Night Film

by Marisha Pessl

  There was a markedly higher incidence of missing persons after 1992, the year of Ashley traversing the bridge and the devil’s curse.

  There was also a young boy who went missing in Rome, New York (114 miles from The Peak), on May 19, 1978, the year that Thumbscrew had been shot at the estate. The four children reported killed in Thumbscrew were between the ages of six and nine. It was a flimsy lead, but if Falcone got back to me with confirmation that it was human blood, Brian Burton was a worthwhile place to start. He was six years old when his mother, a waitress at Yoder Motel and Restaurant, parked illegally on the curb and popped inside the restaurant to pick up a check, leaving her son alone in the backseat. She’d locked the car but left the back windows cracked. When she returned less than ten minutes later, the car was unlocked and her son was gone. He was never seen again.

  The other incidents were similarly haunting—so many last-seens and symbolic details: Sophie Hecta’s locket necklace, Jessica Carr’s crayon drawing of a black fish discovered in her bed when she was found missing by her parents. Unfortunately (and unsurprisingly, given that Cordova would probably know how to obscure his tracks), no detail I read overtly linked any of these cases to the director—no parallels to his films, no sighting of a mysterious man wearing black lenses that stamped out his eyes.

  Nothing—but then, one tenuous clue.

  Laura Helmsley’s locker had been ransacked a week before she ran away from home, and she’d reported her journal stolen to the school office. This detail was vaguely reminiscent of the incidents John, the anonymous caller, had described. Had Cordova stolen the girl’s journal, hoping she might serve as an equal exchange for Ashley? Police believed Laura had simply run off with her older boyfriend. They’d been caught on camera at a White Castle drive-thru two days after she disappeared.

  But there’d been no word from her in more than ten years.

  Before I’d read about the hallucinogenic plants, I might have believed in an alternate possibility, that the world had simply opened up and swallowed these people whole. It actually seemed the only logical explanation in the case of Kurt Sullivan, who disappeared across thirty yards of an easy hiking trail in the Moose River Plains Wild Forest (ninety-four miles from The Peak). He left his family, skipping around the bend back to the campsite to put on longer socks—and was never seen again. A six-hundred-man search, which included help from the U.S. Air Force, elicited not one clue as to what had happened to the boy.

  Shadows with wills of their own, killing curses and devil’s curses, rivers that ran black and beasts with bark for skin, a world with invisible fissures that anyone could accidentally fall down into at any time—I could have actually considered it after what had happened to me at The Peak. Hadn’t this investigation of Cordova been hinting at the outskirts of such a reality—a world that was infinitely mysterious, shrouded with the questions that were impossible to explain? Cordova might very well be a madman, have fatally erased all boundaries between fantasy and reality in his life and work, but hadn’t he been legitimately able to harness some kind of power up there, whatever it was? Hadn’t that been true? Hadn’t I witnessed it with my own eyes?

  Now I didn’t know what I believed. It was logical I’d simply been exposed to too many Mad Seeds. And anyway, what was Cordova—or Popcorn—doing, keeping that greenhouse thriving with enough toxic plants to wipe out an army?

  The more missing-persons cases I read, the more those mysteries seemed to fray into a million threads. Still, I jotted down the various details, vague developments mentioned by local newspapers and missing-person blogs. Then, my mind overloaded, I tore myself away from the computer—deciding to head uptown to Klavierhaus.

  If Ashley had frequented the shop as a child, as Hopper had told us, I wanted to talk to someone who knew her from those early days. The manager we’d spoken to, Peter Schmid, might be helpful finding such a person.

  When I arrived, however, I was shocked to learn something odd had happened—or else, it wasn’t odd at all, given what I’d been researching the past three days.

  Peter Schmid was gone.

  104

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “He quit,” said the young man behind the Klavierhaus counter.

  “When?”

  “Two weeks ago.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “No clue. It was pretty sudden. Mr. Reisinger, our owner, was pissed ’cuz we’re short-staffed now. I’m just an intern. But Peter had been having some problems, so.”

  “Do you have his phone number?”

  The kid looked it up and I dialed it, heading out of the shop—the Fazioli piano that Ashley had played still in the window.

  I stopped on the sidewalk in disbelief. A recording announced that the number had been disconnected.

  I didn’t know what it meant—only that something was wrong.

  I hailed a cab, and minutes later was striding into the lobby of The Campanile—Marlowe Hughes’s building. I recognized the chubby-faced doorman as the second one who’d been on duty the day I’d approached Harold.

  “I’m looking for Harold,” I said, stepping toward him.

  “He doesn’t work here anymore. Got a brand-new gig on Fifth. Some swank white-glove building—”

  “Which one? I need the address.”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “I need to go upstairs to see Marlowe.” I handed him my business card. “I’m a friend of Olivia Endicott’s.”

  “Marlowe?”

  “Marlowe Hughes. Apartment 1102.”

  He looked uncomfortable. “Yeah, Miss Hughes isn’t exactly … home.”

  “Where is she?”

  “I can’t discuss the particulars.”

  Alarm flooding through me, I handed the man a hundred bucks, which he cheerfully pocketed.

