Shutter Island

14

THE TWO HOMES outside the wall—the warden’s and Cawley’s—took direct hits. Half of Cawley’s roof was gone, the tile flung all over the hospital grounds like a lesson in humility. A tree had gone through the warden’s living room window, through the plywood nailed there for protection, roots and all in the middle of his house.

The compound was strewn with shells and tree branches and an inch and a half of water. Cawley’s tile, a few dead rats, scores of soggy apples, all of it gritty with sand. The foundation of the hospital looked like someone had taken a jackhammer to it, and Ward A had lost four windows and several sections of flashing were curled back like pompadours on the roof. Two of the staff cottages had been turned into sticks, and a few others lay on their sides. The nurse and orderly dormitories had lost several windows and suffered some water damage between them. Ward B had been spared, not a mark on it. All up and down the island, Teddy could see trees with their tops snapped off, the naked wood pointing up like spears.

The air was dead again, thick and sullen. The rain fell in a tired, steady drizzle. Dead fish covered the shore. When they’d first come out into the morning, a single flounder lay flapping and puffing in the breezeway, one sad, swollen eye looking back toward the sea.

Teddy and Chuck watched McPherson and a guard rock a jeep off its side. When they turned the ignition, it started on the fifth try, and they roared back out through the gates and Teddy saw them a minute later, racing up the incline behind the hospital toward Ward C.

Cawley walked into the compound, paused to pick up a piece of his roof and stare at it before dropping it back to the watery ground. His gaze swept past Teddy and Chuck twice before he recognized them in their white orderly clothing and their black slickers and black ranger’s hats. He gave them an ironic smile and seemed about to approach them when a doctor with a stethoscope around his neck jogged out of the hospital and ran up to him.

“Number two’s gone. We can’t get it back up. We’ve got those two criticals. They’ll die, John.”

“Where’s Harry?”

“Harry’s working on it, but he can’t get a charge. What good’s a backup if it doesn’t back anything up?”

“All right. Let’s get in there.”

They strode off into the hospital, and Teddy said, “Their backup generator failed?”

Chuck said, “These things will happen in a hurricane apparently.”

“You see any lights?”

Chuck looked around at the windows. “Nope.”

“You think the whole electrical system is fried?”

Chuck said, “Good possibility.”

“That would mean fences.”

Chuck picked up an apple as it floated onto his foot. He went into a windup and kicked his leg and fired it into the wall. “Stee-rike one!” He turned to Teddy. “That would mean fences, yes.”

“Probably all electronic security. Gates. Doors.”

Chuck said, “Oh, dear God, help us.” He picked up another apple, tossed it above his head, and caught it behind his back. “You want to go into that fort, don’t you?”

Teddy tilted his face into the soft rain. “Perfect day for it.”

The warden made an appearance, driving into the compound with three guards in a jeep, the water churning out from the tires. The warden noticed Chuck and Teddy standing idly in the yard, and it seemed to annoy him. He was taking them for orderlies, Teddy realized, just as Cawley had, and it pissed him off that they didn’t have rakes or water pumps in their hands. He drove past, though, his head snapping forward, on to more important things. Teddy realized he had yet to hear the man’s voice, and he wondered if it was as black as his hair or as pale as his skin.

“Probably should get going, then,” Chuck said. “This won’t hold forever.”

Teddy started walking toward the gate.

Chuck caught up with him. “I’d whistle, but my mouth’s too dry.”

“Scared?” Teddy said lightly.

“I believe the term is shit-scared, boss.” He rifled the apple into another section of wall.

They approached the gate and the guard there had a little boy’s face and cruel eyes. He said, “All order lies are to report to Mr. Willis in the admin office. You guys are on cleanup detail.”

Chuck and Teddy looked at each other’s white shirts and pants.

Chuck said, “Eggs Benedict.”

Teddy nodded. “Thanks. I was wondering. Lunch?”

“A thinly sliced Reuben.”

Teddy turned to the guard, flashed his badge. “Our clothes are still in the laundry.”

The guard glanced at Teddy’s badge, then looked at Chuck, waiting.

Chuck sighed and removed his wallet, flipped it open under the guard’s nose.

The guard said, “What’s your business outside the wall? The missing patient was found.”

Any explanation, Teddy decided, would make them look weak and place the balance of power firmly in this little shit’s hand. Teddy had had a dozen little shits like this in his company during the war. Most of them didn’t come home, and Teddy had often wondered if anyone really minded. You couldn’t reach this type of asshole, couldn’t teach him anything. But you could back him off if you understood that the only thing he respected was power.

Teddy stepped up to the guy, searched his face, a small smile tugging the corner of his lips, waiting until the guy met his eyes and held them.

“We’re going on a stroll,” Teddy said.

“You don’t have authorization.”

“Yes, we do.” Teddy stepped closer so the boy had to tilt his eyes up. He could smell his breath. “We’re federal marshals on a federal facility. That’s the authorization of God himself. We don’t answer to you. We don’t explain to you. We can choose to shoot you in the dick, boy, and there’s not a court in the country that would even hear the case.” Teddy leaned in another half inch. “So open the fucking gate.”

The kid tried to hold Teddy’s stare. He swallowed. He tried to harden his eyes.

Teddy said, “I repeat: Open that—”

“Okay.”

“I didn’t hear you,” Teddy said.

“Yes, sir.”

Teddy kept the evil eye in the kid’s face for another second, exhaled audibly through his nostrils.

“Good enough, son. Hoo-ah.”

“Hoo-ah,” the kid said reflexively, his Adam’s apple bulging.

He turned his key in the lock and swung back the gate, and Teddy walked through without a look back.

They turned right and walked along the outside of the wall for a bit before Chuck said, “Nice touch with the ‘hoo-ah.’”

Teddy looked over at him. “I liked that one, myself.”

“You were a ballbuster overseas, weren’t you?”

“I was a battalion sergeant with a bunch of kids under my command. Half of ’em died without ever getting laid. You don’t ‘nice’ your way to respect, you fucking scare it into ’em.”

“Yes, Sergeant. Damn straight.” Chuck snapped a salute at him. “Even with the power out, you recall that this is a fort we’re trying to infiltrate, don’t you?”

“It did not slip my mind, no.”

“Any ideas?”

“Nope.”

“You think they have a moat? That’d be something.”

“Maybe some vats of hot oil up on the battlements.”

“Archers,” Chuck said. “If they have archers, Teddy…”

“And us without our chain mail.”

They stepped over a fallen tree, the ground soggy and slick with wet leaves. Through the shredded vegetation ahead of them, they could see the fort, its great gray walls, see the tracks from the jeeps that had been going back and forth all morning.

“That guard had a point,” Chuck said.

“How so?”

“Now that Rachel’s been found, our authority here—such as it was—is pretty much nonexistent. We get caught, boss, there’s no way we’ll be able to come up with a logical explanation.”

Teddy felt the riot of discarded, shredded green in the back of his eyes. He felt exhausted, a bit hazy. Four hours of drug-induced, nightmare-ridden sleep last night was all he’d had. The drizzle pattered the top of his hat, collected in the brim. His brain buzzed, almost imperceptibly, but constantly. If the ferry came today—and he doubted it would—one part of him wanted to just hop on it and go. Get the fuck off this rock. But without something to show for this trip, whether that was evidence for Senator Hurly or Laeddis’s death certificate, he’d be returning a failure. Still borderline-suicidal, but with the added weight to his conscience that he’d done nothing to effect change.

He flipped open his notebook. “Those rock piles Rachel left us yesterday. This is the broken code.” He handed the notebook to Chuck.

Chuck cupped a hand around it, kept it close to his chest. “So, he’s here.”

“He’s here.”

“Patient Sixty-seven, you think?”

“Be my guess.”

Teddy stopped by an outcropping in the middle of a muddy slope. “You can go back, Chuck. You don’t have to be involved in this.”

Chuck looked up at him and flapped the notebook against his hand. “We’re marshals, Teddy. What do marshals always do?”

Teddy smiled. “We go through the doors.”

“First,” Chuck said. “We go through the doors first. We don’t wait for some city doughnut cops to back us up if time’s a-wasting. We go through that fucking door.”

“Yes, we do.”

“Well, all right, then,” Chuck said and handed the notebook back to him and they continued toward the fort.

ONE LOOK AT it from up close, nothing separating them but a stand of trees and a short field, and Chuck said what Teddy was thinking:

“We’re fucked.”

The Cyclone fence that normally surrounded it had been blown out of the ground in sections. Parts of it lay flat on the ground, others had been flung to the far tree line, and the rest sagged in various states of uselessness.

Armed guards roamed the perimeter, though. Several of them did steady circuits in jeeps. A contingent of orderlies picked up the debris around the exterior and another group of them set to work on a thick tree that had downed itself against the wall. There was no moat, but there was only one door, a small red one of dimpled iron set in the center of the wall. Guards stood sentry up on the battlements, rifles held to their shoulders and chests. The few small window squares cut into the stone were barred. There were no patients outside the door, manacled or not. Just guards and orderlies in equal measure.

Teddy saw two of the roof guards step to the side, saw several orderlies step up to the edge of the battlements and call out to those on the ground to stand clear. They wrestled half a tree to the edge of the roof and then pushed and pulled it until it teetered there. Then they disappeared, getting behind it and pushing, and the half-tree rammed forward another couple of feet and then tipped and men shouted as it sped down the wall and then crashed to the ground. The orderlies came back up to the edge of the battlements and looked down at their handiwork and shook hands and clapped shoulders.

