The Devil in Silver

Mr. Mack made each of them chip and crack a doorway open. The men and the women. All in a spirit of fair play. Everyone’s hands getting dirty. The group learning to act as one. The only doorway they didn’t have to crack open was the one that led into Dorry’s room. She’d opened that one many, many years ago. The doorway was so well trod that the doorjamb dipped in the middle.

By the time every patient had been gathered, it was three in the morning. All of them were sweaty. All of them were out of their rooms and standing in the darkened chamber once known as the New Hyde Hospital Ophthalmology Welcome Pavilion.

(Though nobody had ever really called it that. This was Queens; people just said “the eye clinic.”)

The pavilion had been stripped down decades ago, so now it was like being in the shell of a structure waiting to be finished or torn down. The skeleton intact, but no organs. The only nice touch that remained was the gray granite floors.

The windows along the far wall had all been removed (once there’d been a bank of them, each twenty feet tall). Now it was all dry wall. The center of the ceiling, two stories above, showed an enormous oval pane of glass. It looked vaguely like a single almond-shaped eye. That had been intentional. Moonlight drifted down through the glass and caught the speckles in the granite tiles. This made the floor seem to glow, as if a layer of low fog filled the room.

“So here we are,” Mr. Mack said.

Twelve patients. Pepper and Loochie, Mr. Mack and Frank Waverly, Redhead Kingpin and Still Waters, The Haint, Heatmiser, Wally Gambino and Yuckmouth. Even the two newer admits, Doris Roberts and Sandra Day O’Connor. They gathered in a tight circle directly beneath the great glass eye in the ceiling.

Pepper couldn’t help but imagine Dorry in this cavernous space—how many times?—alone at night. Back here on a mission much too batty to believe. To comfort the Devil. (What the fuck was a Mr. Visserplein?!)

They stood in the large empty space, in the circle of direct moonlight, and none of them dared to step out of the circle alone. There used to be two sets of double doors not fifty feet in front of them, the front entrance to the clinic, but the doors had been sealed over just as surely as the windows. The moonlight lit the room, but only so much. There were shadows on all sides. Mr. Mack was the first one to step out of the moonlight alone. All of them, even Pepper, held their breath.

Once he was out, he spread his arms wide. “I’m fine,” he said. “You’ll be fine.”

With that, more of them moved. Just a few steps. Fanning out. Until only Frank Waverly remained under the moonlight.

“There’s a staircase over here,” Doris Roberts called out.

“Here, too,” mumbled Heatmiser.

Two sets of staircases, at either end of the lobby. Leading up to a second-floor landing. Everyone followed Doris Roberts’s voice and used her stairs.

Only Heatmiser went his own way. His low, affectless voice could be heard in the dim hall.

“That’s fucked up,” he muttered as the others moved off.

Then the lonesome yelp of his sneakers, alone, on his set of stairs.

The patients gathered all together again on the landing and looked down at the first floor. Because the room was so dark, the hall so stark, the granite tiles looked much farther below them. Fifty feet instead of only ten. A railing ran at about waist height on the landing. The braver patients leaned over it to give themselves the thrill of faux vertigo. They were having a little fun, playing tag in the graveyard.

Finally, Mr. Mack called them to order.

“We’ve got things to do and there’s no point in waiting,” he said.

Their eyes had adjusted enough to understand the layout here. It was exactly like on the first floor. They stood before the doors that would lead to the second-floor version of Northwest 2 and Northwest 3. The rooms above their rooms. They’d all known this second floor was up here, of course, but the idea had remained academic. Now, standing on this landing, looking at the actual doors, it was like coming across an alternate universe and being shocked because, all along, it had been this close.

Mr. Mack walked farther along the landing. They followed him. And right there in front of them, they saw it, another silver door. Mr. Mack slapped it. The sight of him actually touching the door caused every patient to tense up, recoil. They expected staff members to appear and tackle the old man.

But that didn’t happen.

Mr. Mack left his hand on the silver door because he, too, couldn’t quite believe Miss Chris wasn’t running toward him with a needle. Now the others wanted a touch. They didn’t take turns. They mobbed the door. Each one placing a hand where he or she could. When Pepper did it, up near the top, he expected the silver door to feel cold or hot. Maybe that smell again, of piss and filth. Something. But a different surprise awaited them.

Wally Gambino shouted, “Yo!”