The Devil in Silver

by Victor Lavalle

  This is what was happening to Josephine while Dorry handed out cigarettes, walked to the television lounge, and unlocked the door to the basketball court. Pepper propped the door open with a heavy chair, which allowed a fresh breeze to blow into the unit. First time in a long while for that. You could almost see the walls inhaling.

  Josephine stared at the keypad of her cell phone and willed herself to dial 911. Dorry and Loochie and Coffee and Pepper left the television lounge, marching down Northwest 5. The police hadn’t been called yet. Whatever they were going to do could still get done.

  They still had time.

  Pepper, Dorry, Loochie, and Coffee returned to the nurses’ station. They were much quieter than the patients in the lounge, whose voices played louder than the television. It seemed like a party was being thrown. There was an undertone of forced cheer, though. As if those patients were working hard to celebrate. Hoping to drown out the sounds of whatever was coming next.

  Coffee walked into the nurses’ station and touched the beige plastic phone. He seemed to forget the others. He whispered the phone number to himself now, ten digits: “5102821833. 5102821833. 5102821833.”

  Dorry and Pepper watched Coffee with concern. Even Dorry couldn’t ignore what Coffee had said about accessing the Internet with his mind. Let him dial the number, if that made him feel better. The rest of them would do the real work.

  “What now?” Dorry asked Pepper. “You want me to unlock the front door for you?”

  Pepper took a step inside the nurses’ station, too. There were so many files, multiple stacks. Was his there? He grabbed a handful of folders and looked at the names written on the tabs.

  “I could make it,” Pepper said as he scanned for his name. Those files were for one patient: Samantha Forrester. Was that Sam?

  Dorry hesitated a moment, she hadn’t expected him to leave. Finally she said, “Where would you go?”

  “I’ve got an apartment. Rent’s paid automatically.”

  Dorry looked bereft. She put her hand against the nurses’ station desktop for balance. Coffee was clearly cuckoo. In a moment Pepper would walk away. Not much of a team.

  Coffee mashed at the phone with an open palm. “It won’t let me make the call.”

  Coffee tried again while Dorry and Pepper watched.

  Dorry sighed. “You have to press the pound sign, then nine, then three. Then you can make an outside call.”

  Coffee did as she said. He looked up from the keypad. “It’s ringing!”

  Dorry looked at Pepper, who’d taken up another handful of files, hunting for his. She leaned her elbows on the desktop.

  “As soon as the police brought you in, I knew why you’d ended up here.”

  Pepper set down the next handful of files and lifted another.

  “I’m not talking about your crime,” Dorry continued. “I’m talking about something bigger than that.”

  “Destiny?”

  He didn’t even look up. Destiny. Fate. Solace for losers. And a defense for the ones who’d hoarded success. By almost anyone’s math, he hadn’t made too much of his life. Not as much as he would’ve imagined by forty-two. Not referring to money here, or some kind of fame, but worth. He’d wanted—let’s say, expected—to be valuable by this age. Somehow. But so far he’d done little worth treasuring. So if that was his fate, then fuck fate.

  He dropped the folders to the floor. The papers scattered at his feet.

  “I’m talking about a calling,” Dorry said. “When they brought you in here, I saw you and knew you were here to meet your purpose.”

  That got Pepper’s attention. Dorry looked into his face, and while it’s true that her sweater was inside out and her hair maybe didn’t look quite as well kept as it had been two days before, but her halfblind eyes didn’t look wild just then. If the time off the meds had been just a little too long for Coffee, maybe Dorry had been off them just long enough to say something absolutely right. Maybe she could see something in him that even he couldn’t right now. She believed in him. Who doesn’t hope for something like that, at least once?

  But before Pepper could ask what purpose Dorry saw for him, Coffee yelled into the phone. “Hello? Yes! Who am I speaking to?”

  Coffee stood straighter, erect with pride.

  “It’s good to speak with you Ms. Hong. I am called Kofi Acholi, and I wish to speak with your superior. What? Yes, that’s Kofi, K-O-F-I.”

