Night Film: A Novel

by Marisha Pessl

  “I’m Cleo,” she announced flatly. “Hear you found evidence of a black trick.”

  “We don’t know what it is,” said Nora.

  Cleo, clearly having heard this many times, pulled an upholstered armchair set against the wall over to the table, foam crumbling out of the seat. She sat down, folding one leg under her, the other knee up, linking her arm around it, so when she was finally still she was in a warped pose—something between an extreme-level yoga position and a dead twisted insect one finds along a windowsill.

  “Get me up to speed?” she asked Dex with a touch of impatience.

  He picked up the Ziploc bags and my BlackBerry and walked her through the evidence like an intern showing a specialist a confounding MRI.

  “But see this?” he murmured, pointing at something. “And here? I—I didn’t understand the symmetry. First I thought anvil dust or maybe rabbit feces? But then that? I’ve never seen …” His voice trailed into doubtful silence. She grabbed the phone, narrowing her eyes as she zoomed in on one of the pictures.

  “I got it,” she said with a glance at Dex. “You can go now.”

  He nodded, and with a final look back at us—what appeared to be genuine worry—he darted around the curtain back into the store.

  Cleo inspected the pictures for another minute, ignoring us.

  She picked up the herbs, sniffing them—unaffected by the rank smell—and then studied the roots, the strand of feathers clipped into her hair rolling along her cheek as she leaned over the table.

  “Tell me where you found all of this,” she said in a low voice.

  “Inside the room that a friend of ours was renting,” said Nora. “The circles and the charcoal were under her cot.”

  “Who is this friend?”

  “We’d like that to remain anonymous,” I said.

  “Man or woman?”

  “Woman,” answered Nora.

  “And where is she now?”

  “That’s also something we don’t care to discuss,” I said.

  “How is she?”

  “Fine,” I answered. “Why?”

  Cleo had been closely inspecting the bouquet of roots, but now she looked up at me. She had black eyes, so deeply embedded in her plump face I couldn’t see the whites, only the black irises sparking with light in spite of the dimness of the room.

  “Your friend has a pretty severe curse on her.”

  She didn’t elaborate, only set down the branches and sat back in the chair, patiently waiting for us to say something.

  I stared back at her in silence. So did Nora.

  Normally I would have shrugged off such a pronouncement, thinking it was pure superstition. Yet there was something about Cleopatra—her point-blank certainty—that wasn’t so easy to shrug off. First of all, the woman looked like Confucius’s punk sister. She also spoke in a bland expert neurosurgeon’s monotone.

  “What type of curse?” I asked her.

  “Not sure,” Cleo answered. “It wasn’t a simple jinx.” She grabbed my BlackBerry, holding up one of the pictures. “She performed a high-level uncrossing ritual. Vandal root in a circle mixed with sulfur, salt, insect chitin, dried human bones, probably some other stuff that’d make your stomach turn. All of that encircling asafoetida burned on a perfect pyramid of charcoal. There was probably a really repulsive smell.”

  “Yes,” answered Nora quickly.

  “That was the Devil’s Dung. Asafoetida. It repels evil and brings harm to enemies. Another way to undo a trick is to mix it with vandal root, black hen feathers, black arts powder, and a strand of hair off the person who cursed you. You urinate into it, put the mixture into a glass jar, and bury it in a place you know they’ll walk over again and again, like their front porch or garage. After that, they’ll pretty much leave you alone for the rest of your life.”

  “Does it work on ex-wives?” I asked. “If she lives in a Fifth Avenue co-op, can I just leave it with the doorman?”

  Nora shot me a look of rebuke, but Cleopatra only cleared her throat.

  “If you don’t have access to a location where they’ll be,” she went on patiently, “you do what your friend did. Set up a Vandal Circle.”

  “Did it work?” asked Nora. “Did it remove the curse from her?”

  “No idea. Spells are like really crude antibiotics. You have to try different ones to see what’s responsive. Super-spells can be resistant like a strain of bacteria, one that constantly morphs to stay firmly attached to and thriving on the host. Have you talked to your friend lately? How’s she feeling?”