“There’s got to be a duct of some sort, right?” Chuck said. “Maybe to dump water or waste out into the sea? We could go in that way.”

Teddy shook his head. “Why bother? We’re just going to walk right in.”

“Oh, like Rachel walked out of Ward B? I get it. Take some of that invisible powder she had. Good idea.”

Chuck frowned at him and Teddy touched the collar of his rain slicker. “We’re not dressed like marshals, Chuck. Know what I mean?”

Chuck looked back at the orderlies working the perimeter and watched one come out through the iron door with a cup of coffee in his hand, the steam rising through the drizzle in small snakes of smoke.

“Amen,” he said. “Amen, brother.”

THEY SMOKED CIGARETTES and talked gibberish to each other as they walked down the road toward the fort.

Halfway across the field, they were met by a guard, his rifle hanging lazily under his arm and pointed at the ground.

Teddy said, “They sent us over. Something about a tree on the roof?”

The guard looked back over his shoulder. “Nah. They took care of that.”

“Oh, great,” Chuck said, and they started to turn away.

“Whoa, Trigger,” the guard said. “There’s still plenty of work to be done.”

They turned back.

Teddy said, “You got thirty guys working that wall.”

“Yeah, well, the inside’s a fucking mess. A storm ain’t gonna knock a place like this down, but it’s still gonna get inside. You know?”

“Oh, sure,” Teddy said.

“WHERE’S THE MOP detail?” Chuck said to the guard lounging against the wall by the door.

He jerked his thumb and opened the door and they passed through into the receiving hall.

“I don’t want to appear ungrateful,” Chuck said, “but that was too easy.”

Teddy said, “Don’t overthink it. Sometimes you get lucky.”

The door closed behind them.

“Luck,” Chuck said, a small vibration in his voice. “That’s what we’re calling it?”

“That’s what we’re calling it.”

The first thing that hit Teddy was the smells. An aroma of industrial-strength disinfectant doing its level best to disguise the reek of vomit, feces, sweat, and most of all, urine.

Then the noise billowed out from the rear of the building and down from the upper floors: the rumble of running feet, shouts that bounced and echoed off the thick walls and dank air, sudden high-pitched yelps that seized the ear and then died, the pervasive yammering of several different voices all talking at once.

Someone shouted, “You can’t! You fucking can’t do that! You hear me? You can’t. Get away…,” and the words trailed off.

Somewhere above them, around the curve of a stone staircase, a man sang “A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” He’d finished the seventy-seventh bottle and started on the seventy-sixth.

Two canisters of coffee sat up on a card table along with stacks of paper cups and a few bottles of milk. A guard sat at another card table at the base of the staircase, looking at them, smiling.

“First time, huh?”

Teddy looked over at him even as the old sounds were replaced by new ones, the whole place a kind of sonic orgy, yanking the ears in every direction.

“Yeah. Heard stories, but…”

“You get used to it,” the guard said. “You get used to anything.”

“Ain’t that the truth.”

He said, “If you guys aren’t working the roof, you can hang your coats and hats in the room behind me.”

“They told us we’re on the roof,” Teddy said.

“Who’d you piss off?” The guard pointed. “Just follow those stairs. We got most of the bugsies locked down to their beds now, but a few are running free. You see one, you shout, all right? Whatever you do, don’t try to restrain him yourself. This ain’t Ward A. You know? These fuckers’ll kill you. Clear?”

“Clear.”

They started up the steps and the guard said, “Wait a minute.”

They stopped, looked back down at him.

He was smiling, pointing a finger at them.

They waited.

“I know you guys.” His voice had a singsong lilt to it.

Teddy didn’t speak. Chuck didn’t speak.

“I know you guys,” the guard repeated.

Teddy managed a “Yeah?”

“Yeah. You’re the guys who got stuck with roof detail. In the fucking rain.” He laughed and extended the finger and slapped the card table with his other hand.

“That’s us,” Chuck said. “Ha ha.”

“Ha fucking ha,” the guard said.

Teddy pointed back at him and said, “You got us, pal,” and turned up the stairs. “You really got our number.”

The idiot’s laughter trailed them up the stairs.

At the first landing, they paused. They faced a great hall with an arched ceiling of hammered copper, a dark floor polished to mirror gloss. Teddy knew he could throw a baseball or one of Chuck’s apples from the landing and not reach the other side of the room. It was empty and the gate facing them was ajar, and Teddy felt mice scurry along his ribs as he stepped into the room because it reminded him of the room in his dream, the one where Laeddis had offered him a drink and Rachel had slaughtered her children. It was hardly the same room—the one in his dream had had high windows with thick curtains and streams of light and a parquet floor and heavy chandeliers—but it was close enough.

Chuck clapped a hand on his shoulder, and Teddy felt beads of sweat pop out along the side of his neck.

“I repeat,” Chuck whispered with a weak smile, “this is too easy. Where’s the guard on that gate? Why isn’t it locked?”

Teddy could see Rachel, wild-haired and shrieking, as she ran through the room with a cleaver.

“I don’t know.”

Chuck leaned in and hissed in his ear. “This is a setup, boss.”

Teddy began to cross the room. His head hurt from the lack of sleep. From the rain. From the muffled shouting and running feet above him. The two boys and the little girl had held hands, looking over their shoulders. Trembled.

Teddy could hear the singing patient again: “…you take one down, pass it around, fifty-four bottles of beer on the wall.”

They flashed before his eyes, the two boys and that girl, swimming through the swimming air, and Teddy saw those yellow pills Cawley had placed in his hand last night, felt a slick of nausea eddy in his stomach.

“Fifty-four bottles of beer on the wall, fifty-four bottles of beer…”

“We need to go right back out, Teddy. We need to leave. This is bad. You can feel it, I can feel it.”

At the other end of the hall, a man jumped into the doorway.

He was barefoot and bare-chested, wearing only a pair of white pajama bottoms. His head was shaved, but the rest of his features were impossible to see in the dim light.

He said, “Hi!”

Teddy walked faster.

The man said, “Tag! You’re it!” and bolted from the doorway.

Chuck caught up with Teddy. “Boss, for Christ’s sake.”

He was in here. Laeddis. Somewhere. Teddy could feel him.

They reached the end of the hall and were met with a wide stone landing and a stairwell that curved down steeply into darkness, another that rose toward the shouting and the chattering, all of it louder now, and Teddy could hear snaps of metal and chains. Heard someone shout, “Billings! All right now, boy! Just calm down! Nowhere to run. Hear?”

Teddy heard someone breathing beside him. He turned his head to the left, and the shaven head was an inch from his own.

“You’re it,” the guy said and tapped Teddy’s arm with his index finger.

Teddy looked into the guy’s gleaming face.

“I’m it,” Teddy said.

“’Course, I’m so close,” the guy said, “you could just flick your wrist and I’d be it again and then I could flick mine and you’d be it and we could go on like that for hours, all day even, we could just stand here turning each other into it, over and over, not even break for lunch, not even break for dinner, we could just go on and on.”

“What fun would that be?” Teddy said.

“You know what’s out there?” The guy gestured with his head in the direction of the stairs. “In the sea?”

“Fish,” Teddy said.

“Fish.” The guy nodded. “Very good. Fish, yes. Lots of fish. But, yes, fish, very good, fish, yes, but also, also? Subs. Yeah. That’s right. Soviet submarines. Two hundred, three hundred miles off our coast. We hear that, right? We’re told. Sure. And we get used to the idea. We forget, really. I mean, ‘Okay, there are subs. Thanks for the info.’ They become part of our daily existence. We know they’re there, but we stop thinking about it. Okay? But there they are and they’re armed with rockets. They’re pointing them at New York and Washington. At Boston. And they’re out there. Just sitting. Does that ever bother you?”

Teddy could hear Chuck beside him taking slow breaths, waiting for his cue.

Teddy said, “Like you said, I choose not to think about it too much.”

“Mmm.” The guy nodded. He stroked the stubble on his chin. “We hear things in here. You wouldn’t think so, right? But we do. A new guy comes in, he tells us things. The guards talk. You orderlies, you talk. We know, we know. About the outside world. About the H-bomb tests, the atolls. You know how a hydrogen bomb works?”

“With hydrogen?” Teddy said.

“Very good. Very clever. Yes, yes.” The guy nodded several times. “With hydrogen, yes. But, also, also, not like any other bombs. You drop a bomb, even an atom bomb, it explodes. Right? Right you are. But a hydrogen bomb, it implodes. It falls in on itself and goes through a series of internal breakdowns, collapsing and collapsing. But all that collapsing? It creates mass and density. See, the fury of its own self-destruction creates an entirely new monster. You get it? Do you? The bigger the breakdown, then the bigger the destruction of self, then the more potent it becomes. And then, okay, okay? Fucking blammo! Just…bang, boom, whoosh. In its absence of self, it spreads. Creates an explosion off of its implosion that is a hundred times, a thousand times, a million times more devastating than any bomb in history. That’s our legacy. And don’t you forget it.” He tapped Teddy’s arm several times, light taps, as if playing a drumbeat with his fingers. “You’re it! To the tenth degree. Hee!”

He leapt down the dark stairwell and they heard him shouting “Blammo” all the way down.

“…forty-nine bottles of beer! You take one down…”

Teddy looked over at Chuck. His face was damp, and he exhaled carefully through his mouth.

“You’re right,” Teddy said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Now you’re talking.”

