He found a cut at the top of the hill, a narrow opening where it met the promontory and enough erosion had occurred for Teddy to stand in the cut with his back against the sandy wall and get both hands on the flat rock above and push himself up just enough so that he could flop his chest onto the promontory and swing his legs over after him.
He lay on his side, looking out at the sea. So blue at this time of day, so vibrant as the afternoon died around it. He lay there feeling the breeze on his face and the sea spreading out forever under the darkening sky and he felt so small, so utterly human, but it wasn’t a debilitating feeling. It was an oddly proud one. To be a part of this. A speck, yes. But part of it, one with it. Breathing.
He looked across the dark flat stone, one cheek pressed to it, and only then did it occur to him that Chuck wasn’t up there with him.
17
CHUCK’S BODY LAY at the bottom of the cliff, the water lapping over him.
Teddy slid over the lip of the promontory legs first, searched the black rocks with the soles of his shoes until he was almost sure they’d take his weight. He let out a breath he hadn’t even known he’d been holding and slid his elbows off the lip and felt his feet sink into the rocks, felt one shift and his right ankle bend to the left with it, and he slapped at the cliff face and leaned the weight of his upper body back against it, and the rocks beneath his feet held.
He turned his body around and lowered himself until he was pressed like a crab to the rocks, and he began to climb down. There was no fast way to do it. Some rocks were wedged hard into the cliff, as secure as bolts in a battleship hull. Others weren’t held there by anything but the ones below them, and you couldn’t tell which were which until you placed your weight on one.
After about ten minutes, he saw one of Chuck’s Luckies, half smoked, the coal gone black and pointed like the tip of a carpenter’s pencil.
What had caused the fall? The breeze had picked up, but it wasn’t strong enough to knock a man off a flat ledge.
Teddy thought of Chuck, up there, alone, smoking his cigarette in the last minute of his life, and he thought of all the others he’d cared for who had died while he was asked to soldier on. Dolores, of course. And his father, somewhere on the floor of this same sea. His mother, when he was sixteen. Tootie Vicelli, shot through the teeth in Sicily, smiling curiously at Teddy as if he’d swallowed something whose taste surprised him, the blood trickling out of the corners of his mouth. Martin Phelan, Jason Hill, that big Polish machine gunner from Pittsburgh—what was his name?—Yardak. That was it. Yardak Gilibiowski. The blond kid who’d made them laugh in Belgium. Shot in the leg, seemed like nothing until it wouldn’t stop bleeding. And Frankie Gordon, of course, who he’d left in the Cocoanut Grove that night. Two years later, Teddy’d flicked a cigarette off Frankie’s helmet and called him a shitbird Iowan asshole and Frankie said, “You curse better than any man I’ve—” and stepped on a mine. Teddy still had a piece of the shrapnel in his left calf.
And now Chuck.
Would Teddy ever know if he should have trusted him? If he should’ve given him that last benefit of the doubt? Chuck, who’d made him laugh and made the whole cranial assault of the last three days so much easier to bear. Chuck, who just this morning had said they’d be serving eggs Benedict for breakfast and a thinly sliced Reuben for lunch.
Teddy looked back up at the promontory lip. By his estimation, he was now about halfway down and the sky was the dark blue of the sea and getting darker every second.
What could have pitched Chuck off that ledge?
Nothing natural.
Unless he’d dropped something. Unless he’d followed something down. Unless, like Teddy now, he’d tried to work his way down the cliff, grasping and toeing stones that might not hold.
Teddy paused for breath, the sweat dripping off his face. He removed one hand gingerly from the cliff and wiped it on his pants until it was dry. He returned it, got a grip, and did the same thing with the other hand, and as he placed that hand back over a pointed shard of rock, he saw the piece of paper beside him.
It was wedged between a rock and a brown tendril of roots and it flapped lightly in the sea air. Teddy took his hand from the black shard and pinched it between his fingers and he didn’t have to unfold it to know what it was.
Laeddis’s intake form.