  Nora eyed me uncomfortably.

  “What about these twigs we found over the door?” I asked.

  Cleo reclined in the chair as she considered the cluster on the table. “It’s Devil’s Shoestring. A natural-occurring root from the honeysuckle family. It grows in wild fields and forests. It’s used for protection. In the deep American South people make anklets out of it. Or they douse them in whiskey and bury them in the ground. You can also do what your friend did. Take nine pieces, some white string, tie a single knot around each piece—nine roots, nine knots—and then you stick it somewhere by your front door or under your porch. Some people bury it in their front yard.”

  “What does it do?” I asked.

  She stared at me for a moment before answering, her face unreadable.

  “It trips up the devil.”

  “Trips him?”

  “Stops him. Gives him pause.”

  “I see,” I said, picking up the roots. “I don’t know why the U.S. spends six hundred billion on national defense. We should just make sure every American family has a set of these.”

  Cleo was clearly used to—and totally unfazed by—skeptics and nonbelievers. She didn’t react, only interlaced her ring-laden fingers—skulls, Egyptian ankhs, a cat’s head—atop her raised knee.

  “Did your friend take baths before sunrise?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said Nora. “In really icy water.”

  I was about to ask Nora what she was talking about when I suddenly remembered the strange incident Iona had described—the early morning when she’d come upon Ashley bathing in the tub.

  “So she did cleansing rituals,” said Cleo, nodding.

  “What are they for?” I asked.

  “They grant purification from evil. For a time. They’re not permanent. More of a temporary Band-Aid. Did she wash her floors?”

  Nora glanced at me. “We don’t know.”

  “Was she cold to the touch?”

  “No idea,” I answered.

  “Did you notice if she had difficulty communicating? Almost as if she had a mouthful of peanut butter or sand?”

  “We wouldn’t know.”

  “What about an alarming heaviness?”

  “Meaning?”

  Cleo shrugged. “I’ve heard of some people, if they’re under a particularly severe curse for an extended period of time, when they step onto an ordinary scale they can weigh up to three hundred, sometimes even four hundred pounds, even though visibly they’ve grown very, very thin.”

  “We wouldn’t know that, either,” I answered, though I had a sudden, unnerving vision of the first and only time I’d ever seen Ashley in person, when she was wandering around the Reservoir—that strange, trancelike bearing, the heavy sound of her footsteps cutting resoundingly through the rain.

  Cleo, suddenly struck by a new thought, grabbed my BlackBerry again, frowning as she scrolled through the pictures.

  “One thing I don’t see here is a reversal. When you’re dealing with black magic, you have to uncross but also reverse, so the curse boomerangs back onto the perpetrator.” She glanced up at us. “Spells are nothing more than energy. Think of it as charged particles that you’ve attracted to one concentrated place. You have to put them somewhere. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, but transferred. It’s the transfer I don’t see evidence of, and that’s troubling.” She tilted her head, thinking, twirling the tooth pendant in her fingers. “
Notice any reversing candles in the room?”

  “What are reversing candles?” Nora asked.

  “White wax on the bottom, black at the top.”

  Nora shook her head.

  “What about a cardboard box filled with objects?”

  “No.”

  “No mirror box,” whispered Cleo to herself.

  “What’s a mirror box?” I asked.

  She glanced at me. “For straightforward reversals. You get a black candle, inscribe the enemy’s name into it, bury it in a graveyard with pieces of a broken mirror. Whatever negativity or evil aimed at you will reflect back onto them.” She cleared her throat, raising an inky black eyebrow. “Let’s go back to her room. Were there any powders or chalk marks on the floor?”

  “It was dark inside,” Nora said. “But no. We would have noticed something like that.”

  “But the floor was sticky,” I added.

  Cleo looked at me. “Sticky?”

  “As if a soft drink had been spilled all over it. Plus a couple of plastic wrappers.”

  Cleo unwound herself from the twisted way she was sitting, leaning across the table, jutting out her chin.