It came from the top of the stairwell:

“Somebody give me a fucking hand here! Jesus!”

Teddy and Chuck looked up and saw two men coming down the stairs in a ball. One wore guard blues, the other patient whites, and they slammed to a stop at the curve in the staircase on the widest stair. The patient got a hand free and dug it into the guard’s face just below his left eye and pulled a flap of skin free, and the guard screamed and wrenched his head back.

Teddy and Chuck ran up the steps. The patient’s hand plunged down again, but Chuck grabbed it at the wrist.

The guard wiped at his eye and smeared blood down to his chin. Teddy could hear all four of them take breaths, hear the distant beer-bottle song, that patient on forty-two now, rounding the corner for forty-one, and then he saw the guy below him rear up with his mouth wide open, and he said, “Chuck, watch it,” and slammed the heel of his hand into the patient’s forehead before he could take a bite out of Chuck’s wrist.

“You got to get off him,” he said to the guard. “Come on. Get off.”

The guard freed himself of the patient’s legs and scrambled back up two steps. Teddy came over the patient’s body and clamped down hard on his shoulder, pinning it to the stone, and he looked back over his shoulder at Chuck, and the baton sliced between them, cut the air with a hiss and a whistle, and broke the patient’s nose.

Teddy felt the body underneath him go slack and Chuck said, “Jesus Christ!”

The guard swung again and Teddy turned on the patient’s body and blocked the arm with his elbow.

He looked into his bloody face. “Hey! Hey! He’s out cold. Hey!”

The guard could smell his own blood, though. He cocked the baton.

Chuck said, “Look at me! Look at me!”

The guard’s eyes jerked to Chuck’s face.

“You stand the fuck down. You hear me? You stand down. This patient is subdued.” Chuck let go of the patient’s wrist and his arm flopped to his chest. Chuck sat back against the wall, kept his stare locked on the guard. “Do you hear me?” he said softly.

The guard dropped his eyes and lowered the baton. He touched the wound on his cheekbone with his shirt, looked at the blood on the fabric. “He tore my face open.”

Teddy leaned in, took a look at the wound. He’d seen a lot worse; the kid wouldn’t die from it or anything. But it was ugly. No doctor would ever be able to sew it back clean.

He said, “You’ll be fine. Couple of stitches.”

Above them they could hear the crash of several bodies and some furniture.

“You got a riot on your hands?” Chuck said.

The guard chugged air in and out of his mouth until the color returned to his face. “Close to.”

“Inmates taken over the asylum?” Chuck said lightly.

The kid looked at Teddy carefully, then over at Chuck. “Not yet.”

Chuck pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, handed it to the kid.

The kid nodded his thanks and pressed it to his face.

Chuck lifted the patient’s wrist again, and Teddy watched him feel for a pulse. He dropped the wrist and pushed back one of the man’s eyelids. He looked at Teddy. “He’ll live.”

“Let’s get him up,” Teddy said.

They slung the patient’s arms around their shoulders and followed the guard up the steps. He didn’t weigh much, but it was a long staircase, and the tops of his feet kept hugging the edges of the risers. When they reached the top, the guard turned, and he looked older, maybe a bit more intelligent.

“You’re the marshals,” he said.

“What’s that?”

He nodded. “You are. I saw you when you arrived.” He gave Chuck a small smile. “That scar on your face, you know?”

Chuck sighed.

“What are you doing in here?” the kid said.

“Saving your face,” Teddy said.

The kid took the handkerchief from his wound, looked at it, and pressed it back there again.

“Guy you’re holding there?” he said. “Paul Vingis. West Virginia. Killed his brother’s wife and two daughters while the brother was serving in Korea. Kept them in a basement, you know, pleasuring himself, while they were rotting.”

Teddy resisted the urge to step out from under Vingis’s arm, let him drop back down the stairs.

“Truth is,” the kid said and cleared his throat. “Truth is, he had me.” He met their eyes and his own were red.

“What’s your name?”

“Baker. Fred Baker.”

Teddy shook his hand. “Look, Fred? Hey, we’re glad we could help.”

The kid looked down at his shoes, the spots of blood there. “Again: what are you doing here?”

“Taking a look around,” Teddy said. “A couple of minutes, and we’ll be gone.”

The kid took some time considering that, and Teddy could feel the previous two years of his life—losing Dolores, honing in on Laeddis, finding out about this place, stumbling across George Noyce and his stories of drug and lobotomy experiments, making contact with Senator Hurly, waiting for the right moment to cross the harbor like they’d waited to cross the English Channel to Normandy—all of it hanging in the balance of this kid’s pause.

“You know,” the kid said, “I’ve worked a few rough places. Jails, a max prison, another place was also a hospital for the criminally insane…” He looked at the door and his eyes widened as if with a yawn except that his mouth didn’t open. “Yeah. Worked some places. But this place?” He gave each of them a long, level gaze. “They wrote their own playbook here.”

He stared at Teddy and Teddy tried to read the answer in the kid’s eyes, but the stare was of the thousand-yards variety, flat, ancient.

“A couple of minutes?” The kid nodded to himself. “All right. No one’ll notice in all this fucking mayhem. You take your couple minutes and then get out, okay?”

“Sure,” Chuck said.

“And, hey.” The kid gave them a small smile as he reached for the door. “Try not to die in those few minutes, okay? I’d appreciate that.”

15

THEY WENT THROUGH the door and entered a cell block of granite walls and granite floors that ran the length of the fort under archways ten feet wide and fourteen feet tall. Tall windows at either end of the floor provided the only light, and the ceiling dripped water and the floors were filled with puddles. The cells stood off to their right and left, buried in the dark.

Baker said, “Our main generator blew at around four this morning. The locks on the cells are controlled electronically. That’s one of our more recent innovations. Great fucking idea, huh? So all the cells opened at four. Luckily we can still work those locks manually, so we got most of the patients back inside and locked them in, but some prick has a key. He keeps sneaking in and getting to at least one cell before he takes off again.”

Teddy said, “Bald guy, maybe?”

Baker looked over at him. “Bald guy? Yeah. He’s one we can’t account for. Figured it might be him. His name’s Litchfield.”

“He’s playing tag in that stairwell we just came up. The lower half.”

Baker led them to the third cell on the right and opened it. “Toss him in there.”

It took them a few seconds to find the bed in the dark and then Baker clicked on a flashlight and shone the beam inside and they lay Vingis on the bed and he moaned and the blood bubbled in his nostrils.

“I need to get some backup and go after Litchfield,” Baker said. “The basement’s where we keep the guys we don’t even feed unless there’s six guards in the room. If they get out, it’ll be the fucking Alamo in here.”

“You get medical assistance first,” Chuck said.

Baker found an unstained section of handkerchief and pressed it back over his wound. “Don’t got time.”

“For him,” Chuck said.

Baker looked in through the bars at them. “Yeah. All right. I’ll find a doctor. And you two? In and out in record time, right?”

“Right. Get the guy a doctor,” Chuck said as they left the cell.

Baker locked the cell door. “I’m on it.”

He jogged down the cell block, sidestepping three guards dragging a bearded giant toward his cell, kept running.

“What do you think?” Teddy said. Through the archways he could see a man by the far window, hanging up on the bars, some guards dragging in a hose. His eyes were beginning to adjust to what there was of the pewter light in the main corridor, but the cells remained black.

“There has to be a set of files in here somewhere,” Chuck said. “If only for basic medical and reference purposes. You look for Laeddis, I look for files?”

“Where do you figure those files are?”

Chuck looked back at the door. “By the sounds of it, it gets less dangerous the higher you go in here. I figure their admin’ has gotta be up.”

“Okay. Where and when do we meet?”

“Fifteen minutes?”

The guards had gotten the hose working and fired a blast, blew the guy off the bars, pushed him across the floor.

Some men clapped in their cells, others moaned, moans so deep and abandoned they could have come from a battlefield.

“Fifteen sounds right. Meet back in that big hall?”

“Sure.”

They shook hands and Chuck’s was damp, his upper lip slick.

“You watch your ass, Teddy.”

A patient banged through the door behind them and ran past them into the ward. His feet were bare and grimy and he ran like he was training for a prize-fight—fluid strides working in tandem with shadow-boxing arms.

“See what I can do.” Teddy gave Chuck a smile.

“All right, then.”

“All right.”

Chuck walked to the door. He paused to look back. Teddy nodded.

Chuck opened the door as two orderlies came through from the stairs. Chuck turned the corner and disappeared, and one of the orderlies said to Teddy, “You see the Great White Hope come through here?”

Teddy looked back through the archway, saw the patient dancing in place on his heels, punching the air with combinations.

Teddy pointed and the three of them fell into step.

“He was a boxer?” Teddy said.

The guy on his left, a tall, older black guy, said, “Oh, you come up from the beach, huh? The vacation wards. Uh-huh. Yeah, well, Willy there, he think he training for a bout at Madison Square with Joe Louis. Thing is, he ain’t half bad.”

They were nearing the guy, and Teddy watched his fists shred the air.

“It’s going to take more than three of us.”

The older orderly chuckled. “Won’t take but one. I’m his manager. You didn’t know?” He called out, “Yo, Willy. Gotta get you a massage, my man. Ain’t but an hour till the fight.”

“Don’t want no massage.” Willy started tapping the air with quick jabs.

“Can’t have my meal ticket cramping up on me,” the orderly said. “Hear?”

“Only cramped-up that time I fought Jersey Joe.”

