Night Film: A Novel

by Marisha Pessl

  “There’s ninety-one,” said Nora, leaning forward to survey the deserted street. “Eighty-three is coming up on the right.”

  Ashley had written in the Klavierhaus guestbook—and Peter Schmid was at a loss to explain when exactly she had done so:

  Kay Glass was the name of the missing friend in A Small Evil—the unseen woman who invites her new coworker, Alexandra, and Alex’s fiancé, Mitchell, to her parents’ beach house for the weekend. In the opening minutes of the film, Alex and Mitch, having argued during most of the drive from the city, arrive at the house a little after midnight. They find it entirely in the dark and deserted, the friend—Kay Glass—nowhere to be found. An initial search of the home—a modernist glass structure standing at the edge of the ocean like a monument to nihilism—reveals that a horrific crime has taken place moments before their arrival, and the perpetrators—masked, dressed head-to-toe in black—are still there.

  I’d recognized the name because not only were the Blackboards rife with theories and the occasional shrine to the elusive Kay Glass, I’d also heard Beckman give a detailed lecture on the name and its meaning. He contended Kay Glass meant chaos. Beckman further argued that the missing woman—the question of what had happened to her—was, in fact, a metaphor for the inescapable darkness in life. The figure was a Cordova trademark, and Beckman had named one of his cats after it: Shadow.

  “Kay Glass is the Shadow that hounds us relentlessly,” Beckman said. “It’s what we chase but never find. It is the mystery of our lives, the understanding that even when we have everything we want it is one day to leave us. It’s the something unseen, the lurking devastation, the darkness that gives our lives dimension.”

  The fact that out of all the potential pseudonyms, Ashley had chosen that one—a missing woman from her father’s film—led to all sorts of psychological conclusions, the most obvious being that her father’s stories were a part of her day-to-day reality, maybe even overshadowed her sense of self. What was her response when Peter Schmid had asked her who she was?

  No one, she’d said.

  It reminded me of the profile in the Amherst newsletter. It’s wonderful to get lost in a piece of music, she’d said. To forget your name for a while.

  Our taxi eased down the deserted street. In front of us, the Manhattan Bridge extended at a diagonal like a massive fallen tree no one had bothered to remove. Dingy walk-ups had sprouted up around it.

  “There,” Hopper said, indicating a building on our right.

  The awning out front read 83 HENRY STREET in white letters, followed by a few Chinese characters. Metal grates had been pulled down on either side of the front entrance—a green door with a small rectangular window.

  I paid the driver, and we climbed out.

  It was oddly silent and still, the only sound the faint moans of unseen cars racing across the bridge. I stepped up to the door, looking through the window.

  Inside, a derelict hallway spray-painted with graffiti extended beyond a row of mailboxes.

  “Look,” Nora whispered, pointing at the label beside the buzzer for #16. It read K. GLASS.

  “Don’t press it,” I said. I stepped back to the curb, staring up at the building: five stories, crumbling red brick, a rusted fire escape. All of the windows were dark except two on the second floor, another on the fifth with frilly pink curtains.

  “Someone’s coming,” Hopper whispered, moving away from the door, darting around the corner, where there was a parking lot. Nora lurched backward, hurrying down the sidewalk. I stepped around the trash bags piled on the curb, heading across the street.

  Seconds later, I heard the door open behind me, rapid footsteps.

  An Asian man wearing a blue jacket had exited, walking toward Pike Street. He didn’t appear to have seen us—not even Hopper, who’d slipped past him and managed to catch the door before it closed.

  “Nice,” Nora whispered excitedly, rushing inside after him. “Number sixteen must be the top floor.”

  “Hold on a minute,” I said, stepping after them.

  But Hopper was already racing down the hall and out of sight, Nora right behind him. I held back, inspecting the mailboxes. Apart from Glass at #16, there was only Dawkins in #1 and Vine in #13.