  “They packed her off to rehab,” he said quietly. “She had an incident. But she’s all right.”

  “Could you still let me into her apartment?”

  He shook his head. “Sorry, no. No one’s been up there since—”

  “I know Olivia’s out of the country, but call her assistant. She’ll authorize it.”

  He looked doubtful, but waited patiently while I found the number.

  “Yeah, hi,” he said into the phone after I dialed for him. “This is The Campanile. I got a gentleman here.” He squinted down at my business card. “Scott McGrath.” He went on to explain the situation, falling silent.

  And then, abruptly, his face—so amiable before—sobered. He glanced at me, visibly startled, then hung up without a word. He stood up, coming around the side of the desk, his arm out to escort me toward the door.

  “You’re gonna have to be on your way, mister.”

  “Just tell me what she said.”

  “If you harass any of the people here again, I’m gonna call the cops. You don’t have any connection to Olivia Endicott.”

  Outside, I turned back—speechless—but he was standing staunchly in the door, glaring at me.

  I headed swiftly down the sidewalk. When I reached the corner, I dialed Olivia’s assistant’s number myself. She picked up immediately.

  “This is Scott McGrath. What the hell just happened?”

  “I beg your pardon, sir? I don’t know what you’re talking—”

  “Cut the bullshit. What’d you tell the doorman?”

  She said nothing, seemingly deciding whether or not to feign ignorance. Then, in a cold, clipped voice:

  “Mrs. du Pont would prefer it if you did not contact her or any member of her family.”

  “Mrs. du Pont and I are working together.”

  “Not anymore. She wants no further connection to your activities.”

  I hung up, seething, and phoned The Campanile’s management company to get Harold’s home phone number.

  It was disconnected.

  105

  I returned to Perry Street and systematically tried contacting every witness we’d encountered during the in
vestigation.

  Iona, the bachelor party entertainer who’d tipped us off to Ashley heading to Oubliette—I called the number on her business card and was informed by the automated recording that her voicemail box was full.

  This didn’t change, not even after four days.

  I dialed Morgan Devold. I no longer had the page torn out of the phone book—that had been stolen when my office was broken into—but found it after calling directory assistance for Livingston Manor, New York.

  There was only a busy signal. I tried the number every hour for the next six hours. It remained busy.

  After learning from the assistant director of housekeeping at the Waldorf Towers that Guadalupe Sanchez was no longer an employee at the hotel, I decided to track down the strawberry-haired young nurse who’d run out in front of our car at Briarwood. I remembered her name had been Genevieve Wilson; Morgan Devold had mentioned it.

  “Genevieve Wilson was a student nurse in our central administration for three months,” a man in the nursing department explained.

  “Can I speak to her?”

  “Her last day was November third.”

  That was more than three weeks ago.

  “Is there a number where I can reach her? A home address?”

  “That’s not available.”

  Was this somehow my doing? Had I lost my mind? The primary symptom of madness was near-constant amazement at the world and a suspicion of all people from strangers to family and friends. I had both symptoms in spades. Why wouldn’t I? Every witness, every stranger and bystander who’d encountered Ashley, was extinct now. They’d silently receded like a fog I hadn’t noticed was lifting until it was gone. It was what had actually happened to my anonymous caller, John, years ago.

  Or did I have it all wrong? Had these people run for their lives, going missing, absconding to the outer reaches of the world—like Rachel Dempsey and the countless other actors who’d worked and lived with Cordova—because they were fleeing something? Were they afraid of him, Cordova, because they’d talked to me about his daughter? With my notes stolen, there was no record of what they’d told me about Ashley. Their testimony now existed solely in my head—and Hopper’s and Nora’s.

  But even they were gone now.

  Then, it existed solely in my head.

  Filled with sudden worry that Nora and Hopper might have vanished in the same way as the others, I called both of them, leaving messages to call me back. I then phoned Cynthia, suddenly wanting to hear Sam’s voice, irrationally worried she, too, was gone. It went to voicemail. I left a terse message, threw on my coat, and left the apartment.

  106

  In the fading daylight, Morgan Devold’s driveway looked so different from the night the three of us drove up here, I hardly recognized it. I pulled over to the shoulder, cut the engine, and climbed out.

  Immediately I was hit by a smell: smoke.

  I started up the drive. Some overgrown branches had been split backward and broken in half—as if a large truck had driven up here. The charred smell grew stronger, and when I crested the top I stopped, staring out at the lawn in front of me.

  Morgan Devold’s ramshackle house had burned to the ground.

  I headed toward it, light-headed with shock. Both cars were gone. All that remained was a charred air conditioner and half a splintered swing.

  My guess was the fire had happened a week ago, maybe longer, and it wasn’t an accident. I climbed through it, looking for evidence, but the only identifiable objects I found were a blackened ceramic bathtub, the burnt base of a La-Z-Boy, and a plastic doll’s arm reaching out from the rubble. Seeing it made me wonder if it belonged to Baby, the doll Morgan had fished out of the kiddie pool. Immediately, I made my way across the overgrown grass toward the far corner of the yard.