“And look how that turned out.”

Willy’s arms snapped to his sides. “You got a point.”

“Training room, right over here.” The orderly swept his arm out to the left with a flourish.

“Just don’t touch me. I don’t like to be touched before a fight. You know that.”

“Oh, I know, killer.” He opened up the cell. “Come on now.”

Willy walked toward the cell. “You can really hear ’em, you know? The crowd.”

“SRO, my man. SRO.”

Teddy and the other orderly kept walking, the orderly holding out a brown hand. “I’m Al.”

Teddy shook the hand. “Teddy, Al. Nice to meet you.”

“Why you all got up for the outside, Teddy?”

Teddy looked at his slicker. “Roof detail. Saw a patient on the stairs, though, chased him in here. Figured you guys could use an extra hand.”

A wad of feces hit the floor by Teddy’s foot and someone cackled from the dark of a cell and Teddy kept his eyes straight ahead and didn’t break stride.

Al said, “You want to stay as close to the middle as possible. Even so, you get hit with just about everything ’least once a week. You see your man?”

Teddy shook his head. “No, I—”

“Aww, shit,” Al said.

“What?”

“I see mine.”

He was coming right at them, soaking wet, and Teddy saw the guards dropping the hose and giving chase. A small guy with red hair, a face like a swarm of bees, covered in blackheads, red eyes that matched his hair. He broke right at the last second, hitting a hole only he saw as Al’s arms swept over his head and the little guy slid on his knees, rolled, and then scrambled up.

Al broke into a run after him and then the guards rushed past Teddy, batons held over their heads, as wet as the man they chased.

Teddy had started to step into the chase, if from nothing else but instinct, when he heard the whisper:

“Laeddis.”

He stood in the center of the room, waiting to hear it again. Nothing. The collective moaning, momentarily stopped by the pursuit of the little redhead, began to well up again, starting as a buzz amid the stray rattlings of bedpans.

Teddy thought about those yellow pills again. If Cawley suspected, really suspected, that he and Chuck were—

“Laed. Dis.”

He turned and faced the three cells to his right. All dark. Teddy waited, knowing the speaker could see him, wondering if it could be Laeddis himself.

“You were supposed to save me.”

It came from either the one in the center or the one to the left of it. Not Laeddis’s voice. Definitely not. But one that seemed familiar just the same.

Teddy approached the bars in the center. He fished in his pockets. He found a box of matches, pulled it out. He struck the match against the flint strip and it flared and he saw a small sink and a man with sunken ribs kneeling on the bed, writing on the wall. He looked back over his shoulder at Teddy. Not Laeddis. Not anyone he knew.

“Do you mind? I prefer to work in the dark. Thank you oh so much.”

Teddy backed away from the bars, turning to his left and noticing that the entire left wall of the man’s cell was covered in script, not an inch to spare, thousands of cramped, precise lines of it, the words so small they were unreadable unless you pressed your eyes to the wall.

He crossed to the next cell and the match went out and the voice, close now, said, “You failed me.”

Teddy’s hand shook as he struck the next match and the wood snapped and broke away against the flint strip.

“You told me I’d be free of this place. You promised.”

Teddy struck another match and it flew off into the cell, unlit.

“You lied.”

The third match left the flint with a sizzle and the flame flared high over his finger and he held it to the bars and stared in. The man sitting on the bed in the left corner had his head down, his face pressed between his knees, his arms wrapped around his calves. He was bald up the middle, salt-and-pepper on the sides. He was naked except for a pair of white boxer shorts. His bones shook against his flesh.

Teddy licked his lips and the roof of his mouth. He stared over the match and said, “Hello?”

“They took me back. They say I’m theirs.”

“I can’t see your face.”

“They say I’m home now.”

“Could you raise your head?”

“They say this is home. I’ll never leave.”

“Let me see your face.”

“Why?”

“Let me see your face.”

“You don’t recognize my voice? All the conversations we had?”

“Lift your head.”

“I used to like to think it became more than strictly professional. That we became friends of a sort. That match is going to go out soon, by the way.”

Teddy stared at the swath of bald skin, the trembling limbs.

“I’m telling you, buddy—”

“Telling me what? Telling me what? What can you tell me? More lies, that’s what.”

“I don’t—”

“You are a liar.”

“No, I’m not. Raise your—”

The flame burned the tip of his index finger and the side of his thumb and he dropped the match.

The cell vanished. He could hear the bedsprings wheeze, a coarse whisper of fabric against stone, a creaking of bones.

Teddy heard the name again:

“Laeddis.”

It came from the right side of the cell this time.

“This was never about the truth.”

He pulled two matches free, pressed them together.

“Never.”

He struck the match. The bed was empty. He moved his hand to the right and saw the man standing in the corner, his back to him.

“Was it?”

“What?” Teddy said.

“About the truth.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“This is about the truth. Exposing the—”

“This is about you. And Laeddis. This is all it’s ever been about. I was incidental. I was a way in.”

The man spun. Walked toward him. His face was pulverized. A swollen mess of purple and black and cherry red. The nose broken and covered in an X of white tape.

“Jesus,” Teddy said.

“You like it?”

“Who did this?”

“You did this.”

“How the hell could I have—”

George Noyce stepped up to the bars, his lips as thick as bicycle tires and black with sutures. “All your talk. All your fucking talk and I’m back in here. Because of you.”

Teddy remembered the last time he’d seen him in the visiting room at the prison. Even with the jail-house tan, he’d looked healthy, vibrant, most of his dark clouds lifted. He’d told a joke, something about an Italian and a German walking into a bar in El Paso.

“You look at me,” George Noyce said. “Don’t look away. You never wanted to expose this place.”

“George,” Teddy said, keeping his voice low, calm, “that’s not true.”

“It is.”

“No. What do you think I’ve spent the last year of my life planning for? This. Now. Right here.”

“Fuck you!”

Teddy could feel the scream hit his face.

“Fuck you!” George yelled again. “You spent the last year of your life planning? Planning to kill. That’s all. Kill Laeddis. That’s your fucking game. And look where it got me. Here. Back here. I can’t take here. I can’t take this fucking horror house. Do you hear me? Not again, not again, not again.”

“George, listen. How did they get to you? There have to be transfer orders. There have to be psychiatric consultations. Files, George. Paperwork.”

George laughed. He pressed his face between the bars and jerked his eyebrows up and down. “You want to hear a secret?”

Teddy took a step closer.

George said, “This is good…”

“Tell me,” Teddy said.

And George spit in his face.

Teddy stepped back and dropped the matches and wiped the phlegm off his forehead with his sleeve.

In the dark, George said, “You know what dear Dr. Cawley’s specialty is?”

Teddy ran a palm over his forehead and the bridge of his nose, found it dry. “Survivor guilt, grief trauma.”

“Noooo.” The word left George’s mouth in a dry chuckle. “Violence. In the male of the species, specifically. He’s doing a study.”

“No. That’s Naehring.”

“Cawley,” George said. “All Cawley. He gets the most violent patients and felons shipped in from all over the country. Why do you think the patient base here is so small? And do you think, do you honestly think that anyone is going to look closely at the transfer paperwork of someone with a history of violence and a history of psychological issues? Do you honestly fucking think that?”

Teddy fired up another two matches.

“I’m never getting out now,” Noyce said. “I got away once. Not twice. Never twice.”

Teddy said, “Calm down, calm down. How did they get to you?”

“They knew. Don’t you get it? Everything you were up to. Your whole plan. This is a game. A handsomely mounted stage play. All this"—his arm swept the air above him—"is for you.”

Teddy smiled. “They threw in a hurricane just for me, huh? Neat trick.”

Noyce was silent.

“Explain that,” Teddy said.

“I can’t.”

“Didn’t think so. Let’s relax with the paranoia. Okay?”

“Been alone much?” Noyce said, staring through the bars at him.

“What?”

“Alone. Have you ever been alone since this whole thing started?”

Teddy said, “All the time.”

George cocked one eyebrow. “Completely alone?”

“Well, with my partner.”

“And who’s your partner?”

Teddy jerked a thumb back up the cell block. “His name’s Chuck. He’s—”

“Let me guess,” Noyce said. “You’ve never worked with him before, have you?”

Teddy felt the cell block around him. The bones in his upper arms were cold. For a moment he was unable to speak, as if his brain had forgotten how to connect with his tongue.

Then he said, “He’s a U.S. marshal from the Seattle—”

“You’ve never worked with him before, have you?”

Teddy said, “That’s irrelevant. I know men. I know this guy. I trust him.”

“Based on what?”

There was no simple answer for that. How did anyone know where faith developed? One moment, it wasn’t there, the next it was. Teddy had known men in war whom he’d trust with his life on a battlefield and yet never with his wallet once they were off it. He’d known men he’d trust with his wallet and his wife but never to watch his back in a fight or go through a door with him.

Chuck could have refused to accompany him, could have chosen to stay back in the men’s dormitory, sleeping off the storm cleanup, waiting for word of the ferry. Their job was done—Rachel Solando had been found. Chuck had no cause, no vested interest, in following Teddy on his search for Laeddis, his quest to prove Ashecliffe was a mockery of the Hippocratic oath. And yet he was here.

“I trust him,” Teddy repeated. “That’s the only way I know how to put it.”

Noyce looked at him sadly through the steel tubing. “Then they’ve already won.”

Teddy shook the matches out and dropped them. He pushed open the cardboard box and found the last match. He heard Noyce, still at the bars, sniffing the air.