  “Did you pick up one of the wrappers?” She demanded it so intensely I caught a whiff of her breath, hot and garlicky and pungent, like she’d been drinking some strange herbal tea. She had small tobacco-stained teeth crowded together, quite a few in the back capped in gold.

  “No,” I said.

  “Then how do you know they were plastic wrappers?”

  “That’s what they sounded like.”

  She took a deep agitated breath. “Did you go inside the room?” she asked, sitting back in the chair.

  “Of course. How do you think we found that thing under her bed?”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Just last night.”

  She looked underneath the table. “Are those the shoes you were wearing?”

  “Yes.”

  She stood up and strode to the back counter, returning with a pair of latex gloves and a pile of faded newspapers. She snapped the gloves onto her hands and spread the newspaper across the table’s surface.

  “Take one shoe off and slowly hand it to me, please.”

  Glancing at Nora—she looked stricken—I pulled off one of my black leather boots, handing it to Cleo.

  Carefully—as if handling a rabid animal—she placed the boot on its side on the newspaper, the sole facing her. She fumbled in her jean pocket and produced a four-inch pocket knife, the handle intricately carved out of some type of animal bone. She opened the blade with her teeth and, holding down the boot with her other hand, scraped it slowly along the sole. She did this for minutes, ignoring us, and when she stopped, inspecting the blade inches from her nose, there was a thick brownish-black paste collected along the edge. It looked like dried molasses.

  “This is the reversal,” she whispered. “It’s a sophisticated foot-track spell. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “What’s a foot-track spell?” asked Nora.

  “Something for your enemy to walk through. A trap.”

  “But we walked through it,” I said.

  Cleo’s eyes darted from the knife to me.

  “Does she have any reason to believe you’re her enemy?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, though as soon as I did, I felt an uneasy chill. I had the sudden memory of Ashley stalking me at the Reservoir, her hard face staring down at me when she’d appeared abruptly by the gatehouse. Had she considered me a threat? But what had I ever done to her, to her father, except seek the truth? Maybe that alone made me an adversary. But how could the family be so hypocritical, when nearly every hero in a Cordova film was desperately searching for the same thing? Didn’t that matter? Didn’t the art in some albeit small way reflect the values of the creator’s life? Not necessarily. People had an illogical, self-serving rationale when it came to interpreting the behavior of others.

  “Whatever her reasoning,” Cleo whispered, as if reading my mind, her gaze returning to the dark glue coating the knife, “one thing is clear.”

  “What?” I asked, my mouth suddenly dry.

  “You’ve been crossed.”

  45

  “You mind expounding on that?”

  Cleo only carefully set down the knife and stood up, striding to the bookcase at the back of the room.

  “Look,” whispered Nora, inspecting the cracked soles of her own motorcycle boots. They were spangled with the same dark blotches, like wads of black gum. She yanked off one, scrutinizing the sole in the overhead light. I could see sand and thread, maybe even fingernails, mixed into the paste, glittering splinters of what looked like glass.

  Cleo returned with a hulking stack of encyclopedias. Hoodoo—Conjuration—Witchcraft—Rootwork by Harry Middleton Hyatt, read the spines. They looked ancient, with orange covers tied together with a frayed black ribbon. She sat down, picking up volume one and flipping to the contents page, slipping her index finger down the entries. When she came to the end—apparently not finding what she was looking for—she slammed it shut, moving on to volume two.

  I grabbed the book she’d just put down. It reeked of mildew, the pages yellowed. It was published in 1970, and a splotch of red liquid—tomato sauce or blood—had dried along the seam of the title page. Hoodoo—Conjuration—Witchcraft—Rootwork. Beliefs accepted by many Negroes and white persons, these being orally recorded among Blacks and whites.

  General Description of Beliefs p.1. Belief in spirits, ghosts, the Devil, and the like p. 19. Timing of spells and recurrence of the effects of spells over time p. 349.

