Shutter Island(70)

“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.”