  I slipped down the hall, a TV babbling somewhere close by. Hopper and Nora could already be heard clanging upstairs. Because of a bright light somewhere beyond the corridor, their dark, elongated shadows were suddenly tossed against the wall in front of me—two long black tongues sliding down it, licking the cracked brown tiles and vanishing.

  I headed after them, the steps strewn with trash and ads for Asian escorts, mostly in Chinese. One flier, wedged into a filthy windowpane, read ASIAN GIRL-MASSAGE and featured a naked Korean wearing rubber chaps shyly peering over her shoulder. MEET YUMI, it read.

  Hopper and Nora had disappeared somewhere along the top floor. As I started up the next flight, kicking aside a Tsingtao beer can, there was a sudden bang somewhere below me.

  I stared over the metal railing.

  No one was visible. Yet I swore I could hear breathing.

  “Hello?” I called out, my voice echoing through the stairwell.

  There was no answer.

  I moved up the remaining flights, pulling open the door marked 5, spotting Hopper and Nora at the end of a long dim hallway outside #16. As I caught up, they both turned, startled, at something behind me.

  A woman had just appeared at the opposite end.

  34

  The single neon bulb on the ceiling drenched her wide nose and forehead in sickly yellow light. She was quite fat, wearing a long green skirt and black T-shirt, straggly brown hair covering her shoulders.

  “What d’you think you’re doing?” she asked in a croaky masculine voice.

  “Checking in on a friend,” I said.

  She scurried toward us, hunched shoulders, flip-flops rapidly slapping her bare feet.

  “What friend?”

  “Ashley.”

  “Who?”

  “Kay,” Nora interjected. “He means Kay.”

  The name made the woman stop short, unwilling to approach further. She had to be in her fifties, with mottled skin, also missing some teeth, giving her face the countenance of a crumbling statue.

  “Where the hell is Kay?” she demanded. “You tell her she owes me three weeks’ rent. I’m not running a free shelter here.”

  Hopper reached into his coat pocket, unfolding a piece of paper.

  “Is this her?” he asked. It was a black-and-white photograph of Ashley. He must have printed it off the Internet, because I’d never seen it before—unless it was from his own collection, a snapshot taken at Six Silver Lakes. The woman didn’t move to look at it, only jutted out her chin.

  “You’re cops?”

  “No,” I said. “We’re friends of Kay’s.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?” blurted Nora.

  The woman glared at us. “I don’t talk to cops.”

  “We’re not cops,” said Hopper, removing his wallet from his back pocket. The instant he flipped it open, the woman’s small black eyes swarmed it like flies over a turd. “Answer our questions, we’ll make it worth your while.” He held out three twenties, which she grabbed instantly, counting them, then sticking them down the front of her T-shirt.

  “Is this Kay?” asked Hopper again, holding out the picture.

  “Sure looks like her.”

  “When did you last see her?” I asked.

  “Weeks ago. That’s how come I came up. Heard all the creepin’ around, thought she came back to get her stuff and was trying to sneak past me. Any idea when Her Highness plans to show?”

  “Not really.”

  The news infuriated her. “I coulda rented this room five times over. Now I gotta get a locksmith up here. Clean out her shit.”

  “Why a locksmith?” I asked.

  She nodded at the door. “I don’ got the key to her room. She changed the locks on me.”

/>   “Why?”

  “Hell if I know.”

  “What was she like?” asked Nora.

  The woman grimaced. “Had duchess airs, if you ask me. Had a way of demanding things, like she thought she was a queen a’ England. Wanted me to fix the lights in the bathrooms ’cuz it was too dark for her, then the hot and cold tap. Musta mistaken this place for a fuckin’ Marriott.”

  “Do you know what she was doing in the city?” asked Nora.

  The woman squinted as if faintly insulted. “You pay me on time, what you do in the room is your business. She did do me a favor once. I had to run out, and she watched my nephew a coupla hours. That I did appreciate. But then she changes the locks, runs out, stiffs me on the rent. I’m runnin’ a business. Not a charity.” She stared resentfully at the door again. “Now I gotta pay for a locksmith.”

  “How long has she been living here?” I asked.