“Please,” he whispered, and Teddy knew he was weeping. “Please.”

“What?”

“Please don’t let me die here.”

“You won’t die here.”

“They’re going to take me to the lighthouse. You know that.”

“The lighthouse?”

“They’re going to cut out my brain.”

Teddy lit the match, saw in the sudden flare that Noyce gripped the bars and shook, the tears falling from his swollen eyes and down his swollen face.

“They’re not going to—”

“You go there. You see that place. And if you come back alive, you tell me what they do there. See it for yourself.”

“I’ll go, George. I’ll do it. I’m going to get you out of here.”

Noyce lowered his head and pressed his bare scalp to the bars and wept silently, and Teddy remembered that last time they’d met in the visitors’ room and George had said, “If I ever had to go back to that place, I’d kill myself,” and Teddy had said, “That’s not going to happen.”

A lie apparently.

Because here Noyce was. Beaten, broken, shaking with fear.

“George, look at me.”

Noyce raised his head.

“I’m going to get you out of here. You hold on. Don’t do anything you can’t come back from. You hear me? You hold on. I will come back for you.”

George Noyce smiled through the stream of tears and shook his head very slowly. “You can’t kill Laeddis and expose the truth at the same time. You have to make a choice. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Where is he?”

“Tell me you understand.”

“I understand. Where is he?”

“You have to choose.”

“I won’t kill anyone. George? I won’t.”

And looking through the bars at Noyce, he felt this to be true. If that’s what it took to get this poor wreck, this terrible victim, home, then Teddy would bury his vendetta. Not extinguish it. Save it for another time. And hope Dolores understood.

“I won’t kill anyone,” he repeated.

“Liar.”

“No.”

“She’s dead. Let her go.”

He pressed his smiling, weeping face between the bars and held Teddy with his soft swollen eyes.

Teddy felt her in him, pressed at the base of his throat. He could see her sitting in the early July haze, in that dark orange light a city gets on summer nights just after sundown, looking up as he pulled to the curb and the kids returned to their stickball game in the middle of the street, and the laundry flapped overhead, and she watched him approach with her chin propped on the heel of her hand and the cigarette held up by her ear, and he’d brought flowers for once, and she was so simply his love, his girl, watching him approach as if she were memorizing him and his walk and those flowers and this moment, and he wanted to ask her what sound a heart made when it broke from pleasure, when just the sight of someone filled you the way food, blood, and air never could, when you felt as if you’d been born for only one moment, and this, for whatever reason, was it.

Let her go, Noyce had said.

“I can’t,” Teddy said, and the words came out cracked and too high and he could feel screams welling in the center of his chest.

Noyce leaned back as far as he could and still maintain his grip on the bars and he cocked his head so that the ear rested on his shoulder.

“Then you’ll never leave this island.”

Teddy said nothing.

And Noyce sighed as if what he was about to say bored him to the point of falling asleep on his feet. “He was transferred out of Ward C. If he’s not in Ward A, there’s only one place he can be.”

He waited until Teddy got it.

“The lighthouse,” Teddy said.

Noyce nodded, and the final match went out.

For a full minute Teddy stood there, staring into the dark, and then he heard the bedsprings again as Noyce lay down.

He turned to go.

“Hey.”

He stopped, his back to the bars, and waited.

“God help you.”

16

TURNING TO WALK back through the cell block, he found Al waiting for him. He stood in the center of the granite corridor and fixed Teddy in a lazy gaze and Teddy said, “You get your guy?”

Al fell into step beside him. “Sure did. Slippery bastard, but in here there’s only so far you can go before you run out of room.”

They walked up the cell block, keeping to the center, and Teddy could hear Noyce asking if he’d ever been alone here. How long, he wondered, had Al been watching him? He thought back through his three days here, tried to find a single instance in which he’d been entirely alone. Even using the bathroom, he was using staff facilities, a man at the next stall or waiting just outside the door.

But, no, he and Chuck had gone out on the island alone several times…

He and Chuck.

What exactly did he know about Chuck? He pictured his face for a moment, could see him on the ferry, looking off at the ocean…

Great guy, instantly likeable, had a natural ease with people, the kind of guy you wanted to be around. From Seattle. Recently transferred. Hell of a poker player. Hated his father—the one thing that didn’t seem to jibe with the rest of him. There was something else off too, something buried in the back of Teddy’s brain, something…What was it?

Awkward. That was the word. But, no, there was nothing awkward about Chuck. He was smooth incarnate. Slick as shit through a goose, to use an expression Teddy’s father had been fond of. No, there was nothing remotely awkward about the man. But wasn’t there? Hadn’t there been one blip in time when Chuck had been clumsy in his movements? Yes. Teddy was sure the moment had happened. But he couldn’t remember the specifics. Not right now. Not here.

And, anyway, the whole idea was ridiculous. He trusted Chuck. Chuck had broken into Cawley’s desk, after all.

Did you see him do it?

Chuck, right now, was risking his career to get to Laeddis’s file.

How do you know?

They’d reached the door and Al said, “Just go back to the stairwell and follow those steps up. You’ll find the roof easy enough.”

“Thanks.”

Teddy waited, not opening the door just yet, wanting to see how long Al would hang around.

But Al just nodded and walked back into the cell block and Teddy felt vindicated. Of course they weren’t watching him. As far as Al knew, Teddy was just another orderly. Noyce was paranoid. Understandably so—who wouldn’t be in Noyce’s shoes?—but paranoid, just the same.

Al kept walking and Teddy turned the knob of the door and opened it, and there were no orderlies or guards waiting on the landing. He was alone. Completely alone. Unwatched. And he let the door close behind him and turned to go down the stairs and saw Chuck standing at the curve where they’d run into Baker and Vingis. He pinched his cigarette and took hard, quick hits off it and looked up at Teddy as he came down the steps, and turned and started moving fast.

“I thought we were meeting in the hall.”

“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:

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.

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.

Like 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?”

“Who doesn’t have those?”

“Ah, yes. But we’re not talking about generalities, other people. We’re talking about particulars. You. Do you have psychological weaknesses that they could exploit? Is there an event or events in your past that could be considered predicating factors to your losing your sanity? So that when they commit you here, and they will, your friends and colleagues will say, ‘Of course. He cracked. Finally. And who wouldn’t? It was the war that did it to him. And losing his mother—or what have you—like that.’ Hmm?”

Teddy said, “That could be said about anyone.”

“Well, that’s the point. Don’t you see? Yes, it could be said about anyone, but they’re going to say it about you. How’s your head?”

“My head?”

She chewed on her lower lip and nodded several times. “The block atop your neck, yes. How is it? Any funny dreams lately?”

“Sure.”

“Headaches?”

“I’m prone to migraines.”

“Jesus. You’re not.”

“I am.”

“Have you taken pills since you’ve come here, even aspirin?”

“Yes.”

“Feeling just a bit off, maybe? Not a hundred percent yourself? Oh, it’s no big deal, you say, you just feel a little punkish. Maybe your brain isn’t making connections quite as fast as normal. But you haven’t been sleeping well, you say. A strange bed, a strange place, a storm. You say these things to yourself. Yes?”

Teddy nodded.

“And you’ve eaten in the cafeteria, I assume. Drank the coffee they’ve given you. Tell me, at least, that you’ve been smoking your own cigarettes.”

“My partner’s,” Teddy admitted.

“Never took one from a doctor or an orderly?”

Teddy could feel the cigarettes he’d won in poker that night nestled in his shirt pocket. He remembered smoking one of Cawley’s the day they’d arrived, how it had tasted sweeter than other tobaccos he’d had in his life.

She could see the answer in his face.

“It takes an average of three to four days for neuroleptic narcotics to reach workable levels in the bloodstream. During that time, you’d barely notice their effects. Sometimes, patients have seizures. Seizures can often be dismissed as migraines, particularly if the patient has a migraine history. These seizures are rare, in any event. Usually, the only noticeable effects are that the patient—”

“Stop calling me a patient.”

“—dreams with an increased vividness and for longer sections of time, the dreams often stringing together and piggybacking off one another until they come to resemble a novel written by Picasso. The other noticeable effect is that the patient feels just a bit, oh, foggy. His thoughts are a wee bit less accessible. But he hasn’t been sleeping well, all those dreams you know, and so he can be forgiven for feeling a bit sluggish. And no, Marshal, I wasn’t calling you a ‘patient.’ Not yet. I was speaking rhetorically.”

“If I avoid all food, cigarettes, coffee, pills, how much damage could already be done?”

She pulled her hair back off her face and twisted it into a knot behind her head. “A lot, I’m afraid.”

“Let’s say I can’t get off this island until tomorrow. Let’s say the drugs have begun to take effect. How will I know?”

“The most obvious indicators will be a dry mouth coupled paradoxically with a drool impulse and, oh yes, palsy. You’ll notice small tremors. They begin where your wrist meets your thumb and they usually ride along that thumb for a while before they own your hands.”

Own.

Teddy said, “What else?”

“Sensitivity to light, left-brain headaches, words begin to stick. You’ll stutter more.”

Teddy could hear the ocean outside, the tide coming in, smashing against the rocks.

“What goes on in the lighthouse?” he said.

She hugged herself and leaned toward the fire. “Surgery.”

“Surgery? They can do surgery in the hospital.”

“Brain surgery.”

Teddy said, “They can do that there too.”