  Dorry slapped the top of the nurses’ station. “Your name is Kofi? Do you know we’ve been calling you Coffee all this time?”

  Coffee covered the receiver with one hand. “I am aware,” he said.

  Then Pepper finally asked the question that should’ve come up minutes ago. “Where’s Loochie?”

  Coffee returned to the phone. “You do know who I mean, Ms. Hong. Of course you do. Our President. The Big Boss. I don’t need to say any more. Now, let him know I am calling about conditions in New Hyde.”

  Dorry and Pepper were less concerned about the phone call that wasn’t apparently magically connecting to the fucking President’s social secretary, and instead they moved around the nurses’ station to seek out their fourth member.

  “Maybe she went to smoke?” Dorry asked.

  Pepper said, “No.”

  Dorry turned and saw Loochie walking calmly as you please. She was three-quarters of the way down Northwest 4.

  “What are you doing?” Dorry shouted. “We haven’t even figured out what we should say to him yet!”

  Loochie looked over her shoulder. “You all were stalling! You weren’t going to ever open this fucking door!”

  Coffee’s voice rose. He was screeching. “Washington, D.C.! The nation’s capital. No, that’s not where I am. That’s where you are! What do you mean ‘Oakland’? The President doesn’t live in Oakland!”

  Dorry called to Loochie. “Well, how are you going to open the damn door if I’ve got the keys?!”

  Loochie didn’t even look back, only extended her right arm, and there, dangling from her wrist was Scotch Tape’s set. They hadn’t searched Josephine for her cell phone, so it shouldn’t be surprising that they’d forgotten to secure the extra set of keys, too. When Loochie dragged Scotch Tape to the conference room, she’d snatched them off his wrist. That’s really why she’d volunteered to haul him.

  Coffee pleaded with the person on the other end of the line. “Do not hang up on me! Please! Do not hang up!” His voice softened, it quieted. “You are my last resort.”

  Then the receiver fell out of Coffee’s hand and bounced against the floor.

  But there wasn’t any time to comfort Coffee. Kofi. Not for Pepper, anyway. He sped toward Loochie. When she heard his boots clomping, she picked up the pace. She sprinted.

  Running aggravated Pepper’s still-tender ribs. He winced and hunched forward when he sped up. He almost tripped. The closer he came to Loochie, the closer he was to the silver door. The air became warmer, just like the last time he got this close.

  There was that smell again. The one from the first night the Devil visited Pepper’s room. The scent on an unclean body. So strong here that it tainted the walls, the floor, the silver door. An unclean place. The air so sour his throat closed up and his eyes burned.

  Down the hall, Kofi howled. “Okay, then! I tried!”

  Loochie slid the key into the lock. There were twenty keys to choose from, but she found the exact right one on the first try.

  “Don’t,” Pepper pleaded.

  But Loochie turned the key.

  She let the Devil out.

  21

  THE SILVER DOOR didn’t just open; it seemed to explode.

  The stainless steel swung back so hard, its handle clanged against the wall and busted a small hole in the Sheetrock. It was as if the Devil had been inside the room, straining to get out, too.

  Then: animal fur, sour and matted, passed between Loochie and Pepper.

  The smell of waste, worse than from a public toilet, hit them, too. Sewe
r water, sewage, sweat, and saliva that have caked and dried. Loochie and Pepper’s eyelids fluttered. Their eyes watered. From a distance, this looked like tears.

  The Devil rushed into the hallway. Its enormous crown leading the charge. Animal fur, sour and matted and curled into knots.

  There were two smallish ears on its long, enormous head. They were small compared to the skull’s grand dimensions. The ears were the size of children’s mittens and about the same shape; they flipped and shook, as if bitten by gnats.

  Just above those ears were its horns. Not very long, but thick and gnarled. Points turned upward, toward the ceiling. They were grayish white, the color of exposed bone. Each tip seemed as sharp as a lance’s. Animal fur, sour and matted and curled into knots, all of it brown as mud.

  The head of a plains bison charged through the open door. The sight unmistakable under the hallway lights.

