The Devil in Silver (50 page)

But today LeClair the Rat was going to change.

Could he really, though? Hard to say. At least he might try.

So that night he’d passed through every room on Northwest’s second floor. Surveying the discarded furniture where he’d made his nests, the wiring he’d chewed through, it was surprisingly difficult for him to give up the grounds he’d cultivated, no matter how barren and lifeless now. He might not have gone through with it, but then he heard the humans nearby. They’d found their way into his realm. Sure, there’d been the old woman, who sometimes sprinkled bits of food on the floor for him, but this night there were a dozen humans crashing around. Howling and battling and encroaching on his territory. This, finally, was what convinced LeClair to go. He thought he might make his way to that place—
Outside—
where the other rats had gone. Maybe he would find some of them. Or maybe he would die. But at least he wouldn’t be stuck in here, bereft, adrift, alone.

This is how LeClair the Rat came to be in a section of the air duct when Loochie appeared. She found that big old rat directly ahead of her.

Wow! She could
scream
. The only thing that shut her up was when the rat turned toward her. She thought LeClair the Rat might charge and bite off her nose. This threw her into a dazed silence.

She tried to turn around, or scoot backward, but pushing back only seemed to wedge her in tight. She imagined getting stuck here,
unable to wriggle free, dying in a fucking pipe. She didn’t know what to do. She could slide her hands up in front of her, one at a time. At the very least she could try to guard her face. Bat the big rat back if it came at her.

But what did LeClair the Rat know about this human in front of him? Zip. As far as he was concerned, this body in the air duct might be kin to With Teeth. It hadn’t been able to catch LeClair, so it sent this smaller one. It wasn’t only Loochie who was smacked with a sudden case of
fright
.

Loochie watched the rat.

And LeClair watched her.

Finally, the rat turned away from Loochie. It moved again.

Loochie thought she’d wait long enough to let the rat disappear. That was what her revulsion suggested she do. But she had to admit that she felt lost. The air duct hadn’t just run a straight line out of the building. The air duct twisted here and there like bends in a road. She wasn’t entirely sure if, at the end of her journey, she’d be looking out on a night sky or just back into the second-floor hallway, where she’d started. Pepper hadn’t given her Dorry’s map after all. In here, she was on her own.

In her mind, she’d already retraced her path to the bus stop in front of Sal’s Famous Pizzeria. (Or whatever it had been called.) She was already looking for the tree that leaned so far over that its leaves touched the roof of one home. She was already planning on the face she’d pull when she pretended she left her MetroCard at home and could the bus driver
please
just let her ride to the depot. She imagined the letter she would write to her mother, explaining why this, as wild as it seemed, was the sanest choice she’d made for herself in many years. For all her hesitation, her fear of hurting her mother, Loochie was already determined to leave.

Then Loochie thought about that rat.
Like rats fleeing from a sinking ship
. That’s the cliché, right? But the point of the line, really, is this: Life wants to live. She didn’t know her way around an air duct, but she bet that rat did. If she followed it, where would it lead? Right back into the building, maybe. But in that case she wouldn’t be doing
any worse than she already was. But the rat might also make its way outside. And she would come tumbling after it.

Loochie followed the rat, at a distance. She could barely make it out ahead, its claws
scritching
on the air-duct metal as it moved. But she managed. And in this way, for once in his life, LeClair the Rat helped someone without being a prick about it.

Loochie reached the end of the air duct. The panel here had been knocked off by hordes of fleeing rats long ago. She saw the big gray rat slip right out. She saw the starry night ahead. She peeked out. A Dumpster sat directly below the duct, lid closed. A one-story drop. Dangerous but manageable. Even if she would have to go out hands-(and head) first.

Loochie watched the rat where it lay on the Dumpster. It surveyed the open parking lot. She shifted in the duct, making noise. The rat looked up at her. Then it shot off the Dumpster and ran into the parking lot. She watched it dart between parked cars and off into the distance. As silly as it sounds, she wished that big old rat well.

She slipped partway out of the duct. She inhaled the air, hoping it would be fresh, but nothing so poetic awaited her. She was right over a Dumpster. She smelled garbage. She hadn’t reached the last step, but the next step. She looked down at the drop. She tried to breathe slowly.