  I spotted it exactly where it’d been before, still partially inflated yet turned upside down. I flung it upright and saw, apart from the encrusted leaves, a sizable black splotch stained the bottom.

  It had to be where Ashley had hidden the doll, so her spell inside the leviathan figurine would work. It was oddly overwhelming to see—as if that black mark was the last confirmation that what we’d learned about her life and death had been real.

  Who had torched the house? Had Morgan and his family been inside when it happened or long gone, like every other witness Ashley had met?

  I spent a half-hour roaming the debris trying to find answers, at once disbelieving and angered by the finality of it. It felt as if this scorched devastation wasn’t simply Devold’s house, but the entire investigation. Because all of it was gone, wasted, and me, the last man, too late, trawling through it, digging for an underlying truth now gone.

  Starting back to my car, I spotted lying in the tall grass, something small and white.

  It was a cigarette butt.

  There were four. I picked up one and saw the strange, minute brand printed by the filter. I hastily collected all four butts and then, my head spinning, sprinted down the driveway.

  Murad.

  107

  Beckman, dressed in black corduroys and a blue plaid flannel shirt, was speaking in front of a packed lecture hall. There were at least three hundred students, every one hanging on his every word.

  “The film keeps the tension skin tight deep into the final minutes,” Beckman was saying, “when Mills learns the contents sealed inside the FedEx-delivered box—his wife’s severed head. The film ends on a cliffhanger and we’re left to wonder what the poor detective’s fate is. He was once so brash, so confident. Now he’s come face-to-face with the horrors that he was chasing. He has the chance to turn into horror himself. Will Mills be savaged or saved? We have to evaluate the story’s moral universe, everything that’s come before, to know the answer. Does he make it out alive?”

  Rather dramatically, Beckman turned on his heel, raising the remote—like a sorcerer pointing a magic wand—and a film clip appeared on the gigantic screen behind him. It was the final minutes of Se7en, which featured Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt as Somerset and Mills, and Kevin Spacey as John Doe in the back of the police car.

  I knocked a second time on the window, and this time Beckman heard me, jolted in evident surprise, glanced back at his students, and scurried over.

  “McGrath, what the hell,” he hissed, opening the door a crack.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “Can’t you see I’m in the middle of something?”

  “This is an emergency.”

  His dark eyes blinked at me behind his glasses. He glanced over his shoulder. His students remained transfixed watching the clip, so he quickly darted out into the hall, silently closing the door behind him.

  “What in Christ’s—you know I don’t like to be interrupted while I’m teaching. There’s a little something called creative flow—”

  “I need the names of your cats.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your cats, your fucking cats. What are their names?”

  A female student walking past turned, eyeing me warily.

  “My fucking cats?” Beckman repeated, glaring at me. “This is why I’ve never liked you, McGrath. Not only are you rude and demanding, but cats you’ve been introduced to fifteen, sixteen times you don’t have any recollection of, as if they’re somehow beneath you.” He opened his mouth, on the verge of berating me further, but must have noticed I was frantic, because he pushed his glasses farther onto the bridge of his nose.

  “Their full birth names or their nicknames?”

  “Full birth names. Start with the one you told me about the other day. Something about Murad Turkish cigarettes.”

  Beckman cleared his throat. “Murad Cigarettes. Boris the Burglar’s Son. One-Eyed Pontiac. The Peeping Tom Shot. The Know Not What. Steak Tartare.” He kneaded his eyebrows. “How many’s that?”

  “Six.” I was writing them down.

  “Evil King. Phil Lumen. And last but not least, The Shadow. There you have it. Enjoy.” With a matador’s ol
é, he started for the door.

  “These are what, Cordova’s trademarks?”

  He sighed. “McGrath, I’ve explained it to you countless times—”

  “How do they work, exactly? Where do they appear?”

  He closed his eyes. “In every story Cordova constructs, rain or shine, at least one or two, sometimes up to five of these trademarks—signatures, if you will—show up unannounced, like long lost family members on Christmas Eve. Naturally they cause a great deal of drama.” He squinted at me, observing my scribbling. “What’s this about, anyway?”

  I reached into my pocket, holding out the cigarette butts. Beckman, frowning, picked up one, scrutinizing it, and then, probably reading the brand printed by the filter, stared at me in alarm.

  “Where in God’s name did you find—”

  “In the country. At the scene of a house fire.”

  “But they don’t exist except in a Cordova film.”

  “I’m in one.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I think I’m inside a Cordova film. One of his narratives. And it’s not over.”

  “What are you talking—?”

  “He set me up. Cordova. Maybe Ashley, too. I don’t know why or how. All I know is that I tried to uncover the circumstances around Ashley’s death and every person I spoke to, everyone who met her, has disappeared. The man had a penchant for working with reality—manipulating his actors, pushing them to the brink. Now he’s done it with me.”

  Beckman’s mouth was open, his eyes wide with disbelief. He appeared to have entered some kind of unresponsive fugue state.

  “Just tell me about the cigarettes,” I said.

  He took a breath. “McGrath, this is really not good.”

  “Can you be a little more specific?”

  “Didn’t I tell you to leave him alo—?”