“And that’s all?” Chuck said.
“That’s all.”
Chuck wiped his eyes with his sleeve, pushed his hair off his forehead. “I don’t believe you. I just don’t.”
Teddy looked off to the south of the ring of trees, saw the top of Ashecliffe, its watchful dormers.
“And don’t you think Cawley knows why you’re really here?”
“I’m really here for Rachel Solando.”
“But fuck, Teddy, if the guy who killed your wife was committed here, then—”
“He wasn’t convicted for it. There’s nothing to tie me and him to each other. Nothing.”
Chuck sat down on a stone jutting out of the field, lowered his head to the rain. “The graveyard, then. Why don’t we see if we can find that, now that we’re out here? We see a ’Laeddis’ headstone, we know half the battle’s over.”
Teddy looked off at the ring of trees, the black depth of them. “Fine.”
Chuck stood. “What did she say to you, by the way?”
“Who?”
“The patient.” Chuck snapped his fingers. “Bridget. She sent me for water. She said something to you, I know it.”
“She didn’t.”
“She didn’t? You’re lying. I know she—”
“She wrote it,” Teddy said and patted the pockets of his trench coat for his notebook.
He found it eventually in his inside pocket and started to flip through it.
Chuck began to whistle and clop his feet into the soft earth in a goose step.
When he reached the page, Teddy said, “Adolf, enough.”
Chuck came over. “You find it?”
Teddy nodded, turned the notebook so that Chuck could see the page, the single word written there, tightly scrawled and already beginning to bleed in the rain:
run
9
THEY FOUND THE stones about a half mile inland as the sky rushed toward darkness under slate-bottomed clouds. They came over soggy bluffs where the sea grass was lank and slick in the rain, and they were both covered in mud from clawing and stumbling their way up.
A field lay below them, as flat as the undersides of the clouds, bald except for a stray bush or two, some heavy leaves tossed in by the storm, and a multitude of small stones that Teddy initially assumed had come with the leaves, riding the wind. He paused halfway down the far side of the bluff, though, gave them another look.
They were spread across the field in small, tight piles, each pile separated from the one closest to it by about six inches, and Teddy put his hand on Chuck’s shoulder and pointed at them.
“How many piles do you count?”
Chuck said, “What?”
Teddy said, “Those rocks. You see ’em?”
“Yeah.”
“They’re piled separately. How many do you count?”
Chuck gave him a look like the storm had found his head. “They’re rocks.”
“I’m serious.”
Chuck gave him a bit more of that look and then turned his attention to the field. After a minute, he said, “I count ten.”
“Me too.”
The mud gave way under Chuck’s foot and he slipped, flailed back with an arm that Teddy caught and held until Chuck righted himself.
“Can we go down?” Chuck said and gave Teddy a mild grimace of annoyance.
They worked their way down and Teddy went to the stone piles and saw that they formed two lines, one above the other. Some piles were much smaller than others. A few contained only three or four stones while others had more than ten, maybe even twenty.
Teddy walked between the two lines and then stopped and looked over at Chuck and said, “We miscounted.”
“How?”
“Between these two piles here?” Teddy waited for him to join him and then they were looking down at it. “That’s one stone right there. Its own single pile.”
“In this wind? No. It fell from one of the other stacks.”
“It’s equidistant to the other piles. Half a foot to the left of that one, half a foot to the right of that one. And in the next row, the same thing occurs again twice. Single stones.”
“So?”
“So, there’re thirteen piles of rock, Chuck.”
“You think she left this. You really do.”
“I think someone did.”
“Another code.”
Teddy squatted by the rocks. He pulled his trench coat over his head and extended the flaps of it in front of his body to protect his notebook from the rain. He moved sideways like a crab and paused at each pile to count the number of stones and write it down. When he was finished, he had thirteen numbers: 18-1-4-9-5-4-23-1-12-4-19-14-5.
“Maybe it’s a combination,” Chuck said, “for the world’s biggest padlock.”
Teddy closed the notebook and placed it in his pocket. “Good one.”
“Thank you, thank you,” Chuck said. “I’ll be appearing twice nightly in the Catskills. Please come out, won’t you?”
Teddy pulled the trench coat back off his head and stood, and the rain pounded him again and the wind had found its voice.
They walked north with the cliffs off to the right and Ashecliffe shrouded to their left somewhere in the smash of wind and rain. It grew measurably worse in the next half hour, and they pressed their shoulders together in order to hear each other talk and listed like drunks.
“Cawley asked you if you were Army Intelligence. Did you lie to him?”
“I did and I didn’t,” Teddy said. “I received my discharge from regular army.”
“How’d you enter, though?”
“Out of basic, I was sent to radio school.”
“And from there?”
“A crash course at War College and then, yeah, Intel’.”
“So how’d you end up in regulation brown?”
“I fucked up.” Teddy had to shout it against the wind. “I blew a decoding. Enemy position coordinates.”
“How bad?”
Teddy could still hear the noise that had come over the radio. Screams, static, crying, static, machine gun fire followed by more screams and more crying and more static. And a boy’s voice, in the near background of all that noise, saying, “You see where the rest of me went?”