She would curl into a ball, protect her head with her arms. She imagined that was the best way to do it, but she’d never tried anything like this before. Unbidden, she saw herself falling at the wrong angle. Flailing. Her head smacking the Dumpster. Her body crumpled on the ground. Bleeding out, alone. Just some trash. She couldn’t stop imagining it now. She talked to herself, trying to calm down. But there is only so much that talking can do. She had to move. Right now. Right
now
.

Lucretia Gardner went out.

PEPPER LEFT THE
air duct and tracked his way back down the hall. He passed the single off-kilter chair in the oval room. He reached the hall right above Northwest 2. He passed the room right above his own, the one with the machine inside. The half-open door made him scurry past, as if the big machine inside might reach out to snatch him. Then he entered the room with all the old equipment. As he felt his way through the filing cabinets, stepping over errant typewriters, he hoped Loochie was safe. Then he reached the other door. He stepped back out to the second-floor landing. Moonlight still filtered down in a beam cast through the glass eye in the pavilion’s ceiling. Pepper felt as if he’d been gone from here for quite awhile. That was because Pepper didn’t hear anything. Meaning that the screaming, those howls, had ceased. Just a heavy silence now.

His valiant urge had already ebbed. He should have gone with Loochie. She was probably getting on a bus right now. Already a guest of the MTA. They were shuttling her to safety. Meanwhile he was here.
You volunteered to return to this?
he asked himself.
You must be fucking crazy after all
.

Pepper walked with hunched shoulders, his head swiveling left and right. He didn’t see the others until he was practically on top of them. Their backs were to him. He counted six standing together.
And farther back, in another clump were three more. He couldn’t say who was who. They were all so still, so quiet, he felt like he’d stumbled across a crew of sleepwalkers.

“It’s Pepper,” he said, just to avoid startling them.

They didn’t answer. The six people with their backs to him stood adjacent to the silver door. When Pepper got closer, he could finally hear something. This group breathed hard, grunting and panting. Their shoulders rose and fell.

Pepper walked around the group. He stood between the cluster of six people and the clump of three others. He wasn’t sure who he should be wary of. From his new position he could make out the trio: Redhead Kingpin, the Haint, and Wally Gambino. Proton, neutron, electron, that’s how tightly packed they were. They didn’t even seem to notice Pepper. Their gazes trained intently, guardedly on the six: Doris Roberts, Heatmiser, Still Waters, Sandra Day O’Connor, Yuckmouth, and Mr. Mack.

Pepper moved toward the larger group. His boots
squelched
, like he’d stepped in jelly. The floor between him and them was slick.

Pepper’s eyes followed the trail of slickness, more like oil really. To their feet. All six of them were standing in it. There were blotches of it, like dark paint, on the fronts of their clothes. Their hands were so wet they dripped.

Of those Pepper had accounted for, Loochie and he made eleven.

“Where’s Frank Waverly?” Pepper demanded.

No one answered. No one moved.

Pepper padded to the edge of the landing and looked over the railing, but Frank Waverly wasn’t down there. The moonlight brightened Pepper’s boots here at the edge of the landing. The soles, the toes, they were almost a reddish brown. The stuff he’d just stepped in almost looked like mud. Pepper returned to the others. Stood in front of Mr. Mack directly.

“
Where
is Frank Waverly?”

Mr. Mack raised a fist slowly. It looked like it had been dipped in balsamic vinegar.

The fingers opened. A small gold key sat on Mr. Mack’s palm.

“They just …” Redhead Kingpin whispered.

Pepper looked back at her.

“They just … opened him,” she said blankly.

It wasn’t possible. Pepper couldn’t move.

“They just …” Redhead Kingpin began again.

Where was Frank Waverly’s body? Tossed aside, in some dark corner, like a torn candy wrapper? If breathing wasn’t an involuntary function, Pepper would’ve choked.