  And somewhere, in all that hair, were the Devil’s two small eyes. Glassy and white and without fear.

  Pepper actually cackled at the sight of thing. Not laughter or bravado, but something crazed. He stood in Northwest 4 with a monster. Such things were impossible, he knew this, but there it was.

  The Devil rushed right past Loochie and Pepper. Its head tilted down. It was charging. The horns aiming to gore.

  Dorry stood at the lip of Northwest 4. She watched the Devil stampede.

  “That’s fine!” Kofi howled again, inside the nurses’ station. He pulled at every drawer in there. Dorry had only unlocked the one that held the staff’s cigarettes, so the others remained locked tight. “Dorry,” he called. “Give me the keys!”

  Loochie and Pepper watched the Devil bolt forward. It had passed between them without any resistance. In twenty paces it would smash into Dorry.

  The old woman stood, paralyzed. She held the key chain in one hand and in the other a clipboard. It was the one the staff read from when handing out medication to patients. She looked as if she planned to read off the Devil’s name and proper doses.

  “I see you,” she muttered, looking into the Devil’s empty eyes.

  Luckily, for all of them, the Devil looked different from behind. A fiend from the front but from the back, the Devil had the body of an old man. A skinny, half-naked old man running down the hall. Now who’s going to be scared of that?

  Not Loochie. Not Pepper.

  The pair finally got their wits back. They ran down the hall now. The Devil had a head start, but they would catch up quickly.

  Its body looked even thinner than Pepper remembered, saggier. The flesh jiggled and swayed. The skin looked reddish, like there was a heat rash all over it, the color of a stewed tomato. Splotchy and mottled. Weak.

  But they could still see the back of that vast head, its weight driving the puny figure forward. And its feet, the bottoms hard and nearly gray, clopped like hooves.

  Loochie caught up to the Devil first, halfway down Northwest 4. She came from behind and grasped its right horn with her right hand. She held the horn and leaned backward, her weight would do the rest. This was a variation on the way she’d taken Pepper out. Apply a little weight and momentum properly and nearly anybody will go down. Loochie was small but she knew how to tussle. She’d learned how to protect herself on the juvenile psychiatric ward.

  The Devil’s head jerked to the right, hard, and for the first time it looked back at her. It noticed her. And she saw more of it. The white eyes and the twitching ears and those two sharp horns. The long slope of its face, leading down to its wet nose, which sniffled and snuffed. And last its mouth, which fell open with surprise. Then its tongue shot out, almost a foot long and the color of uncooked dough.

  Loochie Gardner had yoked the Devil.

  It didn’t speak, it grumbled like an old Johnny Popper tractor. The Devil snorted, once, and from its nose snot slapped against the floor. A gray puddle the size of Pepper’s foot. The Devil shook its head twice and, just that fast, Loochie lost her grip. She was flipped forward. She went down to the floor, on her stomach, right in front of the thing.

  The Devil raised its right foot to stomp her in the small of her back. But she wasn’t alone. Pepper was there, too.

  He didn’t have the finesse to go grabbing horns like rodeo-riding Loochie, so instead, he just full-body tackled the beast. Well, that makes it sound a bit too graceful. Pepper threw his body at the Devil’s left leg, which was supporting all its weight. This was a variation on the way Pepper had taken down Loochie’s family. It didn’t take much to topple the Devil just then, and Pepper gave it all the not-much he had.

  The Devil and Pepper fell into a heap. Loochie scrambled off safely.

  Right after they both fell, Pepper felt like he’d been dropped into a freezing pool. The pain in his chest, all along his rib cage, made him lose his breath. He gasped from it. He shivered. His vision went nearly black.

  The Devil fell face-forward, onto its stomach. Its head slammed hard against the floor, a thump as loud as a couch being dropped. In that position it couldn’t right itself. The thin arms, frail branches, pushed and strained but didn’t have the strength to lift that enormous head. The Devil huffed on the ground, spraying more snot as it breathed, the mucus catching in the fur around its mouth and nose. Its legs scrambled, but they were pretty powerless, too. The Devil couldn’t get up. Now it looked as vulnerable as any living thing.