  “ ’Bout a month. But I haven’t seen her for weeks.”

  “And how did she hear about it?”

  “Answered my ad. I got fliers posted around Port Authority.”

  “How much to break the door down?” Hopper asked, running his hands along it. “We’ll also cover whatever Kay owed you in rent.”

  “Uh, that’d be—oh, one-fifty. Plus any damage to the door.”

  “Here’s three hundred.” He shoved a wad of bills at the woman, which she hastily grabbed, then he strode to the end of the hall, where there was a door with a grimy pane of glass—some sort of communal bathroom—and a fire extinguisher. He pulled the extinguisher free and moved back, raising it over his head and slamming it hard against the deadbolt.

  He did this five times, the wood splintering, and then—with a laid-back ease that hinted he’d done this before—he tossed aside the canister, took a few steps back, and side-kicked it. The door flew open, cracking against the wall, and then closed, stopping so it was ajar about an inch.

  For a moment, no one moved. Hopper pushed the door wider.

  It was pitch-dark inside, light from the hallway barely illuminating the scarred concrete floor, walls of flaking blue paint.

  There was also a noticeable stench—something rotten.

  I turned, intending to ask the landlord when she’d last been inside Kay’s room, but she’d actually backed away.

  “Gotta get downstairs,” she mumbled, then turned, flip-flops hammering her feet as she hurried down the hall. “Gotta check on my nephew.” She darted out, and within seconds could be heard clanging back downstairs.

  “She’s afraid of something,” I said.

  “It’s that smell,” whispered Nora.

  35

  Hopper took a step inside. I followed, sliding my hands along the wall, trying to find a light switch.

  “Fuck,” he said, coughing. “The smell’s really bad.”

  There was a grating screech as he accidentally tripped on something—a metal folding chair—then, fumbling with a lamp, the room was suddenly drenched in pale light.

  It was small and stark, with a faded brown rug, a window with a torn shade, a sagging metal cot in a corner. Something about the way the sheets were thrown back, a green blanket dangling on the floor—a discernible dent in the pillow—seemed to suggest Ashley had just climbed out of it, moments ago. In fact, the entire shabby room hinted she’d just been here, the musty air still filled with her breathing.

  The rank stench, a combination of sewage and burning, seemed to seep out of the walls. A brown stain covered the ceiling by the window, as if something had been slaughtered on the roof, then left to slowly bleed down into the rafters. The floor, strewn with a few plastic wrappers, was sticky from some type of dark soda that had spilled.

  “Didn’t Devold say Ashley was wearing white pajamas when he broke her out of Briarwood?” Hopper asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “They’re right here.”

  Sure enough—a pair of white cotton drawstring pants and a top had been tossed in a heap on the sheets.

  Hopper seemed reluctant to touch them. I picked up the pants, noting with surprise not just that A. Cordova MH-314—her room number at Briarwood—had been printed along the inner waistband, but the legs still held her form. So did the top; cut in the boxy shape of surgical scrubs, the left sleeve still twisted around her elbow.

  I put them back on the bed, stepping toward a small closet. There was nothing in there—just four wire hangers on a wooden rod.

  “Something’s under here,” Hopper said. He was looking under the bed.

  We grabbed the cot, carrying it to the center of the room, and then all three of us stared, bewildered, at what had just been exposed.

  None of us said a word.

  36

  My first thought was that it was some type of target. And if I ever found such a thing under my own bed, I probably couldn’t help but wonder if the Grim Reaper had put it there, a reminder that I was due to be picked up in a matter of days—or I had enemies who wanted to scare the living daylights out of me.

  Four concentric circles made out of black ashes had been meticulously laid out on the floor. At the center—almost directly beneath where Ashley’s torso or heart would be, I noticed, if she were lying flat on the bed—was a pyramid of charcoal. It stood about six inches, the rocks white and crumbling, the concrete beneath it charred black.

  “What is it?” Nora whispered.

  “The ashes are what smells,” said Hopper, crouching beside it.