Mr. Mack walked to the silver door. Triumphant. Not only did the man have numbers on his side, he also had insanity. Not mental illness, but true madness now. Mr. Mack slipped the key in the lock. The other five members crowded closer to Mr. Mack. Imagine trying to talk them down at this moment, to bring them back to the rational, even if ill, human beings they’d very recently been. Pepper doubted that even a volley of tranquilizer darts could stop those six now.

The silver door unlocked with a click as loud as a grandfather clock.

Mr. Mack waved the others back so he could open the door.

The doorway was as dark as an elevator shaft.

Pepper hadn’t realized he’d stepped backward until he was beside Redhead Kingpin, and the Haint, and Wally Gambino. Those three were holding hands. Pepper joined in.

“Don’t hide now,” Mr. Mack taunted the darkness. “Don’t run.”

No movements inside the doorway. No sounds. This made Mr. Mack feel bolder. He took a step toward the open doorway, the darkened room.

“Wait.” One of Mr. Mack’s group called out to him. Hard to tell which one. That one seemed to be speaking for all of them. And even for the other four, watching from farther back.

Another step.

Wait
.

But the caution of the others only fueled Mr. Mack’s brashness. One more step and his foot passed through the doorway.

Then Mr. Mack lost his balance. He fell, headfirst, into the shadows. He didn’t even yelp when he fell.

Mr. Mack was there and then he wasn’t.

Everyone, all nine of them, just stood there, dumbstruck.

Wally Gambino was the first to break the silence.

He
laughed
.

And not a little laugh, either. A real gut-buster. He had to let go of the Haint’s hand. He leaned forward with his hands on his thighs for balance. And he kept on laughing.

“Old boy took a
lump
,” Wally shouted.

And that was that. The cloud that had been hanging over all of them parted. The others didn’t laugh, not at all, but they’d all been teetering over a precipice just then. Wally Gambino’s utterly inappropriate reaction bonked them from that edge.

“Be quiet,” Pepper said, after a moment. “Listen.”

They heard this low, insistent huffing coming from the darkened doorway. As a group they moved closer. The ones at the front had the good sense to brace their hands against the door frame to keep from falling in, too.

“Mr. Mack?” Pepper called.

The huffing sound rose again. Its pace quickened but then slowed. A deep breath taken. “I landed hard,” a weak voice said. “On my leg.”

The huffing again. Then a crinkling noise, hard to place.

“What’s that other sound?” Pepper asked.

The same thing—huffing speeding up, then slowing down. A deep breath.

“I landed in a pile of plastic,” Mr. Mack said.

“Plastic?” Doris Roberts asked.

“Wrappers,” Mr. Mack grunted. “From those goddamn cookies they’re always giving us. Got to be thousands in here.”

“That’s probably what broke your fall,” Pepper said.

Pepper remembered Dorry tucking those cookies into her lap at every meal. She must’ve been bringing them to the Devil for
years
. Of course the Devil would like them, they were as vile as he was.

“How far down are you?” Doris Roberts asked.

“About ten feet, I think.”

Mr. Mack had fallen to the first floor.

New Hyde Hospital, in its relentless penny-pinching, had indeed repurposed a stairwell and made it into a room. When they’d closed
off the second floor, they’d seen that this stairwell would essentially go to waste. (There was a main stairwell already, on the other side of the secure door.) And they needed a room where a violent patient could be kept. Now contrary to most news reports—and the storylines of commercial television and movies—the vast majority of mentally ill people weren’t remotely violent. If they hurt anyone it was usually themselves. But it was true that a very small number of mentally ill patients did cause others harm. For those patients, it was necessary to have a room where they could be sequestered. In the case of Northwest, that would’ve meant constructing a reinforced room. And do you know what that costs? Much more than New Hyde Hospital was willing to spend. But they were already repurposing so much of the building for its transition into a psychiatric unit, so why not be
creative
. Someone who worked with the board (it was actually that legal rep guy who’d used an iPad at Pepper’s meeting after Coffee’s death), suggested that a concrete stairwell could serve their needs as a holding room for any violent patient. The space already had a stainless-steel door, much more resilient than wood, and the walls were reinforced as per the fire code. All New Hyde had to do was remove the stairs. As simple as pulling teeth. Then they’d have one secure room, as legal standards demanded.