He slid it into his back pocket, remembering the way it had nestled unsteadily in Chuck’s back pocket, and he knew now why Chuck had come down here.
For this piece of paper.
For Teddy.
THE LAST TWENTY feet of cliff face was comprised of boulders, giant black eggs covered in kelp, and Teddy turned when he reached them, turned so that his arms were behind him and the heels of his hands supported his weight, and worked his way across to them and down them and saw rats hiding in their crevices.
When he reached the last of them, he was at the shore, and he spied Chuck’s body and walked over to it and realized it wasn’t a body at all. Just another rock, bleached white by the sun, and covered in thick black ropes of seaweed.
Thank…something. Chuck was not dead. He was not this long narrow rock covered in seaweed.
Teddy cupped his hands around his mouth and called Chuck’s name back up the cliff. Called and called it and heard it ride out to sea and bounce off the rocks and carry on the breeze, and he waited to see Chuck’s head peek over the promontory.
Maybe he’d been preparing to come down to look for Teddy. Maybe he was up there right now, getting ready.
Teddy shouted his name until his throat scratched with it.
Then he stopped and waited to hear Chuck call back to him. It was growing too dark to see up to the top of that cliff. Teddy heard the breeze. He heard the rats in the crevices of the boulders. He heard a gull caw. The ocean lap. A few minutes later, he heard the foghorn from Boston Light again.
His vision adjusted to the dark and he saw eyes watching him. Dozens of them. The rats lounged on the boulders and stared at him, unafraid. This was their beach at night, not his.
Teddy was afraid of water, though. Not rats. Fuck the little slimy bastards. He could shoot them. See how many of them hung tough once a few of their friends exploded.
Except that he didn’t have a gun and they’d doubled in number while he watched. Long tails sweeping back and forth over the stone. Teddy felt the water against his heels and he felt all those eyes on his body and, fear or no fear, he was starting to feel a tingling in his spine, an itching sensation in his ankles.
He started walking slowly along the shore and he saw that there were hundreds of them, taking to the rocks in the moonlight like seals to the sun. He watched as they plopped off the boulders onto the sand where he’d been standing only moments before, and he turned his head, looked at what was left of his stretch of beachfront.
Not much. Another cliff jutted out into the water about thirty yards ahead, effectively cutting off the shore, and to the right of it, out in the ocean, Teddy saw an island he hadn’t even known was there. It lay under the moonlight like a bar of brown soap, and its grip on the sea seemed tenuous. He’d been up on those cliffs that first day with McPherson. There’d been no island out there. He was sure of it.
So where the hell did it come from?
He could hear them now, a few of them fighting, but mostly they clicked their nails over the rocks and squeaked at one another, and Teddy felt the itch in his ankles spread to his knees and inner thighs.
He looked back down the beach and the sand had disappeared under them.
He looked up the cliff, thankful for the moon, which was near full, and the stars, which were bright and countless. And then he saw a color that didn’t make any more sense than the island that hadn’t been there two days ago.
It was orange. Midway up the larger cliff. Orange. In a black cliff face. At dusk.
Teddy stared at it and watched as it flickered, as it subsided and then flared and subsided and flared. Pulsed, really.
Lik
e flame.
A cave, he realized. Or at least a sizeable crevice. And someone was in there. Chuck. It had to be. Maybe he had chased that paper down off the promontory. Maybe he’d gotten hurt and had ended up working his way across instead of down.
Teddy took off his ranger cap and approached the nearest boulder. A half-dozen pairs of eyes considered him and Teddy whacked at them with the hat and they jerked and twisted and flung their nasty bodies off the boulder and Teddy stepped up there fast and kicked at a few on the next boulder and they went over the side and he ran up the boulders then, jumping from one to the next, a few less rats every time, until there were none waiting for him on the last few black eggs, and then he was climbing the cliff face, his hands still bleeding from the descent.
This was the easier climb, though. It was higher and far wider than the first, but it had noticeable grades to it and more outcroppings.