“About half a battalion,” Teddy shouted into the wind. “Served ’em up like meat loaf.”
There was nothing but the gale in his ears for a minute, and then Chuck yelled, “I’m sorry. That’s horrible.”
They crested a knoll and the wind up top nearly blew them back off it, but Teddy gripped Chuck’s elbow and they surged forward, heads down, and they walked that way for some time, bowing their heads and bodies into the wind, and they didn’t even notice the headstones at first. They kept trudging along with the rain filling their eyes and then Teddy bumped into a slate stone that tipped backward and was wrenched from its hole by the wind and lay flat on its back looking up at him.
JACOB PLUGH
BOSUN’S MATE
1832-1858
A tree broke to their left, and the crack of it sounded like an ax through a tin roof, and Chuck yelled, “Jesus Christ,” and parts of the tree were picked up by the wind and shot past their eyes.
They moved into the graveyard with their arms up around their faces and the dirt and leaves and pieces of trees gone alive and electric, and they fell several times, almost blinded by it, and Teddy saw a fat charcoal shape ahead and started pointing, his shouts lost to the wind. A chunk of something passed so close to his head he could feel it kiss his hair and they ran with the wind battering their legs and the earth rising up and chunking against their knees.
A mausoleum. The door was steel but broken at the hinges, and weeds sprouted from the foundation. Teddy pulled the door back and the wind tore into him, banged him to his left with the door, and he fell to the ground and the door rose off its broken lower hinge and yowled and then slammed back against the wall. Teddy slipped in the mud and rose to his feet and the wind battered h
is shoulders and he dropped to one knee and saw the black doorway facing him and he plunged forward through the muck and crawled inside.
“You ever see anything like this?” Chuck said as they stood in the doorway and watched the island whirl itself into a rage. The wind was thick with dirt and leaves, tree branches and rocks and always the rain, and it squealed like a pack of boar and shredded the earth.
“Never,” Teddy said, and they stepped back from the doorway.
Chuck found a pack of matches that was still dry in the inside pocket of his coat and he lit three at once and tried to block the wind with his body and they saw that the cement slab in the center of the room was empty of a coffin or a body, either moved or stolen in the years since it had been interred. There was a stone bench built into the wall on the other side of the slab, and they walked to it as the matches went out. They sat down and the wind continued to sweep past the doorway and hammer the door against the wall.
“Kinda pretty, though, huh?” Chuck said. “Nature gone crazy, the color of that sky…You see the way that headstone did a backflip?”
“I gave it a nudge, but, yeah, that was impressive.”
“Wow.” Chuck squeezed his pants cuffs until there were puddles under his feet, fluttered his soaked shirt against his chest. “Guess we should have stayed closer to home base. We might have to ride this out. Here.”
Teddy nodded. “I don’t know enough about hurricanes, but I get the feeling it’s just warming up.”
“That wind changes direction? That graveyard’s going to be coming in here.”
“I’d still rather be in here than out there.”
“Sure, but seeking high ground in a hurricane? How fucking smart are we?”
“Not very.”
“It was so fast. One second it was just heavy rain, the next second we’re Dorothy heading to Oz.”
“That was a tornado.”
“Which?”
“In Kansas.”
“Oh.”
The squealing rose in pitch and Teddy could hear the wind find the thick stone wall behind him, pounding on it like fists until he could feel tiny shudders of impact in his back.
“Just warming up,” he repeated.
“What do you suppose all the crazies are doing about now?”
“Screaming back at it,” he said.
They sat silent for a while and each had a cigarette. Teddy was reminded of that day on his father’s boat, of his first realization that nature was indifferent to him and far more powerful, and he pictured the wind as something with a hawk’s face and hooked beak as it swooped over the mausoleum and cawed. An angry thing that turned waves into towers and chewed houses into matchsticks and could lift him in its grasp and throw him to China.
“I was in North Africa in ’forty-two,” Chuck said. “Went through a couple of sandstorms. Nothing like this, though. Then again, you forget. Maybe it was as bad.”
“I can take this,” Teddy said. “I mean, I wouldn’t walk out into what’s going on now, start strolling around, but it beats the cold. The Ardennes, Jesus, your breath froze coming out of your mouth. To this day, I can feel it. So cold my fingers felt like they were on fire. How do you figure that?”
“North Africa, we had the heat. Guys dropping from it. Just standing there one minute, on the deck the next. Guys had coronaries from it. I shot this guy and his skin was so soft from the heat, he actually turned and watched the bullet fly out the other side of his body.” Chuck tapped the bench with his finger. “Watched it fly,” he said softly. “I swear to God.”
“Only guy you ever killed?”
“Up close. You?”
“I was the opposite. Killed a lot, saw most of them.” Teddy leaned his head back against the wall, looked up at the ceiling. “If I ever had a son, I don’t know if I’d let him go to war. Even a war like that where we had no choice. I’m not sure that should be asked of anyone.”
“What?”
“Killing.”
Chuck raised a knee to his chest. “My parents, my girlfriend, some of my friends who couldn’t pass the physical, they all ask, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“What was it like? That’s what they want to know. And you want to say, ’I don’t know what it was like. It happened to someone else. I was just watching it from above or something.’” He held out his hands. “I can’t explain it any better. Did that make a bit of sense?”
