here. And you want to climb all the way down there and look at rocks.”
“Hey, if it’s code…”
“What does it matter by this point? We have proof that
Laeddis is here. You saw Noyce. All we have to do is head back home with that information, that proof. And we’ve done your job.”
He was right. Teddy knew that.
Right, however, only if they were still working on the same side.
If they weren’t, and this was a code Chuck didn’t want him to see…
“Ten minutes down, ten minutes to get back up,” Teddy said.
Chuck sat down wearily on the dark rockface, pulled a cigarette from his jacket. “Fine. But I’m sitting this one out.”
“Suit yourself.”
Chuck cupped his hands around the cigarette as he got it going. “That’s the plan.”
Teddy watched the smoke flow out through his curved fingers and drift out over the sea.
“See you,” Teddy said.
Chuck’s back was to him. “Try not to break your neck.”
Teddy made it down in seven minutes, three less than his estimate, because the ground was loose and sandy and he’d slid several times. He wished he’d had more than coffee this morning because his stomach was yowling from its own emptiness, and the lack of sugar in his blood combined with lack of sleep had produced eddies in his head, stray, floating specks in front of his eyes.
He counted the rocks in each pile and wrote them in his notebook with their alphabetical assignations beside them:
13(M)-21(U)-25(Y)-18(R)-1(A)-5(E)-8(H)-15(O)-9(I)
He closed the notebook, placed it in his front pocket, and began the climb back up the sandy slope, clawing his way through the steepest part, taking whole clumps of sea grass with him when he slipped and slid. It took him twenty-five minutes to get back up and the sky had turned a dark bronze and he knew that Chuck had been right, whatever side he was on: they were losing the day fast and this had been a waste of time, whatever the code turned out to be.
They probably couldn’t reach the lighthouse now, and if they could, what then? If Chuck was working with them, then Teddy going with him to the lighthouse was like a bird flying toward a mirror.
Teddy saw the top of the hill and the jutting edge of the promontory and the bronze sky arched above it all and he thought, This may have to be it, Dolores. This may be the best I can offer for now. Laeddis will live. Ashecliffe will go on. But we’ll content ourselves knowing we’ve begun a process, a process that could, ultimately, bring the whole thing tumbling down.