The Devil in Silver by Victor LaValle Read Free Book Online

Unbalanced patients could cling to these wooden rails and pull themselves down any hall.
    Parallel to the railing hung a strip of wallpaper, like trim just beneath the ceiling. A series of five repeating images. Lighthouses. A lighthouse at night, under a full sun, at dawn, in the evening, overlooking the sea during a storm. The painted lighthouses ran all the way down Northwest 2.
    Pepper followed their lights.
    He reached the nurses’ station, the room at the hub of the unit. Four staff members worked at the station, all seated. Pepper noticed Miss Chris moving down Northwest 1. She stomped toward the secure door in her practical shoes, still speaking out loud. But to whom?
    The nurses’ station was a rectangular desk area, with two tiers. The outer tier stood as tall as a bar top. Behind that top tier was a second one, lower, where staff members could sit and work at desk height. Pepper saw the tops of four heads. He didn’t recognize any of these people from the intake team last night. Two nurses, an orderly, and a social worker were all in there, hunched over, heads down, filling out forms in the natural posture of the public-hospital worker.
    Pepper wanted to walk over and ask about that phone call. But first he had to make his mind understand what his eyes were seeing. The image wasn’t blurry—four staff members worked inside the nurses’ station—but the meaning of that image made less sense. He could’ve been looking at a giant terra-cotta pot, the tops of the four heads like four plants just breaking the surface of the soil. He was swaying and didn’t even realize Dorry had grabbed his hand until she yanked on his pinky.
    She looked up at him, unsmiling. “You better hurry if you want breakfast. They’re about to shut down. Are you hungry?”
    Pepper was hungry. In fact, ravenous. Huey, Dewey, and Louie sure hadn’t taken him out to dinner before they dropped him at New Hyde last night. He hadn’t eaten since yesterday’s lunch.
    “I have to make a call first,” he said.
    But whose voice was that who said it? His, but not his. Distant. Slow.
    “It’s eight twenty-five,” Dorry told him, and to Pepper her voice sounded faster, a bit daffier, than it had the night before. “They shut breakfast down at eight thirty and don’t serve food again until lunch. You want to wait that long?”
    He didn’t. He couldn’t. His naturally big appetite had been enhanced.
    “Wait,” Pepper said. “How can it be past half past
eight
?”
    Dorry pointed at a wall where no clock hung. She kept her finger pointed there as if he just couldn’t see it. Miss Chris had given Pepper those pills at seven a.m. He’d lost almost an hour and a half since then? Those two little pills had
walloped
his ass.
    Now Dorry pulled at his pinky again. “You can eat or you can talk, but you can’t do both in five minutes. The phones will be there when you’re done. I promise.”
    Pepper nodded at her, or at least he hoped he did. He had a hard time feeling his body. For instance, he was already walking now and he’d hardly noticed. Dorry led Pepper around the nurses’ station and held on to him. Not one staff member looked up at them. All he heard when passing them was the skritching of their pens.
    Dorry pulled Pepper down another hallway. One she hadn’t showed him the night before. “This is Northwest Five,” she said. “You remember the wagon wheel?”
    Pepper did but he couldn’t say yes and nod his head and walk simultaneously. So he just looked down at his feet in their gray thermal socks. He hadn’t even put on his boots.
Left, right. Left, right. Left, right
.
    Much like Northwest 1 and 2 the hall here was lined with closed doors. They barely registered in Pepper’s periphery.
Left then right
. So when they reached the end of Northwest 5, Pepper didn’t expect the room to be so big and bright. It was filled with chairs and tables and surprisingly natural light. It was twice the size of the room at the hub of