The Devil in Silver Read Online Free PDF

walls as in the hallways. It was about the size of the living room in his Jackson Heights apartment. There were two beds in here. The bed frames, industrial metal, twin-sized, were both unmade. But where Pepper’s had the sheetsfolded neatly at the foot of his mattress, the other’s sheets were tossed like a wind-ravaged sea.
    Pepper had a roommate.
    Besides the beds, there wasn’t much furniture. A pair of cheap, narrow dressers backed up against two opposing walls. They came up as high as Pepper’s shoulders. One looked unused, the dresser top bare, while the other, next to the messy bed, had eight soda cans sitting on it, stacks of newspapers, and a dozen old pens in a plastic cup, each pen cap chewed until it was warped.
    Pepper reached down to the handle of the closed door, looking for a lock he could turn. But the only way this room would lock was with a key.
    Pepper walked to the bare dresser, crossing the linoleum tiles. He opened each dresser drawer but found nothing inside. He sat on his bed. The mattress was long enough to accommodate him if he didn’t stretch out. If he did, his ankles and feet would hang over the end. A metal bed in a mental hospital. Now that’s some reality few folks are prepared to face. Pepper let go of the frame.
    Do something. Do something
.
    He picked up the sheets at the foot of the bed and, to his own surprise, made the bed. It was something to do. The only thing he could think of. The sheets were whiter than the walls, crisp but far from plush. He snapped the fitted sheet on, pulling each corner tight. He slipped his thin pillow into its case. As he worked he heard Dorry’s patter in his head, but kept trying to forget it. He didn’t want to remember the layout of Northwest. Didn’t want to remember where Northwest was situated on New Hyde Hospital’s grounds. He didn’t want to wonder if the last patient in this room—in this bed!—was discharged or … not.
    Eventually he finished making his bed. What could he do to distract himself next? His bed sat flush against one of the long walls in the rectangular room. Above his bed were two tall windows. A pair of thin, yellowed curtains, were drawn back.
    Windows
.
    Pepper immediately flashed back to the only thing he knew about mental institutions: the film version of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest
. After Jack Nicholson got lobotomized then smothered by the Indian, hadn’t Big Chief used a piece of machinery to bash open one of the windows and go running off into the gray dawn? Couldn’t Pepper do the same?
    He climbed onto the bed he’d just made, and left some big old boot prints right on that white top sheet, but so what? He was inspired. When he stepped on the bed the springs yelped. He took a second step and the frame itself groaned. He leaned against the windows and wondered if he could use this bed frame as a battering ram.
    But then he saw the same white chicken wire woven into the window, and he recognized it as the same unbreakable plastic outfitting that small window in the ward door. He rapped on the surface, as if it was a door that might creak open. But that didn’t happen, of course. He would’ve bashed at the windows with his fists, his elbows, but what would be the point? That cop had been right; you couldn’t get through this shit with a bullet. Jack Nicholson and the Big Chief had lived in more breakable times.
    When Pepper pulled his face back from the window the chicken wire fell out of focus and the outside world became clearer. Nighttime in New Hyde. A lawn ran just below Pepper’s window, cut so low it was almost bald. It ran about fifty yards until it reached a chain-link fence that surrounded the whole New Hyde campus. The fence was topped with two rows of barbed wire. Pepper could see it from here, like unpolished silver in the moonlight. How bad would that stuff cut him, if he got out and tried to climb?
    With the door shut, the television silenced, Pepper could hear the sounds of traffic