  The book appeared to be an encyclopedia of spells, some of the entries short, others extensive. They were transcribed interviews with backwater southerners with thick accents, their accounts written out phonetically. For example, on p. 523 under the title heading Mojo hands grouped somewhat alphabetically according to their major ingredient (e.g. buckeye nuts, needles, black cat bone) was the following entry:

  669. Jest a — yo’ see yo’ git a snake — yo’ can take a rattlesnake an’ dry his haid up, pound it up, an’ den yo’ kin go to work an’ use dat as goofer dust. Kill anybody.

  [Waycross, Georgia]

  “I found something similar,” muttered Cleo, inspecting the bottom of my boot before returning her attention to the page in front of her. I craned my neck to read what she was looking at.

  Volume four, More conjure work utilizing human body parts and waste.

  “ ‘The Black Bone trick,’ ” she whispered, tucking a chunk of purple hair behind her ears. “ ‘Frayed hemp rope, gum arabic, and goofer dust.’ Your friend used a slight variation. I see some dark brown sand in here, some seaweed, too. She must have picked this up someplace exotic. You put it down on the floor in a quincunx, which is a makeshift crossroads. Your enemy unknowingly walks through it. Immediately it sticks to his shoes, and within hours it’s eating away at his life.”

  “Eating away?” I asked. “What does that mean?”

  She shrugged. “I’ve heard of comas. Heart attacks. Abruptly losing everything you love, like your job or family. Sudden paralysis from the neck down.” She raised an eyebrow. “Have you felt any strange sensations in your legs?”

  “I woke up with my foot asleep this morning,” said Nora worriedly.

  Cleo nodded as if expecting this bad news. She then tilted her head, grabbing that tiger-tooth pendant around her neck, rolling it in her fingers.

  “One thing that troubles me is something you said before. The plastic wrappers all over the floor. I don’t think they were plastic wrappers.”

  “What were they?”

  “Probably snakeskins. If they were filled with graveyard dirt, she combined all of this with a killing curse.”

  “And that’s …”

  “Like it sounds. It’ll kill you.”

  “The surgeon general says the same thing about cigarettes.”

  She only stared at me. “With cigaret
tes death takes decades. With this you could be dead within weeks.”

  Nora looked stricken.

  “Anyone ever told you your witchside manner was a little harsh?” I asked.

  “There’s no point sugarcoating black magic.”

  I tried smiling at Nora for reassurance, but she ignored me, staring at the curse-riddled sole of her shoe as if it were a cluster of malignant tumors.

  “Graveyard dirt,” I said. “That means our friend collected dirt from a graveyard?”

  “Yeah. And it’s not easy to get. You have to do it at a certain time of night. Under a certain moon. You have to know whose grave you’re taking it from. How the person died. Some witches believe the best dirt to use comes from either a murderer, a baby less than six months old, or someone who loved you beyond all reason. You also have to know where you’re digging in relation to the body, if it’s above the head, heart, or feet. You have to leave something behind, too, as a token of appreciation. Money or whiskey usually works. You mix the dirt into the snake sheds and goofer dust.”

  “What’s goofer dust?” asked Nora.

  “The H-bomb of spell materials. When you goofer someone, you’re spiritually poisoning them. It comes from the Congo, the word kufwa, which means to die. The powder’s usually a yellowish color, but you mix in the graveyard dirt so it’s dark and can’t be spotted. It’s really powerful because it eats away at your mind without you even realizing it, poisoning your reasoning and your love. It pulls apart the closest friends, isolates you, pits you against the world so you’re driven to the margins, the periphery of life. It’ll drive you mad, which in some ways is worse than death.”

  “So our friend had something like a PhD in witchcraft,” I said.

  “She had a major proficiency in dark magic. Absolutely.”

  “And what is dark magic? Voodoo? Hoodoo?”

  “It can mean any number of things. It’s a blanket term for all magic that’s used for evil purposes. I’m not an expert. My training is in Earth goddess, fertility spells, spiritual cleansing, that kind of thing. A lot of the black stuff’s underground. Passed down through generations. Secret meetings in the middle of the night. Old leather-bound journals filled with spells written backward. Attics stockpiled with the really obscure ingredients, like deer fetuses, lizard feces, baby blood. This stuff is not for people with queasy stomachs. But it works. Does your friend come from a family of occultists?”