She stared into the flames. “Exploratory surgery. Not the ‘Let’s-open-the-skull-and-fix-that’ kind. No. The ‘Let’s-open-the-skull-and-see-what-happens-if-we-pull-on-this’ kind. The illegal kind, Marshal. Learned-it-from-the-Nazis kind.” She smiled at him. “That’s where they try to build their ghosts.”

“Who knows about this? On the island, I mean?”

“About the lighthouse?”

“Yes, the lighthouse.”

“Everyone.”

“Come on. The orderlies, the nurses?”

She held Teddy’s eyes through the flame, and hers were steady and clear.

“Everyone,” she repeated.

HE DIDN’T REMEMBER falling asleep, but he must have, because she was shaking him.

She said, “You have to go. They think I’m dead. They think I drowned. If they come looking for you, they could find me. I’m sorry. But you have to go.”

He stood and rubbed his cheeks just below his eyes.

“There’s a road,” she said. “Just east of the top of this cliff. Follow it and it winds down to the west. It’ll take you out behind the old commander’s mansion after about an hour’s walk.”

“Are you Rachel Solando?” he said. “I know the one I met was a fake.”

“How do you know?”

Teddy thought back to his thumbs the night before. He’d been staring at them as they put him to bed. When he woke, they’d been cleaned. Shoe polish, he’d thought, but then he remembered touching her face…

“Her hair was dyed. Recently,” he said.

“You need to go.” She turned his shoulder gently toward the opening.

“If I need to come back,” he said.

“I won’t be here. I move during the day. New places every night.”

“But I could come get you, take you off here.”

She gave him a sad smile and brushed the hair back along his temples. “You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you?”

“I have.”

“You’ll never get off here. You’re one of us now.” She pressed her fingers to his shoulder, nudged him toward the opening.

Teddy stopped at the ledge, looked back at her. “I had a friend. He was with me tonight and we got separated. Have you seen him?”

She gave him the same sad smile.

“Marshal,” she said, “you have no friends.”

18

BY THE TIME he reached the back of Cawley’s house, he could barely walk.

He made his way out from behind the house and started up the road to the main gate, feeling as if the distance had quadrupled since this morning, and a man came out of the dark on the road beside him and slid his arm under Teddy’s and said, “We’ve been wondering when you’d show up.”

The warden.

His skin was the white of candle wax, as smooth as if it were lacquered, and vaguely translucent. His nails, Teddy noticed, were as long and white as his skin, their points stopping just short of hooking and meticulously filed. But his eyes were the most disruptive thing about him. A silken blue, filled with a strange wonderment. The eyes of a baby.

“Nice to finally meet you, Warden. How are you?”

“Oh,” the man said, “I’m tip-top. Yourself?”

“Never better.”

The warden squeezed his arm. “Good to hear. Taking a leisurely stroll, were we?”

“Well, now that the patient’s been found, I thought I’d tour the island.”

“Enjoyed yourself, I trust.”

“Completely.”

“Wonderful. Did you come across our natives?”

It took Teddy a minute. His head was buzzing constantly now. His legs were barely holding him up.

“Oh, the rats,” he said.

The warden clapped his back. “The rats, yes! There’s something strangely regal about them, don’t you think?”

Teddy looked into the man’s eyes and said, “They’re rats.”

“Vermin, yes. I understand. But the way they sit on their haunches and stare at you if they believe they’re at a safe distance, and how swiftly they move, in and out of a hole before you can blink…” He looked up at the stars. “Well, maybe regal is the wrong word. How about utile? They’re exceptionally utile creatures.”

They’d reached the main gate and the warden kept his grip on Teddy’s arm and turned in place until they were looking back at Cawley’s house and the sea beyond.

“Did you enjoy God’s latest gift?” the warden said.

Teddy looked at the man and sensed disease in those perfect eyes. “I’m sorry?”

“God’s gift,” the warden said, and his arm swept the torn grounds. “His violence. When I first came downstairs in my home and saw the tree in my living room, it reached toward me like a divine hand. Not literally, of course. But figuratively, it stretched. God loves violence. You understand that, don’t you?”

“No,” Teddy said, “I don’t.”

The warden walked a few steps forward and turned to face Teddy. “Why else would there be so much of it? It’s in us. It comes out of us. It is what we do more naturally than we breathe. We wage war. We burn sacrifices. We pillage and tear at the flesh of our brothers. We fill great fields with our stinking dead. And why? To show Him that we’ve learned from His example.”

Teddy watched the man’s hand stroking the binding of the small book he pressed to his abdomen.

He smiled and his teeth were yellow.

“God gives us earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes. He gives us mountains that spew fire onto our heads. Oceans that swallow ships. He gives us nature, and nature is a smiling killer. He gives us disease so that in our death we believe He gave us orifices only so that we could feel our life bleed out of them. He gave us lust and fury and greed and our filthy hearts. So that we could wage violence in His honor. There is no moral order as pure as this storm we’ve just seen. There is no moral order at all. There is only this—can my violence conquer yours?”

Teddy said, “I’m not sure I—”

“Can it?” The warden stepped in close, and Teddy could smell his stale breath.

“Can what?” Teddy asked.

“Can my violence conquer yours?”

“I’m not violent,” Teddy said.

The warden spit on the ground near their feet. “You’re as violent as they come. I know, because I’m as violent as they come. Don’t embarrass yourself by denying your own blood lust, son. Don’t embarrass me. If the constraints of society were removed, and I was all that stood between you and a meal, you’d crack my skull with a rock and eat my meaty parts.” He leaned in. “If my teeth sank into your eye right now, could you stop me before I blinded you?”

Teddy saw glee in his baby eyes. He pictured the man’s heart, black and beating, behind the wall of his chest.

“Give it a try,” he said.

“That’s the spirit,” the warden whispered.

Teddy set his feet, could feel the blood rushing through his arms.

“Yes, yes,” the warden whispered. “’My very chains and I grew friends.’”

“What?” Teddy found himself whispering, his body vibrating with a strange tingling.

“That’s Byron,” the warden said. “You’ll remember that line, won’t you?”

Teddy smiled as the man took a step back. “They really broke the mold with you, didn’t they, Warden?”

A thin smile to match Teddy’s own.

“He thinks it’s okay.”

“What’s okay?”

“You. Your little endgame. He thinks it’s relatively harmless. But I don’t.”

“No, huh?”

“No.” The warden dropped his arm and took a few steps forward. He crossed his hands behind his back so that his book was pressed against the base of his spine and then turned and set his feet apart in the military fashion and stared at Teddy. “You say you were out for a stroll, but I know better. I know you, son.”

“We just met,” Teddy said.

The warden shook his head. “Our kind have known each other for centuries. I know you to your core. And I think you’re sad. I really do.” He pursed his lips and considered his shoes. “Sad is fine. Pathetic in a man, but fine because it has no effect on me. But I also think you’re dangerous.”

“Every man has a right to his opinion,” Teddy said.

The warden’s face darkened. “No, he doesn’t. Men are foolish. They eat and drink and pass gas and fornicate and procreate, and this last is particularly unfortunate, because the world would be a much better place with far fewer of us in it. Retards and mud children and lunatics and people of low moral character—that’s what we produce. That’s what we spoil this earth with. In the South now, they’re trying to keep their niggers in line. But I’ll tell you something, I’ve spent time in the South, and they’re all niggers down there, son. White niggers, black niggers, women niggers. Got niggers everywhere and they’re no more use than two-legged dogs. Least the dog can still sniff out a scent from time to time. You’re a nigger, son. You’re of low fiber. I can smell it in you.”

His voice was surprisingly light, almost feminine.

“Well,” Teddy said, “you won’t have to worry about me after the morning, will you, Warden?”

The warden smiled. “No, I won’t, son.”

“I’ll be out of your hair and off your island.”

The warden took two steps toward him, his smile dissolving. He cocked his head at Teddy and held him in his fetal gaze.

“You’re not going anywhere, son.”

“I beg to differ.”

“Beg all you want.” The warden leaned in and sniffed the air to the left of Teddy’s face, then moved his head, sniffed the air to the right of it.

Teddy said, “Smell something?”

“Mmm-hmm.” The warden leaned back. “Smells like fear to me, son.”

“You probably want to take a shower, then,” Teddy said. “Wash that shit off yourself.”

Neither of them spoke for a bit, and then the warden said, “Remember those chains, nigger. They’re your friends. And know that I’m very much looking forward to our final dance. Ah,” he said, “what carnage we’ll achieve.”

And he turned and walked up the road toward his house.

THE MEN’S DORMITORY was abandoned. Not a soul inside the place. Teddy went up to his room and hung his slicker in the closet and looked for any evidence that Chuck had returned there, but there was none.

He thought of sitting on the bed, but he knew if he did, he’d pass out and probably not wake until morning, so he went down to the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face and slicked back his crew cut with a wet comb. His bones felt scraped and his blood seemed thick as a malted, and his eyes were sunken and ringed red and his skin was gray. He splashed a few more handfuls of cold water up into his face and then dried off and went outside into the main compound.

No one.

The air was actually warming up, growing humid and sticky, and crickets and cicadas had begun to find their voices. Teddy walked the grounds, hoping that somehow Chuck had arrived ahead of him and was maybe doing the same thing, wandering around until he bumped into Teddy.

There was the guard on the gate, and Teddy could see lights in the rooms, but otherwise, the place was empty. He made his way over to the hospital and went up the steps and pulled on the door only to find it locked. He heard a squeak of hinges and looked out to see that the guard had opened the gate and gone out to join his comrade on the other side, and when the gate swung closed again, Teddy could hear his shoes scrape on the concrete landing as he stepped back from the door.