  After taking photos, Nora found a sandwich bag in her purse, and, turning it inside out, we collected a sample of the powder. It looked like finely chopped leaves, dirt, and bone. I sealed the bag and tucked it into my coat pocket.

  “Holy shit,” Hopper whispered behind us. “Check this out.”

  He was by the door, staring at something lodged above it—a cluster of sticks. They’d been carefully positioned deep in the corner, as if to deliberately escape notice.

  Hopper pulled them down, holding them in the light from the hallway. They looked like roots—some thick, others thin, others tightly coiled in spirals, though they all looked to be from the same plant. Each one had been knotted neatly with white string and tied to another.

  “Looks like some kind of occult practice,” I said, carefully taking the bunch from Hopper. I’d come across some bizarre religious customs over the years—baby-tossing in India; Jain monks who walked around naked, wearing the air; tribal boys forced to wear gloves filled with bullet ants, a ritual to enter adulthood. This seemed to be something along those lines.

  “Why would it be over the doorway?” asked Nora.

  I looked at Hopper. “You remember Ashley being involved in any unusual practices or beliefs?”

  “No.”

  “Let’s do another walk-through. See if there’s anything we missed. Then let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Nora and Hopper nodded, glancing warily around the room. I was about to head over to the bedside table, when out of the corner of my eye I saw something green streaking past the doorway followed by staccato slapping. Flip-flops.

  I stuck my head out. The landlord was scampering down the hall. The old crone had been spying.

  “Wait a minute!” I shouted, stepping after her.

  “I don’t know nothing,” she growled.

  “You must have noticed that smell coming out of her room.”

  She stopped dead at the end of the hallway, turning, her skin glistening with sweat.

  “I don’t know what that girl did with herself.”

  “Have any of the residents said anything?”

  She didn’t respond. She had an off-putting, lizardlike way of moving, remaining stone still—as if knowing she’d be camouflaged by the grim light and cracked walls around her—then hastily scuttling away. Now she was absolutely immobile, staring at me with her head cocked.

  “She scared people.” She grinned. “Don’t know how, ’cuz she’s a skinny thing. And some a’ the numbers who take my rooms, they’re usual
ly the ones who do the scaring. But I don’t make it my business. People can do what they want, long as they pay me.”

  I was halfway down the hall now, but stopped because a small boy—no more than five or six years old—was peering at me through the stairwell door. After a pause, he slipped out, standing sullenly behind the woman. He was in a dirty T-shirt, cotton pants too short in the leg, and socks meant for much larger feet.

  “Is that your nephew?” I asked.

  She surveyed him coldly and turned back to me, saying nothing.

  “You mentioned Kay watched him once when you were out. Can he tell me anything about her?”

  She pointed at me. “For a friend, you don’t know too much.”

  I noticed then a shard of light was coming out of a room beside me, the door moving. Someone was eavesdropping. Before I could see who it was, there was a loud clanging. The landlord and boy had just disappeared into the stairwell. I took off after them.

  “Hold on!”

  “You leave us alone.”

  I raced down the steps, tripping on fliers, catching up on the next landing. Without thinking, I grabbed the boy’s arm. He emitted a bloodcurdling squeal, as if I’d just branded him with an iron.

  Startled, I let go, yet he continued to scream as he watched something—some kind of action figure he’d just dropped—careen down through the metal railings, bouncing on the steps, skidding across the tiles on the ground floor. With a whimper, he took off after it.

  “Look what you done now,” the woman mumbled furiously, heading after him. “Take your friends and get out of here. We don’t know nothin’.”

  When I reached the ground floor, I found the two of them frantically scouring the hallway. The boy stood up, turning to the woman, his fingers working fast in the air. He was speaking in sign language. He was deaf. And I’d traumatized him.

  Guilty, I turned, searching the tiled floor, kicking aside fliers and wrappers. I soon found it in a rectangle of light under the stairwell.

  It was a tiny wood carving of a snake—three inches long, mouth open, tongue extended, twisted body. It felt oddly heavy.