Shutter Island

It is now Teddy’s third day on Shutter Island, and the storm has finally passed through. Unfortunately, it has left considerable damage in its wake. When Teddy and Chuck hear staff members talking about how the back-up generator to Ward C has failed, they realize they have the perfect opportunity to see what Cawley has hidden there. Teddy and Chuck are still wearing their borrowed orderly scrubs, so they also have the perfect disguise to slip in the building unnoticed and search for information about Ashecliffe’s experiments.

When Teddy enters Ward C, he is first struck by the underlying smell of “vomit, feces, sweat, and most of all, urine” (218). The next thing he notices is the chaos. With the back-up generator down, the cell doors have opened, and orderlies are working to find escaped patients and return them to their beds.

Teddy and Chuck take advantage of the disorder to start exploring the building, and one room catches Teddy’s attention. He recognizes it from one of his dreams—it is the room where Rachel killed three children with a cleaver. The images of the dream overlay the scene until Chuck’s conversation snaps him out of it. The pair keep moving, but they are stopped short by a commotion on the stairwell.