Teddy said, “At Dachau, the SS guards surrendered to us. Five hundred of them. Now there were reporters there, but they’d seen all the bodies piled up at the train station too. They could smell exactly what we were smelling. They looked at us and they wanted us to do what we did. And we sure as hell wanted to do it. So we executed every one of those fucking Krauts. Disarmed them, leaned them against walls, executed them. Machine-gunned over three hundred men at one time. Walked down the line putting bullets into the head of anyone still breathing. A war crime if ever there was one. Right? But, Chuck, that was the least we could have done. Fucking reporters were clapping. The camp prisoners were so happy they were weeping. So we handed a few of the storm troopers over to them. And they tore them to shreds. By the end of that day, we’d removed five hundred souls from the face of the earth. Murdered ’em all. No self-defense, no warfare came into it. It was homicide. And yet, there was no gray area. They deserved so much worse. So, fine—but how do you live with that? How do you tell the wife and the parents and the kids that you’ve done this thing? You’ve executed unarmed people? You’ve killed boys? Boys with guns and uniforms, but boys just the same? Answer is—You can’t tell ’em. They’ll never understand. Because what you did was for the right reason. But what you did was also wrong. And you’ll never wash it off.”
After a while, Chuck said, “At least it was for the right reason. You ever look at some of these poor bastards come back from Korea? They still don’t know why they were there. We stopped Adolf. We saved millions of lives. Right? We did something, Teddy.”
“Yeah, we did,” Teddy admitted. “Sometimes that’s enough.”
“It’s gotta be. Right?”
An entire tree swept past the door, upside down, its roots sprouting upward like horns.
“You see that?”
“Yeah. It’s gonna wake up in the middle of the ocean, say, ’Wait a second. This isn’t right.’
“’I’m supposed to be over there.’
“’Took me years to get that hill looking the way I wanted it.’”
They laughed softly in the dark and watched the island race by like a fever dream.
“So how much do you really know about this place, boss?”
Teddy shrugged. “I know some. Not nearly enough. Enough to scare me.”
“Oh, great. You’re scared. What’s normal mortal supposed to feel, then?”
Teddy smiled. “Abject terror?”
“Okay. Consider me terrified.”
“It’s known as an experimental facility. I told you—radical therapy. Its funding comes partially from the Commonwealth, partially from the Bureau of Federal Penitentiaries, but mostly from a fund set up in ’fifty-one by HUAC.”
“Oh,” Chuck said. “Terrific. Fighting the Commies from an island in Boston Harbor. How does one go about doing that?”
“They experiment on the mind. That’s my guess. Write down what they know, turn it over to Cawley’s old OSS buddies in the CIA maybe. I dunno. You ever heard of phencyclidine?”
Chuck shook his head.
“LSD? Mescaline?”
“Nope and nope.”
“They’re hallucinogens,” Teddy said. “Drugs that cause you to hallucinate.”
“All right.”
“In even minimal doses, strictly sane people—you or I—would start seeing things.”
“Upside-down trees flying past our door?”
“Ah, there’s the rub. If we’re both seeing it, it’s not a hallucination. Everyone sees different things. Say you looked down right now and your arms had turn
ed to cobras and the cobras were rising up, opening their jaws to eat your head?”
“I’d say that would be a hell of a bad day.”
“Or those raindrops turned into flames? A bush became a charging tiger?”
“An even worse day. I should’ve never left the bed. But, hey, you’re saying a drug could make you think shit like that was really happening?”
“Not just ’could.’ Will. Given the right dosage, you will start to hallucinate.”
“Those are some drugs.”
“Yeah, they are. A lot of these drugs? Their effect is supposedly identical to what it’s like to be a severe schizophrenic. What’s his name, Ken, that guy. The cold in his feet. He believes that. Leonora Grant, she wasn’t seeing you. She was seeing Douglas Fairbanks.”
“Don’t forget—Charlie Chaplin too, my friend.”
“I’d do an imitation, but I don’t know what he sounds like.”
“Hey, not bad, boss. You can open for me in the Catskills.”
“There have been documented cases of schizophrenics tearing their own faces off because they believed their hands were something else, animals or whatever. They see things that aren’t there, hear voices no one else hears, jump from perfectly sound roofs because they think the building’s on fire, and on and on. Hallucinogens cause similar delusions.”
Chuck pointed a finger at Teddy. “You’re suddenly speaking with a lot more erudition than usual.”
Teddy said, “What can I tell you? I did some homework. Chuck, what do you think would happen if you gave hallucinogens to people with extreme schizophrenia?”
“No one would do that.”
“They do it, and it’s legal. Only humans get schizophrenia. It doesn’t happen to rats or rabbits or cows. So how are you going to test cures for it?”
“On humans.”
“Give that man a cigar.”
“A cigar that’s just a cigar, though, right?”
Teddy said, “If you like.”
Chuck stood and placed his hands on the stone slab, looked out at the storm. “So they’re giving schizophrenics drugs that make them even more schizophrenic?”
“That’s one test group.”
Shutter Island Page 11