He sat on the steps for a minute. So much for Noyce’s theory. Teddy was now, beyond any doubt, completely alone. Locked in, yes. But unwatched as far as he could tell.

He walked around to the back of the hospital and his chest filled when he saw an orderly sitting on the back landing, smoking a cigarette.

Teddy approached, and the kid, a slim, rangy black kid, looked up at him. Teddy pulled a cigarette from his pocket and said, “Got a light?”

“Sure do.”

Teddy leaned in as the kid lit his cigarette, smiled his thanks as he leaned back and remembered what the woman had told him about smoking their cigarettes, and he let the smoke flow slowly out of his mouth without inhaling.

“How you doing tonight?” he said.

“All right, sir. You?”

“I’m okay. Where is everyone?”

The kid jerked his thumb behind him. “In there. Some big meeting. Don’t know about what.”

“All the doctors and nurses?”

The kid nodded. “Some of the patients too. Most of us orderlies. I got stuck with this here door ’cause the latch don’t work real good. Otherwise, though, yeah. Everyone in there.”

Teddy took another cigar puff off his cigarette, hoped the kid didn’t notice. He wondered if he should just bluff his way up the stairs, hope the kid took him for another orderly, one from Ward C maybe.

Then he saw through the window behind the kid that the hallway was filling and people were heading for the front door.

He thanked the kid for the light and walked around out front, was met with a crowd of people milling there, talking, lighting cigarettes. He saw Nurse Marino say something to Trey Washington, put her hand on his shoulder as she did, and Trey threw back his head and laughed.

Teddy started to walk over to them when Cawley called to him from the stairs. “Marshal!”

Teddy turned and Cawley came down the stairs toward him, touched Teddy’s elbow, and began walking toward the wall.

“Where’ve you been?” Cawley said.

“Wandering. Looking at your island.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Find anything amusing?”

“Rats.”

“Well, sure, we have plenty of those.”

“How’s the roof repair coming?” Teddy said.

Cawley sighed. “I have buckets all over my house catching water. The attic is done, wrecked. So’s the floor in the guest bedroom. My wife’s going to be beside herself. Her wedding gown was in that attic.”

“Where is your wife?” Teddy said.

“Boston,” Cawley said. “We keep an apartment there. She and the kids needed a break from this place, so they took a week’s vacation. It gets to you sometimes.”

“I’ve been here three days, Doctor, and it gets to me.”

Cawley nodded with a soft smile. “But you’ll be going.”

“Going?”

“Home, Marshal. Now that Rachel’s been found. The ferry usually gets here around eleven in the morning. Have you back in Boston by noon, I’d expect.”

“Won’t that be nice.”

“Yes, won’t it?” Cawley ran a hand over his head. “I don’t mind telling you, Marshal, and meaning no offense—”

“Oh, here we go again.”

Cawley held up a hand. “No, no. No personal opinions regarding your emotional state. No, I was about to say that your presence here has had an agitating effect on a lot of the patients. You know—Johnny Law’s in town. That made several of them a bit tense.”

“Sorry about that.”

“Not your fault. It was what you represent, not you personally.”

“Oh, well, that makes it all okay, then.”

Cawley leaned against the wall, propped a foot there, looking as tired as Teddy felt in his wrinkled lab coat and loosened tie.

“There was a rumor going around Ward C this afternoon that an unidentified man in orderly’s clothes was on the main floor.”

“Really?”

Cawley looked at him. “Really.”

“How about that.”

Cawley picked at some lint on his tie, flicked it off his fingers. “Said stranger apparently had some experience subduing dangerous men.”

“You don’t say.”

“Oh, I do. I do.”

“What else did Said Stranger get up to?”

“Well.” Cawley stretched his shoulders back and removed his lab coat, draped it over his arm, “I’m glad you’re interested.”

“Hey, nothing like a little rumor, a little gossip.”

“I agree. Said Stranger allegedly—and I can’t confirm this, mind you—had a long conversation with a known paranoid schizophrenic named George Noyce.”

“Hmm,” Teddy said.

“Indeed.”

“So this, um…”

“Noyce,” Cawley said.

“Noyce,” Teddy repeated. “Yeah, that guy—he’s delusional, huh?”

“To the extreme,” Cawley said. “He spins his yarns and his tall tales and he gets everyone agitated—”

“There’s that word again.”

“I’m sorry. Yes, well, he gets people in a disagreeable mood. Two weeks ago, in fact, he got people so cross that a patient beat him up.”

“Imagine that.”

Cawley shrugged. “It happens.”

“So, what kind of yarns?” Teddy asked. “What kind of tales?”

Cawley waved at the air. “The usual paranoid delusions. The whole world being out to get him and such.” He looked up at Teddy as he lit a cigarette, his eyes brightening with the flame. “So, you’ll be leaving.”

“I guess so.”

“The first ferry.”

Teddy gave him a frosty smile. “As long as someone wakes us up.”

Cawley returned the smile. “I think we can handle that.”

“Great.”

“Great.” Cawley said, “Cigarette?”

Teddy held up a hand to the proffered pack. “No, thanks.”

“Trying to quit?”

“Trying to cut down.”

“Probably a good thing. I’ve been reading in journals how tobacco might be linked to a host of terrible things.”

“Really?”

He nodded. “Cancer, I’ve heard, for one.”

“So many ways to die these days.”

“Agreed. More and more ways to cure, though.”

“You think so?”

“I wouldn’t be in this profession otherwise.” Cawley blew the smoke in a stream above his head.

Teddy said, “Ever have a patient here named Andrew Laeddis?”

Cawley dropped his chin back toward his chest. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“No?”

Cawley shrugged. “Should it?”

Teddy shook his head. “He was a guy I knew. “He—”

“How?”

“What’s that?”

“How did you know him?”

“In the war,” Teddy said.

“Oh.”

“Anyway, I’d heard he went a little bugs, got sent here.”

Cawley took a slow drag off his cigarette. “You heard wrong.”

“Apparently.”

Cawley said, “Hey, it happens. I thought you said ‘us’ a minute ago.”

“What?”

“’Us,’” Cawley said. “As in first-person plural.”

Teddy put a hand to his chest. “Referring to myself?”

Cawley nodded. “I thought you said, ‘As long as someone wakes us up.’ Us up.”

“Well, I did. Of course. Have you seen him by the way?”

Cawley raised his eyebrows at him.

Teddy said, “Come on. Is he here?”

Cawley laughed, looked at him.

“What?” Teddy said.

Cawley shrugged. “I’m just confused.”

“Confused by what?”

“You, Marshal. Is this some weird joke of yours?”

“What joke?” Teddy said. “I just want to know if he’s here.”

“Who?” Cawley said, a hint of exasperation in his voice.

“Chuck.”

“Chuck?” Cawley said slowly.

“My partner,” Teddy said. “Chuck.”

Cawley came off the wall, the cigarette dangling from his fingers. “You don’t have a partner, Marshal. You came here alone.”

19

TEDDY SAID, “Wait a minute…”

Found Cawley, closer now, peering up at him.

Teddy closed his mouth, felt the summer night find his eyelids.

Cawley said, “Tell me again. About your partner.”

Cawley’s curious gaze was the coldest thing Teddy had ever seen. Probing and intelligent and fiercely bland. It was the gaze of a straight man in a vaudeville revue, pretending not to know where the punch line would come from.

And Teddy was Ollie to his Stan. A buffoon with loose suspenders and a wooden barrel for pants. The last one in on the joke.

“Marshal?” Cawley taking another small step forward, a man stalking a butterfly.

If Teddy protested, if he demanded to know where Chuck was, if he even argued that there was a Chuck, he played into their hands.

Teddy met Cawley’s eyes and he saw the laughter in them.

“Insane men deny they’re insane,” Teddy said.

Another step. “Excuse me?”

“Bob denies he’s insane.”

Cawley crossed his arms over his chest.

“Ergo,” Teddy said, “Bob is insane.”

Cawley leaned back on his heels, and now the smile found his face.

Teddy met it with one of his own.

They stood there like that for some time, the night breeze moving through the trees above the wall with a soft flutter.

“You know,” Cawley said, toeing the grass at his feet, head down, “I’ve built something valuable here. But valuable things also have a way of being misunderstood in their own time. Everyone wants a quick fix. We’re tired of being afraid, tired of being sad, tired of feeling overwhelmed, tired of feeling tired. We want the old days back, and we don’t even remember them, and we want to push into the future, paradoxically, at top speed. Patience and forbearance become the first casualties of progress. This is not news. Not news at all. It’s always been so.” Cawley raised his head. “So as many powerful friends as I have, I have just as many powerful enemies. People who would wrest what I’ve built from my control. I can’t allow that without a fight. You understand?”

Teddy said, “Oh, I understand, Doctor.”

“Good.” Cawley unfolded his arms. “And this partner of yours?”

Teddy said, “What partner?”

TREY WASHINGTON WAS in the room when Teddy got back, lying on the bed reading an old issue of Life.

Teddy looked at Chuck’s bunk. The bed had been remade and the sheet and blanket were tucked tight and you’d never know someone had slept there two nights before.

Teddy’s suit jacket, shirt, tie, and pants had been returned from the laundry and hung in the closet under plastic wrap and he changed out of his orderly clothes and put them on as Trey flipped the glossy pages of the magazine.

