The Devil in Silver

Pepper had a mouth, but he couldn’t scream. He had no air in his lungs. His lips parted and his tongue stuck straight out. His feet rose and slapped against the cold floor.

Pepper looked up and saw the beast’s great head pitch forward, the weak body out of balance again. Its white eyes seemed to be looking at him and through him, both at once. What could he call this creature? He wasn’t a religious man, but only one name came to him.

The Devil.

The Devil stomped down on his chest again and snorted.

You don’t want to be awake, aware, when your rib cage breaks. When your rib cage breaks you want to be passed out.

But somehow, Pepper hadn’t.

It didn’t hurt. He’d already gone into shock, which is the human body’s last line of defense. Your body loves you too much to let you really feel trauma like that. So it wasn’t pain that made the breaking rib cage such a terror for Pepper. It was a sound.

He’d heard the creaking of his sternum, so he almost felt prepared for the final crack, the tune of grinding bones, but he absolutely was not prepared to hear the ocean. That thing smashed his rib cage and suddenly Pepper heard the sea.

His gasping breaths, the snorts and wheezing of the Devil above him, even the thumps as the back of his head rose and fell, rose and fell while he thrashed on the floor. All of that was drowned out.

His ears filled with the splash of an ocean rolling toward the shore and breaking. If he shut his eyes, he would’ve sworn he was at Jones Beach. Or the dirty curl of Coney Island. Maybe it was just the sound of liquid filling his brain cavity, Pepper didn’t know and he didn’t care anymore.

Let the sea roll over me, he thought.

See the sea?

So when the room’s lights snapped on, Pepper wasn’t prepared.

Not just because of the brightness, or because the pressure on his chest suddenly stopped, but because he’d forgotten about psych units and shatterproof windows and meds three times a day; all the tortures of New Hyde. He’d inhabited a different world. He’d been on that shoreline.

So by the time he returned, drawn back into the hospital and his room and his own body on the floor, by then Pepper’s life had already been saved.

Not by a nurse or orderly.

Not by his roommate, Coffee.

It was Dorry.

Dorry!

She stood over Pepper’s body.

Wielding her bath towel as a weapon.

She had it rolled tight and snapped it like a whip. She aimed it at the corner where the ceiling tile had fallen in, but Pepper couldn’t see around her. Couldn’t focus well enough to see much of anything except that beautiful, badass old woman standing between him and his end.

“Hyah!” Dorry shouted.

She snapped her towel at the corner as if facing a lion in a cage.

“Bad boy!”

Somehow the staff on duty hadn’t heard Pepper kicking his bed frame, but they sure couldn’t ignore that old lady.

“Hyah!”

The towel’s snap echoed in the room again.

“Dorry!”

The night nurse stood in Pepper’s doorway. She looked at the big man, flat on the floor, and her mouth fell open in horror.

“What in the hell did you do to him, Dorry?”

Pepper shook his head, or at least he thought he did. He wanted to clear Dorry’s name, but to everyone else it looked like he was having a seizure.

Dorry said, “I didn’t do that and you know it!”

Scotch Tape, on night duty, stood behind the nurse, as stunned as his coworker.

“Don’t back talk,” he said.

Dorry snapped the towel at the corner again. This time, instead of snorting and wheezing, the thing only whimpered softly, like a whipped dog. A sound that everyone in the room seemed to hear, not just Pepper.

The nurse put one foot into the room. “This is a male hall, Dorry. How you even get here? You been sneaking?”

Dorry dropped the big towel and it landed across Pepper’s legs. He felt its weight on his thighs. Scotch Tape and the nurse surrounded Dorry. Pepper curled up as best he could, afraid one of them would kick him in the head by mistake. This movement made his rib cage stab sharply and he gasped.

But before the nurse gave Dorry any tranquilizers, before Scotch Tape checked on Pepper there on the ground, before all other concerns, came the thing in the corner. It was practically mewling over there.

Scotch Tape stooped over Pepper and pulled the big body towel off him. Scotch Tape unfurled the towel and walked over to the corner where Dorry had been aiming her attack. A moment later Pepper watched Scotch Tape escort that thing out of the room.

Pepper couldn’t see the head, or much of the body, because Scotch Tape had draped the towel over it. Only the pajama bottoms and those calloused heels. The soles slapped the floor tiles loudly as Scotch Tape led it out of the room. The Devil leaned against Scotch Tape for balance. Scotch Tape whispered soft assurances to it.

The Devil was there.

Even once the lights came on.

Even with the staff in the room.

No delusion. No dream. It was real. Pepper almost howled at the terrible truth of it, but he couldn’t muster the sound.