It took him an hour and a half in the moonlight, and he climbed with the stars studying him much the way the rats had, and he lost Dolores as he climbed, couldn’t picture her, couldn’t see her face or her hands or her too-wide lips. He felt her gone from him as he’d never felt since she died, and he knew it was all the physical exertion and lack of sleep and lack of food, but she was gone. Gone as he climbed under the moon.
But he could hear her. Even as he couldn’t picture her, he could hear her in his brain and she was saying, Go on, Teddy. Go on. You can live again.
Was that all there was to it? After these two years of walking underwater, of staring at his gun on the end table in the living room as he sat in the dark listening to Tommy Dorsey and Duke Ellington, of being certain that he couldn’t possibly take one more step into this fucking shithole of a life, of missing her so completely he’d once snapped off the end of an incisor gritting his teeth against the need for her—after all that, could this honestly be the moment when he put her away?
I didn’t dream you, Dolores. I know that. But, at this moment, it feels like I did.
And it should, Teddy. It should. Let me go.
Yeah?
Yeah, baby.
I’ll try. Okay?
Okay.
Teddy could see the orange light flickering above him. He could feel the heat, just barely, but unmistakably. He placed his hand on the ledge above him, and saw the orange reflect off his wrist and he pulled himself up and onto the ledge and pulled himself forward on his elbows and saw the light reflecting off the craggy walls. He stood. The roof of the cave was just an inch above his head and he saw that the opening curved to the right and he followed it around and saw that the light came from a pile of wood in a small hole dug into the cave floor and a woman stood on the other side of the fire with her hands behind her back and said, “Who are you?”
“Teddy Daniels.”
The woman had long hair and wore a patient’s light pink shirt and drawstring pants and slippers.
“That’s your name,” she said. “But what do you do?”
“I’m a cop.”
She tilted her head, her hair just beginning to streak with gray. “You’re the marshal.”
Teddy nodded. “Could you take your hands from behind your back?”
“Why?” she said.
“Because I’d like to know what you’re holding.”
“Why?”
“Because I’d like to know if it could hurt me.”
She gave that a small smile. “I suppose that’s fair.”
“I’m glad you do.”
She removed her hands from behind her back, and she was holding a long, thin surgical scalpel. “I’ll hold on to it, if you don’t mind.”
Teddy held up his hands. “Fine with me.”
“Do you know who I am?”
Teddy said, “A patient from Ashecliffe.”
She gave him another head tilt and touched her smock. “My. What gave me away?”
“Okay, okay. Good point.”
“Are all U.S. marshals so astute?”
Teddy said, “I haven’t eaten in a while. I’m a little slower than usual.”
“Slept much?”
“What’s that?”
“Since you’ve been on-island. Have you slept much?”
“Not well if that means anything.”
“Oh, it does.” She hiked up her pants at the knees and sat on the floor, beckoned him to do the same.
Teddy sat and stared at her over the fire.
“You’re Rachel Solando,” he said. “The real one.”
She shrugged.
“You kill your children?” he said.
She poked a log with the scalpel. “I never had children.”
“No?”
“No. I was never married. I was, you’ll be surprised to realize, more than just a patient here.”
“How can you be more than just a patient?”
She poked another log and it settled with a crunch, and sparks rose above the fire and died before hitting the roof.
“I was staff,” she said. “Since just after the war.”
“You were a nurse?”
She looked over the fire at him. “I was a doctor, Marshal. The first female doctor on staff at Drummond Hospital in Delaware. The first on staff here at Ashecliffe. You, sir, are looking at a genuine pioneer.”
Or a delusional mental patient, Teddy thought.
He looked up and found her eyes on him, and hers were kind and wary and knowing. She said, “You think I’m crazy.”
“No.”
“What else would you think, a woman who hides in a cave?”
“I’ve considered that there might be a reason.”
She smiled darkly and shook her head. “I’m not crazy. I’m not. Of course what else would a crazy person claim? That’s the Kafkaesque genius of it all. If you’re not crazy but people have told the world you are, then all your protests to the contrary just underscore their point. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“Sort of,” Teddy said.