  So when Loochie climbed onto its back again, when she grabbed both horns from behind, when she pulled with all the strength her wiry shoulders could muster, it was difficult not to feel just a spark of sympathy, yes, for the Devil. Pepper experienced shivers of recognition: when the cops had him in handcuffs, or the orderly wrestled him to his bed, or the days stuck in restraints. Pepper didn’t want to make that connection when looking upon the Devil, but he did.

  That empathy wasn’t lost on Loochie, either. She pulled the great head and it reared back. She smelled the fur, sour and unwashed, and she recognized the scent. If she shut her eyes, she might believe this was just another patient, trapped on the unit for so long that he’d stopped bathing, stopped caring. Heatmiser was like that. Hadn’t she felt the same at more than one point?

  But then the Devil bucked and kicked and Loochie lost her grip.

  Her right hand slipped loose from one horn. The Devil thrust its head up in the next moment. Its horn stabbed Loochie’s palm. It burst through her skin and dug in. Then the Devil yanked its head left and the horn tore out of Loochie’s flesh. Right away, her blood ran fast, down her forearm.

  The sound Loochie made, it wasn’t a yell or a cry, it was more like a honk. And yet she wasn’t actually in pain. She was saved by her acute-stress reaction. The trauma of this moment would hit her later, but right now she just had to stay alive. So she stayed where she was, on the beast’s back. Her left hand gripped its left horn. And when she spoke, it was only to give instructions.

  “Grab his legs,” Loochie muttered. The blood from her wounded right hand had soaked her whole shirtsleeve already.

  Pepper had only half-recovered from the pain of his tackle, but there wasn’t any more time.

  Loochie shouted, “Pepper! Please!”

  Pepper moved on his hands and knees and dropped all his weight on the backs of the Devil’s spindly legs while Loochie tried to regain control of the head. Her left hand stayed in place and despite the gash in her palm she squeezed her right hand around the right horn again. Loochie held on even tighter than before. She pulled the Devil’s head so far backward that its nose pointed up at the ceiling. Like this, its throat was exposed.

  “Now what?” Pepper shouted. “Now what?!”

  Kofi had stopped calling for Dorry to give him the nurse’s keys. He wasn’t actually thinking at all in this moment. He was so confused. He’d been sure he had the solution to their collective dilemma, but with each second he felt stupider for having made that phone call. For having faith that someone else would fix everything. How silly he’d been. How naïve. How crazy. A new desperation fille
d him now. It made Kofi feel powerful in an ugly way. A fierceness fueled by disappointment. Which is why Kofi stopped asking Dorry for the keys to the locked drawers of the nurses’ station. He didn’t need them. In his desperation Kofi found access to that Crazy Strength. He tore each of those locked fucking drawers right out of the desk.

  He dumped the contents of each drawer onto the ground as Pepper and Loochie wrestled the Devil. Finally he found the right drawer. Where the staff stored the syringes used on unruly patients. Kofi grabbed the largest ones he could find: 18-gauge Seldinger needles. Coffee tore two of them from their plastic wrapping and moved out of the nurses’ station. It looked like he held a tiny fencing saber in each hand.

  He reached Dorry at the lip of Northwest 4. The old woman remained impassive. Mumbling to herself. She’d dropped the keys and they’d landed on her right foot. The keys looked like a small brass spider, about to crawl up her leg. She still clutched the clipboard, but it wouldn’t serve as much of a shield.

  “Now what?!” Pepper shouted. “Now what?!”

  Kofi raised his hands. Pepper saw the syringes and smiled.

  Then there was a new sound, someone rattling the big door on Northwest 1.

  “Police!” a man shouted. “We are entering the premises!”

  “Hurry, Coffee!” Loochie grunted, straining to hold the Devil’s head up.

  Kofi moved past Dorry. Down the hall. “I’m going to stab out its eyes.”

  “Do it fast!” Pepper begged from the floor.

  The police slammed at the front door, using a two-man Stinger battering ram. The sound like a series of small explosions.