“How you doing tonight, Marshal?”

“Doing okay.”

“That’s good, that’s good.”

He noticed that Trey wouldn’t look at him, kept his eyes on that magazine, turning the same pages over and over.

Teddy transferred the contents of his pockets, placing Laeddis’s intake form in his inside coat pocket along with his notebook. He sat on Chuck’s bunk across from Trey and tied his tie, tied his shoes, and then sat there quietly.

Trey turned another page of the magazine. “Going to be hot tomorrow.”

“Really?”

“Hot as a motherfucker. Patients don’t like the heat.”

“No?”

He shook his head, turned another page. “No, sir. Make ’em all itchy and whatnot. Got us a full moon too coming tomorrow night. Just make things a whole lot worse. All we need.”

“Why is that?”

“What’s that, Marshal?”

“The full moon. You think it makes people crazy?”

“I know it does.” Found a wrinkle in one of the pages and used his index finger to smooth it out.

“How come?”

“Well, you think about it—the moon affects the tide, right?”

“Sure.”

“Has some sort of magnet effect or something on water.”

“I’ll buy that.”

“Human brain,” Trey said, “is over fifty percent water.”

“No kidding?”

“No kidding. You figure ol’ Mr. Moon can jerk the ocean around, think what it can do to the head.”

“How long you been here, Mr. Washington?”

He finished smoothing out the wrinkle, turned the page. “Oh, long time now. Since I got out of the army in ’forty-six.”

“You were in the army?”

“Yes, I was. Came there for a gun, they gave me a pot. Fought the Germans with bad cooking, sir.”

“That was bullshit,” Teddy said.

“That was some bullshit, yes, Marshal. They let us into the war, it would have been over by ’forty-four.”

“You’ll get no argument from me.”

“You was in all sorts of places, huh?”

“Yeah, I was. Saw the world.”

“What’d you think of it?”

“Different languages, same shit.”

“Yeah, that’s the truth, huh?”

“You know what the warden called me tonight, Mr. Washington?”

“What’s that, Marshal?”

“A nigger.”

Trey looked up from the magazine. “He what?”

Teddy nodded. “Said there were too many people in this world who were of low fiber. Mud races. Niggers. Retards. Said I was just a nigger to him.”

“You didn’t like that, did you?” Trey chuckled, and the sound died as soon as it left his mouth. “You don’t know what it is to be a nigger, though.”

“I’m aware of that, Trey. This man is your boss, though.”

“Ain’t my boss. I work for the hospital end of things. The White Devil? He on the prison side.”

“Still your boss.”

“No, he ain’t.” Trey rose up on his elbow. “You hear? I mean, are we definitely clear on that one, Marshal?”

Teddy shrugged.

Trey swung his legs over the bed and sat up. “You trying to make me mad, sir?”

Teddy shook his head.

“So then why don’t you agree with me when I tell you I don’t work for that white son of a bitch?”

Teddy gave him another shrug. “In a pinch, if it came down to it and he started giving orders? You’d hop to.”

“I’d what?”

“Hop to. Like a bunny.”

Trey ran a hand along his jaw, considered Teddy with a hard grin of disbelief.

“I don’t mean any offense,” Teddy said.

“Oh, no, no.”

“It’s just I’ve noticed that people on this island have a way of creating their own truth. Figure they say it’s so enough times, then it must be so.”

“I don’t work for that man.”

Teddy pointed at him. “Yeah, that’s the island truth I know and love.”

Trey looked ready to hit him.

“See,” Teddy said, “they held a meeting tonight. And afterward, Dr. Cawley comes up and tells me I never had a partner. And if I ask you, you’ll say the same thing. You’ll deny that you sat with the man and played poker with the man and laughed with the man. You’ll deny he ever said the way you should have dealt with your mean old aunt was to run faster. You’ll deny he ever slept right here in this bed. Won’t you, Mr. Washington?”

Trey looked down at the floor. “Don’t know what you’re talking about, Marshal.”

“Oh, I know, I know. I never had a partner. That’s the truth now. It has been decided. I never had a partner and he’s not somewhere out on this island hurt. Or dead. Or locked up in Ward C or the lighthouse. I never had a partner. You want to repeat that after me, just so we’re clear? I never had a partner. Come on. Try it.”

Trey looked up. “You never had a partner.”

Teddy said, “And you don’t work for the warden.”

Trey clasped his hands on his knees. He looked at Teddy and Teddy could see that this was eating him. His eyes grew moist and the flesh along his chin trembled.

“You need to get out of here,” he whispered.

“I’m aware of that.”

“No.” Trey shook his head several times. “You don’t have any idea what’s really going on here. Forget what you heard. Forget what you think you know. They going to get to you. And there ain’t no coming back from what they going to do to you. No coming back no how.”

“Tell me,” Teddy said, but Trey was shaking his head again. “Tell me what’s going on here.”

“I can’t do that. I can’t. Look at me.” Trey’s eyebrows rose and his eyes widened. “I. Cannot. Do. That. You on your own. And I wouldn’t be waiting on no ferry.”

Teddy chuckled. “I can’t even get out of this compound, never mind off this island. And even if I could, my partner is—”

“Forget your partner,” Trey hissed. “He gone. You got it? He ain’t coming back, man. You gotta git. You gotta watch out for yourself and only yourself.”

“Trey,” Teddy said, “I’m locked in.”

Trey stood and went to the window, looked out into the dark or at his own reflection, Teddy couldn’t tell which.

“You can’t ever come back. You can’t ever tell no one I told you anything.”

Teddy waited.

Trey looked back over his shoulder at him. “We agreed?”

“Agreed,” Teddy said.

“Ferry be here tomorrow at ten. Leave for Boston at eleven sharp. A man was to stow away on that boat, he might just make it across the harbor. Otherwise, a man would have to wait two or three more days and a fishing trawler, name of Betsy Ross, she pull up real close to the southern coast, drop a few things off the side.” He looked back at Teddy. “Kinda things men ain’t supposed to have on this island. Now she don’t come all the way in. No, sir. So a man’d have to swim his way out to her.”

“I can’t do three fucking days on this island,” Teddy said. “I don’t know the terrain. The warden and his men damn sure do, though. They’ll find me.”

Trey didn’t say anything for a while.

“Then it’s the ferry,” he said eventually.

“It’s the ferry. But how do I get out of the compound?”

“Shit,” Trey said. “You might not buy this, but it is your lucky day. Storm fucked up everything, particularly the electrical systems. Now we repaired most of the wires on the wall. Most of them.”

Teddy said, “Which sections didn’t you get to?”

“The southwest corner. Those two are dead, right where the wall meets in a ninety-degree angle. The rest of them will fry you like chicken, so don’t slip and reach out and grab one. Hear?”

“I hear.”

Trey nodded to his reflection. “I’d suggest you git. Time’s wasting.”

Teddy stood. “Chuck,” he said.

Trey scowled. “There is no Chuck. All right? Never was. You get back to the world, you talk about Chuck all you like. But here? The man never happened.”

IT OCCURRED TO Teddy as he faced the southwest corner of the wall that Trey could be lying. If Teddy put a hand to those wires, got a good grip, and they were live, they’d find his body in the morning at the foot of the wall, as black as last month’s steak. Problem solved. Trey gets employee of the year, maybe a nice gold watch.

He searched around until he found a long twig, and then he turned to a section of wire to the right of the corner. He took a running jump at the wall, got his foot on it, and leapt up. He slapped the twig down on the wire and the wire spit out a burst of flame and the twig caught fire. Teddy came back to earth and looked at the wood in his hand. The flame went out, but the wood smoldered.

He tried it again, this time on the wire over the right side of the corner. Nothing.

He stood down below again, taking a breath, and then he jumped up the left wall, hit the wire again. And again, nothing.

There was a metal post atop the section where the wall met, and Teddy took three runs at the wall before he got a grip. He held tight and climbed up to the top of the wall and his shoulders hit the wire and his knees hit the wire and his forearms hit the wire, and each time, he thought he was dead.

He wasn’t. And once he’d reached the top, there wasn’t much to do but lower himself down to the other side.

He stood in the leaves and looked back at Ashecliffe.

He’d come here for the truth, and didn’t find it. He’d come here for Laeddis, and didn’t find him either. Along the way, he’d lost Chuck.

He’d have time to regret all that back in Boston. Time to feel guilt and shame then. Time to consider his options and consult with Senator Hurly and come up with a plan of attack. He’d come back. Fast. There couldn’t be any question of that. And hopefully he’d be armed with subpoenas and federal search warrants. And they’d have their own goddamned ferry. Then he’d be angry. Then he’d be righteous in his fury.

Now, though, he was just relieved to be alive and on the other side of this wall.

Relieved. And scared.

IT TOOK HIM an hour and a half to get back to the cave, but the woman had left. Her fire had burned down to a few embers, and Teddy sat by it even though the air outside was unseasonably warm and growing clammier by the hour.

Teddy waited for her, hoping she’d just gone out for more wood, but he knew, in his heart, that she wasn’t going to return. Maybe she believed he’d already been caught and was, at this moment, telling the warden and Cawley about her hiding place. Maybe—and this was too much to hope for, but Teddy allowed himself the indulgence—Chuck had found her and they’d gone to a location she believed was safer.

When the fire went out, Teddy took off his suit jacket and draped it over his chest and shoulders and placed his head back against the wall. Just as he had the night before, the last thing he noticed before he passed out were his thumbs.

They’d begun to twitch.