“Look at it as a syllogism. Let’s say the syllogism begins with this principle: ’Insane men deny that they are insane.’ You follow?”
“Sure,” Teddy said.
“Okay, part two: ’Bob denies he is insane.’ Part three, the ’ergo’ part. ’Ergo—Bob is insane.’” She placed the scalpel on the ground by her knee and stoked the fire with a stick. “If you are deemed insane, then all actions that would otherwise prove you are not do, in actuality, fall into the framework of an insane person’s actions. Your sound protests constitute denial. Your valid fears are deemed paranoia. Your survival instincts are labeled defense mechanisms. It’s a no-win situation. It’s a death penalty really. Once you’re here, you’re not getting out. No one leaves Ward C. No one. Well, a few have, okay, I’ll grant you, a few have gotten out. But they’ve had surgery. In the brain. Squish—right through the eye. It’s a barbaric medical practice, unconscionable, and I told them that. I fought them. I wrote letters. And they could’ve removed me, you know? They could’ve fired me or dismissed me, let me take a teaching post or even practice out of state, but that wasn’t good enough. They couldn’t let me leave, just couldn’t do that. No, no, no.”
She’d grown more and more agitated as she spoke, stabbing the fire with her stick, talking more to her knees than to Teddy.
“You really were a doctor?” Teddy said.
“Oh, yes. I was a doctor.” She looked up from her knees and her stick. “I still am, actually. But, yes, I was on staff here. I began to ask about large shipments of Sodium Amytal and opium-based hallucinogens. I began to wonder—aloud unfortunately—about surgical procedures that seemed highly experimental, to put it mildly.”
“What are they up to here?” Teddy said.
She gave him a grin that was both pursed and lopsided. “You have no idea?”
“I know they’re flouting the Nuremberg Code.”
“Flouting it? They’ve obliterated it.”
“I know they’re performing radical treatments.”
“
Radical, yes. Treatments, no. There is no treating going on here, Marshal. You know where the funding for this hospital comes from?”
Teddy nodded. “HUAC.”
“Not to mention slush funds,” she said. “Money flows into here. Now ask yourself, how does pain enter the body?”
“Depends upon where you’re hurt.”
“No.” She shook her head emphatically. “It has nothing to do with the flesh. The brain sends neural transmitters down through the nervous system. The brain controls pain,” she said. “It controls fear. Sleep. Empathy. Hunger. Everything we associate with the heart or the soul or the nervous system is actually controlled by the brain. Everything.”
“Okay…”
Her eyes shone in the firelight. “What if you could control it?”
“The brain?”
She nodded. “Re-create a man so that he doesn’t need sleep, doesn’t feel pain. Or love. Or sympathy. A man who can’t be interrogated because his memory banks are wiped clean.” She stoked the fire and looked up at him. “They’re creating ghosts here, Marshal. Ghosts to go out into the world and do ghostly work.”
“But that kind of ability, that kind of knowledge is—”
“Years off,” she agreed. “Oh, yes. This is a decades-long process, Marshal. Where they’ve begun is much the same place the Soviets have—brainwashing. Deprivation experiments. Much like the Nazis experimented on Jews to see the effect of hot and cold extremes and apply those results to help the soldiers of the Reich. But, don’t you see, Marshal? A half century from now, people in the know will look back and say this”—she struck the dirt floor with her index finger—“this is where it all began. The Nazis used Jews. The Soviets used prisoners in their own gulags. Here, in America, we tested patients on Shutter Island.”
Teddy said nothing. No words occurred to him.
She looked back at the fire. “They can’t let you leave. You know that, don’t you?”
“I’m a federal marshal,” Teddy said. “How are they going to stop me?”
That elicited a gleeful grin and a clap of her hands. “I was an esteemed psychiatrist from a respected family. I once thought that would be enough. I hate to inform you of this, but it wasn’t. Let me ask you—any past traumas in your life?”