Dennis Lehane - Shutter Island

“You’re all fucking rapists. Where are my babies? Where are my babies? You give me back my babies, you sick sons-a-bitches! You give me my babies!”

She let loose a scream that rode up Teddy’s spine like a bullet, and she surged against her restraints so hard the gurney rails clattered, and Cawley said, “We’ll come check on you later, Rachel.”

She spit at him and Teddy heard it hit the floor and then she screamed again and there was blood on her lip from where she must have bitten it, and Cawley nodded at them and started walking and they fell into step behind him, Teddy looking back over his shoulder to see Rachel watching him, looking him right in the eye as she arched her shoulders off the mattress and the cords in her neck bulged and her lips were slick with blood and spittle as she shrieked at him, shrieked like she’d seen all the century’s dead climb through her window and walk toward her bed.

CAWLEY HAD A bar in his office, and he went to it as soon as they entered, crossing to the right, and that’s where Teddy lost him for a moment. He vanished behind a film of white gauze, and Teddy thought:

No, not now. Not now, for Christ’s sake.

“Where’d you find her?” Teddy said.

“On the beach near the lighthouse. Skipping stones into the ocean.”

Cawley reappeared, but only because Teddy shifted his head to the left as Cawley continued on to the right. As Teddy turned his head, the gauze covered a built-in bookcase and then the window. He rubbed his right eye, hoping against all evidence, but it did no good, and then he felt it along the left side of his head—a canyon filled with lava cut through the skull just below the part in his hair. He’d thought it was Rachel’s screams in there, the furious noise, but it was more than that, and the pain erupted like a dozen dagger points pushed slowly into his cranium, and he winced and raised his fingers to his temple.

“Marshal?” He looked up to see Cawley on the other side of his desk, a ghostly blur to his left.

“Yeah?” Teddy managed.

“You’re deathly pale.”

“You okay, boss?” Chuck was beside him suddenly.

“Fine,” Teddy managed, and Cawley placed his scotch glass down on the desk, and the sound of it was like a shotgun report.

“Sit down,” Cawley said.

“I’m okay,” Teddy said, but the words made their way down from his brain to his tongue on a spiked ladder.

Cawley’s bones cracked like burning wood as he leaned against the desk in front of Teddy. “Migraine?”

Teddy looked up at the blur of him. He would have nodded, but past experience had taught him never to nod during one of these. “Yeah,” he managed.

“I could tell by the way you’re rubbing your temple.”

“Oh.”

“You get them often?”

“Half-dozen…” Teddy’s mouth dried up and he took a few seconds to work some moisture back into his tongue. “…times a year.”

“You’re lucky,” Cawley said. “In one respect anyway.”

“How’s that?”

“A lot of migraine sufferers get cluster migraines once a week or so.” His body made that burning-wood sound again as he came off the desk and Teddy heard him unlock a cabinet.

“What do you get?” he asked Teddy. “Partial vision loss, dry mouth, fire in the head?”

“Bingo.”

“All the centuries we’ve studied the brain, and no one has a clue where they come from. Can you believe that? We know they attack the parietal lobe usually. We know they cause a clotting of the blood. It’s infinitesimal as these things go, but have it occur in something as delicate and small as the brain, and you will get explosions. All this time, though, all this study, and we know no more about the cause or much of the long-term effects than we do about how to stop the common cold.”

Cawley handed him a glass of water and put two yellow pills in his hand. “These should do the trick. Knock you out for an hour or two, but when you come to, you should be fine. Clear as a bell.”

Teddy looked down at the yellow pills, the glass of water that hung in a precarious grip.

He looked up at Cawley, tried to concentrate with his good eye because the man was bathed in a light so white and harsh that it flew off his shoulders and arms in shafts.

Whatever you do, a voice started to say in Teddy’s head…

Fingernails pried open the left side of his skull and poured a shaker of thumbtacks in there, and Teddy hissed as he sucked his breath in.

“Jesus, boss.”

“He’ll be fine, Marshal.”

The voice tried again: Whatever you do, Teddy…

Someone hammered a steel rod through the field of thumbtacks, and Teddy pressed the back of his hand to his good eye as tears shot from it and his stomach lurched.

…don’t take those pills.

His stomach went fully south, sliding across into his right hip as flames licked the sides of the fissure in his head, and if it got any worse, he was pretty sure he’d bite straight through his tongue.

Don’t take those fucking pills, the voice screamed, running back and forth down the burning canyon, waving a flag, rallying the troops.

Teddy lowered his head and vomited onto the floor.

“Boss, boss. You okay?”

“My, my,” Cawley said. “You do get it bad.”

Teddy raised his head.

Don’t…

His cheeks were wet with his own tears.

…take…

Someone had inserted a blade lengthwise into the canyon now.

…those…

The blade had begun to saw back and forth.

…pills.

Teddy gritted his teeth, felt his stomach surge again. He tried to concentrate on the glass in his hand, noticed something odd on his thumb, and decided it was the migraine playing tricks with his perception.

don’ttakethosepills.

Another long pull of the sawteeth across the pink folds of his brain, and Teddy had to bite down against a scream and he heard Rachel’s screams in there too with the fire and he saw her looking into his eyes and felt her breath on his lips and felt her face in his hands as his thumbs caressed her temples and that fucking saw went back and forth through his head—

don’ttakethosefuckingpills

—and he slapped his palm up to his mouth and felt the pills fly back in there and he chased them with water and swallowed, felt them slide down his esophagus and he gulped from the glass until it was empty.

“You’re going to thank me,” Cawley said.

Chuck was beside him again and he handed Teddy a handkerchief and Teddy wiped his forehead with it and then his mouth and then he dropped it to the floor.

Cawley said, “Help me get him up, Marshal.”

They lifted Teddy out of the chair and turned him and he could see a black door in front of him.

“Don’t tell anyone,” Cawley said, “but there’s a room through there where I steal my naps sometimes. Oh, okay, once a day. We’re going to put you in there, Marshal, and you’ll sleep this off. Two hours from now, you’ll be fit as a fiddle.”

Teddy saw his hands draping off their shoulders. They looked funny—his hands hanging like that just over his sternum. And the thumbs, they both had that optical illusion on them. What the fuck was it? He wished he could scratch the skin, but Cawley was opening the door now, and Teddy took one last look at the smudges on both thumbs.

Black smudges.

Shoe polish, he thought as they led him into the dark room.

How the hell did I get shoe polish on my thumbs?

THEY WERE THE worst dreams he’d ever had.

They began with Teddy walking through the streets of Hull, streets he had walked countless times from childhood to manhood. He passed his old schoolhouse. He passed the small variety store where he’d bought gum and cream sodas. He passed the Dickerson house and the Pakaski house, the Murrays, the Boyds, the Vernons, the Constantines. But no one was home. No one was anywhere. It was empty, the entire town. And dead quiet. He couldn’t even hear the ocean, and you could always hear the ocean in Hull.